Under the Red Robe, Stanley Weyman [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

so stoutly. In my joy I could have kissed him! It was not only that I had escaped defeat by the skin of my teeth--and his good sword; but I knew, and felt, and thrilled with the knowledge, that the fight had, in a sense, redeemed my character. He was wounded in two places, and I had a scratch or two, and had lost my horse; and my other poor fellow was dead as a herring. But, speaking for myself, I would have spent half the blood in my body to purchase the feeling with which I turned back to speak to M. de Cocheforet and his sister. Mademoiselle had dismounted, and with her face averted and her mask pushed on one side, was openly weeping. Her brother, who had faithfully kept his place by the ford from the beginning of the fight to the end, met me with raised eyebrows and a peculiar smile.

'Acknowledge my virtue,' he said airily. 'I am here, M. de Berault; which is more than can be said of the two gentlemen who have just ridden off.'

'Yes,' I answered with a touch of bitterness. 'I wish that they had not shot my poor man before they went.'

He shrugged his shoulders.

'They were my friends,' he said. 'You must not expect me to blame them. But that is not all, M. de Berault.'

'No,' I said, wiping my sword. 'There is this gentleman in the mask.' And I turned to go towards him.

'M. de Berault!' Cocheforet called after me, his tone strained and abrupt.

I stood. 'Pardon?' I said, turning.

'That gentleman?' he said, hesitating and looking at me doubtfully. 'Have you considered what will happen to him if you give him up to the authorities?'

'Who is he?' I asked sharply.

'That is rather a delicate question,' he answered frowning.

'Not for me,' I replied brutally, 'since he is in my power. If he will take off his mask I shall know better what I intend to do with him.'

The stranger had lost his hat in his fall, and his fair hair, stained with dust, hung in curls on his shoulders. He was a tall man, of a slender, handsome presence, and, though his dress was plain and almost rough, I espied a splendid jewel on his hand, and fancied that I detected other signs of high quality. He still lay against the bank in a half-swooning condition, and seemed unconscious of my scrutiny.

'Should I know him if he unmasked?' I said suddenly, a new idea in my head.

'You would,' M. de Cocheforet answered.

'And?'

'It would be bad for everyone.'

'Ho! ho!' I replied softly, looking hard first at my old prisoner, and then at my new one. 'Then--what do you wish me to do?'

'Leave him here!' M. de Cocheforet answered, his face flushed, the pulse in his cheek beating.

I had known him for a man of perfect honour before, and trusted him. But this evident earnest anxiety on behalf of his friend touched me not a little. Besides, I knew that I was treading on slippery ground: that it behoved me to be careful.

'I will do it,' I said after a moment's reflection. 'He will play me no tricks, I suppose? A letter of--'

'MON DIEU, no! He will understand,' Cocheforet answered eagerly. 'You will not repent it. Let us be going.'

'Well, but my horse?' I said, somewhat taken aback by this extreme haste. 'How am I to--'

'We shall overtake it,' he assured me. 'It will have kept the road. Lectoure is no more than a league from here, and we can give orders there to have these two fetched and buried.'

I had nothing to gain by demurring, and so, after another word or two, it was arranged. We picked up what we had dropped, M. de Cocheforet helped his sister to mount, and within five minutes we were gone. Casting a glance back from the skirts of the wood I fancied that I saw the masked man straighten himself and turn to look after us, but the leaves were beginning to intervene, the distance may have cheated me. And yet I was not indisposed to think the unknown a trifle more observant, and a little less seriously hurt, than he seemed.


CHAPTER XIII. AT THE FINGER-POST

Through all, it will have been noticed, Mademoiselle had not spoken to me, nor said one word, good or bad. She had played her part grimly, had taken defeat in silence if with tears, had tried neither prayer nor defence nor apology. And the fact that the fight was now over, and the scene left behind, made no difference in her conduct. She kept her face studiously turned from me, and affected to ignore my presence. I caught my horse feeding by the roadside, a furlong forward, and mounted and fell into place behind the two, as in the morning. And just as we had plodded on then in silence we plodded on now; almost as if nothing had happened; while I wondered at the unfathomable ways of women, and marvelled that she could take part in such an incident and remain unchanged.

Yet, though she strove to hide it, it had made a change in her. Though her mask served her well it could not entirely hide her emotions; and by-and-by I marked that her head drooped, that she rode listlessly, that the lines of her figure were altered. I noticed that she had flung away, or furtively dropped, her riding-whip; and I began to understand that, far from the fight having set me in my former place, to the old hatred of me were now added shame and vexation on her own account; shame that she had so lowered herself, even to save her brother, vexation that defeat had been her only reward.

