THE WOUNDED NAME

by

D. K. Broster

Doubleday, Page & Company, Garden City, New York, 1923

Copyright, 1923, by Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.

Printed in the United States at The Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y.

First Edition

"O good Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!"

Hamlet, Act v. Sc. 2

"How shall I find that friend

Of the rare friends, the deep-hearted?

When the delicate revels end

And the maskers have all departed.

At a sudden hour and a drear,

For the sweet hour is the sternest,

Thou shalt know who held thee dear,

Whose hand was thine in earnest."

Herbert Trench

CHAPTER I - RUNNING WATER

"Without a horse, and a dog, and a friend, man would perish. The Gods gave me all three, and there is no gift like friendship. Remember this . . . when you become a young man. For your fate will turn on the first true friend you make."

RUDYARD KIPLING, Puck of Pook's Hill ("On the Great Wall").

(1)

The lady who was writing at the rosewood escritoire near the window paused, and with the feather end of the quill traced along the days of the month on a little calendar headed "1814" which was propped up behind the ink-stand.

"April the twelfth," she murmured, and wrote it at the top of the already finished letter under her hand.

She was not young—forty-five at least—but she was distinctly charming in her very short-waisted, close-fitting gown of lilac sarcenet. The irregular-shaped room, cool and fresh and sunlit, opened by a small bow-window on her left hand on to a garden that could not have been other than English. And she herself looked English, yet she had just signed a French name at the bottom of her letter, while over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of a middle-aged man with a refined and thoughtful face who did not even look English.

The door opened, and a man's voice could be heard speaking to someone outside.

"Laurent, is that you?" asked the lady, without looking up. She was sealing her letter. "Dearest, are you going out? Will you take this note to Mesdames Tantes, if you, are passing?—Where are you going, by the way?"

"Fishing," responded the owner of the voice, coming in. "Yes, of course I will take it for you, Maman. But isn't it the anniversary of something or other, so that the Aunts will be plunged in appropriate gloom, and will not approve of my occupation?"

The lady held up her face to his kiss. "No, I do not think it is the anniversary of any calamity to-day, otherwise they would not have agreed to come to supper." Once again she ran her quill along the almanac. "There is nothing now, I think, till Louis XVII's death in June. . . . You will be careful about the river, will you not, chéri? It must be in flood still, after the terribly severe winter we have had."

"Probably the gigantic salmon that I shall hook will pull me in," prophesied the young man teasingly. "Or perhaps I shall be taken with vertigo and fall in . . . or a tidal wave may come up from the sea!" The smile in his clear grey eyes spread to his mouth. "I am so glad that I shall never be a mother!"

"You are a very wicked son!" retorted the lady, laughing, too, and she pulled down his head and kissed the crisp fair hair that, after the fashion of the day, clustered rather thickly on his forehead. "In France, you know, you will have to show me much more respect, from all I hear of the authority of a mother there."

"Respect!" exclaimed Laurent de Courtomer, as he looked at the girlish figure. "How can I respect the authority of a mother who only appears to be about five years older than I am myself? Am I then to respect you more in Paris, and to love you less?"

"Must they run in inverse proportion? Go and fish, Laurent, instead of talking nonsense, and forget that we shall so soon be living in France."

"I rather wish that I could," unpatriotically remarked the young Frenchman, taking up the note from the escritoire. "Is it wrong to be so fond of this country because one was born and brought up in it?" He looked up at the portrait of his father over the mantelpiece. "If only this had come four years ago!" And Mme de Courtomer followed his gaze and sighed.

Although Fate's keys had opened the gate so long shut, and her voice, through the bugles of the advancing Allies, was calling the stout Bourbon, Louis XVIII, from his retreat at Hartwell to the throne of his ancestors, that exile would never return to his native land. And since his widow was English, and his son had never set foot in France, though both duty and sentiment might call them over the Channel to the young man's patrimony, neither of them could welcome the summons in quite the same spirit as he would have done. For to them it was not "returning."

"The Allies are nearly at Paris and Napoleon's star has set," said Laurent, turning away, "but, wonderful as it is, I do not somehow feel any more exhilarated than you do, Maman, for, after all, it is the bayonets of the foreigner which are bringing back the King. And I don't know my French relatives, and I shall miss my English ones."

Mme de Courtomer, rising, slipped her arm through his.

"Take care, darling, that the Aunts do not hear you talking like this! To them, as you know, it matters little who brings back the King, provided he is brought back—and to regret Devonshire would be the last offence."

"Nevertheless, I shall regret it," persisted Laurent, who did not easily change his affections. "You will, too, I know. Still, we are coming back here every year, are we not? . . . Yes, I must start. And this is an invitation for Mesdames Tantes to sup with us to-night? Do you want an answer?"

"No," said his mother, studying him with a smile. "It is only to confirm an arrangement already made. But I should like a salmon."

"You shall have one," replied her son confidently. "And now permit me to practise taking a Parisian farewell of my respected mother, the Comtesse Henri de Courtomer, née Seymour." And he kissed her hand with a flourish.

(2)

Soon afterwards he mounted into his English gig, with his English groom behind in charge of his rod and tackle, and drove down the village street in one of the most English of counties. But he was thinking, "A few weeks more, and I shall no longer be Mr. Laurent Courtomer of Keynton House, but M. le Comte de Courtomer in the family mansion that I have never seen in the Faubourg St. Germain where Mesdames Tantes, at least, will be in their element."

For Laurent's three great-aunts, "Mesdames Tantes de Roi," so christened by him on the analogy of those daughters of Louis XV who were thus known in the days of Louis XVI, were of a Royalist and Catholic fervour truly overwhelming. And of course, once in France, they would all, in French fashion, live together—as indeed they almost did now, settled in one small Devonshire village. But at least they were not all under one roof, and Laurent was not quite sure that he was longing for that increased proximity.

He soon pulled up before a door in a red brick wall, and in a few seconds was walking up a tiled path to the habitation of Mesdemoiselles de Courtomer. He knew that he must deliver his note in person, for the Aunts would consider it unpardonable if he merely left it without paying his respects.

The countenance of Augustine, their elderly, precise maid, bore signs of excitement.

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte," she said in response to his query at the door. "Mesdames are within. And they are receiving company."

"Really?" said Laurent. "In the morning?"

"A traveller, Monsieur le Comte. An old acquaintance just come over from France—M. le Baron de Vicq."

Laurent, by now in the hall, with an engraving of Louis XVI mounting the scaffold on one side of him and a bust of the Duc d'Enghien wreathed in immortelles on the other, murmured, "This is indeed great news!" For he seemed to remember having heard that in times inconceivably remote M. de Vicq had been a suitor for the hand of Tante Bonne or was it that he had been a flame of Tante Odile's? And, before he bowed respectfully over the hands of his venerable relatives, he beheld a withered but well-preserved old gentleman (yet younger, surely, by a decade than any of them) rise from a chair at a disappointingly equal distance from all of the old ladies . . . from Tante Odile's majestic piety and grey curls, from Tante Clotilde's even greater majesty and even more denuded (and therefore even more imposingly becapped) head, and from the long-faded prettiness of Tante Bonne, the youngest, who wore the smallest cap of any, and the least hideous cameo, and no jet at all, so that Tante Clotilde had more than once been known to accuse this eighty-year-old junior of hers of an ineradicable tendency to levity.

But Tante Clotilde herself had undergone a change since Lady Day, when a fair wind from France had blown so many clouds out of the Royalist sky. Her majesty was not less, her loyalism even more pronounced, but a ribbon of a discreet maroon shade had replaced the black moiré round her cap, and her manner to all and sundry was marked by an unexampled benignancy. So that Laurent, when he had saluted her dry, shrivelled hand with the mourning ring, was almost startled by the sensible favour with which she kissed him on either cheek, for though the greeting was not a novelty, it was often frosty. Tante Clotilde considered that Laurent spoke English too well, and his mother's habit of occasionally calling him Laurence—"a girl's name"—was an abomination to her. But, willy-nilly, her great-nephew would have to be entirely French now.

M. de Vicq, on introduction, made him a bow of another generation, and the young man, having duly delivered his note, was inspired to announce his hope that if the newcomer were staying the night he would give the ladies his escort up to Keynton House; this addition to the party would, he assured him, procure his mother and himself the greatest pleasure. After the proper amount of pressing the old gentleman accepted, and Laurent thereupon began to make efforts to extricate himself from his great-aunts' drawing-room.

But this was not so easy. M. de Vicq, whose fervour appeared to be almost equal to that of the old ladies, had embarked on a rapturous description of the enthusiasm manifested at the entry of the Duc d'Angoulême, the King's nephew, into Bordeaux about three weeks before, the news of which had caused such joyful anticipations in the little court at Hartwell, and since, after all, Laurent was French and on the point of treading French soil, the narration was not devoid of interest. Only it had not the charm of entire novelty, and he would rather have heard it at another time. It must, therefore, have been a rather unfortunate spirit of contradiction which led him to remark that Brittany and Vendée, for all their long and glorious struggle on behalf of monarchy, had not at this particular juncture played much part in the imminent restoration of the royal house.

"Oh, que si, Monsieur!" exclaimed the Baron, shocked; and Tante Clotilde said, "Fie, nephew!" in her deepest voice, and he was assured that under the rule of "the Corsican" more than thirty secondary chiefs had perished in that region for the Cause, and their names began to shower upon him.

"I take back my remark!" cried the young man, laughing. "Besides, after all, mes tantes, you are not mentioning a leader who is alive, which is better. What about that fellow in Brittany—L'Oiseleur, the Fowler, who is always luring the enemy into difficult positions, and who is personally so lucky that he is supposed to possess a charm of some sort? . . . Or is that all a myth, and his defence of the burning mill also?"

M. de Vicq almost started from his chair. "What an extraordinary thing that you should speak of L'Oiseleur to-day, Monsieur!" he exclaimed. "No, indeed, he is no myth! I have seen him—I saw him (though for the time I had forgotten it) no later than yesterday, and on the very packet which brought me from Brest to Plymouth."

"The Plymouth packet! Why, what was he doing there?" ejaculated Laurent and the old ladies in the same moment.

"I do not in the least know, Mesdames," replied the visitor, "and as I spent all the time of the voyage most miserably in the cabin below, I knew nothing of our distinguished passenger till we were disembarking at Plymouth. But then, as we were massed on the deck, eager for the shore, I heard a compatriot say, 'That's he—that's L'Oiseleur!'" And so I saw the personage pointed out—a rather stern, rough-looking man of fifty or so, with thick dark hair, somewhat unshorn, a real Chouan type. Greatly moved, I wished to shake him by his heroic hand, but in the press I could not, and I lost sight of him thereafter."

"Owing to his amulet, perhaps," observed Laurent idly. "But I had a notion that he was quite young, this famous fighter, and that he was a gentleman—titled, in fact. Of course I must have been wrong.—Now, if you will excuse me, mes tantes . . ."

"Yes, I, too, had previously thought that L'Oiseleur was gently born," said M. de Vicq slowly, "for he bears an old and honoured name—that of La Rocheterie; but this man could not have been a gentleman. Yet that does not prevent—"

"No, indeed!" cried the noble dames, generously waiving the claims of their caste to exclusive leadership. "Think of the great, the sublime, the sainted Cathelineau—a mason's son—"

"Think of Stofflet, a gamekeeper—"

"Think of Cadoudal, think of Guillemot—"

"Think of a salmon!" said Laurent irreverently to himself. And, by concentrating his will-power on that object, he did at last succeed in making his escape.

But as he drove between the high hedges, making for a chosen spot some five miles up the river, he found his mind running, despite himself, on the twenty years of struggle in the never-conquered west of France. He had been too young to take part in its earlier manifestations, and it was only in the last eighteen months or so that these had begun again, often with the formation of bands of "réfractaires," conscripts who would not serve Napoleon, led by gentlemen who equally refused. And among these was this well-nigh legendary "L'Oiseleur," audacious, undefeated, almost invisible, so swiftly and mysteriously did he move and strike—"jeune homme du plus brillant courage, adoré par ses hommes," as Laurent had heard him called. The double encomium was certainly borne out by his famous defence of the mill at Penescouët, where he and eighteen men were said to have kept five hundred Imperialists, troops of the line, at bay for more than four hours, till the soldiers were at last obliged to send for reinforcements, and contrived to burn the place over their heads. And even then the little band had operated a retreat almost more wonderful than their defence.

And now, if M. de Vicq were correct, this gallant fighter was in England, a shaggy, middle-aged peasant, not, after all, the young man of Laurent's own class who had seized the opportunity which he had missed. For it must be rather fine to have contributed by something more than prayers and wishes to restore Louis XVIII to that throne of his ancestors which, in a few weeks, he would almost certainly mount.

(3)

But these reflections were totally forgotten an hour later, when the young Frenchman was standing, in his high leather boots, the water swirling about his legs, casting hopefully over the particular pool in which it was impossible that there should not be a fish.

Maman was right (though he should not tell her so) about the river. It was running so strongly that, as Laurent moved slowly forward, he used considerable caution before he followed one foot by the other, for though he stood in shallow, broken water, there was enough stream to take him off his legs if he trod on a slippery stone or dropped unexpectedly into even a small hole. Nevertheless, it was not really the strength of the stream which prevented M. de Courtomer from immersing himself even to the fifth button of his waistcoat, which was then accounted the maximum depth, but the fact that, after the severe cold which had once followed this exploit, he had promised his mother never to repeat it. Indeed, in wading at all he was doing more than the majority of fishermen ever thought of attempting.

The long, twenty-foot rod bent; he cast again a little farther over the sliding, deeper water near the opposite bank, which there was flat and pebbly, and sprinkled with low shrubs. Yet the deepest part of the channel was below it. . . . No luck, not the ghost of a rise! Perhaps there was a little too much flood, after all, though the water was perfectly clear. Laurent thought he would try a change of fly. He reeled up and caught the line.

But as he was detaching the fly he had been using (rather clumsily, for his fingers were cold) he heard, somewhat to his annoyance, quick steps on the pebbles of the other side. He did not desire a possibly loquacious spectator. Finding, however, after a moment or two, that the owner of the steps did not address him, he glanced up.

A young man—a gentleman—was standing on the opposite bank looking at him. As Laurent raised his head he lifted his hat and said, in fair but obviously foreign English,

"Can you tell me, sir, where I shall find a bridge across this river? I have deceived myself of the road."

M. de Courtomer recognized in the flavour of the accent and the turn of the idiom an undoubted compatriot though at first glance the speaker did not look French, particularly in colouring. As he stood there bareheaded the April sun struck warmly on hair of an unusual bronze tint—a hue that had no real trace of red in it, and yet that was not brown. He was tall, carefully dressed, and had a noticeably graceful and easy carriage of the head, and indeed of his whole person. So much Laurent took in before he replied pleasantly:

"There is no bridge, I regret to say, Monsieur, within less than two miles of here. The nearest is at Oakford."

At his replying in French the stranger seemed surprised, as Laurent had quite expected that he would be. "Monsieur also is French?" he enquired in that tongue.

"I have that privilege," replied M. de Courtomer, smiling.

"You seem also, Monsieur, to have that of walking on the water, or pretty nearly," observed the newcomer. "Am I right in supposing that you arrived at your present position from the opposite bank—where I desire to find myself? If you would permit me to join you on your Ararat I could thence gain the shore, could I not?" And he advanced right to the water's edge.

"Good Heavens, have a care!" cried Laurent, alarmed. "I am in shallow water here, and have enough ado to keep my feet as it is, but between you and me there is the full force of the current—I don't know how deep the stream is to-day—and all sorts of nasty holes! Don't think of such a thing, I implore you!"

The stranger looked down at the smooth water swirling past his feet at remarkable speed. "The stream—yes, I see that it is excessive. But I do so wish myself on that bank! I am walking from Bidcombe to pick up the Bath coach again at Midhampton; and if I have to go out of my way to this bridge of which you have been kind enough to tell me I shall certainly miss it . . . and my valise which I sent on in it."

"But even that is not worth drowning yourself for," protested Laurent, staggering a little as he spoke. "This river is said to claim a life every year; pray do not be the candidate for 1814. The bridge at—Damnation!" He had dropped his fly.

The stream had it in an instant. Laurent stooped involuntarily to grasp at it as it was whirled out of his reach, lost his balance for a second, had to take a hasty step to recover this, slipped on a stone . . . and the stream had him also.

