Those words made me happy. I carried her to the bank, my heart on fire, and laid her against it just as M. de Cocheforêt rode up. He sprang from his horse, his eyes blazing with anger. "What is this?" he cried harshly. "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 Cocheforêt, 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 hear or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the crossroads, 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 I looked back. This time I saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark blurred mass.
CHAPTER XIII
ST. MARTIN'S EVE
It was late evening on the last day but one of November, when I rode into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the northeast, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed to be full of wood 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 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 cynical 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 would do me when I lay rotting and forgotten; if I was 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 this 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 could be no breach of honour; for in any case I could not reach the Cardinal before tomorrow. And it could do no harm. It could make no change in anything. It would not have been a thing worth struggling about-only I had in my inmost heart suspicions that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force in that atmosphere; that even such a talisman as the memory of a woman's looks and words might lose its virtue there.
Still I think 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. 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 distorted with rage and impatience; with the fever of haste and the fear of death. The eyes burned under the pale brow, the mustachios bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; I could fancy the man crying "Faster! Faster!" and gnawing his nails in the impatience of passion; and I shrank back as if I had been struck. The next moment the galloping 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 the gaming-table.
Such a revelation of such a man was enough to appall me. Conscience cried out that he must have heard that Cocheforêt had escaped, and through me! But I dismissed the idea as soon as formed.
In the vast meshes of the Cardinal's schemes, Cocheforêt 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, – the place seemed to have grown strangely mean and small and ill-smelling in my absence, – I knocked at the door. It was opened by the little tailor himself, who threw up his arms at the sight of me. "By St. Genevieve!" he said. "If it is not M. de Berault!"
"No other," 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 you have been pawning my goods and letting my room, you knave!"
"Never, your excellency!" he answered, beaming on me. "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, 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 was," 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, his jaw falling.
"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. "Your excellency must have made a very long journey indeed, then," he said, with conviction. "For it has been in the air a week or more, and I thought 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. 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-"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.