Under the Red Robe
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Stanley Weyman >> Under the Red Robe
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'To tell her something?'
'Yes.'
'Then you can tell it to me,' he retorted suspiciously.
'Mademoiselle, I will answer for it, has no desire to--'
'See me or speak to me? No,' I said. 'I can understand that.
Yet I want to speak to her.'
'Very well, you can speak in my presence,' he answered rudely.
'If that be all, let us ride on and join her.' And he made a
movement as if to do so.
'That will not do, M. de Cocheforet,' I said firmly, stopping him
with my hand. 'Let me beg you to be more complaisant. It is a
small thing I ask, a very small thing; but I swear to you that if
Mademoiselle does not grant it, she will repent it all her life.'
He looked at me, his face growing darker and darker.
'Fine words,' he said, with a sneer. 'Yet I fancy I understand
them.' And then with a passionate oath he broke out. 'But I
will not have it! I have not been blind, M. de Berault, and I
understand. But I will not have it. I will have no such Judas
bargain made. PARDIEU! do you think I could suffer it and show
my face again?'
'I don't know what you mean,' I said, restraining myself with
difficulty. I could have struck the fool.
'But I know what you mean,' he replied, in a tone of suppressed
rage. 'You would have her sell herself; sell herself to you to
save me. And you would have me stand by and see the thing done.
No, sir, never; never, though I go to the wheel. I will die a
gentleman, if I have lived a fool.'
'I think that you will do the one as certainly as you have done
the other,' I retorted in my exasperation. And yet I admired
him.
'Oh, I am not quite a fool!' he cried, scowling at me. 'I have
used my eyes.'
'Then be good enough to favour me with your ears!' I answered
drily. 'For just a moment. And listen when I say that no such
bargain has ever crossed my mind. You were kind enough to think
well of me last night, M. de Cocheforet. Why should the mention
of Mademoiselle in a moment change your opinion? I wish simply
to speak to her. I have nothing to ask from her, nothing to
expect from her, either favour or anything else. What I say she
will doubtless tell you. CIEL man! what harm can I do to her,
in the road in your sight?'
He looked at me sullenly, his face still flushed, his eyes
suspicious.
'What do you want to say to her?' he asked jealously. He was
quite unlike himself. His airy nonchalance, his careless gaiety
were gone.
'You know what I do not want to say to her, M. de Cocheforet,' I
answered. 'That should be enough.'
He glowered at me a moment, still ill content. Then, without a
word, be made me a gesture to go to her.
She had halted a score of paces away; wondering, doubtless, what
was on foot. I rode towards her. She wore her mask, so that I
missed the expression of her face as I approached; but the manner
in which she turned her horse's head uncompromisingly towards her
brother and looked past me was full of meaning. I felt the
ground suddenly cut from under me. I saluted her, trembling.
'Mademoiselle,' I said, 'will you grant me the privilege of your
company for a few minutes as we ride?'
'To what purpose?' she answered; surely, in the coldest voice in
which a woman ever spoke to a man.
'That I may explain to you a great many things you do not
understand,' I murmured.
'I prefer to be in the dark,' she replied. And her manner was
more cruel than her words.
'But, Mademoiselle,' I pleaded--I would not be discouraged--'you
told me one day, not so long ago, that you would never judge me
hastily again.'
'Facts judge you, not I,' she answered icily. 'I am not
sufficiently on a level with you to be able to judge you--I thank
God.'
I shivered though the sun was on me, and the hollow where we
stood was warm.
'Still, once before you thought the same,' I exclaimed after a
pause, 'and afterwards you found that you had been wrong. It may
be so again, Mademoiselle.'
'Impossible,' she said.
That stung me.
'No,' I cried. 'It is not impossible. It is you who are
impossible. It is you who are heartless, Mademoiselle. I have
done much in the last three days to make things lighter for you,
much to make things more easy; now I ask you to do something in
return which can cost you nothing.'
'Nothing?' she answered slowly--and she looked at me; and her
eyes and her voice cut me as if they had been knives. 'Nothing?
Do you think, Monsieur, it costs me nothing to lose my self-
respect, as I do with every word I speak to you? Do you think it
costs me nothing to be here when I feel every look you cast upon
me an insult, every breath I take in your presence a
contamination? Nothing, Monsieur?' she continued with bitter
irony. 'Nay, something! But something which I could not hope to
make clear to you.'
