Chapter 23

THE LIGHTED WINDOWS OF LANCILLY

There was no way out of it, without telling all. Fortunately Joseph knew that his secrets were safe with these two, whose hearts were absolutely Royalist, though circumstances held them bound to inactivity. Presently Anne rose and left the room.

"Thank God! that is over," Joseph said, half to himself. "I must be going. Monsieur le Curé, I leave her to you. Do not let her be too anxious. D'Ombré is rough, but a good fellow; he will take care of our Angelot."

The old Curé was plunged in gloom. Tall and slight in his long black garment, he stood under the high chimneypiece, and leaned forward shivering, to warm his fingers at the blaze.

"Ah, monsieur!" he murmured. "Have you thought what you are doing? Can you expect good to come out of evil? Your brother, who has done everything for us all, how are you treating him? If madame does not see it, I do. You are taking Ange, making him a conspirator and a Chouan. If you save him from one danger, you plunge him into a greater, for if he and Monsieur d'Ombré are caught on this mission, they will certainly pay for it with their lives. You are doing all this without his father's knowledge--"

"Ah, my dear Curé, I know the police better than you do," Monsieur Joseph said hastily. "These young fellows will not be the first who have escaped to England; and Ange cannot stay here with their eyes and claws upon him. Even his father would not wish that. Leave it to me. What is it, Anne? what are you thinking of?"

His sister-in-law had come back into the room, wrapped in a cloak, with a hood drawn over her face.

"I am going with you to see Ange," she said.

The wind was howling, the rain was pattering outside. But Monsieur Joseph had all the trouble in the world to make her give up this idea. At last, after many arguments and prayers, he persuaded her that she must not come to Les Chouettes but must absolutely trust Ange to him. He promised solemnly that the young man should not start without her knowing it, that, if possible, she should see her boy again.

"And if Urbain comes back before they are gone?" she said, looking whitely into his face. "I tell you positively, Joseph, I shall not dare--"

"My dear friend, owing to Monsieur le Curé's unfortunate second-sight, your son's life is in your hands. If Urbain comes back, tell him all, if you will. His presence did not save Ange from being arrested before, it will not save him from being retaken. My fault, perhaps, as Urbain said--all my fault--" He struck his breast as if in church, with his fine smile. "But then it is my place to save him, and I will do it, if you will let me--in my own way."

They were both trembling, and large tears ran down the old Curé's thin cheeks. Joseph, still smiling, bent to kiss her hand. He held it for a moment, then looked up with dark imploring eyes.

"Adieu, chère Anne! and think of me with all your charity!" he said.

A minute later he had slipped noiselessly out, and plunged alone into the wet, howling darkness.

Through those days of suspense, while Angelot was hidden at Les Chouettes, while master and servants alike acted on the supposition that the house was watched by gendarmes with all the power of the Ministry of Police behind them--through these days, one person alone was happy; it was Henriette. She adored her cousin; it was joy to watch over him, to scold him, to amuse him, to keep him, a difficult matter, within the bounds prescribed by his uncle. Every day Angelot said it was impossible; he must be ill, he must die, if he could not stretch his legs and breathe the open air. Every day Henriette, when her father was out, allowed him to race up and down the stairs, played at hide-and-seek with him in the passages, let him dance her round and round the lower rooms. Or else she played games with him, cards, chess, tric-trac; or he lay and listened to her while she told him fairy tales; listened with a dreamy half-understanding, with a certainty, underlying all his impatience, that there was nothing to live for now. What did it matter, after all? One moment, life and hope and youth made him thrill and tremble in every limb; the next, his fate weighed upon him like a millstone; he laid his head down on the broad pillow of the sofa, and while Henriette chattered his eyelashes were sometimes wet. All was settled now. He must be banished to England, to Germany, banished in a cause he did not care for, in which he was involved against his will. Never again should he walk with his gun and Négo, light-hearted, over his own old country. Never again, more certainly, should he see Hélène, feel the maddening sweetness of her touch, her kiss. There was to be a ball. Henriette told him all about it; he heard of his cousin Hervé's visit, and was half amused, half miserable. Hélène would dance; white and slender, her eyes full of sadness. She would dance with other men, thinking, he knew, of her lost friend, her Angelot. In time, one of them would be presented to her as her husband. Not Ratoneau; Angelot had her father's word for that, and he drew a long breath when he thought of it. But some one else; that was inevitable. Ah! as life must pass, why cannot it pass more quickly? Why must every day have such an endless number of hours and minutes? What torture is there greater than this of waiting, stifled and idle, for a fate arranged in spite of one's self?

Henriette flitted in and out, eager and earnest like her father. After Monsieur Joseph's visit to La Marinière, he sent her there one day with Marie, and she was embraced by her aunt Anne with a quite new passion of tenderness, and trusted with a letter and a huge parcel of necessaries for Angelot's journey. Monsieur Joseph laughed a little angrily over these.

