CHAPTER XXXIV.

"I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HER."

Once more St. Georges was on the road, heading straight for Troyes, and by his side once more rode a friend, as he had ridden over four years ago--Boussac!

When he had thoroughly recovered from the swoon into which he had fallen on hearing that he was free, he had again and again overwhelmed the mousquetaire with his gratitude--all of which the latter had refused to accept, and had, indeed, gently repudiated. Also it seemed to St. Georges that he avoided the subject, or at least said as little as possible.

"If," he said, when at last they were seated in an inn off the new Rue Richelieu to which he had led St. Georges, "there is anything to which you owe your freedom more than another, it is to the fact that the king must recognise that you are in truth le Duc de Vannes, the son of his earliest friend. Yet--yet"--he continued in an embarrassed manner--"he would not even allow that that should influence him--when--I pleaded for you."

"But it did--it did, Boussac, it did. He must have pondered on it afterward--perhaps reflected on how unjustly I had been treated by his vile minister, Louvois--you say he died in disgrace?--and that may have--nay, must have, turned his heart. O Boussac! how am I ever to repay you? Without your thought and exertions what should I have been now?" and he shuddered as he spoke.

"Oh! la! la!" said Boussac, "never mind about me. The question is now what do you intend to do in the future?"

"Do!" exclaimed St. Georges. "Do! Why, that which I returned to France to do, fought against France for--obtain my child. Boussac, where is that woman now?"

"Woman!--what woman?"

"Ah! Boussac, do not joke. You know very well to what woman I refer. That young tigress--in her way almost as vile as the woman Louvigny!--the woman who stole my child."

"Mademoiselle de Roquemaure?"

"Ay, Mademoiselle de Roquemaure! That is the name. Oh Boussac! you have given me more than my life, far more. The power to wrench my child away from her keeping, to stand before her a freed man, the king's pardon in my hand, and tax her with her treachery."

"You will do that?"

"Do it! What am I going to Troyes for--to-night?"

"Ay, true! True! What are you going to Troyes for? Yet I should have thought, if you recover the child, it is enough. Why--say--bitter words?"

"Boussac, you--but, there, you are not a father; you cannot understand all I have suffered in these four years past. Why! man, the galleys, my exile, the death that yawned for me this morning, were easier than the loss of my little one. And, with her dying brother's own confession ringing in my ears still, as it will ring when I stand before her to-morrow, as I hope, you ask me what need I have to reproach her--to utter bitter words?"

The mousquetaire shrugged his shoulders; then he muttered something about the recovery of the child being everything, and that reproaches brought little satisfaction with them; and after that he again asked St. Georges when he meant to set out for Troyes?

"To-night, I tell you--to-night. Yet"--and he paused bewildered--"I--I have no money. Not enough to get me a horse, at least. They have given me back all they took from me after my condemnation, but there were only a few guineas left."

"Where is the horse you rode to Paris on when De Mortemart brought you?"

"Ah!" exclaimed St. Georges, "a good horse--though, alas! at a moment when my life was in danger and a horse alone could save me, I--I stole it. Oh, if I can but get that again!"

"Why not? It is doubtless in the stables behind the _cours criminel_, where the guard stable theirs."

It was there; so that difficulty was soon solved, no objection being offered by the authorities to giving up the property of a prisoner who was so distinguished as to be acquitted by the king's order an hour before his execution; and then, when St. Georges had recovered it, he announced his intention of at once setting forth. He was impatient to be gone now he was so near; he calculated that by midday on the morrow he would have forced from Aurelie de Roquemaure a confession of what she had done with Dorine. She was at Troyes he knew; Boussac, who professed himself well acquainted with her movements, having told him that such was the case.

"She is much at court now," he said; "I often see her. And she must be back at Troyes by now--I mean--that--she has been absent from there of late. But--but she would be back by now--she--told me--she was----"

"What?" asked St. Georges, looking at him and wondering why he seemed so incoherent about the woman's movements; wondering also how he came to know so much about them, especially her recent ones--"what did she tell you when last you saw her?"

"That--she has been paying a visit--to--to--assist a friend--but----"

"Her friendship seems as strong as her hate--and greed," muttered St. Georges.

"But that," Boussac continued, still floundering a good deal in his speech, "she would be at the manoir last night--yes, last night."

"So. Then she will doubtless be there to-morrow also; she will require rest after rendering her friend so much assistance. I shall find her there."

"_We_ shall find her there," Boussac answered. "I am going with you."

"You! Why?" Then he laughed--for the first time for many a day. "Do you think I am in danger now, with Louis's protection in my pocket, or," and his brow darkened a little, "do you fear that she is in danger from me?"

"_Mon ami_," Boussac replied, "I think neither of those things. The king's permission has made you safe--your manhood makes her so. Yet, let me ride with you. Remember"--and again he halted in his speech, as though seeking for a suitable reason for accompanying him--"we rode together when _la petite_ was about to be lost to you; let us do so now when, I hope most fervently, she is about to be restored to you. And, my friend, I have obtained leave--we Mousquetaires are always fortunate in getting that. Do not deny me!"

"Deny you!--you! The man who saved me! I am an ingrate even to question you," and he seized the black gauntleted hand of the other and wrung it hard.

