The Red Cockade Part 21

The words had scarcely pa.s.sed from his lips, when a man ran into the room, looked at us, and raised his hand in a peculiar way. "Pardon me," said M. de Geol quickly; and with a muttered word he followed the man out. Buton was not a whit behind. In a moment I was alone.

I supposed they would return, and I waited impatiently; but a minute or two pa.s.sed, and they did not appear. At length, tired of waiting, and wondering what was afoot, I went into the yard of the inn, and thence into the street. Still I did not find them; but collected before the inn I found a group of servants and others belonging to the place. They were all standing silent, listening, and as I joined them one looked round peevishly, and raised his hand as a warning to me to be quiet.

Before I could ask what it meant, the distant report of a gun, followed quickly by a second and a third, made my heart beat. A dull sound, made, it might be, by men shouting, or the pa.s.sage of a heavy waggon over pavement, ensued; then more firing, each report short, sharp, and decisive. While we listened, and as the last red glow of sunset faded on the eaves above us, leaving the street cold and grey, a bell somewhere began to toll hurriedly, stroke upon stroke; and a man, dashing round a corner not far away, made towards us.

But the landlord of the Ecu did not wait for him. "All in!" he cried to his people, "and close the great gates! And do you, Pierre, bar the shutters. And you, Monsieur," he continued hurriedly, turning to me, "will do well to come in also. The town is up, and the streets will not be safe for strangers."

But I was already half-way down the street. I met the fugitive, and he cried to me, as I pa.s.sed, that the mob were coming. I met a frightened, riderless horse, galloping madly along the kennel; it swerved from me, and almost fell on the slippery pavement. But I took no heed of either. I ran on until two hundred paces before me I saw smoke and dust, and dimly through it a row of soldiers, who, with their backs to me, were slowly giving way before a dense crowd that pressed upon them. Even as I came in sight of them, they seemed to break and melt away, and with a roar of triumph the mob swept over the place on which they had stood.

I had the wit to see that to force my way past the crowd was impossible; and I darted aside into a narrow pa.s.sage darkened by wide flat eaves that almost hid the pale evening sky. This brought me to a lane, full of women, standing listening with scared faces. I hurried through them, and when I had gone, as I judged, far enough to outflank the mob, chose a lane that appeared to lead in the direction of Father Benoit's house. Fortunately, the crowd was engaged in the main streets, the byways were comparatively deserted, and without accident I reached the little square by the gate.

Probably the attack on the soldiers had begun there, or in that neighbourhood, for a broken musket lay in two pieces on the pavement, and pale faces at upper windows followed me in a strange unwinking silence as I crossed the square. But no man was to be seen, and unmolested I reached the door of Father Benoit's staircase, and entered.

In the open the light was still good, but within doors it was dusk, and I had not taken two steps before I tripped and fell headlong over some object that lay in my way. I struck the foot of the stairs heavily, and got up groaning; but ceased to groan and held my breath, as peering through the half light of the entry, I saw over what I had fallen. It was a man's body.

The man was a monk, in the black and white robe of his order; and he was quite dead. It took me an instant to overcome the horror of the discovery, but that done, I saw easily enough how the corpse came to be there. Doubtless the man had been shot in the street at the beginning of the riot--perhaps he had been the first to attack the patrol; and the body had been dragged into shelter here, while his party swept on to vengeance.

I stooped and reverently adjusted the cowl which my foot had dragged away; and that done--it was no time for sentiment--I turned from him, and hurried up the stairs. Alas, when I reached Father Benoit's room it was empty.

Wondering what I should do next, I stood a moment in the failing light. What could I do? Then I walked aimlessly to the cas.e.m.e.nt and looked out. In the dull, almost blind wall which met my eyes across the court, was one window on a level with that at which I stood, but a little to the side. On a sudden, as I stared stupidly at the wall near it, a bright light shone out in this window. A lamp had been kindled in the room; and darkly outlined against the glow I saw the head and shoulders of a woman.

I almost screamed a name. It was Denise!

Even while I held my breath she moved from the window, a curtain was drawn and all was dark. Only the plain lines of the window--and those fast fading in the gloom--remained; only those and the gloomy, well-like court, that separated me from her.

I leaned a moment on the sill, my heart bounding quickly, my thoughts working with inconceivable rapidity. She was there, in the house opposite! It seemed too wonderful; it seemed inexplicable. Then I reflected that the house stood next to the old gate I had seen from the street; and had not some one told me that Froment lived in the Port d'Auguste?

Doubtless this was it; and she lay in his power in this house that adjoined it and was one with it. I leaned farther out, partly that I might cool my burning face, partly to see more; my eyes, greedily scanning the front of the house, traced the line of arrow-slits that marked the ascent of the staircase. I followed the line downwards; it ended beside the porch surmounted by a little statue, at which I had seen the two men enter.

