"Yes," she answered. She spoke absently, and did not look at me.
"How does he talk to you?" I asked, speaking a trifle curtly.
As I intended, my tone roused her. "By signs," she said.
"Is he--is he not a little mad?" I ventured. I wanted to make her talk and forget herself.
She looked at me with sudden keenness, then dropped her eyes.
"You do not like him?" she said, a note of challenge in her voice. "I have noticed that, Monsieur."
"I think he does not like me," I replied.
"He is less trustful than we are," she answered navely. "It is natural that he should be. He has seen more of the world."
That silenced me for a moment, but she did not seem to notice it. "I was looking for him a little while ago, and I could not find him," I said, after a pause.
"He has been into the village," she answered.
I longed to pursue the matter farther; but though she seemed to entertain no suspicion of me, I dared not run the risk. I tried her, instead, on another tack. "Mademoiselle de Cocheforet does not seem very well to-day?" I said.
"No?" she answered carelessly. "Well, now you speak of it, I do not think she is. She is often anxious about--my husband."
She uttered the last two words with a little hesitation, and looked at me quickly when she had spoken them. We were sitting at the moment on a stone seat which had the wall of the house for a back; and, fortunately, I was toying with the branch of a creeping plant that hung over it, so that she could not see more than the side of my face.
For I knew that it altered. Over my voice, however, I had more control, and I hastened to answer, "Yes, I suppose so," as innocently as possible.
"He is at Bosost--in Spain. You knew that, I conclude?" she said, with a certain sharpness. And she looked me in the face again very directly.
"Yes," I answered, beginning to tremble.
"I suppose you have heard, too, that he--that he sometimes crosses the border?" she continued, in a low voice, but with a certain ring of insistence in her tone. "Or, if you have not heard it, you guess it?"
I was in a quandary, and grew, in one second, hot all over. Uncertain what amount of knowledge I ought to admit, I took refuge in gallantry.
"I should be surprised if he did not," I answered, with a bow, "being, as he is, so close, and having such an inducement to return, Madame."
She drew a long, shivering sigh--at the thought of his peril, I fancied, and sat back against the wall. Nor did she say any more, though I heard her sigh again. In a moment she rose. "The afternoons are growing chilly," she said; "I will go in and see how Mademoiselle is. Sometimes she does not come to supper. If she cannot descend this evening, I am afraid you must excuse me too, Monsieur."
I said what was right, and watched her go in; and, as I did so, I loathed my errand, and the mean contemptible curiosity which it had planted in my mind, more than at any former time. These women--I could find it in my heart to hate them for their frankness, for their foolish confidence, and the silly trustfulness that made them so easy a prey!
_Nom de Dieu!_ What did the woman mean by telling me all this? To meet me in such a way, to disarm one by such methods, was to take an unfair advantage. It put a vile--ay, the vilest--aspect, on the work I had to do.
Yet it was very odd! What could M. de Cocheforet mean by returning so soon, if M. de Cocheforet was here? And, on the other hand, if it was not his unexpected presence that had so upset the house, what was the secret? Whom had Clon been tracking? And what was the cause of Madame"s anxiety? In a few minutes I began to grow curious again; and, as the ladies did not appear at supper, I had leisure to give my brain full license, and in the course of an hour thought of a hundred keys to the mystery. But none exactly fitted the lock, or laid open the secret.
A false alarm that evening helped to puzzle me still more. I was sitting, about an hour after supper, on the same seat in the garden--I had my cloak and was smoking--when Madame came out like a ghost, and, without seeing me, flitted away through the darkness toward the stables. For a moment I hesitated, then I followed her. She went down the path and round the stables, and so far I understood; but when she had in this way gained the rear of the west wing, she took a track through the thicket to the east of the house again, and so came back to the garden. This gained, she came up the path and went in through the parlour door, and disappeared--after making a clear circuit of the house, and not once pausing or looking to right or left! I confess I was fairly baffled. I sank back on the seat I had left, and said to myself that this was the lamest of all conclusions. I was sure that she had exchanged no word with any one. I was equally sure that she had not detected my presence behind her. Why, then, had she made this strange promenade, alone, unprotected, an hour after nightfall? No dog had bayed, no one had moved, she had not once paused, or listened, like a person expecting a rencontre. I could not make it out. And I came no nearer to solving it, though I lay awake an hour beyond my usual time.
