Meanwhile, from outside the door, amidst the kicks and beatings which the master of the house was administering, his voice arose:
"What devil's work is doing in there?" he called out. "And what means this clash of arms and firing while I wait outside? Answer, you hounds Are you snarling between yourselves, or whom have you there?"
For reply, Andrew struck the door with the butt of the pistol and called back:
"You desire to know?"
"Ay, answer! Whose voice is that?" And it appeared as though his own voice had changed somewhat as he asked the question.
"The voice," Andrew replied, "of Philip Vause's brother."
It seemed to him-his ears on the alert to catch the other's next words-as though that reply produced a gasp from the man outside; also, he thought, an awful, blasphemous curse. One thing for certain it did produce-silence henceforth. De Bois-Vallée spoke no more.
But, now, he had to return to those around him, since, though Beaujos had fled behind the pillar as Andrew raised his pistol, it was evident that he had not desisted, but only retired temporarily from the attack.
He was coming at him again, supported this time by the others; was whispering-though so loudly and excitedly that each word was plainly to be heard, "You, at his legs, you, seize his sword arm; I will run him through. If that fails-shoot him dead."
"Gad so," said Andrew, answering him, "we will see."
Then the affray began. One man against four-a helpless, shaking woman crouching behind that one.
Did ever sword flash as flashed that sword wielded by the intruder, the pistols being unused at present! Beaujos' strokes were parried as though by magic; like streaks of lightning the outnumbered man's weapon darted forth; one, two, three passes it made, and, with a clang, the steward's blade fell to the floor, his right arm pierced through-the muscles and sinews cut to pieces, while, uttering a moan, the wielder sank down slowly to the ground. Yet, as Andrew drew his blade back, a serving-man leaped to his sword-arm, seized it by both hands and, with the whole weight of his body, bore it down to Andrew's side. But, even now, he was not conquered; with his left hand he dealt the fellow such a blow as sent him reeling away-he was free again!
Free to face the others coming at him, their pistols ready, their swords raised! In his movements his own pistol had fallen to the ground and he did not see, nor know, what was happening behind. Yet, a moment later, a report rang in his ears, one of the servitors threw up his arms with a shriek and fell headlong before him-the fingers clenched at the first joint above the palms-sure sign the heart was reached!
'Twas Marion's hand had slain him! Her hand which had grasped the fallen pistol!
Still, there were the others to be dealt with, and he braced himself to do it.
Again his sword flashed, beat down the blade of the servitor who struck at him, would, in a moment, have sent him to join the man whom Marion had shot, when another report rang through the hall, a lurid gleam of fire almost blinded him-and his own noble weapon dropped from his hand; a faintness came over him, and he reeled back heavily against the door.
As he did so, through the fast coming darkness that seemed to be enveloping him he saw the remaining servitors raise their swords as though to strike him down, saw also, behind them, another form advancing swiftly from a low arched passage at the extremity of the hall; recognized De Bois-Vallée!
And, as Andrew saw him, it seemed to his numbed senses that he heard his enemy say:
"Hold your hand. He is for me alone. Injure him not."
Then the darkness became intense and he knew no more.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE WEIRD WOMAN
Andrew Vause raised himself on his left elbow-though his right arm and shoulder were so intolerably painful that it caused him agony to do so-and endeavoured to peer into the darkness in which he was enveloped. Endeavoured to discover, or imagine, where he was; also to remember what had happened.
Yet he could recollect nothing, had no more conception where he was, or why he was lying on his back suffering excruciating agony accompanied by a burning thirst, than he would have possessed had he been but that moment born.
All was chaos to him.
As, however, the lowest form of creature on which nature confers existence, even though owning no power of reasoning or memory, or the knowledge of why or how it so exists, yet seeks for the necessities that existence requires and for the wherewithal to supply its wants, so the man lying there sought for some assuagement of that intolerable thirst. Sought for it by endeavouring unconsciously to moisten his lips with his dry and parched tongue-then, failing in this attempt, relapsed into the lethargy, followed by the oblivion, which had previously been his.
Yet again, later on-though he knew it not himself, no more than he knew that many more hours had passed since first his eyes had opened-he awoke a second time, still dazed, still unconscious of who, or what, or where he was; knowing only as the unreasoning brute-beast knows that it is suffering, yet also knowing not why.
