In the Day of Adversity

by John Bloundelle-Burton

THE SECOND PERIOD.

CHAPTER XVIII.

LA GALÈRE GRANDE RÉALE.

The July sun blazed down upon the sea which lay beneath it as unruffled as an artificial lake inland; there was no ripple on the water as far as the eye could see; above the water to the northwest there rose the chalky cliffs between Whitby and Scarborough—a white, hazy line over which a few fleecy clouds were massed together. Upon the water, three miles out from those cliffs, a dark blot, which grew larger and clearer moment by moment, and proved to be—when seen through the perspective glasses of the officers on board a French galley which was further out to sea and rapidly retreating from the English coast—one of King William's men-of-war.

A French galley rapidly retreating from the English coast, of the style known as La Grande Réale, and named L'Idole. On board of her six hundred and seventy souls, comprising a first and second captain, a lieutenant and sub-lieutenant, an ensign, also a major general, some standard bearers, a commissary general, one or two volunteer officers, over one hundred soldiers and seventy sailors, a number of subaltern officers and ship boys, and—three hundred and sixty galley slaves and sixty Turkish slaves.

A life of hell was this of the galley to all on board her when at sea—even to those in command! Neither first nor second captain, neither major nor commissary general, nor even volunteer officers—often members of the oldest and most aristocratic families of France—could ever lie down to sleep on board, for the sufficient reason that in the confined space there was no room for bed, cot, nor berth. Rest had to be taken by these superiors either when sitting on ordinary chairs placed on the poop cabin, or in armchairs if such were on board—their clothes on, their arms by their side. For not only was there no room for anything in the shape or nature of a bed, but also the galleys were rarely at sea except in time of open war, when at any moment they might be engaged in action. Truly, a life of hell!

Yet, if to the superiors such miseries came and had to be endured; such want of sleep, such constant necessity for watchfulness, such poor, coarse food as alone the galley could find room to carry—bacon, salt beef, salt cod, cheese, oil, and rice, with a small pot of wine daily, being their allowance—what of those wretches who propelled her when there was no wind, the galley slaves? What was their existence? Let us see!

Bound to the labouring oar—itself of enormous size and weight, being fifty feet long—seven condamnés to each oar, they sat at sixty benches, thirty on each side, four hundred and twenty men in all, including Turkish slaves. Naked they rowed for hours chained to these benches—sometimes for twenty-four hours at a stretch—while the comites, or overseers, men brutal beyond all thought and chosen for the post because of their natural ferocity, belaboured their backs with whips made of twisted and knotted cords. If they fainted under these continuous thrashings, their backs were rubbed with vinegar and salt water to revive them; if they were found to have died under their chastisement, the chains and rings round their legs were taken off and they were flung into the sea like carrion as they were. Then another man took their place, there being always a reserve of these unhappy creatures.

To see them would have wrung the hearts of all but those who dominated them. Their naked backs had upon them wheals, sores, old and new, scars and cicatrices; their faces were burnt black from the effects of the suns, the diverse winds, and the sprays under which and through which they rowed en perpétuité—since most were doomed for life; their hair was long and matted with their beards, when they were not old men who had grown bald in their lifelong toil and misery. Moreover, they were nearly starved, their daily food being twenty-six ounces of coarse and often weevily biscuit, and four ounces of beans a day—or rather "pigeon peas"—with water. And if any swooned from their long hours of rowing (hours only relieved by a favourable wind springing up, when the small sails could be set), in contradistinction to their fainting from the brutalities of the comites, then there was placed in their mouths a piece of bread moistened with salt water or vinegar, or sour and sharp wine, either of which was supposed to be an excellent reviver.

All were distinguished by numbers and none by name, though, in occasional moments that could be snatched from under the watchful eyes and ears of the comites, the doomed wretches could sometimes acquaint each other with their names, former positions in life, and supposed reasons for being condemned to their perpetual slavery. But not often, for a word spoken and overheard brought terrible retribution in its train, especially as in nine times out of ten religion was both the cause for which they suffered and by which they were punished. The galley slaves were in general Protestants who would not embrace the Roman Catholic faith, while the superior officers and the overseers were ardent papists. Yet there were others who, in ordinary eyes, though not in those of their taskmasters, would have been deemed to be sunk in crimes worse than that of being Huguenots. No. 512 was a murderer—of his own father; No. 497 had been caught giving information to England, he being a fisherman, of the whereabouts of Jean Bart's flotilla; No. 36 had cursed the king and his family—a truly awful crime; No. 98 had robbed a church, and so on. But in the eyes of the law, which was the king, or rather the reformed and married wanton, De Maintenon, none were so vile, none deserved such bitter punishment and bastinadoing, and rubbing in of vinegar and salt in their wounds, and starvation, as the pestilential heretics.

The black spot on the horizon grew larger to the view of the officers standing aft on the coursier, or raised fore-and-aft passage of the galley, which ran between the larboard and starboard gangs of rowers, and across which they were hourly stretched to be bastinadoed by their fellow-slaves, the Turks; and those officers by no means appreciated the increasing size of that spot. It showed that the English frigate was overhauling the French galley. The latter, low down in the water though it was, and with its two sails furled, had been seen by the former and the pursuit had begun. Fortunate for the galley, and unfortunate for the miserable slaves whose lives were a curse to them, if she escaped that frigate now following it so rapidly!

"Row! row!" howled the comites, as they rushed up and down the gangways of the benches, striking the bare backs of the vogueurs, or row-slaves, till they were all crimson with blood. "Row! In time! in time! Beware, all you," cried one, as bench 12 rowed wildly, while the lash fell on all their backs in consequence; "will you impede the galley's course? Carogne!" (a common oath), "you wish the accursed English to take us—foul Protestants like yourselves!"

"Ay," replied one slave on that bench, a man known as 211—"ay. Pray God they take us or sink us! In the next world we shall not be chained, nor you free. The chances will be equal."

The lash fell on his back as he spoke, raised a new wheal to keep company with the others already there, and then the comite passed on, thrashing and belabouring all the others on his side of the ship, and howling and bawling and blaspheming at them.

Meanwhile the black spot became a large blur on the blue water; now her royals were visible, white and bright against the equally clear blue sky. She was sailing down the galley,

"Have a care, 211," muttered the galérien next to him—"have a care. If we escape the English ship with life, your existence will be a greater hell than before for those words!"

211 threw his matted hair back from his eyes with a jerk of his head—his hands he could not release from the oar—and looked at his neighbour. He was a man burnt black with the sun, thin, emaciated, and half starved. On his shoulders, where they caught hourly the cords of the comite's whip, great scars, and livid—as well as raw—wounds; yet still young and with handsome features.

"We shall not escape," he replied. "She gains on us each moment. See!" and as their faces were naturally directed aft of the galley, they could observe, through the great scuttle by the poops, the frigate rising larger each instant behind them.

"Better even this than death," said the other. "We know where we are now, at least—who knows where we shall be? Hist! he returns."

Again the comite ran along the gangway, dealing out more blows and curses, each of these men getting their share. Then, when the hoarse, foul voice of the overseer was heard at the other end of the hundred and eighty feet long galère Grand Réale, No. 211 answered him.

"No," he said, "death is better than this. It is peace at least."

"You seek it—hope for it?"

"Ay," No. 211 replied, "pray for it. Hourly!"

"What was your crime?" his companion asked. They had been chained together for two days only, the slave whose place the questioner now filled having been beaten to death, and this, in the excitement of the impending attack, was their first opportunity of conversing.

"Nothing."

The other grinned. Then he exclaimed, "We all say that."

"Most of us say true."

"It is put about," the other went on, "that you are English yourself, like our pursuers. Is that true?"

"Partly. Henceforth, if ever I escape, wholly so. That or death, somehow."

On the coursier there arose more noise and confusion now. The English frigate was nearing them; they could see with the perspective glasses her guns being run out on the lower tiers, so as better to sweep the galley; the course must be altered or their whole larboard side would be raked when once the frigate was on their beam. Therefore the chief captain gave his orders for the usual tactics of the galleys in an engagement to be pursued—they were to turn and "ram" the pursuers.

The first vessels of comparative modern warfare to utilize what is now known as the "ram" were the French galleys, they having at their prow or stern a long éperon, as it was termed, projecting from the deck above the water, and occupying the place of a bowsprit. Being far lower in the water than the ship, this spur was, consequently, in the exact position where it could inflict terrible damage; it struck a vessel of any size below the water line. And to add to the injury which a galley could do in thus advancing to meet an enemy "end on," there were behind this spur two huge gun forts in which were five bronze cannons of large calibre. As they rammed, therefore, propelled by hundreds of galley slaves, they fired also, and as the charge used was that known as à mitraille—viz., a metal case filled with balls of various sizes and pieces of iron, which exploded as it struck, the wounds inflicted in any ship were terribly effective. Moreover, the galley which advanced this presented but a small object for attack, the breadth or beam being never more than forty-eight feet at the broadest.

The order was given, the larboard side galériens backed water, the starboard side pulled lustily, assisted and urged on by both the whips and oaths of the comites and by the alteration of the helm, and slowly—for it was a long business to turn so lengthy a fabric as L'Idole—the galley wore round to meet her pursuer.

She would not have done so could she have escaped by flight, but that was impossible. Even four hundred and twenty galley slaves, Christian and Turk, could not propel her as fast as the lightest breeze could move the great frigate. Moreover, they were caught unawares since they happened to be alone instead of, as was almost always the case, in company with half a dozen other galleys. Their companions had that morning gone in chase of a Dutch merchantman whose mainmast had broken, so that she could only proceed slowly, and L'Idole was being sent back to Dunkirk when observed and chased by the English man-of-war. She had, therefore, to fight and beat the enemy or be sunk and every man on board of her be slain—certainly every man not a slave. For the British sailor of those days so hated the French galleys, in which he knew well enough men of his own faith were kept and tortured, that he spared none in authority in those vessels whenever the chance to slay them arose. Nor, indeed, did he always spare the Protestant slaves themselves in the heat of an engagement. They were fighting against England, and that was enough for him.

"Saperlote!" exclaimed the captain of the galley to the maître-canonnier, by whose side he now stood in the fore part of the galley, "the cochons will not be pierced! See how they change course with us! Grand Dieu! they have our beam. To your guns, at once! What will they do now?"

What they would do in the frigate was obvious. Their master gunner was also busy at his work; they could see his figure with the linstock in his hand, or could rather catch the gleam of the linstock itself, as he moved behind his gun ports. A moment later what he did was equally obvious. He ran along his tier, firing his cannon. Then there was a crash, followed by another, and another, and another, as cannon after cannon were discharged and the balls smashed into the galley. Some swept the coursier, cutting down the captain, two of the blaspheming and brutal comites, and the aumônier, or chaplain—who was encouraging the Protestant and Turkish slaves by reciting the Catholic service to them. Half a dozen more balls struck the benches of the galériens, wounding and killing one fifth of them, smashing even the chains by which some were bound to their seats, even smashing the benches themselves, and taking off legs and arms and heads. Then by a quick and masterly manœuvre the frigate altered course, came round on the other side, and repeated the broadside with her other tier.

As that was delivered, and a moment afterward her boats were lowered, filled with sailors to board L'Idole, the galley heeled over and began to sink.

And No. 211 muttered, as with a jerk from the lurching craft he was thrown into the sea, "Thank God, the end has come!"[6]

[6] The description of the galley is taken from Mémoirs d'un Protestant condamné aux Galères de France, and written by one Jean Marteidhe. It was published in Rotterdam in 1757, and again in Paris, by the Société des Écoles du Dimanche, in 1865 and 1881, and is perhaps the best account in existence of the sufferings and terrible existence of French galley slaves. It is also well known in the translations by Oliver Goldsmith, a reprint of which, edited by W. Austin Dobson, has just appeared.

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CHAPTER XIX.

"A NEW LIFE."

From the frigate there floated at the maintop-gallant-masthead the flag of a rear admiral; on the poop of the frigate herself there stood, surrounded by his officers, Admiral Rooke, the brilliant seaman, soon to win his knighthood and other honours.

The galley had disappeared—was gone forever—and with her had disappeared most of the sufferers from the cruelty of France, and also all those who had inflicted that suffering. Of her survivors there were but a dozen all told, who, some wounded and some untouched, were being brought on board. Among the latter was No. 211, who, in spite of the thanks he had given to God for having brought the end of all his miseries to him, now stood dripping on the deck of the Englishman.

"Send them down to the cockpit to be attended to," the admiral said, "and let them be well cared for. Poor wretches! they all seem to be galley slaves; they have suffered enough, God knows, if all accounts be true!" Then he called to his own men attending to the rescued, and asked if any were unhurt.

"Only two, sir; this man standing here," and he pointed to 211, "and one other. He has just fainted."

"Let that man come up to me; I wish to know something of the—the late galley."

To his surprise the man himself instantly turned and advanced toward the poop ladder, and slowly mounted it. Then, as he reached the poop itself he saluted Rooke, raising his hand to his dark, matted hair, and stood silent and dripping before him and the officers round.

"My man," the admiral said, while his eye roved over the torn and lacerated bare back and shoulders, saw the old and new cuts and bruises, and observed the half-starved flanks through which the bones were plainly visible—"my man, you understand English. Are you an Englishman?"

"My mother was an English woman," No. 211 replied, in a deep, hollow voice.

"That any English woman's son should suffer this!" exclaimed the other, again glancing at the worn, bruised body with warm and manly indignation. "And that!" pointing out to his officers the fleur-de-lis roughly branded on his shoulder; sure sign of the forcat. Then, continuing, he asked, "What was your fault?"

"Nothing," 211 answered, as he had answered his brother galérien an hour before. Only now he lifted his eyes and looked at the admiral, as though by that straight glance he would force him to believe. "No crime, no fault. I was—oh!" he broke off, "not now; not now! The story is too long to tell now."

His tone and bearing—sad and miserable as both were—told all who stood around him that this was no common man, no malefactor flung to the slave ship for an ignoble crime, no wretched printer sent to the galleys for producing Protestant pamphlets, or chapel clerk for assisting in a Protestant service.

"You are of gentle blood?" the admiral asked kindly. "Followed, doubtless, the calling of a gentleman? What are you?"

"I was a cavalry officer of King Louis. But broken and ruined for—for——" and again he broke off.

"Will you tell me your name?"

"Georges St. Georges."

The name conveyed nothing to any on board the frigate; the rank he had borne, when stated by him, stirred them all. They knew one thing, however—namely, that the cavalry officers of France were all gentlemen of birth, and many of great position. Could this be true, or if true was it possible that the man before them had not perpetrated some hideous crime? Louis had the reputation of encouraging and treating good officers well; surely no man of that position could have been condemned to this awful existence but for some great sin. Rooke, however, thought he knew the clew, and continued:

"You are, perhaps, a Protestant? The King of France still wages bitter war against them. Is that your crime?"

"I am a Protestant; but that was not my crime."

He shivered as he spoke, although he stood in the full glare of the July sun, the burnt face whitened beneath its bronze, and the lips became livid and ghastly, then he reeled and staggered against the gun tackle on the poop.

"Take him below," Rooke said, turning to one of the subaltern officers at his side; "let him be seen too and carefully tended and those sores dressed. Also find some proper apparel for him. And—treat him as a gentleman. It is more like that he has been sinned against than sinned himself."

So the fainting man was carried below in the brawny arms of the sailors, a spare cabin was found for him—it had but a few weeks before been occupied by a lieutenant who was killed in the disastrous battle off Beachy Head—and he was put into a clean, comfortable bunk. The release which he had prayed for from the galley's slavery had come, though not in the only way he had dared to hope for.

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"So!" exclaimed Rooke as he helped himself to a glass of Calcavella and passed the bottle to the man whose life had been saved—"so the wanton stabbed you in the back just as you had the fellow at your mercy. The deuce is in it that you missed his heart and could only pink him in the arm. But go on—go on. Faith! 'tis a wondrous story of wrong and cruelty."

They were seated in the admiral's cabin on another such hot July day as that on which St. Georges had been dragged out of the sea with still a portion of his chain attached to the ring round his ankle, and which was rapidly sinking him, but the latter was looking in very different case now. The burnt face was still very black and hollow, the lines of suffering still plainly marked, as they would be for many a day, but otherwise all was changed. He was dressed as a gentleman once more, in a plain but neat suit of blue clothes, guarded with white cotton lace—it had been the unfortunate lieutenant's. His hair, which was combed and brushed now, was, although still somewhat short—it being the custom in the galleys to crop it close to the head for those days once a month—no longer thick and matted.

St. Georges went on as the admiral bade him; he was telling the whole story of his life to his host.

"Yet, sir," he continued, "she was no common wanton either, as I heard afterward, but a lady of Louis's court who loved De Roquemaure. Doubtless her hate and anger were roused by the words I addressed to her. And I must have wronged her in one instance at least; it could scarce have been she who stole my—my poor little babe." And, as ever, when he mentioned that lost one, his eyes filled with tears. She was gone from him now, he feared, forever—he had been in that accursed galley for two years!—how could he hope to see her again on this earth? No wonder that the tears sprang to his eyes!

The seaman opposite to him certainly wondered not at their doing so; instead, he passed his own hand before his eyes, as he had done more than once before in the course of the narrative. Countless men had been sent to their doom by that hand and by his orders, but that was in battle; now, as he thought of St. Georges's little lonely child and wondered if it still lived, his memory wandered back to Monk's Horton, a pleasant seat in Kent, where his own children were doubtless playing at their mother's knee, and his brave heart became as tender as a woman's.

"Poor babe!" he said, "poor babe! Pray God the other woman, the one who did steal her at Troyes, has some bowels of compassion! Surely she must have, however base in other respects."

"I pray so night and day," St. Georges said. "O God! how I pray so." Then again, at the admiral's desire that he should not fret too much, but hope ever for the best, he went on with the account of all that had befallen him.

"When my wound was nearly healed," he said, "there came to the room in the inn, where I was closely guarded, a small body of exempts who carried me to Paris to the prison of La Tournelle, a place from which, as I shortly afterward learned, a chain of condemned galley slaves was to set out, all winter as it was, for Marseilles."

"'But,' I cried to the man who fed us morning and night like animals, while we lay each with an iron collar round our necks by which we were chained to a beam that traversed the dungeon——"

"In a Christian country!" exclaimed the admiral—"a Christian country!"

"Ay! in a Christian country! Yet I cried, I say, to the man who guarded us: 'But these companions of mine are condemned—I am not. I have undergone no trial!'

"'Bah!' he replied, 'your trial is made and done. Bon Dieu! the courts cannot wait until criminals feel themselves in sufficient good health to assist at the séances. Your trial is over,' and the wretch made a joke therewith. 'Your trials have now to commence. Keep a good heart!' 'Show me my sentence, then,' I exclaimed, 'produce it.' 'À la bonne heure,' he replied. 'To-morrow I will obtain it from the governor. You shall see.' And the next day he showed it to me. It was not so long but that I remember every word of it now. It ran: 'To Georges St. Georges. For that you, a cashiered officer of his Majesty's forces, have drawn sword upon and threatened assassination to his Majesty's chief of the army, Monsieur de Louvois, in his Majesty's own palace of the Louvre; for that, also, you attempted the assassination of his Majesty's subject, le Marquis de Roquemaure, appointed captain of his Majesty's Regiment of Picardy, and of a lady of his Majesty's court, you are condemned to the galleys in perpetuity. Signed, Le Marquis de Vrillière.'"

Again the admiral exclaimed, "In a Christian country!" and again St. Georges continued:

"A week afterward we were on the road, chained together two and two by the neck, while all along the line through our chains ran another, joining the first couple to the last. The snow lay on the ground until we reached Avignon, six weeks later; at night we slept in barns, in stables, sometimes in the open air. Some—the old and sickly—fell down and were left by the roadside for the communes to bury; more than fifty were left thus ere we reached Marseilles. There we were distributed to the galleys that were short of their complement, though not before the bishop of the province gave us the Roman blessing, saying that thereby the heretic spirit of the devil could alone be driven out of those who were Protestants. From then till now my life has been what my appearance, as you saw me naked, testifies."

"What," asked the admiral very gently, "can you do now? To live is easy enough. You have been both soldier and sailor"—though he uttered the last word with an expression of disgust as he thought of what manner of sailor this unhappy man had been—"your existence is therefore easy. You can serve the king," and he touched his hat with his finger as he spoke. "Many Huguenots are doing so now, and some other old ones who followed Charles back to England. But"—and he leaned forward across the table as he spoke earnestly—"that will bring you no nearer to regaining your poor little babe; will scarce enable you to thrust your sword at last through the villain De Roquemaure's breast; to obtain the dukedom you believe to be yours."

"Obtain the dukedom, sir!" St. Georges replied, looking at him. "Nay, indeed, that is gone forever. You know what befalls the man in France who has been condemned to the galleys for life?"

"What?"

"He is as dead forever in the law's eyes as though he were sunk to the bottom of the sea. He can never inherit, can never dispose of aught that is his; if he is married, his wife is not considered as a married woman, but a mistress—every right has gone from him forever!"

"Is there no pardon?"

"Never. Unless he can by some wild chance prove a wrongful condemnation. And for me, how that? Louvois, the all-powerful minister, is my judge and executioner; and, further, when once I set foot on English ground I shall become an English soldier or sailor."

"But the child! At least"—and the sailor spoke more softly even than before—"you must know her fate. And—De Roquemaure's punishment! How obtain these?"

"Heaven alone knows! May it, in its supreme mercy, direct me! Yet this is what I have thought, planned to do since you, sir, have taken pity on me. England and France are now most happily, as I think it, plunged in war once more. There is much to do——"

"Ay," interposed the admiral, while his handsome face flushed and his eyes glistened, for he was smarting over his and Torrington's recent defeat. "There is. There is Beachy Head to be wiped out—oh, for our next encounter with them!"

"Thereby," continued St. Georges, "my chance may come. For I may meet De Roquemaure. The sentence on me said he was appointed captain in one of the northern regiments; there have been stranger things than foes to the death meeting on the field, on opposite sides. Then for the child!"

"Ay, the child."

"For that I must go back to France, disguised it may be; nay, must be! That will be easy. The language is mine—though because of my mother's memory I have perfected myself in yours—in hers—there is nothing to reveal who or what I am but one thing"—and he made a gesture toward his shoulder where the hateful fleur-de-lis was branded in forever—"and that thing you may be sure none shall ever see again until my body is prepared for the grave. But—which to do first? To become a soldier or a sailor fighting for England, or travel disguised to Troyes and find out if—if—my child still lives. That would be my desire—only—only——"

"Only?" repeated the admiral, looking at him.

"Only," the other said—then broke off.

And Rooke knew as well as though St. Georges had uttered the words what he would have said. He knew that the man before him was beggared, that he had not a crown in the world to help him perform such a journey.

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CHAPTER XX.

"HURRY, HURRY, HURRY!"

St. Georges was lodged in an old inn on Tower Hill now, in a large room that ran from the front to the back of the house and with, on the latter side, a lookout upon an old churchyard, which in the swift-coming spring of 1692—for it was now April of that year—was green and bright with the new shooting buds. Here he worked hard to earn a living, spending part of his day in translating a book or so from French into English—at beggar's wages!—another part in giving lessons in fencing and swordsmanship—he knowing every trick and passade of the French school—and a third in giving lessons in his old language. And between them he managed to earn enough to support existence while waiting for that which through the interest of Admiral Rooke had been promised him—namely, permission to volunteer into the first vessel taking detachments of recruits to sea with it.

Meanwhile, there were many about the court who had heard his story and who knew he was a man who had once worn the red dress of the chiourme—when his back was not bared to the lashings of the comites!—that he had slaved at the galley oar in summer and been put to road-mending and road-sweeping in the winter, and that he nourished against France a deep revenge. And among them was the king himself.

Rooke had told William his history, over long clay pipes and tankards at Hampton Court, and the astute Dutchman had not hesitated a moment in promising him employment—would, indeed, have taken a hundred such into that employ if he could have found them. He had learned how the exile hated France—as he did himself, his hatred being the mainspring of his life; moreover, that exile knew more about Louis's regiments and whole military system than almost any one else whom the English king could discover. That was sufficient for him.

So St. Georges went on his way, waiting—waiting ever for one of two things to occur: either that the marine regiment should call for volunteers and be sent out again to France, or that he should be able to return disguised to that country and recommence his search for Dorine.

During the period that had elapsed, however, since he was rescued by Rooke, one thing had happened that had brought great happiness to his heart: he had heard more than once from Boussac, now a lieutenant of the Mousquetaires Noirs, and in so hearing had gained news of his child, who was still alive, and, as Boussac believed, well treated.

