Part 4

But Mark paid him no heed. Already his brain was spinning, his senses reeling. Yet still he concentrated on the lithe, tense figure of Jacques Rombeau holding the fuming Baron Morriere at bay. And through his mind the words kept ringing:

"I shall take over the brain of Jacques Rombeau! I shall save Elaine from her fate!

"_I shall change history!_"

* * * * *

"You dog!" said Baron Morriere in a voice that trembled with passion. "I'll see you drawn and quartered for this! You'll swing from the highest gibbet in all France--"

"Save your breath!" snapped Mark--and then nearly dropped the horse pistol he grasped as the sound of his voice struck his ears. For he spoke in the French of the late eighteenth century, and the voice was not his own, but that of Jacques Rombeau!

From behind him came another voice--faintly tremulous, the voice of a woman:

"Jacques, _mon cher_! We are ready! Quick!"

"Right!"

Then, prodding the baron's stomach with the gun barrel:

"Why I don't kill you now I'll never know. _Le Bon Dieu_ knows I've got cause enough. And may He have mercy on your soul if you try to follow us!"

Turning on his heel, Mark sprang aboard the coach. From the driver's seat came a shout and the crack of the whip. With a jerk that nearly threw Mark to the floor, they were off!

"Oh, Jacques! I was so afraid! The baron--"

He turned in his seat. Looked into the lovely, appealing face of Elaine Duchard. Her arms reached out to him. Instinctively he accepted the embrace. He held her close, and his lips sought hers.

It was strange; incredible. Even as he kissed the girl, Mark realized it. He was two people simultaneously--Mark Carter and Jacques Rombeau. The brain of the former had traveled back through time into the body of the latter. In so doing, it had somehow acquired all the knowledge, the personality, the character traits of Rombeau. Yet because the mind of Mark Carter had been protected by Professor Duchard's insulating helmet, he still was able to think independently--almost as if his own twentieth century being was held apart in a special brain lobe within Jacques Rombeau's skull!

"I knew you would come, Jacques! I knew it!"

A wave of sentiment choked off Mark's reply. Again he kissed the soft hollow of that first Elaine Duchard's throat, trying the while to fight off the awful sense of futility that swept over him as he remembered history's verdict as to her fate.

Then, suddenly, the coach was halting.

"Whoa, there!" came the voice of the burly man on the box. And then: "Well, Jacques, what now? We're away from the castle, but where do we go?"

Mark swung to the ground. Glanced back to where the Chateau Morriere still loomed black and menacing on a distant ridge.

"Every road and bridge is blocked," the other went on. "The peasantry's none too peaceful in these parts, and the baron's taking no chances."

Mark nodded slowly.

"What do you think, Baroc?" he asked. Somehow, he knew that was the man's name.

The burly one scowled.

"Paris, I suppose," he grunted. "If you once get there, and into the slums, the devil himself couldn't rout you out."

"Do you think we can make it?"

"Maybe." A shrug. "We could try the post road."

"All right. Let's go."

* * * * *

They jogged on through the night, the coach swaying and bumping over the rough track. Then lights began to sparkle ahead. Baroc pulled up.

"The Golden Cock Inn," he grunted, nodding toward the lights. "Morriere's guards will be there. We'll have to run for it, so be ready for rough going."

The next instant they were rolling again. Closer the lights came, and closer. Now they were almost abreast them....

"Halt!"

A man was running toward them, waving his arms.

Baroc shattered the night with a fearful oath. His long whip cracked over the backs of the double-span of greys ahead. The horses leaped forward.

They were past the inn, driving hellbent through the pitch-blackness of the countryside. But behind them was a tumult of shouts, a wild disorder.

Mark shot a glance through the window. Caught a glimpse of running figures.

"Jacques! Are they after us?" There was panic in Elaine's voice.

A clatter of hooves answered her before Mark could open his mouth. The girl clung to him, her face chalky with fear.

"If the baron catches me again, Jacques--"

"He won't catch you! I promise it, Elaine! He won't!"

But the words of Adrian Vance leaped into his brain like red-hot branding irons:

_Elaine Duchard was tortured and murdered by Baron Morriere's retainers!_

Were these men the ones history had marked to do the awful deed?

The thunder of hooves was almost upon them now. The coach rocked from side to side. Bounced wildly from one rut to another.

