The Abbess Of Vlaye Part 37

Roger sprang forward, eager to help. And they were bearing the man to the rear, and the Abbess had taken heart to uncover her eyes, while still averting them, when a strange sound broke from her lips--lips blanched in an instant to the colour of paper. It caught the ear of the Bat, who stood nearest to her. He turned. The Abbess, with arm outstretched, was pointing to the door of the Countess's hut. There, visible, though she seemed to shrink from sight, and even raised her hand in deprecation, stood the Countess herself.

"By Heaven!" the Bat cried. And he stood. While Roger, in place of advancing, gazed on her as on a ghost.

She tried to speak, but no sound came. And for the Abbess she had as easily spoken as the dead. Her senses tottered, the slim figure danced before her eyes, the voices of those who spoke came from a great way off.

It was the Vicomte who, being the least concerned, was first to find his voice. "Is it you, Countess?" he quavered.

The Countess nodded. She could not speak.

"But how--how have you escaped?"

"Ay, how?" the Bat chimed in more soberly. He saw that it was no phantom, though the mystery seemed none the less for that. "How come you here, Countess? How--am I mad, or did you not go to their quarters at sundown?"

"No," she whispered. "I did not go." She framed the words with difficulty. Between shame and excitement she seemed ready to sink into the earth.

"No? You did not? Then who--who did go? Some one went."

She made a vain attempt to speak. Then commanding herself--

"Bonne went--in my place," she cried. And clapping her hands to her face in a paroxysm of grief, she leant, weeping, against the post of the door.

They looked at one another and began to understand, and to see. And one had opened his mouth to speak, when a strangled cry drew all eyes to the Abbess. She seemed to be striving to put something from her.

Her staring eyes, her round mouth of horror, her waving fingers made up a picture of terror comparable only to one of those masks which the Greeks used in their tragedies of fate. A moment she showed thus, and none of those who turned eye on her doubted that they were looking on a stress of pa.s.sion beside which the Countess's grief was but a puny thing. The next moment she fell her length in a swoon.

When she came to herself an hour later she lay for a time with eyes open but vacant, eyes which saw but conveyed no image to the ailing brain. The sun was still low. Its shafts darting through the interstices in the wall of the hut were laden with a million dancing motes, which formed a shifting veil of light between her eyes and the roof. She seemed to have been gazing at this a whole aeon when the first conscious thought pierced her mind, and she asked herself where she was.

Where? Not in her own lodging, nor alone. This was borne in on her.

For on one side of her couch crouched one of her women; on the other knelt the Countess, her face hidden. In the doorway behind the head of the bed, and so beyond the range of her vision, were others; the low drone of voices, her father's, the Duke's, penetrated one by one to her senses still dulled by the shock she had suffered. Something had happened then; something serious to her, or she would not lie thus surrounded with watchers on all sides of her bed. Had she been ill?

She considered this silently, and little by little began to remember: the flight to the camp, the camp life, the Duke's hut in which she had pa.s.sed most of her time in the camp. Yes, she was in the Duke's hut, and that was his voice. She was lying on his couch. They had been besieged, she remembered. Had she been wounded? From under half-closed lids she scrutinised the two women beside her. The one she knew. The other must be her sister. Yes, her sister would be the first to come, the first to aid her. But it was not her sister. It was----

She knew.

She called on G.o.d and lay white and mute, shaking violently, but with closed eyes. The women rose and looked at her, and suggested remedies, and implored her to speak. But she lay cold and dumb, and only from time to time by violent fits of trembling showed that she was alive.

What had she done? What had she done?

The women could make nothing of her. Nor when they had tried their utmost could her father, though he came and chid her querulously; his tone the sharper for the remorse he was feeling. He had had an hour to think; and during that hour the obedience which his less cherished daughter had ever paid him, her cheerful care of him, her patience with him, had risen before him; and, alas, with these thoughts, the memory of many an unkind word and act, many a taunt flung at her as lightly as at the dog that c.u.mbered the hearth. To balance the account, and a little perhaps because the way in which Odette took it was an added reproach to him, he spoke harshly to the Abbess--such is human nature! But, for all the effect his words had on her, he might have addressed a stone. That which she had done thundered too loudly in her ears for another's voice to enter.

She had not loved her sister over dearly, and into such love as she had given contempt had entered largely. But she was her sister. She was her sister! Memories of childish days in the garden at Villeneuve, when Bonne had clung to her hand and run beside her, and prattled, and played, and quarrelled, and yielded to her--being always the gentler--rose in her mind; and memories of little words and acts, and of Bonne's face on this occasion and on that! And dry-eyed she shook with horror of the thing she had done. Her sister! She had done her sister to death more cruelly, more foully, more barbarously, than if she had struck her lifeless at her feet.

An age, it seemed to her, she lay in this state, cold, paralysed, without hope. Then a word caught her ear and fixed her attention.

"They have been away two hours," Joyeuse muttered, speaking low to the Vicomte. "They should be back."

