IV
Constance de Plélan had walked on very rapidly, only looking back now and again to see whether the police agent had followed her. The road was now quite lonely; not even a belated passer-by was in sight. After a few minutes, the girl halted where a side-track, inches deep in mud, struck at right angles and, cutting across an intervening meadow, plunged into a dense part of the wood at some distance from the road. For a few seconds Constance appeared to hesitate; she pressed her trembling hands against her heart, which was beating so furiously that she felt sick and faint. Next moment, however, she started to run down the side-track as fast as the muddy ooze would allow her. A few minutes later she had reached the margin of the wood and, no longer hesitating, boldly entered the thicket.
The road along which the police agent was striding with his habitual quick and firm step wound in and out of thick masses of coppice; the footpath which Constance de Plélan followed so unerringly led by a direct short cut straight to the thicket where Blue-Heart lay in wait.
The shades of evening were falling fast; the wintry sunset had long since ceased to glimmer among the trees. Blue-Heart was cowering in his hiding-place, grasping his musket and marvelling why Mademoiselle had not yet led her quarry into the trap which had been so carefully prepared. The hated police agent had not yet come. But Blue-Heart was patient and content to bide his time. He knew that the hatred he felt for the Man in Grey had its counterpart in the heart of Constance de Plélan. The secret agent had only been in the province four months, and already the Chouans had felt the weight of his relentless courage, his astuteness and his power. M. le Comte d'Artois, brother and messenger of the uncrowned King, had been sent back to England with ignominy through the instrumentality of this one man, and when Mademoiselle de Plélan had asked for a volunteer to lay this powerful enemy low, Blue-Heart had offered himself, heart and soul, ready to strike and take every risk. If only the quarry would come, Blue-Heart's musket was not likely to err.
Suddenly the Chouan drew in his breath. His whole attitude grew at once more rigid and more tense. Cowering in the thicket, he shouldered his musket. The road stretched out before him, through a veil of coppice, for a length of some thirty feet or so, and at a distance of less than twenty paces from the spot where he crouched, on the alert, holding his breath now that his keen ear had detected the sound of approaching footsteps.
Soon these footsteps drew nearer and Blue-Heart muttered an imprecation: "Malediction!" came between his clenched teeth. "Mademoiselle said that the devil would come alone!"
But his rough, nervy hands grasped the musket with undiminished vigour. If that hated police agent came escorted with a whole posse of his own men, Blue-Heart was not going to be done out of his vengeance.
Then suddenly the footsteps stopped and the melancholy call of a screech-owl pierced the silence of the night.
"White-Beak!" muttered the crouching Chouan as he lowered his musket. "What is he doing here at this hour?"
He, too, raised his fingers to his mouth, and the cry of a screech-owl rang shrilly through the wood. Next moment three or four men pushed their way cautiously through the thicket.
"Well, is it done?" queried the foremost amongst them, as soon as he had become conscious of Blue-Heart's presence close by.
"Done? No!" growled the latter. "What have you come for?"
"To lend you a hand," replied White-Beak, "with the body of the vermin."
"Too soon! I haven't got him yet."
"No hitch, I hope," broke in one of the others.
"None."
"Then we can give you a hand now as well as later. The fox may be armed."
"He may," rejoined Blue-Heart. "Go to the other side of the road," he added, "so as to intercept him in the rear. You have your musket?"
"No."
"Then you can hold him while I use mine. It will make assurance doubly sure."
They spoke in whispers scarcely audible above the manifold murmurs of the wood. Now, like creeping, furtive beasts of prey, White-Beak and his companions crawled on hands and knees through the thicket and across the road, and thence under cover once more. The trap was indeed well set for the quarry which could not fail to walk into it very soon. Indeed, less than five minutes later there came from some little way down the road the sound of a measured and firm footfall.
With rapid steps the hated police agent was drawing nearer. A grim chuckle escaped the lips of the old Chouan as he once more shouldered his musket. The evening gloom was gradually enfolding the wood in its embrace. On either side of the road the miscreants in their hiding-place were peeping through the undergrowth, watching for the approach of their prey. Presently they could discern the vague outline of his slender figure walking unhesitatingly towards them. Within a few seconds he would be passing right in front of them, at a distance of less than twenty paces. Blue-Heart thought that he would wait and take no risks and only pull the trigger when the victim was quite near, the aim sure, and the fast gathering darkness not likely to play him any illusive trick. Not a sound, not the flutter of a dead leaf nor the crackling of a twig would have revealed to an untrained ear the presence of a band of assassins, and for another minute or so the police agent walked along, wary and alert as was his wont but as yet unsuspicious. His footstep sounded unhesitating and firm.
Then suddenly he paused and threw a quick, searching look around him.
