CHAPTER XVII

DISTRESSING NEWS

Dangeau entered Paris next morning. His mission had dragged itself out to an interminable length. Even now he returned alone, his colleague, Bonnet, having been ordered to remain at Lyons for the present, whilst Dangeau made report at headquarters. The cities of the South smouldered ominously, and were ready at a breath to break into roaring flame. Even as Dangeau rode the first tongues of fire ran up, and a general conflagration threatened. Of this he rode to give earnest warning, and his face was troubled and anxious, though the outdoor life had given it a brown vigour which had been lacking before.

He put up his horse at an inn and walked to his old quarters with a warm glow rising in his breast; a glow before which all misgivings and preoccupations grew faint.

He had not been able to forget the pale, proud aristocrat, who had claimed his love so much against his will and hers; but in his days of absence he had set her image as far apart as might be, involving himself in the press of public business, to the exclusion of his thoughts of her. But now--now that he was about to see her again, the curtain at the back of his mind lifted, and showed her standing--an image in a shrine--unapproachably radiant, unforgettably enchanting, unalterably dear, and all the love in him fell on its knees and adored with hidden face.

He passed up the Rue des Lanternes and beheld its familiar features transfigured. Here she had walked all the months of his absence, and here perhaps she had thought of him; there in the little room had mingled his name with her sweet prayers. He remembered hotly the night he had asked her if she prayed for him, and her low, exquisitely tremulous, "Yes, Citizen."

He drew a long, deep breath and entered the small shop.

It was dark coming in from the glare, but he made out Rosalie in her accustomed seat, only it seemed to him that she was huddled forward in an unusual manner.

"Why, Citoyenne!" he cried cheerfully, "I am back, you see."

Rosalie raised her head and stared at him, and she seemed to be coming back with difficulty from a great distance. As his eyes grew used to the change from the outer day he looked curiously at her face. There was something strange, it seemed to him, about the sunken eyes; they had lost the old shrewd look, and were dull and wavering. For a moment it occurred to him that she had been drinking; then the heavy glance changed, brightening into recognition.

"You, Citizen?" she said, with a sort of dull surprise.

"Myself, and very glad to be back."

"You are well, Citizen?"

"And you, I fear, suffering?"

Rosalie pulled herself together.

"No, no," she protested, "I am well too, quite well. It is only that the days are dull when there is no spectacle, and I sit there and think, and count the heads, and wonder if it hurt them much; and then it makes my own head ache, and I become stupid."

Dangeau shuddered lightly. A gruesome welcome this.

"I would not go and see such things," he said.

"Sometimes I wish--" began Rosalie, and then paused; a red patch came on either sallow cheek. "It is too ennuyant when there is nothing to excite one, voyez-vous? Yesterday there were five, and one of them struggled. Ah, that gave me a palpitation! They say it was n't an aristocrat. _They_ all die alike, with a little stretched smile and steady eyes--no crying out--I find that tiresome at the last."

"Why, Rosalie," said Dangeau, "you should stay at home as you used to. Since when have you become a gadabout? You will finish by having bad dreams and losing your appetite."

Rosalie looked up with a sort of horrid animation.

"Ah, j'y suis deja," she said quickly. "Already I see them in the night. A week ago I wake, cold, wet--and there stands the Citizen Clery with his head under his arm like any St. Denis. Could I eat next day?--Ma foi, no! And why should he come to me, that Clery? Was it I who had a hand in his death? These revenants have not common-sense. It is my cousin Therese whose nights should be disturbed, not mine."

Dangeau looked at her steadily.

"Come, come, Rosalie," he said, "enough of this--Edmond Clery's head is safe enough."

"Yes, yes," nodded Rosalie, "safe enough in the great trench. Safe enough till Judgment day, and then it is Therese who must answer, and not I. It was none of my doing."

"But, Rosalie--mon Dieu! what are you saying--Edmond----?"

