"And Madame St. Pierre Lawrence?" inquired the Marquis.
"Madame quitted Paris on Tuesday for England under the care of John Turner, who had business in London. He kindly offered to escort her across the Channel."
"Then she, at all events, is safe," said the Marquis, with a little wave of the hand indicating his satisfaction. "He is not brilliant, Monsieur Turner--so few English are--but he is solid, I think."
"I think he is the cleverest man I know," said Dormer Colville, thoughtfully. And before they had spoken again Loo Barebone returned.
He, like Marie, had grasped at once the serious aspect of the situation, whereas the Marquis succeeded only in reaching it with a superficial touch. He prattled of the political crisis in Paris and bade his friends rest a.s.sured that law and order must ultimately prevail. He even seemed to cherish the comforting a.s.surance that Providence must in the end interfere on behalf of a Legitimate Succession. For this old n.o.ble was the true son of a father who had believed to the end in that King who talked grandiloquently of the works of Seneca and Tacitus while driving from the Temple to his trial, with the mob hooting and yelling imprecations into the carriage windows.
The Marquis de Gemosac found time to give a polite opinion on John Turner while the streets of Gemosac were being cleared by the cavalry from Saintes, and the Gendarmerie, burning briskly, lighted up a scene of bloodshed.
"We have raised the drawbridge a few feet," said Barebone; "but the chains are rusted and may easily be broken by a blacksmith. It will serve to delay them a few minutes; but it is not the mob we seek to keep out, and any organised attempt to break in would succeed in half an hour. We must go, of course."
He turned to Colville, with whom he had met and faced difficulties in the past. Colville might easily have escaped to England with Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, but he had chosen the better part. He had undertaken a long journey through disturbed France only to throw in his lot at the end of it with two pre-condemned men. Loo turned to him as to one who had proved himself capable enough in an emergency, brave in face of danger.
"We cannot stay here," he said; "the gates will serve to give us an hour"s start, but no more. I suppose there is another way out of the chateau."
"There are two ways," answered the Marquis. "One leads to a house in the town and the other emerges at the mill down below the walls. But, alas!
both are lost sight of. My ancestors--"
"I know the shorter one," put in Juliette, "the pa.s.sage that leads to the mill. I can show you the entrance to that, which is in the crypt of the chapel, hidden behind the casks of wine."
She spoke to Barebone, only half-concealing, as Marie had done, the fact that the great respect with which the Marquis de Gemosac was treated was artificial, and would fall to pieces under the strain of an emergency--a faint echo of the old regime.
"When you are gone," the girl continued, still addressing Barebone, "Marie and I can keep them out at least an hour--probably more. We may be able to keep them outside the walls all night, and when at last they come in it will take them hours to satisfy themselves that you are not concealed within the enceinte."
She was quite cool, and even smiled at him with a white face.
"You are always right, Mademoiselle, and have a clear head," said Barebone.
"But no heart?" she answered in an undertone, under cover of her father"s endless talk to Colville and with a glance which Barebone could not understand.
In a few minutes Dormer Colville p.r.o.nounced himself ready to go, and refused to waste further precious minutes in response to Monsieur de Gemosac"s offers of hospitality. No dinner had been prepared, for Marie had sterner business in hand and could be heard beneath the windows urging her husband to display a courage superior to that of a rabbit.
Juliette hurried to the kitchen and there prepared a parcel of cold meat and bread for the fugitives to eat as they fled.
"We might remain hidden in a remote cottage," Barebone had suggested to Colville, "awaiting the development of events, but our best chance is "The Last Hope." She is at Bordeaux, and must be nearly ready for sea."
So it was hurriedly arranged that they should make their way on foot to a cottage on the marsh while Jean was despatched to Bordeaux with a letter for Captain Clubbe.
"It is a pity," said Marie, when informed of this plan, "that it is not I who wear the breeches. But I will make it clear to Jean that if he fails to carry out his task he need not show his face at the gate again."
The Marquis ran hither and thither, making a hundred suggestions, which were accepted in the soothing manner adopted toward children. He a.s.sured Juliette that their absence would be of short duration; that there was indeed no danger, but that he was acceding to the urgent persuasions of Barebone and Colville, who were perhaps unnecessarily alarmed--who did not understand how affairs were conducted in France. He felt a.s.sured that law and order must prevail.
"But if they have put Albert de Chantonnay in prison, why should you be safe?" asked Juliette. To which the Marquis replied with a meaning cackle that she had a kind heart, and that it was only natural that it should be occupied at that moment with thoughts of that excellent young man who, in his turn, was doubtless thinking of her in his cell at La Roch.e.l.le.