They were still fighting in the town. I could hear the dull sound of distant volleys, and the tolling of bells, and now and then a wave of noise, of screams and yells, that rose and sank on the evening air. But my eyes were on the porch below; and suddenly I had a thought. I followed the line of arrow-slits up again--it was too dark in the sombre court to see them well--and marked the position of the window at which Denise had appeared. Then I turned, and pa.s.sing through the room, I groped my way downstairs.

I had no light, and I had to go carefully with one hand on the grimy wall; but I knew now where the monk's body lay, and I stepped over it safely, and to the door, and putting out my head, looked up and down.

Two men, as I did so, pa.s.sed hurriedly through the little square, and, before reaching the gate, dived into an entry on the right, and disappeared. About the eaves of the highest house, that towered high and black above me, a faint ruddy light was beginning to dance. I heard voices, that came, I thought, from the tower of the gateway; and there, too, I thought that I saw a figure outlined against the sky. But otherwise, all was quiet in the neighbourhood; and I went in again.

No matter what I did in the darkness at the foot of the stairs; I hate to recall it. But in a minute or two I came out a monk in cowl and girdle. Then I, too, dived into the entry, and in a trice found myself in the court. Before me was the porch, and with the barrel of the broken musket, which I had s.n.a.t.c.hed up as I pa.s.sed, I struck twice on the pavement.

I had no time to think what would happen next, or what I was going to confront. The door opened instantly, and I went in; as by magic the door closed silently behind me.

I found myself in a long, bare hall or corridor, plain and unfurnished, that had once perhaps been a cloister. A lighted lamp hung against a wall, and opposite me, on a stone seat sat two persons talking; three or four others were walking up and down. All paused at my entrance, however, and looked at me eagerly. "Whence are you, brother?" said one of them, advancing to me.

"The Cabaret Vierge," I answered at a venture. The light dazzled me, and I raised my hand to ward it off.

"For the Chief?"

"Yes."

"Come, quickly then," the man said, "he is on the roof. It goes well?" he continued, looking with a smile at my weapon.

"It goes," I answered, holding my head low, so that my face was lost in the cowl.

"They are beginning to light up, I am told?"

"Yes."

He took up a small lamp, and opening a door in a kind of b.u.t.tress that strengthened one of the arches, he led the way through it, and up a narrow winding staircase made in the thickness of the wall. Presently we pa.s.sed an open door, and I ticked it off in my mind. It led to the rooms on the first floor from the ground. Twenty steps higher we pa.s.sed another door--closed this time. Again fifteen steps and we came to a third. That floor held my heart, and I looked round greedily, desperately, for some way of evading my guide and so reaching it. But I saw only the smooth stones of the wall; and he continued to climb.

I halted half a dozen steps higher. "What is it?" he asked, looking down at me.

"I have dropped a note," I said; and I began to grope about the steps.

"For the Chief?"

"Yes."

"Here, take the light!" he answered impatiently. "And be quick! if your news is worth the telling, it is worth telling quickly. Sacre! man, what have you done?"

I had let the lamp fall on the steps, extinguishing it; and we were in darkness. In the moment of silence which followed, before he recovered from his surprise, I could hear the voices of men above us, and the tramp of their feet on the roof; and a cold draught of air met me. He swore another oath. "Get down, get down!" he cried angrily, "and let me pa.s.s you! You are a pretty messenger to--there wait; wait until I fetch another light."

He squeezed by me, and left me standing in the very place I would have chosen, in the angle of the doorway we had just pa.s.sed; before he had clattered down half a dozen steps I had my finger on the latch. To my joy the door--which might so easily have been locked--yielded to my knee, and pa.s.sing through it, I closed it behind me. Then turning to the right--all was still dark--I groped my way along the wall through which I had entered. I knew it to be the outside wall, and dimly in front I discerned the faint radiance of a window. Now that the moment had come to put all to the test I was as calm as I could wish to be. I counted ten paces, and came, as I expected, to the window; ten paces farther and I felt my way barred by a door. This should be the room--the last that way; listening intently for the first sounds of pursuit or alarm, I felt about for a latch, found it, and tried the door. Again fortune favoured me, it came to my hand; but instead of light I found all dark as before; and then understood, as I struck with some violence against a second door.

A stifled cry in a woman's voice came from beyond it: and some one asked sharply, "Who is that?"

I gave no answer, but searched for the latch, found it, and in a moment the door was opened. The light which poured out dazzled me for a second or two; but while I stood blinking, under the lamp I had a vision of two girls standing at bay, one behind the other, and the nearer was Denise!

I stepped towards her with a cry of joy; she retreated with terror written on her face. "What do you want?" she stammered as she retreated. "You have made some mistake. We----"

Then I remembered the guise in which I stood, and the gun-barrel in my hand, and I dashed back the cowl from my face; and in a moment--it was of all surprises the most joyous, for I had not seen her since we sat opposite one another in the carriage, and then only a word had pa.s.sed between us--in a moment she was in my arms, on my breast, and sobbing with her head hidden, and my lips on her hair.

