"No, Monsieur, to the roof!"
"Up, up, then!" I cried in a frenzy of impatience. "It will give us time. Quick. They are coming."
For I heard the door at the end of the suite, the door I had locked, creak and yield. They were forcing it, at any moment it might give; where I stood waiting to bring up the rear, their hoa.r.s.e cries and curses came to my ears. But the good door held; it held, long enough at any rate. Before it gave way we were on the stairs and I had shut the door of the closet behind me. Then, holding to the skirts of the woman before me, I groped my way up quickly--up and up through darkness with a close smell of bats in my nostrils--and almost before I could believe it, I stood with the panting, trembling group on the roof. The glare of the burning outhouses below shone on a great stack of chimneys beside us and reddened the sky above, and burnished the leaves of the chestnut trees that rose on a level with our eyes. But all the lower part of the steep roofs round us, and the lead gutters that ran between them, lay in darkness, the denser for the contrast. The flames crackled below, and a thick reek of smoke swept up past the coping, but the noise alike of fire and riot was deadened here. The night wind cooled our brows, and I had a minute in which to think, to breathe, to look round.
"Is there any other way to the roof?" I asked anxiously.
"One other, Monsieur!"
"Where? Or do you stay here, and guard this door," I said, pressing my gun on the man who had answered. "And let the boy come and show me. Mademoiselle, stay there if you please."
The boy ran before me to the farther end of the roof, and in a lead walk, between two slopes, showed me a large trap-door. It had no fastening on the outside, and for a moment I stood nonplussed; then I saw, a few feet away, a neat pile of bricks, left there, I learned afterwards, in the course of some repairs. I began to remove them as fast as I could to the trap-door, and the boy saw and followed my example; in two minutes we had stacked a hundred and more on the door. Telling him to add another hundred to the number, I left him at the task and flew back to the women.
They might burn the house under us; that always, and for certain, and it meant a dreadful death. Yet I breathed more freely here. In the white and gold room below, among Madame"s mirrors and Cupids, and silken cushions, and painted Venuses, my heart had failed me. The place, with its heavy perfumes, had stifled me. I had pictured the brutish peasants bursting in on us there--on the screaming women, crouching vainly behind chairs and couches; and the horror of the thought overcame me. Here, in the open, under the sky, we could at least die fighting. The depth yawned beyond the coping; the weakest had here no more to fear than death. Besides we had a respite, for the house was large, and the fire could not lick it up in a moment.
And help might come. I shaded my eyes from the light below, and looked into the darkness in the direction of the village and the Cahors road. In an hour, at furthest, help might come. The glare in the sky must be visible for miles; it would spur on the avengers. Father Benoit, too, if he could get help--he might be here at any time. We were not without hope.
Suddenly, while we stood together, the women sobbing and whimpering, the old man-servant spoke.
"Where is M. Gargouf?" he muttered under his breath.
"Ah!" I exclaimed; "I had forgotten him."
"He came up," the man continued, peering about him. "This door was open, M. le Vicomte, when we came to it."
"Ah! then where is he?"
I looked round too. All the roof, I have said, was dark, and not all of it was on the same level; and here and there chimneys broke the view. In the obscurity, the steward might be lurking close to us without our knowledge; or he might have thrown himself down in despair. While I looked, the boy whom I had left by the bricks came flying to us.
"There is some one there!" he said. And he clung to the old man in terror.
"It must be Gargouf!" I answered. "Wait here!" And, disregarding the women"s prayers that I would stay with them, I went quickly along the leads to the other trap-door, and peered about me through the gloom. For a moment I could see no one, though the light shining on the trees made it easy to discern figures standing nearer the coping. Presently, however, I caught the sound of some one moving; some one who was farther away still, at the very edge of the roof. I went on cautiously, expecting I do not know what; and close to a stack of chimneys I found Gargouf.
He was crouching on the coping in the darkest part, where the end wall of the east wing overlooked the garden by which I had entered. This end wall had no windows, and the greater part of the garden below it lay it darkness; the angle of the house standing between it and the burning buildings. I supposed that the steward had sneaked hither, therefore, to hide; and set it down to the darkness that he did not know me, but, as I approached, he rose on his knees on the ledge, and turned on me, snarling like a dog.
"Stand back!" he said, in a voice that was scarcely human. "Stand back, or I will----"
"Steady, man," I answered quietly, beginning to think that fear had unhinged him. "It is I, M. de Saux."
