Under the Red Robe, Stanley John Weyman [pdf to ebook reader txt] 📗
- Author: Stanley John Weyman
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She clutched at the handrail of the bridge, and for an instant clung to it for support. Her face, from which the shawl had fallen, glimmered white in the shadow of the trees. At last I had shaken her pride. At last!
‘What is your price?’ she murmured faintly.
‘I am going to tell you,’ I replied, speaking so that every word might fall distinctly on her ears, and sating my eyes the while on her proud face. I had never dreamed of such revenge as this! ‘About a fortnight ago, M. de Cocheforet left here at night with a little orange-coloured sachet in his possession.’
She uttered a stifled cry, and drew herself stiffly erect.
‘It contained—but there, Mademoiselle, you know its contents,’ I went on. ‘Whatever they were, M. de Cocheforet lost it and them at starting. A week ago he came back—unfortunately for himself—to seek them.’
She was looking full in my face now. She seemed scarcely to breathe in the intensity of her surprise and expectation.
‘You had a search made, Mademoiselle,’ I continued quietly. ‘Your servants left no place unexplored The paths, the roads, the very woods were ransacked, But in vain, because all the while the orange sachet lay whole and unopened in my pocket.’
‘No!’ she cried impetuously. ‘There, you lie sir, as usual! The sachet was found, torn open, many leagues from this place!’
‘Where I threw it, Mademoiselle,’ I replied, ‘that I might mislead your rascals and be free to return to you. Oh! believe me,’ I continued, letting something of my true self, something of my triumph, appear at last in my voice. ‘You have made a mistake! You would have done better had you trusted me. I am no bundle of sawdust, Mademoiselle, though once you got the better of me, but a man; a man with an arm to shield and a brain to serve, and—as I am going to teach you—a heart also!’
She shivered.
‘In the orange-coloured sachet that you lost I believe that there were eighteen stones of great value?’
She made no answer, but she looked at me as if I fascinated her. Her very breath seemed to pause and wait on my words. She was so little conscious of anything else, of anything outside ourselves, that a score of men might have come up behind her, unseen and unnoticed.
CHAPTER VIII. A MASTER STROKE—Continued
I took from my breast a little packet wrapped in soft leather, and I held it towards her.
‘Will you open this?’ I said. ‘I believe that it contains what your brother lost. That it contains all I will not answer, Mademoiselle, because I spilled the stones on the floor of my room, and I may have failed to find some. But the others can be recovered; I know where they are.’
She took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers shaking. A few turns and the mild lustre of the stones shone out, making a kind of moonlight in her hands—such a shimmering glory of imprisoned light as has ruined many a woman and robbed many a man of his honour. MORBLEU! as I looked at them and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity—I wondered how I had come to resist the temptation.
While I gazed her hands began to waver.
‘I cannot count,’ she muttered helplessly. ‘How many are there?’
‘In all, eighteen.’
‘There should be eighteen,’ she said.
She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real and that she was not dreaming. Then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and I saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before.
‘Well?’ she muttered between her teeth.
‘Your price, man? Your price?’
‘I am coming to it now, Mademoiselle,’ I said gravely. ‘It is a simple matter. You remember the afternoon when I followed you—clumsily and thoughtlessly perhaps—through the wood to restore these things? In seeming that happened about a month ago. I believe that it happened the day before yesterday. You called me then some very harsh names, which I will not hurt you by repeating. The only price I ask for the restoration of your jewels is that you on your part recall those names.’
‘How?’ she muttered. ‘I do not understand.’
I repeated my words very slowly. ‘The only price or reward I ask, Mademoiselle, is that you take back those names and say that they were not deserved.’
‘And the jewels?’ she exclaimed hoarsely.
‘They are yours. They are not mine. They are nothing to me. Take them, and say that you do not think of me—Nay, I cannot say the words, Mademoiselle.’
‘But there is something—else! What else?’ she cried, her head thrown back, her eyes, bright as any wild animal’s, searching mine. ‘Ha! my brother? What of him? What of him, sir?’
‘For him, Mademoiselle—I would prefer that you should tell me no more than I know already,’ I answered in a low voice. ‘I do not wish to be in that affair. But yes; there is one thing I have not mentioned. You are right.’
She sighed so deeply that I caught the sound.
‘It is,’ I continued slowly, ‘that you will permit me to remain at Cocheforet for a few days while the soldiers are here. I am told that there are twenty men and two officers quartered in your house. Your brother is away. I ask to be permitted, Mademoiselle, to take his place for the time, and to be privileged to protect your sister and yourself from insult. That is all.’
She raised her hand to her head. After a long pause,—
‘The frogs!’ she muttered, ‘they croak! I can not hear.’
Then, to my surprise, she turned quickly and suddenly on her heel, and walked over the bridge, leaving me standing there. For a moment I stood aghast, peering after her shadowy figure, and wondering what had taken her. Then, in a minute or less, she came quickly back to me, and I understood. She was crying.
‘M. de Barthe,’ she said, in a
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