CHAPTER XXI.
SHE WOULD, AND WOULD NOT.
We noted some way back the ease with which women use one concession as a stepping-stone to a second; and the lack of magnanimity, amounting almost to unscrupulousness, which the best display in their dealings with a retiring foe. But there are concessions which touch even a good woman’s conscience; and Madame de Tavannes, free by the tenure of a blow, and with that exception treated from hour to hour with rugged courtesy, shrank appalled before the task which confronted her.
To ignore what La Tribe had told her, to remain passive when a movement on her part might save men, women, and children from death, and a whole city from massacre—this was a line of conduct so craven, so selfish, that from the first she knew herself incapable of it. But to take the only other course open to her, to betray her husband and rob him of that, the loss of which might ruin him, this needed not courage only, not devotion only, but a hardness proof against reproaches as well as against punishment. And the Countess was no fanatic. No haze of bigotry glorified the thing she contemplated, or dressed it in colours other than its own. Even while she acknowledged the necessity of the act and its ultimate righteousness, even while she owned the obligation which lay upon her to perform it, she saw it as he would see it, and saw herself as he would see her.
True, he had done her a great wrong; and this in the eyes of some might pass for punishment. But he had saved her life where many had perished; and, the wrong done, he had behaved to her with fantastic generosity. In return for which she was to ruin him? It was not hard to imagine what he would say of her, and of the reward with which she had requited him.
She pondered over it as they rode that evening, with the weltering sun in their eyes and the lengthening shadows of the oaks falling athwart the bracken which fringed the track. Across breezy heaths and over downs, through green bottoms and by hamlets, from which every human creature fled at their approach, they ambled on by twos and threes; riding in a world of their own, so remote, so different from the real world—from which they came and to which they must return—that she could have wept in anguish, cursing God for the wickedness of man which lay so heavy on creation. The gaunt troopers riding at ease with swinging legs and swaying stirrups—and singing now a refrain from Ronsard, and now one of those verses of Marot’s psalms which all the world had sung three decades before—wore their most lamb-like aspect. Behind them Madame St. Lo chattered to Suzanne of a riding mask which had not been brought, or planned expedients, if nothing sufficiently in the mode could be found at Angers. And the other women talked and giggled, screamed when they came to fords, and made much of steep places, where the men must help them. In time of war death’s shadow covers but a day, and sorrow out of sight is out of mind. Of all the troop whom the sinking sun left within sight of the lofty towers and vine-clad hills of Vendôme, three only wore faces attuned to the cruel August week just ending; three only, like dark beads strung far apart on a gay nun’s rosary, rode, brooding and silent, in their places. The Countess was one—the others were the two men whose thoughts she filled, and whose eyes now and again sought her, La Tribe’s with sombre fire in their depths, Count Hannibal’s fraught with a gloomy speculation, which belied his brave words to Madame St. Lo.
He, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not touch her. And she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. So that of the three only La Tribe was single-minded.
This day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak-wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses’ heads and the squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. Night was hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which marked where Vendôme stood.
“Another league,” Count Hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. “’Tis pure and dry here,” he said. “Set a watch, Bigot, and let two men go down for water. I hear frogs below. You do not fear to be moonstruck, Madame?”
“I prefer this,” she answered in a low voice.
“Houses are for monks and nuns!” he rejoined heartily. “Give me God’s heaven.”
“The earth is His, but we deface it,” she murmured, reverting to her thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.
He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor of Nature’s cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.
The Countess long remembered that vigil—for she lay late awake; the cool gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.
“Yet, I believe!” she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself. “Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!”
And though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which her soul shrank! The woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for choosing evil, or good, ease for herself or life for others. But the moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no shame and no suffering seemed—for the moment at least—too great a price to pay for the lives of little children. Love had been taken from her life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity—that must go, too!
She felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and the common round of the journey put to flight the ideals of the night. But things fell out in a manner she had not pictured. They halted before noon on the north bank of the Loir, in a level meadow with lines of poplars running this way and that, and filling all the place with the soft shimmer of leaves. Blue succory, tiny mirrors of the summer sky, flecked the long grass, and the women picked bunches of them, or, Italian fashion, twined the blossoms in their hair. A road ran across the meadow to a ferry, but the ferryman, alarmed by the aspect of the party, had conveyed his boat to the other side and hidden himself.
Presently Madame St. Lo espied the boat, clapped her hands and must have it. The poplars threw no shade, the flies teased her, the life of a hermit—in a meadow—was no longer to her taste.
“Let us go on the water!” she cried. “Presently you will go to bathe, Monsieur, and leave us to grill!”
“Two livres to the man who will fetch the boat!” Count Hannibal cried.
In less than half a minute three men had thrown off their boots, and were swimming across, amid the laughter and shouts of their fellows. In five minutes the boat was brought.
It was not large and would hold no more than four. Tavannes’ eye fell on Carlat.
“You understand a boat,” he said. “Go with Madame St. Lo. And you, M. La Tribe.”
“But you are coming?” Madame St. Lo cried, turning to the Countess. “Oh, Madame,” with a curtsey, “you are not? You”
“Yes, I will come,” the Countess answered.
“I shall bathe a short distance up the stream,” Count Hannibal said. He took from his belt the packet of letters, and as Carlat held the boat for Madame St. Lo to enter, he gave it to the Countess, as he had given it to her yesterday. “Have a care of it, Madame,” he said in a low voice, “and do not let it pass out of your hands. To lose it may be to lose my head.”
The colour ebbed from her cheeks. In spite of herself her shaking hand put back the packet. “Had you not better then—give it to Bigot?” she faltered.
“He is bathing.”
“Let him bathe afterwards.”
