Chapter XXI (1)
There had been a time when Armand de la Roche-Guyon had certainly not anticipated ever seeing Brittany again, yet here he was in Brittany after all.
When he left Paris in the middle of May he had gone straight down to join Charette in Vendée, for he wanted to offer his sword in person to Madame. He had done so; he had seen her, “Petit-Pierre,” in her peasant boy’s attire, gay and indomitable, and had kissed her hand in a farmhouse kitchen. Other young men like himself were there, full of hope and ardour; though even then it was beginning to be apparent that Vendée was not really ready to rise, and some of the chiefs did their utmost to dissuade the princess at the eleventh hour from the scheme. The fatal mistake was made of postponing the insurrection, already fixed for the 24th of May, by a counter order, circulated only two days beforehand. When the fourth of June came, much of the fervour of the peasants had evaporated and the Philippistes were on the alert. Nevertheless, two days afterwards, at the hamlet of Le Chêne, Armand had been one of the little band, only two hundred and twenty strong, who, splashing through the ford or firing (in the old manner) from behind the orchard hedges, had beaten off two bodies of Government troops, only to be routed by a third. Nor was theirs the only defeat. It was over, the chance of a restoration, and, disillusioned but unhurt, Armand had, with difficulty and danger, made his way across the Loire.
Yet for prudence’ sake he had come back, not to Kerfontaine itself, but to the tiny shooting-box in the wood of St. Clair, and therein, this June evening, the day before Horatia’s arrival at Kerfontaine, he lay at full length on a settle, his hands behind his head, and thoughtfully surveyed the unceiled rafters, where the twilight was beginning to weave a veil.
The shooting-box belonged to the château of St. Clair, and stood on the edge of a little clearing in the forest; it consisted only of one room, but a portion had been partitioned off as a kitchen. Armand had known it full of sportsmen. On the table in the centre lay, at this moment, his pistols, in company with a half empty bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a ham; for the place had been provisioned against his coming. He had kicked off his long boots, and flung his cloak on a chair. It was very odd to be, not only without a valet, but without a cook; it did not amuse him, for he was both tired and bored. Already, since his arrival in the early morning, he was beginning to think his concealment absurd. He had heard vague rumours of the presence of soldiers, but since the nearest (and abortive) rising was twenty miles away, he was not disposed to believe them. At any rate, as soon as it was darker he was going to venture out.
For he was back near Laurence de Vigerie, and all that the past week had held of death and broken hopes was shrivelled up in that knowledge. She was at St. Clair, and they, who had never seen each other since the night when she had worn the tell-tale roses in the masquerade, would meet at last. No problematic peril was likely to keep him from her.
The cobwebs of twilight, dropping lower and lower from the rafters, began to reach the young man where he lay on the settle. Surely he could go now. He pulled himself off the hard couch, drew on his boots, picked up his cloak, then, remembering prudence, removed, with visible annoyance, the remains of his meal, and, locking the door behind him, stepped out into the evening.
The wood was sinking into sleep. A gust of subtle, heady scent immediately assailed him, and he saw, on the other side of the little clearing by the hut, a thicket of tall elderbushes, intruders in the ranks of forest trees. The over-fragrant smell seemed to be blown after him down the twilight ride; it was still in his nostrils when he came, twenty minutes later, on the great mass of the château of St. Clair. He jumped down into the fosse, climbed up on the other side, and began cautiously to make his way through the rose garden towards the one lighted window on the ground floor, a long window hung over only with some thin blind or curtain. It was that of Madame de Vigerie’s smaller salon, and since there was a light she must be there. Probably, indeed, she was expecting him.
Had the window been open he might have walked in upon her, but since it was closed and he could not see through, she might not be alone. The traditional method of summons would serve him as well as any. He caught up a handful of gravel from the path and flung it sharply against the glass. Almost immediately the light within was extinguished; then a hasp was heard to turn, and the window opened outward, the panes shimmering a little in the dim light. A figure slipped out.
“Who is it?” asked Madame de Vigerie. But there was that in her voice which made the question unnecessary.
Armand gave no answer at all, but taking a step or two forward, caught both her hands. Then, with a sob of laughter, she was in his arms, and he was kissing her lips, her hair.... Was she not given back to him from the grave?
In a little they were wandering among the dew-drenched roses. Roses and nightingales after the reddened swamps of Le Chêne—it was like a dream. For he, too, had been through his baptism of fire, and bore the singe of it, to make him for the moment to the woman by his side what he had never been before—stronger than she.
“You are at the shooting-box, then?” she said at last. “It is well provisioned? I gave orders.”
“It wants only one thing.”
“What is that?”
“You.”
“I cannot come there,” said Madame de Vigerie. “Not now, I know. I would not ask it. But to-morrow... in the afternoon, when the sun is getting low, you will come...?”
