The Abbess Of Vlaye

"If I were straight!"

The girl leaned forward and took his hand. "You are straight for me," she said softly. "Straight for me! More precious than the straightest thing in the world!"

He sighed and Bonne echoed the sigh. It was the first time the three had met since Charles's flight; since, fretted by inaction and stung beyond patience by the gibes of the father-who, while he withheld the means of making a figure in the world, did not cease to sneer at supineness-he had taken a step which had seemed desperate, and now seemed fatal. For if this Crocan rising were not a Jacquerie in name, if it were not stained as yet by the excesses which made that word a terror, it was still a peasant-rising. It was still a revolt of the canaille, of the mob; and more indulgent fathers than the Vicomte would have disowned the son who, by joining it, ranged himself against his caste.

The younger man had known that when he took the step; yet he had been content to take it. The farther it set him from the Vicomte the better! But he had not known nor had Bonne guessed how hopeless was the cause he was embracing, how blind its leaders, how shiftless its followers, how certain and disastrous its end! But he knew now. He knew that, to the attack which M. de Vlaye meditated, the mob of clods and vagrants must fall an easy prey.

Young and high-spirited, moved a little by the peasants' wrongs, and more by his own, he had done this thing. He had rushed on ruin, made good his father's gibes, played into M. de Vlaye's hands-the hands of the man who had patronised him a hundred times, and with a sneer made sport of his rusticity. The contempt of the man of the world for the raw boy had sunk into the lad's soul, and he hated Vlaye. To drag Vlaye down had been one of Charles's day-dreams. He had pined for the hour when, at the head of the peasants who were to hail him as their leader, he should tread the hated scutcheon under foot.

Now he saw that all the triumph would be M. de Vlaye's, and that by his bold venture he had but added a feather to the hated plume. And Bonne and Roger, mute because their love taught them when to speak and when to refrain, gazed sadly at the lanthorn. The silence lasted a long minute, and was broken in the end, not by their voices, but by the distant creak of a door.

Bonne sprang to her feet, the colour gone from her face. "Hush!" she cried. "What was that? Listen."

They listened, their hearts beating. Presently Roger, his face almost as bloodless as Bonne's, snatched up the lanthorn. "It is the Vicomte!" he gasped. "He is coming! Quick, Charles! You must go the way you came!"

"But Bonne?" his brother muttered, hanging back. "What is she to do?"

Roger, his hand on the door of the Tower Chamber, stood aghast. Charles might escape unseen, there was still time. But Bonne? If her father found the girl there? And the stranger was in the Tower Room, she could not retreat thither. What was she to do?

The girl's wits found the answer. She pointed to the stairs. "I will hide above," she whispered. "Do you go!" It was still of Charles she thought. "Do you go!" But the terror in her eyes-she feared her father as she feared no one else in the world-wrung the brothers' hearts.

Charles hesitated. "The door at the top?" he babbled. "It is locked, I fear!"

"He will not go up!" she whispered. "And while he is in the Tower Room I can escape."

She vanished as she spoke, in the darkness of the narrow winding shaft-and it was time she did. The Vicomte was scarce three paces from the outer door when the two who were left sprang into the Tower Chamber.

The Lieutenant was on his feet by the side of his bed. He had not gone to sleep, and he caught their alarm, he had heard the last hurried whispers, he had guessed their danger. He was not surprised when Charles, without a word, crossed the floor in a couple of bounds, flung himself recklessly over the sill of the window, clung an instant by one hand, then disappeared. A moment the shoot of ivy that grew into the chamber jerked violently, the next the door was flung wide open, and the Vicomte, a gaunt figure bearing a sword in one hand, a lanthorn in the other, stood on the threshold. The light of the lanthorn which he held above his head that he might detect what was before him, obscured his face. But the weapon and the tone of his voice proclaimed the fury of his suspicions. "Who is here?" he cried. "Who is here?" And again, as if in his rage he could frame no other words, "Who is here, I say? Speak!"

Roger, on his feet, the tell-tale lanthorn in his hand, could not force a word. He stood speechless, motionless, self-convicted; and had all lain with him, all had been known. Fortunately des Ageaux took on himself to answer.

