Fortunio and the Marquise reached the window side by side, and they were
in time to hear a dull splash in the waters fifty feet below them. There
was a cloud over the little sickle of moon, and to their eyes, fresh
from the blaze of candle-light, the darkness was impenetrable.
“He is in the moat,” cried the Marquise excitedly, and Valerie, who sat
on the floor whither she had slipped when Fortunio shook her off, rocked
herself in an agony of fear.
To the horrors about her--the huddled bodies lying so still upon the
floor, the bloody footprints everywhere, the shattered furniture,
and the groans of the man with the wounded thigh--to all this she was
insensible. Garnache was dead, she told herself; he was surely dead; and
it seemed as if the very thought of it were killing, too, a part of her
own self.
Unconsciously she sobbed her fears aloud. “He is dead,” she moaned; “he
is dead.”
The Marquise overheard that piteous cry, and turned to survey the girl,
her brows lifting, her lips parting in an astonishment that for a second
effaced the horrors of that night. Suspicion spread like an oil stain
in her evil mind. She stepped forward and caught the girl by one of her
limp arms. Marius, paler than his stunning had left him, leaned more
heavily against the door-post, and looked on with bloodshot eyes.
If ever maiden avowed the secret of her heart, it seemed to him that
Valerie avowed it then.
The Marquise shook her angrily.
“What was he to you, girl? What was he to you?” she demanded shrilly.
And the girl, no more than half conscious of what she was saying, made
answer:
“The bravest gentleman, the noblest friend I have ever known.”
Pah! The Dowager dropped her arm and turned to issue a command to
Fortunio. But already the fellow had departed. His concern was not with
women, but with the man who had escaped him. He must make certain that
the fall had killed Garnache.
Breathless and worn as he was, all spattered now with blood from the
scratch in his cheek, which lent him a terrific aspect, he dashed
from that shambles and across the guard-room. He snatched up a lighted
lantern that had been left in the doorway and leapt down the stairs
and into the courtyard. Here he came upon Monsieur de Tressan with a
half-dozen fellows at his heels, all more or less half clad, but all
very fully armed with swords and knives, and one or two with muskets.
Roughly, with little thought for the dignity of his high office, he
thrust the Lord Seneschal aside and turned the men. Some he ordered off
to the stables to get horses, for if Garnache had survived his leap and
swum the moat, they must give chase. Whatever betide, the Parisian must
not get away. He feared the consequences of that as much for himself as
for Condillac. Some five or six of the men he bade follow him, and never
pausing to answer any of Tressan’s fearful questions, he sped across
the courtyard, through the kitchens--which was the nearest way--into the
outer quadrangle. Never pausing to draw breath, spent though he was, he
pursued his flight under the great archway of the keep and across the
drawbridge, the raising of which had been that night postponed to await
the Lord Seneschal’s departure.
Here on the bridge he paused and turned in a frenzy to scream to his
followers that they should fetch more torches. Meanwhile he snatched the
only one at hand from the man-at-arms that carried it.
His men sprang into the guard-room of the keep, realizing from his
almost hysterical manner the urgent need for haste. And while he waited
for them, standing there on the bridge, his torch held high, he scanned
by its lurid red light the water as far as eye could reach on either
side of him.
There was a faint movement on the dark, oily surface for all that no
wind stirred. Not more than four or five minutes could have elapsed
since Garnache’s leap, and it would seem as if the last ripple from the
disturbance of his plunge had not yet rolled itself out. But otherwise
there was nothing here, nor did Fortunio expect aught. The window of the
Northern Tower abutted on to the other side of the chateau, and it was
there he must look for traces of the fugitive or for his body.
“Hasten!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Follow me!” And without waiting
for them he ran across the bridge and darted round the building, his
torch scattering a shower of sparks behind him on the night, and sending
little rills of blood-red light down the sword which he still carried.
He gained the spot where Garnache must have fallen, and he stood below
the radiance that clove the night from the shattered window fifty feet
above, casting the light of his torch this way and that over the
black bosom of the moat. Not a ripple moved now upon that even, steely
surface. Voices sounded behind him, and with them a great glare of
ruddy light came to herald the arrival of his men. He turned to them and
pointed with his sword away from the chateau.