Not without a battle, however, since before it carried him into deeper water he almost contrived to regain his feet . . . but was pulled down again by the driving weight of it. As its cold fury rolled him over and over, struggling and gasping, he had a distinct (but surely erroneous) impression of a shout and a splash from the other bank, quickly forgotten in the stinging interlude which followed, filled to the brim as it was with confused sensations of choking, of a temperature which took his breath away, of thoughts of Maman, of doubts whether he would ever see France now, of a conviction that he must, of course, go with the stream. . . . But it was so difficult to keep one's head above water, . . . and he wasn't swimming, he was being hurtled. . . . And then, inconceivably, and yet, in a way, expectedly, he was spluttering in the shallows at the bend, his feet touching bottom in that place where the bank was so eaten away—a difficult place to get out at, but where he now most firmly intended to get out, and that instantly. Only the bank was still above his head, and he still had water to his breast, and the bottom was shelving and slippery. . . . But he managed to catch a bit of the old staking with one hand—and just then something clutched him from behind by the shoulder. . . .

Great God, he had jumped in, then! it was no illusion. Yet how, in the name of fortune . . . "There's bottom here!" gasped Laurent, and without loosing his hold of the staking, grabbed in his turn with his other hand, and discovered that he had his compatriot by the collar.

"Have you found your feet?" he asked, not wasting speech over his own amazement. "Try to catch hold of this piece of wood. Then I will get out somehow, and help you out. But we must be careful—the bank is rotten."

"Monsieur, how could you, how could you do such a hazardous thing!" panted Laurent. "I . . . really, words are ridiculous in face of . . . such an obligation. How you are here at all is nothing short of a miracle. You must have jumped . . . straight into the swiftest part of the current!"

They were both on the bank by this, drenched and coughing and rather like landed fishes themselves. But Laurent had no desire to laugh, for though their situation might be absurd now, it had narrowly escaped being tragic.

The water poured off the would-be rescuer as he raised himself and threw back the soaked hair from which the river had dragged the ribbon—hair longer than was usually to be seen in 1814. "I am here, Monsieur," he replied rather breathlessly, "because you pulled me out, that is plain. How could I stand there watching while the river carried you away! And I accomplished nothing at all—I merely made it more difficult for you to extricate yourself. . . . However, I daresay neither of us was really in danger."

"We were in danger," responded Laurent seriously, "and you far more than I. And I had warned you! As to accomplishing nothing, it is the intention which counts in such cases."

His companion was wringing out his sodden locks. "I had the intention of coming across, it is true. Here I am, then; I have saved . . . how much did you say . . . two miles of road?" He suddenly smiled; it was a very attractive smile, too.

"I shall always feel, at any rate, that I owe you the debt," said Laurent rather huskily. "And . . . thank God that you did not pay the price which you might very well have paid!" He held out his hand, wrung the wet hand put into it, and then, jumping to his feet, became very practical.

"We must not stay here a moment longer; we will go to the inn near, have a fire, and get our clothes off at once. Yours, Monsieur"—and as he looked at their deplorable condition he became aware that their owner wore a red ribbon in his buttonhole; he must have the Cross of St. Louis, then, but he was unusually young for such a distinction—"yours will never be dry in time for you to continue your journey to Bath. So you will allow me, will you not, the great pleasure of offering you hospitality for the night at least? I live about five miles from here."

"You are very kind indeed, Monsieur," said the dripping young man, hesitating. Then he looked at him frankly. "I should like it greatly . . . on condition that you will not tell any of your acquaintances of my foolish short cut across your river?"

"Conditions of that kind can be discussed later," responded M. de Courtomer, smiling. "At present I think our joint physical condition is what matters. . . . Excuse me if I lead the way."

(4)

Twenty minutes later both adventurers were peeling off their soaked garments before a hastily lit fire in a room of the Three Trouts, and shortly afterwards, wrapped in blankets, were ensconced before it in a couple of large chairs, with two steaming glasses beside them. And Walters the groom, to his own surprise, was riding across country on M. de Courtomer's cob to intercept the Bath coach at Midhampton and bring back the French gentleman's valise which it contained—this neat strategic idea having occurred to his master on his way to the inn, when it was borne in upon him that no clothes of his were likely to fit his guest, taller than himself by nearly a couple of inches.

Laurent had just now had, too, the opportunity of verifying what his first impressions had already told him, that his compatriot was an exceptionally well-built young man, with the lithe strength of steel. He had also seen that he wore round his left arm, just above the elbow, a little strip of some plaited or woven substance, not fine enough to be hair. Laurent had only obtained a momentary glimpse of this object, and his curiosity had not been gratified by another; but he had now the prospect of being able to study at leisure the appearance of this strangely made acquaintance, and he proceeded to do so.

He had the clear pallor and fine skin which often go with hair of warm colouring, and his, as it dried, was gradually resuming its proper shade, the deepest tone of September bracken. Even his eyes, which at a distance looked dark, were seen at closer quarters to be of a deep red-brown. The rest of his features were noticeably straight and delicate and strong; the chin, a little long, curved slightly forward and was squared at the corners, the mouth was firm and sweet—altogether a face of great individuality and charm, without the weakness which sometimes accompanies the latter quality in a man. Laurent took him to be about twenty-six—a couple of years older than himself.

"I do not know," he observed at last, ashamed to scrutinize any longer, "if it is correct to introduce oneself in this unconventional attire. I ought to have done it earlier. My name is Courtomer—Laurent de Courtomer. I have always lived in England."

"And mine," said the other, setting down his glass, "is La Rocheterie—Aymar de la Rocheterie, at your service. For my part, I have always lived in France."

"What!" cried Laurent, nearly bounding out of his blanket. "La . . . La Rocheterie . . . L'Oiseleur! You, Monsieur, are L'Oiseleur! Is it possible!"

In a lesser degree his companion also showed surprise. "My name is then known to you, Monsieur? But this is not Brittany!"

"But I am a Frenchman—and a Royalist!" cried M. de Courtomer. "I have known of you, Monsieur, for some time—no, I assure you that your name is not so unfamiliar over here as your modesty assumes. We have heard of the defence of the Moulin Brûlé! Indeed we were speaking of you only this morning, my great-aunts and I, and a gentleman who thinks he came over with you in the Brest packet. But he said you were . . . It's more than extraordinary! . . . L'Oiseleur, himself, here!"

"Ma foi, but this is to find oneself famous!" said M. de la Rocheterie, laughing. "One had, perhaps, the good—or ill—fortune to be known on the other side of the Channel, but over here, who cares for an obscure brigand, as our foes are so fond of calling us?"

Even in his present unusual attire, or absence of it, a young man who looked less like a brigand could hardly be imagined. And the question of birth could be set at rest for ever by the beautifully shaped if sunburnt hands emerging from the blanket. So Laurent, remembering M. de Vicq's picture of the hairy individual "not a gentleman" whose hand he had longed to shake, and mindful that he and the Aunts were coming to supper that evening, foresaw an amusing encounter. . . . But—to be sitting here tête-à-tête with this young hero, who had known countless days and nights of hazard and discomfort among the gorse and broom, with only a handful of men and his own wits and courage between him and Napoleon's vengeance . . . and he wrapped in a blanket because he had jumped into the Dart after him—it was incredible!

He pulled himself together.

"I believe, Monsieur, that you bear a title, do you not?" he asked, thinking of the introductions he should have to effect.

"A small one—Vicomte. You, Monsieur, perhaps also?"

Laurent named his. "But I do not use it here. When we are in France I suppose I shall have to tack it on again."

"Ah, you are returning, of course?"

"Almost immediately. Yet, since it is not really a return, it will be strange. . . . I was born in England; my father, now dead, married an Englishwoman and settled here in the early days of the Revolution."

"So Madame votre mère is English?" observed the Vicomte de la Rocheterie, with interest. "That then accounts for the perfection of your accent, Monsieur de Courtomer, and also—if as a Frenchman you can forgive me—for an appearance not altogether French. As you stood in the river which has so happily brought us together I had no idea that you were a compatriot."

"You must remember that I have lived all my life in England," said Laurent to this. "That, probably, has even more to do with it. And since we are on the subject of personal appearance, may I say that I never took you for French, either—till you spoke? Your hair . . . you will excuse me, I trust? is of an unusual colour for a Frenchman, is it not?"

The young man good-humouredly took hold of a damp bronze lock. "This tiresome stuff? Yes, I believe it is not often met with. Indeed, I have found it inconvenient at times, for that reason; in a tight corner one usually does not wish to be identified. As a matter of fact, I have some Norse blood in my veins, and the . . . the other member of my family who shares that with me has much the same hair. So no doubt it comes from that strain. . . . I hope that the next time I fall into a river I shall be wearing it short, which is probable, for I only keep it long to be like my Chouans. I wish it would dry." He put up his other hand to his head, and the blanket slipped instantly off his left shoulder and arm.

Before he could replace it Laurent's eyes had involuntarily darted to his elbow—and away again.

"You were looking at my bracelet, Monsieur?" enquired its owner, in his pleasant voice. "Now there, no doubt, is the explanation of my safe navigation of your river. Are you superstitious, Monsieur de Courtomer? No more than I, probably; so I would like you to realize that I wear this ridiculous thing for the sake of other people's superstitions only—I mean, of course, my men's."

And the little half-smile he gave Laurent (he seemed rarely to smile fully) had a tinge of mischief in it.

"I could not help seeing it," confessed the latter, rather red. "And that, then, is the famous charm which makes you invincible! Might I . . .?"

L'Oiseleur thrust out his arm again for his inspection. The mysterious object upon it resolved itself into a band of plaited rushes or coarse grass, about half an inch wide, fitting just tightly enough not to slip down over the elbow.

"I will make you another confession about that, Monsieur," said its wearer, looking down at it. "It is not even the original jartier which is supposed to have been bestowed upon me by the fairy Mélusine or her deputy! In a somewhat rough-and-tumble life a bracelet of rushes will not last for ever, and so I . . . have it renewed from time to time. Still, there is a strand of the original in it somewhere." He smiled again as he made this rather cynical admission, and finished the remains of his punch.

Laurent was examining the talisman with deep interest. "There is no fastening. Then, Monsieur, the . . . the fairy Mélusine plaits it on your arm every time?"

"She does," replied M. de la Rocheterie.

A woman's fingers, of course. Perhaps he was married; but Laurent did not, somehow, think so. He could not pursue further the question of the weaver, and, moreover, the possessor of the rush bracelet was now looking thoughtfully into the fire.

"And nothing has ever touched you, in all the time you have fought, since you wore that?" asked Laurent after a moment.

L'Oiseleur turned his head, and the enquirer had a little shock of surprise. . . . Or had he merely imagined that a profound sadness looked for a moment out of the red-brown eyes? It was gone so quickly that he was not sure—gone by the time his companion answered simply, "Nothing. I have never received a scratch, so I cannot claim the honour of having shed my blood for the King, as so many better men have done."

"Yet," observed Laurent, "the King seems to consider that you have done fully enough for him without that. That ribbon . . ."

"Yes. His Majesty was pleased to send me the Cross last year. Some of my men had better deserved it. They had no talisman."

"You must really need a strong head, Monsieur de la Rocheterie, not to believe, after all, in the efficacy of yours! Tell me, if I am not impertinent, whether there is not some one action which will break its power if you happen to do it? In most fairy tales it is so."

"I believe," said the young leader, wrapping himself up again, "that there is some dark story in the past history of this object or its predecessors, but I do not know what moral it is supposed to point. Apart from that—Morbleu, what an extraordinary thing! It has just happened to me, and I never gave it a thought!"

"What is it?" asked Laurent eagerly.

"I must never cross running water, except by a bridge, or on horseback, or by some means of that sort. I must never go through it in person. And, to do myself justice—and again in deference to those Chouans of mine—I never have . . . until to-day. But you cannot deny that I have crossed it this morning—water of the most running!"

And he looked at his fellow-adventurer in running water with unfeigned amusement.

(5)

As Laurent de Courtomer tied his stock that evening in his own bedroom, he was both thoughtful and excited. To fall into the river and narrowly escape drowning, to have a total stranger risk his life for him over it, to discover that the stranger in question was someone he knew about and admired, and, finally, to possess him at the moment as a guest under his own roof—these were sufficient reasons why the stock should be well tied . . . and sufficient excuse for the fact that it was not.

Nor had Laurent quite shaken off the shyness which had unexpectedly descended upon him when he was driving home from the Three Trouts with L'Oiseleur beside him—that sudden hot conviction that he, with nothing to his credit, had been chattering too freely to this young hero. Had or had not M. de la Rocheterie seemed a little remote, a little withdrawn, during that drive?

A knock at the door, interrupting these cogitations, heralded the entrance of Mme de Courtomer, looking charming but pale. Laurent's heart smote him as he turned round from the dressing-table. She kissed him long and closely; she had not yet got over her emotion.

"I am just going down to the drawing-room, my darling," she said. "I hope M. de la Rocheterie may be there; I want to see him alone. When you brought him to me in the garden I was, I fear, rather selfishly absorbed in thoughts of you and your danger."

Laurent nodded. "He tried to make me promise not to mention what he did, but of course—"

"An absolute stranger, Laurent! And such a risk! I cannot get accustomed to the idea!"

Like her son, Mme de Courtomer seemed a firm believer in the theory of "intention." Yet it had already been made perfectly clear to her by M. de la Rocheterie himself that he had in no sense saved Laurent's life.

"Maman," said Laurent, putting his arm round her, "if you can't get some more colour into those cheeks I shall not eat any dinner. Dearest, dearest little mother, I did not do it on purpose!—See now, I am going to kiss them very hard. . . . That's a trifle better! Now go down and thank M. de la Rocheterie for spoiling a very elegant suit of clothes—if he gives you the chance. Unless I have gauged him wrongly, you will not get very far."

"There is one thing that comforts me, Laurent," said Virginia de Courtomer, "and that is, that you would have done just the same in similar circumstances."

"Perhaps," replied her son. "But not so quickly!"

The enlightenment of M. de Vicq and the old ladies that evening was indeed great fun, only it was too soon over, and Laurent was a little afraid of embarrassing his guest, who seemed genuinely averse from anything resembling posing or display. But, probably just because he was so free from self-consciousness and so simply dignified, he took the ensuing adulation lightly, and yet with a fine courtesy as if he were aware that he was a young man receiving the homage of the old. If he found the worshippers a little absurd, he did not betray it. The impression which he had produced on Tante Clotilde, even before she realized whom the "Monsieur le Vicomte de la Rocheterie" of Laurent's introduction cloaked, was marked by her making him the suggestion of a curtsey of fifty years ago, with all Versailles behind it—an honour which no Englishman ever received from her. And M. de la Rocheterie had kissed her hand in a manner which also had tradition behind it. Yet more important to Laurent, really, than the unqualified success of his little coup de théâtre, than the joy of being able to whisper to M. de Vicq, "I expect you think, Monsieur, that L'Oiseleur has shaved since you saw him last? I expect he has—but not to that extent!" was his mother's murmur to him, just before they went in to supper. "Your Chouan has already enslaved me, Laurent, I think he is charming!"

But now supper was going forward, and M. de la Rocheterie was making obvious efforts to efface himself, to avoid being what he had become, the centre of the little festivity. But with everybody determined to make him so, it was impossible to get out of the position. First of all, M. de Vicq's mistake of the packet had to be explained. It appeared that L'Oiseleur had come over in it, and that he had heard another passenger being pointed out as himself, "which," as he added with a little smile, "enabled me to escape an attention that I had then no idea I should encounter."

"Ah, Vicomte," interposed Tante Clotilde significantly at this, "you are doubtless in England—am I indiscreet?—on the King's business?"

One felt it almost needed courage to reply, as L'Oiseleur did, "No, Madame; on a purely private matter." However, Tante Clotilde's large face wore the air of one who "knows better."

"I think," said M. de Vicq, then addressing him, "that I once had the pleasure, a few years ago, of meeting a gentleman of your name—a good deal older than you, however. Your father, perhaps?"

The young man's face changed subtly. "My father was guillotined with my mother, during the Terror, Monsieur."

It only needed this avowal to complete his prestige in the eyes of the Aunts. A ripple of emotion went round.

"Where did you meet M. de la Rocheterie, did you say, Laurent?" enquired Tante Clotilde when she had contributed to it.