"Who is here, sir?" he said in a voice a tone louder and a shade easier than was natural. "The devil, I think! For I swear no one else could climb this wall!"

"What do you mean?"

"And climb it," des Ageaux persisted, disregarding the question, "very nearly to this sill! I heard him below five minutes ago. And if I had not been fool enough to rouse your son and bid him light we had had him safe by now on this floor!"

The Vicomte glared. The story was glib, well told, animated; but he doubted it. He knew what he had expected to find. "You lit the lanthorn?" he snarled. "When?"

"Two minutes back-it might be more," des Ageaux replied. "Now he is clean gone. Clean gone, I fear," he added as he stepped into the embrasure of the window and leant forward cautiously, is if he thought a shot from below a thing not impossible. "I hear nothing, at any rate."

The Vicomte, struggling with senile rage, stared about him. "But I saw a light!" he cried. "In the outer room!"

"The outer room!"

"Under the door."

"Shone under both doors, I suppose," des Ageaux replied, still intent to all appearance on the dark void outside. "I'll answer for it," he added carelessly as he turned, "that he did not go out by the door."

"He will not go out now," the Vicomte retorted with grim suspicion, "for I have locked the outer door." He showed the key hung on a finger of the hand which held the lanthorn.

The sight was too much for Roger; he understood at once that it cut off his sister's retreat. A sound between a groan and an exclamation broke from him.

The Vicomte lifted the lanthorn to his face. "What now, booby?" he said. "Who has hurt you?" And, seeing what he saw, he cursed the lad for a coward.

"I did not feel over brave myself five minutes ago," the Lieutenant remarked.

The Vicomte turned on him as if he would curse him also. But, meeting his eyes, he thought better of it, and swallowed the rage he longed to vent. He stared about him a minute or more, stalking here and there offensively, and trying to detect something on which to fasten. But he found nothing, and, having flung the light of his lanthorn once more around the room, he stood an instant, then, turning, went sharply-as if his suspicions had now a new direction-towards the door.

"Good-night!" he muttered churlishly.

"Good-night!" the Lieutenant answered, but in the act of speaking he met the look of horror in Roger's eyes, remembered and understood. "She is still there," the lad's white lips spelled out, as they listened to the grating noise of the key in the lock. "She could not escape. And he suspects. He is going to her room."

Des Ageaux stared a moment nonplussed. The matter was nothing to him, nothing, yet his face faintly mirrored the youth's consternation. Then, in a stride, he was at his bedside. He seized one of the horse-pistols which lay beside his pillow, and, before the lad understood his purpose, he levelled it at the open window and fired into the night.

The echoes of the report had not ceased to roll hollowly through the Tower before the door flew wide again, and the Vicomte reappeared, his eyes glittering, his weapon shaking in his excitement. "What is it?" he cried, for at first he could not see, the smoke obscured the room. "What is it? What is it?"

"A miss, I fear," des Ageaux answered coolly. He stood with his eyes fixed on the window, the smoking weapon in his hand. "I fear, a miss-I had a notion all the time that he was in the ivy outside, and when he poked up his head-"

"His head?" the Vicomte exclaimed. He was shaking from head to foot.

"Well, it looked like his head," des Ageaux replied more doubtfully. He moved a step nearer to the window. "But I could not swear to it. It might have been an owl!"

"An owl?" the Vicomte answered in an unsteady tone. "You fired at an owl?"

"Whatever it was I missed it," des Ageaux answered with decision, and in a somewhat louder tone. "If you will step up here-but I fear you are not well, M. le Vicomte?"

He spoke truly, the Vicomte was not well. He had had a shock. Cast off his son as he might, hate him as he might-and hate him he did, as one who had turned against him and brought dishonour on his house-that shot in the night had shaken him. He leant against the wall, his lips white, his breath coming quickly. And a minute or more elapsed before he recovered himself and stood upright.

He kept his eyes averted from des Ageaux. He turned instead to Roger. Whether he feared for himself and would not be alone, or he suspected some complicity between the two, he signed to the lad to take up the lanthorn and go before him. And, moving stiffly and unsteadily across the floor, he got himself in silence to the door. With something between a bow and a glance-it was clear that he could not trust his tongue-he was out of the room.

