"I don"t know what you mean!" I said, restraining myself with difficulty. I could have struck the fool.
"But I know what you mean," he replied, in a tone of repressed rage.
"You would have her sell herself: sell herself body and soul to you to save me! And you would have me stand by and see the thing done! Well, my answer is--never! though I go to the wheel! I will die a gentleman, if I have lived a fool!"
"I think you will do the one as certainly as you have done the other,"
I retorted, in my exasperation. And yet I admired him.
"Oh, I am not such a fool," he cried, scowling at me, "as you have perhaps thought. I have used my eyes."
"Then be good enough now to favour me with your ears," I answered drily. "And listen when I say that no such bargain has ever crossed my mind. You were kind enough to think well of me last night, M. de Cocheforet. Why should the mention of Mademoiselle in a moment change your opinion? I wish simply to speak to her. I have nothing to ask from her; neither favour nor anything else. And what I say she will doubtless tell you afterwards. _Ciel_, man!" I continued angrily, "what harm can I do to her, in the road, in your sight?"
He looked at me sullenly, his face still flushed, his eyes suspicious.
"What do you want to say to her?" he asked jealously. He was quite unlike himself. His airy nonchalance, his careless gaiety, were gone.
"You know what I do _not_ want to say to her, M. de Cocheforet," I answered. "That should be enough."
He glowered at me for a moment, still ill content. Then, without a word, he made me a gesture to go to her.
She had halted a score of paces away, wondering doubtless what was on foot. I rode towards her. She wore her mask, so that I lost the expression of her face as I approached, but the manner in which she turned her horse"s head uncompromisingly towards her brother, and looked past me--as if I were merely a log in the road--was full of meaning. I felt the ground suddenly cut from under me. I saluted her, trembling. "Mademoiselle," I said, "will you grant me the privilege of your company for a few minutes, as we ride."
"To what purpose, Sir?" she answered, in the coldest voice in which I think a woman ever spoke to a man.
"That I may explain to you a great many things you do not understand,"
I murmured.
"I prefer to be in the dark," she replied. And her manner said more than her words.
"But, Mademoiselle," I pleaded,--I would not be discouraged,--"you told me one day that you would never judge me hastily again."
"Facts judge you, not I, Sir," she answered icily. "I am not sufficiently on a level with you to be able to judge you--I thank G.o.d."
I shivered though the sun was on me, and the hollow where we stood was warm. "Still--once before you thought the same!" I exclaimed.
"Afterwards you found that you had been wrong. It may be so again, Mademoiselle."
"Impossible," she said.
That stung me. "No!" I said fiercely. "It is not impossible. It is you who are impossible! It is you who are heartless, Mademoiselle. I have done much, very much, in the last three days to make things lighter for you. I ask you now to do something for me which can cost you nothing."
"Nothing?" she answered slowly; and her scornful voice cut me as if it had been a knife. "Do you think, Monsieur, it costs me nothing to lose my self-respect, as I do with every word I speak to you? Do you think it costs me nothing to be here, where I feel every look you cast on me an insult, every breath I take in your presence a contamination.
Nothing, Monsieur?" She laughed in bitter irony. "Oh, be sure, something! But something which I despair of making clear to you."
I sat for a moment in my saddle, shaken and quivering with pain. It had been one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were changed to loathing. It was another to listen to her hard, pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing tongue. For a moment I could not find voice to answer her. Then I pointed to M. de Cocheforet. "Do you love him?" I said, hoa.r.s.ely, roughly. The gibing tone had pa.s.sed from her voice to mine.
She did not answer.
"Because, if you do," I continued, "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 drooped, she seemed to grow smaller. All in a moment, as it were, her pride collapsed. "I will hear you," she answered feebly.
"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. In a moment we were pacing side by side, 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 if with cold.
"It is a tale I desire to tell you, Mademoiselle," I answered, speaking with effort. "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."
She turned to 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, this man, 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 the 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: "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 he must risk, and the event proved him right, his life against the life of this unknown man. And--one thing more--there was time 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, 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 this story you know, Mademoiselle; but not all. Suffice it that this man came down to a remote village, and there at a risk, but Heaven knows, basely enough, found his way into his victim"s home. Once there, his heart began to fail him. Had he found the house garrisoned by men, he might have pressed on 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 of the work he had in hand.
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 that paid him. But he pursued it with only half his mind, in great misery sometimes, if you will believe me, 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. 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 about inns and eating-houses, and at the gaming-tables almost all his days, 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--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 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 pa.s.sionately. "Why did you not tell me?
Why did you not confess to me even then? I--oh, no more! No more!" she continued, in a piteous voice. "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 replied.
"I want to 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? Did you think 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. 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 before her; while her sobs shook her so painfully 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; 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 with no light one. Mademoiselle," I continued earnestly, feeling none of the triumph, none of the vanity, I had foreseen, but only 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 brow of the hill and the finger-post now. She cried out wildly that she did not understand.
"What is it 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 back to your brother his word and his parole. From this moment he is free to go whither he pleases. You shall tell him so from me. 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 hands with a cry of despair. "And you? You?" she said, in a voice so changed I should not have known it for hers. "What will you do? I do not understand.
This mask! I cannot hear."
"There is a third road," I answered. "It leads to Paris. That is my road, Mademoiselle. We part here."
"But why? 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 to the Chatelet."