“No,” he answered almost harshly; he found a species of pleasure in showing her that, strange as their relations were, he trusted her. “No; take it, Madame. Only have a care of it.”
She took it then, hid it in her dress, and he turned away; and she turned towards the boat. La Tribe stood beside the stern, holding it for her to enter, and as her fingers rested an instant on his arm their eyes met. His were alight, his arm even quivered; and she shuddered.
She avoided looking at him a second time, and this was easy, since he took his seat in the bows beyond Carlat, who handled the oars. Silently the boat glided out on the surface of the stream, and floated downwards, Carlat now and again touching an oar, and Madame St. Lo chattering gaily in a voice which carried far on the water. Now it was a flowering rush she must have, now a green bough to shield her face from the sun’s reflection; and now they must lie in some cool, shadowy pool under fern-clad banks, where the fish rose heavily, and the trickle of a rivulet fell down over stones.
It was idyllic. But not to the Countess. Her face burned, her temples throbbed, her fingers gripped the side of the boat in the vain attempt to steady her pulses. The packet within her dress scorched her. The great city and its danger, Tavannes and his faith in her, the need of action, the irrevocableness of action hurried through her brain. The knowledge that she must act now—or never—pressed upon her with distracting force. Her hand felt the packet, and fell again nerveless.
“The sun has caught you, ma mie,” Madame St. Lo said. “You should ride in a mask as I do.”
“I have not one with me,” she muttered, her eyes on the water.
“And I but an old one. But at Angers”
The Countess heard no more; on that word she caught La Tribe’s eye. He was beckoning to her behind Carlat’s back, pointing imperiously to the water, making signs to her to drop the packet over the side. When she did not obey—she felt sick and faint—she saw through a mist his brow grow dark. He menaced her secretly. And still the packet scorched her; and twice her hand went to it, and dropped again empty.
On a sudden Madame St. Lo cried out. The bank on one side of the stream was beginning to rise more boldly above the water, and at the head of the steep thus formed she had espied a late rosebush in bloom; nothing would now serve but she must land at once and plunder it. The boat was put in therefore, she jumped ashore, and began to scale the bank.
“Go with Madame!” La Tribe cried, roughly nudging Carlat in the back. “Do you not see that she cannot climb the bank? Up, man, up!”
The Countess opened her mouth to cry “No!” but the word died half-born on her lips; and when the steward looked at her, uncertain what she had said, she nodded.
“Yes, go!” she muttered. She was pale.
“Yes, man, go!” cried the minister, his eyes burning. And he almost pushed the other out of the boat.
The next second the craft floated from the bank, and began to drift downwards. La Tribe waited until a tree interposed and hid them from the two whom they had left; then he leaned forward.
“Now, Madame!” he cried imperiously. “In God’s name, now!”
“Oh!” she cried. “Wait! Wait! I want to think.”
“To think?”
“He trusted me!” she wailed. “He trusted me! How can I do it?” Nevertheless, and even while she spoke, she drew forth the packet.
“Heaven has given you the opportunity!”
“If I could have stolen it!” she answered.
“Fool!” he returned, rocking himself to and fro, and fairly beside himself with impatience. “Why steal it? It is in your hands! You have it! It is Heaven’s own opportunity, it is God’s opportunity given to you!”
For he could not read her mind nor comprehend the scruple which held her hand. He was single-minded. He had but one aim, one object. He saw the haggard faces of brave men hopeless; he heard the dying cries of women and children. Such an opportunity of saving God’s elect, of redeeming the innocent, was in his eyes a gift from Heaven. And having these thoughts and seeing her hesitate—hesitate when every movement caused him agony, so imperative was haste, so precious the opportunity—he could bear the suspense no longer. When she did not answer he stooped forward, until his knees touched the thwart on which Carlat had sat; then, without a word, he flung himself forward, and, with one hand far extended, grasped the packet.
Had he not moved, she would have done his will; almost certainly she would have done it. But, thus attacked, she resisted instinctively; she clung to the letters.
“No!” she cried. “No! Let go, Monsieur!” And she tried to drag the packet from him.
“Give it me!”
“Let go, Monsieur! Do you hear?” she repeated. And, with a vigorous jerk, she forced it from him—he had caught it by the edge only—and held it behind her. “Go back, and”
“Give it me!” he panted.
“I will not!”
“Then throw it overboard!”
“I will not!” she cried again, though his face, dark with passion, glared into hers, and it was clear that the man, possessed by one idea only, was no longer master of himself. “Go back to your place!”
“Give it me,” he gasped, “or I will upset the boat!” And, seizing her by the shoulder, he reached over her, striving to take hold of the packet which she held behind her. The boat rocked; and, as much in rage as fear, she screamed.
A cry uttered wholly in rage answered hers; it came from Carlat. La Tribe, however, whose whole mind was fixed on the packet, did not heed, nor would have heeded, the steward. But the next moment a second cry, fierce as that of a wild beast, clove the air from the lower and farther bank; and the Huguenot, recognizing Count Hannibal’s voice, involuntarily desisted and stood erect. A moment the boat rocked perilously under him; then—for unheeded it had been drifting that way—it softly touched the bank on which Carlat stood staring and aghast.
La Tribe’s chance was gone; he saw that the steward must reach him before he could succeed in a second attempt. On the other hand, the undergrowth on the bank was thick, he could touch it with his hand, and if he fled at once he might escape.
He hung an instant irresolute; then, with a look which went to the Countess’s heart, he sprang ashore, plunged among the alders, and in a moment was gone.
“After him! After him!” thundered Count Hannibal. “After him, man!” and Carlat, stumbling down the steep slope and through the rough briars, did his best to obey. But in vain. Before he reached the water’s edge, the noise of the fugitive’s retreat had grown faint. A few seconds and it died away.