After that there was no more to be said or done ere they set out--or only one thing. Boussac had mentioned that he had a friend, a dragoon officer, who was proceeding to La Hogue to join his regiment which was still there under Bellefond's command, and by him St. Georges sent twenty pistoles to be given to Dubois, the man who owned the horse which saved his life. He borrowed the money of Boussac, described the inn where he had seized the animal, and then mounted it for the first time with a feeling of satisfaction. "'Tis a good beast," he said, "and has done me loyal service; also it has well replaced another good one--that on which I rode from Pontarlier to Paris and never saw again. How long ago that seems, Boussac!"

"Ay," replied the other, "but it was winter then and the clouds were lowering over your life and her you loved--now 'tis summer, and all is well with you."

"I pray God! I have suffered my share."

All through that summer night they rode--resting their horses occasionally at country inns, then going on again, though slowly, and at dawn changing them for others and leaving them to rest until they should return that way. And so at last they neared Troyes, passing through the little town of Nogent, and seeing, ten miles off, the spire of the cathedral glistening in the rays of the bright sun.

"She will not know me," St. Georges had said more than once, as he thought of Dorine. "She was a babe when I lost her, now she is a child possessing speech and intelligence. May God grant it is not too late; that she is not too old yet to learn to love me!"

"Courage! _mon ami_, courage!" exclaimed Boussac, repeating a formula he had adopted from the first; "all must be well."

But--it was natural--as they approached their destination, the goal from which St. Georges hoped so much, his nervousness increased terribly and he began to speculate as to whether the child might not after all be dead; if, perhaps, she might not have lain in her little grave for long. "And then how will it be with me, Boussac? Oh! if she is dead how shall I reckon with the woman who possessed herself of her?"

"Courage!" again repeated the mousquetaire, "I do not believe she is dead. And if mademoiselle did seize upon her--well, she is a woman! a better nurse than the bishop's servant."

"Ah! the bishop's servant! That too has to be explained. What was he doing with her? I have wondered all these years--De Roquemaure's dying words told nothing. 'He had got her safe,' he gasped at the last. But why he? Why he! Oh! shall I ever know all?"

"Ere long, I hope, my friend," said Boussac, "ere long now."

As he spoke, they mounted the last hill that guarded the capital of Champagne and approached the summit. When there, they would be able to look down upon the old city--nay, more, from there they would scarce be a musket shot from the manoir, surrounded now by its ripening vineyards and its woods. She, the kidnapper of his child, would be in his grasp, must answer his demand!

Upon the summit of that hill still stood the gibbet on which the peasant woman's husband had swung, but the body was gone--long since, doubtless--and the gallows tree was bare. "Perhaps," said St. Georges, "the poor thing obtained him decent burial at last. I hope so." Then, seeing a peasant coming along the road, he spoke to him, and asked him what had become of the corpse that hung there four years ago? The fellow looked up at him sullenly enough and stared hard for some moments; then he said:

"You are not De Roquemaure?"

"Nay."

"What affair is it then of yours?"

St. Georges explained briefly to him how he had met the dead man's wife and pitied her, and asked where she was.

"Mad," the man said. "Quite mad. Her brother keeps her." Then he muttered: "A curse on the De Roquemaures, and on him above all! His father was bad; he is worse."

"You need curse him no more," St. Georges answered; "he is dead!"

"Dead is he? Then he was the last; the woman counts not. Dead! Oh, that she whom he injured so could understand it! Dead, thank God! I would it were so with all aristocrats! France has suffered long."

A hundred years almost were to elapse ere the peasant's hopes were to be partly realized, and others like the De Roquemaures to meet their reward; but none foresaw it in those days. Later the clouds gathered, but even then the fury of the coming storm was not perceived.

"Give her this," said St. Georges, putting some of his few remaining pieces in his hand, he having provided himself with French gold for his English guineas.

"Or give it to the brother who has charge of her. I, too, have suffered at the hands of the De Roquemaures."

"And you forgive?" glancing up from the pistoles in his hand to the dark, stern face above him. "You forgive?"

"Not yet!"

Then he urged on his horse again, Boussac following him.

"But you will, my friend, you will," he said, as they rode down the slope. "In the name of the good God who forgives all, forgive her, I implore you!"

"Forgive her? I will never forgive her! I have forgiven that other who lies in a thousand pieces at the bottom of the sea, but her reckoning is yet to come. She stole my child from me, she lied to me in Paris, sympathized with me on my loss when, at the time, she knew where that child was; drove me to draw on Louvois, and thereby to my ruin. I will never forgive her! And if she now refuses to restore the child, then--But enough! Come," and shaking his horse's reins he rode down the vine-clad roads to the front of the manoir.

It frowned as before on the slope below it, presented on this bright summer morning as grim, impassable a front as on that winter night when first he drew rein outside it; beyond the huge hatchment now nailed on its front in memory of the late marquise nothing was changed. It looked to St. Georges's eyes a fitting place to enshroud the evil doings of the family he had hated so bitterly, and of the one representative now left whom he hated too.

Seizing the horn as he had seized it long ago in the murkiness of that winter night, he blew upon it and then waited to be answered. He had not long to do so; a moment later the old warder who had once before opened the small door under the _tourelle_ stood before him.

"Is Mademoiselle de Roquemaure in her house?" he asked sternly, while Boussac, sitting his horse behind him, uttered no word.

"She is in her house, monsieur."

"You know me. I have been here before. Say I have ridden express from Paris to see her and must do so at once."

"I will say so, monsieur. Be pleased to enter."