Beside him the sentries were laying his companion. Louis stooped over him. “Dead,” he said briefly. “Well, Gilbert?”
The Marquis raised his head. “We must hold it now,” he said very quietly, and their hands met for an instant.
But so thorough had been Gilbert’s dispositions from the first that there was nothing more to do except to be on the alert. At sunset came in another fugitive who reported that Charette, having covered La Rochejaquelein’s retreat, was said to be falling back on Chantonnay. Dusk was falling before a sudden little burst of musketry in the direction of the village warned the defenders. A little later the Marquis, guessing at the presence of sharpshooters on the avenue side—the light was too bad to be sure—gave the order to fire from the Marquise’s bedroom, in which, as the largest room on the first floor, he had ensconced himself. A minute or two afterwards an answering crash of glass along the front of the house showed his surmise to be correct.
“What a glazier’s bill!” ejaculated Louis, laughing. “My poor aunt—if she only knew!” He bit at a fresh cartridge, for, happening to be in the room, he was firing with the rest.
But Gilbert laid a hand on his arm. “Go up and take command of the second floor windows, as we arranged,” he said. “And don’t expose yourself: there’s no need. We shall have to make fresh dispositions if they start firing at the garden front, but I do not, somehow, think they will. I will send for you if it is necessary.”
And the duel with an unseen enemy continued.
When Louis reappeared, about an hour later, in the Marquise’s bedroom, two of the shutters hung riddled from their hinges, half a dozen of the defenders lay dead or dying on the floor, and the air was full of smoke and the biting smell of gunpowder. Across the dismantled bed, his fingers tearing convulsively at the blue silken coverlet which still adorned it, lay, coughing, a peasant shot through the lungs. M. des Graves was ministering to another on the floor.
“What is it?” asked the Marquis quickly, as he caught sight of the begrimed figure in the doorway. “Nothing wrong?”
“Nothing,” returned Louis placidly, coming in. “Except that M. des Graves might come up to a couple of my fellows. But I wanted to ask whether you will spare me men for a sortie. I thought I would go out by the garden front, through the pavilion, and take the foe in flank. It would be very neat.”