"In the river, ma tante."

The old lady looked severe, for she did not like being jested with. "Please express yourself more accurately, great-nephew!" So Laurent elaborated, without changing, his statement.

On the heels of the ensuing sensation M. de Vicq asked suddenly whether it was true that the guest possessed, or was popularly supposed to possess, a talisman of some kind.

"Quite true, Monsieur," responded L'Oiseleur soberly. "I really have it—a magic garter, or jartier, as the common folk call it." Then he caught Laurent's eye, and smiled. "But its virtue is, of course, all nonsense."

"The popular voice, in short, ascribes to the possession of a charm what is in reality due solely to your own skill and valour!" observed M. de Vicq rather sententiously, but pointing this remark as a compliment by a bow.

"I did not mean that!" said Aymar de la Rocheterie, looking for the first time a trifle disconcerted. "And I spoke too strongly, for undoubtedly my possession of the jartier has influenced my men and given them confidence—they are exceedingly superstitious—so in that way the thing has its value. That is, in fact, why I wear it."

"And how did you acquire this jartier?" enquired Tante Clotilde massively.

"A witch gave it to me, Madame."

"A witch—a real witch!" exclaimed his hostess. "Oh, how, Monsieur de la Rocheterie—and why?"

"The 'why' makes rather a long story, Madame."

"We shall hope to hear it, then, after supper," announced Mlle Clotilde de Courtomer in a tone that seemed to settle the whole matter.

"And, perhaps, the whole story of the Moulin Brûlé too?" hazarded M. de Vicq; but L'Oiseleur shook his head with a little smile.

Mme de Courtomer looked from one to the other. "What was the Moulin Brûlé?" she enquired of the old gentleman in a low voice.

But it was Tante Clotilde who replied for him. "My dear Virginia—really!—before the hero of Penescouët himself! The details which reached us of that exploit were, I doubt not, inadequate, but surely we all treasure them too securely in our memories to ask 'What was the Moulin Brûlé'?"

Poor Mme de Courtomer, thus brought to book at her own table, before and on account of her guest, flushed, M. de la Rocheterie bit his lip and looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and Laurent's anger was kindled.

"You forget, I think, ma tante," he said as politely as he could, "that my mother, after all, is not French by birth; and it is quite plain that no one can have told her the story, for it is not one which she could ever have forgotten."

"Quite so—very well said!" put in M. de Vicq hastily, and he gallantly monopolized the old lady's attention while the awkward wave in the conversation caused by the boulder she had cast into it spent itself. Indeed Laurent, looking down the table after a moment's silent fight with his annoyance, was relieved to find that the "hero of Penescouët" was smiling delightfully at his hostess, and heard her say, smiling, too, "Will you ever be able to forgive me, Monsieur de la Rocheterie?"

"Madame," replied L'Oiseleur, "you cannot conceive what a relief it is to find that there is one fortunate being in Royalist circles who has not been pestered with the tale of that detestable old windmill! I sometimes wish I had never seen the place!"

When the ladies, following English custom, had left them, M. de Vicq drew in his chair and concentrated his attention on his fellow-guest.

"I remember the Vendée, of course," he remarked, "and the great days of the Chouannerie, Cadoudal's days. You are too young to recall them, Monsieur—but you have relit the sacred fire!"

"No—only fanned the embers," said L'Oiseleur quickly. "The fire is always there. The Breton does not change. Indeed, some of mine are identically the same as those of the great days. And one has the same devotion to rely on, the same obstinacy to combat, the same superstitions to use or respect, and the same kind of warfare."

"That warfare of hedgerows and heather of which one has heard," put in Laurent, his chin on his hands, "and which needs, I imagine, a special aptitude."

"I suppose it does. At any rate, it is the only kind which the Breton really understands. You have to be always on the move; if you have very few men, as I had—at least at the beginning, when I started with twenty-five—that is easy. And if you keep moving you are not only invisible, but the enemy thinks your numbers are much greater than they are. I have never had more than six hundred men, but they were all picked, and if I had told any one of them to go immediately and cut off his hand the only delay would have been the finding of the chopper. . . . Well, that is all over now. I suppose I ought to say, Thank God. I do say it—but one does not like parting from one's comrades."

"You have disbanded them, then?"

"Not yet. But I shall do so directly the King is actually in Paris."

"The King in Paris!" exclaimed the Baron de Vicq in a rapt tone. And he began a loyal reverie on that theme, to which the two young men listened with becoming patience. Then he reverted somewhat abruptly to the question of L'Oiseleur's amulet, and asked so many questions about it, that in the end M. de la Rocheterie, beginning, Laurent fancied, to be slightly bored, offered to show it to him, and, while M. de Vicq murmured delightedly, "Monsieur, you are really too obliging!" took off his coat with an apology to his host and turned up the sleeve of his fine shirt.

Laurent, leaning back on his chair, his hands behind his head, looked on amused. Little exclamations broke from the old Royalist as, spectacles on nose, he bent over the table and scrutinized the circlet closely. "And that is really the fairy garter of the legend—dear, dear, how wonderful! After all these years . . . so fresh and well-preserved . . . there must be something in it, after all! It is indeed to be hoped, Monsieur, that you will never lose that!"

The owner of the jartier, with his bare arm stretched out before him on the mahogany, caught his host's eye over the grey head. "Yes, as you say, Monsieur, remarkably well-preserved!" And Laurent, smiling back, had a delightful sense of complicity with him. He was not going to tell the old fellow what he had told him!

"My last doubts are removed," murmured M. de Vicq, taking off his spectacles. "Now I know that I really have shaken L'Oiseleur and no other by the hand!"

The bearer of that name, who was turning down his shirt-sleeve, stopped, and flushed very slightly.

"Why, Monsieur, did you think I was an impostor?" he demanded. "Was that why you wanted to see the thing?" And he looked at the old gentleman very straight and challengingly.

Poor M. de Vicq, meeting the spark he had so tactlessly struck out, confounded himself in apologies; on which M. de la Rocheterie, evidently quickly penitent, but still with a little air not free from hauteur, begged his pardon for having suspected his motive, and, peace being restored, their young host suggested that they should join the ladies.

"Very interesting, that," he thought as he opened the door. "So he's got a hot temper under that quiet exterior of his! I think that, for all his modesty and charm, I should be sorry to take liberties with M. le Vicomte de la Rocheterie!"

(6)

Installed on the sofa in the drawing-room, Tante Clotilde immediately motioned to M. de la Rocheterie to take his place beside her.

"Now, Vicomte, the story you promised us, if you please—the story of the jartier!" she said with heavy graciousness.

"I can recall no such promise, Madame," replied L'Oiseleur. "However, if you conceive that it would interest you . . . and M. le Baron," he added, flashing a glance half malicious, half apologetic on that offender, "I will endeavour not to bore you too much." He stirred his coffee for an instant. "You must know, then, that in the district of Penescouët there is a legend of an enchanted garter given in the Middle Ages by that ubiquitous immortal, the fairy Mélusine, to a knight whom it rendered invincible. This garter was said to be still in existence, in the keeping of an old witch in the forest of Armor—we still have witches in Brittany—whom some held to be the fairy Mélusine herself. I must also tell you, if you will pardon a reference to my personal appearance, that this knight—known to after ages only as L'Oiseleur—seems to have been so unfortunate as to possess hair of the colour of mine.

"Well, I had—I have—a specially devoted follower named Jacques Eveno, who comes from the neighbourhood of my little estate at Sessignes. This man, who not only knew the legend, but the old woman, too, who had the jartier, must have begun by wishing that he could procure the lucky talisman for me, but hesitated to steal it for fear the theft should bring misfortune on me. Then he must have pondered how to trick the witch into giving it me of her own free will, and how therefore to inveigle me—at the time perfectly innocent—into playing the part as it should be played. For it seems (but I only learnt this afterwards) that if a young man with reddish hair came at sunset to her hut with a hawk on his shoulder, and asked for a night's lodging, offering in payment merely a sprig of mistletoe . . . well, he was the dead Fowler come to life again, and she would give him the jartier as of right. Eveno, a simple peasant, successfully contrived that all those coincidences should come about—except indeed the finding of the hawk. One afternoon he got me into the heart of the forest on some pretext or other, and deliberately misled me, so that I lost my way and had to ask for shelter at the witch's hut. Knowing her reputation I made no difficulty about his suggestion that I should offer her the bit of mistletoe which he had plucked for me—one learns to humour superstition in Brittany. But the hawk . . . yes, that was strange."

"How did he procure the hawk, then?" asked Tante Odile as he paused.

"He did not, Madame; chance procured it, turning his fraud, for him, into reality . . . and somewhat frightening him, I think. For, as we went through the wood, I came on a young hawk half stunned on the ground, with a broken wing, and I picked the poor bird up and carried it for a while, and ended by putting it (all innocently) on my shoulder, where it stayed. So it was there, quite correctly, when I knocked at the witch's door." He smiled—that most attractive smile of his.

"And the witch, Monsieur—she gave you the charm?"

"Without demur. I was only afraid that she was going to kiss me! She did kiss my hands. You must remember, Mesdames, that at the moment I was completely in the dark, and had no idea for whom she took me, nor why, with the tears running down her wrinkled face, she brought out with such awe from a box of battered and time-blackened silver this little dried twist of rushes. Then the legend suddenly came back to me; and as she and Eveno were by now in a frenzy of excitement, and my protests had no effect, I . . . accepted the talisman, which was, so the wise woman assured me, the identical magic circlet which Mélusine had bestowed on the original L'Oiseleur of whom I was, somehow, a reincarnation. I retain, naturally, my own ideas on that subject, but afterwards, of course, my men always called me by that name."

"And you have the jartier still—you wear it perhaps?" asked Mme de Courtomer.

L'Oiseleur bowed. "I always wear it—for my men's sake. But as it was shrunken with age, and had moreover been cut, I could not wear it where a garter should be worn. So the witch fastened it round my left arm, like a bracelet."

The eyes of all the ladies went to his sleeve. But that it would have been out of place they would all, obviously, have dearly loved to invite the young man to remove his coat. Laurent thought it charming of him not to spoil the story for them by confessing that it was not exactly the original jartier which he wore now, and hugged himself to think that he had been the sole recipient of that confidence.

"But what, Monsieur," asked Tante Bonne a little timidly, "was the story of the first owner of the jartier?"

"Alas, Madame, I fear that it was tragic. The legends say that he was betrayed by the woman he loved . . . or else that he gave her the garter in obedience to her whim, and in consequence his enemies fell on him and slew him. I am not sure which; but it comes to the same thing."

"I hope—" began Mme de Courtomer rather rashly; and then, checking herself, blushed like a girl.

"Maman, Maman!" said Laurent to himself—and was surprised to see M. de la Rocheterie look across at her without the shadow of offence, and to hear him say, "Merci, Madame, but of that there is no danger!"

A little enigmatic smile just touched the corners of his firmly cut mouth, and Laurent presumed it meant that he was sure that no woman would ever have sufficient power over him to play Delilah.

At any rate no woman—or man either—had the power to get him to talk any more about himself that evening, and the affair of Penescouët went untold . . . till the guests had driven away in the venerable fly which had brought them.

"And now, Maman," said Laurent with a sigh of relief, "M. de la Rocheterie, as a sign that he has forgiven you for your lamentable ignorance, shall tell us two the true story of the Moulin Brûlé. Will you, Vicomte?"

"To save me from the possibility of being crushed like that again, Monsieur?" pleaded Mme de Courtomer, putting out her hand to him.

L'Oiseleur bent his handsome head and kissed it. "You could extort anything from me with that weapon, Madame," he replied. "Let us get it over then!"

(7)

Late that night Laurent, deeper than ever in the toils of hero-worship, stood, candlestick in hand, in his guest's bedroom, and, looking at M. de la Rocheterie as he took the watch from his fob and laid it on the dimity-hung dressing-table, said earnestly, "I hope you will sleep well!"

He himself would dream to-night of those revolving sheets of flame, the sails of the riddled Moulin Brûlé; of the Emperor's soldiers ceasing fire at last, thinking that they were merely wasting ammunition on the holocaust whose heat was too great for them to approach; and of the dozen blackened figures—or, more probably, of one figure in particular—bursting out of that inferno of smoke and blood and, completely surrounded though they were, cutting a way through the stupefied besiegers.

"I suppose you can—sleep in any surroundings," he added, for though he knew that L'Oiseleur must often have spent the night in the open, that reflection was somehow as incongruous as the recital downstairs with this composed and very well-dressed young man now calmly winding up his watch in the best bedroom of Keynton House.

"I much prefer a bed to any other surroundings," replied the Vicomte de la Rocheterie. "Yours, I am sure, is most comfortable." Here, as Laurent afterwards realized, he must have discovered on what a vain employment he was spending his time; but, instead of holding his useless watch to his ear, or otherwise betraying to the man in whose service he had wrecked it, the effect of Dart water upon its interior, he quietly laid it face downwards on the dressing-table, glanced at the mantelpiece to ascertain that there was a clock in the room, and went on, "By the way, Monsieur de Courtomer, I hope my early start to-morrow will not prevent my taking farewell of Mme la Comtesse?"

Laurent reassured him, warning him that, unless he chose to have coffee brought to him in his room, he would have to face an English breakfast. But for this M. de la Rocheterie expressed a preference.

"I trust you have everything you require?" then said Laurent, reluctantly preparing to take his leave. "No, there is one thing that you will need in the morning, Monsieur, and that is a hat. You cannot travel without one, though you can remedy the lack excellently well when you get to Bath. You must really allow me to supply you with one."

"Thank you," said his guest. "Yes, I suppose that to travel so far bareheaded might excite comment."

"Especially in your case," thought Laurent, though by now he admired the hair en queue. "Do you know Bath, Vicomte?" he asked as an excuse to linger a little.

"No, not at all," returned the traveller.

"It is a prodigious fine place," pronounced Laurent. "I hope I am not impertinent in assuming that it is not—fortunately—for the good of your health that you are going there?"

"No," answered L'Oiseleur, "it is certainly not for my health that I am going to Bath."

He was fingering, with bent head, the seals of his watch lying there. Laurent had the impression that his mouth tightened as he spoke, and got an instant conviction that M. de la Rocheterie's visit to Bath was no pleasure to him. He wondered, not for the first time, what the object of his journey could be, he whose Chouans were still under arms, yet who avowed that he was not on the King's business. And his eyes, following the strong, slender hand, noted the crest on the back of the watch, a swan with its neck encircled by a crown; he even distinguished, on the scroll below the proud and laconic motto, Sans tache. Both pleased him.

Then he made a more determined effort, and bade his guest good-night. There would always be the morning.

But the morning was disappointing, as usually on the occasion of an early start. There seemed no time for conversation, no opportunity for learning any more of the visitor. The inspiration which had come to Laurent of begging the latter to spend a day or two at Keynton House on his way back from Bath proved unfruitful, M. de la Rocheterie explaining that he would probably have to return by London and Dover. It was Mme de Courtomer who had most of L'Oiseleur's attention during the English breakfast, and it seemed to her son that it was not till the last stage of all had arrived, and he was walking down the village beside his guest, with Walters behind carrying his valise, that he had the chance of a word with him; and then there seemed nothing to say . . . just because there was so much. He tried, indeed, to thank him anew for yesterday's act, but even that expression of his feelings was debarred him. Aymar de la Rocheterie declared that thanks for a thing which he had not done made him feel as fraudulent as he sometimes did over the jartier. So Laurent, after murmuring stubbornly, "You meant to save me! I only wish I might have a chance of repaying you some day," had to desist. Then the coach came rumbling in.

"You have promised my mother that when you are in Paris you will give us the pleasure of seeing you, Monsieur," Laurent reminded the traveller. "I want the promise made to me, too."

"I do not need to be doubly bound," retorted M. de la Rocheterie, smiling. "And you, Monsieur de Courtomer, when are you coming to Brittany? We have a little river at Sessignes, with indifferent fishing . . . though to be sure I have succeeded in catching excellent trout at Pont-aux-Rochers . . . but that is a good way off."

"I do not need to be tempted by fishing," responded Laurent in his turn. "Some day . . ."

A hearty shake of the hand on both sides, and again that charming smile of L'Oiseleur's, and he was mounting to his place.

