(1) “You really wish to do this, Madame?” asked Suzon Tessier, looking at the piece of embroidery she had just laid before the Duchesse.
“I must do something, Suzon, to pass the time till I start for the Temple. I cannot go out; Paris hurts me. And, sewing once more in this room, I shall feel I am back in the old days.”
“I only wish you were!” thought Suzon as she left the room—a wish Valentine would never have echoed. Though these days were nothing but linked hours of anguish and suspense, she would not have changed. Heaven lay between that time and this.
The day before yesterday she had arrived with her escort in this new, gay, animated Paris which hurt her so—the Paris which, exhilarated by a slight frost, under a cheerful winter sky, seemed to have drunk in a new lease of life with its revivifying change of government. It was a fresh world to Valentine—and a cruel. So when, after one night at a hotel, she had sought out Suzon to see how she fared, that faithful soul had refused to let her face again the curious looks of the hostelry. Since there was no danger to Mme Tessier in housing her now—and Valentine had learnt long since that the threatened Mirabel enquiry had never come to anything—she let herself be persuaded without much difficulty, and she and Roland were staying in the Rue de Seine. M. de Brencourt was lodging at an obscure little h?tel garni in the Rue du Vieux-Colombier. Mme de Trélan had hardly seen him since their arrival; he was too deeply occupied. For the whole weight of Royalist influence in Paris was at work to procure the release of “M. de Kersaint” from the prison of the Temple, where he was in close confinement awaiting the First Consul’s pleasure. He was still under the sentence of death passed on him at Vannes, and all attempts, based on the disgraceful means taken for his capture, to get that sentence removed, or even commuted, had so far been vain, though Berthier, the Minister of War, was an officer of the ancien régime, and Lebrun, the Third Consul, actually in relations with the Royalist party. Protests and clamour having proved unavailing, there remained therefore nothing, if the prisoner was to be saved, but to carry him off.
And this was by no means a hopeless enterprise, for in Paris there existed a whole subterranean population of Chouans and émigrés, of conspirators and dubious characters. The heads of the secret Royalist agency, the Chevalier de Coigny and the Baron Hyde de Neuville, knew well where to put their hands on suitable instruments. Plans were in fact already well forward for a very promising scheme, to be put into force the following evening. There would arrive at the prison of the Temple a carefully forged order for M. de Trélan’s transference to some other place of confinement; it would be brought by an officer, and there would be a carriage and a considerable escort—enough to impose on any jailor in the world. And, once they had the captive out, they would make for the coast, along the road to which relays would be in waiting.
All this Valentine knew, and it had, till an hour or so ago, been the one thing which filled her mind. But the arrival of the order to see her husband, which after reiterated attempts had been procured for her, absorbed it now. The order was for three o’clock that afternoon.
There was more colour on Mme de Trélan’s face to-day than at Vannes—more colour and more signs of strain. And the sewing she had asked for was something of a pretence—as much a pretence, really, as was Roland’s book, now upside down on his knee where he sat on the window-seat, his chin on his hand, gazing immovably out of the window. She put down her needle and gazed at him in her turn.
How like his profile was to Gaston’s—and how unlike! Was she sorry that she had told him? It had changed him, between that news and the catastrophe of Hennebont he seemed a boy no longer. For a nature so open as his he had said extraordinarily little, but she had divined easily enough the tides of feeling that had met—were meeting still—in his young heart: the shock of knowing that he had no right to the name he bore (though since he had been so carefully recognised by the late M. de Céligny the world need never know that) the shock to his thoughts of the mother of whom, perhaps mercifully, he had no memory. On the other hand there was the fervour of his worship for M. de Trélan, which lent so much reality and poignancy to his frustrated desire to have died to save him. . . . She did not feel sure that she had not been selfish in the matter; she had even said so, later on, that dark evening at Vannes. But when he had cried bewildered, “How can you be so good to me, Madame? You ought to hate me!” she had answered that he must know she loved him and was leaning on him then, or she would never have told him. “But I think you ought to know,” she had ended, “in case he . . .”
Before she got further Roland had come back from the mantelpiece, where his head lay buried in his arms, and was at her feet, kissing the hands which were gripping each other in the effort to finish that sentence. And he said, in a smothered voice, “If it is dishonour . . . I do not feel dishonoured.—But I cannot grasp it yet; it seems too blinding . . .”
Valentine remembered all this, looking at him now after six days.
“Roland, my child,” she said suddenly, “I want to consult you about something. If to-morrow night’s scheme should fail——”
The young man turned his head at once. “Oh, it will not fail,” he asserted. “But I wish—O, how I wish—that I were in it!”