I sat for a moment confounded, quivering with pain. It had been
one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the
trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were
transformed to loathing. It was another to listen to her hard,
pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing
tongue. For a moment I could not find voice to answer her. Then
I pointed to M. de Cocheforet.
'Do you love him?' I said hoarsely, roughly. The gibing tone
had passed from her voice to mine.
She did not answer.
'Because if you do you will let me tell my tale. Say no, but
once more, Mademoiselle--I am only human--and I go. And you will
repent it all your life.'
I had done better had I taken that tone from the beginning. She
winced, her head dropped, she seemed to grow smaller. All in a
moment, as it were, her pride collapsed.
'I will hear you,' she murmured.
'Then we will ride on, if you please,' I said keeping the
advantage I had gained. 'You need not fear. Your brother will
follow.'
I caught hold of her rein and turned her horse, and she suffered
it without demur; and in a moment we were pacing side by side,
with the long straight road before us. At the end where it
topped the hill, I could see the finger-post, two faint black
lines against the sky. When we reached that--involuntarily I
checked my horse and made it move more slowly.
'Well, sir?' she said impatiently. And her figure shook as with
cold.
'It is a tale I desire to tell you, Mademoiselle,' I answered.
'Perhaps I may seem to begin a long way off, but before I end I
promise to interest you. Two months ago there was living in
Paris a man--perhaps a bad man--at any rate, by common report a
hard man; a man with a peculiar reputation.'
She turned on me suddenly, her eyes gleaming through her mask.
'Oh, Monsieur, spare me this!' she said, quietly scornful. 'I
will take it for granted.'
'Very well,' I replied steadfastly. 'Good or bad, he one day, in
defiance of the Cardinal's edict against duelling, fought with a
young Englishman behind St Jacques' Church. The Englishman had
influence, the person of whom I speak had none, and an
indifferent name; he was arrested, thrown into the Chatelet, cast
for death, left for days to face death. At last an offer was
made to him. If he would seek out and deliver up another man, an
outlaw with a price upon his head, he should himself go free.'
I paused and drew a deep breath. Then I continued, looking not
at her, but into the distance, and speaking slowly.
'Mademoiselle, it seems easy now to say what course he should
have chosen. It seems hard now to find excuses for him. But
there was one thing which I plead for him. The task he was asked
to undertake was a dangerous one. He risked, he knew that he
must risk, and the event proved him to be right, his life against
the life of this unknown man. And one thing more; time was
before him. The outlaw might be taken by another, might be
killed, might die, might--But there, Mademoiselle, we know what
answer this person made. He took the baser course, and on his
honour, on his parole, with money supplied to him, he went free;
free on the condition that he delivered up this other man.'
I paused again, but I did not dare to look at her; and after a
moment of silence I resumed.
'Some portion of the second half of the story you know,
Mademoiselle; but not all. Suffice it that this man came down to
a remote village, and there at risk, but, Heaven knows, basely
enough, found his way into his victim's home. Once there,
however, his heart began to fail him. Had he found the house
garrisoned by men, he might have pressed to his end with little
remorse. But he found there only two helpless loyal women; and I
say again that from the first hour of his entrance he sickened at
the work which he had in hand, the work which ill-fortune had
laid upon him. Still he pursued it. He had given his word; and
if there was one tradition of his race which this man had never
broken, it was that of fidelity to his side--to the man who paid
him. But he pursued it with only half his mind, in great misery,
if you will believe me; sometimes in agonies of shame.
Gradually, however, almost against his will, the drama worked
itself out before him, until he needed only one thing.
I looked at Mademoiselle, trembling. But her head was averted:
I could gather nothing from the outlines of her form; and I went
on.
'Do not misunderstand me,' I said in a lower voice. 'Do not
misunderstand what I am going to say next. This is no love-
story; and can have no ending such as romancers love to set to
their tales. But I am bound to mention, Mademoiselle, that this
man who had lived almost all his life about inns and eating-
houses and at the gaming-tables met here for the first time for
years a good woman, and learned by the light of her loyalty and
devotion to see what his life had been, and what was the real
nature of the work he was doing. I think--nay, I know,' I
continued, 'that it added a hundredfold to his misery that when
he learned at last the secret he had come to surprise, he learned
it from her lips, and in such a way that, had he felt no shame,
Hell could have been no place for him. But in one thing I hope
she misjudged him. She thought, and had reason to think, that
the moment he knew her secret he went out, not even closing the
door, and used it. But the truth was that while her words were
still in his ears news came to him that others had the secret;
and had he not gone out on the instant and done what he did, and
forestalled them, M. de Cocheforet would have been taken, but by
others.'
