"No," I said, wiping my sword. "There is this gentleman in the mask." And I turned to go towards him.
"M. de Berault!" There was something abrupt in the way in which Cocheforêt called my name after me.
I stood. "Pardon?" I said, turning.
"That gentleman?" he answered, hesitating, and looking at me doubtfully. "Have you considered--what will happen to him, if you give him up to the authorities?"
"Who is he?" I said sharply.
"That is rather a delicate question," he answered, frowning, and still looking at me fixedly.
"Not from me," I replied brutally, "since he is in my power. If he will take off his mask, I shall know better what I intend to do with him."
The stranger had lost his hat in his fall, and his fair hair, stained with dust, hung in curls on his shoulders. He was a tall man, of a slender, handsome presence, and though his dress was plain and almost rough, I espied a splendid jewel on his hand, and fancied I detected other signs of high quality. He still lay against the bank in a half-swooning condition, and seemed unconscious of my scrutiny. "Should I know him if he unmasked?" I said suddenly, a new idea in my head.
"You would," M. de Cocheforêt answered simply.
"And?"
"It would be bad for every one."
"Ho, ho!" I said softly, looking hard, first at my old prisoner, and then at my new one. "Then, what do you wish me to do?"
"Leave him here," M. de Cocheforêt answered glibly, his face flushed, the pulse in his cheek beating. I had known him for a man of perfect honour before, and trusted him. But this evident earnest anxiety on behalf of his friend touched me. Besides, I knew that I was treading on slippery ground; that it behoved me to be careful. "I will do it," I said, after a moment's reflection. "He will play me no tricks, I suppose? A letter of--"
"Mon Dieu, no! He will understand," Cocheforêt answered eagerly. "You will not repent it, I swear. Let us be going."
"Well,--but my horse?" I said, somewhat taken aback by this extreme haste.
"We shall overtake it," he replied urgently. "It will have kept to the road. Lectoure is no more than a league from here, and we can give orders there to have these two fetched in and buried."
I had nothing to gain by demurring, and so it was arranged. After that we did not linger. We picked up what we had dropped, M. de Cocheforêt mounted his sister, and within five minutes we were gone. Casting a glance back from the skirts of the wood, as we entered it, I fancied that I saw the masked man straighten himself and turn to look after us; but the leaves were beginning to intervene, the distance was great and perhaps cheated me. And yet I was not disinclined to think the unknown a little less severely injured and a trifle more observant than he seemed.
CHAPTER XII.
AT THE FINGER-POST.
Through all, it will have been noticed, Mademoiselle had not spoken to me, nor said one word, good or bad. She had played her part grimly; had taken her defeat in silence, if with tears; had tried neither prayer, nor defence, nor apology. And the fact that the fight was now over, the scene left behind, made no difference in her conduct--to my surprise and discomfiture. She kept her face averted from me; she rode as before; she affected to ignore my presence. I caught my horse feeding by the road-side, a furlong forward, and mounted, and fell into place behind the two, as in the morning. And just as we had plodded on then in silence, we plodded on now, while I wondered at the unfathomable ways of women, and knowing that I had borne myself well, marvelled that she could take part in such an incident and remain unchanged.
Yet it had made a change in her. Though her mask screened her well, it could not entirely hide her emotions, and by-and-bye I marked that her head drooped, that she rode sadly and listlessly, that the lines of her figure were altered. I noticed that she had flung away, or furtively dropped, her riding-whip, and I understood that to the old hatred of me were now added shame and vexation; shame that she had so lowered herself, even to save her brother, vexation that defeat had been her only reward.
Of this I saw a sign at Lectoure, where the inn had but one common room, and we must all dine in company. I secured for them a table by the fire, and leaving them standing by it, retired myself to a smaller one, near the door. There were no other guests, and this made the separation between us more marked. M. de Cocheforêt seemed to feel this. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at me with a smile half sad, half comical. But Mademoiselle was implacable. She had taken off her mask, and her face was like stone. Once, only once, during the meal I saw a change come over her. She coloured, I suppose at her thoughts, until her face flamed from brow to chin. I watched the blush spread and spread, and then she slowly and proudly turned her shoulder to me, and looked through the window at the shabby street.
I suppose that she and her brother had both built on this attempt, Which must have been arranged at Auch. For when we went on in the afternoon, I saw a more marked change. They rode now like people resigned to the worst. The grey realities of the brother's position, the dreary, hopeless future, began to hang like a mist before their eyes; began to tinge the landscape with sadness; robbed even the sunset of its colours. With each hour their spirits flagged and their speech became less frequent, until presently, when the light was nearly gone and the dusk was round us, the brother and sister rode hand in hand, silent, gloomy, one at least of them weeping. The cold shadow of the Cardinal, of Paris, of the scaffold, was beginning to make itself felt; was beginning to chill them. As the mountains which they had known all their lives sank and faded behind us, and we entered on the wide, low valley of the Garonne, their hopes sank and faded also--sank to the dead-level of despair. Surrounded by guards, a mark for curious glances, with pride for a companion, M. de Cocheforêt could doubtless have borne himself bravely; doubtless he would bear himself bravely still when the end came. But almost alone, moving forward through the grey evening to a prison, with so many measured days before him, and nothing to exhilarate or anger,--in this condition it was little wonder if he felt, and betrayed that he felt, the blood run slow in his veins; if he thought more of the weeping wife and ruined home, which he left behind him, than of the cause in which he had spent himself.
But God knows, they had no monopoly of gloom. I felt almost as sad myself. Long before sunset the flush of triumph, the heat of the battle, which had warmed my heart at noon, were gone; giving place to a chill dissatisfaction, a nausea, a despondency, such as I have known follow a long night at the tables. Hitherto there had been difficulties to be overcome, risks to be run, doubts about the end. Now the end was certain, and very near; so near that it filled all the prospect. One hour of triumph I might still have; I hugged the thought of it as a gambler hugs his last stake. I planned the place and time and mode, and tried to occupy myself wholly with it. But the price? Alas, that would intrude too, and more as the evening waned; so that as I passed this or that thing by the road, which I could recall passing on my journey south,--with thoughts so different, with plans that now seemed so very, very old,--I asked myself grimly if this were really I, if this were Gil de Berault, known as Zaton's premier joueur; or some Don Quichotte from Castile, tilting at windmills, and taking barbers' bowls for gold.
We reached Agen very late in the evening, after groping through a by-way near the river, set with holes and willow-stools and frog-spawns--a place no better than a slough. After it the great fire and the lights at the Blue Maid seemed like a glimpse of a new world, and in a twinkling put something of life and spirits into two at least of us. There was queer talk round the hearth here of doings in Paris,--of a stir