"At any rate, he's got my hat!" reflected Laurent, watching the coach roll off. Then he went rather pensively home.

CHAPTER II - "ROSES, ROSES ALL THE WAY"

"Both faithful and loyal, one grace more shall brim

His cup with perfection; a lady's true lover,

He holds—save his God and his King—none above her."

R. BROWNING, Which?

(1)

It is quite possible that Laurent de Courtomer did not miss Devonshire nearly as much as he had anticipated—not, at least, during those first weeks of excitement and fervour which followed Louis XVIII's entry into Paris on that third of May, 1814, behind the eight white horses from Napoleon's stable. There were more than enough of interests in his new life for a young Frenchman who had never been in France, let alone in Paris, and for a young Royalist who was not only sharing the triumph of his cause, but who was himself taking possession of his own deserted family mansion in the capital, and negotiating for the repurchase of his father's confiscated estates in the country.

Yet Laurent never quite forgot the young man he had met in the river. He had always a hope that he might run up against the Vicomte de la Rocheterie some day. Nothing, however, had been heard of him since the advent of a very polite note, written before he left England, thanking Mme de Courtomer for her hospitality.

So the strange, novelty-ridden months slipped past, till the autumn evening when Laurent found himself attending the great reception given by the Duc de Saint-Séverin which Royalty itself was gracing, in the person of the Duchesse d'Angoulême. Moreover, it was an open secret that the King himself would honour the assembly with a short visit if his gout permitted. M. de Courtomer had gone expecting to be bored (for he understood that there was to be no dancing) and thinking that, after all, Maman, nursing a cold at home, had perhaps the best of it. But he was not bored after the first half-hour or so.

The tremendous formalities of the Tuileries were not going to be observed in the Hôtel de Saint-Séverin. Though the Duchesse d'Angoulême, stiff and well-meaning as ever, was holding her court for the ladies in a separate room, her Royal uncle, when he came, was merely going to make a tour of the great salon, speaking to a few people here and there; and this in itself was considered extremely gracious of him, seeing how helpless his gout rendered him. In this vast apartment then, dazzlingly lit, yet only half filled by its hundreds of guests, the greater part of whom were men, Laurent talked to his acquaintances and awaited the entry of his sovereign. All at once the buzz of conversation was entirely stilled, and the young man, turning, saw that the doors at the other side of the room were open.

On the threshold stood that short, stout, but imposing figure of a King, the pale blue ribbon of the Saint-Esprit across his breast, his gouty legs encased in red velvet gaiters, wearing powder in his grey hair, which was still dressed in the fashion of his youth, with a curl behind each ear and a short queue. . . . Bourbon all over, from the prominent light blue eyes, the aquiline nose, the disdainful mouth, to the heavy double chin . . . the prince who through years of exile and privation had never abated a jot of his pretensions, but had waited for the day of their recognition till the day had come.

He advanced, walking with difficulty, but gracious. A little behind him could be seen the unpatrician head of his nephew, the Duc de Berry, and behind him again that of the King's favourite, the Comte de Blacas, tall, cold, dignified, and fair. And Louis XVIII had gone but a few steps along the bowing ranks of gentlemen before he beckoned to Blacas, and leant on his arm, for the effort of walking was great. Now and then he stopped and addressed a few words to one or another, on whom every eye was instantly fixed. At first the scene was amusing to Laurent, quite pleasantly free from the apprehension that any Royal conversation would come his way; then he became less interested.

"Who are those officers the King is coming to next?" he enquired of his companion.

"Vendeans or Bretons, most probably," replied the acquaintance. "He means to show them some favour, no doubt, Vendée having ruined herself for the Bourbons, and words being cheaper than pensions."

But Laurent did not hear this cynical comment. Who—who was that officer the King was addressing now—a tall, slim figure in dark green? The figure's back was towards Laurent, but he would know that hair in a thousand, even though it were no longer gathered into a ribbon, but cut short like everyone else's! Ridiculously excited, he began to try to work himself a little nearer through the press immediately about him, and, obtaining a new angle of vision, saw the officer's face. It was—it was! and he was looking down at Royalty with just that quiet composure, that complete absence of self-consciousness which seemed his native gift. The King, on the other hand, seemed to be half-playfully scolding him.

At last, after shaking his head at L'Oiseleur with a smile, he passed on, and Laurent saw M. de la Rocheterie, when he raised himself from his bow, say something over his shoulder to one of his companions. M. de Courtomer began hastily to extricate himself entirely from the deeply interested throng in which he was embedded, but by the time he reached the spot where L'Oiseleur had stood, his quarry had disappeared.

Half an hour later, however, he came on Aymar de la Rocheterie again, quite unexpectedly, in a smaller and only half-populated room. At one end was a sort of alcove with a swinging lamp, and here he was standing talking to a beautiful woman in green and silver, dark and tall and animated, who was making much play with a fan. Laurent could hardly go and interrupt; but he reflected that if he waited he might have a chance of catching L'Oiseleur's attention, or of following him. And as, with this object, he remained near the door, he overheard a conversation.

"Monsieur du Tremblay," said a woman's voice, "you know him—M. de la Rocheterie, I mean—you are almost a neighbour; do tell us whether that is a case for congratulation?"

Laurent turned at once to see who the man who knew L'Oiseleur might be, and recognized one of the officers from the group in the salon—the very one, he fancied, to whom he had seen La Rocheterie speak—a good-looking man of about five and forty. This gentleman now replied to the lady who had questioned him, "Oh, no, Madame; not to my knowledge—no, I should think certainly not."

"L'Oiseleur's heart is in his own keeping?"

"Either that, or—but I am not in his confidence—that of the cousin with whom he was brought up. But she is married to an old roué, though she does not live with him."

"Where does she live, then?"

"Like La Rocheterie, with his grandmother, at his château of Sessignes."

The lady opened her eyes wide, and a gentleman with her observed drily, "Très commode pour que le beau cousin la console!"

M. du Tremblay shook his head. "Nothing of the sort, I assure you. La Rocheterie has a very cold temperament; there has never been a breath of scandal. Moreover, the attachment is all hearsay."

"But it will add the last touch to L'Oiseleur's vogue," said the lady meditatively—"an unfortunate love affair!" And her companion observed, "One knows those 'cold temperaments.' Their owners sometimes do the most astonishing things."

M. du Tremblay smiled. "Not La Rocheterie, I think. The cousin, Mme de Villecresne, is, by the way, the heroine of a little story which may interest you. During the fighting last year, knowing that La Rocheterie was in great need of definite information as to whether there were or were not Imperialist troops in a certain little town—it was Chalais—she deliberately drove into it in her carriage with her maid and a trunk or two, as though she were travelling, discovered that there were troops there—since they stopped her—and sent off the maid with the news to L'Oiseleur. The Imperialists were very angry when they found out, too late, how they had been outwitted."

"Ah, surely she was in love with him!" deduced the lady, her eyes fixed on the alcove, while "Rather a dangerous game to play," commented the male hearer. "Tell me," he went on, "do you consider that La Rocheterie deserves the military reputation he has acquired?"

"Certainly," replied M. du Tremblay. "He's a fine leader, with just that dash of recklessness in his caution—or of caution in his recklessness—which is so disconcerting to an enemy. It is a pity that his talents have not had wider scope."

Laurent, who had been listening avidly, felt very kindly towards this generous appreciator. The lady, still pensive over the possible love affair, asked where the roué husband lived, to which M. du Tremblay replied that when last he had heard of him he was in England at Bath.

Bath! Illumination broke upon M. de Courtomer; he almost betrayed that he was listening. But at that moment La Rocheterie caught sight of him. His face lighted up, he said a word to his fair companion, and came quickly towards Laurent, holding out his hand.

"My dear Comte, how delightful! I had a hope that I might meet you here. Come and let me present you to Mme de Morsan."

To tell truth, Laurent would much have preferred him without the lady, who was so resplendent, though in perfectly good taste, that she rather alarmed him. But in a moment he was bending before her, a few commonplaces passed, and then, to his disappointment, he was alone with her, for the Vicomte Mathieu de Montmorency, the Duchesse d'Angoulême's chevalier d'honneur, suddenly appeared and signified that the Princess wished to speak to the Vicomte de la Rocheterie, and L'Oiseleur, with a tiny shrug of his shoulders, was obliged to go.

"What it is to be famous!" said Mme de Morsan, letting her fine eyes roam over his substitute. "Shall we sit down, Monsieur de Courtomer, and await my cousin's return?"

They sat. So she was a cousin, too!

"Ce cher Aymar," resumed Mme de Morsan, "he really has no liking for being a lion. And one would fancy that what he has done in Paris would sensibly cloud the sun of Royal favour. On the contrary, here is Her Royal Highness sending for him. But possibly, with her detestation of all things revolutionary, that is precisely why."

Laurent asked what he had done.

"You did not hear? They were talking of nothing else in the great salon a little while ago. Yesterday he refused the Legion of Honour, which the King wanted to give him in addition to his Cross of St. Louis, and this evening he stuck to his refusal—very respectfully, of course—to the King's face."

"I saw the conversation," said Laurent, "though I could not hear it. His Majesty did not seem displeased."

"No, oddly enough, he was not. And, after all, it is Napoleon's decoration, even if he chooses to bestow it. He scolded M. de la Rocheterie . . . but what more flattering than a Royal scolding? It is enough to make Aymar the rage in Court circles, much more than his military exploits. But, as I said, he has small taste for that sort of thing."

"M. de la Rocheterie refused the Legion of Honour because of its associations, then?"

"I suppose so. He has the strangest ideas! His parents were both guillotined, one must remember, and so—" Mme de Morsan shrugged her shoulders. "Did I understand, Monsieur, that you had met in England?"

Laurent told her how.

"He jumped in?—Just like Aymar! For all that quiet tenacity of his he adores taking risks. . . You know, Comte," she went on after a moment, "the risk he took when he openly defied the Emperor in 1813 was out of all reason—one young man alone against all the military authorities of the district. You have heard about that—no? They were trying to arrest him at last because of his refusal to enter the Emperor's guard of honour. He was surprised at Sessignes—his home—and rather than be taken, which would have meant either submission to Napoleon's wishes or a fortress . . . for him, of course, a fortress . . . he leapt straight out of the window before their eyes, swam the river, and took to the woods. He had outlawed himself; still more so when he sent a letter to the sous-prefet, saying briefly, 'Napoleon wishes me to fight; very well, I will fight!' He had no followers at all when he sent that challenge. . . . But you will think that I can talk of no other man! Let us speak of someone else—yourself, for instance, Monsieur de Courtomer!"

They talked small talk. Then, to Laurent's relief, an elderly man came and bore off Mme de Morsan, who went rather reluctantly, but not, Laurent was aware, because she was leaving him. But, since it was just possible that L'Oiseleur would return thither, the young man waited in the alcove. And before very long, to his great pleasure, he saw him making his way through the room again.

"I am lucky to find you still here, Monsieur de Courtomer," he remarked with a little smile, sitting down by him. "I was afraid that you might be gone." On the disappearance of Mme de Morsan he bestowed not even an enquiry.

"Your cousin," Laurent informed him, "was carried off a little while ago."

"Mme de Morsan is not my cousin," replied M. de la Rocheterie a trifle curtly. "She is the widow of a nephew of my grandmother's, Edouard de Morsan, a rather distinguished scholar in his day.—Well, Comte, did you catch any more salmon or pull any more rash persons out of the river before you left England? And how is Madame votre mère, and your venerable aunts?"

"I hope you mean to satisfy yourself personally on that score," replied Laurent. "They will all be delighted to see you, particularly my mother."

"She is not here, then? I hope indeed to give myself the pleasure of calling on them. I should have done so already, but somehow a provincial always finds so much business to transact on his rare visits to Paris, and mine have been very rare of late."

Provincial indeed! Where was there any trace of that? Too shy to refer to the affair of the Legion of Honour, or even to ask him about his recent interview with the Dauphine, Laurent looked at the Cross of St. Louis over La Rocheterie's heart, where previously he had only seen the ribbon—the white cross sown with fleur-de-lys, where on a crimson ground the royal saint held in one hand a crown of laurels, in the other the crown of thorns and the nails. How strikingly his uniform with its high collar and the black stock inside set off his clear, pale face, his lithe figure, and the hair like September bracken. Laurent did not wonder that his "cousin" frankly admired him. Did he admire her? From the way in which he had repudiated their relationship, apparently not.

L'Oiseleur noticed his gaze. "I'm not the wild Chouan any more, you see," he said, smiling and running his hand over his head. "But I should not be surprised if, when you come and visit me in the spring—as I hope I may persuade you to do—I am not condemned to wearing those long locks again."

"Why, you do not anticipate fighting again, surely?"

"No, no; and if there were I could hardly grow them to order in a day or two. But my grandmother, who is very much ancien régime, greatly prefers the queue to which she was accustomed—in my father, for instance. So when I return, as I shortly shall, to my rustic solitudes, I may have to let my hair grow again to please her. But I drew the line at showing myself in Paris in times of peace like that!"

"Some men with his reputation would cling to the singularity," thought Laurent; "I was sure he hated display."

"Your men are disbanded now, I suppose?" he enquired.

"Yes, the Eperviers exist no longer.—Did I tell you that they called themselves the 'Hawks'—I suppose because of the name of 'Fowler' that came to me with the jartier. But I am a peaceful country gentleman now, and keep pigeons, not hawks."

"But you have your swan—or swans perhaps?" observed Laurent, thinking of his crest.

L'Oiseleur looked surprised for a moment; then he smiled. "Ah, I see. Yes, we bear seven on the coat. That is where the name of Sessignes comes from—Sept-Cygnes. There are wild ones in the river sometimes. But I hope you will see them for yourself."

Why, when he spoke of his home, did his face seem, ever so little, to cloud? It struck Laurent that his good spirits, though evidently unassumed, did not go very deep. Perhaps he had terrible memories from childhood? He stole a glance at his profile—strangely sensitive, for all its vigour and resolution. But, puzzling or no, he was more attractive than ever.

Peste! here was that Mme de Morsan back again, on the arm of her cavalier, and her voice saying, "My dear Aymar, I want to hear everything Her Royal Highness said to you!" and, though they both begged him to remain, Laurent excused himself. He should see M. de la Rocheterie later at the Hotel de Courtomer.

About a quarter of an hour later he drifted past the room again on his way out. It was empty now, so his glance, reminiscently, went clear to the other end. But it was not quite empty, for the couple were there still, standing under the lamp. And, thought M. de Courtomer with all the worldly experience of four-and-twenty, as Mme de Morsan's languorous expression and half-mocking smile smote themselves into his perceptions, "if ever a woman was set on a man, she is on him!" But he hesitated to add that the reverse was true, for L'Oiseleur was undisguisedly frowning at her with that peculiarly straight gaze he had when he was angry—as witnessed by Laurent in his own dining-room across the Channel. Unless, of course, it was a lovers' quarrel. They made, indeed, a most striking pair—but somehow he did not want . . . How ridiculous for him to assume a critical attitude to the Vicomte de la Rocheterie's affaires de coeur . . . if he had any.

(2)

L'Oiseleur did pay his call at the Hôtel de Courtomer, but, enormously to Laurent's disappointment, it was when he himself happened to be out. Mme de Courtomer reported that he had said he was on his way back to Brittany in a day or two, so Laurent concluded that the last picture he would have of him would be of his standing with the lady in green and silver under the filigree lamp, looking so deeply annoyed.

But two days later, as he chanced to walk down the Tuileries garden, he caught sight, amid a tolerable crowd, of two people in front of him who gave him a start. He saw only their backs; but one undoubtedly was L'Oiseleur's. Yet he had on his arm a lady who was obviously not Mme de Morsan. For one thing, she was not so tall—she only came up to her escort's shoulder; for another, from below her bonnet escaped a tendril of bright bronze; and for a third, Aymar de la Rocheterie's own head was bent down towards her in a way it had shown no sign of doing to Mme de Morsan. They were obviously talking very intimately—so intimately that the self-denying Laurent slackened his faster pace lest he should overtake them; and they were soon lost in the crowd.

Was that the real cousin, the heroine of the exploit at Chalais, the member of his family who shared his Northern blood—the lady whose unhappy marriage to a roué might very well have been the cause of his visit to England, the lady who had . . . perhaps . . . the charge of his heart?