The Lieutenant sat on his bed for some time, expecting Roger to return. But the lad did not appear, and after an interval des Ageaux took on himself to search the staircase. It was untenanted. The girl, using the chance he had afforded her, had escaped.

CHAPTER III.

STILL WATERS TROUBLED

Had Bonne de Villeneuve, a day earlier, paid a visit much in fashion at that time, and consulted the "dark man" who, in an upper room on the wall of Angoulême, followed the stars and cast horoscopes, and was reputed to have foretold the death of the first Duke of Joyeuse as that nobleman passed southwards to the field of Coutras, she might have put faith in such of the events of the night as the magic crystal showed her; until it came to mirror, faint as an evening mist beside the river, her thoughts after the event. Then, had it foretold that, as she lay quaking in her bed, she would be thinking neither of the brother, whose desperate venture wrung her heart, nor of Roger, her dearer self, but of a stranger-a stranger, whose name she had not known six hours, and of whose past she knew nothing, she would have paused, refusing credence. She would have smiled at the phantasm of the impossible.

Yet so it was. Into the quiet pool of her maiden heart had fallen in an hour the stone that sooner or later troubles the sweet waters. As she lay thinking with wide-open eyes, her mind, which should have been employed with her brother's peril, or her own escape, or her father's rage, was busy with the stranger who had dropped so suddenly into her life, and had begun on the instant to play a sovereign part. She recalled his aspect as he looked in on them, cool and confident, at their midnight conference. She heard his tone as he baffled her father's questions with cunning answers. She marvelled at the wit that in the last pinch had saved her from discovery. He seemed to her a man of the world such as had not hitherto come within the range of her experience. Was he also the perfect knight of whom she had not been woman if she had not dreamed?

What, she wondered, must his life have been, who, cast among strange surroundings, bore himself so masterfully, and so shrewdly took his part! What chances he must have seen, what dangers run, how many men, how many cities visited! He might have known the Court, that strange mêlange of splendour and wickedness, and mystery and valour. He might have seen the King, shrewdest of captains, bravest of princes; he might have encountered eye to eye men whose names were history. He came out of the great outer world of which she had visions, and already she was prepared to invest him with wonderful qualities. Her curiosity once engaged, she constructed for him first one life and then another, and then yet another-all on the same foundation, the one fact which he had told them, that he was a poor gentleman of Brittany. She considered his ring, and the shape of his clothes, and his manner of eating, which she found more delicate than her brothers'; and she fancied, but she told herself that she was foolish to think it, that she detected under his frigid bearing a habit of command that duller eyes failed to discern.

She was ashamed at last of the persistence with which her thoughts ran on him, and she tried to think of other things, and so thought of him again, and, awaking to the fact, smiled. But without blushing; partly because, whatever he was, he stood a great way from her, and partly because it was only her fancy that was touched, and not her heart; and partly again because she knew that he would be gone by mid-day, and could by no possibility form part of her life. Nevertheless, it was not until her time for rising came that anxiety as to her brother's safety and her father's anger eclipsed him. Then, uncertain how much the Vicomte knew, how near the truth he guessed, she forgot her hero, and thought exclusively of her father's resentment.

She might have spared her fears. The Vicomte was a sour and embittered man, but neither by nature nor habit a violent one. Rage had for an hour rendered him capable of the worst, capable of the murder of his son if, having an arm in his hand, he had met him, capable of the expulsion of his daughter from his house. But the fit was not natural to him; it was not so that he avenged the wrongs which the world had heaped upon him-since Coutras. He fell back easily and at once into the black cynical mood that was his own. He was too old and weak, he had too long brooded in inaction, he had too long wreaked his vengeance on the feeble to take strong measures now, whatever happened to him.

But some hours elapsed before Bonne knew this, or how things would be. It was not her father's custom to descend before noon, for with his straitened means and shrunken establishment he went little abroad; and he would have died rather than stoop to the rustic tasks which Roger pursued, and of which Bonne's small brown hands were not ignorant. She had not seen him when, an hour before noon, she repaired to a seat in the most remote corner of the garden, taking with her some household work on which she was engaged.