"Untruly! Untruly!" he protested earnestly. "He has never found fault with me, sister, on good occasion. But I have enemies, all men have enemies----"
"You are like to make more," Roger struck in, with a dark look.
The priest wrung his hands. "I know! I know!" he said. "He carries it too highly. Too highly! They say that he has caught the King"s governor now, and has him in keeping there."
"It is true."
"Well, I have warned him; he cannot say I have not!"
"And what said he to your warning?" the Abbess asked with a sneer.
"He threatened me with the stirrup leathers."
"And you are now to marry him?"
He turned a shade paler. "You know it?" he gasped.
"I know it, but not the time," she answered. And as he hesitated, silent and appalled, "Come," she continued, "the truth, Father. And then I will tell you what I am going to do."
"At sunset," he muttered, "I am to be there."
"Good," she said. "Now we know. Then you will go up an hour earlier.
And I shall go with you."
He protested feebly. He knew something of that which had gone before, something of her history, something of her pa.s.sion for the Captain of Vlaye; and he was sure that she was not bent on good. "I dare not!" he said, "I dare not, sister! You ask too much."
"Dare not what?" the Abbess retorted, bending her handsome brows in wrath. "Dare not go one hour earlier?"
"But you--you want to go?"
"If I go with you, what is that to you?"
"But----"
"But what, Father, but what?"
"You want something of me?" he faltered. He was not to be deceived.
"Something dangerous, I know it!"
"I want your company to the door of the room where she lies," the Abbess replied. "That is all. You have leave to visit her? Do not"--overwhelming him with swift fierce words--"deny it. Do not tell me that you have not! Think you I do not know you, Father? Think you I do not know how well you are with him, how late you sit with him, how deep you drink with him, when he lacks better company? And that this--though you are frightened now, and would fain be clear of it, knowing who she is--is the thing which you have vowed to do for him a hundred times and a hundred times to that, if it would help him!"
"Never! Never!" he protested, paler than before.
"Father," she retorted, stooping forward and speaking low, "be warned.
Be warned! Get you a foot in the other camp while you may! You are over-well fed for the dry crust and the sack bed of the bishop"s prison! You drink too much red wine to take kindly to the moat puddle!
And that not for months, but for years and years! Have you not heard of men who lay forgotten, ay, forgotten even by their gaoler at last, until they starved in the bishop"s prison? The bishop"s prison, Father!" she continued cruelly. "Who comes out thence, but the rats, and they fat? Who comes out thence----"
"Don"t! Don"t!" the priest cried, his complexion mottled, his flabby cheeks trembling with fear of the thing which her words called up, with fear of the thing that had often kept him quaking in the night hours. "You will not do it?"
"I?" she answered drily. "No, not I perhaps. But is a Countess of Rochechouart to be abducted so lightly, or so easily? Has she so few friends? So poor a kindred? A cousin there is, I think--my lord Bishop of Comminges--who has one of those very prisons. And, if I mistake not, she has another cousin, who is in Flanders now, but will know well how to avenge her when he returns."
"What is it you want me to do?" he faltered.
"Go with me to her door--that I may gain admission. Then, whether you go to him or not, your silence, for one half-hour."
"You will not do her any harm?" he muttered.
"Fool, it is to do her good I am here."
"And that is all? You swear it?"
"That is all."
He heaved a deep sigh. "I will do it," he said. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his ca.s.sock. "I will do it."
"You are wise," she replied, "and wise in time, Father, for it is time we went. The sun is within an hour of setting." Then, turning to Roger, who had never ceased to watch the priest as a cat watches a mouse, "The horses may wait in the lane or where you please," she said. "They are hidden from the castle where they stand, and perhaps they are best there. In any case"--with a meaning glance--"I return to this spot. Expect me in half an hour. After that, the rest is for you to contrive. I wash my hands of it."
The words in which he would have a.s.sented stuck in the lad"s throat.
He could not speak. She turned again to the priest. "One moment and I am ready," she said. "Have you a mirror?"
"A mirror?" he exclaimed in astonishment.