"Mon pauvre ami," that gallant officer had written, in reply to a letter forwarded him by St. Georges and addressed to Paris, where he imagined the Mousquetaires might be, "how shall I answer yours, since, when I received it, I had long deemed you dead? Ah! monsieur, I was desolated when we came into Paris at the tidings I gleaned. I sought for you at once, inquired at the Bureau Militaire, and learned—what? That you had threatened to murder the minister—had, indeed, almost murdered the Marquis de Roquemaure; and that for this you were condemned to the galley L'Idole, en perpétuité. Figure to yourself my dismay—nay, more, my most touching grief—for, my friend, I had news for you of the best, the most important. And I could not deliver it, should never now deliver it to you in this world. Monsieur, I had the news to give you that I had seen your child—had seen it well, and, as I think, not unhappy."

It was St. Georges's habit to sit sometimes in the little, old city churchyard beneath his window, and there to muse on his past and meditate upon the future. It had an attraction for him, this old place, more, perhaps, for the reason that scarce any one ever came into it on week days, except himself and a decrepit gravedigger to occasionally open old graves or prepare new ones, than for any other; but also because there was one tombstone that interested him sadly. It bore upon it a child's name, "Dorothy," and told how she had died, "aged three," in January, "in the yeare of Oure Lorde" 1688. And below the scroll of flowers, with an angel's head in their midst, was the quotation from Kings: "Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well."

To his seared and bruised heart some sad yet tender comfort seemed to be afforded by this stone, which marked and recorded the death of one whose very name partly resembled the name of her he had lost—whose little life had been taken from her almost at the very time Dorine was snatched away from him. And the question of the prophet was the question that he so often asked in his prayers. The answer was that which so often he beseeched his Maker to vouchsafe to him.

He was seated opposite to this stone on the day he first received Boussac's letter, having brought it out with him to peruse in quiet. He was seated on it now, many months later, as he reread the mousquetaire's words which told him that Dorine was well, and, he thought, not unhappy. And he raised his eyes to the words of the Shunamite woman and murmured, "It is well with the child," and whispered, "God, I thank thee!" as he had done on the day when first the letter came to him. Then he continued:

"We passed through Troyes, monsieur, three months after you, and I saw her. She was a little outside the town, with an elderly bonne, hand in hand. I obtained permission to quit the ranks for a moment—I was not then promoted, you will understand—and, dismounting and leading my horse toward them—you remember the good horse, monsieur?—I said to the woman, 'Whose child is that, madame?' She drew away from me, gathered the petite to her, and answered, 'Mine,' whereon I smiled; for I could not be harsh with her—the little creature looked so well cared for——"

Again St. Georges lifted up his eyes, again he murmured, "I thank Thee!" and again went on with the letter:

"'And the father,' I demanded, 'where may he be?' 'Dead,' she answered. 'You know that?' I asked hurriedly, and she replied, 'Ay, I know it, monsieur.' But," Boussac continued, "I could see that she repeated a story she had been taught, that she was a paid gouvernante. Yet, what to do? Already the troop was out of sight; I might not linger. Had I been alone, it may be I would have snatched the child from her, jumped on my horse, and carried it away as once you carried it, guarded it as you—as we, monsieur—guarded it. Helas! that could not be. Therefore, on your behalf, I kissed the little thing, and I emptied my poor purse into the woman's hand. 'Keep it well,' I said, 'keep it well, and thereby you shall reap a reward greater by far than any you now receive. I know—I know more than you think.' Then the bonne replied to me: 'So long as I am able it will be guarded well. No danger threatens the child at present'—she said 'at present'—I am unhappy that I have to mention those words. But she spoke them. I knew not what had happened then; I know now from your letter. But, monsieur, what does it mean? De Roquemaure tried to slay the child when you had her in your keeping. Now that he has her in his own—for who can doubt it?—he treats her well. Monsieur, again I say, what does it mean? And the 'at present'—what, too, does that mean?"

St. Georges was no more able to answer that silent question than the far-distant writer of it. Instead, he repeated to himself again and again, as he had often done, the same words, "What did it mean?" And as a man stumbling in the dark, he could find no way that led him to the light.

"How can I answer him?" he mused. "What answer find? The villain tried to slay her, as Boussac says, when we were there to guard her; now that he has her in his charge, now that his hate is doubled, must be doubled and intensified by my determination to slay him, as I almost succeeded in doing, he stays his hand. What does the mystery mean?" And one answer alone presented itself to him. De Roquemaure might have discovered that that which he once suspected to be the case was in reality not so. He might have found that, in truth, he, St. Georges, was not the Duc de Vannes.

"Thus," he reflected, "he would hesitate to murder the harmless child. His vengeance on me is glutted; he must have known, even so early as Boussac's passage through Troyes, that I was as good as dead in that vile galley; if he knew, too, that I am not really De Vannes's heir, the child no longer stands in his light. And devil though he is, even his tigerish nature may have halted at the murder of so helpless a thing."

Also he knew, by now, that both De Roquemaure and Louvois must be perfectly confident that not only was he practically dead but actually so. The galley was gone—sunk; and of the few saved none had gone back to France. And the other galleys—those which had chased the Dutch merchantman—would take the news back; none would suppose that he and a few more were still alive.

As he reflected on this month by month—while often his eyes would rest now on the words before him, "It is well with the child"—another light came at last to his mind: he saw that, almost without any danger, he might return to Troyes. He was a dead man; none would be on the watch for him.

"Return to Troyes!" he repeated. "Return to Troyes!" And starting from his seat he walked hurriedly away after one more glance at the consoling words. He would go at once, find the child, and then return to England forever. Yes, he thought, he would do that. He had money enough now to reach that city.

Excited by this determination, he strode toward his lodging, determined to set out directly. Months had passed, no fresh volunteers had been called for, and although he knew that Louis was massing together a large number of troops in the north of France—with the intention of once more attempting to put James II on the throne he had fled from—nothing had yet been done. It seemed as if nothing would be done beyond endeavouring to guard the shores of England from a French invasion and securing suspected persons and sending forces to the seacoast. But for himself he heard nothing from any source. Perhaps, he mused, he was forgotten.

Yet as he entered his room he learned that the time had not yet come for him to take that solitary and dangerous journey to France. There was something else to be done first.

Lying on his table were two letters: one, with a great seal upon it, from Admiral Rooke; the other, addressed to a firm of merchants in the city, but with—since its arrival in London—St. Georges's name written over theirs, from Boussac. He read the latter first; before all else it was the child he thought of—then threw it down almost with impatience. He looked eagerly for these letters; they were indeed the anxiety of his life, and now that this had come it told him nothing that he cared to hear.

Yet there was one piece of intelligence in the letter that once would have interested him. The mousquetaire had seen Aurélie de Roquemaure, had spoken with her.

"I met her, mon ami," he wrote, "entering the gallery of audience at Versailles where I was in attendance, and she looked, although pale, for she wears no paint like the other grandes dames—I know not why, since his Christian Majesty expects it——"

"She wore enough when I saw her last!" St. Georges muttered.

"—most beautiful. Mon Dieu! what eyes, what a figure! I knew her only from seeing her pass in to audience before, while as for me she had never deigned so much as a glance. Yet now, figurez vous, mon ami, she spoke to me while waiting for the others to pass before her. 'I have heard,' she said, speaking very low, 'that you are Monsieur Boussac.' I answered that that was my name. Then, after a glance around to see that no eyes were upon us, she went on: 'You did a service once to an unhappy gentleman—a chevau-léger—now dead?' What she was going to say further I know not, since I interrupted her so by the slight start I gave that she paused in her intention, whatever it may have been, raised her eyes to mine and regarded me fixedly. Then she approached her face nearer to mine and whispered: 'Why do you start? He is dead—is he not?' Mon ami, what could I reply? She is the sister, by marriage, of your foe; if I told her you lived, who knows what evil I might work? Therefore, I answered briefly, 'Madame, the galère L'Idole was sunk, and he was in it.' Still she regarded me, however—mon Dieu! it seemed as though her eyes would tear the secret from out of my brains. Then—for now the throng was moving on and she had to go with it—she whispered again: 'If—if by any hazard—he was not sunk with the galley—if he still lives, there is news for him that would make him happy.' Then she passed on with the others, and so out by the main gallery, and I have not seen her since."

There was more in the letter, but at that time St. Georges read no further. Once this news would have stirred every fibre in him, for once he had believed that Aurélie de Roquemaure was his friend—was on his side! He had long ceased, however, to do so; had, instead, come to believe that she and her mother were as inimical to him as their cowardly brother. And long months of meditation had brought him to the belief also that the marquise's scorn against the man who had attacked him and Boussac, and endeavoured to slay the child, was simulated; that they regarded his and Dorine's existence with as much hatred as did De Roquemaure himself. And now, now he felt sure that she knew he was alive and was only eager to discover if he was anywhere near them—near enough to work vengeance on them. As for the news which would "make him happy!"—well, any scheming intriguer might endeavour to hoodwink so simple a soldier as Boussac with such a tale as that! He was only too thankful Boussac had had sufficient discretion not to betray his existence to her. To have done that would be to have put her and De Roquemaure on their guard against that return to France which should yet be made, against that revenge which should yet be taken.

He opened Sir George's letter now, quietly and without excitement, for he had grown used to occasional communications at long intervals from that gallant sailor, telling him that at present it was not in his power to be of service to him; but as he hastily ran his eye over the lines he uttered an exclamation of delight. They ran:

"Namesake, if you are still of the mind you were, the time has come. There is a big muster at St. Helens, for Tourville puts to sea to invade us. A place shall be found for you, though maybe not in my ship. Hurry, hurry, hurry!"

---

CHAPTER XXI.

MAY, 1692.

None riding along the Portsmouth road that warm April night could doubt that a great crisis was at hand. Certainly St. Georges did not do so as couriers and messengers galloped past him toward London calling out the news to all who cared to hear it. As he mounted Kingston Vale two men, hastily jumping on their steeds outside "The Baldfaced Stag," cried that they must rouse the queen even, though she be a-bed,[7] for the Frenchman was at sea with an enormous fleet and had been seen in the morning from the coast of Dorset; and all along the route it was the same. Wherever he changed his horse he found couriers setting out for London; whomsoever he passed on the road gave him the same news. At Ripley they told him the French had landed under the command of Bellefonds and King James—but these were rustics drinking in a taproom—at Guildford the news was contradicted, but the certainty of the landing taking place shortly was much believed in. Then, at Godalming, where by now the day had come, he passed a regiment marching as fast as might be toward the coast, and the officer in command told him that no landing had yet been effected; at Petersfield he heard the same; at Portsmouth laughter and derision, scorn and contempt were hurled at all who dared even to suppose that a French fleet would put a French army ashore. For here, in every inn and tavern, were men who had fought in a score of naval engagements, and who were going out now to fight again. And, as he stood upon the Hard, waiting for a boat to take him off, he observed the vast fleet of sixty-three ships under Russell's command lying at anchor off the island, and saw from the maintop-gallant-mast head of the Britannia (flagship) the admiral's flag flying. Also on the main shrouds he saw another flag, showing that a council of war was already being held. There, too, were visible the ensigns of Rooke, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, Sir John Ashley, Sir Ralph Delaval, and Rear Admiral Carter, and as the noble spectacle met his view his heart beat fast within him. The country that had adopted him was about to help him revenge his wrongs on the country that had sent him forth to stripes and beatings and ignominy.

[7] William was fighting on the Continent, and, as usual, being defeated.

The shore boat made its way through countless others—some filled with officers and their baggage going off to the ships, some with sailors half drunk, who would, nevertheless, fight to the death when once they boarded the Frenchmen; some with provisions for the fleet; and some with other volunteers like himself, and with, in several cases, girls going off to say farewell to their sweethearts, or with mothers and wives. From most of these boats there rose the babel of scores of different songs and ballads, all telling how when French sailors met English their doom was sealed. Yet at this time, and for about another month, the French held the supremacy of the sea. After that month was over the supremacy was gone forever!

From the Britannia there came away, as St. Georges's boat approached the lines, several barges bearing the admirals and captains who had attended the council of war, and among them St. Georges saw that of Admiral Rooke, who, as he saluted him, made signs for the other boat to follow to his ship.

"Now," said Rooke, after he had greeted St. Georges and complimented him upon his promptitude in hastening down to the fleet, and also on his improved appearance—for the two years he had passed in London had done much to restore his original good looks, and, with the exception that there rested always upon his face a melancholy expression, none would have guessed the sufferings he had once endured—"now let me understand. Therefore, speak definitely and frankly. You have thrown in your lot forever with England."

"Forever," St. Georges replied.

"Without fear of change, eh?" the admiral said. "Remember—recall before we sail to-night—all you are doing. If you fight on our side now, there will be—henceforth—no tie between you and France. That dukedom of which you told me once is gone forever, no matter how clearly you may find your title to it. Louis will never forgive the work we mean to do. If you are English to-day—for the next week, the next month—you are English for always."

"I have come down here," St. Georges replied, his voice firm, his words spoken slowly, so that Rooke knew that henceforth his resolution would never be shaken, "to fight on England's side against France. There will be no wavering! If I fall, I fall an Englishman; if I survive, I am an Englishman for the rest of my life. I renounce my father's people, whomsoever that father may have been, provided he was a Frenchman: I acknowledge only my mother's. Short of one thing—my endeavour to regain my child."

"How is that to be accomplished? If you survive this which we are about to undertake, your life will be forfeited in France."

"It is forfeited already. Remember, sir, I am still, in the eyes of the law of France, a galley slave. That alone is death, or worse than death. In the future when I go, as I intend to go if I live, upon another quest for her I have lost, I shall be in no worse case. Only, then, it will be the halter and not the galleys. So best!"

"Be it so," the admiral replied. "Henceforth you belong to us. Now, this is what I can do for you. Listen. I find there is a place for you here on this very ship. You know something of seamanship from your bitter experiences; as a soldier, also, you understand discipline. The master's mate of this ship was drowned a week ago; you can try the post if you please. And when the campaign is over, it may be that I can find you a better one."

"I accept, with thanks," St. Georges said. "I adopt from to-day your calling. Henceforth I am an English sailor."

"Come, then, and see your captain," Rooke replied; "you will find him a good one, and hating France as much as you can desire."

He followed the admiral to another cabin, where they found the captain, who was Lord Danby—Rooke's flagship being now the Windsor Castle—and here they were made acquainted with each other, though Danby had already heard the history of the man who was coming into his ship.

"I am very glad to see you, sir," he said quietly. "I know your story—at least so far as it concerns me. I only trust you will encounter some of your late friends' galleys and be able to repay them for some of the kindnesses they once testified toward you."

So St. Georges became a sailor once more—though in a very different manner from what he had last been—and as master's mate sailed in the Blue Squadron of Russell's fleet against the French fleet under Tourville.

The Dutch allies were coming in rapidly ere they left St. Helen's and Spithead on the 26th of April, and already of the fleet of thirty-six ships under Van Almonde many had joined. Their first cruise was, however of no result; they simply picked up their pilots from the Sally Rose, these men having been got from Jersey, and observed that all along the peninsula of Cotentin—where James and Marshal Bellefonds were encamped—great beacons were burning by night. They knew, therefore, that France expected the English fleet. A little later, while once more they lay off Spithead and St. Helen's, they knew that Tourville had put to sea to meet them. Fishermen coming into harbour, spies sent out in various directions, the Sally Rose herself—all brought the news that the French admiral was on the sea—his squadron headed by his own flagship, Le Soleil Royal, and by Le Triumphant and L'Ambitieux, had been seen from Portland cliffs.

The time had come.

On May 18th that great English fleet, formed into two squadrons—the Red commanded by Russell, Delaval, and Cloudesley Shovell, and the Blue by Sir John Ashby, Rooke, and Carter—and followed by the Dutch, stood away from the English coast, their course south and south by west. Swiftly, too, when clear of the Isle of Wight, the line of battle was formed, the Tyger leading the starboard and the Centurion the larboard tacks. And so they sailed to meet the enemy, and to frustrate the last attack of any importance ever made by the French to invade England.

It was not long ere that frustration commenced.

Scouts coming back swiftly on the morning of the 19th reported the enemy in full force near them, and from the Britannia ran out the signal—received with cheers from thousands of throats—to "clear the ships for action!" And St. Georges, busy with his own work, knew that the time was at hand for which he longed.

To the west there loomed up swiftly the topmasts of the French flagships; soon the figurehead of Le Soleil Royal was visible—a figurehead representing Louis standing upon his favourite emblem, a great sun, and with the inhabitants of other nations lying prostrate at his feet and bound in chains.

"Behold," said Rooke, as St. Georges passed close to him, "your late king! Ah, well! that sun shall set ere long, or——"

His words were drowned in more cheers. From all those English seamen on board the various ships—nearly thirty thousand men exclusive of the Dutch allies—there rose hurrah after hurrah, as swiftly the opposing forces advanced to meet one another. Then the Britannia saluted the Soleil Royal—a sinister politeness—and from the French flagships there came an answer in the shape of a discharge of small shot. The battle had begun.

From the English vessels that discharge was answered by broadsides from their great guns: from the Britannia, the Royal Sovereign—Delaval's flagship—those broadsides were poured in with merciless precision. Moreover, the wind favoured the English foe more than it did the French; their great ships being enabled to form a circle round their foes and to pour in their fire on either side of them. Already one Frenchman had blown up, hurling her contents into the air; already, too, the Soleil Royal had had her maintopsail shot away by the Britannia; in another moment she had let down her mainsail and was tacking away from her untiring foe. And following her went L'Admirable and Le Triumphant.

"Heavens!" exclaimed St. Georges, as, black and grimed with powder, he worked with the men under his direction at the lower-deck tier of guns in the Windsor Castle, "they run already! Is that the king the world has feared so long—the king I served?"

The French flagship was not beaten yet, however—it was too soon; and though she could not force her way through those enemies which surrounded her, she could still keep them off, prevent them from boarding her. Twice the Britannia and another had endeavoured to lay themselves alongside her for that purpose, but the fire she vomited from her gunports was too hot; like a gaunt dying lioness she made it death to come too near. Yet her struggles were the struggles of despair; already twenty of her squadron had deserted her and, pursued by English vessels, were tearing through the Race of Alderney as fast as their shot sails would take them, in the hopes of reaching the lee of Cotentin. Two alone remained with her—remained to share her fate—the Admirable and Triumphant.

That fate was not yet, however; those three ships had yet a few hours of existence left to them. Fighting still, still belching forth flames and destruction, they closed together, and so withstood the merciless broadsides of the Britannia and Royal Sovereign; then, at last wounded and shattered—the figure of Louis, his emblem the sun, and the downtrodden representatives of other nations were long since shot away and floating, or sunk, in the sea—a favourable wind sprang up and beneath it they ran, Tourville having already transferred his flag to L'Ambitieux. Yet, fly as they might, behind them came their pursuers as fast as they. Delaval in the Royal Sovereign with a small squadron never halted in the chase. Still pouring volley upon volley from his bow fire into their sterns, he hung upon them, and, when they found they could not enter St. Malo, followed them to Cherbourg.

And here their end came. They had struggled into shoal water, forcing themselves aground in the hope the English men-of-war could not follow them, and rapidly, in a frenzy of fear, the men were casting themselves over the sides and gaining the land. The ships were doomed they knew, their own lives might still be saved. They were none too soon even for that. The fireships and attenders were soon among those three. Le Soleil Royal was ablaze first, Le Triumphant next, and then L'Admirable. As the night came on they lit up the coast for miles around; as morning dawned they were burnt to the water's edge. Their own magazines as they took fire assisted in their destruction and helped by their explosions to finish them.

Meanwhile the remainder of the great French fleet had run for the bay of La Hogue, and behind them, like sleuthhounds, went Russell, Shovell, and Rooke with their squadrons.

---

CHAPTER XXII.

LA HOGUE.

The sun was setting brilliantly behind the peninsula that juts out into the English Channel and forms the department of La Manche; its last rays as it fell away behind Cherbourg lit up a strange scene. On land, looking east, were thirty thousand so-called French troops; they were, indeed, mostly Irish rapparees whom Louis had thought suitable for an invasion of England under James and his own marshal, Bellefonds; among them and in command were Bellefonds, Melfort, and James himself—now a heartbroken man. Also there stood by his side one who knew that not only his heart but his life was broken too—Tourville, who had now come ashore.

What they gazed on in the bay was enough to break the hearts of any.

There, gathered together, the flames leaping from the decks to enfold and set on fire the furled sails, the magazines exploding, the great guns turned toward the land that owned them and their projectiles mowing down all on that land, were the best ships of that French fleet which had put out to sea to crush the English. Among them were Le Merveilleux, L'Ambitieux, Le Foudriant, Le Magnifique, Le St. Philip, L'Etonnant, Le Terrible, Le Fier, Le Gaillard, Le Bourbon, Le Glorieux, Le Fort, and Louis. And all were doomed to destruction, for the English fleet had blockaded them into the shallow water of La Hogue; there was no escape possible.

---

Three hours ere that sun set, Rooke had sent for St. Georges and bade the latter follow him.

"I transfer my flag at once," he said, "to the Eagle, so as better to direct a flotilla of fireships and boats. Come with me," and stepping into his barge he was quickly rowed to that vessel with St. Georges alongside him in the stern sheets.

Reaching the Eagle, Rooke, who had now the command of the attacking party, rapidly made his dispositions for despatching the flotilla—the officering of the various fireships being at his disposition.

"My Lord Danby," he said to that gallant captain, who had refused to remain doing nothing in his own ship, "you will attack with the Half Moon and thirty boats; you, Lieutenant Paul, with the Lightning and thirty more. Mr. St. Georges, who has done well for us to-day, and has a trifling grudge against our friends, will take the Owner's Love."

And so he apportioned out the various commands, until, in all, two hundred fireships and attenders were ready to go into the doomed fleet.

At first things were not favourable. The Half Moon ran ashore, blown thereto by the breeze from off the sea, but in an instant Lord Danby's plans were formed. He and his crew destroyed her, so that she could not be used against their own fleet, then swiftly put off in their boats and rejoined the others. Meanwhile those others were rapidly creeping in toward the French.

Already two fireships had set Le Foudriant and L'Etonnant on fire, the boats were getting under the bows of all the others, the boarders were swarming up the sides, cutlasses in hand and mouths, and hurling grenades on to the French decks.

"Follow!" called St. Georges, as, his foot upon a quarter-gallery breast rail, his hand grasping the chain, he leaped into the huge square port of Le Terrible. "Follow, follow!" and as he cried out, the sailors jumped in behind him.

Yet, when they had entered the great French ship, there was no resistance offered. She was deserted! As they had come up the starboard side, her crew, officers and men, had fled over the larboard—as hard as they could swim or wade they were making for the shore. Yet her guns on the lower tier forward were firing slowly, one by one as the boats reached them. A grenade had been hurled in as St. Georges's party passed under her bows and had set the ship alight forward, and the flames were spreading rapidly.

"Quick!" St. Georges exclaimed, "ignite her more in the waist and here in the stern. Cut up some chips, set this after cabin on fire. As it burns, the flames will fall and explode the magazine. Some men also to the guns, draw the charges of those giving on us; leave charged those pointing toward the shore."

All worked with a will—if they could not get at the Frenchmen themselves, they had, at least, the ships to vent their passions upon—some tore up fittings, some chopped wood, some ignited tow and oakum; soon the stern of the Terrible was in flames. Meanwhile, from Le Fier hard by—so near, indeed, that her bows almost touched the rudder of the ship they were in—there came an awful explosion. Her magazine was gone, and as it blew up it hurled half the vessel into the air, while great burning beams fell on to the deck of the Terrible and helped to set her more alight.

"To the boats!" ordered St. Georges, "to the boats! There is more work yet, more to be destroyed." And again, followed by his men, they descended to their attenders and barges.

But now the tide was retreating, they could do no more that night. They must wait until the morrow when the tide would come back. Then there would be, indeed, more work to do. There were still some transports unharmed; they, too, must be annihilated!

---

They called the roll that night in the British fleet. There were many men wounded, but not one killed. So, amid the noise of powder rooms and magazines exploding, and under a glare from the burning French ships which made the night as clear as day they lay down and rested. And in the morning they began again.

"The work," the admiral said, "is not done yet. It is now to be completed."

Back went, therefore, the fireships and attenders—this time it was the turn of the transports.