"Who goes there?" he called in a loud and firm voice.
Hie ear, attuned to the faintest breath which might be drawn around him, had warned him, all at once, of the danger which awaited him if he continued on his path; it had betrayed to his keen consciousness the presence of human beings, living, breathing, close by—somewhere in the thicket—hiding and crouching in the darkness; obviously with evil intent.
Next moment something definite stirred in the thicket not twenty paces from where he stood; there was a faint click which to a trained ear was unmistakable. In a twinkling Fernand had drawn a pistol from his pocket, and with a swift and sudden spring, he threw himself against a tall beech which bordered the road; and here he stood, with his back against the massive trunk, pistol in hand and his keen eyes searching the darkness around him.
There was a moment of tense suspense and of absolute silence, and in an instant the Man in Grey felt his arm seized from behind, the pistol was knocked out of his hand, a rough fist was thrust into his face, and he found himself pinioned against the tree, whilst a hoarse voice shouted lustily:
"You can shoot now, friend Blue-Heart. No chance of missing the vermin in the dark. We've got him tight."
Then it all happened in a second. A musket-shot rang through the evening air; its sharp report came simultaneously with a loud and piercing cry which rang right through and above it. The cry proceeded from a woman's lips; it was immediately followed by a violent imprecation from one of the Chouans. The Man in Grey, dazed, bewildered, not understanding, had only heard that cry, straight in front of him, right from out the thicket whence had come the report and flash of the assassin's musket. The rough hands that held him relaxed, and there was a wild confusion of cries and oaths and a scrambling and scrimmage in the undergrowth behind him.
What had happened within the depths of the shadows in front of him he did not know, but at a bound he cleared the intervening width of the road, and Constance de Plélan fell staggering in his arms.
"Constance!" he exclaimed, still mystified by the turn of events, "you are hurt!"
"No, no!" she said in a strange, hoarse whisper. "I am not hurt. Only save yourself—— Go, in God's name, ere I forget that I am a woman and again think of you only as the enemy of my King."
"You have saved my life!" he said, as the horror of the situation rose with staggering vividness before his mind, "and at risk of your own."
But already she had disengaged herself from his arms. She struggled to her feet and, as he tried to assist her, pushed him with amazing strength away from her.
"Go, I tell you!" she said, and she tried to steady her voice, which came feeble and panting from her throat. "The hand that fired the first shot might fire another ere I could prevent it—and the others might come back."
"I'll not go," he rejoined firmly, "until I am sure that you are not hurt."
"Hush!" she retorted hurriedly. "I am not hurt, I say. And even if I were, you must go now—at once. Have I not said that I might repent? Behind that thicket lurks the man whom I employed to kill you—I came back here to gloat over his work. Yet, somehow, when the time came, and I saw you in the grip of those assassins, I could not bear to see you die—not like that—five against one—it was too horrible, too cowardly. But you must go. And you and I must never meet again, unless indeed you set your spies on us to-morrow and send us all to the guillotine."
"How you hate me, Constance!" he protested with passionate reproach.
"Perhaps I do," she rejoined softly. "I do not know. But believe me that the guillotine would have no terror for me. I have betrayed a great trust, for you are the enemy of my kindred and my King, and I ought not to have failed when the choice lay betwixt your life and theirs."
She tottered, and he thought she would fall.
"You are hurt!" he cried hoarsely.
"Even if I were dying," she parried feebly, "I would not have you help me now. If we did not part at this hour, perhaps—who knows?—I might become even a blacker traitor than I am. You and I, Fernand, can have nothing in common. Our ways must for ever lie as far apart as are our ideals. The man who at my bidding would have been your murderer will carry me home and minister to my needs. He and I have everything in common—faith, friendship, community of ideals and disappointments of hopes and of sorrows. He is rough, uncultured, a potential assassin; but he and I strive for the same Cause and weep over the same failures. In thought he is my friend—you can never be aught but an enemy."
And suddenly, without giving him another look, she plunged into the thicket. For a few seconds only it seemed to the Man in Grey that he could see her slender form moving among the undergrowth and that he heard the crackling of dead twigs beneath her feet. She had gone for comfort and protection to the assassin who was still in hiding. She went to him because, as she had said, with those savage Chouans she, the irreconcilable Royalist, had everything in common.
Whereas with him, the stranger, the plebeian police agent, the obscure adherent of the newly-founded Empire, she could have nothing to do. Nay, she had actually persuaded an assassin to shoot him—vilely—in the back, when, at the fateful minute of crisis, a thought of womanly compassion had prompted her to save him from his doom. And, on his part, what was there for him to do but mourn the only illusion of his life? It served him right for being a visionary and a fool!
And with a bitter sigh of enduring regret, the police agent turned on his heel and went back the way he came.