"I could not help it," sighed Helene.
She was almost angry with him, and for a moment she was sorry she had sent him any message.
"What is the use? How can I speak to him from the window? it is too high," she said to herself as she stumbled up the stairs, shuddering as her fingers touched the damp wall. "It is my fate--I am never to be happy. My mother knows she can do as she likes with me."
A sob rose in her throat, and burning tears blinded her. But she dashed them away when she reached the level, and saw the thin line of light which showed the entrance into her own room, where she had left a candle burning. The opposite panel flew open as she touched it; she stooped and crept into the chapel.
It was dark, cold, and lonely; no friendly red light in the seldom-used little sanctuary; but the window in the north wall was unshuttered, and let in the pale glimmer of a sky lit by stars. Helene had no difficulty in opening the window, though its rusty hinges groaned. There was a quick, loud rustling in the ivy beneath. Helene stepped back with a slight scream as a hand shot suddenly up and caught the sill; in another instant Angelot had climbed to the level of the window and dropped on the brick floor. Helene was almost in his arms, but she drew back and motioned him away, remembering just in time that she was angry.
"What is it?" he said quickly. "Why--"
"How--how did you get here?" she stammered. "I thought you were down in the moat."
"It is not the first time I have climbed the ivy, as the owls might tell you," he said. "It is easy; the old trunk is as thick as my body, and twists like a ladder. Helene! You are angry with me! What have I done?"
He tried to take her hand, but she drew it from him. He fell on his knees and kissed the hem of her gown.
"Helene!"
She stood motionless, unable to speak. But Angelot was not long to be treated in this chilling fashion. It seemed that he had a good conscience, and was not afraid to account for any of his actions. He rose to his feet; no words pa.s.sed between them; but Helene resisted him no longer. Her head was leaning on his breast; a long, happy sigh escaped her; and it was between kisses that he asked her again, "Why are you angry with me?"
"I am not--not now--I know it is not true," she murmured.
"What, my beloved?"
"You do care for me?"
Angelot laughed. Indeed it did not seem necessary to rea.s.sure her on such a point.
"Because, if you give me up, I shall die," she said. "I should have died, I think, if I had not seen you to-night. Now they may say and do what they please."
"What have they been saying and doing? Ah, my sweet, how have they been tormenting you? You are no happier than when I saw you first, though I love you so. How you tremble! Sit down here--there, softly--you are quite safe. What in G.o.d"s name are we to do? Must I leave you again with these people?"
For a few minutes they sat in a corner of an old carved bench under the window, one of the family seats in those more religious days when grandfathers and grandmothers came to the chapel to pray. Helene leaned against Angelot, clinging to him, and past his dark profile, dimly visible in the twilight of stars, she could see the roughly carved and painted figure of Our Lady, brought from a Spanish convent and much venerated by that Mademoiselle de Sainfoy who became a Carmelite in the early days of the order. Helene had fancied, before now, that there was something motherly in the smile of the statue, neglected so long. She thought, even as her lover kissed her, that neither the Blessed Virgin, nor St. Theresa, nor the ancestor who was her disciple, would have been angry with her and Angelot. Only her own mother, and she for worldly reasons alone, would find any sin in this sweet human love which wrapped her round, which, if allowed to have its way, would shield her from all the miseries of life and keep her in the rapturous peace she enjoyed in this moment, this fleeting moment, which she could not spoil even by telling her Angelot why she sent for him.
"Ah, how I wanted you!" she breathed in his ear.
"My love! But what--what are we to do!" he murmured pa.s.sionately; her feelings of rest and peace and safety were not for him.
"Your father is very good, and loves you," he said. "At least we know that he will not have you sacrificed. I will ask him. If he refuses--then, mille tonnerres, I will carry you off into the woods, Helene."
"It is no use asking him, dearest, none," she said. "Besides, you told them all that you did not care for me."
She lifted her head, and tried to look into his face.
"Ah, did they tell you that? Was that why you were angry?" Angelot cried.
"Yes," she said; "and now you had better ask to be forgiven."
Indeed, as they both knew too well, there were more serious things than kisses and loving words to occupy that stolen half-hour. They had to tell each other all--all they knew--and each became a little wiser.
