The Abbess Of Vlaye Part 26

Not fruitlessly, for when she returned to the door of the chapel, the woman who awaited her stared, thinking that she had never seen her mistress show fairer in her silks than in this black and white, which she so seldom favoured. And soon there was another who thought--if not that thought, a similar one. The Duke, opening on the glory of sunshine and summer warmth, the eyes that had so nearly closed for good, saw at the foot of his litter a wondrous figure kneeling before the altar.

The face of the figure was turned from him, and for a time, between sleeping and waking, he considered her idly, supposing her now an angel interceding for him in the other life on which he had entered, now a nun praying beside his bier; for he took it for certain he was dead. By-and-by he pa.s.sed over to the theory of the angel, for the figure moved, and the sunlight pa.s.sing in through a tiny window-slit formed a nimbus about her head. And then again, moving afresh, as in an ecstacy of devotion, she lifted her eyes to the crucifix, and the hood falling back with the movement revealed a profile of a beauty and purity almost unearthly.

The Duke sighed. He had sighed before, but apparently, for the sigh had not changed her rapt expression, she had not heard. Now she did hear. She rose, and with a deep genuflection turned from the altar, and glided with downcast eyes to his side. Eyes softened to the meekness of a dove's looked into his, and found that he was awake.

Then, angel or saint, or whatever she was, she made a sign to him not to speak; and producing, by magic as it seemed, ambrosial food, she fed him, and with a finger on his lip bade him in gentle accents, "Sleep!"

Sleep? To think he could sleep when an angel--and while he laughed in ridicule of the notion he slept, that heavenly face framed in its nun's hood, that drooping form with the hands crossed upon the breast moving before him into the land of visions. He was back again in those earliest days of his cloistered existence, when to live in an atmosphere, pure and apart, innocent of the pa.s.sions and desires of the world, had been his dream. He had learned--only too soon--that that atmosphere and that innocence were not to be maintained, though the walls of a monastery be ten feet through. For the nature which the thought of such a life had charmed was of all natures the one most open to worldly fascinations. He had fallen; and he had presently replaced the vision of being good by the enthusiasm of doing good. He had lifted his voice, and the preaching of Pere Ange had moved half Paris to a twenty-four hours' repentance. His own had lasted a little longer.

Now, weak and unnerved, he reverted at sight of this beautiful nun's face to his old visions of a saintly life; and in innocent adoration he dreamt of naught but her countenance. When he awoke again and found her still at her devotions, though the sun was high, still at his service when she found him waking, still moving dovelike and silent about her ministrations--he watched her everywhere. Several times he wished to speak, but she laid a finger on her lips, and covering her hands with her sleeves, sat on the bench beside him, reading her book of hours. And so during the hazy period of his return to consciousness he saw her. Awake or drowsing, stung to life by the smart of his hurt or lulled to sleep by the music of the stream, he had her face always before him.

At length there came a time, a little before high noon, when he awoke with a clearer eye and a mind capable of feeling surprise at his position. He saw her sitting beside him, but he saw also the rough grey walls, the altar, the crucifix; and to wonder succeeded curiosity. What had happened, and how came he there? His eyes sought her face and remained riveted to it.

"Where am I?" he whispered.

She marked that his eyes were clear and his strength greater, and, "You are in the chapel in the upper valley of the Dronne," she answered.

"But I----" He stopped and closed his eyes, brought up by some confusion in his thoughts. At last, "I fancied I fought with some one," he whispered. "It was in a courtyard--at night? And there were lights? It was one of Vlaye's men, and the place was----" He broke off in the painful effort to remember. His lips moved without sound.

"Villeneuve," she said.

"Villeneuve," he whispered gratefully. "But this is not Villeneuve?"

"We are two leagues from Villeneuve."

"How come I here?"

She told him, preserving the gentle placidity which, not without thought, she had adopted for her _role_. The repulse of Vlaye's men and the Lieutenant's decision to quit the chateau, that and the night retreat up to the arrival of the party at the ford--all were told.

Then she broke off.

"But des Ageaux?" he murmured. "Where is he?" And again, that he might look round him, he tried to rise. "Where are they all?" he continued in wonder. "They have not left me?" with a querulous note in his voice.

"They are not here," she answered. And gently she induced him to lie back again. "Be still, I pray," she said. "Be still. You do yourself no good by moving."

He sighed. "Where are they?" he persisted.