"What could they do?" the Vicomte answered in a tone of despair.

"Forty swords can do much," Joyeuse answered hardily. "Were I sound I should know what to do. And that right well!"

"They started too late."

"The greater reason they should be back! Were all over they would be back."

"I have no hope."

"I have. Had they desired to kill them only," the Duke continued with reason, "the brutes had done it here, in a moment! If they did not hope to use them why carry them off?"

But the Vicomte with a quivering lip shook his head. He was still thinking--with marvellous unselfishness for him--of the daughter who had borne with him so long and so patiently. For des Ageaux there might be hope and a chance. But a woman in the hands of savages such as those he had seen in the town on the hill! He shuddered as he thought of it. Better death, better death a hundred times than that.

He did not wish to see her again.

But in one heart the mention of hope had awakened hope. The Abbess raised herself on her elbow. "Who have gone?" she asked in a voice so hollow and changed they started as at the voice of a stranger. "Who are gone?" she repeated.

"All but eight spears!" the Duke answered.

"Why not all?" she cried feverishly. "Why not all?"

"Some it was necessary to keep," Joyeuse replied gently. "Not one has been kept that could go. If your sister can be saved, she will be saved."

"Too late!" the Vicomte muttered. And he shook his head.

The Abbess sank back with a groan. But a moment later she broke into a pa.s.sion of weeping. The cord that had bound her heart had snapped. The first horror of the thing which she had done was pa.s.sing. The first excuse, the first suggestion that for that which she had not intended she was not answerable, was whispering at the threshold of her ear. As she wept in pa.s.sionate, in unrestrained abandonment, regarding none of those about her, wonder, an almost resentful wonder, grew in the Vicomte's heart. He had not given her credit for a t.i.the, for a hundredth part of the affection she felt for her sister! For the Duke, he, who had seen her consistently placid, garbed in gentle dignity, and as unemotional as she was beautiful, marvelled for a different reason. He hailed the human in her with delight; he could have blessed the weeping girl for every tear that proclaimed her woman. By the depth of her love for her sister he plumbed her capacity for a more earthly pa.s.sion. He rejoiced, therefore, as much as he marvelled.

There was one other upon whom Odette's sudden breakdown wrought even more powerfully; and that was the Countess. While the sister remained stunned by the dreadful news and deaf to consolation, the poor child, who took all to herself and mingled shame with her grief, had not dared to speak; she had not found the heart or the courage to speak.

Awed by the immensity of the catastrophe, and the Abbess's stricken face, she had cowered on her knees beside the bed with her face hidden; and weeping silently and piteously, had not presumed to trouble the other with her remorse or her useless regret. But the tears of a woman appeal to another woman after a fashion all their own. They soften, they invite. No sooner, then, had Odette proclaimed herself human by the abandonment of her grief than the Countess felt the impulse to throw herself into her arms and implore her forgiveness. She knew, none better, that Bonne had suffered in her place; that in her place and because of her fears--proved only too real--she had gone to death or worse than death; that the fault lay with herself. And that she took it to herself, that her heart was full of remorse and love and contrition--all this she longed to say to the sister. Before Odette knew what to expect or to fear, the younger woman was in her arms.

One moment. The next Odette struck her--struck her with furious, frantic rage, and flung her from her. "It is you! You have done this!

You!" she cried, panting, and with blazing eyes. "You have killed her!

You!"

The young girl staggered back with the mark of the Abbess's fingers crimson on her cheek. She stood an instant breathing hard, the combative instinct awakened by the blow showing in her eyes and her small bared teeth. Then she flung her hands to her face. "It is true!

It is true!" she sobbed. "But I did not know!"

"Know?" the Abbess cried back relentlessly; and she was going to add other and madder and more insulting words, when her father's face of amazement checked her. She fell back sullenly, and with a gesture of despair turned her face to the wall.

The Vicomte was on his feet, shocked by what had pa.s.sed. He began to babble words of apology, of excuse; while Joyeuse, ravished, strange to say, by the spirit of the woman he had deemed above anger and above pa.s.sion, smiled exultant, wondering what new, what marvellous, what incomparable side of herself this wonderful woman would next exhibit.

He who had exhausted all common types, all common moods, saw that he had here the quintessence both of heaven and earth. Her beauty, her meekness, her indignation, her sorrow--what an amalgam was here! And how all qualities became her!

Had Roger been there he had taken, it is possible, another view. But he was not; and presently into the halting flow of the Vicomte's words crept a murmur, a tramp of feet, a sound indescribable, but proclaiming news. He broke off. "What is it?" he said. "What is it?"

"News! Ay, news, for a hundred crowns!" the Duke answered. He moved to the door.

The Countess, her face bedabbled with tears, tears of outraged pride as well as grief, stayed her sobs and looked in the same direction.

Even the Abbess caught the infection, and raising her head from the pillow listened with parted lips and staring eyes. News! There was news. But what was it? Good or bad? The Abbess, her heart standing still, bit her lip till the blood came.

The murmur of voices drew nearer.