"News! no," exclaimed the man, while even the peasants going to their toil pricked up their ears. "What news?"
"Tourville's fleet is ruined—burned—by the English! Stop me not. I ride to carry it. By orders!"
"Mon Dieu!" the man exclaimed, "by the English. Tourville defeated by them? It is impossible!"
"It is true," while as he spoke—still moving across the now lowered drawbridge as he did so—one of the peasants, an old woman, wailed: "My boy was there—in the Ambitieux! Is that burnt?"
"I do not know, good woman," he replied, unwilling to tell the poor old creature the worst. "I must not tarry."
And in a moment he had put the horse to the gallop. He had left Bayeux behind. Out of the jaws of death he had escaped once more. "But," he asked himself, "for how long? How long?"
That danger which he had escaped so soon after setting foot in France was not again equalled on the road, and a week later he neared the old fortified town of Rambouillet. He had progressed by obscure ways to reach it, avoiding every large city or town to which he had approached, and skirting, either on the north or south, Caen, Evreux, and Bernay. He was drawing nearer to Troyes now, nearer to where his child was, if still alive, nearer to the satisfaction he meant to have by his denunciation of the treachery of Aurélie de Roquemaure.
Yet, as he so progressed, he asked himself of what use would such denunciation be—of what importance in comparison with the regaining of Dorine? That was all in all to him; the supreme desire of his life now—to regain her, to escape out of France once more; to earn subsistence sufficient for them both in England. Beyond that, the satisfaction of taxing Mademoiselle de Roquemaure with her treachery—the treachery of, with her mother, appearing to sympathize with him when they first met at the manoir, of expressing that sympathy again in Paris during their brief encounter outside the Louvre, of her false and lying words to Boussac—would be little worth. Yet, small as that satisfaction would be, something within told him he must obtain it; must stand face to face with her and look into those clear gray eyes that had the appearance of being so honest and were so false; must ask her why, since she so coveted all that his and his child's life might deprive her of, she had stooped to the duplicity of pretending to sympathize with him; to the baseness of stealing his child from the man who had himself stolen it—he knew not why; to the foul meanness of accompanying her menial—herself masked to prevent detection—and urging him on to murder; herself, by complicity, a murderess! And as he so pondered, he reflected also with what eager, cruel pleasure—for he knew now, and almost shuddered at knowing, that the wrongs inflicted on him had turned him toward cruelty—he would tell her of how her vile brother had died before his eyes.
So, determinately, he rode on, nearing Rambouillet, yet feeling as though sometimes he could go no further, must drop from his horse into the road. In the week since he escaped from Bayeux he had been feeling that day by day he was becoming ill, that all he had gone through—the immersion in the sea, the intensity of his excitement at Bayeux, his long rides and exposure to the weather—was like ere long to overwhelm him. Sometimes for hours he rode almost unconscious of what was passing around him; he burned with a consuming fever, his limbs and head ached and his thirst was terrible.