"Why, did you not know?"

"Woman!--what?"

"Ask Therese," said Rosalie with a sullen look, and fell to plaiting the border of her coarse apron.

"Rosalie!"

His voice startled her, and her mood shifted.

"Yes, to be sure, he was a friend of yours, and it is bad news. Ah, he 's dead, there 's no doubt of that. I saw it with my own eyes. He had been ill, and could hardly mount the steps; but in the end he smiled and waved his hand, and went off as bravely as the best of them. It is a pity, but he offended Therese, and she is a devil. I told her so; I said to her, 'Therese, I think you are a devil,' and she only laughed."

Dangeau could see that laugh,--red, red lips, and white, even teeth, and all the while lips that had kissed hers livid, dabbled with blood. Oh, horrible! Poor Clery, poor Edmond!

He gave a great shudder and forced his thoughts away from the vision they had evoked, but he sought voice twice before he could say:

"All else are well?"

She looked sullen again, and shrugged her shoulders.

"Ma foi, Citizen, Paris does not stand still."

He bit his lip.

"But here, in this house?"

"I am well, I have said so before."

He turned as if to go.

"And the Citoyenne Roche?" He had his voice in hand now, and the question had a careless ring.

"Gone," said Rosalie curtly.

In a flash that veil of carelessness had dropped. His hand fell heavily upon her shoulder.

"Gone--where?" he asked tensely.

"Where every one goes these days, these fine days. To prison, to the guillotine. They all go there."

For a moment Dangeau's heart stood still, then laboured so that his voice was beyond control. It came in husky gasps. "Dead--she is dead. Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu!"

Rosalie was rocking to and fro, counting on her fingers. His emotion seemed to please her, for she gave a foolish smile.

"She has a little white neck, very smooth and soft," she muttered.

A terrible sound broke from Dangeau's ghastly lips; a sound that steadied for a moment the woman's tottering mind. She looked up curiously, as if recalling something, smoothed the hair from her forehead, and touched the rigid hand which lay upon her shoulder.

"Tiens, Citizen," she said in a different tone, "she is not dead yet"; and the immense relief gave Dangeau's anger rein.

"Woman!" he said violently, "what has happened? Where is she? At once----"

Rosalie twitched away her shoulder, shrinking back against the wall. This blaze of anger kept her sane for the moment.

"She is in prison, at the Abbaye," she said. Under the excitement her brain cleared, and she was thinking now, debating how much she should tell him.

"Since when?"

"A month--six weeks--what do I know?"

"How came she to be arrested?"

"How should I know, Citizen?"

"Did you betray her? You knew who she was. Take care and do not lie to me."

"I lie, I--Citizen! But I was her best friend, and when that beast Hebert came hanging round----"

"Hebert?"

"She took his fancy, Heaven knows why, and you know her proud ways. Any other girl would have played with him a little, given a smile or two, and kept him off; but she, with her nose in the air, and her eyes looking past him, as if he was n't fit for her to see,--why, she made him feel as if he were the mud under her feet, and what could any one expect? He got her clapped into the Abbaye, to repent at leisure."

Dangeau was a man of clean lips, but now he called down damnation upon Hebert's black soul with an earnestness that frightened Rosalie.

"What more do you know? Tell me at once!"

She turned uneasily from the look in his eyes.

"She will be tried to-day."

"You are sure?"

"Therese told me, and she and Hebert are thick as thieves again."

"What hour? Dieu! what hour? It is ten o'clock now."

"Before noon, I think she said, but I can't be sure of that."

"You are lying?"

"No, no, Citizen--I do not know--indeed I do not."

He saw that she was speaking the truth, and turned from her with a despairing gesture. As he stumbled out of the shop he knocked over a great basket of potatoes, and Rosalie, with a sort of groan of relief, went down on her knees and began to gather them up. As the excitement of the scene she had been through subsided her eyes took that dull glaze again. Her movements became slower, and she stared oddly at the brown potatoes as she handled them.