"Hotter this than yesterday," called out Lord Danby to St. Georges from one boat to the other, as, propelled by hundreds of oars, all swept in toward the transports. His lordship's face was raw and bleeding now, for on the previous day he had burned and nearly blinded himself by blowing up tow and oakum to set on fire a vessel which he and his men were engaged in destroying. "Hotter now. See, there are some soldiers in the transport, and the forts on shore are firing on us. On, on, my men!" and he directed those under his charge to one transport, while St. Georges did the same as he selected another.

There were more than a dozen of those transports, and against them went the two hundred boats, Rooke in chief command. As they neared the great vessels, however, on that bright May morning, they found that the work of last night had only to be repeated. They poured into the ships from the starboard side, the French poured out on the larboard; those who could not escape were slaughtered where they stood. And if to St. Georges any further impetus was needed—though none was, for his blood was up now to boiling heat and France was the most hated word he knew—it was given him as he approached the vessel he meant to board; for, from it, out of a stern port, there glared a pair of eyes in a ghastly face—a face that looked as though transfixed with horror!—the eyes and face of De Roquemaure! With a cry that made the rowers before him think he had been struck by a bullet, so harsh and bitter it was, he steered the barge alongside the vessel; in a moment he had clambered on the deck, followed by man after man; had cut down a French soldier who opposed him, and was seeking his way toward the cabin where the other was.

"There is an officer below," he muttered hoarsely to those who followed him. "He is mine—remember, mine—none others. My hand alone must have his life, my sword alone take it. Remember!"

As his followers scattered—some to slay the few remaining on board who had not escaped, some to rush forward and ignite the fore part of the transport, others to fire the great guns laid toward the shore, and still others to find and burst open the powder room—he rushed down to where that cabin was, his sword in hand, his brain on fire at the revenge before him.

"Now! now! now!" he murmured. "At last!"

Under the poop he went, down the aftermost companion ladder, through a large cabin—the officers' living room—and then to a smaller one beyond, opening out of the other on the starboard side—the cabin from which he had seen the livid, horror-stricken face of his enemy. But it was closed tight and would not give to his hand.

"Open," he called; "open, you hound, open! You cannot escape me now. Open, I say!"

There came no word in answer. All was silent within, though, above, the roars and callings of the sailors made a terrible din.

"You hear?" again cried St. Georges, "you hear those men? Open, I say, and meet your death like a man! Otherwise you die like a dog! One way you must die. They are setting fire to the magazine. Cur, open!"

The bolt grated from within as he spoke, and the door was thrown aside. De Roquemaure stood before him.

Yet his appearance caused St. Georges to almost stagger back, alarmed. Was this the man he had dreamed so long of meeting once again, this creature before him! De Roquemaure was without coat, vest, or shirt; his body was bare; through his right shoulder a terrible wound, around which the blood was caked and nearly dry. His face, too, was as white as when he had first seen it from the boat, his eyes as staring.

"So," he said, "it is you, alive! Well, you have come too late. I have got my death. What think you I care for the sailors or the powder room? I was struck yesterday by some of the Englishmen who passed here as the tide turned, who fired into this ship ere the tide—the tide—the——"

"Yet will I make that death sure!" St. Georges cried, springing at him. "Wounds do not always kill. You may recover this—from my thrust you shall never recover!"—and he shortened his sword to thrust it through his bare body.

"I am unarmed," the other wailed. "Mercy! I cannot live!"

"Ay, the mercy you showed me! The attempted murder of my child—the theft of her, the murder perhaps done by now—the galleys! Quick, your last prayer!"

Yet even as he spoke he knew that he was thwarted again. He could not strike, not slay, the thing before him. The villain was so weakened by his wound that he could scarce stand, even though grasping a bulkhead with his two hands; was—must be—dying. Why take his death, therefore, upon his soul when Fate itself was claiming him? It would be murder now, not righteous execution!

Moreover, he had another task to execute ere it was too late.

"Wretch," he exclaimed, "die as you are—find hell at last without my intervention! Yet, if you value a few more minutes of existence, gain them thus. Tell me, ere you go, where you have hidden my child—what done with——"

Before he could finish there came another roar from an exploding transport, the sound of beams and spars falling in the water round; a darkness over the cabin produced by the volumes of smoke; the screams of wounded and burnt Frenchmen hurled into the sea; the loud huzzas and yells of the British sailors. Then, as that roar and shock died away, there rose in the air another sound—a pæan of triumph that must have reached the ears of those on shore as it also reached the ears of those two men face to face in that cabin. From hundreds of throats it pealed forth, rising over all else—crackling wood, guns firing, the swish of oars, orders bawled, and shrieks of dead and dying.

It was the English sailors singing Henry Carey's song, almost new then, now known over all the world:

"God save our gracious king!
Long live our noble king!
God save the king!"

"Answer," St. Georges cried, "ere your master, the devil, gets you! ere I send you to him before even he requires you!"

The man had sunk down upon a locker outside the bunk, his two hands flattened out upon the lid, his face turned up in agony. From either side of his mouth there trickled down a small streak of blood looking like the horns of the new moon; the lips were drawn back from the teeth, as though in agony unspeakable. And did he grin mockingly in this his hour—or was it the pangs of approaching death that caused the grin?

Then he gasped forth:

"You are deceived. The woman who stole—your child—was Aurélie——"

"What!" from St. Georges.

"Aided by—servant—Gaston. Her—servant—not mine——"

"My God!" In that moment there came back to him a memory. The lad, Gaston, had his arm in a sling the morning he learned the child was missing; the woman, who lived in the hut and saw the child taken from Pierre, had said, "His arm hung straight by his side, as though stiff with pain."

Had he found the truth at last?

"Go on," he said.

"The bishop's man—had—got it safe. Aurélie and Gaston—caught—slew him—took the child. She—knew—your birth—and—hated you—and would gain—as much as—as I. Seek her—if you—would-know——"

He fell prone on the lid and spoke no more.

And St. Georges, reeling back against the opposite bulkhead, stared down at him, forgetting all that was taking place around the burning transport in his misery at that revelation.

"Aurélie," he whispered, "Aurélie! Hated me, too, and hated her. O God, pity me!"

And again above all else there rose the triumphant shout:

"Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
God save the king!"

Note.—The description of the battle of La Hogue is taken from many sources, but principally from the narrative of the chaplain on board the Centurion. It is the most full and complete, especially as regards the ships engaged, which I know of. The worthy divine was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and this seems to have been his first cruise. He returned "home" afterward, viz., to Oxford, and has left very fervent expressions of gratitude at having been able to do so.

---

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE BITTERNESS OF DEATH.

As he staggered back after that revelation, St. Georges noticed that the great chant sounded less strongly and more distantly in his ears, and, seized with a sudden apprehension, he rushed to the cabin porthole.

Then he knew that what he had dreaded, that the idea which had sprung into his mind a second before, as the sturdy English voices became more hushed and subdued, was indeed an absolute fact—the flotilla was retiring. It had finished its work of destruction—it was returning to the man-of-war.

And he was left behind!

Behind! to fall into the hands of the French, who, he knew very well, would come forth from the fort and batteries directly the conquerors had withdrawn. He was in a trap from which there was no escape. He would be found there, and his doom be swift.

Yet, in a moment, even as he glanced down at his enemy at his feet and noted the set features—handsome as in life—the white face, the blood at either side of the mouth, looking as before like two small down-turned horns, he asked himself if he was indeed doomed? Also, why stay there to be taken like a rat in a trap? The sea was beneath him; a mile off was the English fleet. If he could swim to that, even halfway to it, he could make signs and, perhaps, be seen and rescued; at the worst it would but be death. And a more fearful death than any the sea could bring awaited him if he remained here.

He cast one more look at De Roquemaure lying with his head upon the locker. At last he was done for! He would never cross his path again. If he himself could live, if he could escape out of this burning pandemonium, could again stand a free man on an English deck, he would have to contend with him no more. There would be but one thing further to do then—to stand face to face with Aurélie de Roquemaure, to ask her if this charge against her was true—as St. Georges never doubted!—to demand his child, and, if she would not restore it to him, to—to—what? His mind was full of deeds of savagery now; the last few days, filled with slaughter and spent amid the arousal of men's fiercest passions, had made him fierce too. At this moment if Aurélie could appear before him he knew that he should slay her—send her to join her brother and all the other victims of his own aroused passions. It would be dangerous for her if she were face to face with him at this moment and refused to acknowledge where she had hidden Dorine.

She was not there, however; at the present moment he had to take steps to free himself, to escape from the burning transport. "'Twill be time enough," he muttered, "to tax her with her perfidy when I stand once more before her to punish her for it. And my own hour is too near, may be too close at hand, for me to think of that. But when it comes, then——"

He heard an explosion in another part of the vessel—he knew another tier of guns had been reached by the flames; he was tarrying too long. The magazine must be close to the cabin in which he was, might be, indeed, beneath the cabin floor—at any moment he risked being blown to atoms. He must lose no time. To be caught there was death, instant and certain!

Lying at the door of the main cabin where he had been slain was one of the officers of the transport; near him another man of lower rank, the one shot through the back the other cut down by Rooke's sailors as he fled into the cabin; and as his eye rested on them a thought struck him. None of Bellefonds and James's forces on land could say who were or were not officers of the transports—what was there to prevent him from being one for the time being? All was fair in war!—and he was as much French as any who might come out from the forts or batteries to the sinking and exploding ships—if any dared to come at all. Once in the garb of either of these lying here, officer or petty officer, and he would be able to get safely ashore, and could avoid question by disappearing a moment afterward, or as soon as might be.

And he would be in France—would be so much nearer to the reckoning with Aurélie de Roquemaure!

He drew on the jacket of the officer as the thoughts of all this chased one another through his mind, threw his own sword down and took up that of the dead man, placed on his head the hat he had worn—bearing in it a gold cockade on which a glittering sun was stamped—and then, glancing through the square porthole that gave on the shore, he looked to see if, yet, any of the French were coming out to save some of their vessels from the conflagration. But the wind was blowing off the sea to the land and carrying with it the smoke from the burning ships; between those ships and the shore all was obscured. And still, as he looked, the explosions—though fainter now—took place at every moment; he could hear the crackling of the flames in the vessel in which he was.

He knew that he must go—must not tarry another instant. Those flames were gaining round him; they would reach the magazine before long—and—then! He must go at once.

He cast one more hurried glance at De Roquemaure, who seemed quite dead now. But, dead or alive, what mattered it? If dead, so much the better; if alive, he would be blown to atoms in a few more moments—as he would himself if he tarried longer. He must go at once.

"Farewell, dog!" he muttered, with one look downward at his enemy. "Farewell. Your account is made!" And without wasting another moment—for his fear of being hurled into eternity himself the next moment had gained terrible hold on him—he rushed to the main cabin door and seized the handle.

An awful sweat of fear—a cold, clammy sweat—broke out all over him as he did so; he knew now how dear life was to him—dearer than he had ever dreamed before that it would be; or was it rather the fear of an awful death than death itself? Was it that which caused him to almost faint with horror as he recognised that the door was either locked or jammed, so that it would not open?

He was doomed—the fire was spreading—he heard one great gun explode by itself—a gun on the lower deck near where the powder room must be—beneath him—he was doomed! In another few moments—perhaps not more than four or five at most—the bulkheads would fly asunder, the deck split like matchwood, he and the dead bodies of De Roquemaure and the others be flung to the elements, be blown into portions of the elements themselves.

Drenched with sweat, paralyzed with terror—it was the terror of an awful death and not of death itself; livid with horror—though he was not aware such was the case; his lips parched and glued together; not knowing whether his limbs were shaking beneath him or the deck of the cabin quivering before its impending upheaval, his starting eyes glared round the prison he was in. And as he so glared he saw—if God gave him a moment more—his opportunity. The great square ports—an invention of but the last few years and superseding the old small round ones—furnished that opportunity.

With a gasp—nay, almost a cry—he clambered on the locker beneath the nearest one—again it seemed as though the ship was quivering with the impending explosion!—thrust his head and shoulders through, dragged the sword by his side carefully after him, seized a top chain hanging down into the water, and was himself in the water a moment later. Then a nervous, hurried thrust of one foot against the hull, with an impetus obtained thereby which propelled him a dozen feet from the vessel, a few masterful strokes made boldly, all trembling with fear and horror as he was, and he plunged into a puff of black smoke, the cinders among which hissed on his face as he struck it, and he was saved—saved from that most awful death, even though countless other deaths surrounded and loomed up before him; saved, at least, from being dismembered and flung piecemeal in a million atoms on the bosom of the ocean.

The smoke drifting in his face recalled to him that he was swimming toward the English fleet; the current still making toward the shore told him that he could never reach that fleet. Even as he swam away from the doomed transport he knew that the powerful tide beneath was carrying him back; he must change his course, or another moment would carry his body against the after part of the ship he had but now escaped from, the ship which must now ere long be hurled out of the sea! It was easy to do so, however; to turn himself away from her so that, even though borne back to the coast of Cotentin, he would pass far astern of her. He had enough strength for that, enough left to haul himself far out from where she lay—but not much more. He was sore spent now with all he had gone through, and was borne down also with the double weight of clothes upon him; as he glided by, or was carried back—though some forty yards adrift of the transport—he could do nothing more than tread water and so manage to keep himself afloat.

Borne through the murky grime, along that water there came now the swish of oars and the voices of men speaking in French—French strongly accentuated and in the Manche patois. What were they doing, he wondered. Had they come out to save some of the burning transports and boats, to endeavour to stop the flames and also the firing of the guns by the heat—their own guns that, as they fired, hurled their charges on their own shore? Were they going to meet their dooms unknowingly by venturing on that very place of death which he had just escaped from?

It might be—might well be so; and though he had fought against them—though they were Frenchmen and his enemies, too, he must warn them, save them, if he could: they were men, human beings; he could not let them go unwittingly to such an awful end as this, could not let them board that ship and meet the fate he had avoided. Therefore he hailed them as loudly as he was able, screamed to them, besought them to enter no vessel near; above all to avoid the burning transport. But whether they understood him, even if they heard, he could not guess; he caught still the beat of the oars upon the waves, heard their chattering voices, even one or two of their expressions; and then, as the tide took him nearer and nearer to the shore, he lost sound of those voices altogether.

"Strange," he muttered, "strange she blows not up—many minutes have elapsed since I quitted her—twenty at the least, and yet the explosion has not come. They may have boarded her, those men, have extinguished the flames: there may have been no powder left in the mag—Ah!"

There came an awful roar as he so muttered, a roar such as he had heard twenty times in as many hours; a hundred feet above and behind him, as he turned swiftly in the water, he saw a fan-shaped mass of flame ascending to the skies; he saw black objects amid that mass of flame—what were they, beams, masts, or human bodies?—he saw the smoke rent open, and great pieces of the transport floating or falling on to the waters with terrific crashes. Then there rushed down on him a fresh mountain of blood-coloured smoke, with blazing cinders and pieces of burning wood, and smouldering sails all borne along in its midst, and it enveloped him and choked him, while the burning matter fell on him and hissed on his wet hair and skin, so that he was fain to let himself sink below the waves for some few seconds to escape the débris and those suffocating fumes. And even as he did so, and when he arose to the surface once more, cooled and refreshed by the immersion of his face, his first thought was to utter a heartfelt prayer for his escape from the awful fate that, but half an hour ago, had threatened him and been so near.

Scarce had he done so than, as he swam a little now, being eased by having floated and trod water for some time, he saw beneath the smoke, which dispersed as it neared the shore and drifted inland, that he himself was close in shore. He could perceive quite clearly the yellow beach of Cotentin on which the incoming tide was rippling, and could see also several bodies lying about on that beach—soldiers doubtless killed by the fire from the English war vessels, or, perhaps, by the discharge of the French guns when turned upon them by the parties which had boarded their own ships. But that was all, except one or two figures moving about and bending over them—no doubt the ghouls who are to be found wherever a dead body is after a battle.

And as he glanced at these last relics of the great battle of La Hogue, his foot touched the bottom; a moment later he was wading ashore.

He stood once more in France, the land in which he would find his child—if she was still alive.

---

CHAPTER XXIV.

ON THE ROAD.

He stood once more upon French ground—then fell half fainting on the wet, shining shingle, struggling to get his breath back, panting and gasping painfully.

Then came toward him a figure terrible to behold, a creature in the garb of a woman, a knife at her girdle, her pockets, which were outside her dress, bulging, and from their openings pieces of gold lace, a silver-hilted pistol, and other things protruding. But besides her and the dead bodies lying further inland upon the beach nothing else was to be seen. The thirty thousand men—some, and most of them, those rapparees whom Louis had thought good enough to send against England—some forming part of the regiments of Picardy, Verdelin, Le Calvados, and others, were not visible, although he could see on the roofs and turrets of the forts that they were still there and lined the coast for many miles. Also he saw with dimmed eyes that the English fleet was moving. It had done its work!

The creature prowling about came nearer, and St. Georges sprang to his feet and drew from the wet scabbard which had remained by his side during his swim ashore, his sword.

"Wretch," he said, "put down that knife and come no nearer, or I will run you through, woman though you seem to be! Begone, vulture!"

The robber of the dead and wounded paused and stared at him; then she assumed a whining tone, and exclaimed in her northern accent:

"Oh, good gentleman, you mistake. I am no slayer of injured men, but a comforter thereof. Will you not take a sup of good Nantz to ease you?"

"No, begone! Away. Yet stay. Where is the nearest village where I can procure food? Answer me, quickly."

"A mile off, good gentleman; there is an auberge there. It is very good. I keep it."

"You!"

"Yes, I. Yes, an excellent inn. But," with a suspicious glance at him, "why not go to the fort, good gentleman? The marshal is there and that king who has been ruined by his own subjects to-day."

"I do not wish to go to the fort. I am not a soldier, but a sailor—saved from one of the transports. Direct me."

"Ha!" she said, with a grunt. "You are not the first. There are many like you who do not want to go to the fort. A many poltroons who are deserting from the army, now defeat has come to France. Are you deserting too, friend?"

"No. But I have nothing to do with the forts nor the army. Direct me, I say."

"There is the road," the hag said, pointing to the north across the sandhills. "Follow that a mile and you will come to my house. But," and she came a step nearer, "give me some money, or you will, perhaps, be followed. The others have given me some. Give me a piece, and I will be silent."

"Away, wretch!" St. Georges said. "If the soldiers come forth again you will flee from them, not wait a moment. I do not fear you," and pushing past her he made toward the road she had indicated, while she stood there muttering curses after him. Then she returned to her work of prowling among the dead and dying, and rifling their pockets.

He made his way among those dead and dying, most of whom were wounded French seamen who had managed to get ashore only to fall down and expire where they fell, and a few of whom were soldiers on land who had been struck by the projectiles from the French vessels while standing gazing at the sea fight. In all, there were lying about the dunes some hundred men, who were in different states of approaching death. One thing he noticed as he went on—several wore the colours of the Picardy Regiment, which he knew well, from having once been quartered with it. Therefore, he understood why De Roquemaure had been on board the transport. They had doubtless been shipped ready for the projected invasion, and these wretched soldiers had been more fortunate than he in one way—they had at least escaped ashore to die, instead of being blown to pieces in the explosions of the transports.

He made his way through the sand, stopping once or twice to endeavour to help some dying wretch whom he came across, and then going on again when he found his efforts useless; and so he came at last to what he supposed must be the auberge spoken of by the woman, a miserable wooden structure with a seat and a bench outside the door.

Two horsemen were drawn up in front of this, and were speaking to some stragglers standing before them, all of whom St. Georges noticed stood cap in hand. One, a tall thin man with a hatchet face, dressed in gray, was questioning them; the other, who sat his horse by his side, was an elderly man of dark, swarthy features, who was, however, deathly pale. His eye—a wandering one—lighted on St. Georges's the instant he approached the front of the inn, and turning away from his companion he addressed him in good French, which, however, St. Georges noticed had a strong accent.

"What uniform is yours, sir?" he asked. "I do not know it. And you seem to have been in the water. Are you one of his Majesty's naval officers?"

"I am," St. Georges replied, recognising at once the danger he was in. "And the uniform is that of a transport officer."

"A transport officer!" the other exclaimed, turning round suddenly at the words—"a transport officer! Have any escaped?"

"I have, at any rate," St. Georges replied.

"You can then give us some information," the first said. "How many others are there who have also escaped?"

"Very few, I imagine. I myself did so only by swimming ashore. And even then the transport was blown up ere I had quitted it very long."

"And," asked the second, "have the—English—made many prisoners?"

"A great number, I should suppose."

"God help me!" the dark, pale man exclaimed.

"Louis will do no more. This is our last chance, Melfort."

As he spoke St. Georges knew in whose presence he was—the presence of the unhappy James. Then, because he knew also that this place was full of danger to him—some naval officers of the French fleet might by chance have got ashore as he had done, and might also come here at any moment—he saluted James, and said he must make his way onward as fast as possible.

"Where are you going to, sir?" the late King of England asked. "You will be better in the forts. They will not refuse you succour."

"Doubtless. Yet I must go on. I have to——"

As he spoke his eyes fell on the doorway of the inn, and, brave man though he was, what he saw there appalled him.

Leaning against the doorpost, regarding him fixedly, were two French sailors whom he had last seen on board the transport—two sailors who, as he had leaped on board followed by his own men, had disputed his entrance, had then been driven back to the larboard side of the ship, and had hurled themselves into the shoalwater and so escaped.

What was there for him to do? In another moment it was possible—certain—that they would denounce him, that he would be seized by the half dozen soldiers standing or sitting about.

He had to make his plans quickly ere these men could speak—already he could perceive they were about to do so; one touched the other with his finger and called his attention to him, and looked with an inquiring glance into his companion's eyes, as though asking if by any possibility he could be mistaken? He had to act at once. But how? Then in a moment an inspiration came.

With a cry he wrenched his sword from his sheath and rushed at them, uttering exclamations that at least he hoped might confuse the others round and also drown any words of those two men.

"Villains! Lâches! Deserters!" he cried, as he flew at them, striking one with the flat of his sword and, with his elbows and body, forcing the other into the passage behind. "Villains! You would desert in the hour of need! Fly the ship, would you!" and other exclamations in as harsh and loud a tone as possible.

And the ruse succeeded beyond even what he dared to hope. The two sailors affrighted, perhaps not hearing his words, and only thinking that the terrible English officer meant to slay them on land, as he had almost succeeded in doing on their own deck, fled down the passage roaring; while to add to the hubbub two large dogs, sitting by the fire of a room opening out of that passage, dashed out barking and yelping. A woman too came from the kitchen and screamed for help, and meanwhile the soldiers who had been lounging about rushed in at the front door. As for James and Melfort, they shrugged their shoulders and turned their horses away. Such a scene as this, which they but half understood, had little enough interest for them. An officer punishing two deserters, as they assumed to be the case, was a trifle in comparison to the ruin which had fallen forever on their cause that day.

The sailors fled down the passage yelling "Au secours! au secours!" and "Sauvez-nous!" and after them rushed St. Georges, making as much noise as he could, and so they reached first a yard behind, and then the potager, or herb garden. One man dashed into an outhouse full of billets of wood and kindlings, and yelled for mercy. "The fight is over!" he screamed; "spare me, spare me!" and in a moment St. Georges had shut the door and turned the key—fortunately it was outside—on him; then he rushed after the other down the sandy path of the garden.

His object was to drive the man on as far as possible away from the inn, and then desist from the chase and escape himself. Behind the garden there ran another path that passed up to a copse of stunted, miserable, wind-blown trees; if he could get into that, he might succeed in avoiding any pursuit.

So he let the sailor gain on him as he neared this copse, and then another chance arose before him—an unhoped, undreamed-of chance! Tethered at the end of the garden, by the reins to the paling, was a horse belonging possibly to some bourgeois who had ridden in to the inn from a village inland and had left his horse at the back. A chance sent by Heaven in its mercy!

Still the sailor ran on swiftly, until, no longer hearing his pursuer behind him, he dared to look over his shoulder, thinking the chase was over; what he saw when he so looked caused him to renew his speed, even to yell with fresh terror.

St. Georges was mounted now, he was urging the horse to its greatest pace, he would be behind him in a moment. And then it would be death, dealt from the sword wielded by the terrible Englishman—almost the man could feel that sword through his back as he ran and the hoofs clattered behind him!

He stumbled and nearly fell in the white sandy dust, got up again with a shriek, and then, in a last, frenzied hope, plunged into the copse which he had now reached. And the awful horseman passed on—could that dust, the poor wretch wondered, have hidden him from his view?—a moment or two more and he knew that he was safe. The clatter of the hoofs on the road grew fainter and fainter; when at last he dared to peer from the edge of the little wood, the Englishman had disappeared.