Mademoiselle broke her long silence so suddenly that her horse
sprang forward.
'Would to Heaven he had!' she wailed.
'Been taken by others?' I exclaimed, startled out of my false
composure.
'Oh, yes, yes!' she answered with a passionate gesture. 'Why
did you not tell me? Why did you not confess to me, sir, even at
the last moment? But, no more! No more!' she continued in a
piteous voice; and she tried to urge her horse forward. 'I have
heard enough. You are racking my heart, M. de Berault. Some day
I will ask God to give me strength to forgive you.'
'But you have not heard me out,' I said.
'I will hear no more,' she answered in a voice she vainly strove
to render steady. 'To what end? Can I say more than I have
said? Or did you think that I could forgive you now--with him
behind us going to his death? Oh, no, no!' she continued.
'Leave me! I implore you to leave me, sir. I am not well.'
She drooped over her horse's neck as she spoke, and began to weep
so passionately that the tears ran down her cheeks under her
mask, and fell and sparkled like dew on the mane; while her sobs
shook her so that I thought she must fall. I stretched out my
hand instinctively to give her help, but she shrank from me.
'No!' she gasped, between her sobs. 'Do not touch me. There is
too much between us.'
'Yet there must be one thing more between us,' I answered firmly.
'You must listen to me a little longer whether you will or no,
Mademoiselle: for the love you bear to your brother. There is
one course still open to me by which I may redeem my honour; and
it has been in my mind for some time back to take that course.
'To-day, I am thankful to say, I can take it cheerfully, if not
without regret; with a steadfast heart, if no light one.
Mademoiselle,' I continued earnestly, feeling none of the
triumph, none of the vanity, none of the elation I had foreseen,
but only simple joy in the joy I could give her, 'I thank God
that it IS still in my power to undo what I have done: that it
is still in my power to go back to him who sent me, and telling
him that I have changed my mind, and will bear my own burdens, to
pay the penalty.'
We were within a hundred paces of the top and the finger-post.
She cried out wildly that she did not understand. 'What is it
you--you--have just said?' she murmured. 'I cannot hear.' And
she began to fumble with the ribbon of her mask.
'Only this, Mademoiselle,' I answered gently. 'I give your
brother back his word, his parole. From this moment he is free
to go whither he pleases. Here, where we stand, four roads meet.
That to the right goes to Montauban, where you have doubtless
friends, and can lie hid for a time. Or that to the left leads
to Bordeaux, where you can take ship if you please. And in a
word, Mademoiselle,' I continued, ending a little feebly, 'I hope
that your troubles are now over.'
She turned her face to me--we had both come to a standstill--and
plucked at the fastenings of her mask. But her trembling fingers
had knotted the string, and in a moment she dropped her hand with
a cry of despair. 'But you? You?' she wailed in a voice so
changed that I should not have known it for hers. 'What will you
do? I do not understand, Monsieur.'
'There is a third road,' I answered. 'It leads to Paris. That
is my road, Mademoiselle. We part here.'
'But why?' she cried wildly.
'Because from to-day I would fain begin to be honourable,' I
answered in a low voice. 'Because I dare not be generous at
another's cost. I must go back whence I came.'
'To the Chatelet?' she muttered.
'Yes, Mademoiselle, to the Chatelet.'
She tried feverishly to raise her mask with her hand.
'I am not well,' she stammered. 'I cannot breathe.'
And she began to sway so violently in her saddle that I sprang
down, and, running round her horse's head, was just in time to
catch her as she fell. She was not quite unconscious then, for
as I supported her, she cried out,--
'Do not touch me! Do not touch me! You kill me with shame!'
But as she spoke she clung to me; and I made no mistake. Those
words made me happy. I carried her to the bank, my heart on
fire, and laid her against it just as M. de Cocheforet rode up.
He sprang from his horse, his eyes blazing, 'What is this?' he
cried. 'What have you been saying to her, man?'
'She will tell you,' I answered drily, my composure returning
under his eye. 'Amongst other things, that you are free. From
this moment, M. de Cocheforet, I give you back your parole, and I
take my own honour. Farewell.'
