“Ahead of us?”
“Yes, M. le Comte,” Tignonville answered, shading his eyes and gazing in the direction of the fringe of trees. “I did not see him take the road, but he was beside the north end of the wood when I saw him last. Thereabouts!” and he pointed to a place where the Challans road wound round the flank of the wood. “When we are beyond that point, I think we shall see him.”
Count Hannibal growled a word in his beard, and, turning in his saddle, looked back the way he had come. Half a mile away, two or three dots could be seen approaching across the plain. He turned again.
“You know the road?” he said, curtly addressing the young man.
“Perfectly. As well as Carlat.”
“Then lead the way, Monsieur, with Badelon. And spare neither whip nor spur. There will be need of both, if we would lie warm to-night.”
Tignonville nodded assent and, wheeling his horse, rode to the head of the party, a faint smile playing about his mouth. A moment, and the main body moved off behind him, leaving Count Hannibal and six men to cover the rear. The mist, which at noon had risen for an hour or two, was closing down again, and they had no sooner passed clear of the wood than the trees faded out of sight behind them. It was not wonderful that they could not see Carlat. Objects a hundred paces from them were completely hidden.
Trot, trot! Trot, trot! through a grey world so featureless, so unreal that the riders, now dozing in the saddle, and now awaking, seemed to themselves to stand still, as in a nightmare. A trot and then a walk, and then a trot again; and all a dozen times repeated, while the women bumped along in their wretched saddles, and the horses stumbled, and the men swore at them.
Ha! La Garnache at last, and a sharp turn southward to Challans. The Countess raised her head, and began to look about her. There, should be a church, she knew; and there, the old ruined tower built by wizards, or the Carthaginians, so old tradition ran; and there, to the westward, the great salt marshes towards Noirmoutier. The mist hid all, but the knowledge that they were there set her heart beating, brought tears to her eyes, and lightened the long road to Challans.
At Challans they halted half an hour, and washed out the horses’ mouths with water and a little guignolet — the spirit of the country. A dose of the cordial was administered to the women; and a little after seven they began the last stage of the journey, through a landscape which even the mist could not veil from the eyes of love. There rose the windmill of Soullans! There the old dolmen, beneath which the grey wolf that ate the two children of Tornic had its lair. For a mile back they had been treading my lady’s land; they had only two more leagues to ride, and one of those was crumbling under each dogged footfall. The salt flavour, which is new life to the shore-born, was in the fleecy reek which floated by them, now thinner, now more opaque; and almost they could hear the dull thunder of the Biscay waves falling on the rocks.
Tignonville looked back at her and smiled. She caught the look; she fancied that she understood it and his thoughts. But her own eyes were moist at the moment with tears, and what his said, and what there was of strangeness in his glance, half-warning, half-exultant, escaped her. For there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing village began to rise from the dull inland level — hills green on the land side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island — she espied the wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her beads. Where it stood, the road from Commequiers and the road she travelled became one: a short mile thence, after winding among the hillocks, it ran down to the beach and the causeway — and to her home.
At the sight she bethought herself of Carlat, and calling to M. de Tignonville, she asked him what he thought of the steward’s continued absence.
“He must have outpaced us!” he answered, with an odd laugh.
“But he must have ridden hard to do that.”
He reined back to her. “Say nothing!” he muttered under his breath. “But look ahead, Madame, and see if we are expected!”
“Expected? How can we be expected?” she cried. The colour rushed into her face.
He put his finger to his lip, and looked warningly at Badelon’s humped shoulders, jogging up and down in front of them. Then, stooping towards her, in a lower tone, “If Carlat has arrived before us, he will have told them,” he said.
“Have told them?”
“He came by the other road, and it is quicker.”
She gazed at him in astonishment, her lips parted; and slowly she understood, and her eyes grew hard.
“Then why,” she said, “did you say it was longer. Had we been overtaken, Monsieur, we had had you to thank for it, it seems!”