For a couple of hours St. Georges urged the poor roadster to its best speed, then slackened rein as the wayside track reached the bay of Charenton. He was safe now from any recognition—or rather exposure—the army of Bellefonds and all who might by chance have got ashore from the destroyed fleet were far behind.

Yet he had been exposed to risks, too, on that ride. Once, near the auberge he had fled from, a farmer riding along called to him to stop, yelling at him to know why he was riding Dubois's horse; but his presence of mind did not fail him, and he called back: "Ride on and see! The French are defeated, the English have burned Barfleur and destroyed La Hogue!" and ere the man, whose terror-stricken face he long remembered, could speak again, he was far away from him.

Also he more than once passed deserters from the army—men who no sooner saw another in a uniform riding as though for life, than they fled away into woods and copses or over fields, imagining that he was in pursuit of them. And, once, he again come in contact with two together whose faces he thought he remembered as he leaped on board a French man-of-war the evening before—men who looked up at him with startled faces and oaths upon their lips—did they recognise him as he dashed by them?

But at last he had outdistanced all who might have escaped from La Hogue; his way lay along a sandy sea-blown road, at the sides of which were fields of millet, sanfoin, and sometimes, though not often, wheat. And ahead of him, against the bright May sky, he saw the tower and two high spire steeples of the ancient cathedral of Sainte Marie at Bayeux.

He eased his horse at a pool of fresh water, descended from it and removed the coarse saddle, and, while it drank eagerly, rubbed its sides and back.

"Good horse!" he said.—"good horse! I have been a hard taskmaster and a stranger to you to-day. Heaven knows I would not have urged you thus but for my necessity. And you have served me bravely, all rough bred as you are. Well, we will not part now, and some day, may be, I can find out your owner—that Dubois the farmer spoke of—and repay him for the friend I stole from him."

And he sat down by the animal's side for half an hour, and then, walking with the reins in his hand and carrying the saddle to ease it, he followed the road toward Bayeux.

It was the road, too, to Troyes and Aurélie de Roquemaure, the woman who had to answer to him for the theft of his child, and also for her duplicity when they had met in Paris!

---

CHAPTER XXV.

"I KNOW YOUR FACE."

The deserted road along which he now walked was, in a way, a relief to him. Nothing could have better suited his present needs than to be thus outside the life of any town and free from all observation, for he had much to meditate upon—many plans to form for his safety. And of those plans, the first to be carried out was to free himself from any appearance of conspicuousness which would draw attention on him.

There was, to begin with, the officer's jacket and cap which he had assumed, and the naval sword by his side, from which he had by now removed all damp it might have received from being in the sea. Yet how to deprive himself of the latter, and still be safe, he knew not.

As for the jacket—which was, indeed, a short coat filled with pockets, outside and in—he could dispense with it very well. He had dragged it on over his own coat when quitting the burning transport, simply as a disguise, as a safeguard. It could now be discarded.

His clothes—the plain English clothes which he had worn in London, and in which he had joined Rooke's flagship and fought through Barfleur and La Hogue[8]—would attract no attention. They were suitable to any one in the middle class; but with the cap it was not the same thing, since he had nothing wherewith to replace it, and if he rejected that he must go bareheaded. This would not do; he had, therefore, to cast about for some headdress.

[8] In those days none possessed naval uniform, and, from admiral downward, all wore what they chose.

At last, however, he was obliged to retain it, altering it as well as he was able with his fingers, tearing off a strip of lace round it and throwing away the gilt cockade. As for the jacket, that was easily disposed of; he rolled up some stones in it and flung it into a pool of water among the reeds by the wayside, where it soon sank beneath the surface. But the sword still remained—a good enough blade, in a leather scabbard, and with not too much to proclaim that it was a sailor's except an anchor—on, of course, the eternal sun, Louis's emblem—fastened to the top of its handle. There was also a sword knot, which followed the jacket into another pool, and he decided that he must take his chance with the weapon itself.

"At least," he thought grimly, "none will have much chance to observe it closely if I am using it against them; if I am not, I can keep my hand on the emblem. Under any circumstances it cannot be parted with."

And now he neared Bayeux, worn and spent with all he had gone through in the last twenty-four hours, since he had hardly slept at all, and that only by snatches after the battle off Barfleur had begun; also his immersion in the sea and his long ride had made him very weary.

"Rest! rest!" he muttered to himself, "a long rest I must have. And then for Troyes and my child—and for Aurélie de Roquemaure. Ay, for her!"

He trudged along by the horse's side, still carrying the saddle over his arm to ease it, and it was not until the gates and walls of Bayeux came into sight that he mounted it again. It would have a good night in a stall before long; that small addition to its day's work would not hurt it much. And he could not present himself on foot before the custodian without raising suspicion of having come a long distance, without courting remark.

"You are from the coast?" the man asked, as he rode through the gate. "How goes it with the marshal's army there? Have they invaded England yet?"

"Not yet, so far as I am aware," he answered. He knew it would be madness to appear cognizant of what had taken place at La Hogue. The whole town would clamour for news, and he would be for the time the most conspicuous man in it. "Not yet."

"We have heard strange rumours," the man said. "But this morning one came in from St. Mère Eglise who said that loud sounds of firing were heard all last night out to sea; and another, a pêcheur de mer, says that great fleets have been seen passing from the west. Mon Dieu! it cannot be that those English chiens would dare to attack us!"

"Impossible, mon ami, impossible! There can be no chance of that. Tourville's fleet would prevent that."

"Je crois bien. Yet why fire all through the night? One fires not on imaginary foes."

"True. Well, later, no doubt, we shall hear more. My friend, tell me a good inn, where I may rest awhile."

"Oh! as for that, there are several. The Pomme d'Or, among others, is good and cheap; also Les Rochers de Calvados. Try one of those and you will be content."

Thanking him, St. Georges passed into the old city, though without the slightest intention of going to either of those houses. His object was to remove every trace of himself as he passed onward to the goal ahead of him—to obliterate his tracks entirely.

He rode quietly through the town, therefore, observing what good and comfortable-looking inns those were which the man had mentioned, but at the same time regretfully avoiding them. For under no circumstances would he have felt justified in alighting at either—he doubted if he could have afforded to do so. When he received Rooke's hasty summons to join him he had but forty-five guineas, saved after two years of an existence that at best had been a hard one. It had been a task to accumulate even that sum, a task entailing careful living, abstinence, almost even a life of total deprivation; when he had paid scrupulously every farthing he owed in the neighbourhood where he lodged, the sum had dwindled down to thirty-five guineas. It was little enough to enable him now to reach Troyes and provide for himself and the horse he had become possessed of on the road, to regain his child, and find his way back to England—if he succeeded in doing so.

To find his way back to England! Would that be possible? Could he pass through the north of France undiscovered? Could he, the ex-galley slave, the man whose face had become known to hundreds of persons connected with the galleys, besides having been known to hundreds of soldiers also, with whom he had been quartered, hope to escape recognition?

"God only knows!" he murmured as he rode through the empty streets of the already dead-and-gone city. "He alone knows. Yet, ere I will be taken alive—ere the mark upon my shoulder shall ever testify against me—I will end it all! Yet, courage! courage! At present I am safe."

He reached the neighbourhood of the east gate, for he had traversed the whole of Bayeux by now, and knew that if he would rest for a night in the old city he must make choice of a halting place. Casting, therefore, his eyes round the wide streets, he saw an auberge—a place, indeed, that in France is known as a pant—a low-roofed, poor drinking place, yet with, inscribed upon its walls over the door, the usual words, "Logement à pied et à cheval."

Around the door several scraggy chickens were picking up anything they could find in the interstices of the stones, and two or three gaunt half-starved-looking dogs lay about basking in the sun and snapping at real or imaginary flies. The place looked none too clean. Yet it was obscure, and it would do for one night. None would molest him here.

"Can I have a room until daybreak to-morrow and a meal?" he asked of a slatternly looking woman leaning against the doorpost; "I have ridden some distance and am very fatigued."

"Without doubt," she answered. "'Tis for that we keep house. Come in."

"And my horse?"

"That also—hard by," she said. "I will call my good man," and uttering a shriek, which was answered from the back by a gruff male voice, she called out again: "Come and take the traveller's horse, scélérat! Mon Dieu, have you nothing else to do but sit drinking there all day?"

A heavy footfall sounded in the passage, and presently a large, unkempt man came along it, and, seeing the traveller standing there, put up a dirty hand to his tousled hair and said, "Bon jour, voyageur." But the next moment he pushed that hair away from his eyes and, staring at St. Georges, said: "I know your face, stranger. Where have I seen it before?"

"How can I say?" St. Georges asked in reply. "I at least do not know yours."

Yet he turned pale as he answered, and regarded the man fixedly, for he had recognised the other at once. The fellow before him had been one of the comites of a galley in which St. Georges had rowed before being transferred to L'Idole—had thrashed and belaboured him often. Of all the brutal overseers this man had been, perhaps, the most cruel! He was in a trap if he should recall where he had seen him before, a trap from which escape would be difficult. For at a word from him he would never be allowed to pass the gates of Bayeux, but would be arrested at once, taken before the president of the city, and—sent back to the galleys if not executed, as he would undoubtedly be if it leaked out that he had fought against France!

"All the same, I know you," the man replied. "I must reflect. I must think. In my time I have known——"

"Dinde!" shrieked the woman at him, "will you keep the traveller standing all day in the passage while you indulge in your accursed recollections? Mon Dieu! are we so overrun with customers that you have naught else to do but gape at them? Sot! take his horse to the forge outside."

The fellow—who seemed bemused by frequent drinkings in the back place whence the termagant had called him forth—did as he was bid, and, seizing the nag's head, led it down an alley running at a left angle to the house, and so to a forge—in which, however, there was no sign of any work being done. And St. Georges, whose old soldier instincts never deserted him, followed by his side, intent on seeing where the animal was taken. The horse was to him—as once, four years ago, another and a dearly loved horse had been—his one chance of reaching Troyes easily, of finding his child, and—Aurélie de Roquemaure!

"A poor place," he said, speaking in as unnatural a tone as possible, while all the time he wondered if the fellow recognised him. And he took heart in recollecting that while he had been subject to this man's brutalities, with scores of other victims, his head had always been either shaved or cropped close and his mustache absent from his face. Now, both hair and mustache were grown again; it might be that the ex-comite could not recall where he had known him. "A poor place for a good horse! And none too secure, I imagine. It has no door. On a winter night a horse stabled here would be chilled to the bone."

"It is not winter now," the man replied. "Your horse will come to no hurt. And we have no thieves in Bayeux. We send them to the galleys!" and his eye roved over St. Georges as he spoke.

The latter was, however, too wary to start at the hateful word; moreover, since this man had been an overseer of the galleys, it was not strange, perhaps, that the name of the system by which he had once subsisted should rise to his mind. Therefore he replied quietly:

"That is well. Now for my room; but, first, a meal."

As he sat over that meal, a plain enough one as befitted the cabaret in which he was, and partook of it in a squalid room which represented the combined functions of living room for the man and his wife, drinking place for those who patronized the house, and general common room, he saw the fellow still casting long glances at him and regarding him from under his eyelids.

And over and over again he asked himself: "Does he recognise me; and, if so, what will he do?"

Presently the woman—who had been knitting behind a counter at which she sat, superintending the bringing in of his sparse meal, and ordering her husband, whom she addressed as André, to call to the serving maid for one thing after another—left the room to see to "monsieur's appartement." He had said to her he was very tired; he would go to it at once if it was ready, early in the evening as it was.

Then he rose as she disappeared and requested the man to show him where it was, and, when he too rose, followed him upstairs.

It was a poor enough place when he got there, in keeping with the whole of the house—a room in which there was a bed in one corner and a chair in another, and with some washing utensils in a third, but nothing more.

"Call me at daybreak," he said to the man André. "I shall sleep until then if I can. Then I must be on my way to—Paris."

"Si, si," the other replied. "You shall be called," and he went toward the door, though, both there and before, he did not cease to glance furtively at him. These glances had not been unobserved, however, by St. Georges, who in his turn had been equally watching him to see if any absolute recognition appeared to dawn upon him. And now, as the man prepared to depart and leave him alone, he said, speaking as carelessly as possible:

"Well! you thought you knew my face, friend. Have you been able to recall yet where you saw it last?" and he looked him straight in the eyes.

But the other only shook his head, and grumbled out:

"No, no. I cannot remember. Perhaps—it may be—I am mistaken."

---

CHAPTER XXVI.

IN THE SNARE.

Had St. Georges followed the impulse that first occurred to him when he recognised the man André, he would have made some excuse for not remaining a night in Bayeux, but would have proceeded at once on his journey to Troyes—though not to Paris as he had said, only with a desire to throw dust in his late oppressor's eyes. For to Paris he had no intention of going under any circumstances, deeming it likely to be full of danger to him. There he would be known to countless military men; he might be seen at any moment and recognised; and the result would, in all likelihood, be ruinous. He meant, however, to proceed some distance toward it and then to strike into another road, and so, leaving the capital a little to the north of him, reach Troyes. He thought he could do this by branching off at Evreux and passing through Fontainebleau, but at present he was not even sure that this would be the direction to take—was, indeed, uncertain if such a course would lead him to the goal he sought, though he believed it would.

But the impulse to quit André's auberge had to be resisted at once as soon as it arose—to follow it would be fraught with, possibly, as much danger as remaining there for a night. For if André really suspected who he was, he would not permit him to quit Bayeux—not at least without extorting something from him for his silence—while, if he could not absolutely remember him, his suspicions would be so much aroused by St. Georges's suddenly altered plans as, perhaps, to absolutely verify them, or to cause him to have the stranger denied exit from the city. Therefore, at all hazards, he must remain the intended night. It was the only way in which to avoid aiding the fellow's hazy recollections, which, after all, might not have taken actual form by the next day's dawn. And there was another thing: however much he might overmaster Nature sufficiently to be able to proceed without rest, the horse could not do so. He must, he decided, remain, and trust to chance.

"What a miserable, what an untoward fate is mine!" he murmured; "could Fortune play me worse? Of all men to light on, that it must be this brute—whom, if I could do so in safety, I would slay for his countless cruelties to me and others! It is hard, hard, hard! There are thousands of inns in France to which I might have gone without meeting any who could recognise me, yet at the very first I stumble on I encounter one who knows me, and knows what I have been. A galley slave!—a man doomed for life, while there, to that brutal work; a man who, since he has escaped, is doomed to death. Ah! well! I am in God's hands. As he has protected me before, may he do so again!"

He threw himself upon the bed as he uttered his little prayer—he must sleep at all cost. Even though André should denounce him to-morrow ere he could quit Bayeux—even though he should have to join la chaine again on its road to the galleys—ay! even though the scaffold was to witness his death in the morning, his wornout frame must rest. He had been without sleep for now almost the whole time that had elapsed since Tourville's fleet had first loomed up before the English; it seemed to him that he could scarce recall when he slept last. And what terrible events he had gone through since that time!

Had he tried to keep awake, he could scarce have done so; as it was he made no such effort. Wrapped in the coverlet, the sword unbuckled but grasped in his hand, he stretched his body out and gave himself up to slumber—slumber deep and heavy as that of a drugged man.

He would not have awakened when he did, would have slept on, perhaps, for hours longer, had not a continued deep, droning, noise—interrupted now and again by a shriller one—at last succeeded in thoroughly rousing him—a noise that came as it seemed from below the bed he lay on, and was only interrupted and drowned once by the booming of the cathedral clock striking three. Three! and he had lain down in early evening had slept for hours. Yet how weary he still felt! It was as yet quite dark—the dawn would not come for another hour, he knew—what could those sounds below mean? He raised himself on his elbow to listen and hear more plainly.

At first he could distinguish nothing but the deep hum, broken now and again by the sharper, more metallic sound; but as he bent over the bed—being now quite wide awake and with his senses naturally very acute—he recognised what those sounds were. And more especially was he enabled to do so from the fact that the planks of the floor were not joined very closely together—or had come apart since they were first laid down—as he had observed when he entered the room the day before.

The sounds were André and his wife talking. At this hour of the night, or morning! And gradually, with his senses strained to the utmost, he was enabled to catch almost every word that they uttered.

"But," said the woman, "I like it not. It is treachery—bassesse. And he is beau. Mon Dieu! mais il est beau——"

"Peste!" the man replied. "It is always of les beaux you think. Once 'twas the fisher from Havre, then Le Bic, of the maréchausse, now this one. And why base? The king pays a hundred gold pistoles for such as he. And if not to us, then others will get it. Why not we?"

"You are sure? You are not mistaken?"

"Sure! From the first moment. Though I held my peace. Ho! why frighten the bird away from the nest? At first the hair and mustache puzzled me—then——"

St. Georges started as he heard this. Now he knew of whom they talked.

"—it came back to me. A galérien in the Raquin, a surly dog—one of the worst; one of those who had been gentlemen. Gentlemen! Ma foi! I have made their backs tingle often, often!"

"Ay!" muttered St. Georges between his teeth, "you have! 'Tis true."

"You are certain?" the woman asked again. "A mistake would be terrible—would send you back to the galleys yourself, only as beaten slave—not overseer."

"Certain! So will the others be when he is taken—alive or dead. There on his shoulder, ma belle, they will see proof—the fleur-de-lis. Fortunate for him he was not a religious prisoner, a victim of our holy Church. Otherwise it would have been burnt into his cheek, and he would have been so marked he could not have escaped a day!"

"Will it be alive—or dead?"

"Dead, if he resists, at daybreak, in an hour. Then they will come for him; it is arranged. And take him—doubtless slay him. What matter? The reward is the same. 'Alive or dead,' says the paper—they showed it me at La Poste—'one hundred gold pistoles.' And the horse will be ours, too."

"How will they do it?"

"Hist! Listen. And get you to bed before they come. You need not be in it. I have arranged it, je te dis."

"But how—how—how?"

"I will awake him, bid him hurry; tell him he is discovered, lost, unless he flies. Then, doubtless, he will rush to the door, and, poof! they will cut him down as he rushes out. I have told them he is violent. They must strike at once. Tu comprends?"

"Yes," and it seemed to the listener as if the woman had answered with a shudder.

"And," the man said again, "the horse will be ours, too. I have not told them of that. No! we shall have that and the pistoles. Now, get you to bed. They will be here ere long. The day is coming. His last on earth if he runs out suddenly or resists."

The listener heard a moment or two later a stealthy tread upon the stairs outside—a tread that passed his door and went on upstairs and was then no more apparent. It was the woman withdrawing from the place where he was to be slain.

To be slain! Possibly. Yet, he determined, not as the man had arranged it. To be slain it might be, but not without a struggle, an attempt for life; without himself slaying others.

He crept to the window after finding that the door had been locked from the outside—no doubt during his long slumber!—and gazed out. It was not yet near daybreak; the miserable street was still in darkness; in no window was there any light—but above in the heavens there was, however, a gray tinge that told of the coming day. Then he looked around.

Beneath the window, which was a common dormer one, as is almost always the case in northern France and the Netherlands, there was nothing but the rain pipe running beneath it along the length of the house. Below was the street full of cobble and other stones—a good thirty feet below! To drop that height, even though hanging by his hands to the rain pipe and thereby diminishing the distance some eight feet would, however, be impossible; it would mean broken ankles and legs and dislocated thigh bones. Yet, what else to do? Behind him was the locked door; in front, through the window, an escape that would leave him mangled and at the mercy of those who were coming to slay him.

Still peering out into the darkness—that was now not all darkness—he saw about six feet to the left of him the mouth of the perpendicular pipe into which the horizontal one emptied itself and which must run down the side of the house. His chance, he thought, was here. Yet if he would avail himself of it he must be quick; the day would come ere long; at any moment those who had been summoned by the landlord must be approaching; he would be discovered.

He fastened his sword to his back with his sash—he could not drag it by his side—then head first he crept out of the window, testing with his right hand the water pipe—for six feet he would have to rely upon that to fend him from destruction, to prevent him from rolling off the roof to death below on the cobblestones! With that right hand pressed against it he could—if it did not give way under the pressure—reach the spout of the upright pipe. As he tried it it seemed strong, securely fastened to the lip of the roof; he might venture.

Face downward, his chest to the sloping roof, of which there was three feet between the sill of the window and the pipe at the edge, he lowered himself—his right hand on the pipe, his left, until obliged to loose it, clinging to the window frame. And at last he was on the roof itself, with the right hand still firmly pressed against that pipe, and the top joints of his left-hand fingers, and even his nails, dug into the rough edges of the tiles. That frail pipe and those tiles were all there was now to save him—nothing else but them between him and destruction! Slowly he thus propelled himself along, feeling every inch of the pipe carefully ere he bore any weight on it, feeling also each tile he touched to see if it was loose or tight. For he knew that one slip—one detached tile, one inch of yielding of the pipe—and he would go with a sudden rush over the sloping precipice to the stones below. And as he dragged himself along, hearing the grating of his body and the scraping of the buttons on his clothes against the roof, he prayed that the man watching below might not hear them also. At last he reached the mouth of the upright pipe, grasped it, and, as before, pressed against it to discover if it was firm—as it proved to be—then drew his body up over it, and gradually prepared to descend by it, feeling with his feet for the continuance of it below.

But, to his horror, there was no such continuance! His legs, hanging down from his groin over the roof—while his body was supported on the wide mouth of the pipe and by his hands being dug into the sides of the tiles, where they were joined to each other—touched nothing but the bare space of the wall. There was no pipe! It was broken off short a foot below the horizontal one, and the wall, he could feel, was damp from the water which had escaped and flowed down from where it was so broken.

He was doomed now, he knew; which doom should he select—to fall below and be crushed and mangled, or return to the room and, refusing to come out, be either done to death or taken prisoner? As he pondered thus in agony, away down the street he heard voices breaking on the morning air, he heard the clank of loosely fastened sabres on the stones—they were coming to take him—to, as André had said, "cut him down." And, scarce knowing what he did, or why in his frenzy he decided thus, he let his body further down into space, and, with his hands grasping the pipe's mouth, swung over that space. And once, ere he let go, which he must do in another moment, for the sides of the spout were cutting into his palms, he twisted his head and glanced down beneath him.

Then as he did so he gave a gasp—almost a cry of relief unspeakable. Beneath him, not two yards below his dangling feet, was the stone roof of the porch or doorway of the inn. The fall to that could not break his legs surely!—he prayed God the sound of it might not disturb the man within, who must be on the alert.

Closing his feet so that both should alight as nearly as possible on the same spot, pressing his body as near to the wall as he could, he let go the spout and dropped.

---

CHAPTER XXVII.

ANOTHER ESCAPE.

He alighted in the exact middle of the porch roof and fell with his ankles against the foot-high raised parapet. Then he paused a moment ere deciding what he should do next.

The sound of voices and clanking sabres were coming nearer—also it would soon now be light. And he wondered that he heard no noise from the man watching within; wondered that he was not staring about for those who were coming; almost wondered that he was not standing at the door with it open, ready to go out and meet them.

One thing St. Georges recognised as necessary to be done at once, viz., to quit the roof of the porch. There was no safety for him there; the instant André entered his room he would perceive he was flown, would rush to the window, and, looking out, would doubtless perceive him crouching and huddled up. He must quit that, and at once. But where? Then suddenly he bethought him of the stable that ran off at left angles from the house, close by the porch itself. That would be his best place of safety; moreover, he would have the horse to his hand; on it he might yet escape. And also from the open door of the stable he could reconnoitre, observe what happened, what must happen, in the next few moments. For now the voices of those who were approaching sounded very near. A little while, and his fate now trembling in the balance would be decided.

He lowered himself quickly over the side of the doorway roof—having but a distance of four or five feet to drop when hanging down—and observed that still the door was fast and that there was no sign of André about—doubtless he was waiting for the men to come, ere opening it! Immediately afterward he touched the ground and turned his steps to the alley leading to the stable and swiftly passed up to it, keeping under the shelter of a low wall. So far he was safe!

The horse whinnied a little as he entered—already the creature had come to know him well, perhaps because of his kindly treatment—but he silenced it at once by placing his arm over its mouth and nostrils, then seized the bridle and saddle and prepared it ready for mounting, doing so very quietly, for now the men were close at hand! This he did very rapidly, yet determinately, for, the animal once saddled, his chance would be still better. He had made his plans: if, when he was discovered missing, any should advance down the alley to seek for him, or to search if the horse was gone, he had resolved to mount as they advanced and to charge through them. Then, when he had done all that was necessary, he removed his sword from his back, drew it from the sheath and affixed the latter to his side. He was ready now.