A hoarse bellow from Baroc:

"They're coming, Jacques!"

Then out of the night like the wind itself the riders came. Big men, with fierce eyes and savage, brutal faces. Men cut from the same pattern as their master, Baron Morriere.

"Halt!"

"To hell with you!"

A rider surged ahead. He cut in toward the coach's horses.

"Oh, no, you don't!"

* * * * *

Baroc's whip lashed out. Bit into the face of the horseman. Laid the flesh bare from eye to jaw. The man gave a shriek of agony. Pitched from his saddle into the road. The coach leaped high as it struck his falling body.

But the others closed in. One sprang from his horse to a precarious perch on the mounting-board. His bearded face leered in. A knife flashed.

_Boom!_

The man fell back, dead before he hit the ground, his throat torn out by the slug from Mark's horse pistol. The coach was blue with the acrid stench of gunpowder smoke.

"Oh, Jacques! Don't let them get me! I love you so, Jacques--no matter what happens--"

Mark's arm was tight around Elaine. His face was taut and grim as they bounced onward. He fingered the haft of a broad-bladed knife in his belt.

"They won't get you! I promise it--"

Then, suddenly, their enemies were rushing to the attack again. From all sides they came. The point of a sword cut off Baroc's hoarse cry in mid-breath. He pitched from the box.

On through the night plunged the driverless coach, the horses mad with fright. A bridge loomed ahead. They raced for it like creatures from hell, flanks lathered, nostrils flaring.

Another rider tried to spring to the coach. Mark's knife flashed out. Drove home.

Then they were onto the bridge.

With a roar the coach jumped sidewise on the boards. Crashed into the flimsy railing. Tottered for a moment above the stream. Plunged backward into the water, dragging the horses with it.

Mark felt himself hurled back into one corner. His head smashed hard against something. Consciousness waned.

But the rush of water revived him. He lurched half-erect as the river spilled through the windows in a tidal wave.

Elaine lay unconscious on the floor. He caught up her limp body. Kicked open one door. Lunged out into the turbulent stream. Drifted with the current, barely keeping their heads above water.

From the banks came the shouts of searching men.

Onward Mark and Elaine drifted. The girl's eyes still were closed. Her body slack.

All his life those endless hours were a nightmare to the man. He remembered, vaguely, that they lay hidden under the roots of a willow while guardsmen on the bank above them cursed the luck that had let the pair escape. Mark's teeth were chattering and his muscles weak. Elaine's face, beside him, was growing blue with cold. Yet still she did not recover consciousness.

Then, at last, the baron's men were clumping off, and Mark was dragging his sweetheart out onto the bank.

A voice said:

"Praise God they did not find you!"

* * * * *

Mark staggered to face the man who spoke. His hand flashed to the knife in his belt.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

The stranger was old. The hands he raised in a gesture of peace were toil-worn.

"Only a poor peasant, friend," he answered. "I welcome you because the baron's men would not be hunting you were you not his enemies--may his soul rot in hell!"

"You will help us?"

The old man nodded.

"As much as I can. There is an abandoned chateau near here. You can hide there. I shall bring you food."

All but one wing of the ancient edifice to which the peasant took them was in ruins, gutted by fire. It stood high on a hill like a blackened skeleton.

"Once those who lived here were as cruel and proud as Baron Morriere," commented their guide. "Fire made them our equals."

And the part of Mark that was Jacques Rombeau answered:

"Fire will make many equals in the years to come, old man. And swords will help, for a poor man's arm can strike as lusty a blow as any lord's."

They laid Elaine on a bed of straw high in the unburned wing. She was conscious now, but screaming in delirium.

"We've got to get a doctor!" Mark grated tensely. "If she dies--"

The thought brought him up short. History said Elaine Duchard could not die! No! She must be tormented and murdered! And already the time was short, for Professor Duchard had asserted that she was killed two days after her first escape. Twelve hours had passed since he and the girl had clambered into the coach. That left thirty-six--

The old peasant was shaking his head.

"There is no doctor here who can be trusted," he declared. "One and all, they would run to Baron Morriere. The nearest who would help you and keep his mouth shut is in Paris--"

For ten long seconds Mark struggled with himself.