“Spread yourselves!” he shouted. “Make search yonder. He cannot have
gone far.”
And they, but dimly realizing whom they sought, yet realizing that they
sought a man, dashed off and spread themselves as he had bidden them,
to search the stretch of meadowland, where ill must betide any fugitive,
since no cover offered.
Fortunio remained where he was at the edge of the moat. He stooped,
and waving his torch along the ground he moved to the far angle of the
chateau, examining the soft, oozy clay. It was impossible that a man
could have clambered out over that without leaving some impression. He
reached the corner and found the clay intact; at least, nowhere could
he discover a mark of hands or a footprint set as would be that of a man
emerging from the water.
He retraced his steps and went back until he had reached the eastern
angle of the chateau, yet always with the same result. He straightened
himself at last, and his manner was more calm; his frenzied haste was
gone, and deliberately he now raised his torch and let its light shine
again over the waters. He pondered them a moment, his dark eyes musing
almost regretfully.
“Drowned!” he said aloud, and sheathed his sword.
From the window overhead a voice hailed him. He looked up and saw the
Dowager, and, behind her, the figure of her son. Away in the meadows
the lights of his men’s torches darted hither and thither like playful
jack-o’-lanterns.
“Have you got him, Fortunio?”
“Yes, madame,” he answered with assurance. “You may have his body when
you will. He is underneath here.” And he pointed to the water.
They appeared to take his word for it, for they questioned him no
further. The Marquise turned to mademoiselle, who was still sitting on
the floor.
“He is drowned, Valerie,” she said slowly, watching the girl’s face.
Valerie looked up. Her eyes were very wide, and her lips moved for a
second. Then she fell forward without a word. This last horror, treading
on the heels of all those that already had assailed her, proved too
great a strain for her brave spirit. She had swooned.
Tressan entered at that moment, full of questions as to what might be
toward, for he had understood nothing in the courtyard. The Marquise
called to him to help her with the girl, Marius being still too faint,
and between them they bore her to her chamber, laid her on the bed, and,
withdrawing, closed the door upon her. Then she signed to Marius and the
Seneschal.
“Come,” she said; “let us go. The sight and smell of the place are
turning me sick, although my stomach is strong enough to endure most
horrors.”
She took up one of the candle-branches to light them, and they went
below and made their way to the hall, where they found Marius’s page,
Gaston, looking very pale and scared at the din that had filled the
chateau during the past half-hour or so. With him was Marius’s hound,
which the poor boy had kept by him for company and protection in that
dreadful time.
The Marquise spoke to him kindly, and she stooped to pat the dog’s
glossy head. Then she bade Gaston set wine for them, and when it was
fetched the three of them drank in brooding, gloomy silence.
The draught invigorated Marius, it cheered Tressan’s drooping spirits,
and it quenched the Dowager’s thirst. The Seneschal turned to her
again with his unanswered questions touching the end of that butchery
above-stairs. She told him what Fortunio had said that Garnache was
drowned as a consequence of his mad leap from the window.
Into Tressan’s mind there sprang the memory of the thing Garnache had
promised should befall him in such a case. It drove the colour from his
cheeks and brought great lines of fearful care into sharp relief about
his mouth and eyes.
“Madame, we are ruined!” he groaned.
“Tressan,” she answered him contemptuously, “you are chicken-hearted.
Listen to me. Did he not say that he had left his man behind him when he
came to Condillac? Where think you that he left his man?”
“Maybe in Grenoble,” answered the Seneschal, staring.
“Find out,” she told him impressively, her eyes on his, and calm as
though they had never looked upon such sights as that very night had
offered them. “If not in Grenoble, certainly, at least, somewhere in
this Dauphiny of which you are the King’s Lord Seneschal. Turn the whole
province inside out, man, but find the fellow. Yours is the power to
do it. Do it, then, and you will have no consequences to fear. You have
seen the man?”
“Ay, I have seen him. I remember him; and his name, I bethink me, is
Rabecque.”
He took courage; his face looked less dejected.
“You overlook nothing, madame,” he murmured. “You are truly wonderful.
I will start the search this very night. My men are almost all at
Montelimar awaiting my commands. I’ll dispatch a messenger with orders
that they are to spread themselves throughout Dauphiny upon this quest.”
The door opened, and Fortunio entered. He was still unwashed and
terrible to look upon, all blood-bespattered. The sight of him drove a
shudder through Tressan. The Marquise grew solicitous.
“How is your wound, Fortunio?” was her first question.
He made a gesture that dismissed the matter.
“It is nothing. I am over full-blooded, and if I am scratched, I bleed,
without perceiving it, enough to drain another man.”
“Here, drink, mon capitaine,” she urged him, very friendly, filling
him a cup with her own hands. “And you, Marius?” she asked. “Are you
recovering strength?”
“I am well,” answered Marius sullenly. His defeat that evening had
left him glum and morose. He felt that he had cut a sorry figure in the
affair, and his vanity was wounded. “I deplore I had so little share in
the fight,” he muttered.
“The lustiest fight ever I or any man beheld,” swore Fortunio. “Dieu!
But he was a fighter, that Monsieur de Garnache, and he deserved a
better end than drowning.”
“You are quite sure that he is drowned?”
Fortunio replied by giving his reasons for that conclusion, and they
convinced both the Marquise and her son indeed they had never deemed
it possible that the Parisian could have survived that awful leap. The
Dowager looked at Marius, and from him to the captain.
“Do you think, you two, that you will be fit for tomorrow’s business?”
“For myself,” laughed Fortunio, “I am ready for it now.”
“And I shall be when I have rested,” answered Marius grimly.
“Then get you both to rest, you will be needing it,” she bade them.
“And I, too, madame,” said the Seneschal, bending over the hand she held
out to him. “Good-night to you all.” He would have added a word to wish
them luck in the morrow’s venture; but for the life of him he dared not.
He turned, made another of his bows, and rolled out of the room.
Five minutes later the drawbridge was being raised after his departure,
and Fortunio was issuing orders to the men he had recalled from their
futile search to go clear the guard-room and antechamber of the Northern
Tower, and to bear the dead to the chapel, which must serve as a
mortuary for the time. That done he went off to bed, and soon after the
lights were extinguished in Condillac; and save for Arsenio, who was, on
guard, sorely perturbed by all that had befallen and marvelling at the
rashness of his friend “Battista”--for he had no full particulars of the
business--the place was wrapped in sleep.
Had they been less sure that Garnache was drowned, maybe they had
slumbered less tranquilly that night at Condillac. Fortunio had been
shrewd in his conclusions, yet a trifle hasty; for whilst, as a matter
of fact, he was correct in assuming that the Parisian had not
crawled out of the moat--neither at the point he had searched, nor
elsewhere--yet was he utterly wrong to assume him at the bottom of it.
Garnache had gone through that window prepared to leap into
another--and, he hoped, a better world. He had spun round twice in the
air and shot feet foremost through the chill waters of the moat, and
down until his toes came in contact with a less yielding substance, yet
yielding nevertheless. Marvelling that he should have retained until now
his senses, he realized betimes that he was touching mud--that he was
really ankle deep in it. A vigorous, frantic kick with both legs at once
released him, and he felt himself slowly re-ascending to the surface.
It has been often said that a drowning man in his struggles sees his
whole life mirrored before him. In the instants of Garnache’s ascent
through the half stagnant waters of that moat he had reviewed the entire
situation and determined upon the course he should pursue. When he
reached the surface, he must see to it that he broke it gently, for at
the window above were sure to be watchers, looking to see how he had
fared. Madame, he remembered, had sent Tressan for muskets. If he had
returned with them and they should perceive him from above, a bullet
would be sent to dispose of him, and it were a pity to be shot now after
having come through so much.
His head broke the surface and emerged into the chill darkness of the
night. He took a deep breath of cold but very welcome air, and moving
his arms gently under water, he swam quietly, not to the edge of the
moat but to the chateau wall, close under which he thought he would be
secure from observation. He found by good fortune a crevice between two
stones; he did not see it, his fingers found it for him as they groped
along that granite surface. He clung there a moment and pondered the
situation. He heard voices above, and looking up he saw the glare of
light through the opening he had battered.
And now he was surprised to feel new vigour running through him. He had
hurled himself from that window with scarce the power to leap, bathed in
perspiration and deeming his strength utterly spent. The ice-cold waters
of the moat had served, it would seem, to brace him, to wash away his
fatigue, and to renew his energies. His mind was singularly clear and
his senses rendered superacute, and he set himself to consider what he
had best do.
Swim to the edge of the moat and, clambering out, take to his legs was
naturally the first impulse. But, reflecting upon the open nature of the
ground, he realized that that must mean his ruin. Presently they would
come to see how he had fared, and failing to find him in the water they
would search the country round about. He set himself in their place. He
tried to think as they would think, the better that he might realize
how they would act, and then an idea came to him that might be worth
heeding. In any case his situation was still very desperate; on that
score he allowed himself no illusions. That they would take his drowning
for granted, and never come to satisfy themselves, he was not optimist
enough to assume.
He abandoned his grip of the wall and began to swim gently toward the
eastern angle. If they came out, they must lower the bridge; he would
place himself so that in falling it should cover him and screen him from
their sight. He rounded the angle of the building, and now the friendly
cloud that had hung across the moon moved by, and a faint, silver
radiance was upon the water under his eyes. But yonder, ahead of him,
something black lay athwart the moat. At once he knew it for the bridge.
It was down. And he had the explanation in that he remembered that the
Lord Seneschal had not yet left Condillac. It mattered little to him one
way or the other. The bridge was there, and he made the best of it.
A few swift, silent strokes brought him to it. He hesitated a moment
before venturing into the darkness underneath; then, bethinking him that
it was that or discovery, he passed under. He made for the wall, and as
he groped along he found a chain depending and reaching down into the
water. He caught at it with both hands and hung by it to await events.
And now, for the first time that night, his pulses really quickened.
There in the dark he waited, and the moments that sped seemed very long
to him, and they were very anxious. He had no good sword wherewith to
defend himself were he attacked, no good, solid ground on which to take
his stand. If he were discovered, he was helpless, at their mercy, to
shoot, or take, or beat to death as best they listed. And so he waited,
his pulses throbbing, his breath coming short and fast. The cold water
that had invigorated him some minutes ago was numbing him now, and
seemed to be freezing his courage as it froze the blood in his veins,
the very marrow in his bones.
Presently his ears caught a rush of feet, a sound of voices, and
Fortunio’s raised above the others. Heavy steps rang on the bridge
over his head, and the thud of their fall was like thunder to the man
beneath. A crimson splash of light fell on the moat on either side of
him. The fellow on the bridge had halted. Then the steps went on. The
light flared this way and that, and Garnache almost trembled, expecting
at every moment that its rays would penetrate the spot where he was
hanging and reveal him cowering there like a frightened water-rat. But
the man moved on, and his light flared no longer.
Then others followed him. Garnache heard the sounds of their search. So
overwrought was he that there was a moment when he thought of swimming
to the edge and making across the country to the north while they were
hunting the meadows to the east; but he repressed the impulse and stayed
on. An eternity did it seem before those men returned and marched once
more over his head. A further eternity was it until the clatter of
hoofs on the courtyard stones and their thunder on the planks above him
brought him the news that Tressan was riding home. He heard the hoofs
quicken, and their loud rattle on the road that led down to the Isere,
a half-mile away; and then, when the hoof-beats grew more distant, there
came again the echo of voices up above.
Was it not over yet? Dear God! would it never end? He felt that a few
moments more of this immersion and he should be done for utterly; his
numbness must rob him of the power to cross the moat.
Suddenly the first welcome sound he had heard that night came to his
ears. Chains creaked, hinges groaned, and the great black pall above
him began gradually to rise. Faster it went, till, at last, it fell back
into position, flat with the wall of the chateau, and such little light
as there was from the moon was beating down upon his frozen face.
He let the chain go, and, with strokes swift and silent as he could
contrive, he crossed the water. He clambered up the bank, almost bereft
of strength. A moment he crouched there listening. Had he moved too
soon? Had he been incautious?
Nothing stirred behind him to confirm his fears. He crept softly
across the hard ground of the road where he had landed. Then, when the
yielding, silent turf was under his feet, he gave not another thought
for his numbness, but started to run as a man runs in a nightmare, so
little did the speed of his movements match the pace of his desire to
set a distance between himself and Condillac.