(1) It was Hyde de Neuville, half beside himself with grief and fury, who brought the Comte de Brencourt the news, which at ten o’clock the young conspirator had only just heard, and which he could hardly believe. Yet there was no doubt about its truth. And someone must break it to the Duchesse.
But not, surely, the stunned and horrified man to whom this announcement had just been made. He stood frozen, in his room at the little h?tel garni, repeating with a stammering tongue, “Dead!—dead! shot this morning! . . . there is some mistake . . .”
“I wish there were!” cried Hyde de Neuville passionately. “I wish to God there were! I wish we had tried for last night—why were we such fools as to delay? I do not yet know whether this morning’s work was prompted by design, or just by evil chance. And the Duchesse——”
“Don’t suggest that I shall tell her!” cried the Comte wildly. “De Neuville, for pity’s sake——”
“But I must not lose a moment in going to Bertin and the others,” said the young man. “We may all find ourselves in prison before nightfall—and to no purpose. Besides, I am a stranger to her; you an old acquaintance—the Duc’s late chief of staff. You are the man, Comte. Tell her the whole plan has failed—tell her her husband is suddenly taken ill—tell her anything to soften the blow!” And he was gone.
The Comte sank down and buried his head in his arms. “I told her that he was dead, once. Now it is true—now it is true!”
He could not do it. He must find someone else. Roland—he would break the news best, if he could get hold of him. O God, to think he had once wished this, had lied for it, had tried to bring it about with his own hand! And—shot at Mirabel! The idea was profoundly shocking to him even in the midst of the shock of the execution itself. He seemed to recall a hateful precedent for it, for he remembered the young Prince de Talmont, captured in the Vendean war and shot in front of the castle of Laval, which had belonged to his family for nine centuries.
What was the time? Suppose Mme de Trélan were to go to the Temple this morning! “The Duc is gone, Madame la Duchesse; he has driven out to his chateau of Mirabel. Will Madame follow?” Why did he see the Temple as it had once been, a princely residence, and why did he imagine that dialogue? He must be going mad. She would not go there to-day; the order was for yesterday. Yesterday she had seen him; and did not know she should see him no more in life.
Or stay, suppose Valentine had taken a fancy to visit Mirabel this morning with Roland. It was most unlikely that she would do such a thing; yet his distracted mind showed him the Duchesse and Roland arriving there and finding God knew what—soldiers, a crowd, and in front of the great fa?ade——
M. de Brencourt sprang up. That wholly baseless picture decided him. He could not let her run that dreadful risk. Oblivious of the fact that, long before she got to Mirabel, if ever she went, she must meet the tidings of what had taken place there, he crammed on his hat, and without a redingote, despite the cold, rushed out in the direction of the Rue de Seine.
“No, M. de Céligny has gone out,” replied Suzon’s servant. “Mme de Trélan is within.”
His last hope was vanished then. He never thought of Mme Tessier. There was no help for it. Far rather would he have been in the dead man’s place at Mirabel.
He was only just in time, apparently, for the first thing that he saw on being ushered into Mme Tessier’s parlour was Valentine’s hat and gloves on the table. And she, standing by the hearth, had her cloak on already—a grey cloak with grey fur at the throat, in which he would always see her now to the end of the world. He contrived, he knew not how, to get across the room and to kiss her hand before she noticed anything unusual.
“I am glad I had not gone out, Monsieur de Brencourt,” she said in an ordinary tone, such as she had managed to preserve nearly all the time in these days of strain. “I was only waiting for Roland to return.”
And then she saw his face and said, quite quietly, “I am afraid you bring some bad news.”
“It is not good.” His voice—he heard it himself—was the voice of a stranger.
“The plan has miscarried somehow, Comte—you have come to tell me that?”
He bent his head. “Yes. Yes, Madame. I . . . came to tell you that.”
A pause. Slowly, slowly the colour faded in the face over the grey fur collar that he would see to the end of the world.
“It will not be carried out to-night, then?”
(“Nor any other night.”) No, he lacked courage to say that yet.
“No, Madame. It . . . it . . . it has proved impossible.”
“This cloak is too hot,” said Valentine de Trélan suddenly. She unfastened the collar. “Perhaps I will not go out after all.” She made as if she were going to throw it off, then sat down instead in the armchair by the fire. “But time is precious, Monsieur de Brencourt,” she said, looking at him fixedly—he could feel that, though he could not meet her eyes.
“No,” he said, trembling, and very low, “time is of no value now.”