And not too soon! In the now gathering light, sombre and lead-coloured, with, above, some clouds from which a misty rain was falling slightly, he saw three men belonging to the Garde de la Poste arrive in front of the door. One, a sergeant, struck lightly with his finger on the door and bent his ear against it.

"Si, si!" he heard this man say, a second after, evidently in reply to André from within, "quite ready. Send him forth." And still he kept his ear to the side post. A moment later he spoke again, also doubtless in answer to a question from within.

"Nay, have no fear," he said; "once outside he is ours," and he turned to the other two and gave them some orders which St. Georges could not overhear. He could see, however; and what he saw was, that under their superior's directions each of the others drew their heavy dragoon sabres—for to that branch of the army the Garde de la Poste belonged—and placed themselves one on either side of the porch.

Then all listened attentively.

A moment later, from the first and top floor, through the open window from which St. Georges had escaped, they heard the shouts of the man André; and St. Georges heard them, too, and grasped his sword more firmly, and with them came from the other side of the house a cry from the woman.

"Carogne!" exclaimed the sergeant, "the galley boy is giving trouble—André cannot induce him to descend. Yet, hark! he comes! listen to his tread on the stairs—he is rushing down. Be ready!" and as he spoke the two men raised their swords.

Again all heard the voice of André shouting within, the woman screaming, too; the door was fumbled at, and in the still, dim, misty light St. Georges saw a form rush out, and a minute later fall shrieking heavily to the ground, cut down by both sabres of the dragoons.

"We have him! we have him!" the sergeant shouted. "Come forth, man; he is ours!"

And as he spoke St. Georges leaped into the saddle, knowing that the time had almost come.

Another moment, and he heard one of the dragoons, who had been bending over the fallen man, exclaim:

"Mon dieu! What have we done? This is no galérien, but André himself!"

"What!" bawled the sergeant. "What! Mon dieu! it is." Then he said in a horror-stricken hoarse voice, "Is he dead?"

"Ma foi! I fear so. His head is in half," the man replied. And with a look of terror he addressed his comrade: "That was your stroke, not mine. I struck him on the shoulder. Thank God, his blood is on your head!"

"Fichte!" exclaimed the second, a man of harder mettle. "What matters? It is our duty. And the piége was his, not ours. He was a fool. But where—where is the galérien? We must have him!"

"Into the house," exclaimed the sergeant, "into the house! The woman screams no more—doubtless he has murdered her. In, I say, and seek for him; scour cellar and garret. In, in!" and together they rushed into the cabaret, finding, as they pushed the door further open, André's wife lying fainting in the passage. She had followed her husband down the stairs and witnessed his end.

That husband's greed—his withholding from the others the fact that the escaped galley slave had a good horse—led to that galley slave's escape. For, all unknowing that, not twenty paces off, the horse was there ready saddled to bear him away, they never thought of the stable, but, instead, plunged into the inn and commenced at once roaming from room to room searching for him.

As they did so, his opportunity came. Swiftly he led the animal down the alley to the door—it had no other exit, or he would have escaped by it—equally swiftly he led it some distance down the street, praying to God all the time that its hoofs striking on the stones might not reach their ears, and sweating with fear and apprehension as he heard their shouts and calls to one another. Then, when he was fifty yards away from the house, he jumped into the saddle, patted his horse on the neck, and rode swiftly for the East Gate.

Whether he would get through before the whole east part of the city was alarmed—as he knew it soon must be—he could not tell yet. If the gates were not open, he was as much lost as before; he must be taken. But would they be so open? Would they? As he prayed they might, the cathedral clock rang out again, struck four.

"O God!" he murmured, "grant this may be the hour. Grant it! grant it!"

It seemed to him as though his prayer was heard. Nearing the East Gate, placed on the west side of a branch of the river Eure, he saw the bascule descending; he knew that four o'clock was the hour. Also he saw several peasants standing by, ready to pass over it into the country beyond, doubtless either to fetch in produce for the city or going to their work. He was safe now, he felt; if none came behind, there would be no hindrance to his exit.

"You ride early, monsieur," the keeper said, glancing up at him from his occupation of throwing down some grain to his fowls, which he had just released for the day. Then, taking out a pocketbook, "Your name, monsieur, and destination?" he asked.

"Destination, Paris. Name——" and he paused. He had not anticipated this. Yet he must give a name and at once; at any moment from the city might appear a crowd, or the dragoons shouting to the man to bar his egress. "Name, Dubois. And I ride in haste. You have heard the news?"

"News! no," exclaimed the man, while even the peasants going to their toil pricked up their ears. "What news?"

"Tourville's fleet is ruined—burned—by the English! Stop me not. I ride to carry it. By orders!"

"Mon Dieu!" the man exclaimed, "by the English. Tourville defeated by them? It is impossible!"

"It is true," while as he spoke—still moving across the now lowered drawbridge as he did so—one of the peasants, an old woman, wailed: "My boy was there—in the Ambitieux! Is that burnt?"

"I do not know, good woman," he replied, unwilling to tell the poor old creature the worst. "I must not tarry."

And in a moment he had put the horse to the gallop. He had left Bayeux behind. Out of the jaws of death he had escaped once more. "But," he asked himself, "for how long? How long?"

---

That danger which he had escaped so soon after setting foot in France was not again equalled on the road, and a week later he neared the old fortified town of Rambouillet. He had progressed by obscure ways to reach it, avoiding every large city or town to which he had approached, and skirting, either on the north or south, Caen, Evreux, and Bernay. He was drawing nearer to Troyes now, nearer to where his child was, if still alive, nearer to the satisfaction he meant to have by his denunciation of the treachery of Aurélie de Roquemaure.

Yet, as he so progressed, he asked himself of what use would such denunciation be—of what importance in comparison with the regaining of Dorine? That was all in all to him; the supreme desire of his life now—to regain her, to escape out of France once more; to earn subsistence sufficient for them both in England. Beyond that, the satisfaction of taxing Mademoiselle de Roquemaure with her treachery—the treachery of, with her mother, appearing to sympathize with him when they first met at the manoir, of expressing that sympathy again in Paris during their brief encounter outside the Louvre, of her false and lying words to Boussac—would be little worth. Yet, small as that satisfaction would be, something within told him he must obtain it; must stand face to face with her and look into those clear gray eyes that had the appearance of being so honest and were so false; must ask her why, since she so coveted all that his and his child's life might deprive her of, she had stooped to the duplicity of pretending to sympathize with him; to the baseness of stealing his child from the man who had himself stolen it—he knew not why; to the foul meanness of accompanying her menial—herself masked to prevent detection—and urging him on to murder; herself, by complicity, a murderess! And as he so pondered, he reflected also with what eager, cruel pleasure—for he knew now, and almost shuddered at knowing, that the wrongs inflicted on him had turned him toward cruelty—he would tell her of how her vile brother had died before his eyes.

So, determinately, he rode on, nearing Rambouillet, yet feeling as though sometimes he could go no further, must drop from his horse into the road. In the week since he escaped from Bayeux he had been feeling that day by day he was becoming ill, that all he had gone through—the immersion in the sea, the intensity of his excitement at Bayeux, his long rides and exposure to the weather—was like ere long to overwhelm him. Sometimes for hours he rode almost unconscious of what was passing around him; he burned with a consuming fever, his limbs and head ached and his thirst was terrible.

Yet, urged on and on by the object he had in view, he still went forward until, at last, he halted outside the town he had now come to, beneath the walls of the old castle of Rambouillet.

---

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE FLEUR-DE-LIS.

The hot sun of those last days of May beat down on the white roads and the orchards and the pastures surrounding the town of Rambouillet, and shone also with unpleasant strength upon La Baronne de Louvigny, being driven back to her house within the walls. And madame's aristocratic countenance, handsome as she was, showed signs of irritation—perhaps from the effects of the heat, perhaps from other things—while her dark eyes, glancing out from under the hood of the summer calèche in which she was lying back, looked as though they belonged to a woman who was not, at the present moment at least, in the best of humours.

She was still a very young woman and was also a widow, the baron having been killed in a duel some few years ago, which had not grieved her in the least, since he was an old man who had married her for her good looks and, possibly, her more aristocratic connections than he himself possessed; yet, in spite of these advantages, there were things in her existence which annoyed her. Among these things was, for instance, one which was extremely irritating—namely, that for four years now she had been required to abstain from visiting Paris or the court, either at Versailles, Marley, or St. Germains, and this notwithstanding that her blood was of the most blue and that she claimed connection with the most aristocratic families in France.

Truly it was an annoying thing to be young, handsome, and very well to do—owing to her not too aristocratic husband, the late baron—and to be of the blue blood owing to her own family, and yet to be under a cloud in consequence of a scandal—of being mixed up in an affair, a scene, or tragedy, which it was impossible to altogether hush up. At least she found it annoying, and, so finding it, revolted a good deal at the ban laid on her. Still, revolt or repine as she might, Louis's word was law in all matters of social importance, and she was forced to bow to it, in the hopes that, as time passed on, the ban might be removed. But it was not strange, perhaps, that in so bowing, her temper, always a hot, passionate one, had grown a little uncertain.

It did not serve to improve that temper on this hot day that, at a moment when the calèche emerged into a particularly sunny portion of the road, unsheltered by either tree or bank, it should suddenly come to a stop and expose her to the full glare of the sun itself. Moreover, the jerk with which the horses were pulled up gave her a jar which did not tend to better matters.

"What are you stopping for?" she asked angrily of one of the lackeys who had by now jumped down from behind. "I bade you take me back as soon as possible. And why in this broad glare? Animal!" and she drew her upper lip back, showing her small white teeth.

"Pardon, my lady," the man said—he knowing the look well, and remembering also that, before to-day, it had boded punishment for him and his fellows—"but there is a man lying in the road, almost under the hoofs of the horses. And his own stands by his side."

"Well! What of that? Thrust them aside and drive on. Am I to be broiled here?"

"Pardon, my lady," the man again ventured to say submissively, "but it is not a peasant. He looks of a better class than that."

"What is he, then, a gentleman of the seigneurie?" And she deigned to lean out of the calèche somewhat, as though to obtain a glance of the person who had barred her way. "Has he been drinking?"

"I do not know, my lady. But his head is hurt. He may have been attacked or injured by his fall. He is plainly dressed, but carries a sword. He is young, too, and wears a mustache like an officer."

"I will see him. Open the door."

The lackey did as he was bidden, his fellow jumping down also from behind, and each of them offering an arm to their imperious mistress to aid her descent from the high vehicle; then madame la baronne advanced to the front of her horses' heads and gazed down at the unconscious man lying in the dust.

"Turn his face up," she said, "and let me see it." The servants doing as she bade them, and parting also the long hair that fell over the face, the woman gave a start and muttered under her lips, "My God!" And at the same time, beneath her patches and powder, she turned very pale. "Is he dead?" she asked a moment later, in a constrained voice, while still she gazed at him.

"I think not, my lady," one of the men said who was kneeling beside the man in the road. "His heart beats. It may be a vertigo or the heat of the sun. Certainly he is not dead."

"Take him up," she said, "and carry him, you two, into the town. Attach his horse, also, to the carriage and lead it in. Follow at once;" and she re-entered the calèche.

"Where, madame, shall we place him?" the lackey asked, who had first spoken. "With the corps-de-garde, my lady?"

"No; bring him to my house. He shall be attended to there. He—he may be a gentleman, and the corps-de-garde are rough. We will attend to him. Now bid the coachman drive on, and follow at once; do not lag with him, or you shall be punished."

Slowly the carriage proceeded, therefore, into Rambouillet, and Madame la Baronne de Louvigny, lying back in it, white to her lips, pondered over the face that a few minutes before had been turned up to her gaze.

"Alive," she said to herself. "De Vannes, and alive! And in my power; another half hour and he will be in my house. So—he was not lost in the galley that those vile English sunk! And Raoul is no nearer to the wealth he needs than ever—no nearer. And, my God! the man lives who called me 'wanton' in the road that night, the man whom I tried to slay, the man through whom came my exposure. And in my house! In my house!" And she laughed to herself and showed her teeth again. Then she muttered to herself: "But for how long! Oh, that Raoul was here to advise with!"

---

Late that night St. Georges opened his eyes and glanced around him, wondering where he was and endeavouring to recall what had befallen him. Yet, at first, no recollection came; he could not recall any of the events of the day—nothing. All was a blank. He had sufficient sensibility, however—a sensibility that momentarily increased—to be able to notice his surroundings and to observe that he lay in a large-capacious bed in a commodious room, well furnished and hung with handsome tapestry representing hunting scenes; also that at the further end of the room by a hugh fireplace—now, of course, empty—there stood a lamp with, by it, a deep chair in which a female figure sat sleeping—a female whose dress betokened her a waiting maid.

"Where am I?" he asked feebly, trying to send his voice to where she sat. "And why am I here?"

The woman arose and came toward the bed and stood beside him; then she said:

"You were found lying in the road outside the town."

"What town?"

"Rambouillet."

"Ah!—I remember. Yes."

"By my mistress, La Baronne de Louvigny. She had you brought here."

"She is very merciful to me, a stranger. A Christian woman."

To this the waiting maid made no reply; in her own heart she had no belief in her mistress's mercy or Christianity—she had served her a long while. Then she said:

"You had best sleep now. You are bruised and cut about the head. But the doctor has bled you, and says you will soon be well. Where are you going to?"

"To—I do not know. I cannot remember."

"Sleep now," the woman said, "sleep. It is best for you," and she left the bedside and went back to the chair she had been sitting in when he called to her.

The comfort of the bed combined with the feeling of weakness that was upon him made it not difficult to obey her behest; yet ere he did so he had sufficient of his senses left to him—or returned to him—to raise his hand and discover by doing so that his clothes were not removed; to satisfy himself that the brand upon his shoulder had not yet been observed. Being so satisfied, he let himself subside into a sleep once more.

Meanwhile, in a room near where he lay, La Baronne de Louvigny, sometimes seated in a deep fauteuil, sometimes pacing the apartment which formed her boudoir or dressing room, was meditating deeply upon the chances which had thrown this man into her hands.

"Mon Dieu!" she muttered to herself, as she had done once before while her calèche had borne her back into the town of Rambouillet, "if Raoul were but here! What shall I do with him? What! What! After that horrible night when the prefect examined us at Versailles, pronounced that I was an attempted murderess—Heaven! if Louvois had not stood our friend with Louis, what would have been the consequence!—Raoul told me all: That this man was in truth the Duc de Vannes; that, if he once knew it, or Louis guessed it, it meant ruin; that all his father's vast estates would go to him instead of to Raoul, who had long felt secure of them; that, worse than all, Louis would never pardon the attack upon his friend's son, would know that he had been struck down from behind by a foul blow, not fairly in a duel. And now he is here, alive in my house—has crossed our path again; is doubtless on his way to the king to tell him the truth, prove his false condemnation to the galleys, claim all that is his. God! if he does that I shall never be Raoul's wife—never, never, never!"

As she had once drunk feverishly of the wine standing on the inn table, while it seemed that to the man who ought, even then, to have been her husband his doom was approaching from St. Georges's avenging sword, so she now went to a cabinet and took from it a flask of strong waters and swallowed a dram. The habit had grown on her of late, had often been resorted to since the night when she—hitherto a woman with no worse failings than that of lightness of manner and with, for her greatest weakness, a mad, infatuated passion for Raoul de Roquemaure—had struck her knife deep between his shoulders, and had become a murderess in heart and almost one in actual fact.

Then, having swallowed the liquor, she mused again.

"What best to do? I can not slay him here in my own house—though I would do so if I could compass it. He called me 'wanton'; read me aright! For that alone I would do it! Yet, how? How? And if he goes free from here 'tis not a dozen leagues to Louis; doubtless he knows now his history, he will see him—Louvois is dead and gone to his master, the devil—he is a free man."

Yet as she said the words "a free man" she started, almost gasped.

"A free man!" she repeated. "A free man! Ha! is he free?"

Through her brain there ran a multitude of fresh thoughts, of recollections. "A free man!" Yet he had been condemned, she knew, to the galleys en perpétuité; there was no freedom, never any pardon for those so sentenced. Once condemned, always condemned; no appeal possible, their rights gone forever, slaves till their day of death; branded, marked, so that forever they bore that about them which sent them back to slavery. If he bore that upon him, he was lost; the galleys still yawned for him—yawned for him so long as Louis did not know that the escaped galérien was the son of his friend of early days.

"I know it all, see it all," she whispered to herself. "The galley was lost, but he was saved—saved to come back to France and ruin us. Yet he bears that about him—must bear it, since all condemned en perpétuité are branded—which, once seen, will send him back to his doom. Let but the préfet see that, or any officer of the garrison or citadel, and the next day he will travel again the road which he has come; go back to Dunkirk or Havre, back to the chiourme and the oar. They will listen to nothing, hear no word or protest, grant no trial. He is mine—mine!" and again she went to the cabinet and drank. "Even though he has found proof of who he is, they will not listen to nor believe him."

One fear only disturbed her frenzy now. That he was the man who had called her "wanton," the man who stood between her lover and his wealth, and consequently between her and that lover, she never doubted. Those features, seen first by the lamp in the parlour of the inn—seen, too, when apparently he lay dying from her murderous stab—were too deeply stamped into her memory to ever be forgotten. And as he lay there, looking like death, so he had looked as he lay in the dust outside Rambouillet. He was the man!—and this was her fear! But was it certain that the galley mark was branded into him, the mark which proclaimed him as one doomed to those galleys forever, that would send him back without appeal, and would make all in authority whom he might endeavour to address turn a deaf ear to him?

She must know that, and at once. She could not rest until she knew that upon his shoulder was the damning evidence.

All was quiet in the house, it was near midnight, the domestics were in their beds by now: she resolved that she would satisfy herself at once. Then, if the brand was there, as it must be, she could arrange her next steps—could send for the commandant of the château, deliver the man into his hands, be not even seen by him. If it was there!

Leaving her room, she crept to the one to which he had been carried, and, pushing open the door, looked in. The waiting maid, who had received orders not to quit him under any pretext, was sleeping heavily in her chair; on the bed at the further end of the room lay the man.

Then swiftly and without noise she advanced toward him, carrying the taper which had been burning by the watcher's side in her hand, and gazed down upon him.

He was sleeping quietly, his coat and waistcoat off—for they had removed these in consequence of the warmth of the day, though nothing else except his shoes—his shirt was open at the neck. If she could turn it back an inch or two without awaking him, her question would be answered.

Shading the lamp with one hand, with the other she touched the collar of his discoloured shirt, her white jewelled fingers looking like snowflakes against it and his bronzed skin; lower she pressed the folds back until, revealed before her, was the mark burned deep into his neck, the fatal iris with, above it, the letter G.

"So," she said, "the way is clear before me;" and softly, still obscuring the light with her hand, she stole from the room quietly as she had come.

---

CHAPTER XXIX.

FAREWELL HOPE!

"Madame," the waiting maid said to her the next afternoon, "the gentleman is desirous of setting forth upon his journey again. He is well now, he says, and he has far to ride."

"Well," said la baronne, glancing up from the lounge on which she lay in her salon and speaking in her usual cold tones, "he may go. What is there to detain him? The surgeon says he is fit to travel, does he not? His was but a fit from long riding in the sun."

"Yes, my lady—but——"

"But what?"

"My lady, he is a gentleman—none can doubt that. He—he is desirous to speak with you—to——"

"To speak with me?" and from her dark eyes there shot a gleam that the woman before her did not understand. Nor did she understand why her ladyship's colour left her face so suddenly. "To speak with me?"

"Yes, my lady. To, he says, thank you for your charity to him a stranger—for your hospitality."

"My hospitality!" and she drew a long breath. Then, and it seemed to the waiting maid as if her mistress had grown suddenly hoarse, "He said that?"

"He said so, madame. He begged you would not refuse to let him make the only return that lay in his power."

"I will not see him."

"Madame!"

"I will not see him—go—tell him so. No! Yet, stay, on further consideration I will. Go. Bring him."

Left alone, she threw herself back once more on the cushions of her lounge, muttering to herself: "After all," she said, "it is best. He never saw my face on that night—the mask did not fall from it until his back was turned—I remember it all well—Raoul's cry for help—this one's determination—my blow. Ah, the blow! It should never have been struck—yet—yet—otherwise he had slain Raoul. And," she continued rapidly, for she knew that the man would be here in a moment, "and I may find out if he knows who and what he is. If he guesses also the fate in store for him."

Rapidly she went to a cabinet in this great salon, took out from it a little dagger, and dropped it in the folds of her dress, muttering: "It may be needed again. He may recognise me even after so long and in such different surroundings," and then turned and faced the door at which a knocking was now heard. A moment later St. Georges was in the room.

Pale from the loss of blood he had sustained both from his fall and at the surgeon's hands, and looking much worn by all he had suffered of late—to say nothing of the two years of slavery he had undergone—he still presented a figure that, to an ordinary woman, would have been interesting and have earned her sympathy. His long hair was now brushed carefully and fell in graceful folds behind; his face, if worn and sad, was as handsome as it had ever been. Even his travel-stained garments, now carefully cleaned and brushed, were not unbecoming to him. And she, regarding him fixedly, felt at last a spark of compunction rise in her bosom for all that she had done against him. Yet it must be stifled, she knew. That very morning's work—a letter to the commandant at the castle—had been sufficient to make all regret unavailing now.

"Madame," he said, bending low before her with the courtesy of the period, "I could not leave your house without desiring first to thank you for the protection you have afforded me. And, poor and unknown as I am, I yet beseech you to believe that my gratitude is very great. You succoured me in my hour of need, madame; for that succour let me thank you." And stooping his knee he courteously endeavoured to take her hand.

But—none are all evil—even Nathalie de Louvigny would not suffer that. Drawing back from him, she exclaimed instead: "Sir, you have nothing to thank me for. I—I—what I did I should have done to any whom I had found as you were."

He raised his eyes and looked at her. A chord or tone in her voice seemed to recall something in the past, and she standing there divined that such was the case. Then he said, quietly:

"Madame, I can well believe it. Charity does not discriminate in its objects. Yet, since I so happened to be that object, I must thank you. Madame, it is not probable that I shall ever visit Rambouillet again, nor, indeed, France after a little while; let an——"

"Not visit France again!" she exclaimed, staring open-eyed at him. "Are you not a Frenchman?"

"Madame, I was a Frenchman. I am so no longer. I have parted with France forever. In another week, or as soon after that as possible, I intend to quit France and never to return to it."

She took a step back from him, amazed—terrified. What had she done! This man had renounced France forever—would have crossed her and Raoul's path no more—have resigned all claim to all that was his. And she had taken a step that would lead to his being detained in France—that might, though his chance was remote, lead to his true position being known. Yet, was it too late to undo that which she had done? Was it?

She had bidden the officer in command at the château, who aspired to her regard, send to her house that night and arrest a man who, she had every reason to believe, had escaped from the galleys. Also she had warned him to let no man pass the gate without complete explanation as to who and what he was; and he had sent back word thanking her, and saying that, provided the person of whom she spoke did not endeavour to leave Rambouillet before sunset, he would have him arrested at her house. She had done this in early morning; now the sunset was at hand. Ere long the soldiers would be here, and he would be detained—would speak—might be listened to. She had set the trap, and she herself was snared in it.

Yet, she remembered, she wanted one other thing—revenge for the opprobrious word he had applied to her long ago. If he quitted France she must forego that. But need she forego it? He had spoken of himself in lowly terms—was it possible he still did not know who he was, as De Roquemaure had told her long ago he did not know then? The revenge might still be hers if he knew nothing. She must find that out if she could.

"Monsieur must have very little in France that he deems of worth," she said, "since he is so desirous of quitting it. There are few of our countrymen who willingly exchange the land of their birth for another."

She had seated herself as she spoke before a table on which stood a tall, thin vase filled with roses; and she caught now in her hands the folds of the tablecloth, while he standing there before her saw these signs of emotion. Also he observed that her eyes sparkled with an unnatural light, and that her upper lip, owing to some nervous contraction, was drawn back a little, so that her small white teeth were very visible. And as he so observed her and noticed these things, the certainty came to him that they had met before. But where? He could not remember at first—could not recall where he had seen a woman seated at a table as she was now seated, clutching the folds of the cloth in her hands.

"My countrymen," he said, still vainly wondering, "have not often suffered as I have suffered—have not such reasons, perhaps, for quitting their native land forever."

"What reasons?" and as she spoke her nervousness was such that she released the folds of the cloth which her left hand grasped, and with that hand toyed with the slim vase before her which contained the roses.