For, there being secret communication between the Royalist agency and the Temple, the prisoner had contrived to express a strong desire that the Vicomte de Céligny should take no active part in the plan of rescue.
“Poor boy, I know you do! But, Roland, I also have to be inactive. Yet I have a scheme of my own, in case the other fails . . . You know the Trélan rubies? We had designed them, M. de Trélan and I, for Marthe on your wedding day. Now I have the thought of giving—of offering—them to someone else . . . as a price.”
“To whom?” asked Roland, leaning forward as the Duchesse unclasped them from under her dress.
“To Mme Bonaparte.”
Roland, a little startled, considered. “Would it be of any use?”
“She is said to be rapacious for jewels—and of Royalist leanings.”
“But what could she do?”
“Use her influence with her husband. What do you think of it, Roland?”
The young man on the window seat reflected. “You should consult M. Hyde de Neuville, Madame, not me. I know nothing of Mme Bonaparte. But——” He stopped and coloured a little.
“What, Roland?”
“Forgive me, Madame, but would the Duc approve of such a step?”
Her own colour faded a little as she met his eyes. And then with courage, she answered, “No, Roland, I am afraid he might not. He is, as you know . . . very proud. But it is not as if he personally would have a hand in it. A wife’s mortal anxiety will excuse anything. I should go as one woman—as one wife—to another . . . an independent step.”
“Shall you tell M. de Trélan of it this afternoon?” asked Roland, with his eyes on the floor.
Valentine did not answer for a moment. “But in that case I could not say truthfully that he knew nothing of it—which I should wish to be able to say. Advise me, Roland!”
“O Madame, how can I presume to advise you in a matter that concerns only you and him. You know so much better what he would wish than I do!”
And Valentine sat silent, looking at him, her face drawn, the red rivulet of fire across her hands.
“Roland, what you really mean is that I know what he would not wish!”
“Yes, Madame,” answered the boy in a very low voice.
Valentine caught her underlip. “You have your father in you, there is no doubt,” she thought to herself, and as she bent over the stones a tear fell on to the possible price of blood. For the worst of it was that she knew Roland was right.
She lifted her head again. “Then I shall speak of it to him—ask his permission. . . . And I think, Roland, that I will go and prepare now. It is very early to start, but it is a long way to the Temple, and we could walk part of it. It is so hard to sit still.”
As she came downstairs again, dressed for the street, she was thinking of the man who had put the rubies into her hands that strange day at Mirabel. Ah, that the Abbé Chassin were here now! he who had always been at hand in difficulties, and who now, at the most critical time of all, was over the sea. But even he, as she knew, could do no more than was being done.
In the parlour she found M. de Brencourt—the first time she had seen him that day.
“You are setting out already, Madame?” he asked, bending over her hand. She told him why, thinking how worn and ill he looked, and how possessed (as indeed he was) by a spirit of restless energy.
“I would beg leave to escort you part of the way,” he said, “but having missed Hyde de Neuville at his lodging, and hearing he had something of importance to say to me and was coming here, I must await him. Roland, I suppose, accompanies you?”
“Yes—but he will not be able to see M. de Trélan, I am afraid. Is there any message you wish conveyed about to-morrow night?”
M. de Brencourt shook his head. “Communications of that kind, Madame, go by their own channel. Besides, there is nothing fresh to say. The Duc knows the attempt is to be made; his part is merely passive.”
She said nothing for a moment. Then, flooding up from the depths, came the thing she had not yet allowed to escape her. “O, Monsieur de Brencourt, if only he had listened to you!”
The Comte shook his head. “No, Madame, say rather, If only the warning had come from other lips! I was the one man in the world who should not have carried it. . . . Duchesse, we cannot put off our past so easily; it clings, like the shirt of fable, and poisons everything. . . . You may tell the Duc, if you will, that I accept his apology in the same spirit in which he sent it. I cannot blame him for disbelieving my veracity—however much, being only human, I resent it. But it was inevitable; and that he is where he is now is Nemesis—the Nemesis I have drawn down on both of us.”
She could find no words before the sadness of his tone. He opened the door for her.
(2)
When he had shut the door behind Mme de Trélan the Comte turned and threw himself down in a chair, his chin on his breast, staring into the fire. His brain was weary, for he had been up most of the night. He could not forget (even if Valentine did, as he sometimes suspected) that the Duc de Trélan was not only a prisoner but a condemned prisoner—not a man awaiting trial, but one already under sentence of death—an............