But now his agony was so intense-the agony of thirst! for the other pain, that of his right side, might be borne-that, like some wounded creature, he writhed and tossed about upon whatever object it might be on which he lay, and in his writhings and the tossings of his long arms his left hand struck something. Something that, even to his bemused mind, seemed to give promise of containing the wherewithal to quench his thirst. Whereon the long fingers twining round that object found that it held water. Then, still with no knowledge of what he did, with nothing beyond that instinct shared by the lowest of creatures to tell him that what he was doing would bring him relief, he drew the vessel nearer and drank. Drank and drank, long and copiously, until at last there was no drop left, then sank back once more, and once more lapsed into unconsciousness.
* * * * * *
Again he awoke, more hours afterwards, with still the impenetrable darkness all around him, and with still the dazed blankness of memory and the inability to recall who or what he was, yet with now through all his density of mind some feeble glimmering of humanity working in his brain. Some hazy idea coursing through that brain and suggesting that he was a thing that had life in it, that he had not only just begun to exist, but, instead, had been existing heretofore. That he was a creature not used to lying paralyzed and helpless here, but, on the contrary, one full of action.
Memory was beginning to assert itself! Though, even as it did so, he slept again, went off once more into oblivion.
At last, awakening for the fourth time, with the terrible thirst gone, he awoke also to life and reason. A little longer-after lying still in the darkness-he recalled the fact that his name was Andrew Vause.
After that the rest was easy, indeed, too easy; for, with this clue to aid him, the whole of the past surged up in such huge waves of remembrance that they almost served to engulf memory altogether, That past rushed in upon him, recollections crowded swift and fast upon his mind and hurtled one another away; gradually he remembered all. All! The passage from the mountain slope to the roof; the meeting with Marion Wyatt; the still unexplained reasons why this English girl should be a prisoner here in the Lorrainer's house; the attempted escape; the fight and his defeat. But, beyond and after that, only the blank occasioned by his insensibility-and now this black impenetrable darkness!
Where was he? He must know that! Always a man of action, and with the promptings to action still working in him, all wounded as he was, he made, therefore, an attempt to rise, but found that attempt useless. His leg was attached by a chain to something at the foot of where he lay, a chain that, as he moved the leg, hung heavily upon it above the ankle and clasped it tight. He was a prisoner. That much was certain But what else?
His hands, which were free-though the right still caused him great pain when he endeavoured to move it-told him he lay close above a floor upon some stretched-out rug or skin; his other senses revealed to him that he was in some large, vast place into which the air entered freely; a damp, cold air, too, that blew upon his face, yet was grateful since it cooled the fever that raged within him still. But that was all; he could discover nothing further, could, from where he was, touch nothing beyond the bare boards around him, excepting only the vessel which he had some time previously-he could not recollect whether it was an hour or a day ago! – drunk from. No more.
Yet now, lying there-half dozing sometimes; sometimes forgetful of everything and recalling next each incident as it had happened and in its proper sequence, as well as with strange clearness-it seemed that a sound broke on his ears. A sound as of one who slowly mounted some steps, or stairs. A footstep that came nearer each time it fell. And, suddenly, as he lay listening, wondering if, with this approaching footfall, his doom approached too, if he was now to pay with his life for the entrance into his enemy's house, a light sparkled in his eyes from a slight distance, then blazed full into them, and a woman carrying a lanthorn in her hand stood before him. A woman who had mounted some steps close by him, and thus entered the place in which he lay. By the light of that lanthorn he recognized where he was namely, the garret beneath the roof of the mansion of Bois-le-Vaux!
She held the lanthorn high above her head, peering down at him under its rays for some time as though scrutinizing the great form stretched before her, and, perhaps, did not see that his eyes were open and looking at her from under his long and much dishevelled hair as curiously as she regarded him. Whereby he had time and opportunity for observing what manner of woman this was who stood there.
She was no longer young, that he saw from the great streaks of grey which mingled with her hair, that once must have been as raven black as his own was now; was, indeed, a woman of about fifty years of age. Yet no man could regard her and fail to observe that she must also once have been beautiful, though with a beauty spoilt and marred by the workings of strong passions within-sensual passions, as testified by the full thick lips and large gleaming eyes-which even now shone with a strange, fierce brightness! – cruel, vindictive passions, as shown by the manner in which those lips closed tightly together; by the broad jaw, and by the perpendicular line between the eyes, which caused a frown to be always upon her face.