And this further action stirred his memory still more. When had he seen a woman seated thus, her hand trifling first with a table cover, then with some object on the table itself? When?

"Reasons so deep, so profound," he said, "that scarce any who knew of them would be surprised at my resolve: a career cruelly blighted for no fault of my own; my life attempted secretly, murderously; my little child doomed to assassination; the wrongdoer in my power, a treacherous stab from behind—" He paused amazed.

The woman's right hand—the left now gathering up the folds of the cloth again in its small palm—had dropped to the side of her dress, was thrust into a pocket in that side, was feeling for, perhaps grasping, something within that pocket. That action aided remembrance and cleared away all wonder. Swift as the lightning flashes, there flashed to his recollection the woman who had sat at the table of the inn—the woman whom, as he and De Roquemaure had once changed places as they fought, he had seen seize the flask of wine with her left hand, her right grasping her small dagger. And this was the woman! The drawn-back lip, the glassy stare with which she regarded him in the swift-coming darkness of the summer evening, all reproduced the scene of that night—a scene which, until now, he had almost forgotten amid the crowd of other events that had taken place since then. Advancing a step nearer to her, so that he stood towering above, he said, his voice deep and solemn:

"It is strange, madame, how we stand face to face once more—alone together. Is it not? It was your hand dealt that stab!"

She could not answer him, could only regard him fixedly, her eyes glaring as they had glared four years ago, and as they had glared not four minutes since. Only now it was with the wild stare of fear added to hate and fury, and not with hate and fury alone; also she kept still her right hand in the fold of her dress.

"When last we met, madame," St. Georges continued, his voice low and solemn as before, "you interfered between me and my vengeance on one who had deeply wronged me. You had the power to do so, bore about you a concealed weapon, and—used it! Have you one now?" and he pointed with his finger to where her hand was.

Still she maintained silence—trembling all over and affrighted; even the arm hanging down by her side with the hand in the pocket was trembling too.

"Well," St. Georges said, "it matters not! I shall not give you a second opportunity—shall not turn my back on you."

Then she spoke, roused by the contempt of those last words.

"I would not have struck at you," she said, "even though I loved De Roquemaure—am his affianced wife when he returns from England——"

"When—he—returns—from England!" St. Georges repeated, astonished.

"Yes. His affianced wife." In her tremor she thought his disbelief of this was the cause of his astonishment, never dreaming of how he had last left her lover. "Not even for that love. But you had abused, insulted me, called me wanton, suggested it was I who stole your child. And you were very masterful, ordered us to follow you into the inn, carried all before you, treated him like a dog, would have slain him——"

"I have since learned I wronged you, at least; that it was another—woman—who stole my child. But enough. We have met again, madame, and—and—I must——"

"What!" she gasped, thinking he was about to slay her. "What will you do to me?"

"Do!" he replied. "Do! What should I do?"

"God knows! Yet in mercy spare me! I am a woman," and overcome with fear she cast herself at his feet. "Spare me—spare me."

"I do not understand you," St. Georges said, looking down disdainfully at her. "I think, too, you do not understand me. I wish to do only one thing now, to quit your presence and never set eyes on you again," and without offering to assist her to her feet he backed toward the door.

But now—perhaps, because of the discovery that this man meant her no harm, intended to exact no horrible atonement from her—a revulsion of feeling took place in the woman's breast.

"No, no!" she cried, springing to her feet. "No, no! Do not go—for God's sake do not attempt to quit the town yet! You will be lost—if you are seen—lost, lost! Ah, heavens!" she screamed, for at that moment there boomed a cannon from the château, "the sunset gun! The sunset gun! It is too late!"

"What is too late?" he asked advancing toward her. "What?" And as he spoke he seized her wrist. "Woman, what do you mean? Is this some fresh plot, some new treachery? Answer me. Am I trapped—and by you?"

"No, no!" she wailed, afraid to tell what she had done, afraid that even now, ere the soldiers should come, he would strangle the life out of her, or thrust the sword he carried by his side through her heart. "No, no! But it is known—they know—that you have been a galérien—you will be arrested! The mark upon your shoulder is known to the commandant."

"How?" he said, again seizing her by the arm. "How? Who knows it? Who? Outside this house none can have seen it."

"Come!" she replied, not daring to answer him; "come, hide. They will look for you here. Yet I can secrete you till the search is over. For a week—months—if need be. Come."

"They know I am here! Through you?"

"No, no! The mark was seen when you lay insensible—ah!" she screamed again. "See, see! it is too late! They are in the garden. It is too late!"

It was true. Along the garden path to which the windows of her salon opened, six soldiers were advancing led by a young officer. Across their shoulders were slung their muskets; the officer carried his drawn sword. And St. Georges looking from her to them knew that he was snared, his freedom gone. Doubtless his life, too.

"Devil," he said to the woman as she reeled back to the lounge and fell heavily on it—"devil, I thanked you too soon. Had I known, dreamed of this, I would have slain you as you dreaded!"

---

CHAPTER XXX.

"IT IS TRUE."

The windows of the salon giving on to the crushed-shell path of the Hôtel de Louvigny had been open all day to let in the air, and the handsomely apparelled young officer of the Régiment de Grancé, stationed at Rambouillet, was enabled therefore to at once enter the room, leaving his men outside. Yet as he did so he seemed bewildered and astonished at the sight which met his eyes.

Lying fainting, gasping, on her couch was Madame de Louvigny—la belle Louvigny as they called her, and toasted her nightly in the guardroom—standing over her was a man, white to the lips, his hands clinched, his whole form and face expressing horror and contempt.

"Pardie!" the young fellow muttered between his lips, "I have interrupted a little scene, un roman d'amour! Bon Dieu the lover has detected madame in some little infidelity, and—and—has had a moment of vivacity. Yet 'tis not my fault. Devoir avant tout," and as he muttered the motto of the noble house to which he belonged—perhaps as an aid in that devoir—he advanced into the room after bidding his men remain where he had stationed them.

"Madame la baronne will pardon my untimely appearance," he muttered in the most courtly manner, and with a comprehensive bow of much ease and grace which included St. Georges, "but my orders were—what—madame herself knows. Otherwise I should regret even more my presence here."

She, still on the lounge, her face buried in her Valenciennes handkerchief, was as yet unable to utter a word—he, standing before her, never removed his eyes from her. The officer's words had confirmed what he suspected—what he knew.

"But," continued the lieutenant, "madame will excuse. I have my orders to obey. The man she mentioned to the commandant has not yet endeavoured to pass the barrier—is it madame's desire that her house should be searched?"

She raised her head from the couch as he spoke, not daring to cast a glance at him whom she had betrayed to his doom. Then she said, her voice under no control and broken. "No. He is not here. He—has escaped."

"Escaped, madame? Impossible! Rambouillet is too small even for him to be in hiding—he——"

"Has not escaped," St. Georges said, turning suddenly on the officer. "On the contrary, he has been betrayed. I am the man."

"You! Madame's——" and he left his sentence unfinished. "You! Here alone with her, and a galérien!"

"Yes—I."

It was useless, he knew, to do aught than give himself up. Escape was impossible. It was known, must be known in this small town, that he was the only stranger who had entered it lately; nor did he doubt that when the treacherous creature had informed against him she had described him thoroughly. Even though now she lied to save him, it would be of no avail. He could not remain in her house, hide in it as she had suggested, take shelter from her. From her! No! even the galleys—or the gallows—were better than that.

"I regret to hear it," the officer said, "since monsieur appears to be a friend of madame la baronne. Yet, under the circumstances, monsieur will not refuse to accompany me."

"I will accompany you."

Whatever the young fellow may have thought of the man who was now in his custody—and what he did think was that he was some old lover of la belle Louvigny who had either cast her off, or been cast off by her, and had reappeared at an awkward moment, so that she had taken an effectual manner of disposing of him—he at least did not show it. But for her he testified his contempt in a manner that was unmistakable. He motioned to St. Georges to precede him to the open window where his men were, and, putting on his hat before he had quitted the room, he strode after his prisoner without casting a glance at the woman.

But as they neared the window, and were about to step on to the path, St. Georges stopped and, addressing him, said: "Sir, grant me one moment's further grace, I beg of you. Ere I go I have a word to say to madame."

Courteous as he had been all through—to him—the young fellow shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly, raised no objection, and lounged by the open window, while St. Georges returned to where she still crouched upon the lounge. Yet, as she heard his footsteps nearing her, she looked up with terror-stricken eye, and shrunk back even further into its ample depths. The officer had not demanded his sword, it hung still by his side; her craven heart feared that in his last moment allowed to him he might wrench it from its sheath and punish her for her treachery. But, as she learned a moment later, he had a worse punishment in store for her than that.

"You have sent me to my doom," he said, gazing down on her, "yet, ere I go, hear what has been the doom of another—as vile as you yourself——"

In an instant she had sprung to her feet, was standing panting before him, one hand upon her heart, the other by her side in the folds of her dress. "Vile as she herself," he had said. "Vile as she herself!" To whom else but De Roquemaure could such words apply when issuing from that man's lips?

"The doom of another!" she hissed, repeating those words; "the doom of another—of whom?"

And again on her face there was now the look—the canine look—that had been there before—the lip drawn back, the small teeth showing, the threatening glance in the eyes.

"Of whom but one! Who else but your vile partner"—the young officer, of noble race as he was, and steeped in good breeding, could scarce refrain from being startled at those words—"the man you say you love? Well, love him! Only learn this, you have nothing but his memory to love. He is dead!——"

With a scream that rang not only through the salon, but the house also, and penetrated out into the cool garden beyond—a scream that caused the lieutenant to start toward them, and his men to peer into the room—she sprang at him, her right hand raised now, and in it the dagger she had so long concealed.

"Beware!" the officer cried. "Beware, she is dangerous!" And, even as he spoke, she struck full at St. Georges's breast with the knife.

"Bah!" he exclaimed, thrusting aside her upraised arm with the hand in which, all through the interview with her, he had held his hat—thrusting it aside with such force that she almost staggered and fell. "Bah! you mistake, woman. Did you think it was my back again at which you struck?"

The room was full of servants now; her own waiting maid and one or two of the lackeys busy about the house, preparing a little supper madame had intended giving that night to a few admirers, had rushed in at her scream; and now the former stood behind and half supported her while she muttered incoherent sounds amid which the words only could be caught, "You slew him!—at last!"

"Nay," he said, standing still in front of her, calm and sinister; "such satisfaction was not granted me, nor so easy an ending to him. The English who drove Tourville's fleet to its doom at La Hogue did their work effectively. Each ship, each transport, found by them was blown out of the water; in one of those transports, named the Vendôme, he was blown up, too. I was there but a little while before it exploded; I saw its fragments and all within it hurled into space. I think, madame, my doom is scarce worse than his."

With another shriek, as piercing as the first, she threw her arms above her head, then fell an insensible mass into the serving woman's arms. And St. Georges, turning to the young officer, said:

"Sir, I am at your service."

---

They took him that night to the Château de Rambouillet, he marching with three of the soldiers in front of and three behind him, the young officer by his side. And this scion of nobility, one of the De Mortemarts, testified by his actions that night that the French good breeding of the great monarch's day was no mere outward show. He permitted his prisoner to still retain his sword, and he walked by his side instead of ahead of his men, because he did not desire that those whom in his mind he considered the canaille should make any observations upon that prisoner as they passed through the streets. Moreover, wherever a knot of persons were gathered together in any corner he affected a smiling exterior, so that they should be induced to suppose that St. Georges was an ordinary acquaintance accompanying him.

"Sir," said the latter, observing all this, "you are very good to me. You make what I have to bear as light as possible."

"It is nothing, nothing," the lieutenant replied. "I only wish it had not fallen to my lot to undertake so unpleasant a duty. By the way, I suppose it is true, as she told the commandant! You have, unfortunately known—been—at the galleys?"

"It is true."

"Tiens! A pity. A thousand pities! Above all, that you should have encountered that she-devil. Well, I am glad you had those hard words with her. Ma foi! she is a tigress! I only hope you may escape from—from other things—as you did from her dagger."

The commandant—who was also the colonel of the Régiment de Grancé—was, however, a different style of man from his lieutenant—a man who from long service in the army had become rough and harsh; also, like many men commanding regiments under Louis, he had risen solely by his military qualifications, and owed nothing to birth or influence.

He listened, however, very attentively to all De Mortemart told him of the scene that had taken place, and especially as to how the Baronne de Louvigny—to whom he himself was paying court, as has been told—had evidently had some lover whose existence he had never suspected; and then he sent for St. Georges, who was brought into his presence by De Mortemart himself.

"So," he said, "you are an escaped galérien, monsieur. Well! You know what happens to them when retaken!"

"I know."

"What was your crime?"

"Nothing—except serving the king as a soldier."

"As a soldier!" he and De Mortemart exclaimed together, while the former continued, "In what capacity?"

"As lieutenant in the Chévaux-Légers of Nivernois."

"Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the commandant. "A picked regiment, and commanded by De Beauvilliers—n'est-ce pas?"

"He was my colonel."

"Come," said the other, relaxing his stern method of addressing St. Georges, and warming toward him, unknowingly to himself by the fact that this man in such dire distress was a comrade and had served in a corps d'élite—"come, tell us your history. We cannot help you—there is but one thing to do, namely, to send you to Paris for inquiry; but until you go we can at least make your existence here more endurable."

So St. Georges told them his story.

All through it both his listeners testified their sympathy—De Mortemart especially, by many exclamations against De Roquemaure and his sister, and also against la belle Louvigny—while the colonel spoke approvingly of the manner in which St. Georges had almost avenged himself on his foe in the inn. The description, too, of his existence in the galleys moved both young and old soldier alike; it was only when he arrived at the account of the destruction of Tourville's fleet that they ceased to make any remark and sat listening to him in silence.

It was finished, however, now, and when the colonel spoke his voice was more cold and unsympathetic.

"You have ruined yourself by the last month's work," he said. "I am afraid you can never recover from that. Did you not know that his Majesty has made it a rule that none who have served him shall ever take service under a foreign power and dare to venture into France again?"

"I know it," St. Georges said, "and I must abide by my fate. Yet, my child was here. I was forced to come, and there was no other way but this."

One thing only he had not told them, the story of what he believed to be his birth, the belief he held that he was the Duc de Vannes. Nor, he determined then—had, indeed, long since determined—would he ever publish that belief now. Had he kept his freedom until he had once more regained Dorine, it was his intention to have repassed to England and never again to have recalled that supposed birthright, or, as the child grew up, to have let her obtain any knowledge on the subject. He would work for her, slave for her, if necessary become tutor, or soldier, or sailor, as Fate might decree; but it must be as an Englishman, and with all connection with France broken forever.

And now, a prisoner, a man who would ere long be tried as an ex-galérien, as—if De Mortemart and the colonel did not hold their peace—a Frenchman who had joined England and helped her in administering the most crushing blow to France which she had suffered for centuries—he would never see his child again; what need, therefore, to publish his belief?

The hope that had sustained him for years was gone; the prayer he had uttered by night and day, that once more he might hold his little child in his arms and cherish and succour her, was gone, too; they would never meet again. Let him go, therefore, to his doom unknown, and, so going, pass away and be forgotten. And it might be that, with him removed, God would see fit to temper to his child the adversity that had fallen to his own lot.

---

CHAPTER XXXI.

ST. GEORGES'S DOOM

The cours criminel on the banks of the Seine had been crowded all day, and the judges seated on the bench began to exhibit signs of fatigue at their labours. They had sat from ten o'clock in the morning far into the afternoon, and, now that four o'clock was at hand, it appeared as if their sitting would be still further prolonged; and this in spite of the number of cases they had disposed of.

A variety of malefactors, or so-called malefactors, had on that day received their sentences: some for professing the "reformed religion," as they blasphemously—in the judges' eyes—termed it; some for being bullies and cutthroats; a student aged sixteen had been sentenced to imprisonment in the Bastille for writing on the walls a distich on Louis, stating that he had displaced God in the minds of the French;[9] and a marchioness had been condemned to a fine of twenty pistoles and to remain out of Paris for a year for having poisoned her husband; also a spy, a Dutchman, supposed to be in the service of the accursed Stadtholder and English king, had been condemned to death by burning, his entrails to be first cut out and flung in his face; and several petty malefactors—a drunken priest who had read a portion of Rabelais to his flock instead of a sermon; a lampoonist who had written a joke on the De Maintenon; an actor who had struck a gentleman in defence of his own daughter; and a courtesan who had induced a young nobleman to spend too much money on her—were all sentenced to the Bastille, to Vincennes, and Bicêtre for various periods.

[9] The distich ran:

"La croix fait place au lis, et Jésus Christ au Roi
Louis, oh! race impie, est le seul Dieu chez toi."

For writing it the student remained in prison thirty-one years.

"Now," said Monsieur de Rennie, who presided to-day, when the last of these wretches had been finished off—"now, is the list cleared? We have sat six hours." And the other judges, one on either side of him, repeated his words and murmured, "Six hours!"

"Your lordships have still some other cases," the procureur du roi said, addressing them, "which you will probably be willing to dispose of to-day. There is one of a man who is thought to have abandoned his ship in the recent disaster at La Hogue, and to have escaped to Paris, where he was captured in hiding; and another of three Jansenists who have blasphemed the faith; also there is a man, an escaped galérien, brought hither from Rambouillet by an officer of the Régiment de Grancé for trial."

"Are the facts clear," asked the presiding judge, "against this man? If so, the case will not occupy us long, and we will take it to-night."

"Quite clear," the procureur replied, "so far as I gather."

"Bring him in."

A moment later St. Georges stood in the dock set apart for the criminals, his hands tied in front of him. And in the court many eyes were cast toward him as he took his stand. All knew that, for those who successfully escaped the galleys, there was but one ending if ever caught again.

"Who gives evidence against this prisoner?" De Rennie asked, looking at St. Georges under his bushy white eyebrows. "And what is his name?—Prisoner, what is your name? Answer truly to the court."

"I have no name," St. Georges replied; "I refuse to answer to any."

The judge's eyebrows were lifted into his forehead and down again; then he observed to his brother judge on his right, with a shrug of his shoulders, "Contumacious!" and then, because he was a man who disliked to be thwarted, he exclaimed: "So much the worse for you. Well, M. le procureur, who prosecutes—who is there as witness?"

"The officer who arrested him and afterward brought him to Paris. He can give your lordships the facts."

"Very well. Why does he not do so? Let him stand forward."

The officer stood forward, in so far that he stood up in the well of the crowd—his gold-laced, cockaded hat still upon his head, since as an officer of the king he was entitled to wear it in all other places but church—and briefly he answered the presiding judge's questions. Yes, he was a lieutenant of the Régiment de Grancé, quartered at Rambouillet—in his opinion, a miserable hole. His opinion on Rambouillet, the judge said, frowning, was not required; he would be good enough to give his name. His name was De Mortemart. De Mortemart! Perhaps, said the judge, he might be a relative of the Duc de Mortemart? Yes, the officer replied, he might be; in effect he was a son of that personage. The judge was pleased to hear it; the duke was universally known and respected, and—the acoustic qualities of the court were bad—would M. de Mortemart take a seat on the bench, where he and his brother judges could better hear him? The officer did not mind, though he was not inconvenienced where he was, but, of course, if their lordships desired. And so forth.

"Now," the judge said with great sweetness, when he had reached the exalted elevation, "would M. de Mortemart give himself the trouble to state how the fellow before them had fallen into his hands?" M. de Mortemart did give himself the trouble—telling, however, exactly what he thought fit, and also omitting many facts which he did not feel disposed to mention—to wit, he contented himself by saying that the "gentleman" in the dock had been betrayed by a woman into their hands—a "treacherous reptile" he termed her—but he said nothing about St. Georges having acknowledged that he had been a soldier of France once, and had afterward fought on the English side against France. To his young and chivalrous mind it was, indeed, a terrible thing that any Frenchman should join with England against his own country, but—he did not say so to the judge trying that man. The case was bad enough against him without that.

In answer to further questions put with great politeness and an evident desire on the judge's part not to bore the son of the Duc de Mortemart too much, he stated that according to orders, he had escorted the gentleman in trouble to Paris, and that he had ridden by that gentleman's side all the way, treating him as well as possible. Yes, he was bound to say he sympathized with the prisoner (he did not say that he wished to Heaven the prisoner had availed himself of many opportunities he had given him of escaping); he thought he had been hardly treated—especially by the woman who was, in truth, a viper. Did he mean to say, the judge asked almost apologetically, that he had allowed the prisoner to ride unbound by his side? Yes, he did mean to say so; the prisoner had made no attempt, either, to take advantage of the license. Did Monsieur de Mortemart think that was wise on his part as an officer? Yes, on his part as an officer he did think so. He was an officer; not"—and here he cast his eye on the turnkeys and jailers in the court"—"the canaille." And, in effect, the prisoner was before the court; that justified him.

After this the judges ceased to ask the Duc de Mortemart's son any further questions, but went on with other matters. One of the canaille, a jailer, was put on the witness stand and questioned briefly. "Speak, fellow," said the president in a totally different tone from that which he had hitherto used to the duke's son, "have you examined the prisoner—is he branded?"

"He is, my lord, on his shoulder; an undoubted galérien."

"Enough! Stand down."

"Prisoner," addressing St. Georges, "what have you to say?"

"Nothing. Do your worst."

"No justification of your quitting the galleys?"

"Nothing that you would accept as such. Yet this I will say: I did not escape of my own attempt; the galley I was in was sunk by an English admiral off their coast; almost all were lost. I was saved and taken back to England."

"So! That may make a difference. What was the galley's name?"

"L'Idole."

Here the judge on the president's right hand leaned over to him and said: "This may be the truth. I had a nephew, an officer, on board L'Idole—she was sunk."

"Allowing such to be the case, prisoner, how comes it you are back in France?"

"I desired to return, and took the first opportunity."

"Ay, he did," suddenly roared out a voice in the court. "And ask him how he returned, my lord; ask him that!"

In an instant all eyes were turned to the place whence the sound came, and the presiding judge became scarlet in the face at any one having the presumption to so bawl at him in the court. "Exempts," he cried, "find out the ruffian who dares to outrage the king's justice by bellowing before us thus. Find him out, I say, and bring him before us!"

It required, however, very little "finding out," since he who had so cried was the man whom the procureur du Roi had spoken of as having abandoned his ship at La Hogue and fled to Paris, and was now present as a prisoner in the court to be tried for his offence. Nor was there much need to hustle and drag him forward, since he came willingly enough—he thought he saw here an immunity from punishment—if punishment be deserved—a chance of escape by the evidence he could give.

"Who is the fellow?" asked De Rennie, when, partly by the man's own willing efforts and partly by pushings and jostlings, he had been got on to the witness stand with two jailers on either side of him. "Who is he?"

"He is, my lord," the procureur du roi said, "the man who is charged with deserting his ship at La Hogue and fleeing to Paris. He says, however, he can give evidence against the galérien here which will also go far to absolve him of his desertion—if your lordships will hear him."

"Ay," said De Rennie, "we will hear him very willingly. But," he said, addressing the sailor, "tell no lies, fellow, in hope of escaping your own punishment. Understand that! And understand, also, that you must justify your own desertion."

"I need tell no lies," the man replied, a rough, bull faced and throated man, with every mark of a seaman about him, "to justify myself. And there was no desertion. Mon Dieu! was Tourville a deserter when he went ashore from L'Ambitieux? If so, then I am one, for I went with him."

"Tell your tale," De Rennie exclaimed angrily, the man's utter want of respect irritating him, "and speak no slander against the king's officers."

"Slander!" the sailor repeated—"slander! How slander? I am Tourville's own coxswain; acted under his orders——"

"Go on!" roared the judge. "Your evidence against the prisoner. Your evidence!"

Briefly the man's evidence was this—and as he told it all in the court knew that the fate of the prisoner was sealed. After that nothing could save him.

The man was Tourville's coxswain—he produced a filthy, water-soaked paper from his breast to prove it—had been with him in Le Soleil Royal, had gone with the admiral when he transferred his flag to L'Ambitieux, had taken that flag from the lieutenant's hands and, with his own, hauled it up on the latter vessel.

"But," continued the man, "it was not for long. The English had got us in shoal water, their fireships and attenders came at us and burned us; their boarding parties came in two hundred boats—we could do nothing after the first resistance! And among those boarding parties"—and he lifted his finger and pointed at the prisoner in the dock—"was one in command of that man—that, standing there in the dock."

"Fellow!" exclaimed the judge, "this is a Frenchman. Beware!—no lies."