"One--two--three," she counted in a monotonous voice, dropping them into the basket. At each little thud she started slightly, then went on counting.

"Four--five--six--seven--eight--" Suddenly she stared at them heavily. "There's no blood," she muttered, "no blood."

Half an hour later Therese found her with a phlegmatic smile upon her face and idle hands folded over something that lay beneath her coarse apron.

"Come along then, Rosalie," she called out impatiently. "Have you forgotten the trial?--we've not too much time."

"Ah!" said Rosalie, nodding slowly; "ah, the trial."

Therese tapped impatiently with her foot.

"Come then, for Heaven's sake! or we shall not get places."

"Places," said Rosalie suddenly; "what for?"

"Ma foi, if you are not stupid to-day. The trial, I tell you, that Rochambeau girl's trial--white-faced little fool. Ciel! if I could not play my cards better than that," and she laughed.

Rosalie's hands were hidden by her apron. One of them clutched something. The fingers lifted one by one, and in her mind she counted, "One--two--three--four--five"--and then back again--"One--two--three--four--five--" Therese was staring at her.

"What's the matter with you to-day?" she said. "Are you coming or no? It will be amusing, Hebert says; but if you prefer to sit here and sulk, do so by all means. For me, I go."

She turned to do so, but Rosalie was already getting out of her chair.

"Wait then, Therese," she grumbled. "Is no one to have any amusement but you? There, give me your arm, come close. Now tell me what's going to happen?"

"Oh, just the trial, but I thought you wanted to see it. For me, I always think it makes the execution more interesting if one has seen the trial also."

"Dangeau is back," said Rosalie irrelevantly.

Therese laughed loud.

"He has a fine welcome home," she said. "Well, are you coming, for I 've no mind to wait?"

"It is only the trial," said Rosalie vaguely. "Just a trial--and what is that? I do not care for a trial, there is no blood."

She laughed a little and rocked, cuddling what lay beneath her apron.

"Just a trial," she muttered; "but whose trial did you say?"

Therese lost patience. She stamped on the floor.

"What, again? What the devil is the matter with you to-day? Are you drunk?"

Rosalie turned her big head and looked at her cousin. They were standing close together, and her left hand, with its strong, stumpy fingers, closed like a vice upon the girl's arm.

"No, I 'm not drunk, not drunk, Therese," she said in a thick voice.

Therese tried to shake her off.

"Well, you sound like it, and behave like it, you old fool," she said furiously. "Drunk or crazy, it's all one. Let go of me, I shall be late."

"Yes," said Rosalie, nodding her head--"yes, you will be late, Therese."

"Va, imbecile!" cried the girl in a passion.

As she spoke she hit the nodding face sharply, twitching violently to one side in the effort to free her arm.

The ponderous hand closed tighter, and Therese, turning again with a curse, saw that upon Rosalie's heavily flushed face that stopped the words half-way, and changed them to a shriek.

"Oh, Mary Virgin!" she screamed, and saw the hidden right hand come swinging into sight, holding a long, sharp knife such as butchers use at their work. Her eyes were all black, dilated pupil, and she choked on the breath she tried to draw in order to scream again. Oh, the hand! the knife!

It flashed and fell, wrenched free and fell again, and Therese went down, horribly mute, her hands grasping in the air, and catching at the basket across which she fell.

She would scream no more now. The knife clattered to the floor from Rosalie's suddenly opened hand, and, as if the sound were a signal, Therese gave one convulsive shudder, which passed with a gush of crimson.

Rosalie went down on her knees, and gathered a handful of the brown tubers from the piled basket. She had to push the corpse aside to get at them, and she did it without a glance.

Then she threw the potatoes back into the basket one by one. She wore a complacent smile. Her eyes were intent.

"Now, there is blood," she said, nodding as if satisfied. "Now, there is blood."