An Enemy to the King Part 31

The moonlight and the presence of mademoiselle made the place a very paradise to me. We two were alone in the garden. The moon spread beauty over the broken walls of the chateau on one side, and the green vegetation around us leaving some places in mysterious shade. The sun-dial was all in light, and so was mademoiselle standing beside it. I breathed sweet wild odors from the garden. From some part of the chateau came the soft tw.a.n.g of the strings responding to the fingers of the gypsy, I held the soft hand of mademoiselle. I raised it to my lips.

"I love you, I love you!" I whispered.

She made no answer, only looked at me with a kind of mingled grief and joy, bliss embittered by despair.

"It cannot be," I went on, "that Heaven would permit so great a love to find no response. Will you not answer me, mademoiselle?"

"What answer would you have?" she asked, in a perturbed voice.

"I would have love for love."

Her answer was arrested by the sound of the gypsy's voice, which at that instant rose in an old song, that one in which a woman's love is likened to a light or a fire. These are the first words:

"Bright as the sun, more quick to fade; Fickle as marsh-lights prove; Where brightest, casting deepest shade-- False flame of woman's love."

"Heed the song, monsieur," said mademoiselle, in the tone of one who warns vaguely of a danger which dare not be disclosed openly.

"It is an old, old song," I answered. "The raving of some misanthrope of bygone time."

"It has truth in it," she said.

"Nay, he judged all women from some bitter experience of his own. His song ought to have died with him, ought to be shut up in the grave wherein he lies, with his sins and his sorrows."

"Though the man is dead, the truth he sang is not. Heed it, monsieur, as a warning from the dead to the living, a warning to all brave men who unwarily trust in women!"

"I needed no song to warn me, mademoiselle," I said, thinking of Mlle.

d'Arency and M. de Noyard. "I have in my own time seen something of the treachery of which some women are capable."

"You have loved other women?" she said, quickly.

"Once I thought I loved one, until I learned what she was."

"What was she?" she asked, slowly, as if divining the answer, and dreading to hear it.

"She was a tool of Catherine de Medici's," said I, speaking with all the more contempt when I compared the guileful court beauty, Mlle. d'Arency, with the pure, sweet woman before me; "one of those creatures whom Catherine called her Flying Squadron, and she betrayed a very honest gentleman to his death."

"Betrayed him!" she repeated.

"Yes, by a pretended love tryst."

Mademoiselle trembled, and held out her hand to the dial for support.

Something in her att.i.tude, something in the pose of her slender figure, something in her white face, her deep, wide-open eyes, so appealed to my love, to my impulse to protect her, that I clasped her in my arms, and drew her close to me. She made no attempt to repulse me, and into her eyes came the look of surrender and yielding.

"Ah, mademoiselle, Julie," I murmured, for she had told me her name, "you do not shrink from me, your hand clings to mine, the look in your eyes tells what your lips have refused to utter. The truth is out, you love me!"

She closed her eyes, and let me cover her face with kisses.

Presently, still holding her hand in mine, I stepped to the other side of the sun-dial, so that we stood with it between us, our hands clasped over it.

"There needs no oath between us now," said I, "yet here let us vow by the moonlight and the sunlight that mark the time on this old dial. I pledge you here, on the symbol of time, to fidelity forever!"

"False flame of woman's love!"

came the song of the gypsy, before mademoiselle could answer.

The look of unresisting acquiescence faded from her face. She started backward, drew her hand quickly from mine, and with the words, "Oh, monsieur, monsieur!" glided swiftly from the garden and around the chateau. In perplexity, I followed. When I reached the courtyard she was not there. She had gone in, and to her chamber.

But I was happy. I felt that now she was mine. Her face, her att.i.tude, had spoken, if not her lips. As for her breaking away, I thought that due to a last recurrence of her old scruples concerning the barrier between us. I did not attribute it to the effect of the sudden intrusion of the gypsy's song. It was by mere accident, I told myself, that her scruples had returned at the moment of that intrusion. What was there in her love that I need fear? She had told me to heed the song as a warning. I considered this a mere device on her part to check the current of my wooing. Her old scruples or her maidenly impulses might cause her to use for that purpose any device that might occur. But, how long she might postpone the final confession of surrender, it must come at last, for the surrender itself was already made. Her heart was mine. What mattered it now though the governor had come to Clochonne solely in quest of me? What though he knew my hiding-place, discovered by the persistent De Berquin, and its location by him communicated through Barbemouche? For, I said to myself, if De Berquin had sent word to the governor, Barbemouche must have been the messenger, for the three rascals now held at Maury could not have been relied on, and they had the appearance of having wandered in the forest several days.

I was just about to summon Blaise, that I might learn the result of his interrogations, when I heard the voice of Maugert, who was lying in watch by the forest path, call out:

"Who goes there?"

"We are friends," came the answer, quickly.

This voice also I knew, as well as Maugert's. It was that of De Berquin.

I ran to the gate and heard him tell Maugert, who covered him with an arquebus, match lighted, that he was seeking the abode of the Sieur de la Tournoire, for whom he had important news.

"Let him come, Maugert!" I called from the gate.

I stepped back into the courtyard. At that moment Blaise came out of the chateau. Very soon De Berquin strode in through the gateway, followed by the burly Barbemouche. Both looked wayworn and fatigued.

"Monsieur de la Tournoire," said De Berquin, saluting me with fine grace and a pleasant air,--he never lost the ways of a gallant gentleman,--"I have come here to do you a service."

So! thought I, does he really intend to seek my confidence and try to betray me, after all? Admirable self-a.s.surance!

I was about to answer, when Barbemouche put in;

"So you, whom it was in my power to kill a hundred times over that night, are the very Tournoire whom I chased from one end of France to the other eight years ago?" And he looked me over with a frank curiosity.

"Yes," I said, with a smile, "after you had destroyed the home of my fathers. And at last you have found me."

"I was but the servant of the Duke of Guise then," said Barbemouche.

At this point Blaise, who, in all our experiences with De Berquin and his henchmen, had not while sober come within hearing of Barbemouche's voice, or within close sight of him, stepped up and said, coolly:

"Let me see the face that goes with that voice."

And he threw up the front of Barbemouche's hat with one hand, at the same time raising the front of his own with the other. The two men regarded each other for a moment.

"Praise to the G.o.d of Israel, we meet again!" cried Blaise, in a loud voice, catching the other by the throat.

"Who are you?" demanded Barbemouche.

"The man on whom you left this mark,"--and Blaise pointed to his own forehead,--"in Paris on St. Bartholomew's night thirteen years ago."

"Then I did not kill you?" muttered Barbemouche, glaring fiercely at Blaise.