"They told me you were dead!" she cried. "They told me you were dead!"

Then I understood; and I held her to me, held her to me more and more closely, and said--G.o.d knows what I said. And for the moment she let me, and we forgot all else, our danger, the dark future, even the woman who stood by. We had been plighted before, and it had been nothing to us; now, with my lips on hers, and her arms clinging, I knew that it was once for all, and that only death, if death, could part us.

Alas! that was not so far from us that we could long ignore it. In a minute or two she freed herself, and thrust me from her, her face pale and red by turns, her eyes soft and shining in the lamplight. "How do you come here, Monsieur?" she cried. "And in that dress?"

"To see you," I answered. And at the word, I stepped forward and would have taken her in my arms again.

But she waved me back. "Oh, no, no!" she cried, shuddering. "Not now! Do you know that they will kill you? Do you know that they will kill you if they find you here? Go! Go! I beg of you, while you can."

"And leave you?"

"Yes, and leave me," she answered, with a gesture of despair. "I implore you to do so."

"And leave you to Froment?" I cried again.

She looked at me in a different way, and with a little start. "You know that?" she said.

"Yes," I answered.

"Then know this too, Monsieur," she replied, raising her head, and meeting my eyes with the bravest look. "Know this too: that whatever betide, I shall not, after this, marry him, nor any man but you!"

I would have fallen on my knees and kissed the hem of her gown for that word, but she drew back, and pa.s.sionately begged me to begone. "This house is not safe for you," she said. "It is death, it is death, Monsieur! My mother is merciless, my brother is here; and he--the house is full of his sworn creatures. You escaped him hardly before; if he finds you here now he will kill you."

"But if I need fear him so," I answered grimly,--for I saw, now that she had ceased to blush, how pale and wan she was, and what dark marks fear had painted under her eyes--child's eyes no longer, but a woman's--"if I need fear him so, what of you? What of you, Mademoiselle? Am I to leave you at his mercy?"

She looked at me with a strange gravity in her face; and answered me so that I never forgot her answer. "Monsieur," she said, "was I afraid on the roof of the house at St. Alais? And I have more to guard now. Have no fear. There is a roof here, too, and I walk on it; nor shall my husband ever have cause to blush for me."

"But I was there," I said quickly. Heaven knows why; it was a strange thing to say. Yet she did not find it so.

"Yes," she said--and smiled; and with the smile, her face burned again and her eyes grew soft, and all her dignity fled in a moment, and she looked at me, drooping. And in an instant she was in my arms.

But only for a few seconds. Then she tore herself away almost in anger. "Oh, go, go!" she cried. "If you love me, go, Monsieur."

"Swear," I said, "to put a handkerchief in your window if you want help!"

"In my window?"

"I can see it from Father Benoit's."

A gleam of joy lit up her face. "I will," she said. "Oh, G.o.d be thanked that you are so near! I will. But I have Francoise, too, and she is true to me. As long as I have her----"

She stopped with her lips apart, and the blood gone suddenly from her cheeks; and we looked at one another. Alas, I had stayed too long! There was a noise of feet coming along the pa.s.sage, and a hubbub of voices outside, and the clatter of a door hastily closed. I think for a moment we scarcely breathed; and even after that it was her woman who was the first to move. She sprang to the door and softly locked it.

"It is vain!" Denise said in a harsh whisper; she leaned against the table, her face as white as snow. "They will fetch my mother, and they will kill you."

"There is no other door?" I muttered, staring round with hunted eyes, and feeling for the first time the full danger of the course I had taken.

She shook her head.

"What is that?" I cried, pointing to the farther end of the chamber, where a bed stood in the alcove.

"A closet," the woman answered, almost with a sob. "Yes, yes, Monsieur, they may not search. Quick, and I can lock it."

In such a case man acts on instinct. I heard the latch of the door tried, and then some one knocked peremptorily; and so long I hesitated. But a second knock followed on the first, and a voice I knew cried imperatively: "Open, open, Francoise!" and I moved towards the closet. The girl, distracted by the repeated summons and her terror, hung a moment between me and the door of the room; but in the end had to go to the latter, so that I drew the closet door upon myself.

Then in a moment it came upon me that if, hiding there, I was found, I should shame Denise; it darted through my brain that if, lurking there behind the closed doors among her woman's things, I was caught, I should harm her a hundred times more than if I stood out in the middle of the floor and faced the worst. And with my face on fire at the mere thought, I opened the door again, and stepped out; and was just in time. For as the door of the room flew open, and M. de St. Alais strode in and looked round, I was the first person he saw.

