Under the Red Robe, Stanley John Weyman [pdf to ebook reader txt] 📗

task of watching her; it filled me with peevish disgust. But in proportion as I hated it I was eager to have it done and be done with it, and succeed, and stuff my ears and begone from the scene. When she presently came to the verge of the beech wood, and, entering a little open clearing, seemed to loiter, I went cautiously. This, I thought, must be the rendezvous; and I held back warily, looking to see him step out of the thicket.

But he did not, and by-and-by she quickened her pace. She crossed the open and entered a wide ride cut through a low, dense wood of alder and dwarf oak—a wood so closely planted and so intertwined with hazel and elder and box that the branches rose like a solid wall, twelve feet high, on either side of the track.

Down this she passed, and I stood and watched her go, for I dared not follow. The ride stretched away as straight as a line for four or five hundred yards, a green path between green walls. To enter it was to be immediately detected, if she turned, while the thicket itself permitted no passage. I stood baffled and raging, and watched her pass along. It seemed an age before she at last reached the end, and, turning sharply to the right, was in an instant gone from sight.

I waited then no longer. I started off, and, running as lightly and quietly as I could, I sped down the green alley. The sun shone into it, the trees kept off the wind, and between heat and haste I sweated finely. But the turf was soft, and the ground fell slightly, and in little more than a minute I gained the end. Fifty yards short of the turning I stopped, and, stealing on, looked cautiously the way she had gone.

I saw before me a second ride, the twin of the other, and a hundred and fifty paces down it her grey figure tripping on between the green hedges. I stood and took breath, and cursed the wood and the heat and Madame’s wariness. We must have come a league, or two-thirds of a league, at least. How far did the man expect her to plod to meet him? I began to grow angry. There is moderation even in the cooking of eggs, and this wood might stretch into Spain, for all I knew!

Presently she turned the corner and was gone again, and I had to repeat my manoeuvre. This time, surely, I should find a change. But no! Another green ride stretched away into the depths of the forest, with hedges of varying shades—here light and there dark, as hazel and elder, or thorn, and yew and box prevailed—but always high and stiff and impervious. Halfway down the ride Madame’s figure tripped steadily on, the only moving thing in sight. I wondered, stood, and, when she vanished, followed-only to find that she had entered another track, a little narrower but in every other respect alike.

And so it went on for quite half an hour. Sometimes Madame turned to the right, sometimes to the left. The maze seemed to be endless. Once or twice I wondered whether she had lost her way, and was merely seeking to return. But her steady, purposeful gait, her measured pace, forbade the idea. I noticed, too, that she seldom looked behind her—rarely to right or left. Once the ride down which she passed was carpeted not with green, but with the silvery, sheeny leaves of some creeping plant that in the distance had a shimmer like that of water at evening. As she trod this, with her face to the low sun, her tall grey figure had a pure air that for the moment startled me—she looked unearthly. Then I swore in scorn of myself, and at the next corner I had my reward. She was no longer walking on. She had stopped, I found, and seated herself on a fallen tree that lay in the ride.

For some time I stood in ambush watching her, and with each minute I grew more impatient. At last I began to doubt—to have strange thoughts. The green walls were growing dark. The sun was sinking; a sharp, white peak, miles and miles away, which closed the vista of the ride, began to flush and colour rosily. Finally, but not before I had had leisure to grow uneasy, she stood up and walked on more slowly. I waited, as usual, until the next turning hid her. Then I hastened after her, and, warily passing round the corner came face to face with her!

I knew all in a moment saw all in a flash: that she had fooled me, tricked me, lured me away. Her face was white with scorn, her eyes blazed; her figure, as she confronted me, trembled with anger and infinite contempt.

‘You spy!’ she cried. ‘You hound! You—gentleman! Oh, MON DIEU! if you are one of us—if you are really not of the CANAILLE—we shall pay for this some day! We shall pay a heavy reckoning in the time to come! I did not think,’ she continued, and her every syllable was like the lash of a whip, ‘that there was anything so vile as you in this world!’

I stammered something—I do not know what. Her words burned into me—into my heart! Had she been a man, I would have struck her dead!

‘You thought that you deceived me yesterday,’ she continued, lowering her tone, but with no lessening of the passion, the contempt, the indignation, which curled her lip and gave fullness to her voice. ‘You plotter! You surface trickster! You thought it an easy task to delude a woman—you find yourself deluded. God give you shame that you may suffer!’ she continued mercilessly. ‘You talked of Clon, but Clon beside you is the most spotless, the most honourable of men!’

‘Madame,’ I said hoarsely—and I know that my face was grey as ashes—‘let us understand one another.’

‘God forbid!’ she cried on the instant. ‘I would not soil myself!’

‘Fie! Madame,’ I said, trembling. But then, you are a woman. That should cost a man his life!’

She laughed bitterly.

‘You say well,’ she retorted. ‘I am not a man—and if you are one, thank God for it. Neither am I Madame. Madame de Cocheforet has spent this afternoon—thanks to your absence and your imbecility—with her husband. Yes, I hope that hurts you!’ she went on, savagely snapping her little white teeth together. ‘I hope that stings you; to spy and do vile work, and do it ill, Monsieur Mouchard—Monsieur de Mouchard, I should say—I congratulate you!’

‘You are not Madame de Cocheforet?’ I cried, stunned, even in the midst of my shame and rage, by this blow.

‘No, Monsieur!’ she answered grimly. ‘I am not! I am not. And permit me to point out—for we do not all lie easily—that I never said I was. You deceived yourself so skilfully that we had no need to trick you.’

‘Mademoiselle, then?’ I muttered.

‘Is Madame!’ she cried. ‘Yes, and I am Mademoiselle de Cocheforet. And in that character, and in all others, I beg from this moment to close our acquaintance, sir. When we meet again—if we ever do meet, which God forbid!’ she went on, her eyes sparkling—‘do not presume to speak to me, or I will have you flogged by the grooms. And do not stain our roof by sleeping under it again. You may lie to-night in the inn. It shall not be said that Cocheforet,’ she continued proudly, ‘returned even treachery with inhospitality; and I will give orders to that end. But to-morrow begone back to your master, like the whipped cur you