CHAPTER XX

SEA-HOLLY

(1)

The moon that night, peering through the half-shuttered windows of the manoir, spilt on the dark floor pools that reminded La Vireville of those others in the interminable wet road of the afternoon. Mme de Guéfontaine and her brother had contrived for him a fairly comfortable resting-place by piling some old moth-eaten hangings and a cloak or two on the oak settle, and he had been made, despite his protests, to occupy this couch. But his foot pained him too much to admit of sleep.

From where he lay he could just see Mme. de Guéfontaine lying back in a great chair by the empty hearth, a cloak over her knees; and at one time the direct moonlight itself, falling on her fine, weary profile, showed a wisp or two of hair escaping down her cheek, a relic of her wild ride with the Chouan. But he knew that she slept only in snatches, and that she was concerned for him. Every time that she stirred and turned her head in his direction he deceitfully closed his eyes to delude her into the belief that he was not awake. At her feet lay her brother, wrapped in his cloak; he at least seemed to be enjoying a motionless repose, and evidences of an acoustic kind went to prove that Grain d'Orge, self-banished, out of respect, to the other end of the hall, was certainly not suffering from insomnia.

La Vireville was indeed not without occupation of a sort as he lay there wakeful and the hours went by. He was enabled to devote almost unlimited time to an interesting problem--one now, unfortunately, impossible of exact solution. Would Mme. de Guéfontaine, this modern Jael, really have stabbed him yesterday morning if he had not forestalled her? On the whole, he was almost inclined to think that she would. But probably she would not have done it very well. . . . What irony, though, if she had--if he, Augustin, after all his hazards and escapes, had ended that way, slain in his sleep by a devoted adherent of the same cause, for a private offence that he had never committed, and which the real offender had since, perhaps, almost expiated! (By the way, he must remember to tell Mme. de Guéfontaine of that.)

At any rate, he was heartily glad to know that she had not, after all, betrayed him. To the conception of her now gradually forming in his mind, such a course seemed so foreign as almost to be incredible. But he did believe that she might have used the knife.

Speculations of this kind did not, of course, advance sleep, though they kept him a little from thinking of his injured foot, which was the real obstacle to slumber. As the moon-pools ebbed away and the place became full of a ghostly grey radiance that might or might not be the dawn--for La Vireville had small idea of the time--he changed his position on the settle, thinking it might ease his foot. Stealthily as he did it, he heard Mme. de Guéfontaine stir. He repeated his expedient of shutting his eyes and lying very still. But he knew in a moment that she had risen from her chair and was bending over him, so he reopened them.

"M. le Chevalier, you cannot sleep, I know," she whispered.

"Peu importe, Madame," he replied. "But what of you?"

"If I could see you sleeping perhaps I could do the same," was her retort. "Let me renew the wet cloth round your foot; it is time it was done."

La Vireville protested, but she paid no heed. Flitting about noiselessly in that pale gloom she procured water, and, kneeling by the settle, very intently unwound the heated wrappings, dipped them in the cool liquid, and replaced them.

"Is that better?" she asked, coming like a ghost to his side.

"Much better," he murmured. "Almost worth having it crushed for, in fact."

Mme. de Guéfontaine looked down at him without speaking, but he was aware, almost painfully aware, of the distress and remorse surging in her heart.

"I was sure that the Blues had got you--if they had not killed you," she said in a vibrating voice. "And all for me, for me who . . ."

"As far as I can tell," interrupted La Vireville lightly, "they rode over me and never saw me. I assure you that I have the devil's own luck, Madame; it is mixed with a good deal of an inferior kind, but it has always held to this point, that I have so far succeeded in cheating l'Ankou, as we call him in Brittany."

"My brother André had that kind of luck too," said she sadly. "But it failed him in the end."

La Vireville perceived that she wanted to talk about him--perhaps as a kind of amende honorable for her suspicions and hostility at Porhoët. "If you cannot sleep, Madame," he suggested, "will you not tell me about your brother? You see, I only knew of him as 'Alexis,' and I must tell you that I had got it into my head that his real name was de Kérouan or something of the sort."

"At what cross-purposes were we playing!" she exclaimed. "Do you really wish me to tell you about André?"

"If you will be so good," replied Fortuné. "Consider also, if you please, Madame, that I have procured you a chair here."

