Under the Red Robe Part 28

She did not answer.

'Because if you do you will let me tell my tale. Say no, but once more, Mademoiselle--I am only human--and I go. And you will repent it all your life.'

I had done better had I taken that tone from the beginning. She winced, her head dropped, she seemed to grow smaller. All in a moment, as it were, her pride collapsed.

'I will hear you,' she murmured.

'Then we will ride on, if you please,' I said keeping the advantage I had gained. 'You need not fear. Your brother will follow.'

I caught hold of her rein and turned her horse, and she suffered it without demur; and in a moment we were pacing side by side, with the long straight road before us. At the end where it topped the hill, I could see the finger-post, two faint black lines against the sky. When we reached that--involuntarily I checked my horse and made it move more slowly.

'Well, sir?' she said impatiently. And her figure shook as with cold.

'It is a tale I desire to tell you, Mademoiselle,' I answered. 'Perhaps I may seem to begin a long way off, but before I end I promise to interest you. Two months ago there was living in Paris a man--perhaps a bad man--at any rate, by common report a hard man; a man with a peculiar reputation.'

She turned on me suddenly, her eyes gleaming through her mask.

'Oh, Monsieur, spare me this!' she said, quietly scornful. 'I will take it for granted.'

'Very well,' I replied steadfastly. 'Good or bad, he one day, in defiance of the Cardinal's edict against duelling, fought with a young Englishman behind St Jacques' Church. The Englishman had influence, the person of whom I speak had none, and an indifferent name; he was arrested, thrown into the Chatelet, cast for death, left for days to face death. At last an offer was made to him. If he would seek out and deliver up another man, an outlaw with a price upon his head, he should himself go free.'

I paused and drew a deep breath. Then I continued, looking not at her, but into the distance, and speaking slowly.

'Mademoiselle, it seems easy now to say what course he should have chosen. It seems hard now to find excuses for him. But there was one thing which I plead for him. The task he was asked to undertake was a dangerous one. He risked, he knew that he must risk, and the event proved him to be right, his life against the life of this unknown man.

And one thing more; time was before him. The outlaw might be taken by another, might be killed, might die, might--But there, Mademoiselle, we know what answer this person made. He took the baser course, and on his honour, on his parole, with money supplied to him, he went free; free on the condition that he delivered up this other man.'

I paused again, but I did not dare to look at her; and after a moment of silence I resumed.

'Some portion of the second half of the story you know, Mademoiselle; but not all. Suffice it that this man came down to a remote village, and there at risk, but, Heaven knows, basely enough, found his way into his victim's home. Once there, however, his heart began to fail him. Had he found the house garrisoned by men, he might have pressed to his end with little remorse. But he found there only two helpless loyal women; and I say again that from the first hour of his entrance he sickened at the work which he had in hand, the work which ill-fortune had laid upon him. Still he pursued it. He had given his word; and if there was one tradition of his race which this man had never broken, it was that of fidelity to his side--to the man who paid him. But he pursued it with only half his mind, in great misery, if you will believe me; sometimes in agonies of shame. Gradually, however, almost against his will, the drama worked itself out before him, until he needed only one thing.

I looked at Mademoiselle, trembling. But her head was averted: I could gather nothing from the outlines of her form; and I went on.

'Do not misunderstand me,' I said in a lower voice. 'Do not misunderstand what I am going to say next. This is no love-story; and can have no ending such as romancers love to set to their tales. But I am bound to mention, Mademoiselle, that this man who had lived almost all his life about inns and eating-houses and at the gaming-tables met here for the first time for years a good woman, and learned by the light of her loyalty and devotion to see what his life had been, and what was the real nature of the work he was doing. I think--nay, I know,'

I continued, 'that it added a hundredfold to his misery that when he learned at last the secret he had come to surprise, he learned it from her lips, and in such a way that, had he felt no shame, h.e.l.l could have been no place for him. But in one thing I hope she misjudged him. She thought, and had reason to think, that the moment he knew her secret he went out, not even closing the door, and used it. But the truth was that while her words were still in his ears news came to him that others had the secret; and had he not gone out on the instant and done what he did, and forestalled them, M. de Cocheforet would have been taken, but by others.'

Mademoiselle broke her long silence so suddenly that her horse sprang forward.

'Would to Heaven he had!' she wailed.

'Been taken by others?' I exclaimed, startled out of my false composure.

'Oh, yes, yes!' she answered with a pa.s.sionate gesture. 'Why did you not tell me? Why did you not confess to me, sir, even at the last moment?

But, no more! No more!' she continued in a piteous voice; and she tried to urge her horse forward. 'I have heard enough. You are racking my heart, M. de Berault. Some day I will ask G.o.d to give me strength to forgive you.'

'But you have not heard me out,' I said.

'I will hear no more,' she answered in a voice she vainly strove to render steady. 'To what end? Can I say more than I have said? Or did you think that I could forgive you now--with him behind us going to his death? Oh, no, no!' she continued. 'Leave me! I implore you to leave me, sir. I am not well.'

