And she was gone, thinking—what? He walked for a minute or two in agitation up and down the room, until going back to the table he picked up the little note, so pathetic in its need and its trustfulness. An idea that was half a hope flashed upon him. That blackened, scorched corner meant one of two things: either the letter had fallen into the fire by mischance, Lucienne being left in the impression that she had sent it, or she had intended to burn it. It had in that case been but the outcry of her distress, destroyed because it had seemed to her unmaidenly. And he devoutly hoped that this was the case, because it left him all the perfume of the message and relieved her of the dreadful tension of waiting for an answer which he had never given.
Since he had looked down at her in his interrupted leave-taking, since he had given her that kiss, whose remembered coldness filled him with the most burning indignation against himself, not half an hour had elapsed. And he had let her go thus—for ever, perhaps—and could not follow her. But he could write to her. He would write here and now. He looked round impulsively for ink and paper—and then remembered, with a checking of his ardour, that he could scarcely with delicacy reveal to her his knowledge of her letter if, as he hoped, she had meant to burn it.
Footsteps, too, were approaching his door. “Yes; I am coming,” he shouted, guessing that he was being summoned, that the post-chaise was waiting. But he lingered a moment, looking with eyes not quite clear at the little scorched letter ere, kissing it, he thrust it into his breast, and left the room which had seen him go down into hell and come forth again.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ROAD TO POITOU
When the light, two-wheeled post-chaise, with its pair of horses and its postilion, was rolling at last along the sunlit quays, Gilbert forced himself to turn his thoughts from the joy and relief in his own breast to the contemplation of a matter for the moment more urgent—the safe conveyance of his cousin from Paris. He glanced at his kinsman, seated beside him in his unfamiliar dark clothes, and observed with a sort of amused despair that he did not seem to consider that prudence required him to refrain from showing his face at the window, for he had been looking out in silence ever since they started.
“One would think, my dear Louis,” observed the Marquis at length, “that you had never seen Paris before. Your evident wish to remain here may soon, perhaps, be gratified.”
“There’s a most extraordinarily pretty woman just going towards the Allée des Princes,” murmured Louis.—“I beg your pardon, Gilbert. You were saying that we shan’t get through. Well, if we don’t I shall have still less faith in any of the La Rochefoucauld. Wasn’t it Liancourt who helped you to your passport? I suppose that if we have to get out at the barrier, I must hold the door open for you. And you must curse me for a clumsy fool. Oh, I forgot! you never swear at your servants. By the way, have I a name? I’ve forgotten it, at any rate.”
The Marquis handed him in silence the passport, with its emblematic figures supporting a shield, inscribed with the device, “Vivre libre ou mourir”—Minerva bearing the cap of liberty on a pike, and a female typifying the French constitution, seated on a lion. The crown which the latter held over the shield had been struck through with a pen, and the same fate had overtaken the crown surmounting the arms of France which accompanied the mayoral seal in red wax at the bottom. Louis’s lip curled as he observed it. “L’an 4 de la liberté,” he muttered scornfully, running his eye up to the date over Pétion’s signature, and passed on to peruse his own description.
“I don’t know what the original portrait was like,” he remarked, returning the document, “but I don’t call this amended version very flattering. I suppose it was jealousy which led you to dock me of an inch of my height. However, Pierre Jourdain has a very convincing sound for a valet.”
When the chaise drew up with a jerk at the Barrière de Versailles it was possibly on account of the hot July sun that no great alacrity was displayed in demanding credentials. A sleepy-looking official, followed by a couple of National Guards, did at last present himself at the left-hand window—Saint-Ermay’s—and to him the Marquis handed out the passport, throwing a severe glance at Louis, who seemed to be struggling with a most inopportune desire to laugh. The man read it yawning, asked a few questions, signed the paper, returned it, and, suddenly pulling himself together, shut the chaise door with a bang, and magnificently waved a dirty hand to the postilion. The horses sprang forward, the gateway slid past—they were out of Paris.