Above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? Of the snatches of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of astonishment? Of the parades which his horse, catching the infection, made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught it?
Ay, what? Why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his melancholy and ride like the youngest? She wondered what the men thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. What were they thinking of it? She could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began to grip her heart.
Twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had shaken under her. But the cool freshness of the early summer morning, and the sight of the green landscape and the winding Loir, beside which their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth.
But this strange mood veiled she knew not what. It seemed, if she comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit. Before it her heart became as water. Even her colour little by little left her cheeks. She knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now guiltily sought and now avoided his. And feeling sure that he did read it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her perplexity.
This, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful thoughts. On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in steps from the river to the white buildings of a convent. On the other the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. Again the travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last year's leaves. And out again and down again they passed, and turning aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through the glare and heat. Down to the river-level again, where a squalid anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them, and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the hour of Nones.
And still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also. He hoped to arrive at Angers before nightfall. What, she wondered, shivering, would happen there? What was he planning to do to her? How would he punish her? Brave as she was, she was a woman, with a woman's nerves; and fear and anticipation got upon them; and his silence--his silence which must mean a thing worse than words!
And then on a sudden, piercing all, a new thought. Was it possible that he had other letters? If his bearing were consistent with anything, it was consistent with that. Had he other genuine letters, or had he duplicate letters, so that he had lost nothing, but instead had gained the right to rack and torture her, to taunt and despise her?
That thought stung her into sudden self-betrayal. They were riding along a broad dusty track which bordered a stone causey raised above the level of winter floods; impulsively she turned to him. "You have other letters!" she cried. "You have other letters!" And freed for the moment from her terror, she fixed her eyes on his and strove to read his face.
He looked at her, his mouth grown hard. "What do you mean, madame?" he asked.
"You have other letters?"