Historical Romances: Under the Red Robe, Count Hannibal, A Gentleman of France

However, be that as it might, it was essential that I should see the arrest made; and I waited patiently while they revived the tortured man, and made their dispositions. These took some time; so that the sun was down, and it was growing dusk, when we marched out, Clon going first, supported by his two guards, the captain and I following, – abreast, and eyeing one another suspiciously, – the lieutenant, with the sergeant and five troopers, bringing up the rear. Clon moved slowly, moaning from time to time, and but for the aid given him by the two men with him, must have sunk down again and again.

He went out between two houses close to the inn, and struck a narrow track, scarcely discernible, which ran behind other houses, and then plunged into the thickest part of the wood. A single person, traversing the covert, might have made such a track; or pigs, or children. But it was the first idea that occurred to us, and it put us all on the alert. The captain carried a cocked pistol, I held my sword drawn, and kept a watchful eye on him; and the deeper the dusk fell in the wood, the more cautiously we went, until at last we came out with a sort of jump into a wider and lighter path.

I looked up and down it, and saw before me a wooden bridge, and an open meadow, lying cold and grey in the twilight; and I stood in astonishment. It was the old path to the Château! I shivered at the thought that he was going to take us there, to the house-to Mademoiselle!

The captain also recognised the place, and swore aloud. But the dumb man went on unheeding, until he reached the wooden bridge. There he paused as if in doubt, and looked towards the dark outline of the building, which was just visible, one faint light twinkling sadly in the west wing. As the captain and I pressed up behind him, he raised his hands and seemed to wring them towards the house.

"Have a care!" the captain growled. "Play me no tricks, or-" But he did not finish the sentence; for Clon turned back from the bridge, and, entering the wood on the left hand, began to ascend the bank of the stream. We had not gone a hundred yards before the ground grew rough, and the undergrowth thick; and yet through all ran a kind of path which enabled us to advance, dark as it was growing. Very soon the bank on which we moved began to rise above the water, and grew steep and rugged. We turned a shoulder, where the stream swept round a curve, and saw we were in the mouth of a small ravine, dark and steep-walled. The water brawled along the bottom, over boulders and through chasms. In front, the slope on which we stood shaped itself into a low cliff; but half-way between its summit and the water, a ledge, or narrow terrace, running along the face, was dimly visible.

"Ten to one, a cave!" the captain muttered. "It is a likely place."

"And an ugly one!" I sneered. "Which one to ten might safely hold for hours!"

"If the ten had no pistols-yes!" he answered viciously. "But you see we have. Is he going that way?"

He was. "Lieutenant," Larolle said, turning and speaking in a low voice, though the chafing of the stream below us covered ordinary sounds, "shall we light the lanthorns, or press on while there is still a glimmering of day?"

"On, I should say, M. le Capitaine," the lieutenant answered. "Prick him in the back if he falters. I will warrant he has a tender place or two!" the brute added, with a chuckle.

The captain gave the word, and we moved forward; it being very evident now that the cliff-path was our destination. It was possible for the eye to follow the track all the way to it through rough stones and brushwood; and though Clon climbed feebly and with many groans, two minutes saw us step on to it. It did not turn out to be the perilous place it looked at a distance. The ledge, grassy and terrace-like, sloped slightly downwards and outwards, and in parts was slippery; but it was as wide as a highway, and the fall to the water did not exceed thirty feet. Even in such a dim light as now displayed it to us, and by increasing the depth and unseen dangers of the gorge, gave a kind of impressiveness to our movements, a nervous woman need not have feared to breast it. I wondered how often Mademoiselle had passed along it with her milk-pitcher.

"I think we have him now!" Captain Larolle muttered, twisting his mustachios, and looking round to make his last dispositions. "Paul and Lebrun, see that your man makes no noise. Sergeant, come forward with your carbine, but do not fire without orders. Now, silence, all, and close up, Lieutenant. Forward!"

We advanced about a hundred paces, keeping the cliff on our left, then turned a shoulder, and saw, a few paces in front of us, a black blotch standing out from the grey duskiness of the cliff-side. The prisoner stopped, and raising his bound hands pointed to it.

"There?" the captain whispered, pressing forward. "Is that the place?"

Clon nodded. The captain's voice shook with excitement. "You two remain here with him!" he muttered, in a low tone. "Sergeant, come forward with me. Now, are you ready? Forward!"

