to ask the question calmly.
“Alas, I do not know.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“I am lost!” thought Mademoiselle de Verneuil.
“She is deceiving me!” thought Corentin. “Marie,” he continued, “I have two maxims. One is never to believe a single word a woman says to me—that’s the only means of not being duped; the other is to find what interest she has in doing the opposite of what she says, and behaving in contradiction to the facts she pretends to confide to me. I think that you and I understand each other now.”
“Perfectly,” replied Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “You want proofs of my good faith; but I reserve them for the time when you give me some of yours.”
“Adieu, mademoiselle,” said Corentin, coolly.
“Nonsense,” said the girl, smiling; “sit down, and pray don’t sulk; but if you do I shall know how to save the marquis without you. As for the three hundred thousand francs which are always spread before your eyes, I will give them to you in good gold as soon as the marquis is safe.”
Corentin rose, stepped back a pace or two, and looked at Marie.
“You have grown rich in a very short time,” he said, in a tone of ill-disguised bitterness.
“Montauran,” she continued, “will make you a better offer still for his ransom. Now, then, prove to me that you have the means of guaranteeing him from all danger and—”
“Can’t you send him away the moment he arrives?” cried Corentin, suddenly. “Hulot does not know he is coming, and—” He stopped as if he had said too much. “But how absurd that you should ask me how to play a trick,” he said, with an easy laugh. “Now listen, Marie, I do feel certain of your loyalty. Promise me a compensation for all I lose in furthering your wishes, and I will make that old fool of a commandant so unsuspicious that the marquis will be as safe at Fougeres as at Saint-James.”
“Yes, I promise it,” said the girl, with a sort of solemnity.
“No, not in that way,” he said, “swear it by your mother.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil shuddered; raising a trembling hand she made the oath required by the man whose tone to her had changed so suddenly.
“You can command me,” he said; “don’t deceive me again, and you shall have reason to bless me to-night.”
“I will trust you, Corentin,” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil, much moved. She bowed her head gently towards him and smiled with a kindness not unmixed with surprise, as she saw an expression of melancholy tenderness on his face.
“What an enchanting creature!” thought Corentin, as he left the house. “Shall I ever get her as a means to fortune and a source of delight? To fling herself at my feet! Oh, yes, the marquis shall die! If I can’t get that woman in any other way than by dragging her through the mud, I’ll sink her in it. At any rate,” he thought, as he reached the square unconscious of his steps, “she no longer distrusts me. Three hundred thousand francs down! she thinks me grasping! Either the offer was a trick or she is already married to him.”
Corentin, buried in thought, was unable to come to a resolution. The fog which the sun had dispersed at mid-day was now rolling thicker and thicker, so that he could hardly see the trees at a little distance.
“That’s another piece of ill-luck,” he muttered, as he turned slowly homeward. “It is impossible to see ten feet. The weather protects the lovers. How is one to watch a house in such a fog? Who goes there?” he cried, catching the arm of a boy who seemed to have clambered up the dangerous rocks which made the terrace of the Promenade.
“It is I,” said a childish voice.
“Ah! the boy with the bloody foot. Do you want to revenge your father?” said Corentin.
“Yes,” said the child.
“Very good. Do you know the Gars?”
“Yes.”
“Good again. Now, don’t leave me except to do what I bid you, and you will obey your mother and earn some big sous—do you like sous?”
“Yes.”
“You like sous, and you want to kill the Gars who killed your father—well, I’ll take care of you. Ah! Marie,” he muttered, after a pause, “you yourself shall betray him, as you engaged to do! She is too violent to suspect me—passion never reflects. She does not know the marquis’s writing. Yes, I can set a trap into which her nature will drive her headlong. But I must first see Hulot.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil and Francine were deliberating on the means of saving the marquis from the more than doubtful generosity of Corentin and Hulot’s bayonets.
“I could go and warn him,” said the Breton girl.
“But we don’t know where he is,” replied Marie; “even I, with the instincts of love, could never find him.”
After making and rejecting a number of plans Mademoiselle de Verneuil exclaimed, “When I see him his danger will inspire me.”
She thought, like other ardent souls, to act on the spur of the moment, trusting to her star, or to that instinct of adroitness which rarely, if ever, fails a woman. Perhaps her heart was never so wrung. At times she seemed stupefied, her eyes were fixed, and then, at the least noise, she shook like a half-uprooted tree which the woodsman drags with a rope to hasten its fall. Suddenly, a loud report from a dozen guns echoed from a distance. Marie turned pale and grasped Francine’s hand. “I am dying,” she cried; “they have killed him!”
The heavy footfall of a man was heard in the antechamber. Francine went out and returned with a corporal. The man, making a military salute to Mademoiselle de Verneuil, produced some letters, the covers of which were a good deal soiled. Receiving no acknowledgment, the Blue said as he withdrew, “Madame, they are from the commandant.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, a prey to horrible presentiments, read a letter written apparently in great haste by Hulot:—
“Mademoiselle—a party of my men have just caught a messenger from
the Gars and have shot him. Among the intercepted letters is one
which may be useful to you and I transmit it—etc.”
“Thank God, it was not he they shot,” she exclaimed, flinging the letter into the fire.
She breathed more freely and took up the other letter, enclosed by Hulot. It was apparently written to Madame du Gua by the marquis.
“No, my angel,” the letter said, “I cannot go to-night to La
Vivetiere. You must lose your wager with the count. I triumph over
the Republic in the person of their beautiful emissary. You must
allow that she is worth the sacrifice of one night. It will be my
only victory in this campaign, for I have received the news that
La Vendee surrenders. I can do nothing more in France. Let us go
back to England—but we will talk of all this to-morrow.”
The letter fell from Marie’s hands; she closed her eyes, and was silent, leaning backward, with her head on a cushion. After a long pause she looked at the clock, which then marked four in the afternoon.
“My lord keeps me waiting,” she said, with savage irony.
“Oh! God grant he may not come!” cried Francine.
“If he does not come,” said Marie, in a stifled tone, “I shall go to him. No, no, he will soon be here. Francine, do I look well?”
“You are very pale.”
“Ah!” continued Mademoiselle de Verneuil, glancing about her, “this