And this, anxious as he was for them, vexed him. He had failed! The long silence that had brooded over the decaying house, the dull life against which he and his brother had fretted, were come to an end with a vengeance. But what use had he made of the opportunity? When he should have been playing the hero upstairs, when he should have been the head and front of the defence, directing all, inspiring all, he lay here in a locked room like a naughty child who must be shielded from harm.
A movement on the part of the sick man cut short his thoughts. The Duke was making futile attempts to raise himself on his elbow. “Ageaux! Des Ageaux!” he muttered. “You are satisfied now! I struck him fairly.”
Roger hurried to him and leant over him. “Lie still and do not speak,” he said, hoping to soothe him.
“We are quits now,” the Duke whispered. “We are quits now. Say so, man!” he continued querulously. “I tell you Vlaye will trouble you no more. I struck him fairly in the throat.”
“Yes, yes,” Roger replied. It was evident that the Duke was rambling in his mind, and took him for some one else. “We are quits now.”
“Quits,” the wounded man muttered, as if he found some magic in the words. And he drowsed off again into the half-sleep, half-swoon of exhaustion.
Roger could make nothing of it, except that the Duke had Vlaye in his mind, and fancied that it was he whom he had killed. But des Ageaux, whom he fancied he was addressing? Roger knew him by name and that he was Governor of Périgord, a man of name and position beyond his rank. But how came he in this galley? Oh, yes. He remembered now. His name had been mentioned in connection with the death of the eldest Joyeuse at Coutras.
Roger snuffed the candles, and mixing a little wine with water, put it by the Duke’s side. Then he wandered to the locked door, and again listened fruitlessly. Thence, for he could not rest, he went to the window, where he pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The fire had sunk lower; it was now no more than an angry eye glowing in the darkness. He could discern little by its light. No one moved, the courtyard seemed as vacant and deserted as the house. Or no. In the direction of the gate he caught the glint of a lanthorn and the movement of several figures, revealed for an instant and as suddenly obscured. He continued to watch the place where the light had vanished, and presently out of the obscurity grew a black mass that slowly took the form of a number of men crossing the court in a silent body, five or six abreast. The tramp of their feet, inaudible on the soil, rumbled hollowly as they mounted the bridge, which creaked beneath them. He caught the gleam of weapons, heard a low order given, fell back from the window. He had little doubt what they were about to do.
He was right. The heavy, noisy entry into the outer hall had scarcely prepared him before the door was thrown open and they filed into the room in which he stood.
What could he do? Resistance was out of the question. “What is it?” he asked, making a show of confronting them.
“No matter, young sir,” the man who had before taken charge answered gruffly. “Stand you on one side and no harm will happen to you.”
“But — —”
“Stand back! Stand back!” the man answered sternly. “We are on no boy’s errand!” Then to his party, “Bring the lights,” he continued, and advancing to the inner door he unlocked it. “Who has the hammer? Good, do you come first with me. And let the last two stand here and keep the door.”
He went through without more words, and disappeared up the staircase, followed by his men in single file. The two last remained on guard at the door, and they and Roger waited in the semi-darkness listening to the lumbering tread of the troopers as they stumbled on the wooden stairs, or their weapons clanged against the wall. Roger clenched his hands hard, vowing vengeance; but what could he do? And he had one consolation. Ampoule’s death had sobered the men. They would execute their orders, but the fear of outrage and excess which had dwelt on his mind earlier in the evening no longer seemed serious.
The sound of the men’s feet on the stairs had ceased; he guessed that they were searching the rooms overhead. A moment later their movements made this clear. He heard their returning footsteps and their raised voices in the upper passage. They seemed to confer, and to halt for a minute undecided. Then a door, doubtless the one which led to the roof, was tried, and tried again. But in vain, for the next moment a voice cried harshly, “Open! Open!” and after an interval a crash, twice repeated, proclaimed that the hammer was being brought into use. A scrambling of hasty feet followed, and then silence — doubtless they were crossing the roof — and then a pistol shot! One pistol shot!
Roger glared at the men who had been left with him. They opened the door more widely, and stepping through seemed to listen. For a moment the wild notion of locking the door on them, of locking the door on all, occurred to Roger. But he discarded it.
CHAPTER IX.
SPEEDY JUSTICE.
The elder of the Villeneuve brothers was less happy than Roger, in that the Vicomte had passed to him a portion of his crabbed nature. Something of the bitterness, something of the hardness of the father lurked in the son; who in the like unfortunate circumstances might have grown to be such another as his sire, but with more happy surroundings and a better fate still had it in him to become a generous and kindly gentleman.
It was this latent crabbedness that had kept the injustice of his lot ever before his gaze. Roger bore lightly with his heavier burden, and only the patient sweetness of his eyes told tales. Bonne was almost content; if she fretted it was for others, and if she dreamed of the ancient glories of the house, it was not for the stiff brocades and jewelled stomacher of her grandame that she pined.