Which playful allusion to Albert de Chantonnay"s pretensions was received by their object with a calm indifference.
"When Jean returns," she said, practically, "I will send him to you at the Bremonts" cottage with food and clothing. But you must not attempt to communicate with us. You would only betray your whereabouts and do no good to us. We shall be quite safe in the chateau. Marie and I and Madame Maugiron are not afraid."
At which the Marquis laughed heartily. It was so amusing to think that one should be young and pretty--and not afraid. In the mean time Barebone was sealing his letter to Captain Clubbe. He had written it in the Suffolk dialect, spelling all the words as they are p.r.o.nounced on that coast and employing when he could the Danish and Dutch expressions in daily use on the foresh.o.r.e, which no French official seeking to translate could find in any dictionary.
Loo gave his instructions to Jean himself, who received them in a silence not devoid of intelligence. The man had been round the walls and reported that nothing stirred beneath them; that there was more than one fire in the town, and that the streets appeared to be given over to disorder and riot.
"It is a.s.suredly a change in the Government," he explained, simply. "And there will be many for Monsieur l"Abbe to bury on Sunday."
Jean was to accompany them to the cottage of an old man who had once lived by ferrying the rare pa.s.senger across the Gironde. Having left them here, he could reach Blaye before daylight, from whence a pa.s.sage up the river to Bordeaux would be easily procurable.
The boatman"s cottage stood on the bank of a creek running into the Gironde. It was a lone building hidden among the low dunes that lie between the river and the marsh. Any one approaching it by daylight would be discernible half an hour in advance, and the man"s boat, though old, was seaworthy. None would care to cross the lowlands at night except under the guidance of one or two, who, like Jean, knew their way even in the dark.
Colville and Barebone had to help Jean to move the great casks stored in the crypt of the old chapel by which the entrance to the pa.s.sage was masked.
"It is, I recollect having been told, more than a pa.s.sage--it is a ramp,"
explained the Marquis, who stood by. "It was intended for the pa.s.sage of horses, so that a man might mount here and ride out into the mill-stream, actually beneath the mill-wheel which conceals the exit."
Juliette, a cloak thrown over her evening dress, had accompanied them and stood near, holding a lantern above her head to give them light. It was an odd scene--a strange occupation for the last of the de Gemosacs.
Through the gaps in the toppling walls they could hear the roar of voices and the occasional report of a firearm in the streets of the town below.
The door opened easily enough, and Jean, lighting a candle, led the way.
Barebone was the last to follow. Within the doorway he turned to say good-bye. The light of the lantern flickered uncertainly on Juliette"s fair hair.
"We may be back sooner than you expect, mademoiselle," said Barebone.
"Or you may go--to England," she answered.
CHAPTER x.x.xIX
"JOHN DARBY"
Although it was snowing hard, it was not a dark night. There was a half moon hidden behind those thin, fleecy clouds, which carry the snow across the North Sea and cast it noiselessly upon the low-lying coast, from Thanet to the Wash, which knows less rain and more snow than any in England.
A gale of wind was blowing from the north-east; not in itself a wild gale, but at short intervals a fresh burst of wind brought with it a thicker fall of snow, and during these squalls the force of the storm was terrific. A man, who had waited on the far sh.o.r.e of the river for a quiet interval, had at last made his way to the Farlingford side. He moored his boat and stumbled heavily up the steps.
There was no one on the quay. The street was deserted, but the lights within the cottages glowed warmly through red blinds here and there. The majority of windows were, however, secured with a shutter, screwed tight from within. The man trotted steadily up the street. He had an unmistakable air of discipline. It was only six o"clock, but night had closed in three hours ago. The coast-guard looked neither to one side nor the other, but ran on at the pace of one who had run far and knows that he cannot afford to lose his breath; for his night"s work was only begun.
The coast-guard station stands on the left-hand side of the street, a long, low house in a bare garden. In answer to the loud summons, a red-faced little man opened the door and let out into the night a smell of bloaters and tea--the smell that pervades all Farlingford at six o"clock in the evening.
"Something on the Inner Curlo Bank," shouted the coast-guard in his face, and turning on his heel, he ran with the same slow, organised haste, leaving the red-faced man finishing a mouthful on the mat.
The next place of call was at River Andrew"s, the little low cottage with rounded corners, below the church.
"Come out o" that," said the coast-guard, with a contemptuous glance of snow-rimmed eyes at River Andrew"s comfortable tea-table. "Ring yer bell.
Something on the Inner Curlo Bank."
River Andrew had never hurried in his life, and like all his fellows, he looked upon coast-guards as amateurs mindful, as all amateurs are, of their clothes.