"And there, I think, I can help you. If you will stray from the party, I will meet you and destroy the letter. That done--and would G.o.d it were done already--I will take to flight as best I can, and you will raise the alarm and say that I robbed you of it! And if you tear your dress--"
"No," she said.
He looked a question.
"No!" she repeated in a low voice. "If I betray him I will not lie to him! And no other shall pay the price! If I ruin him it shall be between him and me, and no other shall have part in it!"
He shook his head. "I do not know," he murmured, "what he may do to you!"
"Nor I," she said proudly. "That will be for him."
Curious eyes had watched the two as they climbed the hill. For the path ran up the slope to the gap which served for gate, much as the path leads up to the Castle Beautiful in old prints of the Pilgrim"s journey, and Madame St. Lo had marked the first halt and the second, and, noting every gesture, had lost nothing of the interview save the words. But until the two, after pausing a moment, pa.s.sed out of sight she made no sign. Then she laughed. And as Count Hannibal, at whom the laugh was aimed, did not heed her, she laughed again. And she hummed the line of Ronsard.
Still he would not be roused, and, piqued, she had recourse to words.
"I wonder what you would do," she said, "if the old lover followed us, and she went off with him!"
"She would not go," he answered coldly, and without looking up.
"But if he rode off with her?"
"She would come back on her feet!"
Madame St. Lo"s prudence was not proof against that. She had the woman"s inclination to hide a woman"s secret; and she had not intended, when she laughed, to do more than play with the formidable man with whom so few dared to play. Now, stung by his tone and his a.s.surance, she must needs show him that his trustfulness had no base. And, as so often happens in the circ.u.mstances, she went a little farther than the facts bore her.
"Any way, he has followed us so far!" she cried viciously.
"M. de Tignonville?"
"Yes. I saw him this morning while you were bathing. She left me and went into the little coppice. He came down the other side of the brook, stooping and running, and went to join her."
"How did he cross the brook?"
Madame St. Lo blushed. "Old Badelon was there, gathering simples," she said. "He scared him. And he crawled away."
"Then he did not cross?"
"No. I did not say he did!"
"Nor speak to her?"
"No. But if you think it will pa.s.s so next time--you do not know much of women!"
"Of women generally, not much," he answered, grimly polite. "Of this woman a great deal!"
"You looked in her big eyes, I suppose!" Madame St. Lo cried with heat.
"And straightway fell down and worshipped her!" She liked rather than disliked the Countess; but she was of the lightest, and the least opposition drove her out of her course. "And you think you know her! And she, if she could save you from death by opening an eye, would go with a patch on it till her dying day! Take my word for it, Monsieur, between her and her lover you will come to harm."
Count Hannibal"s swarthy face darkened a tone, and his eyes grew a very little smaller.
"I fancy that he runs the greater risk," he muttered.
"You may deal with him, but, for her--"
"I can deal with her. You deal with some women with a whip--"
"You would whip me, I suppose?"
"Yes," he said quietly. "It would do you good, Madame. And with other women otherwise. There are women who, if they are well frightened, will not deceive you. And there are others who will not deceive you though they are frightened. Madame de Tavannes is of the latter kind."
"Wait! Wait and see!" Madame cried in scorn.
"I am waiting."
"Yes! And whereas if you had come to me I could have told her that about M. de Tignonville which would have surprised her, you will go on waiting and waiting and waiting until one fine day you"ll wake up and find Madame gone, and--"
"Then I"ll take a wife I can whip!" he answered, with a look which apprised her how far she had carried it. "But it will not be you, sweet cousin. For I have no whip heavy enough for your case."
CHAPTER XXI. SHE WOULD, AND WOULD NOT.
We noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a retiring foe. But there are concessions which touch even a good woman"s conscience; and Madame de Tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy, shrank appalled before the task which confronted her.
To ignore what La Tribe had told her, to remain pa.s.sive when a movement on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole city from ma.s.sacre--this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish, that from the first she knew herself incapable of it. But to take the only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that, the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against punishment. And the Countess was no fanatic. No haze of bigotry glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than its own. Even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as he would see her.
True, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might pa.s.s for punishment. But he had saved her life where many had perished; and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity. In return for which she was to ruin him? It was not hard to imagine what he would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him.
She pondered over it as they rode that evening, with the weltering sun in their eyes and the lengthening shadows of the oaks falling athwart the bracken which fringed the track. Across breezy heaths and over downs, through green bottoms and by hamlets, from which every human creature fled at their approach, they ambled on by twos and threes; riding in a world of their own, so remote, so different from the real world--from which they came and to which they must return--that she could have wept in anguish, cursing G.o.d for the wickedness of man which lay so heavy on creation. The gaunt troopers riding at ease with swinging legs and swaying stirrups--and singing now a refrain from Ronsard, and now one of those verses of Marot"s psalms which all the world had sung three decades before--wore their most lamb-like aspect. Behind them Madame St. Lo chattered to Suzanne of a riding mask which had not been brought, or planned expedients, if nothing sufficiently in the mode could be found at Angers. And the other women talked and giggled, screamed when they came to fords, and made much of steep places, where the men must help them. In time of war death"s shadow covers but a day, and sorrow out of sight is out of mind. Of all the troop whom the sinking sun left within sight of the lofty towers and vine-clad hills of Vendome, three only wore faces attuned to the cruel August week just ending; three only, like dark beads strung far apart on a gay nun"s rosary, rode, brooding and silent, in their places. The Countess was one--the others were the two men whose thoughts she filled, and whose eyes now and again sought her, La Tribe"s with sombre fire in their depths, Count Hannibal"s fraught with a gloomy speculation, which belied his brave words to Madame St. Lo.
He, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not touch her. And she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. So that of the three only La Tribe was single-minded.
This day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak- wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses" heads and the squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. Night was hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which marked where Vendome stood.
"Another league," Count Hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. ""Tis pure and dry here," he said. "Set a watch, Bigot, and let two men go down for water.
I hear frogs below. You do not fear to be moonstruck, Madame?"
"I prefer this," she answered in a low voice.
"Houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "Give me G.o.d"s heaven."
"The earth is His, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.
He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor of Nature"s cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.