But either she had not heard, or she did not understand. He could see that; so he tried again, and got out more. “Madame, I must tell you that the time for this plan is past for ever.”
He felt the impact of these words on her mind, yet he felt also that she was gathering herself up in spirit either to resist their meaning or to infuse fresh will into him. He saw her hands clench themselves a little as she said,
“If that has failed, then, you will make another, a better plan, will you not?”
O, why would she not understand! He raised his eyes at last in agony from her clenched hands to her face. “Valentine . . .” he said, and, had her life depended on it, could get out no other word. His throat had closed up. He turned away and hid his face.
The fire crackled like a burning house; outside in the street a boy was whistling like a fife . . . and yet it was so still.
At last her voice came, and it sounded sick with horror. “Monsieur de Brencourt, what—what, in God’s name, are you trying to tell me?”
“Not to go to the Temple to-day—not to go——”
“They have taken him away?” she interrupted sharply, her hands on the arms of the chair. “Transferred him to another prison?”
At last he turned and faced her, at last he got it out in its entirety. “Yes, he is gone—but not to another prison. He is gone where I wish I were gone too, before I had to tell you. It is all over, Valentine, all over . . .”
She fell back in her chair. If only he might kneel and kiss her feet, try—though he knew he could not—to comfort her. But the memory of this scene’s parody, played out falsely before, lay like a bitter flood between him and her. This time it was true, his news.
Steps outside, thank God! Roland, perhaps, or Mme Tessier, whom he had forgotten. He hurried to the door, caught at the passerby—Suzon.
“Go in to the Duchesse at once,” he said. “I have had to bring her terrible news—I can bear no more. The Duc was shot at Mirabel this morning. Go in, I say!” He pushed her in.
(2)
On the very threshold, as he opened the door into the street to escape, M. de Brencourt all but ran into an officer of hussars. The officer was young, handsome, rigid, set about the mouth.
“Does Mme de Trélan lodge here?” he asked with a foot on the doorstep.
“Yes,” replied the Comte. “Excuse me, Monsieur——”
The officer barred the way. “Pardon me a moment. I must see her.”
“You cannot,” retored de Brencourt, stopped despite himself. “She cannot see anyone.”
“She knows then!” said the young man, and there was relief in his tone.
And instantly, looking at the expression on his visage, the Comte understood.
“I have just told her,” he said.
“Thank God for that,” returned the hussar. “But I have a message to deliver—and I pray you, Monsieur, to give it to her, as you have . . . done the other thing. I come straight from Mirabel.”
“Monsieur,” replied the Comte hoarsely. “Once it was prophesied to me that I should do this lady a service. I did not know what it would be—now, I think I do . . . I have just rendered it, and not for the hope of heaven would I go through the like again. You must give the message yourself, if it was from . . . him.”
“There is no verbal message from . . . the late Duc de Trélan,” answered the young hussar, and as he paused at the name and its qualification he suddenly brought his heels together and saluted. And the Comte, for all his pre-occupation with his own feelings, saw that his mouth was twitching. “There is no verbal message,” he repeated, “but I have two letters, and the Duc’s decoration. I am charged, however, to say, that Mme de Trélan is at liberty to go to Mirabel when and how she will, that her privacy will be respected in every way, and that if she wishes the body to be buried in the chapel there——”
“Is this the First Consul’s magnanimity!” flared out the Comte. And, thinking he heard a sound behind him in the house, and suddenly becoming conscious, too, that all this was taking place on the doorstep, he seized hold of the young officer’s hanging dolman. “Bring that cursed uniform of yours inside!” he muttered, and, opening the door of a little room close by, pushed the glittering and jingling form inside.
Once sheltered by a closed door the young Republican turned on him almost savagely. “Do you think that you are the only man heartbroken over this horrible business?” he demanded. “Do you realise that I have had to help carry it out—that it was I, at least, who commanded the escort, that it was I who had to rouse M. de Trélan early this morning with the news, had to drive with him from Paris to Mirabel, had to sit my horse like a statue with my sword drawn, as though I approved, while it was done—I who have been one of Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp in Egypt and Syria, and have worshipped his very stirrup leather . . . and am going to throw up my commission the moment I leave this house!”
There was no doubt of his emotion now; two tears were running down his face. He could not have been more than five and twenty. He raised a gauntleted hand and brushed them away.
“Why, then, did you——” began M. de Brencourt in a suddenly weary voice.
“Because if I had not commanded the escort someone else would have done so. When I found I was detailed for that duty, I tho............