"But of course you have not," she replied. She looked about her an instant, then with a quick step she pa.s.sed through the doorway into the chapel. There her eye had caught a polished sheet of bra.s.s, recording in monkish Latin the virtues of that member of the old family who had founded this "Capella extra muros," as ancient deeds style it. She placed herself before the tablet, and paying as little heed to her brother or the priest--though they were within sight--as to the sacred emblems about her, or the scene in which she stood, she cast back her hood, and drew from her robes a small ivory case. From this she took a morsel of sponge, and a tiny comb, also of ivory; and with water taken from the stoup beside the door, she refreshed her face, and carefully recurled the short ringlets upon her forehead.
With a pencil drawn from the same case, she retouched her eyelashes and the corners of her eyes, and with deft fingers she straightened and smoothed the small ruff about her neck. Finally, with no less care, she drew the hood of her habit close round her face, and after turning herself about a time or two before the mirror went back to the others. They had not taken their eyes off her.
"Come," she said. And she led the way out without a second word, pa.s.sed by the waiting horses and the servants, and, attended by the reluctant Father, walked at a gentle pace along the lane towards the main street.
The priest went in fear, his stout legs trembling under him. But until the two reached a triangular open s.p.a.ce, graced by an Italian fountain, and used, though it sloped steeply, for a market site, the street they pursued was not exposed to view from the castle. Above the marketplace, however, the road turned abruptly to the left, and, emerging from the houses, ascended between twin mounds, of which the nearer bore the castle, and the other, used on occasion as a tilt-yard, was bare. The road ascended the gorge between the two, then wound about, this time to the right, and gained the summit of the unoccupied breast; whence, leaping its own course by a drawbridge, it entered the grey stronghold that on every other side looked down from the brow of a precipice--here on the cl.u.s.tering roofs of the town, and there, and there again, on the wide green vale and silvery meanders of the Dronne.
Looking to the south, where the valley opened into a plain, the eye might almost discern Coutras--that famous battlefield that lies on the Dronne bank. Northward it encountered the wooded hills beyond which lay Villeneuve, and the town of Barbesieux on the great north road, and the plain towards Angouleme. Fairer eyrie, or stronger, is scarce to be found in the width of three provinces.
Until they came to the market-place the Abbess and her unwilling companion had little to fear unless they met M. de Vlaye himself. As far as others were concerned, Father Benet"s coa.r.s.e, plump face, albeit less ruddy than ordinary, was warrant enough to avert both suspicion and inquiry. But thence onwards they walked in full view not only of the lounge upon the ramparts which the Captain of Vlaye most affected at the cool hour, but of a dozen lofty cas.e.m.e.nts from any one of which an officious sentry or a servant might mark their approach and pa.s.s word of it. Father Benet pursued this path as one under fire.
The sun was low, but at its midday height it had not burned the stout priest more than the fancied fury of those eyes. The sweat poured down his face as he climbed and panted and crossed himself in a breath.
"Believe me, you are better here than in the bishop"s prison," his companion said, to cheer him.
"But he will see us from the ramparts," he groaned, not daring to look up and disprove the fact. "He will see us! He will meet us at the gate."
"Then it will be my affair," the Abbess answered.
"We are mad--stark, staring mad!" he protested.
"You were madder to go back," she said.
He looked at her viciously, as if he wished her dead. Fortunately they had reached the narrow defile under the bridge, and a feverish longing to come to an end of the venture took place of all other feelings in the priest"s breast. Doggedly he panted up the Tilt Mound, as it was called, and pa.s.sed three or four groups of troopers, who were taking the air on their backs or playing at games of chance. Thence they crossed the drawbridge. The iron-studded doors, with their clumsy grilles, above which the arms of the old family still showed their quarterings, stood open; but in the depths of the low-browed archway, where the shadows were beginning to gather, lounged a dozen rogues whose insolent eyes the Abbess must confront.
But she judged, and rightly, that the priest"s company would make that easy which she could not have compa.s.sed so well alone, though she might have won entrance. The men, indeed, were surprised to see her, and stared; some recognised her with respect, others with grins half-knowing, half-insolent. But no one stepped forward or volunteered to challenge her entrance. And although a wit, as soon as her back was turned, hummed