Marguerite saw it all. The movement, the crowd of men, two vague, black forms lifting another one, which appeared heavy and inert, out of the coach, and carrying it staggering up towards the chapel.
Then the forms disappeared, swallowed up by the more dense mass of the little building, merged in with it, immovable as the stone itself.
Only a few words reached her now.
“He is unconscious.”
“Leave him there, then; he’ll not move!”
“Now close the gates!”
There was a loud clang, and Marguerite gave a piercing scream. She tore at the handle of the carriage door.
“Armand, Armand, go to him!” she cried; and all her self-control, all her enforced calm, vanished in an outburst of wild, agonising passion. “Let me get to him, Armand! This is the end; get me to him, in the name of God!”
“Stop that woman screaming,” came Heron’s voice clearly through the night. “Put her and the other prisoner in irons—quick!”
But while Marguerite expended her feeble strength in a mad, pathetic effort to reach her husband, even now at this last hour, when all hope was dead and Death was so nigh, Armand had already wrenched the carriage door from the grasp of the soldier who was guarding it. He was of the South, and knew the trick of charging an unsuspecting adversary with head thrust forward like a bull inside a ring. Thus he knocked one of the soldiers down and made a quick rush for the chapel gates.