He and the sergeant passed quickly, one on either side of Clon and his guards. The path was narrow here, and the captain passed outside. The eyes of all but one were on the black blotch, the hollow in the cliff-side, and no one saw exactly what happened. But somehow, as the captain passed abreast of him, the prisoner thrust back his guards, and springing sideways, flung his unbound arms round Larolle's body, and in an instant swept him, shouting, to the verge of the precipice.

It was done in a moment. By the time the lieutenant's startled wits and eyes were back, the two were already tottering on the edge, looking in the gloom like one dark form. The sergeant, who was the first to find his head, levelled his carbine; but as the wrestlers twirled and twisted, the captain shrieking out oaths and threats, the mute silent as death, it was impossible to see which was which; and the sergeant lowered his gun again, while the men held back nervously. The ledge sloped steeply there; the edge was vague; already the two seemed to be wrestling in mid-air, – and the mute was a man beyond hope or fear.

That moment of hesitation was fatal. Clon's long arms were round the other's arms, crushing them into his ribs; Clon's skull-like face grinned hate into the other's eyes; his long limbs curled round him like the folds of a snake. Suddenly Larolle's strength gave way. "Damn you all! Why don't you-Mercy! mercy!" came in a last scream from his lips; and then, as the lieutenant, taken aback before, sprang forward to his aid, the two toppled over the edge, and in a second hurtled out of sight.

"Mon Dieu!" the lieutenant cried, in horror. The answer was a dull splash in the depths below.

He flung up his arms. "Water!" he said. "Quick, men, get down! We may save him yet! They have fallen into water!"

But there was no path, and night was come, and the men's nerves were shaken. The lanthorns had to be lit, and the way to be retraced; and by the time we reached the dark pool which lay below, the last bubbles were gone from the surface, the last ripples had beaten themselves out against the banks. True, the pool still rocked sullenly, and the yellow light showed a man's hat floating, and near it a glove three parts submerged. But that was all. The mute's dying grip had known no loosening, nor his hate any fear. Later, I heard that when they dragged the two out next day, his fingers were in the other's eye-sockets, his teeth in his throat. If ever man found death sweet, it was he.

As we turned slowly from the black water, some shuddering, some crossing themselves, the lieutenant looked vengefully at me. "Curse you!" he said, in sudden fury. "I believe you are glad!"

"He deserved his fate," I answered coldly. "Why should I pretend to be sorry? It was now or in three months. And for the other poor devil's sake I am glad."

He glared at me a moment, in speechless anger. At last, "I should like to have you tied up!" he said, between his teeth.

"I should have thought that you had had enough of tying up for one day!" I retorted. "But there; it comes of making officers out of the canaille. Dogs love blood. The teamster must still lash something, if he can no longer lash his horses."

We were back, a sombre little procession, at the wooden bridge, when I said this. He stopped suddenly. "Very well," he replied, nodding viciously, "That decides me. Sergeant, light me this way with a lanthorn. The rest of you to the village. Now, Master Spy," he continued, glancing at me with gloomy spite, "your road is my road. I think I know how to cook your goose."

I shrugged my shoulders in disdain, and together, the sergeant leading the way with the light, we crossed the meadow, and passed through the gate where Mademoiselle had kissed my hand, and up the ghostly walk between the rosebushes. I wondered uneasily what the lieutenant would be at, and what he intended; but the lanthorn light which now fell on the ground at our feet, and now showed one of us to the other, high-lit in a frame of blackness, discovered nothing in his grizzled face but settled hostility. He wheeled at the end of the walk to go to the main door; but as he did so, I saw the flutter of a white skirt by the stone seat against the house, and I stepped that way. "Mademoiselle," I said softly, "is it you?"

"Clon?" she muttered, her voice quivering. "What of him?"

"He is past pain," I answered gently. "He is dead, but in his own way. Take comfort, Mademoiselle." And then before I could say more, the lieutenant with his sergeant and light were at my elbow. He saluted Mademoiselle roughly. She looked at him with shuddering abhorrence.

"Are you come to flog me, Sir?" she said icily. "Is it not enough that you have murdered my servant?"

"On the contrary, it was he killed my captain," the lieutenant answered, in another tone than I had expected. "If your servant is dead, so is my comrade."

She looked with startled eyes, not at him, but at me. "What! Captain Larolle?" she muttered.

I nodded.

"How?" she asked.

"Clon flung the captain and himself into the river-pool," I explained, in a low voice. "The pool above the bridge."