"Stand back!" was his only answer; and, though he cowered so low that I could not get his figure against the shining trees, I saw a pistol-barrel gleam as he levelled it. "Stand back! Give me a minute! a minute only"--and his voice quavered--"and I will cheat the devils yet! Come nearer, or give the alarm, and I will not die alone! I will not die alone! Stand back!"
"Are you mad?" I said.
"Back, or I shoot!" he growled. "I will not die alone."
He was kneeling on the very edge, with his left hand against the chimney. To rush upon him in that posture was to court death; and I had nothing to gain by it. I stepped back a pace. As I did so, at the moment I did so, he slid over the edge, and was gone!
I drew a deep breath and listened, flinching and drawing back involuntarily. But I heard no sound of a fall; and in a moment, with a new idea in my mind, I stepped forward to the edge, and looked over.
The steward hung in mid-air, a dozen feet below me. He was descending; descending foot by foot, slowly, and by jerks; a dim figure, growing dimmer. Instinctively I felt about me; and in a second laid my hand on the rope by which he hung. It was secured round the chimney. Then I understood. He had conceived this way of escape, perhaps had stored the rope for it beforehand, and, like the villain he was, had kept the thought to himself, that his chance might be the better, and that he might not have to give the first place to Mademoiselle and the women. In the first heat of the discovery, I almost found it in my heart to cut the rope, and let him fall; then I remembered that if he escaped, the way would lie open for others; and then, even as I thought this, into the garden below me, there shone a sudden flare of light, and a stream of a dozen rioters poured round the corner, and made for the door by which I had entered the house.
I held my breath. The steward, hanging below me, and by this time half-way to the ground, stopped, and moved not a limb. But he still swung a little this way and that, and in the strong light of the torches which the new-comers carried, I could see every knot in the rope, and even the trailing end, which, as I looked, moved on the ground with his motion.
The wretches, making for the door, had to pa.s.s within a pace of the rope, of that trailing end; yet it was possible that, blinded by the lights they carried, and their own haste and excitement, they might not see it. I held my breath as the leader came abreast of it; I fancied that he must see it. But he pa.s.sed, and disappeared in the doorway. Three others pa.s.sed the rope together. A fifth, then three more, two more; I began to breathe more freely. Only one remained--a woman, the same whose imprecations had greeted me on my appearance at the window. It was not likely that she would see it. She was running to overtake the others; she carried a flare in her right hand, so that the blaze came between her and the rope. And she was waving the light in a mad woman"s frenzy, as she danced along, hounding on the men to the sack.
But, as if the presence of the man who had wronged her had over her some subtle influence--as if some sense, unowned by others, warned her of his presence, even in the midst of that babel and tumult--she stopped short under him, with her foot almost on the threshold. I saw her head turn slowly. She raised her eyes, holding the torch aside. She saw him!
With a scream of joy, she sprang to the foot of the rope, and began to haul at it as if in that way she might get to him sooner; while she filled the air with her shrieks and laughter. The men, who had gone into the house, heard her, and came out again; and after them others. I quailed, where I knelt on the parapet, as I looked down and met the wolfish glare of their upturned eyes; what, then, must have been the thoughts of the wretched man taken in his selfishness--hanging there helpless between earth and heaven? G.o.d knows.
He began to climb upwards, to return; and actually ascended hand over hand a dozen feet. But he had been supporting himself for some minutes, and at that point his strength failed him. Human muscles could do no more. He tried to haul himself up to the next knot, but sank back with a groan. Then he looked at me. "Pull me up!" he gasped in a voice just audible. "For G.o.d"s sake! For G.o.d"s sake, pull me up!"
But the wretches below had the end of the rope, and it was impossible to raise him, even had I possessed the strength to do it. I told him so, and bade him climb--climb for his life. In a moment it would be too late.
He understood. He raised himself with a jerk to the next knot, and hung there. Another desperate effort, and he gained the next; though I could almost hear his muscles crack, and his breath came in gasps. Three more knots--they were about a foot apart--and he would reach the coping.
But as he turned up his face to me, I read despair in his eyes. His strength was gone; and while he hung there, the men began, with shouts of laughter, to shake the rope this way and that. He lost his grip, and, with a groan, slid down three or four feet; and again got hold and hung there--silent.