"We were hard pressed at the ford," she answered with feigned reluctance. "And your litter delayed them. It was necessary to leave you or all had been lost."

He lay in silence awhile with closed eyes, considering what she had told him. At last, "And you stayed?" he murmured in so low a voice that the words were barely audible. "You stayed!"

"It was necessary," she answered.

"And you have been beside me all night?"

She bowed her head.

His eyes filled with tears, and his lips trembled, for he was very weak. He groped for her hand, and would have carried it to his lips, but as men kiss relics or the hands of saints--if she had not withheld it from him. Settling the thin coverings more comfortably round him, she gave him to drink again, softly chiding him and bidding him be silent--be silent and sleep.

But, "You have been beside me all night!" he repeated. "All night, alone here, and a woman! A woman!"

She did not tell him that she was not alone; that her woman was even then sitting outside, under strict orders not to show herself. For now she was a.s.sured that she was in the right path. She had had opportunities of studying his countenance while he slept, and she had traced in it those qualities of enthusiasm and weakness, of the libertine and the ascetic, which his career so remarkably displayed.

The beauty which in ordinary circ.u.mstances his jaded eye, versed in woman's wiles, might neglect, would appeal with irresistible force in a garb of saintliness. Nay, more; as he recovered his strength and returned to his common feelings, it would prove, she felt sure, more provocative than the most worldly lures. Her resolve to carry the matter through was now fixed and immutable: and with her eye on the goal, she neglected no precaution that occurred to her mind.

CHAPTER XII.

THE PEASANTS' CAMP.

Something after high noon des Ageaux appeared and, whatever the Abbess's feelings, he was overjoyed to find the three undisturbed. He despatched a flying party down the valley that he might have notice if the enemy approached, and then he bent himself to remove the Duke in safety to his camp. In this the Abbess had her own line to take, and took it with decision. She represented the patient as worse than he was, described the fever as still lingering upon him, and using the authority which her devotion of the night gave her, she insisted that the Duke should see no one. A kind of shelter from the sun was woven of boughs, and placed over the litter. He was then lifted and borne out with care, the Abbess walking on one side, and her woman on the other. In the open air des Ageaux would have approached and spoken to him, for between grat.i.tude and remorse the Lieutenant was much touched. But the authority of the sick-nurse was great then as it is now. The Abbess repelled him firmly, and, refusing the horse which had been brought for her, she persisted in walking the whole distance to the camp--a full league--by the side of the litter. In this way she fenced others off, and the Duke had her always before him. Always the opening at the side of the litter framed her face.

She gave her mind so completely to him that she took no note of their route, save that they kept the valley, which preserving its flat bottom now ran between hills of a wilder aspect. It was only when the troopers, at a word from the Lieutenant, closed in about the litter, that she observed--though it had been some time in sight--the object which caused the movement. This was a small hill-town, girt by a ruinous wall, and buckled with crazy towers, which topped an acclivity on the right of the valley, and commanded the road. The suspicion with which her escort regarded the place did not surprise her when she remarked the filthy forms and wild and savage faces which swarmed upon the wall. There were women and children as well as men in the place, and all, ragged and half naked, mopped and mowed at the pa.s.sers, or, leaping to their feet, defied them with unspeakable words and gestures.

The Abbess looked at them with daunted eyes. There was something inhuman in their squalor and wildness. "Who are they?" she asked.

"Crocans," the nearest rider answered.

"But we are not going to them?" she returned in astonishment. She had heard that they were bound for the peasants' camp, and her lip had curled at the information. But if these were Crocans--horror!

The man spat on the ground. "That is one band, and ours is another,"

he replied. "All canaille, but--not all like that, or we had some strange bed-fellows indeed!"

He would have said more, but he caught the Lieutenant's eye, and was silent and five minutes later the Abbess saw a strange sight. The riders before her wheeled to the left, and, bending low in their saddles, vanished bodily in the rock that walled the road on that side.

A moment later she probed the mystery. In the rock wall which fenced the track on the left, as the river fenced it on the right, was an arched opening, resembling the mouth of a cave--of one of those caves so common in the Limousin. Within was no cave, however, but a s.p.a.cious circus of smooth green turf open to the heaven, though walled on every side by gra.s.sy slopes which ran steeply to a height of a hundred feet.

There was no entrance to the basin, but neither its defensible strength, nor the wisdom of the Crocans in choosing it, was apparent until the green rampart cast about it by nature was examined and found to be so scarped on the outer side as to form here a sheer precipice, there a descent trying to the most active foot.