There were three or four men behind him; and among them the man whom I had cheated on the stairs. But M. St. Alais' eyes blazing with wrath caught mine, and held them; and the others were nothing to me.

CHAPTER XXII.

n.o.bLESSE OBLIGE.

Yet he was not the first to speak. One of the men behind him took a step forward, and cried, "That is the man! See, he still has the gun-barrel."

"Seize him, then," M. de St. Alais replied. "And take him from here! Monsieur," he continued, addressing me grimly, and with a grim eye, "whoever you are, when you undertook to be a spy you counted the cost, I suppose? Take him away, my men!"

Two of the fellows strode forward, and in a moment seized my arms; and in the surprise of M. de St. Alais' appearance and the astonishment his words caused me, I made no resistance. But in such emergencies the mind works quickly, and in a trice I recovered myself. "This is nonsense, M. de St. Alais!" I said. "You know well that I am no spy. You know why I am here. And for the matter of that----"

"I know nothing!" he answered.

"But----"

"I know nothing, I say!" he repeated, with a mocking gesture. "Except, Monsieur, that we find you here in a monk's dress, when you are clearly no monk. You had better have tried to swim the Rhone at flood, than entered this house to-night--I tell you that! Now away with him! His case will be dealt with below."

But this was too much. I wrested my hands from the men who held me, and sprang back. "You lie!" I cried. "You know who I am, and why I am here!"

"I do not know you," he answered stubbornly. "Nor do I know why you are here. I once knew a man like you; that is true. But he was a gentleman, and would have died before he would have saved himself by a lie--by a trumped-up tale. Take him away. He has frightened Mademoiselle to death. I suppose he found the door open, and slipped in, and thought himself safe."

At last I understood what he meant, and that in his pa.s.sion he would sacrifice one rather than bring in his sister's name. Nay, I saw more; that he viewed with a cruel exultation the dilemma in which he had placed me; and my brow grew damp, as I looked round wildly, trying to solve the question. I had the sounds of street fighting still in my ears; I knew that men staking all in such a strife owned few scruples and scant mercy. I could see that this man in particular was maddened by the losses and humiliations which he had suffered; and I stood in the way of his schemes. The risk existed, therefore, and was no mere threat; it seemed foolish quixotism to run it.

And yet--and yet I hesitated. I even let the men urge me half-way to the door; and then--heaven knows what I should have done or whether I could have seen my way plainly--the knot was cut for me. With a scream, Denise, who since her brother's entrance had leaned, half-fainting, against the wall, sprang forward, and seized him by the arm.

"No, no!" she cried in a choked voice. "No! You will not, you will not do this! Have pity, have mercy! I----"

"Mademoiselle!" he said, cutting her short quietly, but with a gleam of rage in his eyes. "You are overwrought, and forget yourself. The scene has been too much for you. Here!" he continued sharply to the maid, "take care of your mistress. The man is a spy, and not worthy of her pity."

But Denise clung to him. "He is no spy!" she cried, in a voice that went to my heart. "He is no spy, and you know it!"

"Hush, girl! Be silent!" he answered furiously.

But he had not counted on a change in her, beside which the change in him was petty. "I will not!" she answered, "I will not!" and to my astonishment, releasing the arm to which she had hitherto clung, and shaking back from her face the hair which her violent movements had loosened, she stood out and defied him. "I will not!" she cried. "He is no spy, and you know it, Monsieur! He is my lover," she continued, with a superb gesture, "and he came to see me. Do you understand? He was contracted to me, and he came to see me!"

"Girl, are you mad?" he snarled in the breathless hush of the room, the hush that followed as all looked at her.

"I am not mad," she answered, her eyes burning in her white face.

"Then if you feel no shame do you feel no fear?" he retorted in a terrible voice.

"No!" she cried. "For I love! And I love him."

I will not say what I felt when I heard that, myself helpless. For one thing, I was in so great a rage I scarcely knew what I felt; and for another, the words were barely spoken before M. le Marquis seized the girl roughly by the waist, and dragged her, screaming and resisting, to the other end of the room.

This was the signal for a scene indescribable. I sprang forward to protect her; in an instant the three men flung themselves upon me, and bore me by sheer weight towards the door. St. Alais, foaming with rage, shouted to them to remove me, while I called him coward, and cursed him and strove desperately to get at him. For a moment I made head against them all, though they were three to one; the maid's screaming added to the uproar. Then the odds prevailed; and in a minute they had me out, and had closed the door on her and her cries.

I was panting, breathless, furious. But the moment it was done and the door shut, a kind of calm fell upon us. The men relaxed their hold on me, and stood looking at me quietly; while I leaned against the wall, and glowered at them. Then, "There, Monsieur, have no more of that!" one of them said civilly enough. "Go peaceably, and we will be easy with you; otherwise----"

"He is a cowardly hound!" I cried with a sob.

"Softly, Monsieur, softly."