Elaine was sick. Perhaps dying. Well, why not let her die? Wouldn't it be better than to see her perhaps back in the hands of Baron Morriere? Was it not to kill her that he, Mark Carter, had come across a hundred fifty years of time? Had he not sworn he would contradict history's verdict--

"Jacques! Don't let them get me! Save me! Jacques--"

She was screaming in delirium again, her lovely face pale, her golden hair water-soaked to limp stringiness. Mark knelt beside her. Chafed her wrists. Sponged the fevered brow.

"Jacques! Jacques!"

"History be damned!"

He shouted it aloud. Sprang erect, eyes flashing cold fire.

"I won't let her die now, and I won't let the baron get her! History or no history, she's my Elaine, and I'll save her!"

* * * * *

He whirled on the bewildered peasant.

"How far is it to Paris?"

"About eleven miles."

"Then I'll go there. I'll get a doctor." Even as he spoke, Mark was pulling on his jacket. He strode toward the door, then hesitated and came back. He gripped the old peasant's shoulders. "Stay with her, old man, 'till I come back."

"I shall stay."

Mark drew the knife from his belt. Handed it to the other. When he spoke, his voice was but a cracked whisper:

"If _they_ come ... use this. She would rather have it so."

And the answer came back:

"I promise it, friend! They shall not take her alive!"

A wild trip it was, that journey to Paris. A dozen times before he was beyond Baron Morriere's domains, Mark was certain he would be trapped.

Then he was in the city and searching out the doctor's office in a vast, ancient rookery on the Left Bank. Outside--although it was only mid-afternoon--hovering storm clouds transformed day into night, while, at last, he pounded on the door to which he had been directed.

The door opened. A scowling, youthful man with tousled hair glared out at him, reeling tipsily all the while.

"Wha' y' want?"

"I'm looking for Doctor d'Allempier."

"Then why y' come here? _I_ ain' no doc-tor. Me, I'm painter. Gustav Jerbette. 'M bes' dam' pain'er--"

Disgust welled within Mark's heart like the thunder that rumbled overhead. He jerked free of the drunk's pawings.

And then, suddenly, he stopped. Stopped coldly and completely, as if he had been turned to stone. Deep within him an idea was growing. An idea so stupendous that it made his brain reel within his skull.

He whirled on the drunk.

"What did you say your name was?"

"'M Gustav Jerbette. 'M pain'er. Bes' dam' pain'er--"

The next instant the tipsy one was reeling backward into his room under the impetus of a powerful shove.

"Hey! Wha's idea?" he burbled. "Qui' pushin'--"

"Shut up, you stew-bum! I'm going to sober you up if I have to kill you! You've got a job to do!"

* * * * *

The doctor was a grave, bearded man. At last he rose from beside Elaine's straw bed in the fire-gutted chateau.

"How is she, doctor? Is there any hope?" Mark's voice was choked with emotion, his face drawn and haggard with strain.

Slowly, the medical man shook his head.

"I am sorry, _m'sieur_," he said quietly. "I can offer you little solace. Her lungs already are filling. I doubt that she can last until morning."

The other was breathing hard. His eyes were like fiery gimlets.

"Isn't there anything you can do?" he begged, half-sobbing. "Can't you at least give her something so she'll recover consciousness? I must talk to her--"

"That I can do."

The physician turned back to the bed. Raised the dying girl's head from the pallet to administer doses of several medicines.

"I have done all I can," he said. "From here it is in the hands of _Le Bon Dieu_."

Dazedly, Mark thanked him. Paid him with coins from Jacques Rombeau's wallet.

The door to the room beyond opened on sagging hinges and Gustav Jerbette stepped out. His eyes still were red-rimmed from drink, but otherwise he appeared sober.

"It's done," he said in a disgusted tone. "Lord knows it looks like nothing in this world or the next, but it's done."

Again Mark dealt out coins.

The old peasant entered the room.

"The baron is furious," he reported grimly. "They are searching every hut and hovel--"

The doctor shifted his feet nervously.

"Since there is nothing more I can do--" he murmured.

Mark seemed to shake off the strange, dream-like lassitude that gripped him.

"Of course, gentlemen. All of you have done your best. But there isn't any need of your staying longer, imperiling your lives by the chances of Baron Morriere's vengeance. Please leave--and my thanks go with you."

Out they marched, a weird procession: painter, doctor, peasant. Only the old man hesitated at the door.

"God be with you, friend!" he whispered, and pulled the heavy portal shut behind him.