This question Laurent asked of the unresponsive facade of the Tuileries as he strong-mindedly returned towards it. For the answer to it he would have to wait now till the spring . . . and the spring would be a deuced long time in coming.

(3)

But it was not. The winter—gay despite almost universal discontent—passed very swiftly in Paris. Laurent went out a great deal, and already the Aunts said that it was time he should think of marrying, particularly as his English grandfather, who died in the autumn, had left him nearly all his money. His mother laughed and replied, "Wait till he sees a lady he likes," to which Tante Clotilde responded: "Virginia, that is not the way things are done in France! It is your—our—duty to find a suitable match." And Mme de Courtomer promised that she would try.

Yet had she really made any matrimonial plans for her son they could hardly have been followed up that spring. The bombshell of Napoleon's landing at Cannes on March 1st would have cast them into as much confusion as it did the whole organization of the newly established regime. But Laurent's mind at least was not troubled by divided counsels; he was off to join the Royalists of the west. Nothing could stop him from seizing this unexpected chance of proving his loyalty, and Mesdames Tantes, at all events, were not likely to do anything in that direction. They gave him benedictions and scapulars. His mother tried not to show her heart. The leader of all others whom he longed to join was, of course, L'Oiseleur in Brittany—he imagined that he would spring at once to arms—but, not having heard anything of him since the autumn, and not knowing whether he himself would prove a welcome recruit, he abandoned the idea.

Moreover, directly it became known that the Duc de Bourbon was being sent to the Loire, it seemed plain to Laurent and all his like-minded friends that Vendée, and not Brittany, would prove the centre of resistance; and so, having had the good fortune to procure a personal introduction to the Vendean general, Comte Charles d'Autichamp, who held the military command at Angers, he and a few others set off thither, full of enthusiasm to lay their swords, through him, at the feet of the Duc d'Enghien's father.

CHAPTER III - IN THE DUST

"La blessure intime et profonde qui assombrit une Ame noble,

qui la fait se redresser pleine d'orgueil et de haine . . ."

RENE BOYLESVE, Mademoiselle Cloque.

"Yea, twofold hosts of torment hast thou there,

The stain to think on, and the pain to bear."

Oedipus Rex (Gilbert Murray's translation).

"I would not hear your enemy say so,

Nor shall you do my ear that violence

To make it truster of your own report

Against yourself . . ."

Hamlet, Act. 1, Sc. 2.

(1)

On Monday, the first of May, 1815, a fresh, cloudless afternoon, a young man in the Vendean uniform, holding by the bridle a sorrel horse, stood at the fork of a road not far from Locmélar in Brittany, and peered up at a rough and almost illegible signpost. The young man was Laurent de Courtomer, who, until about half an hour ago, had been in possession of a happiness as unclouded as this May sunshine—and who was still enjoying himself.

The misunderstandings and delays in Vendée, the fiasco of the Duc de Bourbon's short sojourn in the west, his precipitate departure, first from Angers and then from Beaupréau, because some of the leaders, M. d'Autichamp himself chief among them, thought the time not ripe for a rising, and were nervous for the safety of the old man's princely person—all this had very much irked M. d'Autichamp's aide-de-camp, Comte Laurent de Courtomer. And towards the end of April that aide-de-camp became so restive that his general had to find him some employment. He gave him, therefore, a despatch to carry to North Brittany, to M. de Pontbriand and the rest of the Chouan leaders there, not disguising his doubt whether Laurent would ever succeed in reaching them, nor his conviction that he would fail to return across the Loire. The young man was authorized, in that case, to join one of the Breton chiefs if he pleased; "not," added M. d'Autichamp, "but that I should prefer to have you back again with me, in the event of our moving later on."

Laurent went off in high feather. Moreover, he succeeded in reaching his destination, delivered his despatches, which did no more than set forth a general desire on the part of the Vendean chiefs for such cooperation as was possible with their comrades on the right bank of the Loire, and was complimented on the address he had displayed. Elated by his good fortune, and seeing that nothing but the merest skirmishes had as yet taken place between the Royalists and the Imperialists, and that he was now unencumbered with despatches, he determined to return by a different and rather less secure route—through the Penescouët district in fact, though he was warned against it. For that was L'Oiseleur's country, and it might so well be that he should come up against him somehow—the figure out of a fairy tale, with the hawk and the mistletoe—in his real surroundings. If he got only a glimpse of him it was well worth the risk . . . if there were extra risk, which he did not believe when he set out.

However, he thought rather differently about that now, and quite differently about his chance of meeting L'Oiseleur. For, having ridden all morning happily and expectantly through the deep Breton lanes, he came at noon to a solitary little inn which had been recommended to him. It was kept by a very lame young man. His face had clouded over at Laurent's enquiry as to L'Oiseleur's possible whereabouts.

"You have not heard, then, Monsieur? Alas, L'Oiseleur met with a great disaster last week at the Pont-aux-Rochers, over Plumauden way. Three days ago it was—last Friday morning. His men were ambushed by the Blues, and nearly all captured or killed. It is terrible . . . he who had so often entrapped them."

"Good God!" said Laurent, staring at him. It was the very last piece of news for which he had been prepared.

"And L'Oiseleur himself?" he asked, his heart beating fast.

"Escaped, Monsieur, it is believed. He has the jartier, you know. But he can have few men left now, and it is not known where he is. I wish I could join him; I should have done so long ago but for this." He pointed to his shrunken leg.

It was all the news he could give. Laurent rode very soberly away. He had only been thinking of success for his friend—for sometimes he ventured privately so to call him. And this—at the very outset of the campaign! Still, if La Rocheterie himself had escaped, as was rumoured, that was chiefly what he cared about. If he could only be sure of that; for that he should meet him now was a thousand times more unlikely than before. He must be in hiding—pursued perhaps. . . And the desire to meet him, to share his danger, grew with every second that Laurent frowned at the signpost.

As it was impossible to read it he stooped at last to do what he had in reality dismounted for, take a stone out of the sorrel's shoe. He had just dislodged the obstacle when he heard a sound that made him raise himself sharply. Yes, not more than two hundred yards away, trotting up the sloping road on his left towards the signpost, was a patrol of Bonapartist cavalry—red and green hussars. And here he was, dismounted, in uniform, full in their view!

He did not long remain so, at least—he was in the saddle and dashing along the road in front of him as hard as he could go; and as he went he thought, "This has solved the problem of the choice of road, anyhow! What a fool I was . . . but it is rather good fun, all the same!" He could not see the hussars yet over his shoulder, but from the sounds and shouts they were certainly after him. However, he had a good horse, and though there was nothing to take from him now save his liberty, he was not going to make them a present of that if he could help it. And what if he were to make across country? The bank here was no more than an English hedgerow. He set the sorrel at it.

Laurent was staring up into the blue sky, and everything was going round. The sensation having been his once before he knew of course what had happened—a fall out hunting.

But why was someone kneeling on his chest and pinning his arms down? It was a curious way of succouring an accident in the hunting-field; he could not breathe.

"Damn you, get off me!" he said angrily and indistinctly in English.

"Tiens, c'est un Anglais!" exclaimed a surprised voice.

But Laurent was soon able to explain the falsity of this deduction. The hussars helped him up, disarmed and searched him, finding little. The officer said courteously, "You have a deep scratch on your forehead, Monsieur, taken, no doubt, from the hedge when your horse fell with you.—One of you tie it up, and then we must be getting on."

It appeared that no shot had been fired, no blade unsheathed. His horse had fallen at the leap, and then they had come and sat on him; thus ingloriously was Laurent de Courtomer made a prisoner. Even the blood which was now trickling rather copiously down his cheek had been drawn by nothing more lethal than a broken bough. He was a little savage, but there was no profit in ill-temper. His captors were quite pleasant; one of them tied up his forehead with his handkerchief, and then they mounted, fastened his bridle to one of theirs and trotted back the way they had come. It seemed that they were out scouting from a considerable distance, and knew little of happenings in this neighbourhood, beyond the bare fact that there had been a Royalist defeat there a few days ago. And so, said Laurent to himself, ends my dream of meeting with La Rocheterie. Seeing what it had brought about, he almost regretted having indulged it.

As evening drew on, they entered a village to water the horses. The officer went into the inn. M. de Courtomer was by now beginning to revolve the chances of escape, but his captors were pretty wary. It was best at least to appear resigned, so he sat most meekly on his slightly lamed steed between his guards at the village trough, speculating as to what the village was, and where, for he had lost his sense of direction. And, thus engaged, he found himself all at once observing the slow approach of a farm cart along the one street of the place—an ordinary and rather small cart drawn by an old white horse, but driven, oddly enough, by a soldier, and having another, with fixed bayonet, seated sideways on the edge. That there was something unusual about this conveyance was shown by the fact that everyone whom it passed in its progress over the cobbles was straight away smitten with immobility and remained staring after it. Laurent himself became curious to see what was in it.

As the cart came within range, the hussars at the horse-trough began to call out pleasantries to the grenadier driver: what was he taking to market; it was true he looked better suited to a farm than the army, and so on.

"You look like a performing circus!" retorted the grenadier. "We have a prisoner in here; that's what we've got." Yet he had his musket idly between his knees and a straw in his mouth.

"We've got one, too!" replied the hussars. Then the cart came abreast. On its tailboard, let down nearly level at the back, was visible an inert head and shoulders. And the sun of the Mayday evening shone on hair that Laurent knew, hair that fell back from a face like death—like tragic death . . . Aymar de la Rocheterie's.

Laurent gave a sharp exclamation, and the sorrel responded to the half-automatic pressure of his knees. A hussar at once seized his arm, and a pistol was pressed into his ear, with an enquiry as to whether he wished to join "that one" in the cart with a bullet in his head? He did not answer; he was too stunned. But he made no further movement.

The cart rumbled slowly past with its burden. L'Oiseleur was plainly quite unconscious, if not dead; his head rolled slightly with the comfortless motion of the conveyance. On the mortal pallor of his face there showed up a faint smear or two of blood, and the white dust of the country road had drifted into his loosened hair, together with some bits of the straw on which he had been laid. A dark green uniform coat similar to that in which Laurent had last seen him was flung over him, but his shirt had obviously been removed, and one shoulder at least was swathed round with a bloody wrapping. And the sunlight showed how deeply stained was the coat also.

Before Laurent had recovered from his stupefaction the cart had passed. All the hussars turned in their saddles and looked after it, oddly silent, except one irrepressible spirit who shouted out an enquiry as to why they were going like a funeral.

"To avoid one, son of an idiot!" called back the man with the musket. "We happen to want this parishioner alive. It's a damned nuisance, going at this pace, but if we hurry—" He made an expressive gesture.

"Where are you taking him to?"

But either the soldier did not hear, or did not answer, because the hussar officer came at that moment out of the inn shouting an order. And hastily, with much jingling of accoutrements, the patrol began to move off up the sunny street in the opposite direction, Laurent in the midst.

He was feeling very dismal. Rumour was incorrect, and L'Oiseleur had paid in person for his defeat—and paid heavily. He had fallen with his men after all . . . no, hardly, because the affair at the bridge was three days old, and the blood on him was fresh. He must have been tracked down afterwards . . . horrible! But how strange that there was no escort with the cart—for though L'Oiseleur himself was only too obviously in no condition to escape from it, there must always be the risk of a rescue so long as any of those devoted followers of his were at large. Or did the absence of an adequate guard signify that the whole of his remaining force had since been wiped out—and was that the meaning of the look, almost of horror, which had persisted even in unconsciousness? Laurent could not get that look out of his head, nor the way the cart had jolted. Surely, if they wanted him kept alive, that soldier might have held him in his arms; surely——

The young man gave an exclamation. Slow-witted dolt that he was! "I must speak to your officer at once!" he said to the hussar who had command of his reins.

But it took time, in that quickly trotting advance, before his demand could be complied with, and already when he proffered his suggestion it seemed absurd, seeing that by then the cart with its burden and he, who was not a free agent, were a mile or more apart. So the officer not unnaturally replied that it was out of the question to send him back now to bear the other prisoner company.

(2)

To a young man deeply conscious of how unwelcome it is to be made a captive it is not likely to occur that he may also be unwelcome to his captors. This fact was nevertheless made plain to Laurent next morning when the officer came into the barn where M. de Courtomer had spent the night with the patrol, and told him frankly that he was becoming a nuisance to them. They wished to return with all possible speed to headquarters, yet the sergeant reported that the strain taken by the prisoner's horse in its fall yesterday was much worse. The officer really wished, he avowed, that he had bestowed his captive in the cart with the other; he proposed now, instead of dragging him further with them on his lame beast, to hand him over to the care of the garrison at Arbelles, which was still within a few hours' ride.

Laurent replied indifferently that he must do as he thought best. He had passed a haunted night; had La Rocheterie lived to see this day break? He doubted it.

The crux came over the question of parole, which was required of him because only one hussar could be spared to take him to Arbelles; and in the end Laurent agreed to give it until he was in the hands of his new gaolers; and so, fettered by his word, he set out in a corporal's charge. But he was feeling too much depressed this morning to care to think of a dash for freedom. He had had his wish: he had seen L'Oiseleur, and doubted if he should see him more in this life. And about midday, riding slowly because of the sorrel's condition, he and the corporal came in sight of their destination, the château of Arbelles, a really fine and extensive Renaissance building, capable of containing, as it then did, a considerable number of troops, though plainly not designed for any warlike end. It belonged, Laurent subsequently discovered, to a Royalist gentleman absent in Paris, and during his progress up the avenue the prisoner wondered how long, under military occupation, it would retain its general air of well-kept luxury, almost that of a big English country house.

In the imposing hall, with its great oriel window and vast hearth, he was delivered over to a tall major of the line of a lifeless and, as Laurent privately thought, stupid visage. The hussar made his report and handed over Laurent's papers. The officer was looking at them in a slow, undecided way, when a quick step was heard and he turned round and saluted a big, burly, hard-faced man in the green and yellow of the dragoons—a man with a choleric eye and close-cut grizzled side-whiskers coming to the level of the cheek-bone. To him Laurent was presented as a prisoner on parole just sent in.

"But I take back my parole, sir, now that I am in your hands," put in the captive quickly.

The dragoon colonel gave a mirthless smile. "As you please, Monsieur"—he looked at the papers. "Lieutenant le Comte de Courtomer, is it not? You have a report, corporal?"

The corporal made it, and the Colonel proceeded—quite civilly—to question his prisoner. But the fact that Laurent, when captured, had been coming from the north, as he readily acknowledged, appeared to annoy the commander of Arbelles, whose preferences seemed to be for a prisoner from the south-west. Could not M. le Comte give him any inkling of what was going forward in the Plesguen district? Laurent intimated that he was totally unable to do so, not having been there; nor, he added coldly, did he see that he was called upon to present such information to an enemy if he had had it. And the Colonel did not press the point; he muttered something cryptic to the impassive Major about having patience and waiting a little longer. After which, looking at the handkerchief round Laurent's brow, he observed almost solicitously, "You are wounded, I see, Monsieur le Comte. You must have that attended to. Where is M. Perrelet?"

A young, loose-limbed lieutenant of chasseurs à cheval standing by said, with a significant lift of the eyebrows, "Still in that room, sir."

"Ah," said his superior. "Well, I hope he is in it to some purpose. I think that this officer then, had best go up there to M. Perrelet, to have his hurt dressed, and meanwhile we can consider where to lodge him.—We are rather full for the next few days; you must excuse us, Monsieur le Comte."

"I am your prisoner," responded Laurent rather stiffly, disliking the effect which his title appeared to be making on this certainly not aristocratic foe.

"Rigault," said the latter to the young officer who had spoken, "take a couple of men and conduct M. de Courtomer upstairs. I am to understand that you definitely withdraw your parole now, Monsieur?"

"Definitely, Monsieur le Colonel."

But when the chasseur returned with two soldiers the Colonel announced that he had changed his mind, and would go with the prisoner himself, as he wished to speak to the doctor.

They mounted the noble staircase together. At the top they met an orderly, of whom the Colonel asked if M. Perrelet were along there, indicating a certain passage. The man replied that the surgeon had just left the room for a moment, but would soon return; on which his commanding officer told him to inform him that there was a captured Royalist officer there awaiting his services. Then, followed by the two soldiers, he went down the passage with his prisoner, talking as he went.

