The traitor's way

by S. Levett Yeats

Were other men like me, I wondered, or was I accursed beyond my fellows, one marked with the Mark of the Beast?

Good would it have been if I had taken Jean’s offer, and turned rein to Blois. The bitter days that were to come had then perchance never been; but my word was passed, and I would not draw back for dread of my life. It would be said that Gaspard de Vibrac had feared to die with his friend, that he had fled like a frighted roe at the first rustle of the leaves. It would be no longer the Fever of St. Vallière, but the Sweat of Vibrac, that would brand a poltroon with infamy. No! It could not be! And so, against myself, I drifted with the tide, into that yawning abyss from which there is no return.

I had once put the past to sleep as I thought. Fool that I was! The past never sleeps. The madness had come on me again, and again I had crushed it, as I imagined, in that lonely struggle with myself which he, who was a priest of his people, had mocked at and gibed. And was this horror to envelop me again? God forbid! No! A thousand times no! I would play this last game to the end of my sword, and then—farewell to France.

I longed, yet feared, to meet Marie. I felt my bridle hand shiver as I thought of her, and, so thinking, I all unconsciously slackened pace, and dropped behind the others, letting my horse go slower and slower until he barely walked. It was at this moment that I became possessed of an intense feeling that the thoughts of the woman I loved were with me. I involuntarily glanced to my right, and there, as I live, at the edge of the purple shadow, where a lean glade opened and stretched out, long and white, I saw her stand. It was no dream of fancy. No fever of the brain. She stood there, I say, at the fringe of the glade, where the light and darkness joined, with the gold of her hair all shining like a glory. She was looking straight at me, with that in her glance I had never seen before. It was not love nor hate, but an infinite pity, that shone in her eyes, and then her lips seemed to move in speech, and—she was gone.

I drew rein at the spot where she stood. It was not ten paces from me. I peered into the quaking shadows, but my glance met nothing except the endless lines of hoary trunks, that stretched like pillars along the dim aisles of the forest. Here and there, past the gaps in the boughs that arched overhead, I saw the blood light of the dying sunset shining as through the stained glass of some old minster window, a light that made the darkness yet more dark, and flung strange, awesome shadows on the still scene upon which it shone.

“Marie!” I called out in a low voice, “Marie!”

But there was no answer except the mockery of the echoes. “Marie—Marie!” they gibed from behind the haggard trees. “Marie—Marie!” they whispered from the wan branches. The very air was full of her name.

I turned, sick at heart, from those voices that spoke to me of her.

Echoes—not they? They were the long-dead people of the wood come back in that shivering twilight—sprite and elf and goblin—and they had fashioned of their cunning a phantom to make me a plaything and a sport.

Slowly I pushed my horse a little way into the wood, my eyes here, there, and everywhere. The dry undergrowth snapped and crackled beneath his hoofs, and from a bent and twisted bough overhead a huge owl, startled by the sound, fled with flapping wings, and a dismal hoot, into the deep of the forest.