She smiled a little, and, bringing one quietly to the side of the settle, sat down, and began in her low and beautiful voice to tell him her history. There was a strange kind of unreal and yet intimate charm in this recital in the morning twilight, that went back now and then to childish days, some of which this old hall itself had witnessed. For here André and Raymonde du Coudrais, from their home in more western Brittany, had been used to visit an old uncle and aunt, and here they and their cousins had played hide-and-seek, and here André himself had lain hid only a week before his death. By reason of its early associations with that beloved brother the old place was now, the narrator confessed, painful to her, yet with a kind of sweetness. But the rest of the Carhoët country, she suddenly acknowledged in a voice that shook, had become intolerable to her.

An extraordinary devotion to her brother André had always been hers from childhood; listening to her, La Vireville thought that so ardent a nature as hers (beating under an exterior that in some ways belied it) must always have needed someone on whom to expend itself, and that having so early found that person, it was singularly fitting that she should never have been forced to transfer her allegiance. For André had never married, and her own marriage, in 1788, to a man many years older than herself, for whom it was evident she had not felt love, but much respect, had left unimpaired the bond between her brother and herself. The Comte de Guéfontaine's death in exile at Hamburg, in 1792, had set her free to serve André and the cause he followed with all her heart and soul. That was the year of the unfortunate Coblentz episode, of which she spoke with far more bitterness than of her brother's death; it was from Coblentz that he had come to her at Hamburg, not yet recovered of the wound to his body, and healed still less of that to his spirit. At Hamburg they had shared the privations of exile--and worse, the slight sneers of compatriots who looked askance at the Marquis de la Vireville's victim. Their pride at last drove them thence to England. And from England André had found the way to Brittany, the command of the Carhoët division, and his death. His sister had been with him all the time, nineteen months--a long spell of life for a Chouan leader.

And when he had heard the whole tale and realised what a sensitive pride and what a singularly tender affection his cousin's action had outraged, La Vireville was certainly in no mind to rescind his half-jesting condonation of Raymonde de Guéfontaine's attempt at vengeance. Rather, he ratified it.

"Madame," he said when she had ended, "perhaps you can extend some measure of forgiveness to my unhappy cousin when you learn that he gave his life, after all, for the same cause as your brother has done. He died of his wounds after the battle of Charleroi last year."

"But that does not undo what he did," she said quite simply. "It does not give André back his honour; it makes no difference at all."

"No," answered La Vireville, after a pause, "that is true. It does not."

There was a silence. Then she said, leaning forward and looking at him very directly--there was more light now, "M. le Chevalier, I think there are some who love better than they hate, and some who hate better than they love. Could you forgive a mortal injury so readily? . . . But perhaps you have none to forgive?"

La Vireville abruptly put his locked hands over his eyes. "Madame," he replied after a moment, "I have had a mortal injury to forgive these ten years--and I have not forgiven it."

She was startled, no doubt, at the hard intensity of his tone, and drew back, as one who has stumbled on a grave.

"I beg your pardon," she said in a very low voice. "That was impertinent. I ought not to have asked such a question."

And it was a proof of the measure in which they had both already passed into a region of intimacy sufficiently remote from the somewhat unfortunate circumstances of their first meeting, that it struck neither of them at the moment, least of all the man, that it was a strange question to put to him, considering those circumstances. His recent treatment of an at least attempted mortal injury could hardly be termed rancorous. But this reflection did not occur to Mme. de Guéfontaine till she had, a little later, resumed her efforts at slumber, and to Fortuné it did not occur at all.

(2)

It was something of a surprise to the Chevalier de la Vireville to learn, next morning, how near the manoir of L'Estournel stood to the sea. Henri du Coudrais had, it appeared, made all the necessary arrangements for conveying his sister to Guernsey that evening, and they were to embark, as soon as dusk fell, from a tiny cove not a mile distant from the old house, and, when they had sailed to a certain point, were to be picked up by a fishing smack, and so to St. Peter Port.

But La Vireville himself, as the brother and sister assured him, could lie very conveniently hidden at L'Estournel for another day or two, to permit his foot a further chance of recovery. This, however, was not a course which commended itself to the invalid. He declared that he also should leave that evening for Carhoët, taking the sole means of locomotion open to him, namely, Grain d'Orge's horse, which, having conveyed its double burden safely to the manoir, was now secretly tethered in one of the tumble-down stalls, nourished on handfuls of grass. If Grain d'Orge could not somehow procure another steed for his own use (which was improbable) he must go on foot, leading this beast, and his master upon it, under cover of night, and by ways known to himself, to Carhoët. Moreover, La Vireville proposed, since the coast was so conveniently near, to accompany Mme. de Guéfontaine and her brother thither, and speed their departure before himself turning inland for his own destination. And in these two resolutions he persisted all day, despite every effort to dissuade him.