By this time the group below had grown into a crowd--a crowd of maddened beings, raving and howling, and leaping up at him as dogs leap at food; and the horror of the sight, though the doomed man"s features were now in shadow, and I could not read them, overcame me. I rose to draw back--shuddering, listening for his fall. Instead, before I had quite retreated, a hot flash blinded me, and almost scorched my face, and, as the sharp report of a pistol rang out, the steward"s body plunged headlong down--leaving a little cloud of smoke where I stood.
He had balked his enemies.
CHAPTER IX.
THE TRICOLOUR.
It was known afterwards that they fell upon the body and tore it, like the dogs they were; but I had seen enough. I reeled back, and for a few moments leaned against the chimney, trembling like a woman, sick and faint. The horrid drama had had only one spectator--myself; and the strange solitude from which I had viewed it, kneeling at the edge of the roof of the Chateau, with the night wind on my brow and the tumult far below me, had shaken me to the bottom of my soul. Had the ruffians come upon me then I could not have lifted a finger; but, fortunately, though the awakening came quickly, it came by another hand. I heard the rustle of feet behind me, and, turning, found Mademoiselle de St. Alais at my shoulder, her small face grey in the gloom.
"Monsieur," she said, "will you come?"
I sprang up, ashamed and conscience-stricken. I had forgotten her, all, in the tragedy. "What is it?" I said.
"The house is burning."
She said it so calmly, in such a voice, that I could not believe her, or that I understood; though it was the thing I had told myself must happen. "What, Mademoiselle? This house?" I said stupidly.
"Yes," she replied, as quietly as before. "The smoke is rising through the closet staircase. I think that they have set the east wing on fire."
I hastened back with her, but before I reached the little door by which we had ascended I saw that it was true. A faint, whitish eddy of smoke, scarcely visible in the dusk, was rising through the crack between door and lintel. When we came up the women were still round it watching it; but while I looked, dazed and wondering what we were to do, the group melted away, and Mademoiselle and I were left alone beside the stream of smoke that grew each moment thicker and darker.
A few moments before, immediately after my escape from the rooms below, I had thought that I could face this peril; anything, everything, had then seemed better than to be caught with the women, in the confinement of those luxurious rooms, perfumed with poudre de rose, and heavy with jasmine--to be caught there by the brutes who were pursuing us. Now the danger that showed itself most pressing seemed the worst. "We must take off the bricks!" I cried. "Quick, and open that door! There is nothing else for it. Come, Mademoiselle, if you please!"
"They are doing it," she answered.
Then I saw whither the women and the servants had gone. They were already beside the other door, the trap-door, labouring frantically to remove the bricks we had piled on it. In a moment I caught the infection of their haste.
"Come, Mademoiselle! come!" I cried, advancing involuntarily a step towards the group. "Very likely the rogues below will be plundering now, and we may pa.s.s safely. At any rate, there is nothing else for it."
I was still flurried and shaken--I say it with shame--by Gargouf"s fate; and when she did not answer at once, I looked round impatiently. To my astonishment, she was gone. In the darkness, it was not easy to see any one at a distance of a dozen feet, and the reek of the smoke was spreading. Still, she had been at my elbow a moment before, she could not be far off. I took a step this way and that, and looked again anxiously; and then I found her. She was kneeling against a chimney, her face buried in her hands. Her hair covered her shoulders, and partly hid her white robe.
I thought the time ill-chosen, and I touched her angrily. "Mademoiselle!" I said. "There is not a moment to be lost! Come! they have opened the door!"
She looked up at me, and the still pallor of her face sobered me. "I am not coming," she said, in a low voice. "Farewell, Monsieur!"
"You are not coming?" I cried.
"No, Monsieur; save yourself," she answered firmly and quietly. And she looked up at me with her hands still clasped before her, as if she were fain to return to her prayers, and waited only for me to go.
I gasped.
"But, Mademoiselle!" I cried, staring at the white-robed figure, that in the gloom--a gloom riven now and again by hot flashes, as some burning spark soared upwards--seemed scarcely earthly--"But, Mademoiselle, you do not understand. This is no child"s play. To stay here is death! death! The house is burning under us. Presently the roof, on which we stand, will fall in, and then----"
"Better that," she answered, raising her head with heaven knows what of womanly dignity, caught in this supreme moment by her, a child--"Better that, than that I should fall into their hands. I am a St. Alais, and I can die," she continued firmly. "But I must not fall into their hands. Do you, Monsieur, save yourself. Go now, and I will pray for you."
"And I for you, Mademoiselle," I answered, with a full heart. "If you stay, I stay."