"I tell no lies. It is the truth. Ask him. He was on the deck of L'Ambitieux with a dozen other boat crews; we could not resist; their whole fleet came over our sides; the admiral and I left in the same boat, he bade us all save ourselves, gave us our freedom, disbanded us. Send for him, ask him if I am a deserter. Ask, too, that man, if he fought not against us on the English side."

"You hear," De Rennie said, looking toward St. Georges, "the charge against you—that you, a Frenchman, fought on the English side against your country. Answer the court, is it true?"

With all eyes turned on him—the pitying eyes of De Mortemart, the scowling eyes of the judges, and the vindictive eyes of most people in the court, who, having been hitherto inclined to sympathize with the prisoner, now only thirsted for his death—St. Georges drew himself up and faced his inquirer. Then, a moment later, he said: "It is true."

Those words were the signal for an indescribable hubbub in the court. Men muttered fiercely, "Burn him, burn him!" women shrieked to one another that no wonder the English devils had beaten France when Frenchmen fought on their side, forgetting the mothers that bore them; and De Mortemart, muttering between white lips: "My God! nothing can save him," left the court. The coxswain, too, who but a quarter of an hour before had heard hissed in his ears the words "lâche," "déserteur," "misérable," and other epithets, was now the centre of a group of turnkeys and exempts, all asking him why he had not told them before that he was a hero?

Meanwhile the procureur du roi, arrayed in his scarlet gown, sat at his table arranging his papers—there would be no further trials that day, he knew, the Jansenists and others would have to wait—and glancing up now and again at the other three scarlet-robed figures on the bench, conferring with their heads close together. Presently, however, a nod from De Rennie to the greffier caused that official to bawl out orders for silence in the court, and forced the muttering men and shrieking women to hold their tongues. They did so, willingly enough, too; they knew what was coming.

"Are your lordships prepared to deliver judgment?" asked the procureur du roi, carrying out the usual formula and pushing his papers away and rising as he addressed them.

"We are prepared," the president replied.

"I pray your lordships do so."

"The sentence of the court is that the prisoner be taken to the Hôtel de Ville, and from there to the Place de Grève, and there broken on the wheel till he is dead."

More murmurings, more exclamations from the nervous, excited crowd, and then a hush, while again the procureur's voice was heard:

"I pray your lordships to appoint a day and hour on which your righteous sentence shall be carried out."

"The decree of the court is that the sentence be carried out at the daybreak following the time when forty-eight hours shall have elapsed from now."

"In the name of justice I thank your lordships.—Prisoner," and the procureur turned to him, "you hear and understand your sentence?"

"Yes, I hear and understand it."

---

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE LAST CHANCE.

Outside the court all was sunshine and brightness on that June evening, and all the people streaming out in the warm air—that yet seemed fresh and cool after the stuffiness within—chattered and laughed and chuckled at the exciting day they had had.

"For, figurez vous," said one, a hideous creature, "when we went to see the marchioness tried we could only hope she would be condemned, though all the while we know well that for the noblesse there is no serious punishment. Ma foi! what a punishment! Twenty pistoles—a sum she pays weekly, I'll be sworn, for absolution—and a retraite from Paris for a year. Tiens! she was not ill favoured, that marchioness; she will doubtless have a score of lovers follow her into the country. Say, Babette," and she turned to a pale-faced girl by her side, "shall we go to the Place de Grève to see that villain broken? Daybreak, after forty-eight hours; that will be daybreak on Monday. To-day is Friday!"

"Not I," the pale-faced girl replied. "For my part I could pity him—only that he fought against France. Il etait beau, cet homme la bas. His mustache was enough to set a girl dreaming. And his eyes! Ciel! what eyes, when he faced the old hérisson, De Rennie!"

"Ah, bah! His eyes! Curse them, and him, too! He is a traitor."

"All the same, he is handsome. I wonder how many women love him?"

But now they stood apart from the courtyard to look at a troop of the Mousquetaires Noirs riding away from the precincts of the court itself—where they had been on guard all day—and to admire their trappings and bravery. And the pale-faced girl, who seemed—like many other pale-faced, cadaverous girls!—to have a great appreciation of manly beauty, tugged at her companion's arm, and bade her observe the two handsome officers in conversation under the gateway.

"See, Manon, see!" she exclaimed. "There is the one who said he was son to the Duc de——"

"I hate all dukes," interrupted the other, "and all the noblesse. They grind the poor."

"Yet he seemed kind. He would have saved that one, I do believe, if he could. And how he spoke to the judge—as he himself speaks to others—like to a dog! And his companion, the officer of Mousquetaires who does not follow the troop. Mon Dieu! il est beau aussi. How many handsome men we see to-day!"

"Ah! voyons," exclaimed the other, grimacing irritably, "les beaux! les beaux! Nothing but les beaux! Some day, Babette, you will regret your admiration of the men."

"He looks pale and troubled, does that mousquetaire," the girl replied, taking no heed of the elder woman's reproofs; and then they passed on to the foul quarter of Paris where they dwelt, and where dukes' sons and handsome mousquetaires did not often obtrude themselves.

Had she been able to overhear the commencement of the conversation between De Mortemart and that officer of Mousquetaires she would probably not have wondered at the pallor which overspread the latter's face, nor at his look of trouble.

When the young fellow had fled out of the court, unable to remain and hear that doom pronounced on St. Georges, which he knew must come, he had gone straight to the guardroom with the intention of removing the three men of his troop whom he had brought with him to Paris in charge of their prisoner. Their work was done in Paris, he knew; it was best they should take the road hack to Rambouillet at once. It was but eight leagues, and the summer nights were long; they could ride that easily and regain their quarters almost without halting.

But as he entered the room set apart for officers preparatory to summoning his men, he saw that which prevented him from doing so for some little time longer. He saw, seated in a deep wooden chair, his wig off, and fast asleep in that chair—with a flask of wine by his side—an officer of the guard for the day, whose face he knew very well indeed. The Régiment de Grancé was not always quartered at such dead-and-alive places as Rambouillet; it was sometimes accorded the privilege of being in attendance on the court itself—since it was officered from the aristocrats as a rule, the colonel generally being an exception, and selected because of his services—and at Versailles it had, not long ago, been thrown in with the Mousquetaires Noirs.

"Tiens, Boussac!" the young fellow cried, slapping the sleeping officer on the shoulder, and disturbing his slumbers; "rouse yourself, man; the court will be up directly—already your brother officer is chuckling that his guard hour will not last half a one."

"De Mortemart!" cried Boussac, springing from his seat and grasping the newcomer's hand with his own, while with the other he clapped his wig on. "De Mortemart—what brings you here? Have you got the route, is the regiment returned to Paris?"

"No such chance, mon ami, our luck is out. Neither Paris, nor, ma foi! a campaign for us—we are stewed up in Rambouillet for another year. And, peste! the only woman there worth a pistole has turned out the vilest of creatures. We cannot even sup with her now, or take a glass of ratafia or a cup of chocolate from her hands."

"That is not well. But what—what—brings you here? Come, tell me," and drawing the wine flask toward him he poured out a drink for his comrade. "And you look sad, De Mortemart; is it because of the 'vilest of creatures'?"

Then, without more ado, his friend told what had brought him to Paris and in the vicinity of the cours criminel.

As he proceeded with his story—telling it all from the beginning, when la belle Louvigny had sent to the commandant, apprising him of an escaped galérien in her house—he marvelled at the excitement which took possession of his auditor. At the statement that the betrayed man was branded, was in truth an escaped galley slave, Boussac had sprung to his feet and commenced to pace the guardroom; when he described the scene he had witnessed between him and Madame de Louvigny, he could contain himself no longer.

"The man, De Mortemart, the man!" he broke out, "describe him to me." And without giving his friend time to do so, he went on:

"Tall, slight, long brown hair, curling at the ends, gray eyes—deep and clear. Gentleman to the tips of his fingers; a soldier above all."

"Ay, he has been a soldier."

"And his name—his name, my friend. It must be St. Georges. Come from England, you say, with the English fleet. It is St. Georges!"

"Nay, his name he will not tell. But this I know: he was once of the Chevaux-Légers of Nivernois."

"My God! it is he!" and overcome with excitement Boussac sank back into his seat again.

Rapidly De Mortemart told the rest—the coxswain's evidence; the certain doom that must be St. Georges's must be pronounced by now, since, outside, the clatter of the Mousquetaires could be heard, proclaiming already clearly enough that the court was up, the sentence awarded.

"I must know all!" Boussac cried, and followed by the other he rushed out. And then he learned the galérien's doom—wheel on the third morning from now.

No wonder the pale-faced girl thought he looked sad as he stood in the gateway bidding De Mortemart a hasty farewell.

"If I can," he said, "I must save him; must if necessary see the king. I am mousquetaire—I have the right of audience."

"Nothing can save him," the other replied. "He has served Louis, and he has fought against him—on the conquering side. That is enough!"

"Yet," said Boussac, "I will try. I can tell Louis something of his history that may—though the chance is poor, God knows!—induce him to hold his hand. Or, at least, to let the doom be something less awful than the wheel."

So they parted, the one to take his men back to Rambouillet, the other to try and save St. Georges, vain as he feared the attempt would be.

First, he sought a messenger, a trusty honest man he knew of, himself an old disbanded soldier, and told him he must ride that night on a message of life and death. Would he promise to let nothing stand in his way?—he should be well rewarded.

"Never fear, monsieur. To where must I ride?"

"To Troyes. You can obtain a good horse?"

"Ay! or get a renfort on the road. 'Tis thirty leagues, but I will manage it. What have I to do when there?"

"This. Make for the Manoir de Roquemaure, then see at once la châtelaine, Mademoiselle de Roquemaure—she rules it since her mother's death. Next, give her this. Put it into her own hand and no other. In the name of God fail not! Again I say, it is life or death!"

"Fear not. I will not fail. In half an hour I am on the road. Hark! the clock strikes from the Tour St. Jacques; 'tis seven o'clock—ere it strikes the same hour in the morning I shall be there and to spare—or dead."

"Brave man! Good soldier! I believe you. Go."

What the old soldier was to give into the hand of Aurélie de Roquemaure was a letter containing the following hastily scribbled words:

"Mademoiselle: You spoke to me once of an unhappy gentleman, a chevau-léger; asked me if he was dead, and said you had some news would make him happy if he knew it. Mademoiselle, he is not dead, but dies on Monday, on the wheel—Monday morning next at dawn! He has returned to France, fought against Tourville on the high seas, is taken, and, as I say, condemned. If you have any power with the king, if you know aught that may weigh with him, I beseech you lose no effort. It is Monday morning, I repeat, at dawn that he dies. Your respectful servitor,

"Boussac."

The messenger departed—and about his fidelity he had no doubt, so well did he know him—Boussac mounted his horse and rode to where the three troops of the Mousquetaires now in Paris on guard duty were quartered. Then he made his way to the senior officer in command, begged leave of him on urgent matters of the last importance—so urgent, indeed, did he represent them to be that he stated he was about to seek an after-supper audience of the king—obtained the leave, and, procuring a fresh horse, set out for Versailles.

"I will tell him," he said, "who St. Georges is, whom he believes himself to be. The late duke was Louis's friend in the days when the king's heart was young and fresh—surely he will, at least, grant a reprieve. More especially if I tell him all of De Roquemaure's villainy. As for the sister—if she is what St. Georges told me in his last letter he felt convinced she was—she will do nothing. Yet, mon Dieu! mon Dieu! who can look in those eyes as I have done and deem her so vile? Surely, surely, though he stands in her way so much, she will not let him go to his doom. Even though she knows for certain he is De Vannes, she will strive to save him. She must!"

It was no easy thing to approach Louis at the after-supper audience, free as the monarch generally made himself for an hour at that period, and in spite of an officer of the Mousquetaires being a more or less favoured person. For there were many who had greater claims than a mousquetaire to the royal ear, the royal salutation—a finger to the hat for a man, the hat lowered to the right ear for a lady—to the royal smile.

There were, to wit, the bishops, the ladies of the court, the marshals and the bastards, the ministers and many others. And to-night the king was, and had been for some days, so depressed, so for him almost angry, that few took this period for presenting petitions or requests. His great fleet was shattered by the hereditary enemies of France—since the Spanish Armada no fleet had ever been so shattered!—his power and might were broken, even if for a time only; and though he had told Tourville—with that royal graciousness which scarcely ever deserted him—that he was satisfied "he had done his best," he was in no humour for granting boons.

What hope was there that a mousquetaire should obtain aught from him that night; should even be able to approach him? Above all, what hope that such a request as Boussac's—that one of his own subjects who had helped in the shattering of his great fleet should be pardoned—was likely to be granted?

Yet, at last, the soldier who had waited so patiently for hours drew nearer and nearer to the circle in which the arbiter of the destiny of all in France sat, a crowd of courtiers and nervous petitioners behind and round him; at last, after having seen countless others bowed and smiled to, he was face to face with Louis, stammering and scarce knowing how to begin his request.

But the finger went to the hat, the king's smile—perhaps a little artificial now—shone on him, the king's soft, courtly voice said:

"Monsieur le lieutenant, have you a petition to make also? I am afraid it cannot be granted. Is it for promotion?"

"No, sire. It is for a man's life," and before he thoroughly understood, himself, what he was saying, he poured out his story before the king and the astonished listeners. And, at last, in a halting, laboured way it was told. Then the king spoke, while the shoulder-shrugging, grinning courtiers held their breath to hear his reply.

"Mon brave mousquetaire," he said, "you have been imposed on. De Vannes never married. I know it well—know, too, the woman whom he loved, who married De Roquemaure. And even if he had married and had this son, do you think I would pardon him for doing that for which he lies under sentence of death? Nay, were he my own I would not do so. Ah!"—turning to a beautiful blue-eyed woman who stood by the side of Boussac, "Madame de Verneuil"—and the hand went up to the hat and lowered it till the fringe touched his right ear—"I rejoice to see you here to-night." Boussac's audience was over.

---

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE DAY OF EXECUTION.

The night of Sunday had passed; already the holiday-makers were seeking their beds after a day spent in the country—by some in the woods of Fontainebleau and St. Germains; by others in the gardens of Versailles, where they had waited all day to see the king come out upon the great balcony and salute his people; by others, again, who had been to Marly to gaze in amazement on distorted Nature; to gaze on the trees stuck in the ground which would not grow here though they had flourished for a century elsewhere, before being uprooted to gratify a king's caprice; on artificial lakes now gay with caïques and gondolas where but a few years ago the frogs and eels had held undisputed possession; on a palace which reared its new walls where starving peasants' hovels had been not long since.

The holiday-makers were going home to their beds as all the clocks of the city clanged out the hour of midnight; all were about to seek their homes ere they commenced the new week—a week that to most of them brought nothing but hard, griping toil, starvation, and a heavy load of taxation imposed upon them by that king whom they stared at and reverenced, and by his nobility.

Yet not quite all, either! For some there were who, as they streamed across the Pont Neuf, or came in from the Charenton gate, or arrived back from Versailles or Marly, broke off in solitary twos and threes from the others and directed their footsteps toward the great place in front of the Hôtel de Ville—toward the Place de Grève! They, these solitary ones, had no intention of seeking their homes and beds that night—they could sleep long and well to-morrow night—instead they meant to enjoy themselves in the place until day broke, with the anticipation of what the daybreak would bring. For at that hour they knew they would see a man done to death upon the wheel; see limb after limb broken until life was extinguished by the final côup de grâce.

As they neared the great open space some cast their eyes up at the lights burning in the Hôtel de Ville and muttered to each other, wondering which room the man was in who would be led forth three hours hence; what he was thinking of; if he was counting each quarter as it sounded from tower and steeple; if—these speculations generally by women in the fast-gathering crowd—there were any who loved him? If he had a wife—a mother—a child? Any to mourn his loss?

"A traitor, they say," some whispered; "one who joined England against France." "A spy," others murmured, "who betrayed Tourville to the brutal islanders. Well, he deserves the dog's death! Let him endure it."

The quarters boomed forth again; at half past twelve the executioner and his assistants arrived in a cart. Ordinarily they came earlier when they had a scaffold to erect and a block to place upon it. Now, however, there was no block on which the man's head would need to be laid to receive the headsman's stroke. Instead, a great cannon wheel was lifted from out the cart, then next a wooden platform was constructed, having in it a socket of raised wood into which the wheel was dropped and firmly fixed by cords, three parts of it towering above that socket. Then a heap of ropes brought forth and flung down beside the wheel—they would secure the body tightly enough—following the heap two huge iron bars and a heavy iron-bound club. That was all, yet enough to do justice on the traitor.

"La toilette de la Roue est faite," said one man, a joker; "soon his will be made also. 'Tis well the early mornings are warm now. He will not miss his clothes so much when they strip him to his singlet," and he laughed and grinned like a wolf and turned his eyes on the Hôtel de Ville. And still, as the moments and the quarters crept by, they chattered and talked about the coming spectacle, and wondered how the man felt in there who was now so shortly to furnish it. If they could have seen him, have been able to read his thoughts, they would have been little gratified—perhaps, indeed, a little dissatisfied—for he knew as well as they that his doom was fast approaching, that the clocks were telling of his fast-ebbing hours on earth; knew, too, that down below the wheel was being prepared, and bore the knowledge calmly and with resignation.

As they discussed down in the place what he might be doing and speculated on what his feelings were in those last hours, he above, at the iron-barred window of a room to which they had brought him after his sentence was pronounced, was gazing down at the crowd gathering to see him die. The feelings on which they speculated so much were scarcely such as would have satisfied them.

"The dawn breaks," he murmured to himself, as, although heavily chained both at the feet and hands, he leaned against the window and gazed far away over the roofs of the houses to, across the Seine, where the mists rose in the fields—"is near at hand. Another hour and daylight will have come—and then it is ended! So best!—so best!"

He shifted his position a little, still gazing out, however; then continued his meditations:

"Yes, so best. My last chance, last hope of life was gone when M. de Mortemart trusted me—let me ride by his side a free man instead of bound. Then I knew I must go on—come on—to this. I could have stabbed him to the heart more than once—have perhaps evaded even his three men—have escaped—been free—but how! By treachery unparalleled, by murder and deceit! And, afterward, a life of reproach and self-contempt. No! better this—better that wheel below than such a freedom!"

Looking down now at the crowd, his attention was called to it by a slight stir in its midst; he saw a troop of dragoons ride in to the place and observed them distributing themselves all round it at equal distance under the orders of an officer. Also he saw that a lane was made to the platform where the wheel stood—a lane among the people that ended at the platform and began he knew at the door of the Hôtel de Ville beneath him, from which he would be led forth.

"Courage," he whispered to himself, "courage. It will not be long; they say the first blow sometimes brings insensibility, and after that there is no more. Only death—death! Death with my little child's name upon my lips—that name the last word I shall ever speak; my last thoughts a prayer for her."

Gradually now he let himself sink to the floor, his manacles almost preventing him from doing so, and when in a kneeling position he buried his head in his iron-bound hands and prayed long and fervently.

"O God," he murmured, "thou who hast in thy wisdom torn her from me, keep and guard her ever, I beseech thee, in this my darkest hour; let her never know her father's sorrow, nor share the adversity thou hast thought fit to visit upon him. And, since I may never gaze on her face again, see her whom I have so dearly loved, so mourned for, never hear the tones of her voice, be thou her earthly as her heavenly Father; sleeping and waking, oh, watch over her still!"

Then, because the thoughts of her were more than he could bear, and because he knew that the child whom he had loved so dearly—the child whose future life he had once sworn solemnly to her dying mother should be dearer to him than his own—would never know his fate nor his regrets, he buried his head once more in those manacled hands and wailed: "My child! my child! My little lost child! Oh, my child! my child!"

"If I could only know," he murmured, later, "that you were well, happy—feel sure, as that woman told me once herself, and Boussac thought—that whoever has you in his keeping was not cruel to you, my little, helpless child, the end might be easier. If I could only know! O Dorine! Dorine!"

Looking up, as he strove with his two hands, so tightly chained together, to wipe the tears from his eyes, he noticed that the room was lighter now; the sky was a clear daffodil. Daybreak was coming; the day was at hand—his last on earth!

And again he whispered: "It is better so. But for her there is naught to hold me to life. Better so. Now"—and as he spoke to himself, across the roofs of the houses the first rays of the summer sun shot up—"now be brave. The end is near; meet it like a man. And remember, her name the last word on your lips—the last ere your soul goes to meet its God!"

A murmur, a noise from the crowd below waiting for its victim, caused him to look forth again from the window, and to observe that some new officials had arrived. A horseman in a rich scarlet coat, over which, however, he wore a riding cloak—for the morning was still chilly—followed by two others in sober blue coats trimmed with silver lace, was making his way down the lane of people and was being greeted by the crowd.

Yet, to the doomed man standing by the window, he did not seem to be altogether popular with them, especially when he suddenly halted his horse, and turning round on the vast concourse behind him, said something to them, accompanied with a comprehensive wave of his disengaged hand—something that vexed and annoyed that concourse terribly, he could see, and hear, too—a vexation increased when, after the other had spoken a further word to the officer in command of the dragoons, they began to close in from the outside of the place round the assembled mob.

Then the horseman disappeared from St. Georges's view, evidently having entered the door beneath his window, and again the people murmured and shrieked.

"Has he given orders to clear them away," he began to speculate, "so that they may not witness my end?——" but his speculation was not concluded.

On the stone steps outside he could hear the tread of many feet, the clang of spurs and of swords as those who wore them mounted the stairs.

"They are coming for me," he thought, and again he whispered: "The time is at hand. Courage! Be brave!"

The keys turned grating in the locks, a great transverse bar outside was moved with a clash, and the door opened, the first person to enter being the newly arrived horseman, followed by the principal official of the Hôtel de Ville, and next by some of his subordinate officers, as well as the jailers, one of whom carried in his hands a large iron hammer and the other a great bunch of keys.

And St. Georges, standing there facing them, looked as brave a gentleman as any who had ever been led to his fate.

"This is the condemned man?" the horseman asked of the chief official; "the man who was sentenced at the cours criminel on Friday last to die this morning?"

"It is the man, Monsieur l'Hérault," the official replied, his questioner being none other than L'Hérault, the head of the police system.

"Remove his irons."

At this order the two jailers stepped forward, the one unlocking the fetters that bound St. Georges's hands, the other knocking away with the hammer the iron pegs that ran through the steel ring which held the chains round his ankles. And in less than three moments chains and fetters lay at his feet.

"Here is the warrant," L'Hérault said, handing it to the governor of the Hôtel de Ville—for such the principal official by his side was—"read it aloud to the prisoner," and it was read accordingly. It ran:

"To M. l'Hérault, superintendent of our police, and to the governor of our Hôtel de Ville at Paris:

"It is our royal will that the prisoner tried at our cours criminel by M. Barthe de la Rennie, one of our judges, and sentenced to die on the morning of Monday, the 26th June of this year 1692, be released and set free unconditionally. And may——"

"What!" exclaimed St. Georges, reeling backward, and speaking in a hoarse whisper—"what! what does this mean? Who has written that?"

"The king," L'Hérault answered. Then he said briefly, "You are free."

"Free! Not to go to—to that?" and he pointed below.

"Not to go to that—though 'tis where escaped galériens usually go sooner or later. Your time is not yet come, it seems. I know no more, except that at midnight I was roused from my bed to ride here with this," pointing to the paper in the governor's hand, "and with this," putting another in St. Georges's. "It will," he continued, "bear you harmless in France so long as you offend no more."

"Sir," St. Georges said, and as he spoke L'Hérault looked at him, wondering if in truth this was an innocent man before him, "for your errand of mercy I thank you. Yet, believe me or not as you will, I had committed no sin when I went to the galleys."

Then he read the paper handed to him. It also was brief:

"The man bearing this is to be held free of arrest on any charge and to be allowed to pass in freedom through all and any of our dominions. His name is Georges St. Georges, and he is branded with the fleur-de-lis and the letter G.

Signé, Louis R."

"What does it mean?" reiterated St. Georges. "Who can have done this?"

"It means," said L'Hérault, "that you have some powerful interest with his Majesty. Whomsoever you may be, even though you were one of the king's own sons, you must be deemed fortunate. However great your friends may be, your escape is remarkable."

"Friends! I have none. I——" but the sentence was never finished. The excitement of the last hour had overmastered him at last and he sank in a swoon before them.

