I had totally forgotten my companions. In the nervous state to which I was reduced, I know not how far I might have gone on, but now I heard my name called out again and again, as Marcilly and Badehorn galloped back to seek me, and, brought to the moment by their shouts, I came out and joined them.
“Cap de Diou!” exclaimed Jean, “as our friend Ponthieu would say, this is no season for woodland flowers, Gaspard, nor are we here to gather posies for our sweethearts. Have you a mind to spend the night in Russy woods?”
A sharp answer rose to my tongue; but checking myself I forced a laugh, and we rode on together, until we at length reached the park gates of Nanteuil, and found a hospitable welcome in the house of Monsieur de Villequier.
There, as we sat round the log fire, sipping the old Vouvray, and listening to Villequier’s tales—monsieur was a veteran of Pavia and Cerisoles—we all unconsciously threw off our gloom, and Villequier seemed to slip back into the past years; his cheeks flushed, and his eyes glowed as he recalled his youth, and so the talk drifted on until it struck midnight from the bells of the Antwerp clock in the hall, and we retired to rest; and as I lay down, all wearied, to sleep, I could not help thinking of the strong old age of our host, who was descending as full of honors as of years to his grave, and I wondered if the future would bring me the same when I had played my part—wondered and hoped.
That night I slept the sleep of the weary in body and in mind, the sleep, deep and dreamless, in which the hours pass like minutes, and it is light and morning almost, as it seems, in a moment. Strange as it may appear, no thought of the vision I had seen troubled me, nor did it appear again, and I woke with the sun, refreshed and cooler in brain than I had been for long, and laughed and jested gaily as we rode in the winter sunlight, through the glistening woods on our way to Orleans.
Marcilly, too, seemed to have shaken off his sadness, or caught the infection of gayety from me, and we gave way to the moment without a thought that in a few hours we would be but a finger’s distance from the rack, and the headsman’s block.
I am not going to tell of how we rode through the wintry Orléanais. How we swam the Cosson, and galloped all wet and dripping to the Ardoux. How we dried our clothes and broke our fast at the Three Stags, opposite Our Lady of Clery, where, in the chapel, those who care may see the lonely grave of Louis XI. of France, that King whose tisane was stronger than strong wine, whose laughter was worse than his frown, and who, small, deformed, and mean-looking as a tailor of the Rue St. Antoine, could make his proudest nobles shiver at a look.
All these things and more may rest, for they are foreign to my story.
At length, splashed with the mud and snow of the road, we passed the Loiret, and saw before us the Faubourg St. Marceau, and beyond, on the opposite bank of the Loire, the confused mass of pointed gables and sloping roofs, square towers and slender campaniles, that showed where Orleans lay. Before us, on the left, rose high the Abbey Church of Notre Dame de Recouvrance; higher still, though looking smaller because of the distance, stood the tall spire and the twin towers of Ste. Croix; whilst overhead a mass of gray and white clouds hung in the lazy air, and cast their quivering shadows on the City of the Maid.
Our pulses quickened as we trotted through the Rue Dauphine to the Quai des Augustins, and Marcilly, as he passed the Tudette, pointed to the spire of Notre Dame, standing out high to view, and said: