Odette de Villeneuve — the ears that drank in the voices of the slumbering host were hers — stood half-hidden in the doorway of her quarters and listened. The inner darkness had become intolerable to her. The wattled walls, though they were ventilated by a hundred crevices, stifled her. Pent behind them she fancied a hundred things; she saw on the curtain of blackness drawn faces and staring eyes; she made of the faintest murmur that entered now a roar of voices, and now the hoarse beginnings of a scream. Outside, with the cooler air fanning her burning face, she could at least lay hold on reality. She was no longer the sport and plaything of her own strained senses. She could at least be sure that nothing was happening, that nothing had happened — yet. And though she still breathed quickly and crouched like a fearful thing in the doorway, here she could call hate to her support, she could reckon her wrongs and think of her lover, and persuade herself that this was but a nightmare from which she would awake to find all well with herself and with him.
If only the thing were over and done! Ah, if only it were done! That was her feeling. If only the thing were done! She bent her ear to listen; but nothing stirred, no alarm clove the night; and it could want little of morning. She fancied that the air struck colder, laden with that chill which comes before the dawn: and eastwards she thought that she discerned the first faint lightening of the sky. The day was at hand and nothing had happened.
She could not say on the instant whether she was sorry or glad. But she was sure that she would be sorry when the sun rose high and shone on her enemy’s triumph, and Charles and Roger and Bonne, whom she had taught herself to despise, saw their choice justified, and the side they had supported victorious. The triumph of those beneath us is hard to bear; and at that picture the Abbess’s face grew hard, though there was no one to see it. The blood throbbed in her head as she thought of it; throbbed so loudly that she questioned the reality of a sound that a moment later forced itself upon her senses. It was a sound not unlike the pulsing of the blood; not terrible nor loud, but rhythmical, such as the tide makes when it rises slowly but irresistibly to fill some channel left bare at the ebb.
What was it? She stood arrested. Was it only the blood surging in her ears? Or was it the silent uprising of a multitude of men, each from the place where he lay? Or was it, could it be the stealthy march of countless feet across the camp?
It might be that. She listened more intently, staying with one hand the beating of her heart. She decided that it was that.
Thereon it was all she could do to resist the impulse to give the alarm. She had no means of knowing in which direction the unseen band was moving. She could guess, but she might be wrong; and in that case, at any moment the night might hurl upon her a hundred brutes whose first victim as they charged through the encampment she must be. She fancied that the darkness wavered; and here and there bred shifting forms. She fancied that the dull sound was drawing nearer and growing louder. And — a scream rose in her throat.
She choked it down. An instant later she had her reward, if that was a reward which left her white and shuddering — a coward clinging for support to the frail wall beside her.
It was a shrill scream rending the night; such an one as had distended her own throat an instant before — but stifled in mid-utterance in a fashion horrible and suggestive. Upon it followed a fierce outcry in several voices, cut short two seconds later with the same abruptness, and followed by — silence. Then, while she clung cold, shivering, half fainting to the wattle, the darkness gave forth again that dull shuffling, moving sound, a little quickened perhaps, and a little more apparent.
This time it caused an alarm. Sharp and clear came a voice from the ridge, “What goes there? Answer!”
No answer was given, and “Who goes there?” cried a voice from a different point, and then “To arms!” cried a third. “To arms! To arms!” And on a rising wave of hoarse cries the camp awoke.
The tall form of the Bat seemed to start up within a yard of the Abbess. He seized a stick that hung beside a drum on a post, and in a twinkling the hurried notes of the Alert pulsed through the camp. On the instant men rose from the earth about him; while frightened faces, seen by the rays of a passing light, looked from hut-doors, and the cries of a waiting-maid struggling in hysterics mingled with the words of command that brought the troopers into line and manned the ground in front of the Vicomte’s quarters. A trooper flew up the sloping rampart to learn from the sentry what he had seen, and was back as quickly with the news that the guards knew no more than was known below. They had only heard a suspicious outcry, and following on it sounds which suggested the movement of a body of men.
The Bat, bringing order out of confusion — and in that well aided by Roger, though the lad’s heart was bursting with fears for his mistress — could do naught at the first blush but secure his position. But when he had got his men placed, and lanthorns so disposed as to advantage them and hamper an attack, he turned sharply on the man. “Did they hear my lord’s voice?” he asked.
“It was their fancy. Certainly the outcry came from that part of the camp.”
“Then out on them!” Roger exclaimed, unable to control himself. “Out on them. To saddle and let us charge, and woe betide them if they stand!”
“Softly, softly,” the Bat said. “Orders, young sir! Mine are to stand firm, whatever betides, and guard the women! And that I shall do until daylight.”
“Daylight?” Roger cried.
“Which is not half an hour off!”
“Half an hour!” The lad’s tone rang with indignation. “Are you a man and will you leave a woman at their mercy?” He was white with rage and shaking. “Then I will go alone. I will go to their quarters — I, alone!” As he thought of the girl he loved and her terrors his heart was too big for his breast.
“And throw away another life?” the Bat replied sternly. “For shame!”
“For shame, I?”
“Ay, you! To call yourself a soldier and cry fie on orders!”
He would have added more, but he was forestalled by the Vicomte. In his high petulant tone he bade his son stand for a fool. “There are women here,” he continued, sensibly enough, “and we are none too many to guard them, as we are.”
“Ay, but she” Roger retorted, trembling, “is alone there.”
“A truce to this!” the Bat struck in, with heat. “To your post, sir, and do your duty, or we are all lost together. Steady, men, steady!” as a slight movement of the troopers at the breastwork made itself felt rather than seen. “Pikes low! Pikes low! What is it?”
He saw then. The commotion was caused by the approach of a group of men, three or four in number, whose neighbourhood one of the lights had just betrayed. “Who comes there?” cried the leader of the Countess’s troopers, who was in charge of that end of the line. “Are you friends?”
“Ay, ay! Friends!”
If so, they were timorous friends. For when they were bidden to advance to the spot where the Bat with the Vicomte and Roger awaited them, their alarm was plain. The foremost was the man who had spoken for the peasants at the debate some days before. But the smith’s boldness and independence were gone; he was ashake with fear. “I have bad news,” he stammered. “Bad news, my lords!”
“The worse for some one!” the Bat answered with a grim undernote that should have satisfied even Roger. As he spoke he raised one of the lights from the ground, and held it so that its rays fell on the peasants’ faces. “Has harm happened to the hostages?”
“God avert it! But they have been carried off,” the man faltered through his ragged beard. It was evident that he was thoroughly frightened.
“Carried off?”
“Ay, carried off!”
“By whom? By whom, rascal?” The Bat’s eyes glared dangerously. “By Heaven, if you have had hand or finger in it — —” he added.
“Should I be here if I had?” the man answered, piteously extending his open hands.
“I know not. But now you are here, you will
stay here! Surround them!” And when the order had been carried out, “Now speak, or your skin will pay for it,” the Bat continued. “What has happened, spawn of the dung-heap?”
“Some of our folk — God knows without our knowledge” — the smith whined— “brought in a party of the men on the hill — —”
“The Old Crocans from the town?”
“Ay! And they seized the — my lord and the lady — and got off with them! As God sees me, they were gone before we were awake!” he protested, seeing the threatening blade with which Roger was advancing upon him.
The Lieutenant held the lad back. “Very good,” he said. “We shall follow with the first light. If a hair of their heads be injured, I shall hang you first, and the rest of you by batches as the trees will bear!” And with a black and terrible look the Bat swore an oath to chill the blood. The leader of the Countess’s men repeated it after him, word for word; and Roger, silent but with rage in his eyes, stood shaking between them, his blade in his hand.
The Vicomte, his fears for the safety of his own party allayed, turned to see who were present. He discovered his eldest daughter, leaning as if not far from fainting, against the doorway of the Duke’s quarters. “Courage, girl,” he said, in a tone of rebuke. “We are in no peril ourselves, and should set an example. Where is your sister?”
“I do not know,” the Abbess replied shakily. It was being borne in on her that not two lives, but the lives of many, of scores and of hundreds, might pay for what she had done. And she was new to the work. “I have not seen her,” she repeated with greater firmness, as she summoned hate to her support, and called up before her fancy the Countess’s childish attractions. “She must be sleeping.”
“Sleeping?” the Vicomte echoed in astonishment. He was going to add more when another took the words out of his mouth.
“What is that?” It was Roger’s voice fiercely raised. “By Heaven! It is Fulbert.”
It was Fulbert. As the men, of whom some were saddling — for the light was beginning to appear — pressed forward to look, the steward crawled out of the gloom about the brook, and, raising himself on one hand, made painful efforts to speak. He looked like a dead man risen; nor did the uncertain light of the lanthorns take from the horror of his appearance. Probably he had been left for dead, for the smashing blow of some blunt weapon had beaten in one temple and flooded his face and beard with blood. The Abbess, faint and sick, appalled by this first sign of her handiwork, hid her eyes.
“Follow! Follow!” the poor creature muttered, swaying as he strove to rise to his feet. “A rescue!”
“With the first light,” the Bat answered him. “With the first light! How many are they?”
But he only muttered, “Follow! A rescue! A rescue!” and repeated those words in such a tone that it was plain that he no longer understood them, but said them mechanically. Perhaps they had been the last he had uttered before he was struck down.
The Bat saw how it was with him; he had seen men in that state before. “With the first light!” he said, to soothe him. “With the first light we follow!” Then turning to his men he bade them carry the poor fellow in and see to his hurts.
Roger sprang forward, eager to help. And they were bearing the man to the rear, and the Abbess had taken heart to uncover her eyes, while still averting them, when a strange sound broke from her lips — lips blanched in an instant to the colour of paper. It caught the ear of the Bat, who stood nearest to her. He turned. The Abbess, with arm outstretched, was pointing to the door of the Countess’s hut. There, visible, though she seemed to shrink from sight, and even raised her hand in deprecation, stood the Countess herself.
“By Heaven!” the Bat cried. And he stood. While Roger, in place of advancing, gazed on her as on a ghost.