But all morning and afternoon he obediently lay, or rather sat propped up, on his settle, his swathed foot extended in front of him, and conversed with the two émigrés, or watched the lady preparing the somewhat exiguous meals necessitated by the absence of fire, which they dared not light for fear of the betraying smoke. During the afternoon they held a solemn conclave, he and she, and she gave him a fresh quantity of valuable information about his new command, of which he took cypher notes.

"How am I going to replace you, Madame?" he said at the end, putting the notes away in his breast, and looking at her with a certain admiration and wonder.

"Shall I come back?" she suggested, smiling. And though he knew that she did not for a moment mean the offer to be accepted, and she had told him that the place, from its memories of the lost André, was hateful to her, he guessed at some lingering traces of regret, even of poignant regret, in her mind.

"You could not take up your quarters at Porhoët again, I fear," said he, smiling too. "I wonder if the Citizen Botidoux has got over his interview with the Commissary! Why did you so providentially keep that tricolour sash in your press, Madame? It is true that I have not felt my own man since I had it round me, but it certainly lent a most convincing--perhaps _the_ convincing--touch to the whole affair."

"How amazingly you carried it off!" she exclaimed, her eyes glowing. "Oh, I kept the sash because . . . well, one never knew when it would prove useful--to an émigré embarking, for instance. It came off a dead Blue. But, as you can imagine, I could have bitten my tongue out afterwards for having screamed as I did. Yet I--yes, it seemed like a nightmare to recognise your voice. I thought for a moment, you see, that all the time you must have been a Government spy. I could hardly be expected, could I," she inquired, with the glimmer of a smile, "to grasp in a moment such unequalled magnanimity?"

"Madame," said La Vireville hardily, "I am getting somewhat tired of that word. You know, to be quite frank, I have not so much claim to it as you might think. In the first place, I rather admired you for . . . for that business with my hunting-knife--save that if you really want to stab a man you must not hesitate like that about it, and you must know just where to strike (I can show you if you wish); and secondly----"

"Monsieur," said his Jael, looking down and biting her lip, with a heightened colour, "either you are laughing at me, or you are trying to avenge yourself. I think it is true . . . you are not so magnanimous after all."

"Just as I told you!" cried Fortuné. "But I swear that I am not laughing at you. It is the truth, as I live, that when I knew the provocation you had received I thought not less of you, but more, for trying to rid yourself of me--I mean of my cousin Gaspard. But--there is one thing I am dying to know, though I do not feel certain that you can tell me."

She looked warily at his half-mocking expression.

"I suppose, Monsieur Augustin, that you have earned the right to any information I can give you."

La Vireville lazily put his clasped hands behind his head and kept his eyes on her. "Would you really have inserted that knife into me if I had not . . . waked?"

Mme. de Guéfontaine parried. "I will tell you," she said, no more than a little perturbed, "if you will tell me something. At what moment exactly _did_ you wake?"

He held her a second or two under his amused gaze before he would answer. "That, Madame," he said at length, "is too vital a secret to be revealed. I cannot tell you."

"Then I cannot answer your question either," retorted she.

La Vireville made her a bow. "So be it. I shall always cherish the hope that you meant to make a good job of it, like Mlle. de Corday with the late Citizen Marat. Your opportunity, par exemple, was something better. And you, Madame, if it gives you any pleasure, need not know whether I was not awake and watching you all the time." He smiled mischievously. "But let me proceed to the second reason why I am not so magnanimous--what a mouthful of a word it is!--as you think. It is this--that the advent of the patriots of Porhoët followed so soon on your threatening departure that I felt tolerably sure you had not had time, even if you had the will, to summon them. And I remembered that you had warned me of certain suspicious spirits."

This time Mme. de Guéfontaine confessed to emotion, drawing a great breath of relief. "M. le Chevalier, you believe me then--that I did not send for them, that I never should have done!"

