"This is that scoundrel Masseran's doing," said the count: "but he shall find himself deceived, for I will be in Paris as soon as he is. You, madam, will be good enough to come along with me; so put your dress in some better array, and lose no time."
He looked as if he could have said a great deal more, but he restrained himself; and, though the anger that he felt at heart found relief in a bitter and sneering smile, unaccompanied by any words, he turned upon his heel, walked down to the inn door, and remained for a few minutes looking forth upon the morning as if nothing had happened. In a minute or two after, seeing one of his men pass, he beckoned to him, spoke a word or two in his ear, and suffered him to depart. The man returned in a few minutes, and replied, "They are all ignorant of anything of the kind, sir. It is evident none of the people of the place know aught about it."
"Have you seen the landlord?" demanded the count.
"No!"
"Go and make inquiries regarding him."
The man did as he was bid, and the reply was, "That the landlord had gone away towards the market of St. Laurent an hour or two before daybreak, as was always his custom."
"That is sufficient," said the count, with a sneer. "Quick with the horses; let us mount and go on."
CHAPTER XIII.
The great tamers of strong spirits, the quellers of the rebellious heart, the conquerors of the obdurate, the determined, and the enduring, Silence and Solitude, were upon Bernard de Rohan. To know nothing of what is passing without; to have no marker of the steps of time; to see no sun rise or set; to have not even the moving shadow upon the wall to tell us that another lapse of the wearisome hours has taken place; to have nothing, in short, to link us on to human destinies, and to show us that we are wending on our way with our fellow-beings—nothing but the dull beatings of the heavy heart, and the grinding succession of bitter thoughts—this, surely, is not life; and if it be not death, it is something worse. Where there is no change of anything to mark its passing, time seems, in truth, to sink back into that ocean from which it was called at first, Eternity: and, wanting all means of calculating its flight, Bernard de Rohan did indeed feel each moment to be an age. Actual pain would have been almost a relief to the despairing vacuity of that which must have been the second day of his confinement. We can scarcely doubt that the punishment of Prometheus would have been more complete, had he been left in the solitude of the frowning heavens, without the vulture as his companion, though his tormentor.