She tried to speak, but no sound came. And for the Abbess she had as easily spoken as the dead. Her senses tottered, the slim figure danced before her eyes, the voices of those who spoke came from a great way off.
It was the Vicomte who, being the least concerned, was first to find his voice. “Is it you, Countess?” he quavered.
The Countess nodded. She could not speak.
“But how — how have you escaped?”
“Ay, how?” the Bat chimed in more soberly. He saw that it was no phantom, though the mystery seemed none the less for that. “How come you here, Countess? How — am I mad, or did you not go to their quarters at sundown?”
“No,” she whispered. “I did not go.” She framed the words with difficulty. Between shame and excitement she seemed ready to sink into the earth.
“No? You did not? Then who — who did go? Some one went.”
She made a vain attempt to speak. Then commanding herself —
“Bonne went — in my place,” she cried. And clapping her hands to her face in a paroxysm of grief, she leant, weeping, against the post of the door.
They looked at one another and began to understand, and to see. And one had opened his mouth to speak, when a strangled cry drew all eyes to the Abbess. She seemed to be striving to put something from her. Her staring eyes, her round mouth of horror, her waving fingers made up a picture of terror comparable only to one of those masks which the Greeks used in their tragedies of fate. A moment she showed thus, and none of those who turned eye on her doubted that they were looking on a stress of passion beside which the Countess’s grief was but a puny thing. The next moment she fell her length in a swoon.
* * * * *
When she came to herself an hour later she lay for a time with eyes open but vacant, eyes which saw but conveyed no image to the ailing brain. The sun was still low. Its shafts darting through the interstices in the wall of the hut were laden with a million dancing motes, which formed a shifting veil of light between her eyes and the roof. She seemed to have been gazing at this a whole æon when the first conscious thought pierced her mind, and she asked herself where she was.
Where? Not in her own lodging, nor alone. This was borne in on her. For on one side of her couch crouched one of her women; on the other knelt the Countess, her face hidden. In the doorway behind the head of the bed, and so beyond the range of her vision, were others; the low drone of voices, her father’s, the Duke’s, penetrated one by one to her senses still dulled by the shock she had suffered. Something had happened then; something serious to her, or she would not lie thus surrounded with watchers on all sides of her bed. Had she been ill?
She considered this silently, and little by little began to remember: the flight to the camp, the camp life, the Duke’s hut in which she had passed most of her time in the camp. Yes, she was in the Duke’s hut, and that was his voice. She was lying on his couch. They had been besieged, she remembered. Had she been wounded? From under half-closed lids she scrutinised the two women beside her. The one she knew. The other must be her sister. Yes, her sister would be the first to come, the first to aid her. But it was not her sister. It was ——
She knew.
She called on God and lay white and mute, shaking violently, but with closed eyes. The women rose and looked at her, and suggested remedies, and implored her to speak. But she lay cold and dumb, and only from time to time by violent fits of trembling showed that she was alive. What had she done? What had she done?
The women could make nothing of her. Nor when they had tried their utmost could her father, though he came and chid her querulously; his tone the sharper for the remorse he was feeling. He had had an hour to think; and during that hour the obedience which his less cherished daughter had ever paid him, her cheerful care of him, her patience with him, had risen before him; and, alas, with these thoughts, the memory of many an unkind word and act, many a taunt flung at her as lightly as at the dog that cumbered the hearth. To balance the account, and a little perhaps because the way in which Odette took it was an added reproach to him, he spoke harshly to the Abbess — such is human nature! But, for all the effect his words had on her, he might have addressed a stone. That which she had done thundered too lou
dly in her ears for another’s voice to enter.
She had not loved her sister over dearly, and into such love as she had given contempt had entered largely. But she was her sister. She was her sister! Memories of childish days in the garden at Villeneuve, when Bonne had clung to her hand and run beside her, and prattled, and played, and quarrelled, and yielded to her — being always the gentler — rose in her mind; and memories of little words and acts, and of Bonne’s face on this occasion and on that! And dry-eyed she shook with horror of the thing she had done. Her sister! She had done her sister to death more cruelly, more foully, more barbarously, than if she had struck her lifeless at her feet.
An age, it seemed to her, she lay in this state, cold, paralysed, without hope. Then a word caught her ear and fixed her attention.
“They have been away two hours,” Joyeuse muttered, speaking low to the Vicomte. “They should be back.”
“What could they do?” the Vicomte answered in a tone of despair.
“Forty swords can do much,” Joyeuse answered hardily. “Were I sound I should know what to do. And that right well!”
“They started too late.”
“The greater reason they should be back! Were all over they would be back.”
“I have no hope.”
“I have. Had they desired to kill them only,” the Duke continued with reason, “the brutes had done it here, in a moment! If they did not hope to use them why carry them off?”
But the Vicomte with a quivering lip shook his head. He was still thinking — with marvellous unselfishness for him — of the daughter who had borne with him so long and so patiently. For des Ageaux there might be hope and a chance. But a woman in the hands of savages such as those he had seen in the town on the hill! He shuddered as he thought of it. Better death, better death a hundred times than that. He did not wish to see her again.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 458
