The great bell hanging inside the gates of Gemosac was silent for two days after the return of Juliette de Gemosac from her fever-stricken convent school, at Saintes.
But on the third day, soon after nightfall, it rang once more, breaking suddenly in on the silence of the shadowy courts and gardens, bidding the frogs in the tank be still with a soft, clear voice, only compassed by the artificers who worked in days when silver was little accounted of in the forging of a bell.
It was soon after eight o’clock, and darkness had not long covered the land and sent the workers home. There was no moon. Indeed, the summons to the gate, coming so soon after nightfall, seemed to suggest the arrival of a traveller, who had not deemed it expedient to pass through the winding streets of Gemosac by daylight.
The castle lies on a height, sufficiently removed from the little town to temper the stir of its streets to a pleasant and unobtrusive evidence of neighbourhood. Had the traveller come in a carriage, the sound of its wheels would certainly have been heard; and nearer at hand, the tramp of horses on the hollow of the old drawbridge, not raised these hundred years, must have heralded the summons of the bell. But none of these sounds had warned Juliette de Gemosac, who sat alone in the little white room upstairs, nor Marie and her husband, dumb and worn by the day’s toil, who awaited bedtime on a stone seat by the stable door.
Juliette, standing at the open window, heard Jean stir himself, and shuffle, in his slippers, toward the gate.
“It is some one who comes on foot,” she heard Marie say. “Some beggar—the roads are full of them. See that he gets no farther than the gate.”
She heard Jean draw back the bolts and answer gruffly, in a few words, through the interstice of a grudging door, what seemed to be inquiries made in a voice that was not the voice of a peasant. Marie rose and went to the gate. In a few minutes they returned, and Juliette drew back from the window, for they were accompanied by the new-comer, whose boots made a sharper, clearer sound on the cobble-stones.
“Yes,” Juliette heard him explain, “I am an Englishman, but I come from Monsieur de Gemosac, for all that. And since Mademoiselle is here, I must see her. It was by chance that I heard, on the road, that there is fever at Saintes, and that she had returned home. I was on my way to Saintes to see her and give her my news of her father.”
“But what news?” asked Marie, and the answer was lost as the speakers passed into the doorway, the new-comer evidently leading the way, the peasant and his wife following without protest, and with that instinctive obedience to unconscious command which will survive all the iconoclasm of a hundred revolutions.
There followed a tramping on the stairs and a half-suppressed laugh as the new-comer stumbled upward. Marie opened the door slowly.