“There is no answer, Célandine,” said she, with well-acted calmness, belied by the fixed crimson spot in each cheek. “My darling,” she added caressingly, to her daughter, “your old bonne is quite right. The sooner you are in bed the better. Good-night, my child. I shall come and see you as usual after you are asleep. Ah! Cerise, how I used to miss that nightly visit when you were at the convent. You slept better without it than your mother did, I am sure!”
Then, after her daughter left the room, she moved the lamp far back into a recess, and sat down at the open window, pressing both hands against her bosom, as though to restrain the beating of her heart.
How her mind projected itself into the future! What wild inconceivable, impracticable projects she formed, destroyed, and reconstructed once more! She overleaped probability, possibility, the usages of life, the very lapse of time. At a bound she was walking with him through her woods in Touraine, his own, his very own. They had given up Paris, the Court, ambition, society, everything in the world for each other, and they were so happy! so happy! Cerise, herself, and him. Ah! she felt now the capabilities she had for goodness. She knew what she could be with a man like that—a man whom she could respect as well as love. She almost felt the pressure of his arm, while his kind, brave face looked down into her own, under just such a moon as that rising even now through the trees above the guard-house. Then she came back to her boudoir in the Hôtel Montmirail, and the consciousness, the triumphant consciousness that, come what might, she must at least see him and hear his voice within an hour; but recalling the masked ball at the Opera House the night before, she trembled and turned pale, thinking she would never dare to look him in the face again.
There was yet another subject of anxiety. The Prince-Marshal was to come, as he often did of an evening, and pass half-an-hour over a cup of coffee before he retired to rest. It made her angry to think of her old admirer, as if she did indeed already belong to some one else. How long that some one seemed in coming, and yet she had sat there, hot and cold by turns, for but five minutes, unless her clock had stopped.
Suddenly, with a great start, she sprang from her chair, and listened, upright, with parted lips and hair put back. No! her ear was not deceived! It had caught the clink of spurs, and a faint measured footfall, outside in the distant street.
CHAPTER XX
A GENERAL RENDEZVOUS
Meanwhile Cerise, not the least sleepy, though sent prematurely to bed, dismissed her attendant protesting vehemently, and sat herself down also at an open window, to breathe the night air, look at the moon, and dream, wide-awake, on such subjects as arise most readily in young ladies’ minds when they find themselves alone with their own thoughts in the summer evening. However exalted these may have been, they can scarcely have soared to the actual romance of which she was an unconscious heroine, or foreseen the drama of action and sentiment she was about to witness in person. Little did she imagine, while she leaned a sweet face, pale and serene in the moonlight, on an arm half hidden in the wealth of her unbound hair, that two men were watching every movement who could have kissed the very ground she trod on; for one of whom she was the type of all that seemed best and loveliest in woman, teaching him to look from earth to heaven; for the other, an angel of light, pure and holy in herself, yet luring him irresistibly down the path to hell.
The latter had been hidden since dusk, that he might but see her shadow cross the windows of the gallery, one by one, when she sought her chamber; the other was visiting his guard two hours earlier than usual, with a silent caution that seemed mistrustful of their vigilance, in order that he might offer her the heart of an honest man, ere he fled for his life to take refuge in another land.
Captain George, entering the garden through a private door, could see plainly enough the figure of Mademoiselle de Montmirail brought into relief by the lamp-light in her room. She must have heard his step in the street, he thought, for she had risen and was looking earnestly out into the darkness; but from some cause or another, at the instant the door in the garden wall closed behind him, she shrank back and disappeared.