In the morning neither of the ladies descended to dinner, and I heard that Mademoiselle was not so well. After a lonely meal, therefore--I missed them more than I should have supposed--I retired to my favourite seat, and fell to meditating.
The day was fine, and the garden pleasant. Sitting there with my eyes on the old-fashioned herb-beds, with the old-fashioned scents in the air, and the dark belt of trees bounding the view on either side, I could believe that I had been out of Paris not three weeks, but three months. The quiet lapped me round. I could fancy that I had never loved anything else. The wood-doves cooed in the stillness; occasionally the harsh cry of a jay jarred the silence. It was an hour after noon, and hot. I think I nodded.
On a sudden, as if in a dream, I saw Clon"s face peering at me round the angle of the parlour door. He looked, and in a moment withdrew, and I heard whispering. The door was gently closed. Then all was still again.
But I was wide awake now, and thinking hard. Clearly the people of the house wished to a.s.sure themselves that I was asleep and safely out of the way. As clearly, it was to my interest to know what was pa.s.sing.
Giving way to the temptation, I rose quietly, and, stooping below the level of the windows, slipped round the east end of the house, pa.s.sing between it and the great yew hedge. Here I found all still, and no one stirring. So, keeping a wary eye about me, I went on round the house--reversing the route which Madame had taken the night before--until I gained the rear of the stables. Here I had scarcely paused a second to scan the ground before two persons came out of the stable-court They were Madame and the porter.
They stood a brief while outside, and looked up and down. Then Madame said something to the man, and he nodded. Leaving him standing where he was, she crossed the gra.s.s with a quick, light step, and vanished among the trees.
In a moment my mind was made up to follow; and, as Clon turned at once and went in, I was able to do so before it was too late. Bending low among the shrubs, I ran hot-foot to the point where Madame had entered the wood. Here I found a narrow path, and ran nimbly along it, and presently saw her grey robe fluttering among the trees before me. It only remained to keep out of her sight and give her no chance of discovering that she was followed; and this I set myself to do. Once or twice she glanced round, but the wood was of beech, the light which pa.s.sed between the leaves was mere twilight, and my clothes were dark-coloured. I had every advantage, therefore, and little to fear as long as I could keep her in view and still remain myself at such a distance that the rustle of my tread would not disturb her.
a.s.sured that she was on her way to meet her husband, whom my presence kept from the house, I felt that the crisis had come at last; and I grew more excited with each step I took. True, I detested the task of watching her: it filled me with peevish disgust. But in proportion as I hated it I was eager to have it done and be done with it, and succeed, and stuff my ears and begone from the scene. When she presently came to the verge of the beech wood, and, entering a little open clearing, seemed to loiter, I went cautiously. This, I thought, must be the rendezvous; and I held back warily, looking to see him step out of the thicket.
But he did not, and by-and-bye she quickened her pace. She crossed the open and entered a wide ride cut through a low, dense wood of alder and dwarf oak--a wood so closely planted, and so intertwined with hazel and elder and box that the branches rose like a solid wall, twelve feet high, on either side of the track.
Down this she pa.s.sed, and I stood and watched her go; for I dared not follow. The ride stretched away as straight as a line for four or five hundred yards, a green path between green walls. To enter it was to be immediately detected, if she turned; while the thicket itself permitted no pa.s.sage. I stood baffled and raging, and watched her pa.s.s along. It seemed an age before she at last reached the end, and, turning sharply to the right, was in an instant gone from sight.
I waited then no longer. I started off, and, running as lightly and quietly as I could, I sped down the green alley. The sun shone into it, the trees kept off the wind, and between heat and haste, I sweated finely. But the turf was soft, and the ground fell slightly, and in little more than a minute I gained the end. Fifty yards short of the turning I stayed myself, and, stealing on, looked cautiously the way she had gone.
