Yet, urged on and on by the object he had in view, he still went forward until, at last, he halted outside the town he had now come to, beneath the walls of the old castle of Rambouillet.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FLEUR-DE-LIS.
The hot sun of those last days of May beat down on the white roads and the orchards and the pastures surrounding the town of Rambouillet, and shone also with unpleasant strength upon La Baronne de Louvigny, being driven back to her house within the walls. And madame's aristocratic countenance, handsome as she was, showed signs of irritation—perhaps from the effects of the heat, perhaps from other things—while her dark eyes, glancing out from under the hood of the summer calèche in which she was lying back, looked as though they belonged to a woman who was not, at the present moment at least, in the best of humours.
She was still a very young woman and was also a widow, the baron having been killed in a duel some few years ago, which had not grieved her in the least, since he was an old man who had married her for her good looks and, possibly, her more aristocratic connections than he himself possessed; yet, in spite of these advantages, there were things in her existence which annoyed her. Among these things was, for instance, one which was extremely irritating—namely, that for four years now she had been required to abstain from visiting Paris or the court, either at Versailles, Marley, or St. Germains, and this notwithstanding that her blood was of the most blue and that she claimed connection with the most aristocratic families in France.
Truly it was an annoying thing to be young, handsome, and very well to do—owing to her not too aristocratic husband, the late baron—and to be of the blue blood owing to her own family, and yet to be under a cloud in consequence of a scandal—of being mixed up in an affair, a scene, or tragedy, which it was impossible to altogether hush up. At least she found it annoying, and, so finding it, revolted a good deal at the ban laid on her. Still, revolt or repine as she might, Louis's word was law in all matters of social importance, and she was forced to bow to it, in the hopes that, as time passed on, the ban might be removed. But it was not strange, perhaps, that in so bowing, her temper, always a hot, passionate one, had grown a little uncertain.
It did not serve to improve that temper on this hot day that, at a moment when the calèche emerged into a particularly sunny portion of the road, unsheltered by either tree or bank, it should suddenly come to a stop and expose her to the full glare of the sun itself. Moreover, the jerk with which the horses were pulled up gave her a jar which did not tend to better matters.
"What are you stopping for?" she asked angrily of one of the lackeys who had by now jumped down from behind. "I bade you take me back as soon as possible. And why in this broad glare? Animal!" and she drew her upper lip back, showing her small white teeth.
"Pardon, my lady," the man said—he knowing the look well, and remembering also that, before to-day, it had boded punishment for him and his fellows—"but there is a man lying in the road, almost under the hoofs of the horses. And his own stands by his side."