She did not answer, but he could feel her tremble.
“I am starving, Laurence. If anyone should see you, it is easy to explain. I am a fugitive—you are a conspirator, too.”
“I was not counting that cost,” she said in a low voice. “O Armand, Armand, why will you not go away and leave me in peace!”
“Because, at last, you love me.”
And she made no denial, but breaking from his hold, stood in the midst of the roses with her face in her hands.
“There is the nightingale,” said Armand softly. “It sings for us. There are no nightingales in the forest, nor roses. But if you came to me there, Laurence, in the little hut, it would not lack either. O my world, my rose... I have waited so long, so patiently!... Has not death itself spared us for this...?”
Half an hour later he was groping his way across the hut. It was foolish to strike a light, so, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down in the dark on the settle. But his brain was on fire, and phantasmagoric figures danced before his eyes—Charette, and the little princess in her boy’s clothes, and he heard himself saying, as he had said to Marie-Caroline, when he had kissed that royal, adventurous hand, “I would gladly die for you, Madame.” But in the half-dream Madame had the face of Laurence de Vigerie.
He came back from it. The settle was confoundedly hard, as hard as a coffin. Then he remembered having seen, lying dead on a couch just like this, in a peasant’s cottage at Le Chêne, before the engagement began, a young man shot by an Orleanist patrol. He had been sorry for him then; he was sorrier now, for perhaps the blood had once raced and pounded in his veins as now in his own, and he, too, had thought, perhaps, “To-morrow! to-morrow....”
(2)
That night, the last of her journey, the cloud of apprehension lifted from Horatia’s mind, and sitting by her window in the inn at Ploermel, she had a clear conviction that Armand was alive, and had escaped from Vendée. She would not be too late. She would forgive him; she would even ask him to forgive her the hardness she had shown him. And—who knew—they might perhaps take up their life together again where it had been broken off, for she had experience now.
But who knows when the cup of experience is fully drained?
When Kerfontaine came in sight next morning she could hardly control herself. Would he have had any word of her approach; was he there at all?...
“Yes, we know for certain that M. le Comte has escaped from Vendée, praise the saints,” said old Jean to Horatia and Emmanuel. “But he has not been here, and we think he is probably in hiding in the wood for a day or two. Then he will come here. It was arranged so.”
“He might come any time—to-day even?”
“Yes, Madame la Comtesse, any time, when it is safe. And M. le Comte was never one to be over-cautious.”
“But there are no soldiers about here, surely?” asked Emmanuel.
“We have not seen any, Monsieur le Marquis, but there are reported to be some in Pontivy.”
Emmanuel drew his sister-in-law aside. “I think I will ride over to Pontivy,” he said, “and see if I can get any information. I am not known in these parts, and I may be able to find out something.”
So, after déjeuner, he set out. The afternoon crawled slowly on. Horatia went over the château, most of which was shut up. The nurseries were still unfurnished, and behind the screen which she and Claude-Edmond had made a year ago she found a heap of dusty pictures and a pot with dried relics of paste. After supper she sat in the salon. The suspense was beginning to tell on her—not the suspense about Armand’s safety, for as he had succeeded in getting away from Vendée he must be out of danger now—but the suspense about his entrance. At any moment he might come in. Would he be surprised to see her there? She could not picture their meeting; she would not try to; she must trust that with the moment would come the right words.
About nine o’clock she wandered out into the hall. What time would Emmanuel be back? The sardonic smile of the ancestress over the hearth followed her, as on that night when Armand had lain there, his head on her knee, and she had hoped to be the first to die. Nothing now could ever restore the perfume of that rapture; but the broken vase, which once held it, might yet be pieced together....
... Surely that was a horse’s hoofs in the avenue, the hoofs of a horse approaching at breakneck pace. If it was Emmanuel he evidently had important news. Horatia ran to the door and opened it herself. A mounted man was tearing up between the trees, had flung himself off his panting horse and dashed up the steps, a little square of white in his hand.
“For Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon,” he said, thrusting it into her hold. “Give it to her at once!” And she was aware that he wore Madame de Vigerie’s livery. How strange; she had not known that she was here!
She read the letter in the hall. It was very short. When she had done so she put her hands over her eyes, read it again, and hurried to the bell-pull.
“Jean,” she said, “order the carriage at once! I am going to St. Clair. There is not a moment to lose.... Give this letter to Monsieur le Marquis directly he returns.”
(3)
It was six o’clock in the evening of the longest day that Armand de la Roche-Guyon had ever spent. He had hardly slept all night; at dawn he had risen and gone out, but since that time he had been a self-constituted prisoner. If, at any time, there was risk in his being seen—which he could not bring himself to believe—that risk was much greater in the day-time. Besides, he had Laurence to think of.