"Tiens, mon petit! your mother thinks you are going to drive to the coast in a chaise and four," he said; but Angelot bent his head very gravely over the coats and the shirts that those little thin hands had folded together for him.

"You must give me fair notice, Uncle Joseph," he said. "Police or no police, I do not go without wishing her good-bye."

Everything came at once, as fate would have it. It was after dark, a wild, windy evening, stars looking through the hurrying clouds, no moonrise till early morning. With every precaution, Monsieur Joseph now allowed his nephew to dine in the dining-room, taking care to place him where he could not be seen from outside when Gigot came in through the shutters from the kitchen. Angelot had now been kept in hiding for ten days, and the police seemed to have disappeared from the woods, so that Monsieur Joseph's mind was easier.

Suddenly, as they sat at dinner that evening, all the dogs began to bark.

"Go into your den!" said the little uncle, starting up.

"No, dear uncle, this game pie is too good," Angelot said coolly. "I heard a horse coming down the lane. It is Monsieur d'Ombré's messenger."

"If it is--very true, you had better eat your dinner," said his uncle.

And to be sure, in a few minutes, Gigot came in with a letter, Angelot's marching orders. At five o'clock the next morning César d'Ombré would wait for him at the Étang des Morts, a lonely, legend-haunted pool in the woods where four roads met, about two leagues beyond the _landes_ by way of La Joubardière.

"Very well; you will start at three o'clock," said Monsieur Joseph. "Give the man something to eat and send him back, Gigot, to meet his master."

"Three o'clock! I shall be asleep!" said Angelot. "Surely an hour will be enough to take me to the Étang des Morts--a cheerful rendezvous!"

He laughed and looked at Riette. She was very pale and grave, her dark eyes wide open.

"The good dead--they will watch over you, mon petit!" she murmured. "We must not be afraid of them."

"This is not a time for talking nonsense, children," said Monsieur Joseph; he looked at them severely, his mouth trembling. "Half-past three at latest; the boy might lose his way in the dark."

Riette got up suddenly and flung her arms round Angelot's neck.

"Mon petit, mon petit!" she repeated, burying her face on his shoulder.

"What are you doing?" he cried. "How am I to finish my dinner? You come between me and the best pie that Marie ever made! Get along with you, little good-for-nothing!"

He laughed; then Marie's pie seemed to choke him; he pushed back his chair, lifted Riette lightly and carried her out of the room.

"Now I am in prison no longer," he said. "I am going to run across to La Marinière; will you come too, little cousin?"

But Monsieur Joseph had something to say to that. He would not let Angelot go without sermons so long that the boy could hardly listen to them, on the care he was to take that no servant or dog at La Marinière saw him, on the things he might and might not say to his mother.

At last Angelot said aside to Henriette: "There is only one thing I regret--that I did not go straight home at first to my father and mother. That will bring misfortune on us all, if anything does--my uncle is absolutely too much of a conspirator."

"Hush, you are ungrateful," said Riette, gravely.

"Ah! It seems to me that I am nothing good or fortunate--everything bad and unlucky! My relations and their politics toss me like a ball," Angelot sighed impatiently. "I wish this night were over and we were on our way, I and that excellent grumpy César. And the farther I go, the more I shall want to come back. Tiens! Riette, I am miserable!"

The child gazed at him with her great eyes, full of the love and understanding of a woman.

"Courage!" she said. "You will come back--with the King."

"The King!" Angelot repeated bitterly. "Ask Martin Joubard about that. Hear him talk of the Emperor."

"A peasant! a common soldier! What does he know?" said the girl, scornfully. "I think my papa knows better."

"Ah, well! Believe in him; you are right," said Angelot.

They talked as they stood outside the house in the dim starlight, waiting a few moments for Monsieur Joseph: he chose to go part of the way with Angelot, and consented unwillingly to take Riette with him. The dead silence of the woods and fields was only broken by the moan of the wind; a sadness that struck to the heart brooded over the depths of lonely land; far down in the valley cold mists were creeping, and even on the lower slopes of Monsieur Joseph's meadow a chilly damp rose from the undrained ground. As far as one could tell, not a human being moved in the woods; the feet of Monsieur d'Ombré's messenger had passed up the lane out of hearing; all was solitary and silent about the quaint turreted house with its many shuttered windows and dark guards lying silent, stretched on the sand. Only one of these rose and shook himself and followed his master.

But the loneliness was not so great as it seemed. Behind a large tree to leeward of the house, Simon was lurking alone. He had sent his men away for the night, and he ground his teeth with rage when he saw his victim, out of reach for the time. For he had not the courage, with no law or right on his side, to face the uncle and nephew, armed and together.

