In the Day of Adversity

CHAPTER XIII.

DE ROQUEMAURE'S WORK

The weather had changed, the frost was gone, and the night was hot and murky, while rain was falling, as alone, now, alas! St. Georges mounted the summit of a hill that rose close above Troyes on the road to Paris.

He had commenced his journey again.

It was a gruesome spot to which he had arrived on this night – an elevation that surmounted a billowy country, over all of which, in the summer time, the vines and corn grew in rich profusion, but which now looked bare and melancholy as the southwest wind swept the rain clouds over it beneath a watery moon. To the left of him there swung, upon the exact crest of the hill, a corpse in chains, with, perched upon its mouldering head, a crow – looking for the eyes long since pecked out by others of its brood! To the right there rose a little wood, through which the wind moaned and sighed onto his face, bringing with it warm drops of rain.

Involuntarily he glanced up at the thing swinging above his head – heartbroken as he was at having had to leave Troyes with his child still unfound, he could not refrain from doing that! – and wondered who and what the malefactor had been who was thus exalted. And as he lowered his eyes from the ghastly mass of corruption, he saw against the gibbet a thicker, darker thing than the gallows tree itself – a thing surmounted by a white, corpselike face, from which stared a pair of large gray eyes at him – eyes in which, as the clouds scurried by beneath the moon, the moon itself shone dazzlingly, lighting them up and showing their large pupils.

The horse saw them too, and started forward a pace or so until reined in by his master's hand, and then whimpered and quivered all over, while its rider, with his own flesh creeping, bent over his saddle and peered toward the dark form surmounted by the pallid face and glaring eyes.

"Who in Heaven's name are you?" St. Georges whispered, "and why select this ghastly spot to stand in and affright passers-by? What are you, man or woman?" and he leaned still further over his demi-pique to gaze at the figure, though as he did so his right hand stole to his sword hilt.

"A woman," a voice answered. "A woman who comes here to weep her husband's death. He" – and she cast the staring gray eyes upward to the object swinging with each gust of the wind in its chains – "was my husband. Pass on, and leave me with his murdered remains."

"Murdered! Rather, poor soul, say executed. Murderers slay not thus."

Slowly the figure left the foot of the gibbet as he spoke, so that he saw she was a tall young woman of the peasant class, clad in dark, poor clothes, and slowly she advanced the few yards that separated them, whereby he could observe her features and notice more plainly the awful whiteness of her face.

"Murdered, I say!" she replied, still with the glare in her eyes. "Murdered! Wrongfully accused, foully tried, falsely condemned. Done to death wickedly as a braconnier. But he was none – yet there he swings. O God! that life can be so easily torn from us by the powerful!"

"Who, then, has done this deed?" St. Georges asked, deeply stirred by the woman's wild sorrow, perhaps also by the gloomy surroundings. "Who can do such things as this, even though powerful?"

"Who?" she replied. "Who? Who but one in these parts? The hound, De Roquemaure!"

"De Roquemaure!" St. Georges exclaimed with a start that caused his trembling horse to move forward, thinking that he had pressed its flanks to urge it on, which start was perfectly perceptible to the unhappy woman. "De Roquemaure!"

"You know him?" she asked eagerly, bending her face toward and up to him so that he could see her pale lips – lips, indeed, almost as pale as her cheeks – "you know him?"

"I know of him," St. Georges replied.

"And hate him, perhaps, as I do. It may be, would kill him as I would. Is it so? Answer me?"

Carried away by this strange encounter, and with so strange a third thing near them as that above, which once had life as they had still; carried away, too, by the woman's vehemence – a vehemence which caused her, a peasant, to speak on equal terms with one whose dress and accoutrements showed the difference between them – he answered almost in a whisper:

"It may be," he said, bending down still further to her, "that I shall be doomed to kill him some day. May be that he has merited death at my hands."

"You hate him?"

"I fear I have but too just cause to hate him."

"As all do! As all! He lives," she went on, "but to slay and injure others as he slew and injured him," and she half turned her head and cast up her eyes at the miserable relic above her. Then she continued: "Listen. He was no poacher, no thief. But I – I – his wife – was unfortunate enough to fall under the other's notice – he sought me – you understand? – and he" – with again the upward glance – "resisted his desires. You see the end!"