He bit his lip. “But we have not been overtaken,” he rejoined. “On the contrary, you have me to thank for something quite different.”
“As unwelcome, perhaps!” she retorted. “For what?”
“Softly, Madame.”
“For what?” she repeated, refusing to lower her voice. “Speak, Monsieur, if you please.” He had never seen her look at him in that way.
“For the fact,” he answered, stung by her look and tone, “that when you arrive you will find yourself mistress in your own house! Is that nothing?”
“You have called in my people?”
“Carlat has done so, or should have,” he answered. “Henceforth,” he continued, a ring of exultation in his voice, “it will go hard with M. le Comte, if he does not treat you better than he has treated you hitherto. That is all!”
“You mean that it will go hard with him in any case?” she cried, her bosom rising and falling.
“I mean, Madame — But there they are! Good Carlat! Brave Carlat! He has done well!”
“Carlat?”
“Ay, there they are! And you are mistress in your own land! At last you are mistress, and you have me to thank for it! See!” And heedless in his exultation whether Badelon understood or not, he pointed to a place before them where the road wound between two low hills. Over the green shoulder of one of these, a dozen bright points caught and reflected the last evening light; while as he spoke a man rose to his feet on the hillside above, and began to make signs to persons below. A pennon, too, showed an instant over the shoulder, fluttered, and was gone.
Badelon looked as they looked. The next instant he uttered a low oath, and dragged his horse across the front of the party.
“Pierre!” he cried to the man on his left, “ride for your life! To my lord, and tell him we are ambushed!” And as the trained soldier wheeled about and spurred away, the sacker of Rome turned a dark scowling face on Tignonville. “If this be your work,” he hissed, “we shall thank you for it in hell! For it is where most of us will lie to-night! They are Montsoreau’s spears, and they have those with them are worse to deal with than themselves!” Then in a different tone, and throwing off all disguise, “Men to the front!” he shouted. “And you, Madame, to the rear quickly, and the women with you! Now, men, forward, and draw! Steady! Steady! They are coming!”
There was an instant of confusion, disorder, panic; horses jostling one another, women screaming and clutching at men, men shaking them off and forcing their way to the van. Fortunately the enemy did not fall on at once, as Badelon expected, but after showing themselves in the mouth of the valley, at a distance of three hundred paces, hung for some reason irresolute. This gave Badelon time to array his seven swords in front; but real resistance was out of the question, as he knew. And to none seemed less in question than to Tignonville.
When the truth, and what he had done, broke on the young man, he sat a moment motionless with horror. It was only when Badelon had twice summoned him with opprobrious words that he awoke to the relief of action. Even after that he hung an instant trying to meet the Countess’s eyes, despair in his own; but it was not to be. She had turned her head, and was looking back, as if thence only and not from him could help come. It was not to him she turned; and he saw it, and the justice of it. And silent, grim, more formidable even than old
Badelon, the veteran fighter, who knew all the tricks and shifts of the mêlée, he spurred to the flank of the line.
“Now, steady!” Badelon cried again, seeing that the enemy were beginning to move. “Steady! Ha! Thank God, my lord! My lord is coming! Stand! Stand!” The distant sound of galloping hoofs had reached his ear in the nick of time. He stood in his stirrups and looked back. Yes, Count Hannibal was coming, riding a dozen paces in front of his men. The odds were still desperate — for he brought but six — the enemy were still three to one. But the thunder of his hoofs as he came up checked for a moment the enemy’s onset; and before Montsoreau’s people got started again Count Hannibal had ridden up abreast of the women, and the Countess, looking at him, knew that, desperate as was their strait, she had not looked behind in vain. The glow of battle, the stress of the moment, had displaced the cloud from his face; the joy of the born fighter lightened in his eye. His voice rang clear and loud above the press.