Avoiding the open starlit slope, those three with the dog passed at once into the shadow of the woods, thus taking the safest, though not the shortest way to La Marinière. Simon stole after them at a safe distance. They came presently to a high corner in a lane, where, over the bank on which the pollard oaks stood in line, they could look across to the other side of the valley. As a rule, the Château de Lancilly was hardly to be seen after sunset, facing east, and its own woods shadowing it on three sides; but to-night its long front shone and glowed and flashed with light; every window seemed to be open and illuminated; the effect was so festal, so dazzling, that Riette cried out in admiration. Monsieur Joseph exclaimed angrily, and Angelot gazed in silence.

"Ah, papa! It is the ball! How beautiful! How I wish I could be there!" cried the child.

"No doubt!" said Monsieur Joseph. "Exactly! You would like to dance till to-morrow morning, while Ange is escaping. Well, shall I take you across there now? One of your pretty cousins would lend you a ball-dress!"

Riette's blushes could not be seen in the dark, but she said no more. Monsieur Joseph walked on a few paces and stopped.

"Ange will go quicker without us," he said. "Go, my boy, and God bless and protect you. We have given those rascals of police the slip, I think, or they have decided that you are not to be caught here. For the last day or two Tobie has seen nothing of them. But remember you are not safe; go cautiously and come back quickly. Do not let your mother keep you long. I believe I am doing very wrong in letting you go to her at all!"

"As to that, Uncle Joseph, it is certain that I won't leave the country without seeing her," said Angelot.

"Go, then, and don't be long, don't be rash; remember that I am dying with impatience. You have the pistols I gave you?"

"Yes."

"Don't shoot a gendarme if you can help it. It might make things more serious. Away with you! Come, Riette."

As the two walked back along the lane, Simon scrambled out of their way, like Angelot out of his, into the thick mass of one of the old _truisses_. The dog looked up at the tree and growled as they passed. Monsieur Joseph glanced sharply that way, but saw nothing, and called the dog to follow him, walking on a little more quickly.

"He will go straight to La Marinière," he was saying to Riette, "stay twenty minutes or so with his mother, and be back at Les Chouettes in less than an hour"--a piece of information not lost on Simon, who climbed down carefully from his tree, looked to his carbine, and chuckled as he walked slowly on towards La Marinière.

"Nothing in the world like patience," he said to himself. "Monsieur le Général ought to double my reward for this. I was right from the beginning; that old devil of a Chouan had the boy hidden in that robber's den of his. The fellows thought I was wasting my time and theirs. They didn't like being half starved and catching cold in the woods. I have had all the trouble in the world to hold them down to it. But what does it matter, so that we catch our game after all! I must choose a good place to drop on the youngster--lucky for me that he couldn't live without seeing his mother. Is he armed? Never mind! I must be fit to die of old age if I can't give an account of a boy like that. His mother, eh? Why did his father go to Paris, if they knew he was here? Perhaps they thought it wiser to keep the good news from Monsieur Urbain; these things divide families. They let him go off on a wild-goose chase after a pardon or something. Well, so that I catch him, tie him up out of the General's way, get my money, start off to Paris to see my father, and--perhaps--never come back--for this affair may make another department pleasanter--"

So ruminated Simon, as he strolled through the lanes in the starlight, following, as he supposed, in the footsteps of Angelot, and preparing to lie in wait for him at some convenient corner on his return.

But when his uncle and cousin left him, disappearing into the shadows, Angelot leaped up on the bank and stood for a minute or two gazing across at Lancilly. To watch till her shadow passed by one of those lighted windows--if not to climb to some point where he might see her, herself, without breaking his word to her father and attempting to speak to her--it might cost an extra half-hour and Uncle Joseph's displeasure, perhaps. But after all, what was leaving all the rest of the world compared with leaving her, Hélène, and practically for ever? His gentle, frightened love, to whom he had promised all the strength and protection he had to give, to whom invisible cords drew him across the valley!

"No, I cannot!" Angelot said to himself. He waited for no second thoughts, but jumped down into the field beyond the bank, and did not even trouble himself to keep in the shadow while with long light strides he ran towards Lancilly.

Two hours later Monsieur Joseph was pacing up and down, wildly impatient, in front of his house. Over his head, Riette listened behind closed shutters, and heard nothing but his quick tramp, and an angry exclamation now and then against Angelot. At last Monsieur Joseph stopped short and listened. The dogs barked, but he silenced them; then came a swinging light and two figures hurrying along the shadowy footpath from La Marinière. Another instant, and Urbain's strong voice rang through the night that brooded over Les Chouettes.

"Joseph, you incorrigible old Chouan! what have you done with my boy?"