He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to heed
or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past
the cross-roads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland
stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless; and behind me,
all I loved. Once, when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked
back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after
me across her body. And again a minute later I looked back.
This time saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark
blurred mass.
CHAPTER XIV
ST MARTIN'S EVE
It was late evening on the twenty-ninth of November when I rode
into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the north-
east, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry
sunset. The air seemed to be heavy with smoke, the kennels
reeked, my gorge rose at the city's smell; and with all my heart
I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly
two months before, with his face to the south and the prospect of
riding day after day and league after league across heath and
moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life before
him, and freedom and the open air, and hope and uncertainty;
while I came back under doom, and in the pall of smoke that hung
over the huddle of innumerable roofs saw a gloomy shadowing of my
own fate.
For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself
of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does
not run counter to all the hard saws and instances by which he
has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts
and horrible misgivings, and struggles of heart. At least a
dozen times between the Loire and Paris I asked myself what
honour was, and what good it could do me when I lay rotting and
forgotten; if I were not a fool following a Jack o' Lanthorn; and
whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom
I was returning would not be the first to gibe at my folly?
However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of
Mademoiselle's looks and words. I dared not be false to her
again; I could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low, And
therefore--though not without many a secret struggle and quaking
--I came, on the last evening but one of November, to the Orleans
gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the
Luxembourg on my way to the Pont au Change.
The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the
first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins
under my horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries--the
first breath, in a word, of Paris--there came a new temptation;
to go for one last night to Zaton's, to see the tables again and
the faces of surprise, to be for an hour or two the old Berault.
That would be no breach of honour, for in any case I could not
reach the Cardinal before to-morrow. And it could do no harm.
It could make no change in anything. It would not have been a
thing worth struggling about, indeed; only--only I had in my
inmost heart a suspicion that the stoutest resolutions might lose
their force in that atmosphere; and that there even such a
talisman as the memory of a woman's looks and words might lose
its virtue.
Still, I think that I should have succumbed in the end if I had
not received at the corner of the Luxembourg a shock which
sobered me effectually. As I passed the gates, a coach, followed
by two outriders, swept out of the Palace courtyard; it was going
at a great pace, and I reined my jaded horse on one side to give
it room. By chance as it whirled by me, one of the leather
curtains flapped back, and I saw for a second by the waning
light--the nearer wheels were no more than two feet from my boot
--a face inside.
A face and no more, and that only for a second. But it froze me.
It was Richelieu's, the Cardinal's; but not as I had been wont to
see it--keen, cold, acute, with intellect and indomitable will in
every feature. This face was contorted with the rage of
impatience, was grim with the fever of haste, and the fear of
death. The eyes burned under the pale brow, the moustache
bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; I could fancy the
man crying 'Faster! Faster!' and gnawing his nails in the
impotence of passion; and I shrank back as if I had been struck.
The next moment the outriders splashed me, the coach was a
hundred paces ahead, and I was left chilled and wondering,
foreseeing the worst, and no longer in any mood for Zaton's.
Such a revelation of such a man was enough to appal me, for a
moment conscience cried out that he must have heard that
Cocheforet had escaped him, and through me. But I dismissed the
idea as soon as formed. In the vast meshes of the Cardinal's
schemes Cocheforet could be only a small fish; and to account for
the face in the coach I needed a cataclysm, a catastrophe, a
misfortune as far above ordinary mishaps as this man's intellect
rose above the common run of minds.
It was almost dark when I crossed the bridges, and crept
despondently to the Rue Savonnerie. After stabling my horse I
took my bag and holsters, and climbing the stairs to my old
landlord's--I remember that the place had grown, as it seemed to
me, strangely mean and small and ill-smelling in my absence--I
knocked at the door. It was promptly opened by the little tailor
himself, who threw up his arms and opened his eyes at sight of
me.
'By Saint Genevieve!' he said, 'if it is not M. de Berault?'
'It is,' I said. It touched me a little, after my lonely
journey, to find him so glad to see me; though I had never done
him a greater benefit than sometimes to unbend with him and
borrow his money. 'You look surprised, little man!' I
continued, as he made way for me to enter. 'I'll be sworn that
you have been pawning my goods and letting my room, you knave!'
'Never, your Excellency!' he answered. 'On the contrary, I have
been expecting you.'
