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 passionately. "Why did you not tell me? Why did you not confess to me even then? I--oh, no more! No more!" she continued, in a piteous voice. "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 replied.
"I want to 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? Did you think 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. 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 before her; while her sobs shook her so painfully 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; 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 with no light one. Mademoiselle," I continued earnestly, feeling none of the triumph, none of the vanity, I had foreseen, but only 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 brow of the hill and the finger-post now. She cried out wildly that she did not understand. "What is it 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 back to your brother his word and his parole. From this moment he is free to go whither he pleases. You shall tell him so from me. 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 hands with a cry of despair. "And you? You?" she said, in a voice so changed I should not have known it for hers. "What will you do? I do not understand. This mask! I cannot hear."
"There is a third road," I answered. "It leads to Paris. That is my road, Mademoiselle. We part here."
"But why? 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 to the Châtelet."
She tried feverishly to raise her mask with her hand. "I am--not well," she stammered. "I cannot breathe."
She swayed so violently in her saddle as she spoke, 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 murmured, "Leave me! Leave me! I am not worthy that you should touch me."
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,