THE HEART OF CAIN.
Seven hours had passed.
The moon had just dropped below the narrow horizon of the camp, but to
eyes which looked up from the blackness of the hollow the form of the
nearest sentinel, erect on the edge of the cup, showed plain against
the paler background of sky. The hour was the deadest of the night;
but, as the stillest night has its noises, the camp was not without
noises. The dull sound of horses browsing, the breath of a thousand
sleepers, the low whinny of a mare, or the muttered word of one who
dreamed heavily and spoke in his dream, these and the like sounds fed
a murmurous silence that was one with the brooding heaviness of a June
night.
Odette de Villeneuve--the ears that drank in the voices of the
slumbering host were hers--stood half-hidden in the doorway of her
quarters and listened. The inner darkness had become intolerable to
her. The wattled walls, though they were ventilated by a hundred
crevices, stifled her. Pent behind them she fancied a hundred things;
she saw on the curtain of blackness drawn faces and staring eyes; she
made of the faintest murmur that entered now a roar of voices, and now
the hoarse beginnings of a scream. Outside, with the cooler air
fanning her burning face, she could at least lay hold on reality. She
was no longer the sport and plaything of her own strained senses. She
could at least be sure that nothing was happening, that nothing had
happened--yet. And though she still breathed quickly and crouched like
a fearful thing in the doorway, here she could call hate to her
support, she could reckon her wrongs and think of her lover, and
persuade herself that this was but a nightmare from which she would
awake to find all well with herself and with him.
If only the thing were over and done! Ah, if only it were done! That
was her feeling. If only the thing were done! She bent her ear to
listen; but nothing stirred, no alarm clove the night; and it could
want little of morning. She fancied that the air struck colder, laden
with that chill which comes before the dawn: and eastwards she thought
that she discerned the first faint lightening of the sky. The day was
at hand and nothing had happened.
She could not say on the instant whether she was sorry or glad. But
she was sure that she would be sorry when the sun rose high and shone
on her enemy's triumph, and Charles and Roger and Bonne, whom she had
taught herself to despise, saw their choice justified, and the side
they had supported victorious. The triumph of those beneath us is hard
to bear; and at that picture the Abbess's face grew hard, though there
was no one to see it. The blood throbbed in her head as she thought of
it; throbbed so loudly that she questioned the reality of a sound that
a moment later forced itself upon her senses. It was a sound not
unlike the pulsing of the blood; not terrible nor loud, but
rhythmical, such as the tide makes when it rises slowly but
irresistibly to fill some channel left bare at the ebb.
What was it? She stood arrested. Was it only the blood surging in her
ears? Or was it the silent uprising of a multitude of men, each from
the place where he lay? Or was it, could it be the stealthy march of
countless feet across the camp?
It might be that. She listened more intently, staying with one hand
the beating of her heart. She decided that it was that.
Thereon it was all she could do to resist the impulse to give the
alarm. She had no means of knowing in which direction the unseen band
was moving. She could guess, but she might be wrong; and in that case,
at any moment the night might hurl upon her a hundred brutes whose
first victim as they charged through the encampment she must be. She
fancied that the darkness wavered; and here and there bred shifting
forms. She fancied that the dull sound was drawing nearer and growing
louder. And--a scream rose in her throat.
She choked it down. An instant later she had her reward, if that was a
reward which left her white and shuddering--a coward clinging for
support to the frail wall beside her.
It was a shrill scream rending the night; such an one as had distended
her own throat an instant before--but stifled in mid-utterance in a
fashion horrible and suggestive. Upon it followed a fierce outcry in
several voices, cut short two seconds later with the same abruptness,
and followed by--silence. Then, while she clung cold, shivering, half
fainting to the wattle, the darkness gave forth again that dull
shuffling, moving sound, a little quickened perhaps, and a little more
apparent.
This time it caused an alarm. Sharp and clear came a voice from the
ridge, "What goes there? Answer!"
No answer was given, and "Who goes there?" cried a voice from a
different point, and then "To arms!" cried a third. "To arms! To
arms!" And on a rising wave of hoarse cries the camp awoke.