"I must apologize, Monsieur de Courtomer, for asking you to see the doctor in this particular room, but he is very much taken up with a wounded prisoner who occupies it, and he has his dressings and so forth there. But of course I shall have you put elsewhere when he has done what is necessary for you."

"Oh," said Laurent cheerfully, "I am not averse to company, sir, if the prisoner in question is not too ill for it."

The Colonel shrugged his shoulders. "It is not on his account that I would not quarter you there, though he is very ill, but on quite another—that on which I really feel apologies are due to you for being required to spend even a few minutes in his society." He broke off as he stopped at a door on his right hand, and beckoned to the soldiers. "One of you must stand sentry here while this officer is within, and the door must be locked, now. . . . No," he resumed to Laurent, his hand on the door knob, "I should not dream of leaving you with this man, officer of your own side though he is, for I am sorry to say he has just turned traitor—betrayed his own men into an ambush four days ago, and was himself shot yesterday by those that were left." And seeing Laurent's look of incredulity and aversion, he added, "Yes, he was found tied up to a tree, all but dead, outside his own headquarters. The doctor, at my request, has been doing his best for him since yesterday evening, but it seems doubtful if he will live . . . fortunately for himself, perhaps."

He turned the handle of the unlocked door and motioned the now reluctant Laurent in. "With apologies!" he said once more.

The door shut again, the key turning. And on its inner side Laurent de Courtomer, appalled, stood staring . . . staring . . . fighting with all his mind against the evidence of his eyes. . . .

(3)

The bronze hair was scattered on the pillow. Except for brows and lashes the only trace of colour in the upturned face that it surrounded was the blue stain beneath the shut eyes, for the shut lips had none. But the blood and dust which had disfigured that visage yesterday were gone; it was now so utterly bloodless that it had become mere sculpture, too fine-drawn for life—a little severe, almost disdainful. Lying there so straight and motionless and low, Aymar de la Rocheterie, in the hands of his enemies, had the aspect of a dead Crusader.

And it was of him that vile thing had just been said, the other side of the door!

Laurent stood petrified. He felt himself guilty, polluted, a party to that terrible lie. His instant impulse was to cry to the still figure, "Forgive me for having even heard it—for not having had time to deny it for you . . . this idea of a madman! You betray your men!" Then the knowledge swamped him like a flood to what deaf ears he would cry. L'Oiseleur was . . . surely . . . dying.

Oh, why had he not tried sooner to go with him yesterday? Now it was too late. There was no visible lift of breathing under the bedclothes, smoothly disposed as they were up to the very chin. And, pierced with an even keener pain than yesterday's, Laurent went nearer to the bed, drawn as by a magnet to something he was half afraid to approach, remembering Devonshire and the bright salmon river, the stranger who had so lightly risked his life for him, who had shown him the amulet—the useless amulet—the brilliant friend he had reëncountered in Paris, the lover he had guessed at in the Tuileries garden. Was this to be the end of all that charm and vigour and young renown?

And at that moment, as if to answer him . . . but in what sense? . . . Aymar de la Rocheterie opened his eyes and looked at him.

Laurent suffered a double shock, since, apart from their unmistakable warm red-brown colour, they did not seem to be L'Oiseleur's eyes at all. They were immensely large and even lustrous, but they had no life in them, nor, as Laurent almost instantly realized, any power of recognition worth the name. They might have seen something, but it certainly was not he. For the space of ten heart-beats or so they remained open; then the lashes fell again on to the blue circles and so stayed. There was no other movement.

Thank God, he was still alive then. But why, in this extremity, had he been left alone? The Colonel had said that they were doing their best to save him. There seemed a quantity of objects to that end on the table by the bed; the grey-panelled, well-furnished room with its two windows—a sitting-room, evidently—was very pleasant; there was a little fire burning; the bed itself, even if narrow, had fine linen sheets and an embroidered counterpane. But for all that it was patent that he who lay in it lay very near the brink of a swifter river than the Dart. That indeed Laurent had guessed and feared yesterday; but the other dark flood lapping at him—the atrocious calumny—how was that to be stayed? Yet, if Aymar de la Rocheterie were dying, so long as he had a tongue in his head he should not die sullied by so horrible a charge.

And, with a rapidly beating heart, he found himself away from the bedside staring through the window. How dared they say such a thing? As he asked himself the question the key turned in the lock. A sharp voice outside said rapidly, "Sentry? nonsense! I won't have one here, tell the Colonel!—Another prisoner waiting for me? Yes, I know." And the speaker entered, a short, stout, more than middle-aged man in civilian attire, with a pair of rather fierce eyes under shaggy grizzled brows. He threw a quick glance at Laurent, said, "In a moment!" and, crossing to the bed, bent over its occupant and slipped his hand under the bedclothes.

He was there a full minute; then he came away compressing his lips and frowning. "Now, Monsieur, I am at your service. It is your head, I see. Sit down, please. A cut? Anything else?"

Laurent did not sit down. "For God's sake, Monsieur le Docteur, tell me what is the meaning of that?" And he made a gesture towards the bed.

"Heart failure and collapse from excessive loss of blood is the meaning of that, Monsieur," replied the doctor rather curtly. "If you will kindly sit down and let me examine your head—"

"There's nothing there but a scratch," returned the young man, still uncomplying. "And that is not exactly what I meant. It's this dreadful story—they must all be lunatics in this place to think such a thing of him!"

The surgeon looked at him keenly. "You know who he is, then?"

"I do; but surely the Bonapartists do not—that is their only excuse. L'Oiseleur, the Vicomte de la Rocheterie, betray his own men! It's . . . it's grotesque!"

"You speak very confidently, Monsieur. But they do know quite well who he is, and I am afraid the story is only too true."

At that Monsieur de Courtomer, with almost a gesture of desperation, took the handkerchief off his head and sat down in the chair. "That is rank lunacy," he observed. "It was bad enough to come across him being brought here in this state—as I did yesterday—but to hear this slander in addition is like being in a nightmare. Even if I did not know him personally——"

The surgeon's hands, which were pushing the hair away from the scratch, stopped. "Ah, you know him personally," he said quickly. "You are a friend of his, then?"

Laurent's eyes turned towards the effigy in the bed. "I should be proud indeed if I could claim that distinction. An acquaintance would, I am afraid, be nearer the mark."

"And a champion," supplied the doctor.

"L'Oiseleur needs no champion," retorted the young man.

The hand fell somewhat weightily on his shoulder. "Indeed he does, Monsieur," returned its owner, and his voice was no longer sharp. "I assure you he stands in need of one rather badly just now. . . . And, for the moment, in need still more of something else."

Then he took his hand away, dropping all pretence of examining the hurt. His round face was very grave, and the fierceness had quite gone out of his little eyes. He looked at Laurent.

And Laurent stared back at him. "Something else," he repeated stupidly after an instant; and then, abruptly, "Tell me, is he going to live?"

"I don't know," answered M. Perrelet. The three words were eloquent. After a second or two he added, "He cannot hear; you need not be afraid," and went on, "I have only kept him alive so far by unremitting care and the constant use of stimulants. I have hardly left him for five minutes since he came. I shall sit up with him again to-night, but even if I succeed in pulling him through till to-morrow, I cannot go on doing that, for I'm an old man, with my work to do in the day . . ." He broke off and looked at Laurent again.

A certain dismayed realization of whither this was tending came over M. de Courtomer. "But, good Heavens, I could not take your place! No one in the world knows less of medicine, less of nursing, than I do. I could not undertake the responsibility!"

"Then you are undertaking a heavier," responded the surgeon meaningly. "Without the most incessant care these next few days, that young man will just flicker out. It's a question whether he doesn't do it in any case."

"But surely you could get someone——"

"Yes, some stupid orderly into whose head I could perhaps drum something which he would do unwillingly and with contempt in his heart, because it is not only for an enemy—that he could stomach—but for a renegade. For this story, true or no, is known to every soul in the garrison." And, as Laurent gave an exclamation, he went on, "The result of such 'nursing' would inevitably be that he would slip through my fingers. And I cannot bring in a woman from the village; the Colonel would not hear of it, and indeed it would not be much better. I'm no sentimentalist, Monsieur, but, guilty or innocent, what that unfortunate young man needs now as he never needed it, probably, in his life before, is just what Providence seems to have sent him—a friend! If it is a friend who still believes in him, so much the better. The only friend he does not want is one who, having seen his necessity, will pass him by on the other side."

How could he hesitate! He had wanted to meet L'Oiseleur, owed his capture very likely to the indulgence of that desire, and was needing to be urged to tend him now that he had thus tragically encountered him! Laurent put out his hand, his eyes smarting rather uncomfortably.

"I'll do it. I'll do anything you want. But I shall probably kill him," he added miserably.

He who claimed to be no sentimentalist patted him on the shoulder.

"No, you will not. And I shall be here myself until to-morrow. Now I will just wash that scratch of yours and put some more plaster on it, and then I will make them bring a bed for you in here." He worked quickly and deftly till Laurent's forehead was adorned with an impressive star. "There, that will do for the present. I must get something down his throat now—not very easy, but imperatively necessary every hour or so. You had better watch me."

And Laurent watched, nervously realizing what he, so totally inexperienced, was about to undertake.

"He is unconscious, you say," he whispered, looking at the paper-white face on the surgeon's arm. "But he opened his eyes and looked at me a little before you came in."

M. Perrelet laid the inert head with its dulled and tangled locks very gently back on the pillow. "He is quite unconscious at this moment. From time to time he comes to the surface, as it were. If he is going to live he will do that oftener, until he stays there altogether." He slipped his hand under the bedclothes again. "Yes, the pulse, fast as it is, seems a trifle stronger. With your help, Monsieur, I have hopes . . . I have great hopes. There is evidently much natural vitality." And he left the bedside, adding briskly, "I will just run down and tell Colonel Guitton that you have volunteered your services."

"I should like to see the Colonel myself as soon as possible," observed Laurent. "I must disabuse his mind at once of this preposterous idea about M. de la Rocheterie."

"I am afraid that you will not find it very easy to do that, Monsieur," said the doctor, shaking his head. "Facts stand in the way."

"Facts!" ejaculated Laurent with illimitable scorn.

"There was undoubtedly treachery at Pont-aux-Rochers. Colonel Richard, commanding at Saint-Goazec, had definite information sent him that L'Oiseleur's men would pass the bridge at a certain hour last Friday; he acted on the information, which purported to come from L'Oiseleur himself, ambushed the unprepared Chouans, and smashed them up."

"Well," said Laurent with a little grimace, "information may have been sent to this Colonel Richard, but that it should have been sent by La Rocheterie himself, by their own commander, by L'Oiseleur, who for more than a year before the Restoration kept the Imperialists at bay single-handed is, as I said before, grotesque!"

M. Perrelet shrugged his shoulders. "I assure you I should prefer to think so, too. But, in that case, why did his men shoot him?"

"That idea is equally grotesque, Monsieur le Docteur. They would be incapable of such a thing. They did not shoot him, that's all.—What are his wounds, by the way? Very serious, I suppose?"

"No, not in themselves, except that he has a bullet lodged in his left shoulder which I rather dislike because I do not know how, in this state of exhaustion, he is ever going to stand the extraction. He has also had a ball through the right side, a little above the hipbone, which, by some miracle, has touched nothing vital. And there is a painful but superficial glancing wound across the chest.—But what did the mischief was the haemorrhage; tied as he was in an upright position to that tree, and abandoned there for goodness knows how long . . . and he evidently struggled hard to get free . . . you can imagine——"

Laurent's face had slowly blanched as he stared at him.

"It is really true—about that tree!"

"I do not see what object the contingent who found him could have in making up such a story. And when he was brought in he had a cut end of rope dangling from either wrist. I saw them with my own eyes—and the state of his wrists, too!"

Laurent could feel now that he had turned pale. Could so unspeakable a thing have been the prelude to that forlorn journey in the cart!

"Yes, you see, Monsieur," said the doctor rather sadly, "it's pretty conclusive."

"Ah, not a bit!" retorted Laurent, recovering himself. "All it proves is that an attempt was made to murder him. To put the attempt down to his own men is the insanest of conjectures. He may have been captured by some band of marauders, or by Fédérés from the nearest town—or even by the Imperialists themselves . . . not these of Arbelles, but some other force. Yes, how can you disprove that it was the Imperialists?"

"Well, for one thing," replied M. Perrelet drily, "because I imagine that regulars would have made a more thorough job of it. But I am quite open to conviction, for I don't mind telling you that—unsentimental old curmudgeon though I am—I took a sort of fancy to the unhappy young man from the moment I saw him yesterday. . . And now I will go and see the Colonel. You are sure that you do not repent?"

"I am alarmed," replied Laurent with much truth, "but certainly I do not repent.—By the way," he added, as the doctor was at the door, "does M. de la Rocheterie himself know of the existence of this slander?"

M. Perrelet raised his eyebrows. "It all depends on what happened in the wood—the Bois des Fauvettes, I believe it is called. If his men shot him, it was presumably on account of the imputation that they did so; therefore he must know of it."

"Well, I am confident that that did not happen in the wood," proclaimed Laurent. "But has he learnt of the calumny since? Does he even know where he is?"

"Almost certainly not," replied the doctor. "He has never been sufficiently conscious. So he cannot have learnt of the charge since, and if he is really quite ignorant of it—well, there's no need to tell him yet awhile . . . if ever," he added under his breath. Then he turned the useless handle of the door. "Peste! I forgot I was locked in on your account!"

When Laurent was once more alone he ventured over to the bed again, and stood looking down at it in a tempest of pity and horror and indignation. That was L'Oiseleur . . . in need of a friend! And Fate had chosen him for the part. Fate had been bringing them together all the time! Ah, now he could repay that leap into the river—repay it doubly, perhaps, not only by caring for La Rocheterie's hurt body, but also for his honour, which seemed to have suffered so desperate and inexplicable a wound. . . .

Yet how could he, a prisoner, discover of what disastrous occurrence in the Bois des Fauvettes L'Oiseleur had been a victim, till L'Oiseleur himself could tell him? And perhaps those pale lips would never speak again. His own mouth twitched. "You shall live!" he said. "You shall . . . you will!"

(4)

That night always seemed to Laurent like a bad dream, in which, however, he was only a spectator, not an actor. There was nothing he could do, beyond attending to the fire; indeed, M. Perrelet told him that he might as well go to sleep. But, though he lay down on the bed which had been brought in for him and placed at the other side of the room, he scarcely closed his eyes.

About dawn, seeing the surgeon, who had never left his patient's side, get up rather quickly and bend over him, he slipped off his bed and tiptoed across the room. But after a moment M. Perrelet lifted his head from L'Oiseleur's heart, and Laurent, prepared for the worst, could see that he looked relieved.

"Distinctly stronger," he murmured. "We shall do it yet. Give me that saucepan off the fire. I want some more hot bouillon and brandy."

His own face looked tired and haggard in the growing light, but there was no fatigue in his manner. And after the brandy, his head still lying in the crook of the doctor's arm, L'Oiseleur sighed, shut his lips tight, and moved that head a little with a faint suggestion of restlessness.

"Go round and turn the pillow over," commanded M. Perrelet in a low voice.

Secretly terrified, Laurent obeyed. He was persuaded that La Rocheterie would open his eyes just at that moment. But the dark lashes were down now as if they meant to stay there for ever.

"That will do," said M. Perrelet. "Go back to bed and try to get a little sleep. You will be wanted in the day—for there will be a day for him now, I think."

About eight o'clock, indeed, M. Perrelet was so well satisfied with his patient's condition that he left the room for a little. To Laurent's surprise he returned with Colonel Guitton. The latter, taking no notice of Laurent, went straight over to La Rocheterie's bed with the doctor, and stood there in silence.

"You said that he was better," he remarked after a moment. "He looks no better at all!" The disappointment in his tone almost amounted to annoyance.

"I told you it would be slow," replied M. Perrelet rather shortly.

The Colonel stooped. "I suppose he's not shamming by any chance?"

Laurent gave a movement. So did M. Perrelet.

"Shamming!" he exclaimed. "Do you think I am a . . . a greengrocer, Colonel? And I wish you would feel his pulse, and tell me how a man can simulate one like that!"

Colonel Guitton gave a sort of laugh. "You need not be so peppery, my dear Perrelet. I did not mean to cast any slur on your professional acumen. And, as to your patient, the charge of malingering would be a trifling one to bring against a man who has done what he has done.—Let me have a report of his progress, please, twice a day without fail," he finished curtly, and, turning on his heel, came in Laurent's direction.

