"It is late for you to be out, Mademoiselle," I said politely. "You might meet with some rudeness, dressed as you are. Permit me to see you home."
She shuddered, and I thought I heard her sob, but she did not answer.
Instead, she turned and walked quickly through the village in the direction of the Chateau, keeping in the shadow of the houses. I carried the pitcher and walked beside her; and in the dark I smiled. I knew how shame and impotent rage were working in her. This was something like revenge!
Presently I spoke. "Well, Mademoiselle," I said. "Where are your grooms?"
She gave me one look, her eyes blazing with anger, her face like hate itself; and after that I said no more, but left her in peace, and contented myself with walking at her shoulder until we came to the end of the village, where the track to the great house plunged into the wood. There she stopped, and turned on me like a wild creature at bay.
"What do you want?" she cried hoa.r.s.ely, breathing as if she had been running.
"To see you safe to the house," I answered coolly.
"And if I will not?" she retorted.
"The choice does not lie with you, Mademoiselle," I answered sternly.
"You will go to the house with me, and on the way you will give me an interview; but not here. Here we are not private enough. We may be interrupted at any moment, and I wish to speak to you at length."
I saw her shiver. "What if I will not?" she said again.
"I might call to the nearest soldiers and tell them who you are," I answered coolly. "I might, but I should not. That were a clumsy way of punishing you, and I know a better way. I should go to the captain, Mademoiselle, and tell him whose horse is locked up in the inn stable.
A trooper told me--as some one had told him--that it belonged to one of his officers; but I looked through the crack, and I knew the horse again."
She could not repress a groan. I waited. Still she did not speak.
"Shall I go to the captain?" I said ruthlessly.
She shook the hood back from her face, and looked at me. "Oh, you coward! you coward!" she hissed through her teeth. "If I had a knife!"
"But you have not, Mademoiselle," I answered, unmoved. "Be good enough, therefore, to make up your mind which it is to be. Am I to go with my news to the captain, or am I to come with you?"
"Give me the pitcher!" she said harshly.
I did so, wondering. In a moment she flung it with a savage gesture far into the bushes. "Come!" she said, "if you will. But some day G.o.d will punish you!"
Without another word she turned and entered the path through the trees, and I followed her. I suppose every turn in its course, every hollow and broken place in it had been known to her from childhood, for she followed it swiftly and unerringly, barefoot as she was. I had to walk fast through the darkness to keep up with her. The wood was quiet, but the frogs were beginning to croak in the pool, and their persistent chorus reminded me of the night when I had come to the house-door hurt and worn out, and Clon had admitted me, and she had stood under the gallery in the hall. Things had looked dark then. I had seen but a very little way ahead. Now all was plain. The Commandant might be here with all his soldiers, but it was I who held the strings.
We came to the little wooden bridge and saw beyond the dark meadows the lights of the house. All the windows were bright. Doubtless the troopers were making merry. "Now, Mademoiselle," I said quietly. "I must trouble you to stop here, and give me your attention for a few minutes. Afterwards you may go your way."
"Speak!" she said defiantly. "And be quick! I cannot breathe the air where you are! It poisons me!"
"Ah!" I said slowly. "Do you think you make things better by such speeches as those?"
"Oh!" she cried--and I heard her teeth click together. "Would you have me fawn on you?"
"Perhaps not," I answered. "Still you make one mistake."
"What is it?" she panted.
"You forget that I am to be feared as well as--loathed!" I answered grimly. "Ay, Mademoiselle, to be feared!" I continued. "Do you think that I do not know why you are here in this guise? Do you think that I do not know for whom that pitcher of broth was intended? Or who will now have to fast to-night? I tell you I know all these things. Your house is full of soldiers; your servants were watched and could not leave. You had to come yourself and get food for him!"
She clutched at the hand-rail of the bridge, and for an instant clung to it for support. Her face, from which the shawl had fallen, glimmered white in the shadow of the trees. At last I had shaken her pride. At last! "What is your price?" she murmured faintly.