I saw before me a second ride, the twin of the other, and a hundred and fifty paces down it her grey figure tripping on between the green hedges. I stood and took breath, and cursed the wood and the heat and Madame"s wariness. We must have come a league or two-thirds of a league, at least. How far did the man expect her to plod to meet him?
I began to grow angry. There is moderation even in the cooking of eggs, and this wood might stretch into Spain, for all I knew!
Presently she turned the corner and was gone again, and I had to repeat my man[oe]uvre. This time, surely, I should find a change. But no! Another green ride stretched away into the depths of the forest, with hedges of varying shades--here light and there dark, as hazel and elder, or thorn, and yew and box prevailed--but always high and stiff and impervious. Half-way down the ride Madame"s figure tripped steadily on, the only moving thing in sight. I wondered, stood, and, when she vanished, followed--only to find that she had entered another track, a little narrower, but in every other respect alike.
And so it went on for quite half an hour. Sometimes Madame turned to the right, sometimes to the left. The maze seemed to be endless. Once or twice I wondered whether she had lost her way, and was merely seeking to return. But her steady, purposeful gait, her measured pace, forbade the idea. I noticed, too, that she seldom looked behind her--rarely to right or left. Once the ride down which she pa.s.sed was carpeted not with green, but with the silvery, sheeny leaves of some creeping plant that in the distance had a shimmer like that of water at evening. As she trod this, with her face to the low sun, her tall grey figure had a pure air that for the moment startled me--she looked unearthly. Then I swore in scorn of myself, and at the next corner I had my reward. She was no longer walking on. She had stopped, I found, and seated herself on a fallen tree that lay in the ride.
For some time I stood in ambush watching her, and with each minute I grew more impatient. At last I began to doubt--to have strange thoughts. The green walls were growing dark. The sun was sinking; a sharp, white peak, miles and miles away, which closed the vista of the ride began to flush and colour rosily. Finally, but not before I had had leisure to grow uneasy, she stood up and walked on more slowly. I waited, as usual, until the next turning hid her. Then I hastened after her, and, warily pa.s.sing round the corner--came face to face with her!
I knew all in a moment--that she had fooled me, tricked me, lured me away. Her face was white with scorn, her eyes blazed; her figure, as she confronted me, trembled with anger and infinite contempt.
"You spy!" she cried. "You hound! You--gentleman! Oh, _mon Dieu!_ if you are one of us--if you are really not _canaille_--we shall pay for this some day! We shall pay a heavy reckoning in the time to come! I did not think," she continued--her every syllable like the lash of a whip--"that there was anything so vile as you in this world!"
I stammered something--I do not know what. Her words burned into me--into my heart! Had she been a man, I would have struck her dead!
"You thought you deceived me yesterday," she continued, lowering her tone, but with no lessening of the pa.s.sion and contempt which curled her lip and gave fulness to her voice. "You plotter! You surface trickster! You thought it an easy task to delude a woman--you find yourself deluded. G.o.d give you shame that you may suffer!" she continued mercilessly. "You talked of Clon, but Clon beside you is the most honourable of men!"
"Madame," I said hoa.r.s.ely--and I know my face was grey as ashes--"let us understand one another."
"G.o.d forbid!" she cried, on the instant. "I would not soil myself!"
"Fie! Madame," I said, trembling. "But then, you are a woman. That should cost a man his life!"
She laughed bitterly.
"You say well," she retorted. "I am not a man. Neither am I Madame.
Madame de Cocheforet has spent this afternoon--thanks to your absence and your imbecility--with her husband. Yes, I hope that hurts you!"
she went on, savagely snapping her little white teeth together. "To spy and do vile work, and do it ill, Monsieur Mouchard--Monsieur de Mouchard, I should say--I congratulate you!"
"You are not Madame de Cocheforet!" I cried, stunned--even in the midst of my shame and rage--by this blow.
"No, Monsieur!" she answered grimly. "I am not! And permit me to point out--for we do not all lie easily--that I never said I was. You deceived yourself so skilfully that we had no need to trick you."