(4)
When he came out of his room at seven o'clock Madeleine informed him, rather to his surprise, that M. Perrelet had gone, M. le Vicomte being much better, and in fact, asleep at the moment. The doctor, however, had said that he would come again in the evening to see how he did.
So evidently this threatened illness had relaxed its grip. Laurent could not be too thankful. He stole into Aymar's room. His friend was better, and, like himself, he was free, and the sun was shining, and there was a bunch of stocks by the bed. . . . Of what use were these things to a man whose face wore, even in sleep, a look of such ineffable sadness? It struck Laurent to the heart, that look. The consolations which he had been adding up in his mind were too facile—even freedom. Yes, perhaps freedom most of all. What was Aymar, when he was well enough, going to do with his freedom, if he could not clear himself? He turned and went out of the room.
To distract himself he then set out in quest of a hiding-place that might have baffled the soldiers last night, and finally selected the roof of a large barn near the house, which was overhung by the branch of a huge walnut tree. No one who was not unusually agile could possibly have gained it by means of that branch, and, for that very reason, searchers were unlikely to imagine that a fugitive had gained it at all. But Laurent, with time heavy on his hands, tried the ascent, and found it feasible, if hazardous.
When, therefore, he sat in the afternoon with Aymar, somewhat languid but evidently much better, it amused him to find the invalid obsessed with the idea that the soldiers would return and make a more thorough search, and that Laurent ought therefore to find himself a refuge beforehand—one, moreover, which should if possible be unknown to Madeleine, so that she could deny the knowledge of his whereabouts. Laurent heard him out, and then told him that the refuge was already secured. "Perhaps I had better not tell you either what it is," he added, laughing, but Aymar insisted upon knowing.
"It sounds a most excellent, breakneck spot," he observed, "but, Laurent, it would be so much better if you did not wait to play the squirrel, but left me to-day. I am well looked after, and nobody will hunt for me! I do beseech you not to go on risking your liberty for me! You risked it too desperately yesterday, going back as you did into the very lion's mouth for my sake, since I am sure Guitton would have treated you abominably if he had got you into his hands again."
"Oh, he had made preparations before I left, in the best mediaeval style, for doing that," replied Laurent light-heartedly, and told him what they were. "Imagine to yourself anybody in this century 'languishing in a dungeon'! The very word strikes me as ludicrous!"
"But the fact would not be. And you knew that when you went back yesterday!"
"It made passing the château in M. Perrelet's gig all the more enjoyable."
"Laurent, to please me—don't stay here! Get back to Vendée!"
"But, my dear fellow," protested M. d'Autichamp's aide-de-camp, "I tried to do that once, and came to grief! I shall go by sea when I do go. But it would be foolish to attempt it till the hue and cry for me has died down a little—till the soldiers, for instance, have paid this second visit on which you seem to have set your heart.—Will you bet on it, by the way?"
"Englishman!" retorted Aymar, smiling; and lay silent for a little. Laurent sniffed the stocks by the bed and said, "I wonder when Père Perrelet will let you get up?"
"To-morrow, I hope. He ought to be pleased with me. But I did not see him this morning; he slipped away when I was asleep."
"A lamb this morning, then! He was quite fierce in the night. I came in about three o'clock—at least I tried to come in, but he would not let me. He almost used force to keep me out. You were having a conversation with him, I fancy."
Aymar, who was turning about in the bed, became suddenly rigid, leaning on one elbow.
"I, a conversation with him! . . . I never spoke in the night . . . I was too drowsy. I hardly knew he was there. I . . ."
He broke off, and Laurent was amazed to see a flood of colour mount up from his bare throat to the very roots of his hair. It was gone in a moment, however, and he dropped back on to his pillows and began to speak of some thing else; but Laurent could see that his attention was wandering, and, thinking that he was tiring him, he left him not long afterwards.
It was about six o'clock that he heard the wheels of M. Perrelet's gig and ran out. "He's much better, Doctor!"
