St. George's Cross; Or, England Above All

"Pourquoi me boudez-vous, Monsieur?" at last she said; "are you perhaps permitting yourself to be offended at my seeing M. Elliot to the door? Do you not know that he is our old friend?"

"He is nothing to me," answered Alain, moodily, "it is you of whom I am thinking."

"As Rose says, we can take care of ourselves. Do you for one moment think that I acknowledge any restraining right on your part, any privilege of question even? But come, if M. Elliot is an old friend you are a much older. Do not let us quarrel."

"It takes two to make a quarrel," said the foolish fellow, not observing the olive-branch.

If his display of annoyance was only a mask of jealousy she fancied that she could deal with it, and forgive it, but if it should be really a sign of indifference? so reasoned her rapid female brain; the cruder masculine mind was but too ready to supply the solution of the problem.

"Voyons, Marguerite," said her lover, almost blubbering. "I have loved you all your life. Ever since you were a little totterer whom I carried in my arms and planted on the top of the garden wall to pick coquelicots, I have thought of you as one to be some day mine. I see now how foolish I have been. I will put the sea between us; and I hope my boat will go to the bottom; and then perhaps you will be sorry." … And in the fervour of self-pity he actually shed tears.

Marguerite watched him, with a joyous sense of triumph. Secure of her victory, she could now assume her turn to show anger. But she did not feel it; and she had not much skill in the feigning of unbecoming passions.

"That is ungenerous, Monsieur. You do not think of the poor boatmen who would go to the bottom with you. They are not sulky young men who have quarrelled with harmless women. The Race of Alderney will do without them; dame! it may afford to wait for you too."

If Alain had but caught the look with which these final words were accompanied! But he was still sitting in the distant darkness, with his moistened eyes bent obstinately on the ground.

And so the misunderstanding widened and deepened; and presently Rose returned. Taking in the situation with a rapid glance, she passed through the room and out into the buttery, whence she soon returned with the materials of a modest supper. "We must be our own domestics," she said with an attempt at lightness: but the attempt was hollow; a cloud seemed to fill the low room, and press upon the inmates. The three sate down, but neither of the young people did much justice to her hospitality. After supper she held a brief consultation with Alain; and after giving him a bag of gold and a letter for her husband, dismissed him, to rest if not to slumber, in the chamber that stood at the head of the stair on which the door in the wainscot opened. Then she and Marguerite retired by the other door to their own part of the upper floor, where I fear the young lady received a lecture before she went to her virgin couch.

ACT III.

The States

Next morning the Militia Captain left before the house was awake, to return to Lempriere in London. When the ladies went, later in the forenoon, to arrange the chamber in which he had passed the night, they found that the bed had not been used during Le Gallais' occupation. A copy of Ben Jonson's Poems lay on the table; by the side of which were pen and ink, and a burnt-out candle. On opening the book, Mdlle. de St. Martin found some lines written on the fly-leaf, which ran as follows:—

"What tho' the floures be riche and rare
of hue and fragrancie,
What tho' the giver be kinde and fair,
they have no charme for me.

The wreathe whose brightest budde is gone
is not ye wreathe I'de prise:
I'de pluck another, and so passe on,
with unregardfull eyes.

And so the heart whose sweet resorte
an hundred rivalls share
May yielde a moment's passing sporte,
but Love's an alyen there."

"He is unpolite, my sister," cried Marguerite, laughing. "But that is only because he is sore. The wounded bird has moulted a feather in his empty nest."

"All the same, he is flown," answered Mdme. de Maufant, gravely.

"N'importe," answered the damsel. "Leave him to me. I can whistle him back when I want him—if I ever do."

Leaving the ladies to the discussion of the topic thus set afoot, let us turn to the more prosaic combinations of the rougher, if not harder, sex. Majora canamus!

About four miles south-east of the manor-house, the old Castle of Gorey arose out of the sea, almost as if it grew there, a part of the granite crag. A survival of the rude warfare of Plantagenet times, it bore—as it still does—the self assertive name of "Mont Orgueil," and boasted itself the only English fortress that had ever resisted the avenger of France, the constable Bertrand du Guesclin. But, in spite of its pride, it proved to be commanded by a yet higher point, sufficiently near to throw round shot into the Castle in the more advanced days to which our tale relates. For this reason, and also because of the smallness of the harbour at its feet, Mont Orgueil had given way to the growing importance of S. Helier, protected by its virgin Castle. Hence the place, though not quite in ruins, had sunk to a minor and subordinate character; the Hall, in which the States had once assembled, was neglected and dirty; the chambers formerly appropriated to the Governor and his family were used as cells, or not used at all; the garden was unweeded; and Mont Orgueil in general had sunk to be a prison and a watch-tower. None the less proudly did it rise—as it does still—with a protecting air above its little town and port, and look defiance upon the opposite shores of Normandy.

