DE ROQUEMAURE'S WORK.
The weather had changed, the frost was gone, and the night was hot and
murky, while rain was falling, as alone, now, alas! St. Georges
mounted the summit of a hill that rose close above Troyes on the road
to Paris.
He had commenced his journey again.
It was a gruesome spot to which he had arrived on this night--an
elevation that surmounted a billowy country, over all of which, in the
summer time, the vines and corn grew in rich profusion, but which now
looked bare and melancholy as the southwest wind swept the rain clouds
over it beneath a watery moon. To the left of him there swung, upon
the exact crest of the hill, a corpse in chains, with, perched upon
its mouldering head, a crow--looking for the eyes long since pecked
out by others of its brood! To the right there rose a little wood,
through which the wind moaned and sighed onto his face, bringing with
it warm drops of rain.
Involuntarily he glanced up at the thing swinging above his
head--heartbroken as he was at having had to leave Troyes with his
child still unfound, he could not refrain from doing that!--and
wondered who and what the malefactor had been who was thus exalted.
And as he lowered his eyes from the ghastly mass of corruption, he saw
against the gibbet a thicker, darker thing than the gallows tree
itself--a thing surmounted by a white, corpselike face, from which
stared a pair of large gray eyes at him--eyes in which, as the clouds
scurried by beneath the moon, the moon itself shone dazzlingly,
lighting them up and showing their large pupils.
The horse saw them too, and started forward a pace or so until reined
in by his master's hand, and then whimpered and quivered all over,
while its rider, with his own flesh creeping, bent over his saddle and
peered toward the dark form surmounted by the pallid face and glaring
eyes.
"Who in Heaven's name are you?" St. Georges whispered, "and why select
this ghastly spot to stand in and affright passers-by? What are you,
man or woman?" and he leaned still further over his demi-pique to gaze
at the figure, though as he did so his right hand stole to his sword
hilt.
"A woman," a voice answered. "A woman who comes here to weep her
husband's death. He"--and she cast the staring gray eyes upward to the
object swinging with each gust of the wind in its chains--"was my
husband. Pass on, and leave me with his murdered remains."
"Murdered! Rather, poor soul, say executed. Murderers slay not thus."
Slowly the figure left the foot of the gibbet as he spoke, so that he
saw she was a tall young woman of the peasant class, clad in dark,
poor clothes, and slowly she advanced the few yards that separated
them, whereby he could observe her features and notice more plainly
the awful whiteness of her face.
"Murdered, I say!" she replied, still with the glare in her eyes.
"Murdered! Wrongfully accused, foully tried, falsely condemned. Done
to death wickedly as a _braconnier_. But he was none--yet there he
swings. O God! that life can be so easily torn from us by the
powerful!"
"Who, then, has done this deed?" St. Georges asked, deeply stirred by
the woman's wild sorrow, perhaps also by the gloomy surroundings. "Who
can do such things as this, even though powerful?"
"Who?" she replied. "Who? Who but one in these parts? The hound, De
Roquemaure!"
"De Roquemaure!" St. Georges exclaimed with a start that caused his
trembling horse to move forward, thinking that he had pressed its
flanks to urge it on, which start was perfectly perceptible to the
unhappy woman. "De Roquemaure!"
"You know him?" she asked eagerly, bending her face toward and up to
him so that he could see her pale lips--lips, indeed, almost as pale
as her cheeks--"you know him?"
"I know of him," St. Georges replied.
"And hate him, perhaps, as I do. It may be, would kill him as I would.
Is it so? Answer me?"
Carried away by this strange encounter, and with so strange a third
thing near them as _that_ above, which once had life as they had
still; carried away, too, by the woman's vehemence--a vehemence which
caused her, a peasant, to speak on equal terms with one whose dress
and accoutrements showed the difference between them--he answered
almost in a whisper:
"It may be," he said, bending down still further to her, "that I shall
be doomed to kill him some day. May be that he has merited death at my
hands."
"You hate him?"
"I fear I have but too just cause to hate him."
"As all do! As all! He lives," she went on, "but to slay and injure
others as he slew and injured him," and she half turned her head and
cast up her eyes at the miserable relic above her. Then she continued:
"Listen. _He_ was no poacher, no thief. But I--I--his wife--was
unfortunate enough to fall under the other's notice--he sought me--you
understand?--and _he_"--with again the upward glance--"resisted his
desires. You see the end!"
