The man led me into the common room of the tavern--a low-roofed, poor place, lacking a chimney or glazed windows, and grimy with smoke and use. The fire--a great half-burned tree--smouldered on a stone hearth, raised a foot from the floor. A huge black pot simmered over it, and beside one window lounged a country fellow talking with the goodwife. In the dusk I could not see his face, but I gave the woman a word, and sat down to wait for my supper.
She seemed more silent than the common run of women; but this might be because her husband was present. While she moved about, getting my meal, he took his place against the doorpost and fell to staring at me so persistently that I felt by no means at my ease. He was a tall, strong fellow, with a rough moustache and brown beard, cut in the mode Henri Quatre; and on the subject of that king--a safe one, I knew, with a Béarnais--and on that alone, I found it possible to make him talk. Even then there was a suspicious gleam in his eyes that bade me abstain from questions; and as the darkness deepened behind him, and the firelight played more and more strongly on his features, and I thought of the leagues of woodland that lay between this remote valley and Auch. I recalled the Cardinal's warning that if I failed in my attempt I should be little likely to trouble Paris again.
The lout by the window paid no attention to me; nor I to him, when I had once satisfied myself that he was really what he seemed to be. But by and by two or three men--rough, uncouth fellows--dropped in to reinforce the landlord, and they, too, seemed to have no other business than to sit in silence looking at me, or now and again to exchange a word in a patois of their own. By the time my supper was ready, the knaves numbered six in all; and, as they were armed to a man with huge Spanish knives, and evidently resented my presence in their dull rustic fashion--every rustic is suspicious--I began to think that, unwittingly, I had put my head into a wasp's nest.
Nevertheless, I ate and drank with apparent appetite; but little that passed within the circle of light cast by the smoky lamp escaped me. I watched the men's looks and gestures at least as sharply as they watched mine; and all the time I was racking my wits for some mode of disarming their suspicions--or failing that, of learning something more of the position, which, it was clear, far exceeded in difficulty and danger anything I had expected. The whole valley, it would seem, was on the lookout to protect my man!
I had purposely brought with me from Auch a couple of bottles of choice Armagnac; and these had been carried into the house with my saddlebags. I took one out now and opened it, and carelessly offered a dram of the spirit to the landlord. He took it. As he drank it, I saw his face flush; he handed back the cup reluctantly, and on that hint I offered him another. The strong spirit was already beginning to work. He accepted, and in a few minutes began to talk more freely and with less of the constraint which had marked us. Still, his tongue ran chiefly on questions--he would know this, he would learn that; but even this was a welcome change. I told him openly whence I had come, by what road, how long I had stayed in Auch, and where; and so far I satisfied his curiosity. Only when I came to the subject of my visit to Cocheforêt I kept a mysterious silence, hinting darkly at business in Spain and friends across the border, and this and that, and giving the peasants to understand, if they pleased, that I was in the same interest as their exiled master.
They took the bait, winked at one another, and began to look at me in a more friendly way--the landlord foremost. But when I had led them so far, I dared go no farther, lest I should commit myself and be found out. I stopped, therefore, and, harking back to general subjects, chanced to compare my province with theirs. The landlord, now become almost talkative, was not slow to take up this challenge; and it presently led to my acquiring a curious piece of knowledge. He was boasting of his great snow mountains, the forests that propped them, the bears that roamed in them, the izards that loved the ice, and the boars that fed on the oak mast.
"Well," I said, quite by chance, "we have not these things, it is true. But we have things in the north you have not. We have tens of thousands of good horses--not such ponies as you breed here. At the horse fair at Fécamp my sorrel would be lost in the crowd. Here in the south you will not meet his match in a long day's journey."
"Do not make too sure of that!" the man replied, his eyes bright with triumph and the dram. "What would you say if I showed you a better--in my own stable?"
I saw that his words sent a kind of thrill through his other hearers, and that such of them as understood--for two or three of them talked their patois only--looked at him angrily; and in a twinkling I began to comprehend. But I affected dulness, and laughed scornfully.
"Seeing is believing," I said. "I doubt if you know a good horse here when you see one, my friend."
"Oh, don't I?" he said, winking. "Indeed!"
"I doubt it," I answered stubbornly.
"Then come with me, and I will show you one," he retorted, discretion giving way to vainglory. His wife and the others, I saw, looked at him dumbfounded; but, without paying any heed to them, he took up a lanthorn, and, assuming an air of peculiar wisdom, opened the door. "Come with me," he continued. "I don't know a good horse when I see one, don't I? I know a better than yours, at any rate!"
I should not have been surprised if the other men had interfered; but--I suppose he was a leader among them, and they did not, and in a moment we were outside. Three paces through the darkness took us to the stable, an offset at the back of the inn. My man twirled the pin, and, leading the way in, raised his lanthorn. A horse whinnied softly, and turned its bright, soft eyes on us--a baldfaced chestnut, with white hairs in its tail and one white stocking.
"There!" my guide exclaimed, waving the lanthorn to and fro boastfully, that I might see its points. "What do you say to that? Is that an undersized pony?"
"No," I answered, purposely stinting my praise. "It is pretty fair--for this country."
"Or any country," he answered wrathfully. "Any country, I say--I don't care where it is! And I have reason to know! Why, man, that horse is-- But there, that is a good horse, if ever you saw one!" And with that he ended abruptly and lamely, lowering the lanthorn with a sudden gesture, and turning to the door. He was on the instant in such hurry, that he almost shouldered me out.
But I understood. I knew that he had nearly betrayed all--that he had been on the point of blurting out that that was M. de Cocheforêt's horse! M. de Cocheforêt's, comprenez bien! And while I turned away my face in the darkness, that he might not see me smile, I was not surprised to find the man in a moment changed, and become, in the closing of the door, as sober and suspicious as before, ashamed of himself and enraged with me, and in a mood to cut my throat for a trifle.
It was not my cue to quarrel, however--anything but that. I made, therefore, as if I had seen nothing, and when we were back in the inn praised the horse grudgingly, and like a man but half convinced. The ugly looks and ugly weapons I saw around me were fine incentives to caution; and no Italian, I flatter myself, could have played his part more nicely than I did. But I was heartily glad when it was over, and I found myself, at last, left alone for the night in a little garret--a mere fowl-house--upstairs, formed by the roof and gable walls, and hung with strings of apples and chestnuts. It was a poor sleeping-place--rough, chilly, and unclean. I ascended to it by a ladder; my cloak and a little fern formed my only bed. But I was glad to accept it. It enabled me to be alone and to think out the position unwatched.
Of course M. de Cocheforêt was at the Château. He had left his horse here, and gone up on foot: probably that was his usual plan. He was therefore within my reach, in one sense--I could not have come at a better time--but in another he was as much beyond it as if I were still in Paris. So far was I from being able to seize him that I dared not ask a question or let fall a rash word, or even look about me freely. I saw I dared not. The slightest hint of my mission, the faintest breath of distrust, would lead to throat-cutting--and the throat would be mine; while the longer