She drooped over her horse's neck as she spoke, and began to weep so pa.s.sionately that the tears ran down her cheeks under her mask, and fell and sparkled like dew on the mane; while her sobs shook her so that I thought she must fall. I stretched out my hand instinctively to give her help, but she shrank from me. 'No!' she gasped, between her sobs. 'Do not touch me. There is too much between us.'

'Yet there must be one thing more between us,' I answered firmly. 'You must listen to me a little longer whether you will or no, Mademoiselle: for the love you bear to your brother. There is one course still open to me by which I may redeem my honour; and it has been in my mind for some time back to take that course. 'To-day, I am thankful to say, I can take it cheerfully, if not without regret; with a steadfast heart, if no light one. Mademoiselle,' I continued earnestly, feeling none of the triumph, none of the vanity, none of the elation I had foreseen, but only simple joy in the joy I could give her, 'I thank G.o.d that it IS still in my power to undo what I have done: that it is still in my power to go back to him who sent me, and telling him that I have changed my mind, and will bear my own burdens, to pay the penalty.'

We were within a hundred paces of the top and the finger-post. She cried out wildly that she did not understand. 'What is it you--you--have just said?' she murmured. 'I cannot hear.' And she began to fumble with the ribbon of her mask.

'Only this, Mademoiselle,' I answered gently. 'I give your brother back his word, his parole. From this moment he is free to go whither he pleases. Here, where we stand, four roads meet. That to the right goes to Montauban, where you have doubtless friends, and can lie hid for a time. Or that to the left leads to Bordeaux, where you can take ship if you please. And in a word, Mademoiselle,' I continued, ending a little feebly, 'I hope that your troubles are now over.'

She turned her face to me--we had both come to a standstill--and plucked at the fastenings of her mask. But her trembling fingers had knotted the string, and in a moment she dropped her hand with a cry of despair. 'But you? You?' she wailed in a voice so changed that I should not have known it for hers. 'What will you do? I do not understand, Monsieur.'

'There is a third road,' I answered. 'It leads to Paris. That is my road, Mademoiselle. We part here.'

'But why?' she cried wildly.

'Because from to-day I would fain begin to be honourable,' I answered in a low voice. 'Because I dare not be generous at another's cost. I must go back whence I came.'

'To the Chatelet?' she muttered.

'Yes, Mademoiselle, to the Chatelet.'

She tried feverishly to raise her mask with her hand.

'I am not well,' she stammered. 'I cannot breathe.'

And she began to sway so violently in her saddle that I sprang down, and, running round her horse's head, was just in time to catch her as she fell. She was not quite unconscious then, for as I supported her, she cried out,--

'Do not touch me! Do not touch me! You kill me with shame!'

But as she spoke she clung to me; and I made no mistake. Those words made me happy. I carried her to the bank, my heart on fire, and laid her against it just as M. de Cocheforet rode up. He sprang from his horse, his eyes blazing, 'What is this?' he cried. 'What have you been saying to her, man?'

'She will tell you,' I answered drily, my composure returning under his eye. 'Amongst other things, that you are free. From this moment, M.

de Cocheforet, I give you back your parole, and I take my own honour.

Farewell.'

He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to heed or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the cross-roads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless; and behind me, all I loved. Once, when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after me across her body. And again a minute later I looked back. This time saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark blurred ma.s.s.

CHAPTER XIV. ST MARTIN'S EVE

It was late evening on the twenty-ninth of November when I rode into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the north-east, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed to be heavy with smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city's smell; and with all my heart I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south and the prospect of riding day after day and league after league across heath and moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life before him, and freedom and the open air, and hope and uncertainty; while I came back under doom, and in the pall of smoke that hung over the huddle of innumerable roofs saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate.

For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run counter to all the hard saws and instances by which he has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings, and struggles of heart. At least a dozen times between the Loire and Paris I asked myself what honour was, and what good it could do me when I lay rotting and forgotten; if I were not a fool following a Jack o'

Lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom I was returning would not be the first to gibe at my folly?

However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of Mademoiselle's looks and words. I dared not be false to her again; I could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low, And therefore--though not without many a secret struggle and quaking--I came, on the last evening but one of November, to the Orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the Luxembourg on my way to the Pont au Change.

The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins under my horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries--the first breath, in a word, of Paris--there came a new temptation; to go for one last night to Zaton's, to see the tables again and the faces of surprise, to be for an hour or two the old Berault. That would be no breach of honour, for in any case I could not reach the Cardinal before to-morrow. And it could do no harm. It could make no change in anything. It would not have been a thing worth struggling about, indeed; only--only I had in my inmost heart a suspicion that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force in that atmosphere; and that there even such a talisman as the memory of a woman's looks and words might lose its virtue.

Still, I think that I should have succ.u.mbed in the end if I had not received at the corner of the Luxembourg a shock which sobered me effectually. As I pa.s.sed the gates, a coach, followed by two outriders, swept out of the Palace courtyard; it was going at a great pace, and I reined my jaded horse on one side to give it room. By chance as it whirled by me, one of the leather curtains flapped back, and I saw for a second by the waning light--the nearer wheels were no more than two feet from my boot--a face inside.