A spring near the inner margin of this natural amphitheatre fed a rivulet which, after pa.s.sing across it, and dividing it into two unequal parts, escaped to the river through the rocky gateway.

The smaller portion of the sward thus divided, a portion raised very slightly above the rest, had something of the aspect of a stage on a great scale. About its middle a flat-topped rock rising to a man's height from the ground had the air of an altar, and this was shaded by the only tree in the enclosure, a single plane-tree of vast size, which darkened with its ancient smooth-barked limbs a half-acre of ground. Probably this rock and this tree had witnessed the meetings of some primitive people, had borne part in their human sacrifices, and echoed the cries with which they acclaimed the moment of the summer solstice.

To-day this basin, long abandoned to the solitude of the hills, presented once more a scene of turmoil, such as for strangeness might rival the gatherings of that remote age. Nor, save for a circ.u.mstance presently to be named, could even the Abbess's sullen curiosity have withheld a meed of admiration as the panorama unfolded itself before her.

Round the edge of the larger half of the amphitheatre ran a long line--in parts double and treble, of booths open at the front, and formed, some of branches of trees, some of plaited rushes or osier.

Under these, swarms of men, women, and children lounged in every posture, while others strolled about the ground before the sheds, which, crowded with sheep, oxen and horses, wore the aspect of a rustic fair. The turf that had been so fair a fortnight before was trodden bare in places, and in others poached and stained by the crowds that moved on it. Only the immediate bank of the rivulet had been kept clear.

The smaller portion of the sward had been given up to des Ageaux and his band of troopers and refugees. A dozen horses tethered in an orderly row at the rear of the plane-tree, with a pile of gear at the head of each, spoke of military order, as did the three or four booths which had been erected for the accommodation of the Vicomte's party.

But as in such a place and under such circ.u.mstances it was impossible to enforce strict discipline, the curious among the peasants, and not men only, but women and children, roved in small parties on this side also, staring and questioning; some with furtive eyes as expecting a trap and treachery, others watching in clownish amazement the evolutions of a picked band of three score peasants whom the Bat was beginning to instruct in the use of their weapons and in the simplest movements of the field. Here and there on the steep slopes about the saucer were groups of peasants; and on the top of the ridge, which was forbidden to the crowd, were five sentinels, stationed beside as many cairns of stones piled for the purpose at fixed distances from one another. These were of the Lieutenant's inst.i.tution, for though the safety of the camp hung wholly on the command of its natural battlement, which captured would convert the basin into a death-trap, the Crocans had kept no regular guard on it. He on his arrival had entrusted its oversight to the two young Villeneuves, and one or the other was ever patrolling the length of the vallum, or from the highest point searching the chaos of uninhabited hills and glens that stretched on every side.

This hasty sketch of the scene leaves to be fancied those worst traits of the camp, of its wildness and savagery, that could not fail to disquiet the mind even of a bold woman. Many of the peasants were half naked, others were clad in cow-skins, in motley armour, in sordid, blood-stained finery. All went unshaven, and many had long, filthy elf-locks hanging about their faces, and ragged beards reaching to their girdles. Some had squalid bandages on head or limb, and all were armed grotesquely with bill-hooks or scythes, or with stakes pointed and hardened in the fire, or with knotty clubs. M. de Vlaye and his kind would have seen in them only a horde to be exterminated without pity or remorse. Nor could their looks have failed to startle the Abbess, high as was her natural courage--if a thing had not at the very entrance engaged her attention.

For there, under the archway, a group of six men sat on their hams, their backs against the rock. And these were so foul in garb, and repulsive in aspect, that the common peasants of the camp seemed by comparison civilised. The Abbess shuddered at the mere look of them, and would have averted her eyes if they had not, as des Ageaux entered, risen and barred the way. The foremost, a tall, meagre figure with a long white beard, and the gleam of madness in his eyes, seized the Lieutenant's bridle and raising his other hand seemed to forbid his entrance. "Give us," he cried in a strange patois, "our man! Our man!"

The Abbess expected des Ageaux to strike him from his path, or bid his men ride him down. But the Lieutenant considered with patience the strange figure clad much as John the Baptist is portrayed in pictures, and when he answered he spoke calmly. "You are from the town on the hill?" he said.

"Ay, and we claim our man!"

"The man, you mean, whom we took from your hands last night?"