When he came to himself the others were gone with the exception of one turnkey, who was kneeling by his side, supporting his head and moistening his lips with brandy. But in the place of those who had departed there was another now, a man at whom St. Georges stared with uncertain eyes as though doubting whether his senses were not still playing him false; a man also on one knee by his side, clad in the handsome uniform of the Mousquetaires Noirs.

"Boussac!" he exclaimed. "Boussac! Is it in truth you?"

"It is I, my friend."

Then, as St. Georges's senses came fully back to him, he seized the other's hand and murmured: "You! It is you have done this! Through you that I am saved."

"You are saved, my friend. That is enough. What matter by whom?"

---

CHAPTER XXXIV.

"I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HER."

Once more St. Georges was on the road, heading straight for Troyes, and by his side once more rode a friend, as he had ridden over four years ago—Boussac!

When he had thoroughly recovered from the swoon into which he had fallen on hearing that he was free, he had again and again overwhelmed the mousquetaire with his gratitude—all of which the latter had refused to accept, and had, indeed, gently repudiated. Also it seemed to St. Georges that he avoided the subject, or at least said as little as possible.

"If," he said, when at last they were seated in an inn off the new Rue Richelieu to which he had led St. Georges, "there is anything to which you owe your freedom more than another, it is to the fact that the king must recognise that you are in truth le Duc de Vannes, the son of his earliest friend. Yet—yet"—he continued in an embarrassed manner—"he would not even allow that that should influence him—when—I pleaded for you."

"But it did—it did, Boussac, it did. He must have pondered on it afterward—perhaps reflected on how unjustly I had been treated by his vile minister, Louvois—you say he died in disgrace?—and that may have—nay, must have, turned his heart. O Boussac! how am I ever to repay you? Without your thought and exertions what should I have been now?" and he shuddered as he spoke.

"Oh! la! la!" said Boussac, "never mind about me. The question is now what do you intend to do in the future?"

"Do!" exclaimed St. Georges. "Do! Why, that which I returned to France to do, fought against France for—obtain my child. Boussac, where is that woman now?"

"Woman!—what woman?"

"Ah! Boussac, do not joke. You know very well to what woman I refer. That young tigress—in her way almost as vile as the woman Louvigny!—the woman who stole my child."

"Mademoiselle de Roquemaure?"

"Ay, Mademoiselle de Roquemaure! That is the name. Oh Boussac! you have given me more than my life, far more. The power to wrench my child away from her keeping, to stand before her a freed man, the king's pardon in my hand, and tax her with her treachery."

"You will do that?"

"Do it! What am I going to Troyes for—to-night?"

"Ay, true! True! What are you going to Troyes for? Yet I should have thought, if you recover the child, it is enough. Why—say—bitter words?"

"Boussac, you—but, there, you are not a father; you cannot understand all I have suffered in these four years past. Why! man, the galleys, my exile, the death that yawned for me this morning, were easier than the loss of my little one. And, with her dying brother's own confession ringing in my ears still, as it will ring when I stand before her to-morrow, as I hope, you ask me what need I have to reproach her—to utter bitter words?"

The mousquetaire shrugged his shoulders; then he muttered something about the recovery of the child being everything, and that reproaches brought little satisfaction with them; and after that he again asked St. Georges when he meant to set out for Troyes?

"To-night, I tell you—to-night. Yet"—and he paused bewildered—"I—I have no money. Not enough to get me a horse, at least. They have given me back all they took from me after my condemnation, but there were only a few guineas left."

"Where is the horse you rode to Paris on when De Mortemart brought you?"

"Ah!" exclaimed St. Georges, "a good horse—though, alas! at a moment when my life was in danger and a horse alone could save me, I—I stole it. Oh, if I can but get that again!"

"Why not? It is doubtless in the stables behind the cours criminel, where the guard stable theirs."

It was there; so that difficulty was soon solved, no objection being offered by the authorities to giving up the property of a prisoner who was so distinguished as to be acquitted by the king's order an hour before his execution; and then, when St. Georges had recovered it, he announced his intention of at once setting forth. He was impatient to be gone now he was so near; he calculated that by midday on the morrow he would have forced from Aurélie de Roquemaure a confession of what she had done with Dorine. She was at Troyes he knew; Boussac, who professed himself well acquainted with her movements, having told him that such was the case.

"She is much at court now," he said; "I often see her. And she must be back at Troyes by now—I mean—that—she has been absent from there of late. But—but she would be back by now—she—told me—she was——"

"What?" asked St. Georges, looking at him and wondering why he seemed so incoherent about the woman's movements; wondering also how he came to know so much about them, especially her recent ones—"what did she tell you when last you saw her?"

"That—she has been paying a visit—to—to—assist a friend—but——"

"Her friendship seems as strong as her hate—and greed," muttered St. Georges.

"But that," Boussac continued, still floundering a good deal in his speech, "she would be at the manoir last night—yes, last night."

"So. Then she will doubtless be there to-morrow also; she will require rest after rendering her friend so much assistance. I shall find her there."

"We shall find her there," Boussac answered. "I am going with you."

"You! Why?" Then he laughed—for the first time for many a day. "Do you think I am in danger now, with Louis's protection in my pocket, or," and his brow darkened a little, "do you fear that she is in danger from me?"

"Mon ami," Boussac replied, "I think neither of those things. The king's permission has made you safe—your manhood makes her so. Yet, let me ride with you. Remember"—and again he halted in his speech, as though seeking for a suitable reason for accompanying him—"we rode together when la petite was about to be lost to you; let us do so now when, I hope most fervently, she is about to be restored to you. And, my friend, I have obtained leave—we Mousquetaires are always fortunate in getting that. Do not deny me!"

"Deny you!—you! The man who saved me! I am an ingrate even to question you," and he seized the black gauntleted hand of the other and wrung it hard.

After that there was no more to be said or done ere they set out—or only one thing. Boussac had mentioned that he had a friend, a dragoon officer, who was proceeding to La Hogue to join his regiment which was still there under Bellefond's command, and by him St. Georges sent twenty pistoles to be given to Dubois, the man who owned the horse which saved his life. He borrowed the money of Boussac, described the inn where he had seized the animal, and then mounted it for the first time with a feeling of satisfaction. "'Tis a good beast," he said, "and has done me loyal service; also it has well replaced another good one—that on which I rode from Pontarlier to Paris and never saw again. How long ago that seems, Boussac!"

"Ay," replied the other, "but it was winter then and the clouds were lowering over your life and her you loved—now 'tis summer, and all is well with you."

"I pray God! I have suffered my share."

All through that summer night they rode—resting their horses occasionally at country inns, then going on again, though slowly, and at dawn changing them for others and leaving them to rest until they should return that way. And so at last they neared Troyes, passing through the little town of Nogent, and seeing, ten miles off, the spire of the cathedral glistening in the rays of the bright sun.

"She will not know me," St. Georges had said more than once, as he thought of Dorine. "She was a babe when I lost her, now she is a child possessing speech and intelligence. May God grant it is not too late; that she is not too old yet to learn to love me!"

"Courage! mon ami, courage!" exclaimed Boussac, repeating a formula he had adopted from the first; "all must be well."

But—it was natural—as they approached their destination, the goal from which St. Georges hoped so much, his nervousness increased terribly and he began to speculate as to whether the child might not after all be dead; if, perhaps, she might not have lain in her little grave for long. "And then how will it be with me, Boussac? Oh! if she is dead how shall I reckon with the woman who possessed herself of her?"

"Courage!" again repeated the mousquetaire, "I do not believe she is dead. And if mademoiselle did seize upon her—well, she is a woman! a better nurse than the bishop's servant."

"Ah! the bishop's servant! That too has to be explained. What was he doing with her? I have wondered all these years—De Roquemaure's dying words told nothing. 'He had got her safe,' he gasped at the last. But why he? Why he! Oh! shall I ever know all?"

"Ere long, I hope, my friend," said Boussac, "ere long now."

As he spoke, they mounted the last hill that guarded the capital of Champagne and approached the summit. When there, they would be able to look down upon the old city—nay, more, from there they would scarce be a musket shot from the manoir, surrounded now by its ripening vineyards and its woods. She, the kidnapper of his child, would be in his grasp, must answer his demand!

Upon the summit of that hill still stood the gibbet on which the peasant woman's husband had swung, but the body was gone—long since, doubtless—and the gallows tree was bare. "Perhaps," said St. Georges, "the poor thing obtained him decent burial at last. I hope so." Then, seeing a peasant coming along the road, he spoke to him, and asked him what had become of the corpse that hung there four years ago? The fellow looked up at him sullenly enough and stared hard for some moments; then he said:

"You are not De Roquemaure?"

"Nay."

"What affair is it then of yours?"

St. Georges explained briefly to him how he had met the dead man's wife and pitied her, and asked where she was.

"Mad," the man said. "Quite mad. Her brother keeps her." Then he muttered: "A curse on the De Roquemaures, and on him above all! His father was bad; he is worse."

"You need curse him no more," St. Georges answered; "he is dead!"

"Dead is he? Then he was the last; the woman counts not. Dead! Oh, that she whom he injured so could understand it! Dead, thank God! I would it were so with all aristocrats! France has suffered long."

A hundred years almost were to elapse ere the peasant's hopes were to be partly realized, and others like the De Roquemaures to meet their reward; but none foresaw it in those days. Later the clouds gathered, but even then the fury of the coming storm was not perceived.

"Give her this," said St. Georges, putting some of his few remaining pieces in his hand, he having provided himself with French gold for his English guineas.

"Or give it to the brother who has charge of her. I, too, have suffered at the hands of the De Roquemaures."

"And you forgive?" glancing up from the pistoles in his hand to the dark, stern face above him. "You forgive?"

"Not yet!"

Then he urged on his horse again, Boussac following him.

"But you will, my friend, you will," he said, as they rode down the slope. "In the name of the good God who forgives all, forgive her, I implore you!"

"Forgive her? I will never forgive her! I have forgiven that other who lies in a thousand pieces at the bottom of the sea, but her reckoning is yet to come. She stole my child from me, she lied to me in Paris, sympathized with me on my loss when, at the time, she knew where that child was; drove me to draw on Louvois, and thereby to my ruin. I will never forgive her! And if she now refuses to restore the child, then—But enough! Come," and shaking his horse's reins he rode down the vine-clad roads to the front of the manoir.

It frowned as before on the slope below it, presented on this bright summer morning as grim, impassable a front as on that winter night when first he drew rein outside it; beyond the huge hatchment now nailed on its front in memory of the late marquise nothing was changed. It looked to St. Georges's eyes a fitting place to enshroud the evil doings of the family he had hated so bitterly, and of the one representative now left whom he hated too.

Seizing the horn as he had seized it long ago in the murkiness of that winter night, he blew upon it and then waited to be answered. He had not long to do so; a moment later the old warder who had once before opened the small door under the tourelle stood before him.

"Is Mademoiselle de Roquemaure in her house?" he asked sternly, while Boussac, sitting his horse behind him, uttered no word.

"She is in her house, monsieur."

"You know me. I have been here before. Say I have ridden express from Paris to see her and must do so at once."

"I will say so, monsieur. Be pleased to enter."

---

CHAPTER XXXV.

AT LAST.

It seemed almost as if he had been expected from his appearance being received in so matter-of-fact a way. Yet, he reflected, why should it be otherwise? Aurélie de Roquemaure could scarce know of all that had happened to him of late—above all could not be aware that he had become possessed of the information that she was the kidnapper of Dorine.

He had, however, but little time for reflection since Boussac was by his side, and, when they dismounted from their horses, had followed him into the large sombre hall to which the old servant had led the way. Yet, when the man had gone to seek his mistress, the latter took one more opportunity to plead that he should be gentle with her.

"Remember," he said, "remember, I beseech you, that you have but her brother's word for what you suspect her of; he was a villain, he might have lied in his last moments for some reason—perhaps did not even think those last moments were in truth at hand; might have hoped to escape after all and profit by the lie. Remember! Oh, remember!"

"I will remember," St. Georges said. Then, with one glance at Boussac, he added, "But the villain did not lie then!"

The domestic came back, and St. Georges learned that the hour for his explanation, long sought and meditated upon, was at hand. "His mistress would see monsieur," he said. He would conduct him to her.

In the same room where he had first set eyes on Aurélie de Roquemaure he saw her again—the old man ushering him in and then swiftly leaving the room. They were face to face at last! As it had been before, so it was now—her beauty as she rose on his entrance was strikingly apparent, compelled regard. And the four years that had passed since that first meeting had done much to increase, to ripen that beauty; instead of the budding girl it was a stately woman who now met his eyes. And the contrast between them was great, was all to her advantage so far as exterior matters were concerned: he travel-stained, worn, and with now in his long hair some streaks of gray; she fresh and beautiful in the long black lace dress she wore, a rose in her bosom, her hair undisguised by any wig and swept back into a huge knot behind. "How beautiful she is!" he thought, as he gave her one glance, "yet how base and contemptible!"

With a swift movement she came toward him from the further end of the room, her hands extended and her eyes sparkling, exclaiming as she advanced: "You are free! you are free!" But her greeting met with no response from him. Could she have expected it, he wondered? Then he stepped back and coldly said:

"Yes, Mademoiselle de Roquemaure, I am free," while to himself he said: "So she knew that too. That I was trapped! God! That womankind can be so base!"

Staggered at the coldness of his first words, affronted at his refusal to take her outstretched hands, she drew back and looked at him calmly. Then she said, quietly, "I rejoice to know it," and, pausing, looked at him again.

"Mademoiselle de Roquemaure," he said, "I have not ridden here from Paris, from a prison which at one time I scarce thought to leave except for the wheel, to interchange idle compliments. I have come here with one set purpose, to learn what you have done with my child—the child you stole from the Bishop of Lodève's servant on the morning that your servant gave that man his death wound."

His eyes were intent upon her as he spoke, watching her eagerly. Yet, to his surprise, she neither started nor paled at his accusation. Instead, she said quietly:

"You know that?"

"Yes," he replied; "I know it."

"And your informant was——?"

"Your brother, or half-brother. With his dying words."

"He was slain at La Hogue; ah, yes! you were there! I remember. Was it you who slew him?"

"No; but, pardon me, it is not about Monsieur de Roquemaure that I have come here. The De Roquemaures and I have had enough intercourse." And now he saw that he had touched her, since she grew pale as death. "There will be no need of any further when once my child is restored to me. Mademoiselle, I have come to demand that child of you. Where is she—what have you done with her?"

For answer she advanced to a bell rope, and, pulling it, said to the servant when he appeared, "Send Mademoiselle de Vannes to me."

"Mademoiselle de Vannes!" he exclaimed, "Mademoiselle de Vannes! You call her that—you know——"

"I know."

He raised his hand to his forehead with a gesture of bewilderment, then said, "And you keep her here?"

"She is here, monseigneur," as the door opened once more; "here is your child."

Even as she spoke a bright-haired child ran into the room and, rushing toward Mademoiselle de Roquemaure, caught her by the hands and buried her face in her dress, while she whispered:

"Aurélie, dear sister Aurélie, why do you send for me now when I am so hard at work with Père Antoine? And who is this stranger? What does he want?"

"Who is this stranger?" At those words St. Georges's heart gave a throb—he said afterward that he thought it would cease to beat—and the room swam round with him. He had found the child of many longings—and he was a stranger! A moment later he heard Aurélie speaking.

"Dorine, this is no stranger. Give him your hand; kiss him."

Reluctantly the child advanced to where he stood, and obeyed her in so far that she held out her hand; but, either from coyness or some other cause, she did not offer to lift up her face for him to kiss. And he, standing there, looking down on her, felt as if his heart would break. Then, overcome by all that was struggling within his bosom, he dropped upon one knee beside the child and drew her toward him, she seeming terrified at his embrace.

"Ah, little one!" he said, "if I tell you how I have longed for this hour, prayed for it to come, surely you will say some word of greeting to me. Dorine, do you not know me? Dorine, Dorine!"

For answer, the child, still seeming frightened, drew further away from him and whispered that she did not know him, that she desired to go to Aurélie.

"You love her?" he whispered, too, for now his voice seemed to be failing him—"you love her? You are happy with her? I hoped you would have come with me——"

"With you!"—and now the tears stood in the child's eyes as she shrank still further from him—"and leave Aurélie?"

"Why not?" he asked almost fiercely, his despair driving him nearly to distraction. "Why not? Who is she? What share has she in you? You are mine, mine, mine! O child, I am your father!" And suddenly overwrought by his emotions, by the broken hopes he had cherished, the vanishing of the future to which he had looked forward, he sprang to his feet and turned to Mademoiselle de Roquemaure. "I see it all," he said; "understand all. Your brother uttered the truth at last. You stole my child because she stood in your way; you won her love afterward because——"

"Stop!" exclaimed Aurélie de Roquemaure, and as she spoke she drew herself to her full height and confronted him, while the child, trembling by her side, could not understand why her sister had changed so. "Stop and hear the truth since you force me to tell it. I stole your child because in that way alone could her life be saved, her safety at least be assured. My brother would—God forgive him!—have hidden her away forever; even then, as I learned afterward, the bishop's servant had stolen her from the inn in the city and was hastening to meet him. There was no time to lose; it was that man's life or hers, and—and—I acted by my mother's orders. Now, Monseigneur le Duc——"

But he whom she addressed thus had fallen on his knees before her, had endeavoured to seize her hand, and, failing that, was kissing the hem of her dress.

"Forgive, forgive, forgive!" he moaned; "I have been blind—blind! Let me go in peace and offend no more. She is yours, not mine; yours by your womanly grace and mercy—the love she has to give belongs to you by right of your womanly mercy. Better that I had died in Paris yesterday than live to repay you as I have!"

But now to the child's mind there seemed to come some gleam of light as to what was passing between the stranger and her mother; the words, "Better I had died in Paris," awakened her intelligence.

"Aurélie," she cried, "was this the gentleman whom you hurried to Paris to save?"

"To save!" St. Georges exclaimed, "to save! My God! do I owe my life to you as well?"

And Aurélie—her eyes cast down, her frame trembling from head to foot—murmured: "I could not let you die, knowing what I did, knowing the evil the De Roquemaures had wrought you. When Monsieur Boussac sent me word you were doomed, I determined to tell the king all."

---

So she had saved him! She, whom for four years he had regarded as a treacherous enemy, had saved not only his child but him. And ere the day was over he had learned all that she had done besides.

She told her tale to St. Georges and to Boussac as they sat in the grounds of the old manoir, and made at last all clear to the former that for so long had been dark and impenetrable.

"The man who was your worst enemy," she said, "was that vile Bishop of Lodève; the next was Louvois—for without them my unhappy brother would have known nothing and could have attempted no harm against you. He regarded himself as the heir of the Duc de Vannes, and did not know of your existence until Phélypeaux told him of it. And at the same time the bishop said that he had another formidable rival in the Romish Church——"

"The Romish Church!"

"Yes, your father had become converted to it and was received into it by Phélypeaux himself, the example of Turenne having much influenced him. At first, on being received, he had, with the fervour of many converts, bequeathed half of his great fortune to that Church, the other half remaining a bequest to his heir—my father, and after him my unhappy half-brother. But, ere he set out on the campaign in which both he and Turenne were to lose their lives, he wrote to the bishop and told him that he had a son by an unacknowledged marriage; that he could not deem it right that he should be deprived of what was properly his, and that he had made a will leaving all his property to him. Then the search for you began, though my brother was not concerned in it, being still a child. But the bishop sought high and low, first for proofs of the marriage and next to discover where the duke's son was. And Louvois helped him because he had hated your father, who despised him, as Turenne and many of the other marshals did."

"But you, mademoiselle," exclaimed St. Georges, "how do you know all this? And did you know it when we first met?"

"No," she replied, "but my mother suspected. By this time my brother had heard something from Louvois, who had found out all when the effects of the Duc de Vannes, which he had taken with him on his last campaign—his private papers and other things—were brought back to Paris by the Comte de Lorge, Turenne's nephew; had discovered that the son was named St. Georges, his English mother's name having been St. George, but could not discover where the duke had bestowed him. Nor did he discover it until long afterward, when, happening to once more refer to the papers brought by the comte, he discovered one he had overlooked addressed to my mother; and he read it and discovered thereby that the officer, who was serving in the Regiment of the Nivernois, under the name of St. Georges, was, in truth, the lawful Duc de Vannes. Then in his cold, brutal manner he informed the bishop where the man was who stood in the light of the Church's gains, and alas! he told that other who expected so much, my unhappy half-brother. Also he told them both that this man was to be transferred to another regiment, and that he would set out from Pontarlier on a certain night. They might care to see him, he continued; therefore he should receive orders to call on the bishop at his family residence in Dijon, where he happened to be then, and on my brother in this house—though, not to arouse any suspicions, he was to present himself as a visitor to my mother. Also he told them that which neither dreamed of until then—namely, that Monsieur St. Georges was a widower, but had a child whom he would doubtless endeavour to bring with him. You must be able," she concluded, "to understand the rest."

"Ay!" said the Duc de Vannes, "I can understand. Only still, mademoiselle, I cannot conceive how you know all this."

"Yet the answer is simple. By one of those marvellous coincidences which happen as often in our everyday life as in the romances of Mademoiselle de Scudery, or the fables of Monsieur de La Fontaine, my brother had once asked my mother if she had ever heard of you, if your assumed name was known to her; the bishop supposing that she was greedy as he himself, had sent to warn her that you were on your way to Paris, and that it would be well if she could recognise in you any traces of your father and would send a word to Louvois saying whether she thought you were the man. But he overreached himself," Mademoiselle de Roquemaure added; "my mother's sympathies were with the son of him she had once loved so dearly, not with him who was the son of the man she had married. And as for Phélypeaux—she despised him!"

"Heaven bless her!" exclaimed the duke. "Yet still I know not how she unravelled all—how found out my birthright—my mother's name."

"That, too, is simple. Louvois died suddenly, as you know, in disgrace with the king. Some said by poison administered by himself, some from fear of the king's displeasure. Be that, however, as it may, his son, Barbézieux, was not allowed to touch any of his papers and all were handed to Louis intact. He confided them to De Chamlay, who refused Louvois's vacant post as minister of war but consented to go over his state affairs, and in those papers he found all; a copy of your father's letter to the bishop, the letter to my mother which had never been delivered—telling her everything and begging her to see you righted—his will and his marriage certificate, as well as that of your birth. Monseigneur, I have them upstairs—I showed them to the king the night before last—they are now at your disposal."

Boussac had strolled away ere the narrative was done—his delicacy prompting him to leave them alone—and as she concluded the Duke de Vannes dropped on his knee by her side, and, taking her hand, murmured:

"Forgive, pardon me! Bring yourself to say you forgive the evil I have thought, and let me go. Unworthy as I am to ask it, yet, if you can, forgive me and never more in this world will I offend your sight. And, for expiation, I give my child to you—you who have been so much more to her than I."

But Aurélie de Roquemaure, bending toward the kneeling man, said: "Nay. Why say that I forgive—I, who have naught to pardon? Only—do not go! Stay, rather, and win the love of the child whom you have loved so much through all your grief, through your long separation."

---

CONCLUSION.

The Peace of Ryswick brought about many changes in both France and England. It opened each country to the other—for a time, though but a short one!—it enabled the refugees of each to return to their own lands, and for a few years England and her neighbours were not at open enmity.

Yet one refugee there was who never returned to France, but who, in the country of his adoption, and with his beautiful wife by his side and at his knee his children, took no part in the strife between the two lands or in their politics. Instead, he dwelt upon the estate he had bought in the heart of Surrey—with the money he had realized by the sale of his property in France—and there, a prosperous gentleman, passed life easily and well.

But there was no longer any Duc de Vannes in France—that old title was never revived after the death of the late owner of it on the plains of Salzbach—and in Surrey the handsome grave gentleman, who was known to be a wealthy emigré from across the Channel, was invariably spoken of and addressed as Mr. St. George.

And he was very happy thus!—happy when he thought of all the dangers he had passed through safely—though sometimes in the night his wife would hear him mutter in his sleep, "At dawn, at dawn!" and know that in his dreams his mind had gone back to that summer morning on the Place de Grève, when, putting out her hand, she would softly wake him; happy, too, in his children—in the one whose love had come back to him as he had prayed so long it might; happy in those others whom God had sent him: in the bright, handsome boy who bore his own name; and in the delicate, beautiful girl who bore her mother's—Aurélie.

And happy beyond all thought and early expectation when she, that mother, was by his side, or when, rising from her place near him, and stroking back the long hair from his forehead—now streaked with silver—and kissing him, would murmur:

"'If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small,'" and then falling on her knees beside him would whisper, "But your strength was great, my love, and in that strength you were able to endure."