But with Charles it was otherwise. The honour of the family was more to him, for he was the heir. Its dignity and welfare were his in a particular sense; and had he been of the most easy disposition, he must still have found it hard to see all passing; to see the end, and to stand by with folded arms. But when to the misery of inaction and the hopelessness of the outlook were added the Vicomte’s daily and hourly taunts, and all fell on a nature that had in it the seeds of unhappiness, what wonder if the young man broke away and sought in action, however desperate, a remedy for his pains?
A step which he would now have given the world to undo. As he rode a prisoner along the familiar track, which he had trodden a thousand times in freedom and safety, the iron entered into his soul. The sun shone, the glades were green, in a hundred brakes the birds sang, in shady dells and under oaks the dew sparkled; but he rode, his feet fastened under his horse’s belly, his face set towards Vlaye. In an hour the dungeon door would close on him. He would have given the world, had it been his, to undo the step.
Not that he feared the dungeon so much, or even death; though the thought of death, amid the woodland beauty of this June day, carried a chill all its own, and death comes cold to him who awaits it with tied hands. But he could have faced death cheerfully — or he thought so — had he fallen into a stranger’s power; had the victory not been so immediately, so easily, so completely with Vlaye — whom he hated. To be dragged thus before his foe, to read in that sneering face the contempt which events had justified, to lie at his mercy who had treated him as a silly clownish lad, to be subjected, may-be, to some contemptuous degrading punishment — this was a prospect worse than death, a prospect maddening, insupportable! Therefore he looked on the woodland with eyes of despair, and now and again, in fits of revolt, had much ado not to fight with his bonds, or hurl unmanly insults at his captors.
They, for their part, took little heed of him. They had not bound his hands, but had tied the reins of his horse to one of their saddles, and, satisfied with this precaution, they left him to his reflections. By-and-by those reflections turned, as the thoughts of all captives turn, to the chance of escape; and he marked that the men — they numbered five — seemed to be occupied with something which interested them more than their prisoner. What it was, of what nature or kind, he had no notion; but he observed that as sure
ly as they recalled their duty and drew round him, so surely did the lapse of two or three minutes find them dispersed again in pairs — it might be behind, it might be before him.
When this happened they talked low, but with an absorption so entire that once he saw a man jam his knee against a sapling which he failed to see, though it stood in his path; and once a man’s hat was struck from his head by a bough which he might have avoided by stooping.
Naturally the trooper to whose saddle he was attached had no part in these conferences. And by-and-by this man, a grizzled, thick-set fellow with small eyes, grew impatient, and even, it seemed, suspicious. For a time he vented his dissatisfaction in grunts and looks, but at last, when the four others had got together and were colloguing with heads so close that a saddle-cloth would have covered them, he could bear it no longer.
“Come, enough of that!” he cried surlily. “One of you take him, and let me hear what you have settled. I’d like my say as well as another.”
“Ay, ay, Baptist,” one of the four answered. “In a minute, my lad.”
Baptist swore under his breath. Still he waited, and by-and-by one of the men came grudgingly back, took over the prisoner, and suffered Baptist to join the council. But Villeneuve, whose attention was now roused, noted that this man also, after an interval, became restless. He watched his comrades with jealous eyes, and from time to time he pressed nearer, as if he would fain surprise their talk. Things were in this position when the party arrived at a brook, bordered on either side by willow beds and rushes, and passable at a tiny ford. Beyond the brook the hill rose suddenly and steeply. Charles knew the place as he knew his hand, and that from the brook the track wound up through the brushwood to a nick in the summit of the hill, whence Vlaye could be seen a league below.
The four troopers paused at the ford, and letting their horses drink, permitted the prisoner and his guard to come up. The man they called Baptist approached the latter. “If you will wait here,” he said, with a look of meaning, “we’ll look to the — you know what.”
“I? No, cursed if I do!” the man answered plumply, his swarthy face growing dark. “I’m not a fool!”
“Then how in the devil’s name are we to do it?” Baptist retorted with irritation.
“Stay yourself and take care of him!”
“And let you find the stuff!” with an ugly look. “A nice reckoning I should get afterwards.”
“Well, I won’t stay, that’s flat!”
The men looked at one another, and their lowering glances disclosed their embarrassment. The prisoner could make no guess at the subject of discussion, but he saw that they were verging on a quarrel, and his heart beat fast. Given the slightest chance he was resolved to take it. But, that his thoughts might not be read, he kept his eyes on the ground, and feigned a sullenness which he no longer felt.
Suddenly, “Tie him to a tree!” muttered one of the men with a sidelong look at him.
“And leave him?”
“Ay, why not?”
“Why not?” Baptist, the eldest of the men, rejoined with an oath. “Because if harm happen to him, it will be I will pay for it, and not you! That is why not!”
“Tie him well and what can happen?” the other retorted. And then, “Must risk something, Baptist,” he added with a grin, which showed that he saw his advantage, “since you are in charge.”
The secret was simple. The men had got wind that morning of a saddle and saddle-bags — and a dead horse, but that counted for nothing — that in the search after the attack on the Countess’s party had been overlooked in the scrub. Detached to guard the prisoner to Vlaye they had grinned at the chance of forestalling their comrades and gaining what there was to gain; which fancy, ever sanguine, painted in the richest colours. But the five could neither trust one another nor their prisoner; for Charles might inform Vlaye, and in that case they would not only lose the spoil but taste the strapado — the Captain of Vlaye permitting but one robber in his band. Hence they stood in the position of the ass between two bundles of hay, and dared not leave their prisoner, nor would leave the spoil.
