He went out, addressed some orders to four or five men who sat on a bench facing my door, and disappeared: I heard his feet descending the stairs. My door was left wide open, so that I was directly in the gaze of the men. But even if I had been unobserved, I could not have moved from the place where I sat. Any effort to break my bonds, either of wrist or ankle, by sheer strength, was but to cause weakness and pain. My arms ached from the constraint of their position, and, because of them behind me, it was impossible to lie at full length on my back. Nor would the chain, without cutting into my thighs, permit me to lie on either side. I was thus unable to change even my attitude.
But my discomforts of body were nothing in presence of the question that tore my mind. Minutes passed; time stretched into hours: still I discussed with myself, to which of the fates at my choice should I deliver her? Should I give her to death, or to the arms of the red Captain? Little as she feared the first, much as she loathed the second, dared I take it upon myself to assign her to death? Had it been mere death, without the horrors of darkness and desertion, without the anxious wonder as to why I failed her, I should not have been long in deciding upon that. For that would be her wish, and I should not survive her. Let us both die, I should have said; for what will life be to her after she has fallen into the hands of this villain, and what to me after I have delivered her into them? But the peculiar misery of the death that threatened her, kept the problem still busy in my mind.
And yet I could not bring myself to yield her to the Captain.
The day had become afternoon, and I still debated. The Countess must have expected me to return before this time. What was her state now? what were her conjectures? Ah, thought I, if we had not found our way to that lonely tower, if the storm had not come up the previous night, if we had started to leave the forest earlier!—nay, if I had had the prevision, upon hearing of the presence of robbers, to make her turn back to Chateaudun with me, and lodge quietly there until the Mother Superior of the convent could be sounded, and a safe way of approach be ascertained, all would now be well. We should have heard in the meantime of the Count's death. Yes, everything had gone wrong since the Countess had taken the road for the forest. The third of Blaise Tripault's maxims which he had learned from the monk came back to me with all the force of hapless coincidence:
"Never leave a highway for a byway."
The thought of Blaise Tripault made me think of my father. What a mockery it was to know that I, chained helpless to the floor in this remote stronghold of ruffians, was the son of him, the Sieur de la Tournoire, the invincible warrior before whose sword no man could stay, and who would have rushed to the world's end to save me or any one I loved! To consider my need, and his power to help, and that only his ignorance of my situation stood between, was so vexing that in my bitterness of soul, regardless of the men in the passage, I cried out to the empty air, "Oh, my father! If you but knew!"
And then, for a moment, as if the bare wall were no impediment, I saw a vision of my father, with his dauntless brow and grizzled beard, his great long sword at his side, riding toward me among green trees.