"I am going to tell you," I replied, speaking so that every word might fall distinctly on her ears, and sating my eyes on her proud face. I had never dreamed of such revenge as this! "About a fortnight ago, M.
de Cocheforet left here at night with a little orange-coloured sachet in his possession."
She uttered a stifled cry, and drew herself stiffly erect.
"It contained--but there, Mademoiselle, you know its contents," I went on. "Whatever they were, M. de Cocheforet lost it and them at starting. A week ago he came back--unfortunately for himself--to seek them."
She was looking full in my face now. She seemed scarcely to breathe in the intensity of her surprise and expectation. "You had a search made, Mademoiselle," I continued quietly. "Your servants left no place unexplored. The paths, the roads, the very woods were ransacked. But in vain, because all the while the orange sachet lay whole and unopened in my pocket."
"No!" she cried impetuously. "You lie, Sir! The sachet was found, torn open, many leagues from this place!"
"Where I threw it, Mademoiselle," I replied, "that I might mislead your rascals and be free to return. Oh! believe me," I continued, letting something of myself, something of my triumph, appear at last in my voice. "You have made a mistake! You would have done better had you trusted me. I am no bundle of sawdust, Mademoiselle, but a man: a man with an arm to shield and a brain to serve, and--as I am going to teach you--a heart also!"
She shivered.
"In the orange-coloured sachet that you lost I believe there were eighteen stones of great value?"
She made no answer, but she looked at me as if I fascinated her. Her very breath seemed to pause and wait on my words. She was so little conscious of anything else, of anything outside ourselves, that a score of men might have come up behind her unseen and unnoticed.
I took from my breast a little packet wrapped in soft leather, and held it towards her. "Will you open this?" I said. "I believe it contains what you lost. That it contains all I will not answer, Mademoiselle, because I spilled the stones on the floor of my room, and I may have failed to find some. But the others can be recovered--I know where they are."
She took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers shaking. A few turns and the mild l.u.s.tre of the stones made a kind of moonlight in her hands--such a shimmering glory of imprisoned light as has ruined many a woman and robbed many a man of his honour.
_Morbleu!_ as I looked at them--and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity--I wondered how I had come to resist the temptation.
While I gazed her hands began to waver. "I cannot count," she muttered helplessly. "How many are there?"
"In all, eighteen."
"They should be eighteen," she said.
She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so twice, as if to rea.s.sure herself that the stones were real and that she was not dreaming. Then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and I saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before. "Well?" she muttered between her teeth. "Your price, man? Your price?"
"I am coming to it now, Mademoiselle," I said gravely. "It is a simple matter. You remember the afternoon when I followed you--clumsily and thoughtlessly perhaps--through the wood to restore these things? It seems about a month ago. I believe it happened the day before yesterday. You called me then some very harsh names, which I will not hurt you by repeating. The only price I ask for restoring your jewels is that you recall those names.
"How?" she muttered. "I do not understand."
I repeated my words very slowly. "The only price or reward I ask, Mademoiselle, is that you take back those names, and say that they were not deserved."
"And the jewels?" she exclaimed hoa.r.s.ely.
"They are yours. They are nothing to me. Take them, and say that you do not think of me-- Nay, I cannot say the words, Mademoiselle."
"But there is something--else! What else?" she cried, her head thrown back, her eyes, bright as any wild animal"s, searching mine. "Ha! my brother? What of him? What of him, Sir?"
"For him, Mademoiselle--I would prefer that you should tell me no more than I know already," I answered in a low voice. "I do not wish to be in that affair. But yes, there is one thing I have not mentioned. You are right."
She sighed so deeply that I caught the sound.
"It is," I continued slowly, "that you will permit me to remain at Cocheforet for a few days, while the soldiers are here. I am told that there are twenty men and two officers quartered in your house. Your brother is away. I ask to be permitted, Mademoiselle, to take his place for the time, and to be privileged to protect your sister and yourself from insult. That is all."