So he sat before the fireless hearth, he paced up and down, he flung himself on the settle, he examined over and over again all the heads of beasts upon the walls, the only ornaments of the place. The hut was very tidy, but he could not deck it as befitted the guest. He had told her last night that there were no roses, but it now occurred to him that he might at least have gathered this morning a branch of something green and living—a branch, for instance, of the flowering elder just outside. Thinking of these bushes, but without any intention of going out to rifle them, his restless feet carried him to the little half-shuttered window. Yes, there they stood, with their broad flat masses of blossom. How strong the scent had been last night! She would smell it as she came; she would hear the birds beginning their vespers. This golden sun would shine on her; would she ride or walk?
Leaning idly by the window, Armand looked at his watch. Half an hour still. He glanced at the elder-bushes again... and suddenly even Laurence was forgotten, and the little trees were everything in the world to him. For among the leaves he had caught sight of a leaf of other kind, thin and shining. It was a bayonet.
Armand stood a moment incapable of thought or movement. Then the truth stabbed him with a cold and sickening pang. He looked again. Further along they had scarcely troubled to take cover; he could see the uniforms among the tree-trunks. He went a little white round the mouth, and moving away sank into a chair by the table and hid his face in his hands.
What he had thought so absurd, so incredible, had happened! He had been tracked or betrayed, and they were waiting to shoot him as he came out. They did not mean to force an entrance, that was obvious, or they would have done so by now. They had no intention, the careful Philippistes, of running any risks. They would wait there in ambush until he came out....
... Or till he came in. It might be that they were watching for his entrance, not knowing that he was there already. And that was, after all, a more likely explanation of their present inaction. More than that, it gave him a chance, a feeble glimmering chance, for his life. It was just conceivable that, seeing no one enter, they would go away without searching the hut. It was a chance, a chance... O God! it was a chance....
But even as his mind caught at that slender hope, embracing it fiercely, the very heart in his body stopped beating. Seeing no one enter! Why, in half an hour Laurence would come along the clearing, and then... He heard the report, saw her writhing on the ground... Why should they hesitate because she was a woman the men who could shoot a girl of sixteen in cold blood. She was a Carliste. It might even be she that they were expecting.
Armand raised his face, grown old and haggard. On him lay the burden of her coming there; it was for him to avert, if by any means he could, so horrible a thing. They must be sent away before she came. And there was only one way of doing that. It might not be successful. That he would never know. But he had to do it; he had to do it.
He pressed his hands tightly round his head, where the whirling thoughts drove like bees, and where the remembrance of Horatia, and his courtship, and Maurice, and the consciousness of the sunshine outside, the knowledge that in an incredibly short space of time he would lie out in it and neither feel nor see it, clear and vehement in themselves, were all subordinated to a vision of Laurence coming along the forest path. He looked once more at his watch. Twenty-five minutes—not a second to lose, since they must be gone some distance before she came, and they would probably spend some time in searching his body and the hut before they left. His brain had suddenly become as clear as ice. He stood up, turned out his pockets, put his money and watch on the table, took up his pistols, which were loaded; then laid them down again. It would waste time, and be quite useless. For a moment more he stood looking round the room which had been so irradiated by the thought of her presence, where—it was his last prayer—she would never come now.
And then, since with whatever of less worthy commingled, there ran in his veins the blood of a long line that had never stayed for mortal peril, Armand de la Roche-Guyon set his teeth, and, opening the door, walked out to death.
The two wood pigeons on the roof, who had been frightened away by the noise of the volley, had returned, and their sleepy, liquid notes melted into the peace of the summer afternoon as Madame de Vigerie came riding in her green amazone through the wood. As the hut came into sight she dropped into a walk. At first she merely noticed, though with an instant surprise, that the door stood open.
But her horse knew, before she did, and stopped, trembling. Laurence de Vigerie gave a broken scream, and put her hands instinctively over her eyes. The next moment she had slid to the ground, and catching up the folds of her long habit, was running to him.
Armand lay face downwards on the woodland grass, about ten paces from the open door, in an attitude not wholly unlike a sleeper’s. Except by one shoulder, there was little sign of blood, till, tugging at him, she had turned him over. But his head, when she raised it, fell back inert on her arm, the face uninjured, but of a mortal greyness, the half open eyes rolled upwards almost out of sight. A thin scarlet stream had trickled down from one corner of his mouth; his right hand clutched a tuft of grass. Three or four patches of wet blood on his clothes, his left sleeve, soaked from shoulder to wrist—the arm was broken and the hand shot through—and the one pool on the ground which was already crimsoning her habit, were more than enough to show her what had happened. Yet she tore off his neck-cloth and unfastened his coat and shirt before she knew, shuddering, that here was ruin beyond human repairing, And she caught the riddled body in her arms, crying to him, kissing him, while the pigeons cooed in the sun, and, to windward of the evidence of slaughter, her horse grazed reassured.