Looking into her eyes, observing her well-defined features, noticing
that, except for her awful pallor, she might well be a handsome woman,
especially when bright and happy instead of, as now, grief-stained,
St. Georges could understand. Then, while also he meditated as to
whether this De Roquemaure was a fiend that had taken human shape, the
woman went on:
"Daily almost some fall under his bane. But a week ago a stranger
here--one carrying a helpless babe--was set upon----"
"What!" and now he felt as though the universe was spinning round.
--"was set upon," she continued, "struck to death--he is dying now, or
dead----"
"And the babe?" St. Georges interposed.
"Carried off by those who did his bidding."
"O God! Lost again!" and the moan he uttered startled the woman out of
her own grief.
"Who are you?" she asked, her great eyes piercing him.
"As I believe, that child's unhappy father."
Aroused by this to forget her own sufferings, even to forget for the
moment the dreadful burden borne by the gallows tree, she thrust out
her hand and seized his sleeve.
"Who, then, is the dying man?" she whispered.
"I know not--but--but--for mercy's sake, in memory of the misery you
have suffered, in pity for mine, lead me to this man! You know where
he is; you can do so?"
"Come," she said. "Come. He is in my hut close by. We were very poor,
we had no better. Come. Tie your horse to a tree and follow me."
Dazed, scarce knowing whether he was awake or asleep and dreaming, he
obeyed her, leading the horse away some paces so that it should be no
more frightened by the horrible burden of the gibbet, and following
her through a thicket. In other circumstances he might have feared an
ambush; now, a thousand hidden enemies would not have held him back.
She wound her way along a trodden track leading down into the valley
below, but went only a few score yards when she stopped outside what
was indeed no better than a hut, a wooden building thatched with turf,
from a window in which there gleamed a ray of light. And she, placing
her ears to the door ere she pushed it open, said to him: "He lives
still. You can hear his breathing. Hark!"
"Thank God!" St. Georges said fervently. "Whoever he may be, he will
be able to tell me of the child. Open, I beg you; open in the name of
mercy!"
She obeyed him at once, thrusting the door open and drawing him in,
and then by the light of a miserable, small oil lamp that flickered on
a rude wooden table he saw stretched upon a pallet in a corner of the
place the dying man. Also he noticed that the room reeked and was
fetid with his hot breath and with another hot, dry odour that he knew
was the odour of blood.
In the shadow of the room St. Georges could see a white face, could
also perceive two great staring eyes turned up to the rafters; he
could hear, too, the drawn, labouring breath as it rattled through his
throat and chest, accompanied by a moan as it came forth.
"Quick!" he exclaimed, "quick! The light! He lives still, but his
minutes are numbered. He is dying, dying fast. Where is his wound?"
"In the lower part of his body, through him. A sword thrust. I have
tried to stanch it, but it flows always. I marvel he has lived so
long."
She brought the oil lamp forward as she spoke and held it near the
man, and St. Georges, kneeling down, looked at him. Then with a bound
he sprang up again, exclaiming: "He here! Heaven and earth! what
brings him here? How comes he in this mystery? What--what does it
mean, what portend?"
"You know him?"
"Yes, I know him."
The man stretched upon the pallet was Pierre, the Bishop of Lodeve's
man-servant!
* * * * *
"Speak!" said St. Georges to him a moment later, smothering for the
time his wonder and astonishment. "Speak if you can. One word from you
may alter my whole life, my child's life. Speak ere you die."
It seemed, however, that he would never speak again. But, also, it
seemed as if all consciousness was not gone from him yet--as if he
recognised the man kneeling once more at his side, while again the
woman held the lamp above them. As far as he was able with his failing
strength, he endeavoured to shrink from St. Georges while as he did so
his eyes, distended either with fear or horror, glared at him. But
from his mouth there came no sound but the laboured breathing.
Again St. Georges besought him to speak; plied him with questions.
Was the child taken from him Dorine; by whom had it been taken; how
had he whom St. Georges had never seen until he slept at the bishop's,
and whom he had left at Dijon, found his way here only to be murdered?