“Badelon! wait you and two with Madame!” he cried. “Follow at fifty paces’ distance, and, when we have broken them, ride through! The others with me! Now forward, men, and show your teeth! A Tavannes! A Tavannes! A Tavannes! We carry it yet!”
And he dashed forward, leading them on, leaving the women behind; and down the sward to meet him, thundering in double line, came Montsoreau’s men-at-arms, and with the men-at-arms, a dozen pale, fierce-eyed men in the Church’s black, yelling the Church’s curses. Madame’s heart grew sick as she heard, as she waited, as she judged him by the fast-failing light a horse’s length before his men — with only Tignonville beside him.
She held her breath — would the shock never come? If Badelon had not seized her rein and forced her forward, she would not have moved. And then, even as she moved, they met! With yells and wild cries and a mare’s savage scream, the two bands crashed together in a huddle of fallen or rearing horses, of flickering weapons, of thrusting men, of grapples hand-to-hand. What happened, what was happening to any one, who it was fell, stabbed through and through by four, or who were those who still fought single combats, twisting round one another’s horses, those on her right and on her left, she could not tell. For Badelon dragged her on with whip and spur, and two horsemen — who obscured her view — galloped in front of her, and rode down bodily the only man who undertook to bar her passage. She had a glimpse of that man’s face, as his horse, struck in the act of turning, fell sideways on him; and she knew it, in its agony of terror, though she had seen it but once. It was the face of the man whose eyes had sought hers from the steps of the church in Angers; the lean man in black, who had turned soldier of the Church — to his misfortune.
Through? Yes, through, the way was clear before them! The fight with its screams and curses died away behind them. The horses swayed and all but sank under them. But Badelon knew it no time for mercy; iron-shod hoofs rang on the road behind, and at any moment the pursuers might be on their heels. He flogged on until the cots of the hamlet appeared on either side of the way; on, until the road forked and the Countess with strange readiness cried “The left!” — on, until the beach appeared below them at the foot of a sharp pitch, and beyond the beach the slow heaving grey of the ocean.
The tide was high. The causeway ran through it, a mere thread lipped by the darkling waves, and at the sight a grunt of relief broke from Badelon. For at the end of the causeway, black against the western sky, rose the gateway and towers of Vrillac; and he saw that, as the Countess had said, it was a place ten men could hold against ten hundred!
They stumbled down the beach, reached the causeway and trotted along it; more slowly now, and looking back. The other women had followed by hook or by crook, some crying hysterically, yet clinging to their horses and even urging them; and in a medley, the causeway clear behind them and no one following, they reached the drawbridge, and passed under the arch of the gate beyond.
There friendly hands, Carlat’s foremost, welcomed them and aided them to alight, and the Countess saw, as in a dream, the familiar scene, all unfamiliar: the gate, where she had played, a child, aglow with lantern-light and arms. Men, whose rugged faces she had known in infancy, stood at the drawbridge chains and at the winches. Others blew matches and handled primers, while old servants crowded round her, and women looked at her, scared and weeping. She saw it all at a glance — the lights, the black shadows, the sudden glow of a match on the groining of the arch above. She saw it, and turning swiftly, looked back the way she had come; along the dusky causeway to the low, dark shore, which night was stealing quickly from their eyes. She clasped her hands.
“Where is Badelon?” she cried. “Where is he? Where is he?”
One of the men who had ridden before her answered that he had turned back.
“Turned back!” she repeated. And then, shading her eyes, “Who is coming?” she asked, her voice insistent. “There is some one coming. Who is it? Who is it?”
Two were coming out of the gloom, travelling slowly and painfully along the causeway. One was La Tribe, limping; the other a rider, slashed across the forehead, and sobbing curses.
“No more!” she muttered. “Are there no more?”
The minister shook his head. The rider wiped the blood from his eyes, and turned up his face that he might see the better. But he seemed to be dazed, and only babbled strange words in a strange patois.
