answered the officer, and saluting, he departed.
For a moment or two after he was gone Suzanne and Caron stood confronting each other in silence. She seemed smitten with a sudden awkwardness, and she looked away from him what time he waited, hat in hand, the chill morning breeze faintly stirring a loose strand of his black hair.
"Monsieur," she faltered at last, "I am come to intercede."
At that a faint smile hovered a second on the Republican"s thin lips.
"And is the n.o.blesse of France fallen so low that it sends its women to intercede for the lives of its men? But, perhaps," he added cynically, "it had not far to fall."
Her cheeks reddened. His insult to her cla.s.s acted upon her as a spur and overcame the irresoluteness that seemed to have beset her.
"To insult the fallen, sir, is worthy of the new regime, whose representative you are, Enfine! We must take it, I suppose, as we take everything else in these disordered times--with a bent head and a meek submission."
"From the little that I have seen, Citoyenne," he answered, very coldly, roused in his turn, "it rather seems that you take things on your knees and with appeals for mercy."
"Monsieur," she cried, and her eyes now met his in fearless anger, "if you persist in these gratuitous insults I shall leave you."
He laughed in rude amus.e.m.e.nt, and put on his hat. The spell that for a moment her beauty had cast over him when first she had appeared had been attenuating. It now broke suddenly, and as he covered himself his whole manner changed.
"Is this interview of my seeking?" he asked. "It is your brother I am awaiting. Name of a name, Citoyenne, do you think my patience inexhaustible? The ci-devant Vicomte promised to attend me here. It was the boast of your order that whatever sins you might be guilty of you never broke your word. Have you lost even that virtue, which served you as a cloak for untold vices? And is your brother fled into the woods whilst you, his sister, come here to intercede with me for his wretched life? Pah! In the old days you aroused my hatred by your tyrannies and your injustices; to-day you weary and disgust me by your ineffable cowardices, from that gentleman in Paris who now calls himself Orleans-Egalite downwards."
"Monsieur," she began But he was not yet done. His cheeks were flushed with a reflection of the heart within.
"Citoyenne, I have a debt to discharge, and I will discharge it in full.
Intercessions are vain with me. I cannot forget. Send me your brother within ten minutes to meet me here, man to man, and he shall have--all of you shall have--the chance that lies in such an encounter. But woe unto every man at Bellecour if he should fail me. Citoyenne, you know my mind."
But she overlooked the note of dismissal in his voice.
"You speak of a debt that you must discharge," said she, with no whit less heat than he had exhibited. "You refer to the debt of vengeance which you look to discharge by murdering that boy, my brother. But do you not owe me a debt also?"
"You?" he questioned. "My faith! Unless it be a debt of scorn, I know of none."
"Aye," she returned wistfully, "you are like the rest. You have a long memory for injuries, but a short one for benefits. Had it not been for me, Monsieur, you would not be here now to demand this that you call satisfaction. Have you forgotten how I--"
"No," he broke in. "I well remember how you sought to stay them when they were flogging me in the yard there. But you came too late. You might have come before, for from the balcony above you had been watching my torture. But you waited overlong. I was cast out for dead.".
She flashed him a searching glance, as though she sought to read his thoughts, and to ascertain whether he indeed believed what he was saying.
"Cast out for dead?" she echoed. "And by whose contrivance? By mine, M. la Boulaye. When they were cutting you down they discovered that you were not dead, and but that I bribed the men to keep it secret and carry you to Duhamel"s house, they had certainly informed my father and you would have been finished off."
His eyes opened wide now, and into them there came a troubled look--the look of one who is endeavouring to grasp an elusive recollection.
"Ma foi," he muttered. "It seems to come to me as if I had heard something of the sort in a dream. It was--" He paused, and his brows were knit a moment. Then he looked up suddenly, and gradually his face cleared. "Why, yes--I have it!" he exclaimed. "It was in Duhamel"s house. While I was lying half unconscious on the couch I heard one of the men telling Duhamel that you had paid them to carry me there and to keep a secret."
"And you had forgotten that?" she asked, with the faintest note of contempt.