Like a man in a trance, Mark watched them go. His feet were spread apart; fists clenched. Nor did the Sphinx at Giza look out upon the world with a face more grey or stony or implacable than was his.

"History!" he cried aloud, and his voice was half-hysterical. "Damn history! I'll beat it yet! Those devils shan't have Elaine--"

"Jacques!"

It was Elaine. Wanly she looked up from the pallet where she lay. Tried to force a smile.

Mark dropped to his knees beside her.

"Elaine! My darling!"

The girl raised a hand that trembled. Caressed his forehead.

"Poor Jacques!" she whispered. "He looks so worried; so frightened--"

"And good cause he has, too!"

* * * * *

Mark whirled, every muscle taut, at that harsh voice.

There, in the doorway, backed by his guardsmen, stood the Baron Morriere!

Tension hung over the silence of the room like smoke above a battlefield.

"Did you think you'd get away, you fool?" the noble gloated. "Did you think you'd escape Raoul Morriere's vengeance?"

Mark was breathing hard. His face was pale, his eyes over-bright. Deep within his brain words were pounding, with the beat of a giant sledge....

"_I shall defeat fate!_" those words throbbed. "_I shall rewrite history! Not as I wanted to. No. But they shall not have Elaine--_"

His hand clashed down, then, as a cobra strikes. Down to the broad bladed knife Jacques Rombeau carried in his belt. All his mind, all his heart, was concentrated on this one thing: Even though lightning should strike him this very instant, he would seize that knife. Whip it out. Bury it to the hilt in Elaine's breast, that death--not Baron Morriere's retainers--might claim her!

But his hand clutched empty air. He stared down in shocked incredulity. Stared down, and remembered--

He had given that knife to the old peasant before he went to Paris! And he had failed to ask it back!

"Look! He reaches for his knife!" whooped the baron. "He would protect his sweetheart!"

The guardsmen behind him joined in his roar of laughter.

Something came over Mark Carter in that moment. Something at once cold and deadly, and hotly, fiercely passionate. He felt a kinship to all earth's fighting madmen--the Malay, run amok; the Viking, gone berserk; the Arab, charging through hell to paradise.

Like a human projectile he launched himself, straight for the throat of Baron Morriere!

"Ai!"

It was not a word, that sound that came from the noble's throat. No. There was something more primitive than that about it.

It was terror, incarnate.

Before the man could move, Mark's fingers were clutching at him, tearing his clothing and his flesh. Again he screamed.

As one possessed, Mark jerked him from the bosom of his guardsmen. Hurled him bodily across the room, to slam against the farthest wall with a crash that echoed through the ancient wing.

But now the guardmen's paralysis was broken. They surged forward as one man.

"Jacques! Look out!"

* * * * *

Elaine's scream lent strength to her lover's arms. He slammed the door in the face of the oncoming fighters. Half a dozen swords stabbed deep into its wood, so closely were they upon him. He hurled himself at the portal. Forced it shut by sheer desperation. Slammed home its triple bolts.

He turned, then, his breath coming in great, sobbing gasps.

Baron Morriere had lurched to his feet. His right hand gripped a sword, his left a dagger.

"You'll die yet, you dog!" he snarled. "I'll spit you on my sword like a pig above a bed of coals!"

The flames of the pit showed in Mark's eyes.

"And I'll see _you_ in hell," he grated.

With a curse of contempt, the baron charged.

Mark sprang aside.

Again the other rushed to the attack.

Once more Mark dodged. But now desperation gleamed in his eyes. He was unarmed, helpless. One slip, one misstep, and that cruel blade would pin him to the wall!

Another rush. Another escape. But this time the blade had come close. Mark's shirt was ripped; his shoulder bleeding from a long scratch.

Even worse: from the end of the room came the sound of splintering wood as the guardsmen smashed in the panels of the door. A moment more and they would be upon him!

Again the deadly play of wits. And then, suddenly, Mark found himself penned in a corner. Trapped. The baron faced him, panting, his face alight with evil joy. And beyond the noble, on her bed of straw, Elaine Duchard stared at her lover with horror-straught eyes.

"Die, you dog!"

The baron lunged. His gleaming sword stabbed for Mark's vitals. The unarmed man's teeth clenched to the take the fatal blow.

It never came!

One moment the baron was charging. The next, falling.

"Elaine!"