"Madame, naturally I believe you. Have you not already told me so? Yet consider--you told me here, after it was all over, while my point is, that the idea had already occurred to me at the time, and that when I had the honour of carrying you off I was pretty sure that you had not, in the event, betrayed me."

She winced at the word, and dropped her head. "I do not know how I could even have threatened it," she said earnestly. "But I was mad."

"You cannot think, Madame," went on La Vireville, the mischief gone out of his face, "how much that thought comforted me. It was difficult for me to connect the idea of you and . . . treachery. The knife--well and good, I could understand that, but not the other."

Mme. de Guéfontaine lifted her head and met his eyes.

"The difficulty is," she said quietly, "to be sure that I have convinced you that I did not betray you even in intention; that when they rushed in, my idea of vengeance was already dead."

"I am content to take your word for that, Madame," said La Vireville, and, bending forward, he lightly took one of her hands and lifted it to his lips.

She flushed and sighed. "It is no use for you to deny it, M. le Chevalier. You are what you refuse to be called."

At that moment Grain d'Orge stumbled past, bearing an armful of herbage for the horse, and casting at the pair as he went, out of his quick little eyes, a glance at once solicitous and discontented. Mme. de Guéfontaine seemed fully conscious of it.

"Poor Grain d'Orge," she said musingly, as soon as he was out of hearing. "He was half beside himself with anxiety about you. I do not know to what saints he did not pray. I am sure he will never be able to pay for all the candles he has promised to St. Yves alone. How was it, Monsieur Augustin, you who repudiate . . . that word . . . that you had never given him even an inkling that I was responsible (as you had every reason to think) for the appearance of the National Guard?"

"Because in that case, Madame," responded La Vireville promptly, "I should never have got him to help me in my little plan. He would never have gone near the lock-up. He was sufficiently insubordinate as it was. And, as events turned out," he added gravely, "it was a good thing that I never even hinted at it. He would have been quite capable of cutting your throat when he got you alone."

"He did not seem very much pleased with me as it was," remarked Mme. de Guéfontaine pensively. "He accused me of having----" She stopped abruptly.

"He made the same remark to me in the cottage," observed La Vireville gravely, but with laughter in his eyes. "I trust that, like me, you were quick to acknowledge its justice. I told him that you had done it with a--knife."

If he had wished to put an end to their conversation La Vireville certainly succeeded, for at that Mme. de Guéfontaine, murmuring something about Henri and a meal, arose and left him. She had, for the time being, quite lost her beautiful pallor.

(3)

La Vireville had his way in the end, and rode with them at dusk to the sea, and Mme. de Guéfontaine walked beside the grey horse, throwing a glance now and then at the bandaged foot, which his rider could not get into the stirrup.

"It was all my fault," she said, when they had gone a little way, and L'Estournel, place of refuge and memories, was a memory once more.

"Pardon me, Madame," objected La Vireville from above her, "it was not you who dropped a barrel on my toes."

She gave a rather impatient sigh. "Do you always jest about yourself, M. le Chevalier?"

"Madame, what else would you have me to do? Does it not strike you as humorous, you who know the conditions of our warfare in Brittany, that when fighting begins again I should have, for a time at least, to lead my men over hedges and through the broom in a litter, which is the only method of conveyance that I can think of at the moment?" He laughed under his breath. "At any rate, my foot is a change of site for an injury. Last time, not so long ago, it was a knock on the head that I acquired."

"And in whose cause, pray, did you receive that?"

"But in the usual--no, parbleu, when I come to think of it, it was an extra. It was for--a child, a small boy."

"And what, if one may ask, were you doing that you got knocked on the head for a small boy?"

"I was trying to convey him back to England. He had come to France by--mistake. I had some trouble over it."

"And is he back in England?"

The rider nodded. "Safely back in Cavendish Square by now, I trust."

"Cavendish Square?" said she, surprised, for she knew London. "Then he was an English boy?"

"No, French, the son of a friend of mine, the Marquis de Flavigny, who lives with his Scotch father-in-law there. And I think I may count the child himself as a friend, if it comes to that."

"Ah, it was not for a person unknown, then, that time--or for one who had tried to do you an injury?"

"What do you mean?" asked La Vireville. And he added quickly, "Madame, I beseech you never to refer to that episode again, or I----" But here the grey stumbled badly, and he never finished his threat.

"Hold up, Rosinante!" adjured Mme. de Guéfontaine below her breath.

