"Even if I were dying," she parried feebly, "I would not have you help me now. If we did not part at this hour, perhaps—who knows?—I might become even a blacker traitor than I am. You and I, Fernand, can have nothing in common. Our ways must for ever lie as far apart as are our ideals. The man who at my bidding would have been your murderer will carry me home and minister to my needs. He and I have everything in common—faith, friendship, community of ideals and disappointments of hopes and of sorrows. He is rough, uncultured, a potential assassin; but he and I strive for the same Cause and weep over the same failures. In thought he is my friend—you can never be aught but an enemy."
And suddenly, without giving him another look, she plunged into the thicket. For a few seconds only it seemed to the Man in Grey that he could see her slender form moving among the undergrowth and that he heard the crackling of dead twigs beneath her feet. She had gone for comfort and protection to the assassin who was still in hiding. She went to him because, as she had said, with those savage Chouans she, the irreconcilable Royalist, had everything in common.
Whereas with him, the stranger, the plebeian police agent, the obscure adherent of the newly-founded Empire, she could have nothing to do. Nay, she had actually persuaded an assassin to shoot him—vilely—in the back, when, at the fateful minute of crisis, a thought of womanly compassion had prompted her to save him from his doom. And, on his part, what was there for him to do but mourn the only illusion of his life? It served him right for being a visionary and a fool!
And with a bitter sigh of enduring regret, the police agent turned on his heel and went back the way he came.
CHAPTER VII
THE LEAGUE OF KNAVES
I
One of the letters written to the Man in Grey by Fouchée, Duc d'Otrante, is preserved in the Archives of the Ministry of Police. It is dated February 17th, 1810, and contains the following passage:
"Do not let those official asses meddle with the affair, my good Fernand, for they are sure to mismanage it completely. That man de Livardot is an astute brigand and a regular daredevil. To apprehend or to deport him would not be of the slightest use to us; he has escaped out of three different prisons already, and has come back once—none the worse—from Cayenne. To murder him from behind a thicket would be more useful, but for the fact that he has many secrets of that damnable Chouan organisation in his keeping, which would be of incalculable value to us, if we could get hold of them. At any rate, see what you can do, my dear Fernand. I rely on your skill and discretion. De Livardot has left England for Jersey; he is at St. Helier now. I'd stake my life that he is on his way to France. The Emperor will be at Caen within the next month. Remember Cadoudal and his infernal machine, and for the love of Heaven keep an eye on de Livardot!"
For obvious reasons the Man in Grey did not communicate the actual contents of the letter to the préfet of Caen, M. Laurens, a typical official of not too assured loyalty, or to M. Carteret, chief commissary of the district. But both these worthies had had news, through police spies, of the arrival of de Livardot in Jersey, and were alive to the fact that the wily Chouan leader was probably meditating a secret landing on the shores of France.