'How?' I said. 'To-day?'
'To-day or to-morrow,' he answered, following me in and closing
the door. 'The first thing I said when I heard the news this
morning was--now we shall have M. de Berault back again. Your
Excellency will pardon the children,' he continued, bobbing round
me, as I took the old seat on the three-legged stool before the
hearth. 'The night is cold and there is no fire in your room.'
While he ran to and fro with my cloak and bags, little Gil, to
whom I had stood at St Sulpice's, borrowing ten crowns the same
day, I remember, came shyly to play with my sword hilt.
'So you expected me back when you heard the news, Frison, did
you?' I said, taking the lad on my knee.
'To be sure, your Excellency,' he answered, peeping into the
black pot before he lifted it to the hook.
'Very good. Then now let us hear what the news is,' I said
drily.
'Of the Cardinal, M. de Berault.'
'Ah! And what?'
He looked at me, holding the heavy pot suspended in his hands.
'You have not heard?' he exclaimed in astonishment.
'Not a tittle. Tell it me, my good fellow.'
'You have not heard that his Eminence is disgraced?'
I stared at him. 'Not a word,' I said.
He set down the pot.
'Then your Excellency must have made a very long journey indeed,'
he said with conviction. 'For it has been in the air a week or
more, and I thought that it had brought you back. A week? A
month, I dare say. They whisper that it is the old Queen's
doing. At any rate, it is certain that they have cancelled his
commissions and displaced his officers. There are rumours of
immediate peace with Spain. Everywhere his enemies are lifting
up their heads; and I hear that he has relays of horses set all
the way to the coast that he may fly at any moment. For what I
know he may be gone already.'
'But, man--' I said, surprised out of my composure. 'The King!
You forget the King. Let the Cardinal once pipe to him and he
will dance. And they will dance too!' I added grimly.
'Yes,' Frison answered eagerly. 'True, your Excellency, but the
King will not see him. Three times to-day, as I am told, the
Cardinal has driven to the Luxembourg and stood like any common
man in the ante-chamber, so that I hear it was pitiful to see
him. But his Majesty would not admit him. And when he went away
the last time I am told that his face was like death! Well, he
was a great man, and we may be worse ruled, M. de Berault, saving
your presence. If the nobles did not like him, he was good to
the traders and the bourgeoisie, and equal to all.'
'Silence, man! Silence, and let me think,' I said, much excited.
And while he bustled to and fro, getting my supper, and the
firelight played about the snug, sorry little room, and the child
toyed with his plaything, I fell to digesting this great news,
and pondering how I stood now and what I ought to do. At first
sight, I know, it seemed to me that I had nothing to do but to
sit still. In a few hours the man who had taken my bond would be
powerless, and I should be free; in a few hours I might smile at
him. To all appearance the dice had fallen well for me. I had
done a great thing, run a great risk, won a woman's love; and,
after all, I was not to pay the penalty.
But a word which fell from Frison as he fluttered round me,
pouring out the broth and cutting the bread, dropped into my mind
and spoiled my satisfaction.
'Yes, your Excellency,' he said, confirming something he had
stated before and which I had missed, 'and I am told that the
last time he came into the gallery there was not a man of all the
scores who had been at his levee last Monday would speak to him.
They fell off like rats--just like rats--until he was left
standing alone. And I have seen him!'--Frison lifted up his eyes
and his hands and drew in his breath--'Ah! I have seen the King
look shabby beside him! And his eye! I would not like to meet
it now.'
'Pish!' I growled. 'Someone has fooled you. Men are wiser than
that.'
'So? Well, your Excellency understands,' he answered meekly.
'But--there are no cats on a cold hearth.'
I told him again that he was a fool. But for all that, and my
reasoning, I felt uncomfortable. This was a great man, if ever a
great man lived, and they were all leaving him; and I--well, I
had no cause to love him. But I had taken his money, I had
accepted his commission, and I had betrayed him. These three
things being so, if he fell before I could--with the best will in
the world--set myself right with him, so much the better for me.
That was my gain--the fortune of war, the turn of the dice. But
if I lay hid, and took time for my ally, and being here while he
still stood, though tottering, waited until he fell, what of my
honour then? What of the grand words I had said to Mademoiselle
at Agen? I should be like the recreant in the old romance, who,
lying in the ditch while the battle raged, came out afterwards
and boasted of his courage.
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