For the girl's white body was sprawled across the floor. Her thin hands still clutched the baron's ankle.

The next instant her lover was at the noble's throat. His fists beat a tattoo of mayhem on the other's face. Forced him back against a window-sill. Beat him to a senseless, bleeding pulp.

"Jacques!"

He whirled. Saw the door at the far end of the room buckle and give way.

With one sweep of his arms, he sent the baron's body toppling through the window. Falling down ... down ... down, to death on the stone-slab walk three stories below.

Even as he did it, Mark was leaping toward Elaine. He caught her in his arms and lunged for the room's second door. He made it bare inches ahead of the guardsmen's swords.

This door was lighter. Already it rattled under the blows of the baron's men.

"Let me die, Jacques!" Elaine whispered. "I know I am going. You need not try to save me."

"Don't say it!" Mark's voice was a jagged knife of command. "You can't die now. Don't say it!"

* * * * *

He carried her, then, to where the picture Gustav Jerbette had painted stood. A strange picture, for that day and age, for it portrayed Mark Carter and his fiancee, Elaine Duchard, standing side by side in front of a building clearly identifiable as Professor Duchard's laboratory. And the pair were dressed, not in the garb of eighteenth century France, but in that of twentieth century America.

"Shut your eyes, Elaine!"

Wearily, the dying girl obeyed.

With one savage jerk, Mark whipped the cover from another stand. A stand on which stood a mirror. A mirror whose surface seemed to ripple in the fading light. A circular mirror, full three feet in diameter. A mirror with a garishly ornate frame.

His hands trembling with feverish haste, Mark adjusted the picture to reflect in the glass.

Already the door was cracking.

He snatched Elaine from where she lay. Held her half-conscious body before the mirror.

"Open your eyes, Elaine! Open your eyes and look at that girl in the mirror! Concentrate on her, Elaine! _Concentrate!_"

His own eyes were fixed on the image of his twentieth century self that Gustav Jerbette had painted. His brain ached with the force of will he was exerting. He felt himself falling through endless miles of space. Falling ... falling ... falling....

"Thank God!" exclaimed Professor Duchard fervently. "You both are safe!"

Dazedly, Mark and Elaine looked at each other across the narrow aisle separating their white hospital beds. Across the room, sunlight streamed in an open window, its rays glistening on the snowy linen of a third but empty bed.

"What happened?" Mark queried in a bewildered tone. "I was in your laboratory, professor, and Vance rushed in--"

"You went through the time mirror, my boy. Back to eighteenth century France. And Vance went with you. Apparently he came too close to the glass in his eagerness to stop you; his eyes must have focussed on one of the other figures from Jerbette's picture, reflected in the gap through the space-time barrier. He fell in a coma at the same instant you did."

"But I don't remember anything!" Mark protested. "I was going to go back through time to save Elaine, even if I had to change history to do it. Then Vance came in, and everything went blank--"

"Yes," broke in Elaine. "The same thing happened to me. I was sitting in front of the mirror Adrian gave me. Then I saw my ancestor from the painting, and I seemed to be falling--"

Professor Duchard nodded.

"Of course. Time travel apparently brings with it complete loss of memory--"

"But I was insulated against amnesia!" exclaimed Mark.

"Only on the trip back, my boy. Not on your return. No doubt you remembered the twentieth century while in the eighteenth. But your return destroyed your memories of Bourbon France."

* * * * *

The younger man scowled.

"It doesn't make sense," he grunted. "I'm beginning to think the whole business is so much imagination. After all, how could I transport Elaine back from 1780 to 1942? Or myself, for that matter--"

"Perhaps I have some information which will throw light on the subject," the white-haired scientist interrupted. "Yesterday my old friend, Strong, the historian, was passing through the city. He came here to see me.

"He told me he had run across Gustav Jerbette's unpublished memoirs in the course of his researches. And Jerbette, in describing how he came to paint 'Elaine Duchard's Escape,' says the figure in the time mirror on which you concentrated--the man with the horse pistol--was the first Elaine Duchard's lover, Jacques Rombeau.

"Jerbette says Rombeau came to him with a strange assignment. First he took him to the largest glass works in Paris and made him wait while the craftsmen manufactured a special mirror to his order. Then Rombeau led the way to an abandoned chateau a few miles out of Paris. Elaine Duchard lay hidden on the top floor, desperately ill.