In The Day Of Adversity Part 14

"Who, then, has done this deed?" St. Georges asked, deeply stirred by the woman's wild sorrow, perhaps also by the gloomy surroundings. "Who can do such things as this, even though powerful?"

"Who?" she replied. "Who? Who but one in these parts? The hound, De Roquemaure!"

"De Roquemaure!" St. Georges exclaimed with a start that caused his trembling horse to move forward, thinking that he had pressed its flanks to urge it on, which start was perfectly perceptible to the unhappy woman. "De Roquemaure!"

"You know him?" she asked eagerly, bending her face toward and up to him so that he could see her pale lips--lips, indeed, almost as pale as her cheeks--"you know him?"

"I know of him," St. Georges replied.

"And hate him, perhaps, as I do. It may be, would kill him as I would.

Is it so? Answer me?"

Carried away by this strange encounter, and with so strange a third thing near them as _that_ above, which once had life as they had still; carried away, too, by the woman's vehemence--a vehemence which caused her, a peasant, to speak on equal terms with one whose dress and accoutrements showed the difference between them--he answered almost in a whisper:

"It may be," he said, bending down still further to her, "that I shall be doomed to kill him some day. May be that he has merited death at my hands."

"You hate him?"

"I fear I have but too just cause to hate him."

"As all do! As all! He lives," she went on, "but to slay and injure others as he slew and injured him," and she half turned her head and cast up her eyes at the miserable relic above her. Then she continued: "Listen. _He_ was no poacher, no thief. But I--I--his wife--was unfortunate enough to fall under the other's notice--he sought me--you understand?--and _he_"--with again the upward glance--"resisted his desires. You see the end!"

Looking into her eyes, observing her well-defined features, noticing that, except for her awful pallor, she might well be a handsome woman, especially when bright and happy instead of, as now, grief-stained, St. Georges could understand. Then, while also he meditated as to whether this De Roquemaure was a fiend that had taken human shape, the woman went on:

"Daily almost some fall under his bane. But a week ago a stranger here--one carrying a helpless babe--was set upon----"

"What!" and now he felt as though the universe was spinning round.

--"was set upon," she continued, "struck to death--he is dying now, or dead----"

"And the babe?" St. Georges interposed.

"Carried off by those who did his bidding."

"O G.o.d! Lost again!" and the moan he uttered startled the woman out of her own grief.

"Who are you?" she asked, her great eyes piercing him.

"As I believe, that child's unhappy father."

Aroused by this to forget her own sufferings, even to forget for the moment the dreadful burden borne by the gallows tree, she thrust out her hand and seized his sleeve.

"Who, then, is the dying man?" she whispered.

"I know not--but--but--for mercy's sake, in memory of the misery you have suffered, in pity for mine, lead me to this man! You know where he is; you can do so?"

"Come," she said. "Come. He is in my hut close by. We were very poor, we had no better. Come. Tie your horse to a tree and follow me."

Dazed, scarce knowing whether he was awake or asleep and dreaming, he obeyed her, leading the horse away some paces so that it should be no more frightened by the horrible burden of the gibbet, and following her through a thicket. In other circ.u.mstances he might have feared an ambush; now, a thousand hidden enemies would not have held him back.

She wound her way along a trodden track leading down into the valley below, but went only a few score yards when she stopped outside what was indeed no better than a hut, a wooden building thatched with turf, from a window in which there gleamed a ray of light. And she, placing her ears to the door ere she pushed it open, said to him: "He lives still. You can hear his breathing. Hark!"

"Thank G.o.d!" St. Georges said fervently. "Whoever he may be, he will be able to tell me of the child. Open, I beg you; open in the name of mercy!"

She obeyed him at once, thrusting the door open and drawing him in, and then by the light of a miserable, small oil lamp that flickered on a rude wooden table he saw stretched upon a pallet in a corner of the place the dying man. Also he noticed that the room reeked and was fetid with his hot breath and with another hot, dry odour that he knew was the odour of blood.

In the shadow of the room St. Georges could see a white face, could also perceive two great staring eyes turned up to the rafters; he could hear, too, the drawn, labouring breath as it rattled through his throat and chest, accompanied by a moan as it came forth.

"Quick!" he exclaimed, "quick! The light! He lives still, but his minutes are numbered. He is dying, dying fast. Where is his wound?"

"In the lower part of his body, through him. A sword thrust. I have tried to stanch it, but it flows always. I marvel he has lived so long."

She brought the oil lamp forward as she spoke and held it near the man, and St. Georges, kneeling down, looked at him. Then with a bound he sprang up again, exclaiming: "He here! Heaven and earth! what brings him here? How comes he in this mystery? What--what does it mean, what portend?"

"You know him?"

"Yes, I know him."

The man stretched upon the pallet was Pierre, the Bishop of Lodeve's man-servant!

"Speak!" said St. Georges to him a moment later, smothering for the time his wonder and astonishment. "Speak if you can. One word from you may alter my whole life, my child's life. Speak ere you die."

It seemed, however, that he would never speak again. But, also, it seemed as if all consciousness was not gone from him yet--as if he recognised the man kneeling once more at his side, while again the woman held the lamp above them. As far as he was able with his failing strength, he endeavoured to shrink from St. Georges while as he did so his eyes, distended either with fear or horror, glared at him. But from his mouth there came no sound but the laboured breathing.

Again St. Georges besought him to speak; plied him with questions.

Was the child taken from him Dorine; by whom had it been taken; how had he whom St. Georges had never seen until he slept at the bishop's, and whom he had left at Dijon, found his way here only to be murdered?

And still no answer came, while once the dying man tried with his feeble hand to push St. Georges away, and still stared in ghastly horror at him.

At last the end arrived. The breathing grew faster and faster and more laboured; it rattled more horribly in his chest; a spasm convulsed him, and he sank back exhausted, while from his face and throat which were all uncovered a heavy sweat poured. Then suddenly he raised himself to almost a sitting posture with his hands, and, with a rolling glance that seemed to take in all the hut, he sank back slowly again. Yet as he did so his lips moved, and a whisper came from them--a whisper that seemed to frame the words "De Roquemaure." A moment after he was dead.

"Tell me all you know," St. Georges said to the woman a few moments later. "How he came here, how he was set upon and done to death? I must ride on and on to-night, yet ere long, if I can compa.s.s it, I will return to Troyes and never leave it until I have found my child and know all. Tell me."

"He came here," she said, "five days ago--was brought here by me, for I saw him attacked and wounded to the death, as you know now. I was up there by--by him who swings upon that h.e.l.lish gibbet; the dawn was at hand."

"The dawn," St. Georges whispered to himself. "The dawn of five days ago, when D'Arpajou's horse rode into the town. The day Dorine was lost."

"Then," the woman continued, "through the coming day I saw him advancing from the town upon this road, carrying a bundle under his arm."

"Ah!"

"Yet not so fast but that two others who had left the gate behind him came swifter than he. One, a man, young and supple, clad in the De Roquemaure russet--no need of that to tell me that devil had a hand in what was to be done; the other, a woman, all in sombre black, a mask upon her face."

"A woman in it!"

"Ho!" said the peasant, "doubt not! He has his women, too, at his beck and call. Easy enough to find one of the scourings of Troyes--perhaps an innocent girl once, before she knew him!--to do his bidding."