She had no time for thought of her surroundings. Gaston, warned by the opening of the door, was waiting just inside, and she was in his arms, strained to him, clinging to him, before ever it had finished closing behind her. O, haven where she had thought these last dreadful days never to rest again! But no, how could God take it from her again so soon? He was too good! Just to be there once more, to feel Gaston’s lips on hers, to hold him—the agony of suspense drugged, if not dead—nothing else mattered, not even that he was a prisoner.
“Beloved, your cheek is cold,” he murmured. “Is it so cold in here?—and if I hold you all the time will you be warm enough?”
“I am not cold,” she answered in a whisper, “but hold me . . . hold me . . .” And consciousness of everything but that hold drifted away.
. . . Cold? Perhaps he was cold—neglected? What was this place like? To see it, in its relation to him, she lifted her head from his breast, and was conscious for the first time of the small, high room in which she stood, of the window ten feet up in the wall, so that no view was possible, and the light came down from it very cheerlessly. On the ancient walls, blackened in places by the smoke of many a bygone torch, names were scrawled. She saw a pallet, a table and chair—and a stove, which was burning.
Then she scrutinised him, with such eyes of anxiety for what she might discover in his appearance that Gaston smiled at it.
“Do you expect to find, my darling, that ten days of captivity can have changed me?” he asked. “I have everything I want—everything I can pay for, that is—except liberty for correspondence . . . and my personal liberty, bien entendu.”
Indeed he looked younger, less worn, than at her last sight of him. And his tone, assumed or natural, was so calm. But somehow that very fact made her a little uneasy.
He took her hands again. “Sit down, my heart. No, not on my solitary chair; I cannot recommend it. The bed is better; I can sit there too.”
She obeyed him. She did not like to think he slept on that!
“This place makes me shudder, Gaston.”
“Dearest, after La Force and your other prison! It seems to me, now that you are here, like a palace! And you, what roof in Paris has the happiness of sheltering you?”
She told him. And then, holding his hand as he sat by her on the little bed, and turning round and round on his finger, for which it was now too loose, his emerald ring, she approached the subject so near her lips.
“Gaston, you spoke just now—not seriously, I know—of paying for your liberty. Suppose this plan for your rescue fails, which God forbid, but suppose it fails . . . could your liberty be bought?”
He looked at her so hard, so questioningly, that her hopes for the scheme sank lower still.
“I fear not,” he said very gravely. And then, after another pause, “What did you imagine could buy it, my wife?”
And by his very intonation she knew that she would never, with his consent, kneel to Joséphine Bonaparte. Yet she would not give up.
“With the ruby necklace,” she answered, and went on. But he soon stopped her.
“Valentine, you cannot really be proposing that I should stoop to beg my life of Bonaparte!”
She winced, for the tone was almost hard, and hurt. “No, no,” she interposed hastily, “not that you should! But I, your wife, approaching Mme Bonaparte, a wife herself, that is a very different thing. For me to do so is a most natural step, and when I point out to her what surely her husband cannot realise, the infamy of the means by which he took you, the violation of your safe-conduct——”
He had been staring at the floor, his mouth set. But again he broke in. “The First Consul has had plenty of time to reflect on that, Valentine. Believe me, he knows what he is doing.”
O, the place was cold, after all, deadly cold! And Gaston so inexorable——
“And you will not let me——” she began once more unsteadily.
“A thousand times no! I forbid it absolutely.”
Very low, Valentine said, “And what of me? Am I too to be sacrificed to the pride of your race? Can I not plead for myself, Gaston,—not with Bonaparte indeed, but with you, with you!”
He turned, he caught her quickly in his arms. “My darling, my very dear, don’t say that!” he exclaimed in a moved voice. “Don’t say that! It is not I indeed, nor pride——”
But she retorted, half sobbing, “Gaston, I almost think that if you were to be told you could have your life for the asking, you would not ask for it!”
Mercifully she could not guess that the sudden closer tension of his arms about her told how her shot had gone home, nor that her head almost rested at that moment on Hyde de Neuville’s letter. As for Gaston himself, who knew how truly, indeed, she had unwittingly spoken, he dared not take up her challenge. So he said, as calmly as he could, “My dearest, you are overwrought. And, Valentine, can you think that I should allow you to put yourself to a useless humiliation, you whom I love more than my life? For I do not think Mme Bonaparte would have any influence in the matter, and if she had, I dislike the idea of bribing her to use it, as much as you do, I am sure, in your heart. No, we will trust to that clever and audacious young man, Hyde de Neuville, with all the means he has at his disposal. To come and demand a prisoner with a forged order and a fictitious escort will be child’s play to him. And some day I will tell you the very good reason I have for not wishing my life to be begged by anyone. On the faith of a gentleman it is not merely pride. But for the present you must trust me.”
The present. He could speak of it like that! Then he really thought that there might be a future in which he would be a free man? Did he, did he? She looked hard at him, and suddenly out of the past shot the remembrance of that very different struggle which had ended their life at Mirabel. Then she had pleaded with him to do something worthy of himself; now . . . was it possible that she was urging him to consent to something unworthy? If that were so, thank God that he was, as before, unmoved. And as she studied the fine, rather worn profile she realised, too, how much less stern were the lines of his mouth. He had asked a little while ago, in jest, if she thought his brief captivity had changed him. But it was true; there was a deep change in him. The profound depression of those last days at La Vergne was gone. Why?
“Gaston,” she said on an impulse, “you are happier than when we parted.”