In a narrow guard-room on the South side of this castle, a few days later than the visit of La Cloche to the King, the Lieutenant-Governor was sitting at a heavy oaken table, with his steel cap before him and his basket-hilted sword hung by the belt from the back of his carven chair. A writer sate at the left-hand side of the same table, and between them lay militia muster-rolls and other papers. At the further end of the room, between two halberdiers in scarlet doublets, stood a tall Jerseyman in squalid garments, his legs in fetters, his wrists in manacles. Keen little grey eyes peered through the neglected black hair that fell over his narrow brow; and his iron-grey beard showed signs of long neglect.

"Now, Pierre Benoist," said Sir George, "for the last time I give you warning. If you do not speak, freely and to the purpose, it will be the worse for you. There be those who can tell me what I desire to know. As for you, I shall deliver you to the Provost-Sergeant, who will need no words from me to tell him how to deal with you. I ask you, is Michael Lempriere in correspondence with Henry Dumaresq?"

"Palfrancordi! Messire; you press me hard," said the prisoner, but his eye was scarcely that of a pressed man. "When you examined me a week ago in secret I think I answered that. I know of no letters that have passed between M. de Samarès and M. de Maufant. That is," he added hastily, as the Governor began to look impatient, "I have carried none myself."

"Who has?" asked the Governor.

The Greffier, at a signal from Carteret, plunged his pen into the ink; the halberdiers shifted their legs and leaned upon their weapons; the prisoner moistened his lips with his tongue.

"Speak, Benoist; who carried the letters?"

"It was Alain Le Gallais," answered Pierre in a low voice.

"It was Alain Le Gallais? Write, Master Greffier, the prisoner says that the letters were carried by one Alain Le Gallais. You are sure of that, Benoist?"

"As sure as my name is Peter." A cock crew in the yard of the castle. The coincidence did not seem to strike any of the party in the room.

"By what route did Le Gallais go?"

"He went by Boulay Bay."

"By what conveyance?"

"By Lesbirel's lugger."

"When did he go last?"

"This is the fourth day."

Carteret compared these replies with some that lay before him, and proceeded:—

"Do you know when he will return?"

"I cannot know; but I can divine. The wind is changing; if he landed at Southampton on Monday night he would be in London in twenty-four hours, riding on the horses of the Parliament. Riding back in the same way he might be back in Boulay Bay, with a fair wind, some time to-morrow."

"C'est assez," said the Governor, "take the prisoner away; but not to his former quarters. Lodge him in Prynne's old cell."

As the prisoner was being removed, in obedience to these orders, he was seen to limp heavily, and there was a bandage on one of his legs.

"March, comrade," said one of his guards, when they were in the corridor.

"My leg was hurt, John Le Gros, when I tried to escape last night."

"Not so badly but you can walk if you like," and the militia-man emphasised his words by a slight thrust with the point of his weapon.

To which of the parties in the island Master Benoist was faithful, the muse that presides over this history declines to reveal: perhaps he was an impartial traitor to both. It became presently clear that, in any case, his lameness was little more than a feint. During that same night he made a rope of his bedding, and letting himself down from the window of his cell at high water, swam like a fish to the unwatched shore of Anneport, and so effected his escape. It was long ere he was again heard of by the Jersey authorities; but there is no record to show that he was either mourned or missed.

For the next three nights a party of soldiers—not militia-men, but Cornishmen of the Royal body-guard—occupied a hut on the landing-place at Boulay Bay, belonging to Lesbirel, the man whose lugger was known to be employed in the communication between the Parliamentary party in the island and their English allies. The third night being dark and stormy, the patrol was suspended by orders of the sergeant in command, and the men devoted themselves to the indoor pleasures afforded by cards, tobacco, and cider. But others were less careful of personal comfort. On the western point of the cliff over their heads (the "Belle Hougue") a beacon was burning, of whose existence the sergeant and his men were unaware. A man watched by the fire, keeping it alive by constant care and attention, or rekindling it from time to time, when it was overcome by the wind and rain. The soldiers in their hut did not see the light; but it was seen by the crew of a lugger, driving through the waves of the flowing tide before a rough but favouring gale. Accordingly, putting the helm down, their steersman drove the craft clear of the threatened danger that was prepared for the occupants below, and made her touch the land in the adjacent bay of Bonne Nuit, hid from observation by the interposing cliffs. Leaping to the shore, Alain Le Gallais, who was the sole passenger, climbing the western heights, made his way by paths with which he was well acquainted from his youth, to the manor-house of his exiled friend the Seigneur of Maufant.