The tall form of the Bat seemed to start up within a yard of the
Abbess. He seized a stick that hung beside a drum on a post, and in a
twinkling the hurried notes of the Alert pulsed through the camp. On
the instant men rose from the earth about him; while frightened faces,
seen by the rays of a passing light, looked from hut-doors, and the
cries of a waiting-maid struggling in hysterics mingled with the words
of command that brought the troopers into line and manned the ground
in front of the Vicomte's quarters. A trooper flew up the sloping
rampart to learn from the sentry what he had seen, and was back as
quickly with the news that the guards knew no more than was known
below. They had only heard a suspicious outcry, and following on it
sounds which suggested the movement of a body of men.
The Bat, bringing order out of confusion--and in that well aided by
Roger, though the lad's heart was bursting with fears for his
mistress--could do naught at the first blush but secure his position.
But when he had got his men placed, and lanthorns so disposed as to
advantage them and hamper an attack, he turned sharply on the man.
"Did they hear my lord's voice?" he asked.
"It was their fancy. Certainly the outcry came from that part of the
camp."
"Then out on them!" Roger exclaimed, unable to control himself. "Out
on them. To saddle and let us charge, and woe betide them if they
stand!"
"Softly, softly," the Bat said. "Orders, young sir! Mine are to stand
firm, whatever betides, and guard the women! And that I shall do until
daylight."
"Daylight?" Roger cried.
"Which is not half an hour off!"
"Half an hour!" The lad's tone rang with indignation. "Are you a man
and will you leave a woman at their mercy?" He was white with rage and
shaking. "Then I will go alone. I will go to their quarters--I,
alone!" As he thought of the girl he loved and her terrors his heart
was too big for his breast.
"And throw away another life?" the Bat replied sternly. "For shame!"
"For shame, I?"
"Ay, you! To call yourself a soldier and cry fie on orders!"
He would have added more, but he was forestalled by the Vicomte. In
his high petulant tone he bade his son stand for a fool. "There are
women here," he continued, sensibly enough, "and we are none too many
to guard them, as we are."
"Ay, but she" Roger retorted, trembling, "is alone there."
"A truce to this!" the Bat struck in, with heat. "To your post, sir,
and do your duty, or we are all lost together. Steady, men, steady!"
as a slight movement of the troopers at the breastwork made itself
felt rather than seen. "Pikes low! Pikes low! What is it?"
He saw then. The commotion was caused by the approach of a group of
men, three or four in number, whose neighbourhood one of the lights
had just betrayed. "Who comes there?" cried the leader of the
Countess's troopers, who was in charge of that end of the line. "Are
you friends?"
"Ay, ay! Friends!"
If so, they were timorous friends. For when they were bidden to
advance to the spot where the Bat with the Vicomte and Roger awaited
them, their alarm was plain. The foremost was the man who had spoken
for the peasants at the debate some days before. But the smith's
boldness and independence were gone; he was ashake with fear. "I have
bad news," he stammered. "Bad news, my lords!"
"The worse for some one!" the Bat answered with a grim undernote that
should have satisfied even Roger. As he spoke he raised one of the
lights from the ground, and held it so that its rays fell on the
peasants' faces. "Has harm happened to the hostages?"
"God avert it! But they have been carried off," the man faltered
through his ragged beard. It was evident that he was thoroughly
frightened.
"Carried off?"
"Ay, carried off!"
"By whom? By whom, rascal?" The Bat's eyes glared dangerously. "By
Heaven, if you have had hand or finger in it----" he added.
"Should I be here if I had?" the man answered, piteously extending his
open hands.
"I know not. But now you are here, you will stay here! Surround them!"
And when the order had been carried out, "Now speak, or your skin will
pay for it," the Bat continued. "What has happened, spawn of the
dung-heap?"
"Some of our folk--God knows without our knowledge"--the smith
whined--"brought in a party of the men on the hill----"
"The Old Crocans from the town?"
"Ay! And they seized the--my lord and the lady--and got off with them!
As God sees me, they were gone before we were awake!" he protested,
seeing the threatening blade with which Roger was advancing upon him.