He turned his head, looked down into her eyes, and smiled. “You can guess why, my soul—you who know what was spared me. God was kind to me. The wine was poured, but I did not drink it. I never had to give up my sword; I never did consent to disarmament. And Finistère is saved all the same. Have I not reason to be happier?”
“And yet—O Gaston, Gaston, I must say it—if only you had listened to M. de Brencourt’s warning!”
He got up from the bed. “M. de Brencourt, I trust, has received the message I sent by M. Camain?”
“Yes,” said Valentine. “He sent one back by me to-day; that he accepted your apology. But he said—and it distressed me, Gaston—that he ought never to have brought the message himself. Your disbelief, he seemed to think, was his Nemesis.”
“That is true,” said her husband a little coldly. “To this hour I do not see how I could have believed in his good faith. But—I have been wanting to say this to you, my dearest—nothing could have made any difference. You think that if I had listened to his warning I should not be here to-day, nor those poor boys lying at Hennebont. But as far as I am concerned it would have been just the same. I must have gone to Vannes to give up my sword, even were I sure that I was walking into a snare. For if, scenting a trap, I had not gone, what would have happened? Brune would have stoutly denied the intended treachery, I should have been branded as failing to redeem my pledge, and Finistère would have been invaded after all. Do you not see that even if I had believed de Brencourt I could have done no differently?”
She looked up at him a moment, standing there with a prison wall for background. No, he could have done no differently, whatever a man with less strict a sense of honour might have done.
“You are you!” she said proudly. “But I will point out that aspect to the Comte—for he has suffered, Gaston. . . . But, my darling, there is something else I want to ask you.” She paused a moment. “If you will not let me beg your life, and I”—she faltered a little—“I accept your wishes . . . what is to happen if the plan for to-morrow fails? Will Bonaparte keep you in prison for years, perhaps?”
And the human spirit has such strange recesses that it really seemed to her that by throwing out this suggestion in words she could make it real, avoid a worse. For at Vannes they had told her——
Gaston de Trélan went suddenly over to the stove, and held out his hands for a moment to its warmth. His back was towards her. Then, sitting down beside her on the bed again, he said lightly, “He is not likely to have the chance of doing that—unless he captures me a second time.”
She saw that he was evading her. “Yes,” she broke in, seizing his arm, “I know; we have spoken about that. But the best plans sometimes fail. What then? Gaston, as you love me . . . Gaston, answer me!”
He looked down at the little hand gripping his arm, and after a moment put his other hand over it. “My wife, can you not see that the First Consul, a soldier himself, would not incur the odium of an almost unparalleled piece of military treachery unless it were worth his while? . . . My dear, there is no braver woman than you. I do you the honour, therefore, of telling you the truth. No, he will not keep me in prison. If I am not rescued I shall undoubtedly be shot . . . as an—example.”
She was answered. Her hand relaxed upon his arm, and he hastily slipped the arm itself about her as she fell away from him. But Valentine pulled herself still further away.
“Then I am going to disregard your wishes, Gaston! You do not know what you are saying. I give you fair warning. I am going to Mme Bonaparte—to the First Consul himself! You expect me to stand by and see you murdered when I might save you! What is your pride—which you cannot deny—against your life . . . and Gaston, Gaston, against my love for you, which you treat so lightly!”
He slipped to his knees and caught her hands to his breast. “O, my more than dear, do not say that!” he implored. “Is not your love for me all the light I have in the world? But at this hour there is something that calls more insistently even than love—something that, if it has to do with pride, is not linked with personal pride. I mean—honour. And you could not gain me my life if you asked—I am sure of it—yet if you were to make the attempt——”
But Valentine broke in with desperate logic. “You cannot know that I should fail! How could you? You cannot be sure till it has been tried. And I shall try! Then you can talk of failure!”
Gaston knelt there as pale as she. Surely, surely, he could find some way to stay her without revealing the cruel knowledge he had—that only he himself could ever be successful in an entreaty which even she could not move him to make.
“Valentine, sooner than think of you on your knees to that man I would go on my own—if that were conceivable. But it is not conceivable—not if he had a pardon ready sealed in his hand, not if he held it out to me! Think a moment, heart of my heart, and face it! When did any captured Breton or Vendean, even the humblest peasant, ever ask for mercy? Thousands of them have laid down their lives readily in the cause they fought for, and hundreds of gentlemen, too. And would you have me—through your mouth or my own it matters little—would you have me, a leader, be the first in either of those lists to play the recreant? Was it for that you wrought and gave me that scarf there—that when the crucial moment came I should deal the cause it represents such a stab in the back as my humiliation would be? Think of our enemies saying, ‘At the last moment the Duc de Trélan’s heart failed him, and he humbly besought the First Consul for his life.’ How would that sound in the streets of Paris next week . . . and when the King comes back?”
Valentine flinched. Her lips were grey. Indeed she did not like the sound of it.
“But, Gaston,” she said, those lips quivering, “for the cause you have done more than enough. You have done everything that mortal man could do, you, the last in arms—more than Cadoudal, who was so strong—more than all the rest!”
“And all in vain,” he finished sadly.
“No devotion is in vain!”
He smiled suddenly, the smile, somehow, of a young man. “My darling, that is what I have been trying to say. There are two sides to being made an ‘example’ of.”
But at that she gave a sharp exclamation and put her hands over her eyes.
Her husband’s face became still more drawn. “Valentine,” he said tenderly, but very gravely, “have you forgotten the night I came, when the tide of fortune was ebbing, to La Vergne. It was............