She stamped her foot in passion. “More lights!” she cried. “Lights! How can they find their way? And let six men go down the digue, and meet them. Will you let them be butchered between the shore and this?”
But Carlat, who had not been able to collect more than a dozen men, shook his head; and before she could repeat the order, sounds of battle, shrill, faint, like cries of hungry seagulls, pierced the darkness which shrouded the farther end of the causeway. The women shrank inward over the threshold, while Carlat cried to the men at the chains to be ready, and to some who stood at loopholes above, to blow up their matches and let fly at his word. And then they all waited, the Countess foremost, peering eagerly into the growing darkness. They could see nothing.
A distant scuffle, an oath, a cry, silence! The same, a little nearer, a little louder, followed this time, not by silence, but by the slow tread of a limping horse. Again a rush of feet, the clash of steel, a scream, a laugh, all weird and unreal, issuing from the night; then out of the darkness into the light, stepping slowly with hanging head, moved a horse, bearing on its back a man — or was it a man? — bending low in the saddle, his feet swinging loose. For an instant the horse and the man seemed to be alone, a ghostly pair; then at their heels came into view two figures, skirmishing this way and that; and now coming nearer, and now darting back into the gloom. One, a squat figure, stooping low, wielded a sword with two hands; the other covered him with a half-pike. And then beyond these — abruptly as it seemed — the night gave up to sight a swarm of dark figures pressing on them and after them, driving them before them.
Carlat had an inspiration. “Fire!” he cried; and four arquebuses poured a score of slugs into the knot of pursuers. A man fell, another shrieked and stumbled, the rest gave back. Only the horse came on spectrally, with hanging head and shining eyeballs, until a man ran out and seized its head, and dragged it, more by his strength than its own, over the drawbridge. After it Badelon, with a gaping wound in his knee, and Bigot, bleeding from a dozen hurts, walked over the bridge, and stood on either side of the saddle, smiling foolishly at the man on the horse.
“Leave me!” he muttered. “Leave me!” He made a feeble movement with his hand, as if it held a weapon; then his head sank lower. It was Count Hannibal. His thigh was broken, and there was a lance-head in his arm. The Countess looked at him, then beyond him, past him into the darkness.
“Are there no more?” she whispered tremulously. “No more? Tignonville — my—”
Badelon shook his head. The Countess covered her face and wept.
CHAPTER XXXIV. WHICH WILL YOU, MADAME?
It was in the grey dawning of the nex
t day, at the hour before the sun rose, that word of M. de Tignonville’s fate came to them in the castle. The fog which had masked the van and coming of night hung thick on its retreating skirts, and only reluctantly and little by little gave up to sight and daylight a certain thing which night had left at the end of the causeway. The first man to see it was Carlat, from the roof of the gateway; and he rubbed eyes weary with watching, and peered anew at it through the mist, fancying himself back in the Place Ste.-Croix at Angers, supposing for a wild moment the journey a dream, and the return a nightmare. But rub as he might, and stare as he might, the ugly outlines of the thing he had seen persisted — nay, grew sharper as the haze began to lift from the grey, slow-heaving floor of sea. He called another man and bade him look.
“What is it?” he said. “D’you see, there? Below the village?”
“’Tis a gibbet,” the man answered, with a foolish laugh; they had watched all night. “God keep us from it.”
“A gibbet?”
“Ay!”
“But what is it for? What is it doing there?”
“It is there to hang those they have taken, very like,” the man answered, stupidly practical. And then other men came up, and stared at it and growled in their beards. Presently there were eight or ten on the roof of the gateway looking towards the land and discussing the thing; and by-and-by a man was descried approaching along the causeway with a white flag in his hand.
At that Carlat bade one fetch the minister. “He understands things,” he muttered, “and I misdoubt this. And see,” he cried after the messenger, “that no word of it come to Mademoiselle!” Instinctively in the maiden home he reverted to the maiden title.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 397