Of this I saw a sign at Lectoure, where the inn had but one common room and we must all dine in company. I secured for them a table by the fire, and leaving them standing by it, retired myself to a smaller one near the door. There were no other guests; which made the separation between us more marked. M. de Cocheforet seemed to feel this. He shrugged his shoulders and looked across the room at me with a smile half sad half comical. But Mademoiselle was implacable. She had taken off her mask, and her face was like stone. Once, only once during the meal, I saw a change come over her. She coloured, I suppose at her thoughts, until her face flamed from brow to chin. I watched the blush spread and spread; and then she slowly and proudly turned her shoulder to me and looked through the window at the shabby street.

I suppose that she and her brother had both built on this attempt, which must have been arranged at Auch. For when we went on in the afternoon, I marked a change in them. They rode like people resigned to the worst. The grey realities of the position, the dreary future began to hang like a mist before their eyes, began to tinge the landscape with sadness, robbed even the sunset of its colours. With each hour Monsieur's spirits flagged and his speech became less frequent; until presently when the light was nearly gone and the dusk was round us the brother and sister rode hand in hand, silent, gloomy, one at least of them weeping. The cold shadow of the Cardinal, of Paris, of the scaffold fell on them, and chilled them. As the mountains which they had known all their lives sank and faded behind us, and we entered on the wide, low valley of the Garonne, their hopes sank and faded also--sank to the dead level of despair. Surrounded by guards, a mark for curious glances, with pride for a companion, M. de Cocheforet could have borne himself bravely; doubtless would bear himself bravely still when the end came. But almost alone, moving forward through the grey evening to a prison, with so many measured days before him, and nothing to exhilarate or anger--in this condition it was little wonder if he felt, and betrayed that he felt, the blood run slow in his veins; if he thought more of the weeping wife and ruined home which he had left behind him than of the cause in which he had spent himself.

But God knows, they had no monopoly of gloom. I felt almost as sad myself. Long before sunset the flush of triumph, the heat of battle, which had warmed my heart at noon, were gone, giving place to a chill dissatisfaction, a nausea, a despondency such as I have known follow a long night at the tables. Hitherto there had been difficulties to be overcome, risks to be run, doubts about the end. Now the end was certain and very near; so near that it filled all the prospect. One hour of triumph I might have, and would have, and I hugged the thought of it as a gambler hugs his last stake, planning the place and time and mode, and trying to occupy myself wholly with it. But the price? Alas! that too would intrude itself, and more frequently as the evening waned; so that as I marked this or that thing by the road, which I could recall passing on my journey south with thoughts so different, with plans that now seemed so very, very old, I asked myself grimly if this were really I; if this were Gil de Berault, known at Zaton's, PREMIER JOUEUR, or some Don Quichotte from Castille, tilting at windmills and taking barbers' bowls for gold.

We reached Agen very late that evening, after groping our way through a by-road near the river, set with holes and willow-stools and frog-spawn--a place no better than a slough; so that after it the great fires and lights at the Blue Maid seemed like a glimpse of a new world, and in a twinkling put something of life and spirits into two at least of us. There was queer talk round the hearth here, of doings in Paris, of a stir against the Cardinal with the Queen-mother at bottom, and of grounded expectations that something might this time come of it. But the landlord pooh-poohed the idea; and I more than agreed with him. Even M. de Cocheforet, who was at first inclined to build on it, gave up hope when he heard that it came only by way of Montauban; whence--since its reduction the year before--all sort of CANARDS against the Cardinal were always on the wing.

'They kill him about once a month,' our host said with a grin. 'Sometimes it is MONSIEUR is to prove a match for him, sometimes CESAR MONSIEUR--the Duke of Vendome, you understand--and sometimes the Queen-mother. But since M. de Chalais and the Marshal made a mess of it and paid forfeit, I pin my faith to his Eminence--that is his new title, they tell me.'

'Things are quiet round here?' I asked.

'Perfectly. Since the Languedoc business came to an end, all goes well,' he answered.

Mademoiselle had retired on our arrival, so that her brother and I were for an hour or two this evening thrown together. I left him at liberty to separate himself from me if he pleased, but he did not use the opportunity. A kind of comradeship, rendered piquant by our peculiar relations, had begun to spring up between us. He seemed to take an odd pleasure in my company, more than once rallied me on my post of jailor, would ask humorously if he might do this or that; and once even inquired