She uttered an exclamation of awe, and stood silent. But her lips moved; I think she was praying for Clon, though she was a Huguenot. Meanwhile I had a fright. The lanthorn, swinging in the sergeant's hand, and now throwing its smoky light on the stone seat, now on the rough wall above it, showed me something else. On the seat, doubtless where Mademoiselle's hand had lain, as she sat in the dark, listening and watching, stood a pitcher of food. Beside her, in that place, it was damning evidence. I trembled lest the lieutenant's eye should fall upon it, lest the sergeant should see it; I thought what I could do to hide it; and then in a moment I forgot all about it. The lieutenant was speaking, and his voice was like doom. My throat grew dry as I listened. My tongue stuck to my mouth; I tried to look at Mademoiselle, but I could not.

"It is true, the captain is gone," he said stiffly. "But others are alive, and about one of them, a word with you, – by your leave, Mademoiselle. I have listened to a good deal of talk from this fine gentleman friend of yours. He has spent the last twenty-four hours saying, 'You shall!' and 'You shall not!' He came from you, and took a very high tone because we laid a little whip-lash about that dumb devil of yours. He called us brutes and beasts, and but for him I am not sure that my friend would not be alive. But when he said a few minutes ago that he was glad, – glad of it, damn him! – then I fixed it in my mind that I would be even with him. And I am going to be!"

"What do you mean?" Mademoiselle asked, wearily interrupting him. "If you think you can prejudice me against that gentleman-"

"That is precisely what I do think! And I am going to do it. And a little more than that!"

"You will be only wasting your breath!" she answered proudly.

"Wait! wait, Mademoiselle, until you have heard!" he said. "If ever a black-hearted scoundrel, a dastardly, sneaking spy, trod the earth, it is this fellow! This friend of yours! And I am going to expose him. Your own eyes and your own ears shall persuade you. Why, I would not eat, I would not drink, I would not sit down with him! I would not! I would rather be beholden to the meanest trooper in my squadron than to him! Ay, I would, so help me Heaven!" And the lieutenant, turning squarely on his heels, spat on the ground.

CHAPTER X

THE ARREST

So it had come! And come in such a fashion that I saw no way of escape. The sergeant was between us, and I could not strike him. And I found no words. A score of times I had thought with shrinking how I should reveal my secret to Mademoiselle, what I should say, and how she would take it. But in my mind it had always been a voluntary act, this disclosure. It had been always I who had unmasked myself, and she who listened-alone; and in this voluntariness and this privacy there had been something which seemed to take from the shame of anticipation. But here-here was no voluntary act on my part, no privacy, nothing but shame. I stood mute, convicted, speechless-like the thing I was.

Yet if anything could have braced me, it was Mademoiselle's voice, when she answered him. "Go on, Monsieur," she said, with the perfect calmness of scorn. "You will have done the sooner."

"You do not believe me?" he replied hotly. "Then, I say, look at him! Look at him! If ever shame-"

"Monsieur!" she said abruptly-she did not look at me. "I am ashamed myself!"

"Why, his very name is not his own!" the lieutenant rejoined jerkily. "He is no Barthe at all. He is Berault the gambler, the duellist, the bully-"

Again she interrupted him. "I know it," she said coldly. "I know it all. And if you have nothing more to tell me, go, Monsieur. Go!" she continued, in a tone of infinite scorn. "Enough that you have earned my contempt as well as my abhorrence!"

He looked for a moment taken aback. Then, "Ay, but I have more!" he cried, his voice stubbornly triumphant. "I forgot that you would think little of that! I forgot that a swordsman has always the ladies' hearts. But I have more. Do you know, too, that he is in the Cardinal's pay? Do you know that he is here on the same errand which brings us here, – to arrest M. de Cocheforêt? Do you know that while we go about the business openly and in soldier fashion, it is his part to worm himself into your confidence, to sneak into Madame's intimacy, to listen at your door, to follow your footsteps, to hang on your lips, to track you-track you until you betray yourselves and the man? Do you know this, and that all his sympathy is a lie, Mademoiselle? His help, so much bait to catch the secret? His aim, blood-money-blood-money? Why, morbleu!" the lieutenant continued, pointing his finger at me, and so carried away by passion, so lifted out of himself by wrath and indignation, that in spite of myself I shrank before him, – "you talk, lady, of contempt and abhorrence in the same breath with me! But what have you for him? What have you for him, the spy, the informer, the hired traitor? And if you doubt, if you want evidence, look at him. Only look at him, I say!"