At length, after some debate, made up in the main of oaths, “Draw lots who stays!” one suggested.
“We have no cards.”
“There are other ways.”
“Well,” said he who had charge of the prisoner, “whose horse stops drinking first — let him stay!”
“Oh, yes!” retorted Baptist. “And we have watered our horses and you have not!”
The man grinned feebly; the others laughed. “Well,” he said, “do you hit on something then! You think yourself clever.”
Villeneuve bethought him of the prince who set, his guards to race, and, when their horses were spent, galloped away laughing. But he dared not suggest that, though he tingled with anxiety. “Who sees a heron first,” said one.
But “Pooh!” with a grin, “we are all liars!” put an end to that.
“Well,” said Baptist sulkily, “if we stay here a while longer we shall all lie for nothing, for we shall have the Captain upon us.”
Thus spurred a man had an idea that seemed fair. “We’ve no two horses alike,” he said. “Let us pluck a hair from the tail of each. He” — pointing to Charles— “shall draw one with his eyes shut, and whoever is drawn shall stay on guard.”
They agreed to this, and Charles, being applied to, consented with a sulky air to play his part. The hairs were plucked, a grey, a chestnut, a bay, a black, and a sorrel; and the prisoner, foreseeing that he would be left with a single trooper, and determined in that case to essay escape, shut his eyes and felt for the five hairs, and selected one. The man drawn was the man who had last had him in charge, and to whose saddle his reins were still attached.
The man cursed his ill-fortune; the others laughed. “All the same,” he cried, “if you play me false you’ll laugh on the other side of your faces!”
“Tut, tut, Martin!” they jeered in answer. “Have no fear!” And they scarce made a secret of their intention to cheat him.
The four turned, laughing, and plunged into the undergrowth which clothed the hill. Still their course could be traced by the snapping of dry sticks, the scramble of a horse on a steep place, or the scared notes of blackbirds, fleeing low among the bushes. Slowly Martin’s eyes followed their progress along the hill, and as his eyes moved, he moved also, foot by foot, through the brook, glaring, listening, and now and then muttering threats in his beard.
Had he glanced round once, however impatiently, and seen the pale face and feverish eyes at his elbow, he had taken the alarm. Charles knew that the thing must be done now or not at all; and that there must be one critical moment. If nerve failed him then, or the man turned, or aught happened to thwart his purpose midway, he had far better have left the thing untried.
Now or not at all! He glanced over his shoulder and saw the sun shining on the flat rushy plat beyond the ford, which the horses’ feet had fouled while their riders debated. He saw no sign of Vlaye coming up, nor anything to alarm him. The road was clear were he once free. Martin’s horse had stepped from the water, his own was in act to follow, his guard sat, therefore, a little higher than himself; in a flash he stooped, seized the other’s boot, and with a desperate heave flung him over on the off side.
He clutched, as the man fell, at his reins; they were life or death to him. But though the fellow let them slip, the frightened horse sprang aside, and swung them out of reach. There remained but one thing he could do; he struck his own horse in the hope it would run away and drag the other with it.
But the other, rearing and plunging, backed from him, and the two, pulling in different directions, held their ground until the trooper had risen, run to his horse’s head and caught the reins. “Body of Satan!” he panted with a pale scowl; the fall had shaken him. “I’ll have your blood for this! Quiet, beast! Quiet!”
In his passion he struck the horse on the head; an act which carried its punishment. The beast backed from him and dragged him,
still clinging to the reins, into the brook. In a moment the two horses were plunging about in the water, and he following them was knee deep. Unfortunately Villeneuve was helpless. All he could do was to strike his horse and excite it further. But the man would not let go, and the horses, fastened together, circled round one another until the trooper, notwithstanding their movements, managed to shorten the reins, and at last got his horse by the bit.
“Curse you!” he said again. “Now I’ve got you! And in a minute, my lad, I’ll make you pay for this!”
But Villeneuve, seeing defeat stare him in the face, had made use of the last few seconds. He had loosened the stirrup-leather from the trooper’s saddle, and as the fellow, thinking the struggle over, grinned at him, he swung the heavy iron in the air, and brought it down on the beast’s withers. It leapt forward, maddened by pain, dashed the man to the ground, and dragging Villeneuve’s horse with it, whether it would or no, in a moment both were clear of the brook and plunging along the bank.
Villeneuve struck the horses again to urge them forward; but only to learn that which he should have recognised before; that to escape on a horse, fastened to a second, over difficult ground and through a wood, was not possible. Half-maddened, half-bewildered, they bore him into a mass of thorns and bushes. It was all he could do to guard his eyes and head, more than they could do to keep their feet. A moment and a tough sapling intervened, the rein which joined them snapped, and his horse, giving to the tug at its mouth, fell on its near shoulder.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 447