"So you have elected to stay here, Monsieur le Comte, and play the Good Samaritan? Please remember that it is not my wish, and that when you change your mind you have only to ask to be moved."

Laurent had got the better of the strangling sensation which had afflicted him while the Bonapartist stood over Aymar de la Rocheterie (unhearing and unseeing though the latter was) and spoke of him like that. He was on fire, but coherently so, and having decided in the night exactly what he meant to say, he said it.

The Colonel heard him out. Then he shrugged his shoulders, remarked calmly, "Ah, a champion! Well, Monsieur de Courtomer, I am sorry for you!" and departed, M. Perrelet with him, leaving Laurent angry, dumbfounded, and thoroughly bewildered, not by his incredulity but by his inconsistency. How, if he was so concerned for La Rocheterie's life, so anxious to hear of his progress, could he speak of him with such utter contempt? If he had such an opinion of him why did he trouble to have him kept alive at all? In M. Perrelet's case he could see that he really cared, and he was, besides, a doctor, but the Colonel . . .

Then M. Perrelet returned, looking rather grim, and Laurent was immediately called upon to assist at the dressing of the patient's wounds—his first experience of the kind. Of this proceeding, indeed, L'Oiseleur himself betrayed little consciousness beyond moaning once or twice; but there was one matter of which Laurent, for his part, was even more acutely aware than of the injuries themselves. Each of M. de la Rocheterie's wrists, now seen for the first time, was encircled by a neat little bandage. After what the surgeon had said about ropes, it was not difficult to guess the reason for their presence, and it turned Laurent sick and cold. What ignominy had he suffered in that horrible wood, he, a gentleman and a hero?

The rest of the slow day was not free from anxiety, but as it wore on La Rocheterie's condition certainly improved and he became conscious for increasingly longer intervals, till at last, by the end of the afternoon, he was lying most of the time with his eyes open, though he seemed quite unaware of Laurent's presence, possibly even of the doctor's.

And when the night came which Laurent had been so dreading, he found that the responsibility for L'Oiseleur's life was not to rest entirely on his untried shoulders, since M. Perrelet was going to sleep in the château, not in his house in the village, and could be summoned at need by means of the sentry.

That was an immense relief. And Laurent did not have to summon him. The little flame of life, so anxiously tended, showed no flicker. La Rocheterie was very quiet, much as he had been during the day. Occasionally he would stir feebly or sigh; part of the time he seemed to be asleep. But even when his eyes were open they rested on his candle-lit surroundings, on the screen which had now been placed at the side of the bed, or on the watcher, with the same absence of interest, and he took what was given him with a similar indifference.

Perhaps, drained of blood as he was, he had lost for the time his hold on realities. And possibly, in the circumstances, this was as well. But the human body seemed to the newly initiated student a terrifyingly frail machine. What would Maman say if she could see M. de la Rocheterie now . . . if she could have seen both of them, brought together like this! Darling Maman! . . . and Laurent pondered at intervals, during that long night, whether his gaolers would let him send a letter to tell her that he was at least safe. Too safe, he would have said, but for that helpless and calumniated head on the pillow there!

(5)

At the conclusion of his vigil in the morning Laurent, heavy-eyed but relieved, was rewarded with praise. A little later another milestone was passed: Aymar de la Rocheterie spoke for the first time.

Laurent had already pricked up his ears when he heard M. Perrelet, on the inner side of the screen, saying to him encouragingly, "Ah, now I am beginning to be pleased with you!"

And to this a voice—more a breath than a voice, and broken at that—said, slowly and with effort,

"You are the doctor, Monsieur? . . . Where am I?"

"In the château of Arbelles," responded M. Perrelet, "where we are going to make you quite well again."

"How long . . ."

"Since Monday evening. This is Thursday morning."

"Arbelles," murmured the voice. There was a pause; then it said, "But that Royalist officer . . . here sometimes . . . ?"

"He is a prisoner like you, Monsieur," responded M. Perrelet. There was a moment's silence, and then the wounded man said,

"And it was the . . . Bonapartists then who . . . brought me here?"

To some sudden strand of anguish in the voice M. Perrelet replied soothingly, "Well, it does not much matter who brought you. Yes, they found you unconscious. Now you had better not talk any more. I am going to do your dressings."

He was obeyed. Indeed it was obviously as much as La Rocheterie could do to retain his hold on consciousness at all during the next half-hour. But he made no shadow of protest or complaint, and when at last the business was over, he lay motionless again, with his eyes shut, just a little more nearly the hue of the sheets than before.

He seemed in fact to be in a drowse when M. Perrelet came back to the bedside with a towel and the bandage scissors in his hand. "I meant to have cut off this long hair before," he remarked to Laurent, still on the farther side of the bed. "He will be much more comfortable with it gone. Curious colour!" He touched a bronze ripple.

"You are going to cut it off!" exclaimed Laurent in a low tone. The intention seemed almost sacrilege.

The surgeon nodded. "At least, you shall do it, while I hold his head up."

"Oh, but . . ." said Laurent, hesitatingly accepting the scissors, "perhaps he would not wish it. . . . Unless of course it is necessary. . . ."

"I don't know that it is necessary," returned M. Perrelet, "but——"

Here, immensely to the surprise of both of them, he over whose body they were holding this debate opened his eyes and faintly said something. The old doctor bent down to catch it, but Laurent, whose hearing was sharper, had no need to stoop. L'Oiseleur had whispered, "Cut it off. . . . I shall not want it so . . . any more. . . ."

After that there was nothing to say. But Laurent had his teeth in his underlip as he played the executioner, nervously clipping away at the "tiresome stuff," as its owner had once so insouciantly called it, till the shoulder-long locks, curling a little at the ends, lay like autumn beech-leaves on the linen.

"Nous n'irons plus aux bois,

Les lauriers sont coupés,"

—that most haunting couplet came into his head meanwhile, to stay there all the rest of the morning.

"That will be much better, thank you, Monsieur de Courtomer," said M. Perrelet, settling the shorn head back again.

Was it only Laurent's fancy that a slight change passed over Aymar de la Rocheterie's half-conscious face at the name?

And, waking that afternoon from a short doze himself, Laurent found his charge's conscious gaze fixed full on him. As Laurent's glance met his the very faintest tinge of colour mounted to his face—he was too bloodless to show more. But he looked away, saying nothing.

Laurent felt certain, however, that he had recognized him. In his present great prostration this was probably a shock; he must give him time to get over it. He would obviously have to wait a little for the story of the doings in the wood; La Rocheterie would not have the strength to tell him yet.

Nor, perhaps, the inclination, it occurred to him later, when, having asked the wounded man whether there was anything he could do to make him more comfortable, he replied in the negative in a voice that seemed to the enquirer, for all its weakness, to be so extremely glacial that he felt a chill at the heart. Had La Rocheterie not recognized him, after all? Should he recall himself to his memory? Better not: M. Perrelet would probably disapprove.

But during the night he was faced with a new idea. Was it possible that L'Oiseleur, even though he had recognized him (for the more Laurent thought about that the more he felt sure that he had), did not want to admit the fact? And if so, in Heaven's name why not? Was it possible that—after all, he did know something of the terrible imputation under which he lay? But even then—Laurent was at a loss, and no amount of studying his face, at moments during the vigil when La Rocheterie was asleep, helped him to a solution. All he gained was a completer impression of the extraordinary effect of candour, innocence, and helplessness given to it in repose by the motionless lashes, as long and curving as those of a boy.

Another morning brought a repetition of the morning before. M. Perrelet seemed pleased, and, presumably of set purpose, he talked a little as he did the dressings. But his patient did not respond to his encouragement, and Laurent could not disguise from himself that he himself was beginning to be a trifle . . . yes, disappointed in him. La Rocheterie was very likely in pain from the wound in his chest with every breath he drew, and, worse, was so drained of vitality that he could not move or lift a hand to help himself, but somehow one would have thought that, by this time, a man of his fibre would have rallied a little in spirit, if not in body. On the contrary, in these last two days Laurent had once or twice surprised on his increasingly haggard face such an expression of utter hopelessness as to be shocked by it. Yet it was puzzling how, despite his silence and inertia, La Rocheterie would now and then turn on M. Perrelet a gaze that seemed pregnant with some unspoken question.

Possibly the doctor himself had noticed this, or it was for some other reason that he gave Laurent a warning before he left.

"In spite of the improvement, he must be kept absolutely quiet," he said. "Whatever you do, don't go talking to him about Pont-aux-Rochers or the wood. I would not answer for the consequences if he is agitated in any way."

"To talk is the last thing he seems to want to do," observed his nurse.

"I am not so sure of that," returned M. Perrelet.

(6)

There seemed to be a great deal of movement going on at Arbelles that afternoon, and Laurent, sitting sleepily by the open window, remembered how M. Perrelet had said that a considerable part of the troops there had been ordered off against the small Royalist bodies in the Plesguen district who, under the leadership of a certain M. du Tremblay, were understood to be meditating a coup, but in what direction was uncertain. Colonel Guitton was going in command of the force from the château, a piece of news which delighted M. de Courtomer. The name of du Tremblay seemed familiar to him, but he was too lazy, or too tired, to recover the connection.

La Rocheterie was asleep. Though the screen hid his body from Laurent, it had not been drawn completely up to the head of the bed, and through the gap the young man could see his face turned sideways on the pillow, still and colourless as alabaster, and all the more colourless for the lock of ruddy hair lying on the brow. He was tranquil enough now. But when he was awake . . . Oh, that cursèd, cursèd wood!

Quick spurred steps were audible at this juncture outside, and in a moment more, to Laurent's surprise, and by no means pleasure, there entered Colonel Guitton, with the Major. The former was evidently ready for the field, booted, sword-girt and polished, his tall brass helmet with the horse-hair plume and the strip of leopard-skin giving him additional height and truculence. Into the yellow plastron of his uniform was stuck a folded paper. He took no notice of Laurent beyond returning his salute, and, followed by the other officer, clanked across the room to L'Oiseleur's bed and disappeared behind the screen.

This irruption had of course roused the sleeper, for Laurent saw him stir and open his eyes.

"Ah, I am glad to see—as well as to hear—that you are better, Monsieur," came Colonel Guitton's voice, quick and incisive, "because I want a little conversation with you."

Laurent promptly walked to the farther edge of the screen. "If you will excuse me, sir, M. Perrelet left particular orders that M. de la Rocheterie was to be kept absolutely quiet."

The helmeted head turned. "I can't help that," said its owner, none too agreeably. "This business is far too urgent to wait on M. Perrelet's permission. Moreover, we shall not keep M. de la Rocheterie long."

He drew the chair by the bed still nearer and sat down, the Major standing behind him, while Laurent, after a second or two's hesitation, returned to his former place by the window. He was perturbed, but he felt that if Colonel Guitton had the sense of a fly he would see that L'Oiseleur was in no fit state for conversation.

"I want to ask you a question or two," he heard the Colonel reiterate, in a much lower voice—but one which, whether he knew it or no, was perfectly audible. "To go straight to the point, the district of St. Pierre de Plesguen is moving." He waited a moment, and then added, "I expect I am right in concluding that M. du Tremblay's real plans are known to you?"

L'Oiseleur also waited a moment before replying. "If it interests you . . . they are." His voice was slow and weak, but the reply had all the effect of curtness.

"It does interest me, Monsieur de la Rocheterie," said the dragoon. "I am going out now in the hope of countering those plans . . . when I know a little more definitely what they are."

And there was another pause, which Laurent dimly felt to be charged with something uncomfortable and threatening, though he could not as yet divine the goal of this conversation. But it had suddenly come to him where he had heard the name of du Tremblay before, where he had seen the man who bore it—that officer at the Duc de Saint-Séverin's reception who knew so much about La Rocheterie and had spoken of him so warmly. They had probably concerted measures.

"Do you expect me to wish you success?" asked the faint voice at last.

"No, I expect something a little more concrete than good wishes," retorted Colonel Guitton. He gave a half-laugh and lowered his voice still more, but not sufficiently. "Come, La Rocheterie, let us get this business over as quickly as possible. I am sure that you understand me!"

The faint, fugitive colour dyed L'Oiseleur's pallor to the roots of his hair. "God! For what do you take me!"

"Well," sniggered the Imperialist, "I had really no intention of pronouncing the word to your face, but if you want it . . . No, I take you for a man who, like M. de Labédoyère, has seen the error of his ways, a man who is aware, now that the Emperor is back, how things are likely to go, and has acted accordingly . . . and wisely, in my view. Only you cannot stop halfway, you know. So——"

Little shoots of incredulity and horror had been running up and down the witness as he stood there rigid by the window, unseen and perhaps already forgotten. Was it conceivable that they were expecting L'Oiseleur, L'Oiseleur, to reveal the plans which he and du Tremblay had no doubt made together, now that du Tremblay was on the verge of carrying them out? It was so infamous that it could not be true; he must be wronging the two officers. He restrained himself and listened. As for L'Oiseleur himself, pinned there under their gaze, he had turned his head away, his teeth set in his lip.

"Come, La Rocheterie, don't prolong this!" went on the Imperialist, and his tone held a certain repellent bonhomie. "I am in a great hurry, and you are ill. And, hang it all, you made Colonel Richard a present of your own plans; all I'm asking for is a little light on du Tremblay's!"

Yes, they did expect it! And it was repeated to his very face, that vile and terrible lie! Laurent took an instinctive step forward—and then checked himself. La Rocheterie had turned his head back again on the pillow; he was going at least to have the satisfaction of denying the charge. But was it any wonder that he looked ghastly? "You can . . . insult me . . ." he got out, struggling a little for breath, "but you can never . . . make me do that!"

"Make you, you fool!" snarled Colonel Guitton, all the false geniality gone, "there's no question of 'making,' if you have any regard for your own skin! Don't you realize that you stand to find a Royalist triumph a cursed bad lookout for yourself after what you've done, if they get hold of you!"

L'Oiseleur's lip curled. "I had rather their justice . . . than your mercy."

The charge was beneath his contempt then; he had not even troubled to deny it. But how long was this to go on? Was it of any use making another appeal to them? No; a fellow-captive had no power to stop them, and if he intervened again, La Rocheterie would inevitably realize his presence, and he was beginning most devoutly to hope that he had forgotten it.

The Colonel cleared his throat. From his now quite unmodulated voice it was plain that he, at all events, had forgotten him. "Now, look here, La Rocheterie, you are behaving insanely. I can't think what has come to you! Your own side knows, or will soon know, what you have done, while on the other hand ours is already in your debt—though I don't doubt you got your quid pro quo from Richard. Now here is a still greater opportunity of putting us—I might almost say the Emperor—under an obligation to you, and yet, after having so thoroughly burned your boats, you hesitate to take it!"

"Hesitate!"

The Colonel swore softly. Then he smote himself on the leg. "Parbleu, I am stupid! I . . . I apologize, La Rocheterie. But you were unlucky, and you need have no fear of consequences this time, for, most fortunately, I have a document here which will make the business quite safe for you. I brought it to ask you about it." Something rustled. "I assume that this paper which was found on you contains notes or what not of du Tremblay's plans, since it is headed with his name. So if ever you were accused of having communicated them you could safely say—and I would support you—that the cipher notes were taken from you and read." His voice was eager, explanatory, almost coaxing. "Do you see? It is quite safe. I perfectly understand that in the event of recapture you do not want to face a firing-party for the second time. But no one could possibly prove that we did not contrive to decipher these notes for ourselves."

A sound resembling a laugh came from the bed. "Try then!" said its occupant.

"Aubert!" said the Colonel, and he and the Major whispered together. Nevertheless, Laurent overheard the words "extraordinary obstinacy . . . never anticipated . . . cannot understand. . . ." It seemed clear now—only too clear—why they had been so anxious to keep L'Oiseleur alive. . . . And meanwhile he lay, not looking at them, his mouth set hard, and breathing rather fast, the disastrous effect of this insulting interrogatory quite plain. And when Laurent saw the sweat on his brow he hoped with a desperate hope that, as his inquisitors were in a hurry and could, surely, see that they would elicit nothing, they would desist. . . . But then, to his dismay, he heard the murmured words, "going to have it out of him at whatever cost!"