Looking into her eyes, observing her well-defined features, noticing that, except for her awful pallor, she might well be a handsome woman, especially when bright and happy instead of, as now, grief-stained, St. Georges could understand. Then, while also he meditated as to whether this De Roquemaure was a fiend that had taken human shape, the woman went on:

"Daily almost some fall under his bane. But a week ago a stranger here – one carrying a helpless babe – was set upon – "

"What!" and now he felt as though the universe was spinning round.

– "was set upon," she continued, "struck to death – he is dying now, or dead – "

"And the babe?" St. Georges interposed.

"Carried off by those who did his bidding."

"O God! Lost again!" and the moan he uttered startled the woman out of her own grief.

"Who are you?" she asked, her great eyes piercing him.

"As I believe, that child's unhappy father."

Aroused by this to forget her own sufferings, even to forget for the moment the dreadful burden borne by the gallows tree, she thrust out her hand and seized his sleeve.

"Who, then, is the dying man?" she whispered.

"I know not – but – but – for mercy's sake, in memory of the misery you have suffered, in pity for mine, lead me to this man! You know where he is; you can do so?"

"Come," she said. "Come. He is in my hut close by. We were very poor, we had no better. Come. Tie your horse to a tree and follow me."

Dazed, scarce knowing whether he was awake or asleep and dreaming, he obeyed her, leading the horse away some paces so that it should be no more frightened by the horrible burden of the gibbet, and following her through a thicket. In other circumstances he might have feared an ambush; now, a thousand hidden enemies would not have held him back.

She wound her way along a trodden track leading down into the valley below, but went only a few score yards when she stopped outside what was indeed no better than a hut, a wooden building thatched with turf, from a window in which there gleamed a ray of light. And she, placing her ears to the door ere she pushed it open, said to him: "He lives still. You can hear his breathing. Hark!"

"Thank God!" St. Georges said fervently. "Whoever he may be, he will be able to tell me of the child. Open, I beg you; open in the name of mercy!"

She obeyed him at once, thrusting the door open and drawing him in, and then by the light of a miserable, small oil lamp that flickered on a rude wooden table he saw stretched upon a pallet in a corner of the place the dying man. Also he noticed that the room reeked and was fetid with his hot breath and with another hot, dry odour that he knew was the odour of blood.

In the shadow of the room St. Georges could see a white face, could also perceive two great staring eyes turned up to the rafters; he could hear, too, the drawn, labouring breath as it rattled through his throat and chest, accompanied by a moan as it came forth.

"Quick!" he exclaimed, "quick! The light! He lives still, but his minutes are numbered. He is dying, dying fast. Where is his wound?"

"In the lower part of his body, through him. A sword thrust. I have tried to stanch it, but it flows always. I marvel he has lived so long."

She brought the oil lamp forward as she spoke and held it near the man, and St. Georges, kneeling down, looked at him. Then with a bound he sprang up again, exclaiming: "He here! Heaven and earth! what brings him here? How comes he in this mystery? What – what does it mean, what portend?"

"You know him?"

"Yes, I know him."

The man stretched upon the pallet was Pierre, the Bishop of Lodève's man-servant!

"Speak!" said St. Georges to him a moment later, smothering for the time his wonder and astonishment. "Speak if you can. One word from you may alter my whole life, my child's life. Speak ere you die."

It seemed, however, that he would never speak again. But, also, it seemed as if all consciousness was not gone from him yet – as if he recognised the man kneeling once more at his side, while again the woman held the lamp above them. As far as he was able with his failing strength, he endeavoured to shrink from St. Georges while as he did so his eyes, distended either with fear or horror, glared at him. But from his mouth there came no sound but the laboured breathing.

Again St. Georges besought him to speak; plied him with questions. Was the child taken from him Dorine; by whom had it been taken; how had he whom St. Georges had never seen until he slept at the bishop's, and whom he had left at Dijon, found his way here only to be murdered? And still no answer came, while once the dying man tried with his feeble hand to push St. Georges away, and still stared in ghastly horror at him.