M. Perrelet seemed in a great hurry. "I need not have come, then," he muttered as he got down. "Do you mind holding the mare, Monsieur de Courtomer; she's a little fresh." And he went into the farmhouse with hardly a glance at him.
Laurent did as he was desired for a minute or two, then he whistled to Jeannot and made him take his place. He wanted to hear M. Perrelet's jolly voice rallying his patient and saying that he had got him there under false pretences. But instead of that it was very quiet in Aymar's room, and the young man, seeing through the half-open door that the surgeon was listening to his patient's breathing, stayed silently outside.
"Yes, there is no trace of anything," he heard M. Perrelet say, in a voice singularly free from jollity. "You have been extremely lucky . . . I shall not need to come again. Have the wound in your shoulder dressed every third or fourth day for a little; the other dressings can come off now. You may get up the day after to-morrow. If you are going to stay on here for a while I will speak to the good woman about you."
"Have you dismissed M. de Courtomer then?" Laurent heard Aymar reply. "I have not succeeded in doing so."
"No, quite so," answered M. Perrelet in a very peculiar tone. "I am afraid he carries his fidelity too far."
Aymar's hand suddenly gripped the blanket.
"Tell me one thing," he said in a whisper which, nevertheless, Laurent heard well enough. "Was I . . . delirious . . . last night?"
"You had that—misfortune," replied the old surgeon, and stood looking down at him, his little gimlet eyes almost invisible under a frown. Then, as the young man in the bed flung his arm across his own eyes, M. Perrelet abruptly brushed away something—a fly perhaps—below his spectacles, and on that Laurent, very uncomfortable at having eavesdropped, came openly in.
"Ah, Monsieur de Courtomer," said the doctor, "I can leave my patient with every confidence in your hands now, for the time that you are here. He will not need me any more."
And Aymar said, in a strange, suffocated voice, "I have nothing to offer you, Monsieur Perrelet, in exchange for my life, but thanks, which are . . . equally worthless."
"They are good enough," returned M. Perrelet roughly, "for an old fool." And without another word he walked out of the bedroom.
Laurent, puzzled and embarrassed, followed him.
"M. de la Rocheterie is all right," said M. Perrelet in an unenthusiastic voice, his foot on the step of his gig. "There is no more danger of pulmonary trouble, though he has had the nearest escape from congestion of the lungs that I ever came across."
"Was that why he was delirious last night?"
"How do you know he was?"
"I heard you say so just now."
The old surgeon looked sharply at him. "You did not hear what he was saying when you came to the door early this morning, did you?—Not, of course, that it matters," he added hastily.
Laurent stared at him. "No, I didn't catch a word. Why, was he saying anything uncomplimentary about me?"
"No, no!" returned M. Perrelet. "Oh, no, not at all! Besides, delirium is too strong a word; he was only rambling." And he climbed up, but not before Laurent had seen his face relax in obvious relief. "Well, I must be off, Monsieur de Courtomer; I have an appointment. I sincerely trust that you will keep out of Guitton's reach."
He bent down, gripped his late assistant's hand very hard for a second, and, looking fixedly at the glove he was pulling on, said gruffly, "Life is full of disillusionments, young man; never trust it!—But all the same, though I have never regretted being a bachelor, I could have done with a son—if he were like you! . . . Get on, mare!" And the gig passed out of the yard, leaving Laurent thoroughly bewildered. What an extraordinary thing to say to him!
As he got into the farmhouse he heard Aymar's voice calling, an unusual phenomenon. He hurried to his open door. L'Oiseleur was sitting up in bed.
"Ask M. Perrelet to come in here again when he has finished with Madeleine," he said earnestly. "I have something to say to him—something particular."
"Oh, I am sorry!" ejaculated Laurent. "He has just driven off. He did not see Madeleine at all."
Aymar remained an instant motionless. Then he said in a dulled voice, "It's of no consequence," and lay down again, with his face this time to the wall.