"Not forgotten," he answered, "for it was never really there to be remembered. That I had heard such words had more than once occurred to me, but I have always looked upon it as the recollection of something that I had dreamt. I had never looked upon it as a thing that had had a real happening."
"How, then, did you explain your escape?"
"I always imagined that I had been a.s.sumed dead."
There was a brief spell of silence. Then--
"And now that you know, Monsieur--?"
She left the question unfinished, and held out her hands to him in a gesture of supplication. His face paled slightly and overclouded. Her influence, against which so long he had steeled himself, reinforced by the debt in which she had shown him that he stood towards her, was prevailing with him despite himself. Stirred suddenly out of the coldness that he had hitherto a.s.sumed, he caught the outstretched hands and drew her a step nearer. That was his undoing. Strong man though he unquestionably was, like many another strong man his strength seemed to fall from him at a woman"s touch. He had led so austere and stern a life during the past four years; of women he had but had the most pa.s.sing of glances, and intercourse with none save an old female who acted as his housekeeper in Paris. And here was a woman who was not only beautiful, but the woman who years ago had embodied all his notions of what was most perfect in womanhood; the woman who ever since, and despite all that was past, had reigned in his heart and mind almost in spite of himself, almost unknown to him.
The touch of her hand now, the closeness of her presence, the faint perfume that reached him from her, and that was to him as a symbol of her inherent sweetness, the large blue eyes meeting his in expectation, and the imploring half-pout of her lips, were all seductions against which he had not been human had he prevailed.
Very white in the intensity of the long-quiescent pa.s.sion she had resuscitated, he cried:
"Mademoiselle, what shall I say to you?"
The four years that were gone seemed suddenly to have slipped away. It was as if they stood again by the brook in the park on that April morn when first he had dared to word his presumptuous love. Even the vocabulary of the Republic was forgotten, and the interdicted t.i.tle of "Mademoiselle" fell naturally from his lips.
"Say that you can be generous," she implored him softly. "Say that you prefer the debt you owe to the injury you received."
"You do not know the sacrifice you ask," he exclaimed still fighting with himself. "I have waited four years for this, and now--"
"He is my brother," she whispered, in so wonderful a tone that words which of themselves may have seemed no argument at all became the crowning argument of her intercession.
"Soit!" he consented. "For your sake, Mademoiselle, and in payment of the debt I owe you, I will go as I came. I shall not see the Citizen-marquis again. But do you tell him from me that if he sets any value on his life, he had best shake the dust of France from his feet.
Too long already has he tarried, and at any moment those may arrive who will make him emigrate not only out of France but out of the world altogether. Besides, the peasantry that has risen once may rise again, and I shall not be here to protect him from its violence. Tell him he had best depart at once."
"Monsieur, I am grateful--very, very deeply grateful. I can say no more. May Heaven reward you. I shall pray the good G.o.d to watch over you always. Adieu, Monsieur!"
He stood looking at her a moment still retaining his hold of her hands.
"Adieu, Mademoiselle," he said at last. Then, very slowly--as if so that realising his intent she might frustrate it were she so minded--he raised her right hand. It was not withdrawn, and so he bent low, and pressed his lips upon it.
"G.o.d guard you, Mademoiselle," he said at last, and if they were strange words for a Republican and a Deputy, it must be remembered that his bearing during the past few moments had been singularly unlike a Republican"s.
He released her hand, and stepping back, doffed his hat. With a final inclination of the head, she turned and walked away in the direction of the terrace.
At a distance La Boulaye followed, so lost in thought that he did not observe Captain Juste until the fellow"s voice broke upon his ear.
"You have been long enough, Citizen-deputy," was the soldier"s greeting.
"I take it there is to be no duel."
"I make you my compliments upon the acuteness of your perception,"
answered La Boulaye tartly. "You are right. There is to be no encounter."
Juste"s air was slightly mocking, and words of not overdelicate banter rose to his lips, to be instantly quelled by La Boulaye.
"Let your drums beat a rally, Citizen-captain," he commanded briskly.
"We leave Bellecour in ten minutes.".
And indeed, in less than that time the blue-coats were swinging briskly down the avenue. In the rear rode La Boulaye, his cloak wrapped about him, his square chin buried in his neck-cloth, and his mind deep in meditation.