"She will tell you," I answered drily, my composure returning under his eye,--"amongst other things, that you are free. From this moment, M. de Cocheforêt, I give you back your parole, and I take my own honour. Farewell."
He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to hear or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the crossroads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless--and behind me all I loved. Once, when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after me across her body. And again I looked back. This time I saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark blurred mass.
CHAPTER XIII.
[ST. MARTIN'S EVE.]
It was late evening on the last day but one of November, when I rode into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the northeast, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed to be full of wood smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city's smell; and with all my heart I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south, and the prospect of riding day after day across heath and moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life before him, and freedom, and the open air, and hope and uncertainty, while I came back under doom; and in the pall of smoke that hung over the huddle of innumerable roofs, saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate.
For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run counter to all the cynical saws and instances by which he has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings and struggles of heart. At least a dozen times between the Loire and Paris, I asked myself what honour was; and what good it would do me when I lay rotting and forgotten; if I was not a fool following a Jack-o'-lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom I was returning, would not be the first to gibe at my folly.
However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of Mademoiselle's looks and words. I dared not be false to her again; I could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low. And therefore--though not without many a secret struggle and quaking--I came, on this last evening but one of November, to the Orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the Luxembourg, on my way to the Pont au Change.
The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins under my horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries, the first breath, in a word, of Paris, there came a new temptation--to go for one last night to Zaton's to see the tables again and the faces of surprise; to be, for an hour or two, the old Berault. That could be no breach of honour; for in any case I could not reach the Cardinal before tomorrow. And it could do no harm. It could make no change in anything. It would not have been a thing worth struggling about--only I had in my inmost heart suspicions that the stoutest resolutions might lose their force in that atmosphere; that even such a talisman as the memory of a woman's looks and words might lose its virtue there.
Still I think I should have succumbed in the end, if I had not received at the corner of the Luxembourg a shock which sobered me effectually. As I passed the gates, a coach followed by two outriders swept out of the palace courtyard; it was going at a great pace, and I reined my jaded horse on one side to give it room. As it whirled by me, one of the leather curtains flapped back, and I saw for a second, by the waning light,--the nearer wheels were no more than two feet from my boot,--a face inside.
A face, and no more, and that only for a second! But it froze me. It was Richelieu's, the Cardinal's; but not as I had been wont to see it, keen, cold, acute, with intellect and indomitable will in every feature. This face was distorted with rage and impatience; with the fever of haste and the fear of death. The eyes burned under the pale brow, the mustachios bristled, the teeth showed through the beard; I could fancy the man crying "Faster! Faster!" and gnawing his nails in the impatience of passion; and I shrank back as if I had been struck. The next moment the galloping outriders splashed me, the coach was a hundred paces ahead, and I was left chilled and wondering, foreseeing the worst, and no longer in any mood for the gaming-table.