The Lieutenant held the lad back. "Very good," he said. "We shall
follow with the first light. If a hair of their heads be injured, I
shall hang you first, and the rest of you by batches as the trees will
bear!" And with a black and terrible look the Bat swore an oath to
chill the blood. The leader of the Countess's men repeated it after
him, word for word; and Roger, silent but with rage in his eyes, stood
shaking between them, his blade in his hand.
The Vicomte, his fears for the safety of his own party allayed, turned
to see who were present. He discovered his eldest daughter, leaning as
if not far from fainting, against the doorway of the Duke's quarters.
"Courage, girl," he said, in a tone of rebuke. "We are in no peril
ourselves, and should set an example. Where is your sister?"
"I do not know," the Abbess replied shakily. It was being borne in on
her that not two lives, but the lives of many, of scores and of
hundreds, might pay for what she had done. And she was new to the
work. "I have not seen her," she repeated with greater firmness, as
she summoned hate to her support, and called up before her fancy the
Countess's childish attractions. "She must be sleeping."
"Sleeping?" the Vicomte echoed in astonishment. He was going to add
more when another took the words out of his mouth.
"What is that?" It was Roger's voice fiercely raised. "By Heaven! It
is Fulbert."
It was Fulbert. As the men, of whom some were saddling--for the light
was beginning to appear--pressed forward to look, the steward crawled
out of the gloom about the brook, and, raising himself on one hand,
made painful efforts to speak. He looked like a dead man risen; nor
did the uncertain light of the lanthorns take from the horror of his
appearance. Probably he had been left for dead, for the smashing blow
of some blunt weapon had beaten in one temple and flooded his face and
beard with blood. The Abbess, faint and sick, appalled by this first
sign of her handiwork, hid her eyes.
"Follow! Follow!" the poor creature muttered, swaying as he strove to
rise to his feet. "A rescue!"
"With the first light," the Bat answered him. "With the first light!
How many are they?"
But he only muttered, "Follow! A rescue! A rescue!" and repeated those
words in such a tone that it was plain that he no longer understood
them, but said them mechanically. Perhaps they had been the last he
had uttered before he was struck down.
The Bat saw how it was with him; he had seen men in that state before.
"With the first light!" he said, to soothe him. "With the first light
we follow!" Then turning to his men he bade them carry the poor fellow
in and see to his hurts.
Roger sprang forward, eager to help. And they were bearing the man to
the rear, and the Abbess had taken heart to uncover her eyes, while
still averting them, when a strange sound broke from her lips--lips
blanched in an instant to the colour of paper. It caught the ear of
the Bat, who stood nearest to her. He turned. The Abbess, with arm
outstretched, was pointing to the door of the Countess's hut. There,
visible, though she seemed to shrink from sight, and even raised her
hand in deprecation, stood the Countess herself.
"By Heaven!" the Bat cried. And he stood. While Roger, in place of
advancing, gazed on her as on a ghost.
She tried to speak, but no sound came. And for the Abbess she had as
easily spoken as the dead. Her senses tottered, the slim figure danced
before her eyes, the voices of those who spoke came from a great way
off.
It was the Vicomte who, being the least concerned, was first to find
his voice. "Is it you, Countess?" he quavered.
The Countess nodded. She could not speak.
"But how--how have you escaped?"
"Ay, how?" the Bat chimed in more soberly. He saw that it was no
phantom, though the mystery seemed none the less for that. "How come
you here, Countess? How--am I mad, or did you not go to their quarters
at sundown?"
"No," she whispered. "I did not go." She framed the words with
difficulty. Between shame and excitement she seemed ready to sink into
the earth.
"No? You did not? Then who--who did go? Some one went."
She made a vain attempt to speak. Then commanding herself--
"Bonne went--in my place," she cried. And clapping her hands to her
face in a paroxysm of grief, she leant, weeping, against the post of
the door.
They looked at one another and began to understand, and to see. And
one had opened his mouth to speak, when a strangled cry drew all eyes
to the Abbess. She seemed to be striving to put something from her.
Her staring eyes, her round mouth of horror, her waving fingers made
up a picture of terror comparable only to one of those masks which the
Greeks used in their tragedies of fate. A moment she showed thus, and
none of those who turned eye on her doubted that they were looking on
a stress of passion beside which the Countess's grief was but a puny
thing. The next moment she fell her length in a swoon.
* * * * *
When she came to herself an hour later she lay for a time with eyes
open but vacant, eyes which saw but conveyed no image to the ailing
brain. The sun was still low. Its shafts darting through the
interstices in the wall of the hut were laden with a million dancing
motes, which formed a shifting veil of light between her eyes and the
roof. She seemed to have been gazing at this a whole aeon when the
first conscious thought pierced her mind, and she asked herself where
she was.
Where? Not in her own lodging, nor alone. This was borne in on her.
For on one side of her couch crouched one of her women; on the other
knelt the Countess, her face hidden. In the doorway behind the head of
the bed, and so beyond the range of her vision, were others; the low
drone of voices, her father's, the Duke's, penetrated one by one to
her senses still dulled by the shock she had suffered. Something had
happened then; something serious to her, or she would not lie thus
surrounded with watchers on all sides of her bed. Had she been ill?
She considered this silently, and little by little began to remember:
the flight to the camp, the camp life, the Duke's hut in which she had
passed most of her time in the camp. Yes, she was in the Duke's hut,
and that was his voice. She was lying on his couch. They had been
besieged, she remembered. Had she been wounded? From under half-closed
lids she scrutinised the two women beside her. The one she knew. The
other must be her sister. Yes, her sister would be the first to come,
the first to aid her. But it was not her sister. It was----
She knew.
She called on God and lay white and mute, shaking violently, but with
closed eyes. The women rose and looked at her, and suggested remedies,
and implored her to speak. But she lay cold and dumb, and only from
time to time by violent fits of trembling showed that she was alive.
What had she done? What had she done?
The women could make nothing of her. Nor when they had tried their
utmost could her father, though he came and chid her querulously; his
tone the sharper for the remorse he was feeling. He had had an hour to
think; and during that hour the obedience which his less cherished
daughter had ever paid him, her cheerful care of him, her patience
with him, had risen before him; and, alas, with these thoughts, the
memory of many an unkind word and act, many a taunt flung at her as
lightly as at the dog that cumbered the hearth. To balance the
account, and a little perhaps because the way in which Odette took it
was an added reproach to him, he spoke harshly to the Abbess--such is
human nature! But, for all the effect his words had on her, he might
have addressed a stone. That which she had done thundered too loudly
in her ears for another's voice to enter.
She had not loved her sister over dearly, and into such love as she
had given contempt had entered largely. But she was her sister. She
was her sister! Memories of childish days in the garden at Villeneuve,
when Bonne had clung to her hand and run beside her, and prattled,
and played, and quarrelled, and yielded to her--being always the
gentler--rose in her mind; and memories of little words and acts, and
of Bonne's face on this occasion and on that! And dry-eyed she shook
with horror of the thing she had done. Her sister! She had done her
sister to death more cruelly, more foully, more barbarously, than if
she had struck her lifeless at her feet.
An age, it seemed to her, she lay in this state, cold, paralysed,
without hope. Then a word caught her ear and fixed her attention.
"They have been away two hours," Joyeuse muttered, speaking low to the
Vicomte. "They should be back."
"What could they do?" the Vicomte answered in a tone of despair.
"Forty swords can do much," Joyeuse answered hardily. "Were I sound I
should know what to do. And that right well!"
"They started too late."
"The greater reason they should be back! Were all over they would be
back."
"I have no hope."
"I have. Had they desired to kill them only," the Duke continued with
reason, "the brutes had done it here, in a moment! If they did not
hope to use them why carry them off?"
But the Vicomte with a quivering lip shook his head. He was still
thinking--with marvellous unselfishness for him--of the daughter who
had borne with him so long and so patiently. For des Ageaux there
might be hope and a chance. But a woman in the hands of savages such
as those he had seen in the town on the hill! He shuddered as he
thought of it. Better death, better death a hundred times than that.
He did not wish to see her again.
But in one heart the mention of hope had awakened hope. The Abbess
raised herself on her elbow. "Who have gone?" she asked in a voice so
hollow and changed they started as at the voice of a stranger. "Who
are gone?" she repeated.
"All but eight spears!" the Duke answered.
"Why not all?" she cried feverishly. "Why not all?"
"Some it was necessary to keep," Joyeuse replied gently. "Not one has
been kept that could go. If your sister can be saved, she will be
saved."
"Too late!" the Vicomte muttered. And he shook his head.
The Abbess sank back with a groan. But a moment later she broke into a
passion of weeping. The cord that had bound her heart had snapped. The
first horror of the thing which she had done was passing. The first
excuse, the first suggestion that for that which she had not intended
she was not answerable, was whispering at the threshold of her ear. As
she wept in passionate, in unrestrained abandonment, regarding none of
those about her, wonder, an almost resentful wonder, grew in the
Vicomte's heart. He had not given her credit for a tithe, for a
hundredth part of the affection she felt for her sister! For the Duke,
he, who had seen her consistently placid, garbed in gentle dignity,
and as unemotional as she was beautiful, marvelled for a different
reason. He hailed the human in her with delight; he could have blessed
the weeping girl for every tear that proclaimed her woman. By the
depth of her love for her sister he plumbed her capacity for a more
earthly passion. He rejoiced, therefore, as much as he marvelled.
There was one other upon whom Odette's sudden breakdown wrought even
more powerfully; and that was the Countess. While the sister remained
stunned by the dreadful news and deaf to consolation, the poor child,
who took all to herself and mingled shame with her grief, had not
dared to speak; she had not found the heart or the courage to speak.
Awed by the immensity of the catastrophe, and the Abbess's stricken
face, she had cowered on her knees beside the bed with her face
hidden; and weeping silently and piteously, had not presumed to
trouble the other with her remorse or her useless regret. But the
tears of a woman appeal to another woman after a fashion all their
own. They soften, they invite. No sooner, then, had Odette proclaimed
herself human by the abandonment of her grief than the Countess felt
the impulse to throw herself into her arms and implore her
forgiveness. She knew, none better, that Bonne had suffered in her
place; that in her place and because of her fears--proved only too
real--she had gone to death or worse than death; that the fault lay
with herself. And that she took it to herself, that her heart was full
of remorse and love and contrition--all this she longed to say to the
sister. Before Odette knew what to expect or to fear, the younger
woman was in her arms.
One moment. The next Odette struck her--struck her with furious,
frantic rage, and flung her from her. "It is you! You have done this!
You!" she cried, panting, and with blazing eyes. "You have killed her!
You!"
The young girl staggered back with the mark of the Abbess's fingers
crimson on her cheek. She stood an instant breathing hard, the
combative instinct awakened by the blow showing in her eyes and her
small bared teeth. Then she flung her hands to her face. "It is true!
It is true!" she sobbed. "But I did not know!"
"Know?" the Abbess cried back relentlessly; and she was going to add
other and madder and more insulting words, when her father's face of
amazement checked her. She fell back sullenly, and with a gesture of
despair turned her face to the wall.
The Vicomte was on his feet, shocked by what had passed. He began to
babble words of apology, of excuse; while Joyeuse, ravished, strange
to say, by the spirit of the woman he had deemed above anger and above
passion, smiled exultant, wondering what new, what marvellous, what
incomparable side of herself this wonderful woman would next exhibit.
He who had exhausted all common types, all common moods, saw that he
had here the quintessence both of heaven and earth. Her beauty, her
meekness, her indignation, her sorrow--what an amalgam was here! And
how all qualities became her!
Had Roger been there he had taken, it is possible, another view. But
he was not; and presently into the halting flow of the Vicomte's words
crept a murmur, a tramp of feet, a sound indescribable, but
proclaiming news. He broke off. "What is it?" he said. "What is it?"
"News! Ay, news, for a hundred crowns!" the Duke answered. He moved to
the door.
The Countess, her face bedabbled with tears, tears of outraged pride
as well as grief, stayed her sobs and looked in the same direction.
Even the Abbess caught the infection, and raising her head from the
pillow listened with parted lips and staring eyes. News! There was
news. But what was it? Good or bad? The Abbess, her heart standing
still, bit her lip till the blood came.
The murmur of voices drew nearer.