She looked at me a moment, her face troubled. Then she rose slowly to her feet. The servants had disappeared, the trap-door lay open; no one had yet come up. We had the roof to ourselves. I saw her shudder as she looked round; and in a second I had her in my arms--she was no heavier than a child--and was half-way across the roof. She uttered a faint cry of remonstrance, of reproach, and for an instant struggled with me. But I only held her the tighter, and ran on. From the trap-door a ladder led downwards; somehow, still holding her with one hand, I stumbled down it, until I reached the foot, and found myself in a pa.s.sage, which was all dark. One way, however, a light shone at the end of it.
I carried her towards this, her hair lying across my lips, her face against my breast. She no longer struggled, and in a moment I came to the head of a staircase. It seemed to be a servant"s staircase, for it was bare, and mean, and narrow, with white-washed walls that were not too clean. There were no signs of fire here, even the smoke had not yet reached this part; but half-way down the flight a candle, overturned, but still burning, lay on a step, as if some one had that moment dropped it. And from all the lower part of the house came up a great noise of riot and revelry, coa.r.s.e shrieks, and shouts, and laughter. I paused to listen.
Mademoiselle lifted herself a little in my arms. "Put me down, Monsieur," she whispered.
"You will come?"
"I will do what you tell me."
I set her down in the angle of the pa.s.sage, at the head of the stairs; and in a whisper I asked her what was beyond the door, which I could see at the foot of the flight.
"The kitchen," she answered.
"If I had any cloak to cover you," I said, "I think that we could pa.s.s. They are not searching for us. They are robbing and drinking."
"Will you get the candle?" she whispered, trembling. "In one of these rooms we may find something."
I went softly down the bare stairs, and, picking it up, returned with it in my hand. As I came back to her, our eyes met, and a slow blush, gradually deepening, crept over her face, as dawn creeps over a grey sky. Having come, it stayed; her eyes fell, and she turned a little away from me, confused and frightened. We were alone; and for the first time that night, I think, she remembered her loosened hair and the disorder of her dress--that she was a woman and I a man.
It was a strange time to think of such things; when at any instant the door at the foot of the stairs before us might open, and a dozen ruffians stream up, bent on plunder, and worse. But the look and the movement warmed my heart, and set my blood running as it had never run before. I felt my courage return in a flood, and with it twice my strength. I felt capable of holding the staircase against a hundred, a thousand, as long as she stood at the top. Above all, I wondered how I could have borne her in my arms a minute before, how I could have held her head against my breast, and felt her hair touch my lips, and been insensible! Never again should I carry her so with an even pulse. The knowledge of that came to me as I stood beside her at the head of the bare stairs, affecting to listen to the noises below, that she might have time to recover herself.
A moment, and I began to listen seriously; for the uproar in the kitchen through which we must pa.s.s to escape, was growing louder; and at the same time that I noticed this, a smell of burning wood, with a whiff of smoke, reached my nostrils, and warned me that the fire was extending to the wing in which we stood. Behind us, as we stood, looking down the stairs, was a door; along the pa.s.sage to the left by which we had come were other doors. I thrust the candle into Mademoiselle"s hands, and begged her to go and look in the rooms.
"There may be a cloak, or something!" I said eagerly. "We must not linger. If you will look, I will----"
No more; for as the last word trembled on my lips the door at the foot of the stairs flew open, and a man blundered through it and began to ascend towards us, two steps at a time. He carried a candle before him, and a large bar in his right hand; and a savage roar of voices came with him through the doorway.
He appeared so suddenly that we had no time to move. I had a side glimpse of Mademoiselle standing spell-bound with horror, the light drooping in her hand. Then I s.n.a.t.c.hed the candle from her and quenched it; and, plucking it from the iron candlestick, stood waiting, with the latter in my hand--waiting, stooping forward, for the man. I had left my sword in the farther wing, and had no other weapon; but the stairs were narrow, the sloping ceiling low, and the candlestick might do. If his comrades did not follow him, it might do.
He came up rapidly, two-thirds of the way, holding the light high in front of him. Only four or five steps divided him from us! Then on a sudden, he stumbled, swore, and fell heavily forwards. The light in his hand went out, and we were in darkness!