And still no answer came, while once the dying man tried with his
feeble hand to push St. Georges away, and still stared in ghastly
horror at him.
At last the end arrived. The breathing grew faster and faster and more
laboured; it rattled more horribly in his chest; a spasm convulsed
him, and he sank back exhausted, while from his face and throat which
were all uncovered a heavy sweat poured. Then suddenly he raised
himself to almost a sitting posture with his hands, and, with a
rolling glance that seemed to take in all the hut, he sank back slowly
again. Yet as he did so his lips moved, and a whisper came from
them--a whisper that seemed to frame the words "De Roquemaure." A
moment after he was dead.
* * * * *
"Tell me all you know," St. Georges said to the woman a few moments
later. "How he came here, how he was set upon and done to death? I
must ride on and on to-night, yet ere long, if I can compass it, I
will return to Troyes and never leave it until I have found my child
and know all. Tell me."
"He came here," she said, "five days ago--was brought here by me, for
I saw him attacked and wounded to the death, as you know now. I was up
there by--by him who swings upon that hellish gibbet; the dawn was at
hand."
"The dawn," St. Georges whispered to himself. "The dawn of five days
ago, when D'Arpajou's horse rode into the town. The day Dorine was
lost."
"Then," the woman continued, "through the coming day I saw him
advancing from the town upon this road, carrying a bundle under his
arm."
"Ah!"
"Yet not so fast but that two others who had left the gate behind him
came swifter than he. One, a man, young and supple, clad in the De
Roquemaure russet--no need of that to tell me that devil had a hand in
what was to be done; the other, a woman, all in sombre black, a mask
upon her face."
"A woman in it!"
"Ho!" said the peasant, "doubt not! He has his women, too, at his beck
and call. Easy enough to find one of the scourings of Troyes--perhaps
an innocent girl once, before she knew him!--to do his bidding."
"Go on."
"Swiftly they came behind him, yet silently, too, the man ahead of the
woman, each on different sides of the way, the former outstripping the
latter, so fast did he come. Then, at last, the hunted one, this dead
one here, knew that it was so; he turned and saw he was pursued. At
first he made as though about to run for it; then, because, may be,
the burden he bore was heavy, he paused. Next he placed the child upon
the ground--for now I knew, I saw, what it was as he did so--and he
drew his sword with one hand, took a pistol from his belt and held it
in the other, and so awaited his pursuer."
Again St. Georges said beneath his breath, "Go on."
"The other came swiftly up, paused once himself--perhaps he feared the
doubly armed man--then looked round at the masked woman, who seemed to
say something. Doubtless she urged him on, and again he came forward
until he and the fugitives were face to face."
"Yes," came from St. Georges's close-set lips.
"What they said I know not; I was too far away. But their action was
swift. De Roquemaure's man made as though he would seize upon the
child lying at the roadside--the disguised woman creeping ever
nearer--when the other fired his pistol at him, and missed. I saw that
as the smoke cleared away, for when it had done so they were closely
engaged with their swords. Some passes they made; once it seemed as if
the fugitive won upon the other, for I saw his blade go through his
left sleeve; then, ere he could recover himself, the other had thrust
his sword through his body--I heard him shriek; I saw him fall! A
moment later the woman had snatched up the child and was hurrying back
to the city, the man following after her, his left arm hanging
straight by his side, as though still from pain. And I ran to this one
here and saw that he had got his death. 'Tis strange he died not
sooner than to-night. Strange he should linger so long."
"How got you him here?"
"My brother, who hates the De Roquemaures as I do--as God knows I have
cause to do--works near here on his farm. I dragged that dead
creature, all insensible as he was, into the copse, then fetched Jean,
and so, together, we brought him. Say," the woman continued, leaning
forward under the lamp to regard the soldier fixedly, "you are a
gentleman, an officer of some regiment. You can tell me. Is not so
foul a crime as this enough to doom De Roquemaure, if brought home to
him?"
"If brought home to him, perhaps. But the nobles are powerful. You say
that he is so, especially in this neighbourhood."
"Curse him, yes!" she replied, her livid lips drawn tight together.
"Yet not forever. There are those who will set the snare and trap him
yet."
"I pray God!" St. Georges replied. "He has wronged many; surely
justice will yet be done."