"You learnt this beast's name the other night, I suppose," suggested La Vireville innocently, for he had not clearly heard what name she used.

She looked up at him with dancing eyes which held a suspicion of moisture.

"Did you not recognise the animal the moment you saw it, M. le Chevalier?"

"But I never set eyes on it before in my life," objected he.

"Yet it certainly comes out of the illustrations--by Coypel, if I remember right, they were. But perhaps when you read it in your childhood you had not an illustrated edition?"

"An edition of what?" asked La Vireville, now completely at sea.

"Of an old Spanish book called _The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha_," she said, sparkling, having, as was evident, so timed this thrust that their overtaking her brother and Grain d'Orge at that very moment should prevent his answering her.

* * * * *

Since neither of them could assist in getting ready the little sailing-boat, already at her moorings below them, they had, afterwards, a few moments' more converse. La Vireville had dismounted, and now sat upon the short sea turf at the head of the steep little sandy track that plunged down into the cove. For all the circumstances of escape and danger and caution there was a certain feeling of security, almost of holiday. No patrol was out that night, so much had been previously ascertained. The offshore breeze of evening was blowing; although the sun was down there were rosy wisps in the sky, and the tide drew in upon the little sandy beach like a lover.

"Madame," said La Vireville, looking up at her, for she was still standing, "some time hence, when I come to Jersey, I shall make an excuse to visit Guernsey and see if you are tired of domesticity, and ready to undertake the post of agent de la correspondance again."

"So it is not in the Carhoët division," answered she, looking out to sea.

"Would you come to Kerdronan then?"

The breeze had loosened a strand of her hair, and she put it back before she replied, turning to him with a half-smile, "I am afraid that Grain d'Orge--I should say Sancho Panza--would not approve."

"True," responded La Vireville, but before he had time to suggest a means of getting round this difficulty, Henri du Coudrais appeared up the sandy path.

"Come, Raymonde," he said, "we should be off." To M. de la Vireville he had already made his grateful adieux, and seeing that gentleman's evident desire to escape any further testimonies of gratitude he did not repeat them now.

But for her leave-taking Raymonde de Guéfontaine waited till her brother had run down the slope once more.

"I forbid you to stand up!" she said to the Chouan, and, slipping to her knees beside him, she held out her hand. When, however, he thought to carry it to his lips, she seized his right hand strongly in both of hers and pressed her own lips upon it. "I wish André had known you!" she murmured, with something that sounded like a sob. Then she got up and ran down the sandy path.

And the Chevalier de la Vireville was left in some stupefaction, staring after her and then at his just-saluted hand. . . . After a moment he got to his knees and made a grab for the trailing bridle of his horse, now deriving a hasty nourishment from the coarse grass, intending by this means to support himself on one foot. In clutching at the reins--the grey naturally moving on precisely at the moment of capture--his hand, that hand which had recently been so unexpectedly hallowed, came into contact with something prickly. It was a young plant of sea-holly.

"Peste!" ejaculated the sufferer, but he caught the bridle and scrambled to his feet--or foot. Once again he looked curiously at his right hand. But the tingling sensation which was running over it now was not due entirely to its contact with a woman's lips. There was a little blood on it, for the sharp, bloomless sea-holly had scratched him. Blood on his hand and a kiss; the sea-holly's wound and a woman kneeling beside him by the sea--these things were all to come back to him afterwards. . . . Now he stood with his arm over the saddle, and watched the embarkation.

* * * * *

"I am glad the witch has gone," observed Grain d'Orge with simple thankfulness as he in his turn came up the slope. "She has caused a great deal of trouble. Are you ready, Monsieur Augustin, to start for Carhoët?"

Monsieur Augustin came out of his momentary reverie. "Quite ready," he replied. "Turn the animal round. I must mount on the wrong side as before with your kind assistance. By the way, Grain d'Orge, do you know what this creature's name is?"

He was in the saddle before the Breton, with a grunt, replied in a conclusive tone that it had no name.

"There you are wrong, mon gars," retorted his leader, settling his damaged foot as comfortably as he could. "Very wrong. We all have names--you included. Heigh-ho . . . and so this interlude comes to an end! Let us hope that we shall succeed in getting to Carhoët this time."

He gathered up the reins, and, with the old Chouan at the horse's head, set his face inland. Not very far out from shore, in the dwindling light, a little sail was bobbing to the waves.