Instinctively I gripped Mademoiselle"s hand in my left hand to stay the scream that I knew was on her lips; then we stood like two statues, scarcely daring to breathe. The man, so near us, and yet unconscious of our presence, got up swearing; and, after a terrible moment of suspense, during which I think he fumbled for the candle, he began to clatter down the stairs again. They had closed the door at the bottom, and he could not for a moment find the string of the latch. But at last he found it, and opened the door. Then I stepped back, and under cover of the babel that instantly poured up the staircase I drew Mademoiselle into the room behind us, and, closing the door which faced the stairs, stood listening.
I fancied that I could hear her heart beating. I could certainly hear my own. In this room we seemed for the moment safe; but how were we, without a light, to find anything to disguise her? How were we to pa.s.s through the kitchen? And in a moment I began to regret that I had left the stairs. We were in perfect darkness here and could see nothing in the room, which had a close, unused smell, as of mice; but even as I noticed this the fumes of burning wood, which had doubtless entered with us, grew stronger and overcame the other smell. The rushing wind-like sound of the fire, as it caught hold of the wing, began to be audible, and the distant crackling of flames. My heart sank.
"Mademoiselle," I said softly. I still held her hand.
"Yes, Monsieur," she murmured faintly. And she seemed to lean against me.
"Are there no windows in this room?"
"I think that they are shuttered," she murmured.
With a new thought in my mind, that the way of the kitchen being hopeless we might escape by the windows, I moved a pace to look for them. I would have loosed her hand to do this, that my own might be free to grope before me, but to my surprise she clung to me and would not let me go. Then in the darkness I heard her sigh, as if she were about to swoon; and she fell against me.
"Courage, Mademoiselle, courage!" I said, terrified by the mere thought.
"Oh, I am frightened!" she moaned in my ear. "I am frightened! Save me, Monsieur, save me!"
She had been so brave before that I wondered; not knowing that the bravest woman"s courage is of this quality. But I had short time for wonder. Her weight hung each instant more dead in my arms, and my heart beating wildly as I held her I looked round for help, for a thought, for an idea. But all was dark. I could not remember even where the door stood by which we had entered. I peered in vain, for the slightest glimmer of light that might betray the windows. I was alone with her and helpless, our way of retreat cut off, the flames approaching. I felt her head fall back and knew that she had swooned; and in the dark I could do no more than support her, and listen and listen for the returning steps of the man, or what else would happen next.
For a long time, a long time it seemed to me, nothing happened. Then a sudden burst of sound told me that the door at the foot of the stairs had been opened again; and on that followed a clatter of wooden shoes on the bare stairs. I could judge now where the door of the room was, and I quickly but tenderly laid Mademoiselle on the floor a little behind it, and waited myself on the threshold. I still had my candlestick, and I was desperate.
I heard them pa.s.s, my heart beating; and then I heard them pause and I clutched my weapon; and then a voice I knew gave an order, and with a cry of joy I dragged open the door of the room and stood before them--stood before them, as they told me afterwards, with the face of a ghost or a man risen from the dead.
There were four of them, and the nearest to us was Father Benoit.
The good priest fell on my neck and kissed me. "You are not hurt?" he cried.
"No," I said dully. "You have come then?"
"Yes," he said. "In time to save you, G.o.d be praised! G.o.d be praised! And Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle de St. Alais?" he added eagerly, looking at me as if he thought I was not quite in my senses. "Have you news of her?"
I turned without a word, and went back into the room. He followed with a light, and the three men, of whom Buton was one, pressed in after him. They were rough peasants, but the sight made them give back, and uncover themselves. Mademoiselle lay where I had left her, her head pillowed on a dark carpet of hair; from the midst of which her child"s face, composed and white as in death, looked up with solemn half-closed eyes to the ceiling. For myself, I stared down at her almost without emotion, so much had I gone through. But the priest cried out aloud.
"Mon Dieu!" he said, with a sob in his voice. "Have they killed her?"
"No," I answered. "She has only fainted. If there is a woman here----"
"There is no woman here that I dare trust," he answered between his teeth. And he bade one of the men go and get some water, adding a few words which I did not hear.
The man returned almost immediately, and Father Benoit, bidding him and his fellows stand back a little, moistened her lips with water, afterwards dashing some in her face; doing it with an air of haste that puzzled me until I noticed that the room was grown thick with smoke, and on going myself to the door saw the red glow of the fire at the end of the pa.s.sage, and heard the distant crash of falling stones and timbers. Then I thought that I understood the men"s att.i.tude, and I suggested to Father Benoit that I should carry her out.
"She will never recover here," I said, with a sob in my throat. "She will be suffocated if we do not get her into the air."