Fixing her glance at last full on him she saw he was awake and conscious, and, so seeing, moved the lanthorn a little and peered under it into his eyes. Then she spoke, while as she did so her features either assumed a cynical smile or seemed, in the flickering light of the lamp, to assume it.
"So," she said, "you are the man who found his way into this house by a road none have ever been known to travel before in our day. The man who thought to carry off your countrywoman-almost succeeded in doing so! Ciel! at least you are a brave one."
"I am the man," Andrew assented calmly; "who are you?"
It seemed, however, to be no part of her intention to tell him this, since, after casting another glance at his stretched-out form, she strode off to that part of the garret where the ladder, or steps, from below entered it, and, stooping down to the floor, picked up a jar of water and a platter of bread which she had placed there ere she advanced towards him. Then she returned to where he lay, put them by his side, and, taking up the other water-pitcher which he had drained when alone in the darkness, prepared to retire. But Andrew-who hoped that, even from this stern-looking woman (who was, he did not doubt, that custodian of Marion Wyatt of whom the peasant had spoken-the woman who had loved De Bois-Vallée's father and hated, in consequence, his mother) he might obtain some information as to what had been the conclusion of the events which had occurred in the hall-put out his hand as though to stop her going, and exclaimed:
"Tell me, I beseech you-as a woman yourself-what has befallen that countrywoman of mine. Is all well with her?"
Pausing in her withdrawal to gaze down at him, while the dark, piercing eyes looked into his, she made the enigmatic answer:
"As well as before. As well as it is ever like to be," then again directed her steps towards where the ladder descended from the room.
"And I-" he cried, endeavouring thereby to arrest her steps, "I-what is to be done to me-what attempted? Tell me that."
But she answered no more, continuing still upon her way to the steps. Yet, had Andrew been a timorous man who feared for whatever was about to befall him, he might have shuddered even as much as though she had told him he was to be done to death that very hour. For she turned her dark, grey-flecked head over her shoulder and looked at him with those piercing eyes-pausing in her progress as she did so-and in the eyes, nay! in the whole face, there was so mocking, devilish an expression-in the flickering rays of the lanthorn it seemed to be a grin! – that he divined there was no hope for him. That look told as plainly as a hundred words that he was doomed! Was in the hands of one who would forego nothing of the opportunity that had fallen in his way-and this woman knew it, gloated over it!
Yet, with what he felt to be his fate foretold by that baleful glance, this creature with her air of weird sardonic espièglerie fascinated him, even as the snake fascinates those who cannot fly from it, and, as she strode slowly towards the other end of the vast garret, he followed her with his eyes, unable to withdraw them. For it seemed to him that in her he saw a living semblance of those women, those Fates or Furies, of whom his mother and gentle, scholarly Philip had read to him in his wild boyish days; the dark and terrible women who held the web of men's lives in their hands and tore it as they listed. And he wondered if she, this woman, whose worn face told of fierce and stormy passions not yet spent-perhaps only subdued and half burnt out-might hold his fate. Was she to be the administrator of some terrible death marked out for him by the man in whose power he now was-did that hideous glance she had given him over her shoulder mean this, or mean, instead, that though death might not come to him at her hands she knew well how it must and would come?
Watching her still, half awed, half bewitched by her weirdness, he saw her suddenly stop ere she approached close to the ladder-head, gaze on the ground, then flash the lanthorn's miserable light on the spot at which she stared; next, stoop swiftly to the floor-supple now as a girl of twenty! – pick something up from the floor and, holding it in the palm of her disengaged hand, regard it by the lamp's gleam. And, if her face had stirred him with an undefined feeling of repulsion as she cast that leering, evil look over her shoulder, it horrified him now by the glance of hate it bore as she inspected the object in her hand.
For it was the face of a devil glaring on an enemy, and that a well-hated one; the face of a fiend regarding that which it would blast to all eternity if possessing the power to do so. The mouth twitching-the full lips livid now, and with the teeth clenched over the lower one so that they seemed dug into it, until Andrew wondered no blood spurted forth-the eyes staring, the last remaining colour gone from the already dead-ivory of the cheeks-the woman gazed Medusa-like at what she held in her hand.
Then, suddenly, her long, loose gown swishing the floor as she moved, she strode back to him, her movements resembling a tigress's now; and, standing quivering before him, she said-while her voice sounded hoarse from out her throat-
"This! This! This! This cursed thing! It has fallen from your body-must have done so when you were brought here. How came it yours? Answer!"
"If," replied Andrew calmly, yet marvelling now at what the "cursed thing" could be, the finding of which had stirred her so-observing, too, the shaking of her limbs and the wild tempestuous fury that held her in its grasp, "If madame would deign to say what it is that she has found which moves her so-"
"What it is! What!" she repeated. Then exclaimed, "Man, trifle not with me, or I shall anticipate your death by some few hours. God! why bring this before my eyes? This! This picture of Fleurange Debrasques! His mother! And in your possession. In yours! It is some trick 'twixt you and him! Are you in truth his enemy?" and she bent her livid face down and peered into his face. "Or is this a scheme to torture me even in my swift-coming age, as, oh my God," and she wailed out these last words, "I have been tortured all my life by her. By her and by her memory," and, while she spoke, she struck the miniature against the side of the lanthorn as though demented.
In a moment it seemed to Andrew's now cleared brain that here was an accident, a chance, that might go far to help him to win, perhaps, this wild cat, this creature of mad passions, to his side. To win her-to! – to! – ah! it seemed more than one might hope for! Yet he would make the attempt. His life-Marion's life-might hang on what he could do with this woman.
"That," he said quietly, "Oh! that. The miniature. Why, 'tis nothing. Only his mother's portraiture. True, I have heard she was a Debrasques. And beautiful as the morning. Is it not so?"
Yet he had to pause as he looked now at the fury above him. For, by his remarks on the beauty of the woman whose likeness she held in her hand, he saw that he had goaded her almost too far. That she was trembling from head to foot, that a little more and he would spoil his chance. He must goad her further-but by degrees.
As he so paused she controlled herself. Calmed herself enough to say, "how came it in your possession? Answer that."
"'Tis simple. He dropped it fleeing from Turenne's army-fleeing, as I do pride myself, from me. For in solemn truth I am his enemy. Yet, I pray, an honest one. And, therefore, because I know he loved that lady, his mother, dearly, because also I knew his father worshipped her from the moment he set eyes on her first, it was my intention to have returned the jewel to him."
Andrew never moved his eye from off her as he spoke; he knew it might have been death to do so. If she had a weapon about her, his words were as like as not to cause her to use it on him. He was driving her to desperation; only-he did not want that desperation vented on him. And, watching the woman thus, he knew that it must find its vent somehow. Those livid lips-dashed now with flecks of foam-those glaring eyes, told clearly of the fire burning within.
"His father worshipped her! His father worshipped her!" she repeated, bringing out the words, as it seemed to him lying there before her, with an agonizing effort. "His father worshipped her. From the moment he set eyes on her first. My God! that they had been blinded first! That she had never come across my- Yet," calming herself with another strong effort, while she took a step nearer, so that now she stood rigid before him-"how know you that? How? How? You never knew nor saw his father-nor," and she seemed to force her glance to rest upon the medallion-"this woman, Fleurange Debrasques-his wife."
In Andrew's mind there rang the Lorrainer's words, "She loved his father and, they say, hated his mother par consequent" – he knew that his cue was here. Also he knew he must be careful. Must be ready to ward off any blow from hidden knife or dagger that might come; be prepared to feel himself struck to the heart with some bullet from concealed pistol when next he spoke. Yet the train was laid. The time had come to say his last words.
And he said them.
"Know it? How know it? Is not the tale oft told hereabouts? Even I, a stranger, have heard it! Sometimes with laughter-sometimes with pity for another-sometimes-"
"With pity for another! What other?"
As she spoke no statue of marble, no corpse, was ever more rigid than this woman standing there before him. Nor more white!
"What other?"
"One whom he thought he loved at first," the words coming clear and distinct from Andrew's lips, "yet found he cared nothing for when Fleurange Debrasques-ay! that was her name-met his view. One whom they say he even then meant to discard, having grown weary of her; one whom he did discard when Mdlle. Debrasques made him love her. Have you never heard this?"
* * * * * *
The woman spoke no more, nor, as Andrew had thought would happen, did she spring at him. Instead, without one word, she turned on her heel and slowly made her way to the ladder, where, grasping the side-rail, she descended it. Yet, ere she did so, she turned her face once and glanced at him, the look she gave him piercing to his heart.
And, as he flung himself back on his rug, he muttered in the darkness by which he was once more surrounded:
"Heaven forgive me! Heaven forgive me! I had to do it-it may win her to our side; help Marion Wyatt and myself to our freedom. It had to be done. Yet, it has driven her mad-if she was not already so. Heaven forgive me!"