I took no notice. The man was old, and his gibing tongue his only weapon. I ran down the steps to where Jacques was, ready for me with the horses. Springing into the saddle, I put spurs to the beast, and we dashed down the avenue, but as I did so I yielded to an impulse, and glanced up to the window—it was empty.
CHAPTER V
[A GOOD DEED COMES HOME TO ROOST]
We dashed through the streets of Bidache, arousing the village dogs asleep in the yellow-sunlight to a chorus of disapprobation. About a dozen sought to revenge their disturbed slumbers, and, following the horses, snapped viciously at their heels; but we soon distanced them, and flinging a curse or so after us, in dog language, they gave up the pursuit, and returned to blink away the afternoon. It was my intention to keep to the right of Ivry, and after crossing the Eure, head straight for Paris, which I would enter either by way of Versailles or St. Germains; it mattered little what road, and there was plenty of time to decide.
I have, however, to confess here to a weakness, and that was my disappointment that Madame had not stayed to see the last of me. Looking back upon it, I am perfectly aware that I had no right to have any feeling in the matter whatsoever; but let any one who has been placed similarly to myself be asked to lay bare his heart—I would stake my peregrine, Etoile, to a hedge crow on the result.
Madame knew I loved her. She must have seen the hunger in my eyes, as I watched her come and go, in the days when I lay at Ste. Geneviève, wounded to death. She must have felt the words I crushed down, I know not how, when we parted. She knew it all. Every woman knows how a man stands towards her. I was going away. I might never see her again. It was little to have waved me Godspeed as I rode on my way, and yet that little was not given.
In this manner, like the fool I was, I rasped and fretted, easing my unhappy temper by letting the horse feel the rowels, and swearing at myself for a whining infant that wept for a slice of the moon.
For a league or so we galloped along the undulating ground which sloped towards the ford near Ezy; but as we began to approach the river, the country, studded with apple orchards, and trim with hedgerows of holly and hawthorn, broke into a wild and rugged moorland, intersected by ravines, whose depths were concealed by a tall undergrowth of Christ's Thorn and hornbeam, whilst beyond this, in russet, in sombre greens, and greys that faded into absolute blue, stretched the forests and woods of Anet and Croth-Sorel.
In the flood of the mellow sunlight the countless bells of heather enamelling the roadside were clothed in royal purple, and the brown tips of the bracken glistened like shafts of beaten gold. At times the track took its course over the edge of a steep bank, and here we slackened pace, picking our way over the crumbling earth, covered with grass, whose growth was choked by a network of twining cranesbill, gay with its crimson flowers, and listening to the dreamy humming of the restless bees, and the cheerful, if insistent, skirl of the grass crickets, from their snug retreats amidst the yarrow and sweet-scented thyme.
As we slid rather than rode down one of these banks, my horse cast a shoe, and this put a stop to any further hard riding until the mishap could be repaired.