Helene knew that General Ratoneau had actually asked for her, and that her father had refused to listen; thus realising that her mother was deceiving her, and also that for some hidden reason the plan seemed to Madame de Sainfoy still possible. Angelot, even as they sat there together, realised vividly that he was living in a fool"s paradise; that his love"s confession to her mother had made things incalculably worse, justifying all the stern treatment, the violent means, which such a mother might think necessary.
"She means to marry her to Ratoneau," he thought, "and she will do it, unless Heaven interferes by a miracle. Uncle Joseph is my only friend, and he cannot help me--at least--if I do not act at once, we are lost."
He lifted Helene"s fair head a little, and its pale beauty, in the dim gleam from the open window, seemed to fill his whole being as he gazed.
He drew her towards him and kissed her again and again; it might have been a last embrace, a last good-bye, but he did not mean it for that.
"Will you come with me now?" he said.
"Yes!" Helene said faintly.
"Are you afraid?"
"No"--she hesitated--"not with you. I can be brave when I am with you--but when you are not here--"
"They shall not part us again," Angelot said.
"But how are we to get out?"
Though her lover was there, still holding her, the girl trembled as she asked the question.
"I can unbar the door," he said. "Come to the top of the stairs and wait there till I whistle; then come down to me."
This seemed enough for the moment, and the wild fellow had no further plan at all. To have her outside these prison walls, in the free air he loved, under the trees in the starlight, to make a right to her, as he vaguely thought, by running off with her in this fashion--that was all that concerned him at the moment. Where was he to take her? Would Uncle Joseph receive them? Such thoughts just flashed through the tumult of his brain, but seemed of no present importance. Angelot was mad that night, mad with love of his cousin, with the desperate necessity which needed to be met by desperate daring.
Helene followed him, trembling very much, to the top of the stairs.
"You have a candle there? Fetch it for me," he said.
She obeyed him, slipping through the tapestry into her own room. Once there, she looked round with a wild wonder. Could this be herself--Helene de Sainfoy--about to escape into the wide world with her lover--and empty-handed? She looked down vaguely at her white evening gown and thin shoes, s.n.a.t.c.hed up her watch and chain and a diamond ring, which were lying on the table, and slipped them into her pocket. It was the work of a moment, yet when she carried the candle to Angelot, he was white as death, and stamping with impatience; the flame in his eyes frightened her.
He took the candle without a word and disappeared down the first steep winding of the stairs. His moving shadow danced gigantic on the wall, then was gone. Helene waited in the darkness. Even love and faith, with hope added, were not strong enough to keep her brave and happy during the terrible minutes of lonely waiting there. Her limbs trembled, her heart thumped so that she had to lean for support against the cold damp wall. She bent her head forward, eagerly listening. Why had she not gone down with him? Somebody might hear him whistle. However, no whistle came; only a dull sound of banging, which echoed strangely, alarmingly, up the narrow staircase in the thickness of the wall.
It seemed to Helene that she had waited long and was becoming stupefied with anxiety, when a light flashed suddenly upon her eyes, and she opened them wide; she had never lost the childish fear which made her shut them in the dark. Angelot had leaped up the stairs again and was standing beside her, white and frowning.
"It is impossible," he said, in a hurried whisper. "I cannot move the bar without tools. Come back into the chapel."
He set down the candlestick on the altar step, walked distractedly to the end of the low vaulted room, then back to where she stood gazing at him with a pitiful terror in her eyes.
"What is to be done! Is there no other way!" he said, half to himself.
"Mon Dieu, Helene, how beautiful you are! Ah, what is that? Listen!"
His ears, quicker than hers, had caught steps and a rustling sound in the pa.s.sage that ended at the chapel door.
"Dear--go back to your room," he said. "They must not find you here. We shall meet again--Good-night, my own!"
He was gone. The bewildered girl looked after him silently, and he was across the floor, on the window-sill, disappearing hand over head down his ladder of old twisted ivy stems, before she realised anything. Then, not the least aware that some one was knocking at her bedroom door in the pa.s.sage, shaking the latch, calling her name, she flew after him to the window and leaned out, crying to him low and wildly, "Angelot, come back, come back! Why did you go? Ah, don"t leave me! Help me to climb down, too,--please, please, darling!"
Angelot was out of sight, though not out of hearing. Forty feet of thick ivy and knotted stems, shelter of generations of owls, stretched between the chapel window and the moat"s green floor; ivy two centuries old, the happy hunting-ground of many a lad of Lancilly and La Mariniere. But that night, perhaps, the hospitable old tree reached the most romantic point of its history.