He was extremely silent all the rest of the evening, and as by ten o'clock he looked to Laurent much more ill than he had done at that hour in the morning the latter decided to spend the night in his room, in an ancestral and not uncomfortable chair. What could Aymar and M. Perrelet have disagreed about, as they obviously had, and when could the disagreement have taken place? Clearly only during the doctor's first visit—during the night, in fact. Then Aymar had been fibbing to him when he said that no conversation had passed between them. Pausing a moment over this distasteful idea he remembered with relief that, on M. Perrelet's showing, Aymar had been slightly light-headed. His friend need not then have been consciously lying to him. Still, one couldn't quarrel in delirium—the thing was preposterous; and surely no doctor would take offence at anything said in that state! What could M. Perrelet have been thinking about to be so touchy? He had seemed this evening as if he hardly cared what happened to the man he had dragged back from death and been so devoted to—"that lad of mine" as he had called him less than twenty-four hours ago. Laurent began to feel rather annoyed with the old surgeon, and, remembering, too, what he had said about his own "over-fidelity," even angry. What a cruelly unjust thing to hint at to Aymar, who had tried so hard to get his friend to leave him!
Aymar's own voice broke in on his reflections and preparations.
"What are you doing there?" he demanded rather sharply.
"I am going to spend the night in here with you."
Aymar flung round instantly. "No, indeed you are not!" he said with vehemence. "If you do, I don't sleep in this bed!"
"Certainly I will not, then," returned Laurent, somewhat offended. He resumed his coat. "I don't wish to force my society on you to that extent!"
"Laurent," said his friend quickly, beseechingly, "I beg your pardon! I'm . . . I'm in a vile temper to-night. I am better alone, that is all I meant. . . . Forgive me for saying that!"
"My dear fellow!" said Laurent, instantly melted. He came over to the bed. How frightfully strained he looked! "Of course I forgive you! Well, let me shake up your pillows for you. You have something to drink there, haven't you? Promise me, at least, that you will call me if you need anything?"
He gave him his hand to show him that he bore him no rancour for his display of petulance, but he was rather embarrassed when Aymar bowed his head and put his lips to it. Decidedly L'Oiseleur was deeply shaken out of his composure to-night.
It was not until he was himself half undressed that the explanation of everything came on Laurent like a thunderclap—of M. Perrelet's unaccountable demeanour, of Aymar's distress, of his own semi-banishment from his room just now. Last night, in fever, Aymar had let slip his carefully guarded secret—and knew it. Moreover, to have sent away M. Perrelet, who was so fond of him, who only yesterday was so whole-heartedly proclaiming his belief in him—to have sent him away, as it had, a changed man, it could be no honourable mystery, after all. It was something disgraceful, something of which, for good reasons, Aymar could not clear himself . . . as he had acknowledged with his own lips.
That was why M. Perrelet had pushed him, Laurent, out of the room last night, why he had asked him this evening if he had overheard anything, and been relieved at his reply. He wanted him, poor fool, to preserve his illusions. . . . Fool, fool, indeed, as Rigault, he knew, had always thought him, and blind beyond belief! And the fact that it had taken him hours to recognize what was now so horribly clear to him—that he had not at once realized the sharp significance of the doctor's profoundly altered attitude towards his cherished patient, seemed to open beneath Laurent's feet further abysses of self-delusion. He had been so secure in this fool's paradise of his. . . . But it was Aymar, Aymar himself who had shattered it—Aymar who had so plainly showed alarm when he told him this morning that he had been talking in the night—Aymar whose demeanour to M. Perrelet also had altered . . . guiltily altered. . . . Aymar who had driven him out of his room for fear of a recurrence of the same thing. . . . Aymar who had in fact betrayed himself!
And with a sensation as though his heart were being slowly cased in ice Laurent de Courtomer sat on the side of the farmhouse bed staring at the dwindling candle, till at last it went out and left him in physical darkness also.