And Colonel Guitton's chair scraped along the floor as he drew it nearer. Laurent could now see part of his green sleeve and his strong, blunt-fingered hand, in which was a piece of stained and crumpled paper.

"Now, La Rocheterie," he said, in quite a different tone, "you'll answer my questions, please! It's no good shamming faintness. You can have brandy if you need it. Are these"—he tapped the paper—"your notes or du Tremblay's?"

From his low pillow L'Oiseleur looked up at his interrogator steadily. Laurent felt sure that the taunt about shamming had stung him, and that he was going, to his own cost, to show that it was not that he could not speak, but that he would not. He now said quietly, "They are my own."

"Good! It is your private cipher then?"

"Yes."

"And the notes are concerned with this plan of du Tremblay's?"

"I shall not answer that."

"That shows they are. You have answered. Now I suppose you will pretend that you cannot read your cipher without the key?"

"I can read it perfectly," said the weak, disdainful voice.

"The deuce you can! Well, that's honest, at all events. As I hold the paper in front of you, you could read it off, then?"

"If I pleased."

"As a matter of fact," observed the Colonel over his shoulder to the Major, "he probably knows by heart what is there—there is not very much." He turned once more to his prisoner. "Now I daresay you think that is what I am going to ask you to do, eh?—and that is why you are so ready to admit that you can read it. Well, you are wrong. I am not quite such a fool. What you are going to do, Monsieur L'Oiseleur, is to give us the key of your cipher, and then, deciphering these notes ourselves, we can be sure that we are not being tricked! Otherwise I might just as well have asked you straight out for verbal information, which I see now I could not rely on when I had it . . . though God knows what game you are playing! You follow me?"

"Perfectly." But the sweat was running down his forehead.

"Well now! You are not strong enough to write, I fancy. The Major will take it down for you. Is it a complicated cipher?"

There was a pause which seemed to Laurent endless. He stood there biting his clenched hands, only keeping himself in with the greatest difficulty. Surely, surely they could see what they were doing, and would refrain! The pulsations of La Rocheterie's enfeebled and overdriven heart seemed to be shaking him as he lay there with his eyes half closed, and the silence was filled with the sound of his rapid, sobbing breathing. But at last he said, with a supreme effort to speak clearly,

"Do you really imagine . . . I am going . . . to give it to you?"

"I know you are," retorted Guitton coolly, "because I am going to sit beside you and ask you for it till you do!"

"Then you are likely . . . to stay here till . . ." But, game as he was, he could not finish the sentence. He made instead a slight convulsive movement.

"Give me the pencil and paper, Aubert," said the Colonel, undisturbed. "Now, La Rocheterie, we have had enough of this heroic pose. The Moulin Brûlé is very much past history. The sooner you give in the better for yourself. Do you think I am going to move against du Tremblay ignorant of his plans when you, with your penchant for passing on information, are aware of them? I don't enjoy sacrificing my men! . . . This is mainly a number cipher, I see; but I fancy one or two of the words are really cipher, too, eh?"

"I shall not . . ."

"Oh, yes, you will. Suppose you begin by telling me what this number which occurs so frequently represents. You see the one I mean. Don't shut your eyes like that! Two hundred and eighteen—what does two hundred and eighteen represent?"

There was no answer. The face on the pillow was no longer alabaster; it was ashen.

"What does two hundred and eighteen represent, La Rocheterie? I have plenty of time yet; you'll have to tell me in the end. Is it 'river'—'Aven'?"

L'Oiseleur suddenly moved his head as if he could not bear much more, and said sharply to himself, "O God!"

"Ah," commented Guitton in a tone of satisfaction. "You see! in a few minutes you will find yourself telling me all I want to know, and then I will go away and leave you in peace. Perhaps indeed you are already prepared to . . . No? Very well, we will return to our friend two hundred and eighteen. Once more, what does two hundred and eighteen stand for?"

His victim looked up at him desperately and defiantly and shook his head. It made no difference; the query was merely repeated: "What does two hundred and eighteen stand for?"

L'Oiseleur made a last effort to speak, but no sound was audible. His eyes closed. Something in his appearance caused Colonel Guitton to jump up with an exclamation. "Look here, then, I will be contented with just this—Does du Tremblay intend to cross the Aven or no? But, mind you, the truth, or it will be the worse for you! Now, yes or no? Do you hear me? . . . Do you hear me? . . . What's that?"

"I think he means, sir," said the Major, who had slipped up to the other side of the bed, and was also bending over its occupant, "that he hears you, but that he will not tell you. I'm afraid it's no use; he's collapsing."

"I was afraid so, damn him!" said Colonel Guitton with passionate disgust. "Find some brandy then, Aubert. There must be some way to get it out of him!"

But Laurent, like Aymar de la Rocheterie, had had more than he could stand. Only those two considerations, his knowledge of his own helplessness, and regard for L'Oiseleur's feelings, had kept him in leash so long. Now it was not a question of L'Oiseleur's feelings but of his very life—for Laurent had just had a full view of him as the Colonel shifted his position. He snatched up the brandy, and sprang to the other entrance of the screen just as Major Aubert came round it.

"Stop, stop, for God's sake!" he cried, seizing him by the arm. "You are murdering him—can't you see it!—and he'll never tell! Here's the brandy, but for pity's sake don't go on . . . it's quite useless!"

"What's this?" cut in Colonel Guitton's voice through the screen—or rather, over it, for, turning suddenly and catching the end, he toppled the whole structure over with a crash. "Is the other still there?—Damnation, I had forgotten!"

"So I should imagine," retorted Laurent, facing him over the fallen screen. "I can very well fancy that you did forget you had a witness of your detestable proceedings! Let me go to him!" And he frantically tried to push past the Colonel, but that officer as furiously pushed him back. "Major Aubert, put this young meddler outside the door in charge of the sentry! I was a damned fool ever to let him stay in the room. Of course La Rocheterie won't speak while he is here! Out with him!"

"I refuse!" began Laurent—and then saw that he had better go. If he objected it would only lead to his being dragged out, and prolonging this dreadful scene. Besides, La Rocheterie, lying there like death itself, without any struggle for breath now, without the flicker of an eyelid—La Rocheterie was palpably beyond hearing any more insults or questions.

"You have killed him, you devil!" he cried with a passionate gesture. But the executioner was more than deaf. Even as Laurent was pushed to the door by the Major he heard the angry voice saying, "Perhaps the initial mistake I made was in not offering this fellow here a price first. How much, I wonder, did he get from——"

Then the door slammed and was locked behind him, and he found himself, seething with fury, in the corridor with the bewildered sentry.

His first impulse, now that he was out, was to batter on the door to be let in again; it was horrible to have to leave L'Oiseleur in the grip of those vultures. But they could not do any more now. The question was, had they finished him already? Tears of helpless rage were dimming his eyes when suddenly, some way down the corridor, he saw a rotund form making for the staircase—M. Perrelet. But he was not coming this way; he had paid his afternoon visit . . . they knew that, probably. He should come, though . . . Despite his somewhat sturdy build, Laurent was very quick and light on his feet, and was down the passage like a flash, the sentry, when he had grasped his intention, pounding after him.

"Hallo!" said M. Perrelet, turning round. "Here, young man, if you are escaping, I——"

Laurent seized him by the arm. "For Heaven's sake, come! They are killing him in there, the Colonel and——" Further revelations were cut short by the sentry's throwing himself on their maker from behind and putting an arm around his neck.

"It's all right," gasped Laurent, "I'm not escaping. Hurry, Monsieur Perrelet—they've been questioning him till . . . I don't know if he's breathing now!"

M. Perrelet let fly as full-blooded an oath as any soldier and trotted down the corridor. "Come on!" said Laurent to the sentry, who still held him. And the cortège arrived just as the door opened once more and the two officers came out. The Colonel was in a towering rage.

"Ah, Doctor, you'd better go in to your patient. He needs you, I fancy—not that it matters now. By the time I got this young meddler out it was too late. . . . And to have the very notes in my hand!" He crumpled the sheet of cipher into a ball, threw it violently down and strode off down the corridor followed by the Major. M. Perrelet had already shot in through the open door.

And in a moment or two Laurent, with a failing heart for what he should find, said to the now dazed sentry, "I suppose I had better go back," and went.

"Is that you?" called out M. Perrelet. "Put the kettle on the fire, quick!—and come and rub his hands and feet!"

He had L'Oiseleur, quite inanimate, in his arms; the bandages were already severed, and he was rubbing him over the region of the heart with brandy.

"He's gone!" exclaimed Laurent, terrified, when he saw the fixed, half-open eyes and the head fallen aside.

"Not quite," replied M. Perrelet grimly. "But you must work harder than that!"

(7)

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning—but not of the next morning, the morning after that. Laurent rose from replenishing the little fire which was always burning. In a few moments M. Perrelet would relieve him and he could sleep.

Thanks to the old surgeon, L'Oiseleur had been saved—for the second time—but it had been touch and go for some hours. Before nightfall on Friday they had succeeded in pulling him back to a kind of consciousness, and all yesterday he had lain quiescent, so exhausted that it had been difficult to rouse him to take nourishment, but at least in outward peace, as Laurent kept assuring himself, for the brutality which had been practised on La Rocheterie in this room haunted him, waking or sleeping. M. Perrelet indeed was amazed at the rally, considering that the victim's heart was, and would long remain, so much impaired.

Laurent stood now for a moment at the foot of the bed—and had a sudden feeling that he should like to hang a laurel wreath there. Then M. Perrelet entered in a dressing-gown, and waved him to his own couch.

He woke about five o'clock to find, to his surprise, a low-voiced conversation going on behind the screen. Since his collapse La Rocheterie had not uttered a word.

". . . kept me alive for that!" he caught the end of a sentence, in his broken, trailing voice, suffused nevertheless with bitterness.

"Now, my boy," he heard M. Perrelet reply gently, "you cannot honestly think that was my purpose, can you? If I could have Colonel Guitton tried for attempted murder, I would willingly do so. But you must not think of it any more; it is over now."

The voice said, "Till they try again!"

"No, no!" The old surgeon sounded genuinely shocked. "The Colonel has left Arbelles. It shall never happen again, I swear it. And you did not tell him anything; you know that, don't you?"

"Yes . . . but . . . he asked me . . . he dared to ask me!" gasped L'Oiseleur ". . . and before M. de Courtomer!"

(Yes, he had recognized him—he had realized that he was there!)

"Come, come, my child, you must be quiet!" said the doctor. "I know that you went through a dreadful time, but you kept your mouth shut—that's really all you care about, isn't it? Now see if you cannot get to sleep again—to please me!"

And to Laurent's relief there was silence for a little; then the ghost of a voice began again. The question itself was inaudible.

"M. de Courtomer is here," answered M. Perrelet. "He is asleep just now. He helps me to look after you, you know."

"He is here—in the room? Always?"

"Certainly. You cannot be left."

"But, my God," came desperately from the bed, "that is the one thing I want . . . to be left alone. And instead of that he . . . who knew me once . . . was in the room . . . and heard . . . everything! Can't he be put somewhere else . . . can't I be alone?" The voice was almost sobbing in its entreaty.

Poor Laurent, in his bed, covered his face with his hand. So much for his dreams of a grateful recognition! Yes, that was it, as he had felt at the time—the intolerable humiliation, to a very proud and sensitive spirit, of having had an acquaintance a witness of Friday's proceedings.

There was a movement behind the screen. "Chut! mon enfant!" said the doctor. "You must not agitate yourself like this! M. de Courtomer is here of his own free will to nurse you, and he is so much your champion that he has twice already fought your battle with the Colonel. And if he had not fetched me in after that business on Friday——"

"I wish he had not!" broke in the faint, bitter voice. "You are kind, Doctor . . . but if you would only let me die . . ."

This was becoming unbearable. Never had Laurent conceived of the La Rocheterie he had known before, though he was young enough, than as a man—even, by reason of his quiet self-possession and his prestige, than as a man older, perhaps, than he really was. He sounded now like a broken-hearted boy. The listener put his hands over his ears.

He kept them there till he was sure that the voices had ceased. A little afterwards he heard M. Perrelet emerge very cautiously and tiptoe over to his bed. The young man's instant pretence of being asleep did not deceive the doctor. He bent over him till his mouth was almost at his ear and whispered, "Did you by any chance hear what was said just now?"

"Yes," breathed Laurent with his eyes shut.

"You won't take any notice of it, my dear boy, will you?" pleaded the surgeon in the same almost inaudible tone. "He's nearly crazy after that damnable strain."

"That's obvious. And therefore—after what he said—I had better be moved elsewhere."

"No, no, I can't spare you. He will get over this morbid feeling about you as the effects of that scene wear off."

"But shall I get over his having had it?" thought Laurent. He said nothing, but suddenly buried his face in the pillow.

"You will stay—and take no notice?" queried the voice in his ear; and after a moment Laurent gave a smothered assent.

The grasp on his shoulder tightened. "Good boy!" whispered M. Perrelet, and went away.

But it was not easy to carry out that promise. Already, by the time that the hour for dressings arrived, L'Oiseleur had contrived, without the aid of speech, to make his feelings about the unwilling witness so clear that Laurent was constrained to help himself through that ordeal by pretending that the set and frozen face below him belonged to someone whom he had never seen before. And indeed it could not have shown less sign of recognition had this really been the case.

At the conclusion M. Perrelet suddenly laid hold of his patient's arm.

"Time I had a look at these wrists again," he murmured, and began to unfasten the little bandage.

The wrist jerked weakly in his hold. "No!" ejaculated the Vicomte de la Rocheterie with a catch of the breath. "Leave them alone, please!"

Low as it was, the tone was a command, which the frown emphasized. M. Perrelet just glanced at the speaker. "My dear boy," he said, almost equally low, "it is necessary," and went on unwinding. But Laurent, averting his face, slipped away from the bed, lest he should see the marks of those accursed ropes, and L'Oiseleur have him again as an unwilling witness of his humiliation.

He was not so to avoid it. "Will you please bring that fresh lint I left on the table," came the surgeon's voice a moment later. For an instant Laurent had the idea of saying that he could not find it—the next, he snatched it angrily up and went round the barrier. La Rocheterie's head was turned stiffly away, but Laurent had the impression that he was grinding his teeth. And on the unbandaged wrist in M. Perrelet's hold he saw just what he had guessed and feared. . . . Yes, he must have struggled, indeed! Perhaps, still worse, he had been dragged about. . . . Laurent silently put the lint on the bed and went away again.

And there was more than one moment during that day—it was the Sunday—when, despite his promise to M. Perrelet, Laurent found himself saying, "I'll be hanged if I stay here!" For L'Oiseleur's demeanour towards him continued to be of a politeness so stony that his guardian would really much have preferred him to be rude. After that one approach to a breakdown to which, in his precarious state, insults and torture had brought him, La Rocheterie had evidently summoned up all his pride and his endurance. There was nothing of that heartrending boyishness about him now; he was a man again, and a desperately unapproachable one. It was extraordinary that a person who was so utterly helpless and dependent on another could contrive to keep that other so freezingly at arm's length. Yet, directly Laurent had come to the conclusion that next time M. Perrelet entered he must ask to be moved elsewhere, he had only to look at his charge lying there to feel that he could not bring himself to desert him. However much La Rocheterie might not want him, he needed him terribly.

And always at the back of Laurent's mind was the instinctive knowledge that, before he was brought to Arbelles, he must have been through some terrible experience to be so completely changed. The very attractive, courteous, self-contained young man of last year, with his modesty, his easy and quiet gaiety, his consideration for others, was entirely gone, and in his place was a phantom of that figure, sombre and tortured, too sore in spirit to accept the most willing sympathy and service. His very voice was changed. No; it was plain to Laurent that the slander was at the back of all that had happened to him even before he came to the château. And what exactly had happened? Every day, every hour, the situation seemed to blossom into fresh horrible possibilities; and before that agonized silence one was helpless. For that he would hear now from the victim's own lips the story of what he had undergone seemed so improbable that Laurent had given up considering it. The best he could hope for was that he could continue to nurse him without being asked point-blank to leave him. And though he would abstain from that request now, directly L'Oiseleur was well enough to be left he should ask to be moved—instantly.

It was a small but very wounding occurrence which fixed him in this resolve. He noticed during the afternoon that a lock of the hair which he had cut so badly, straggling over his forehead, was bothering the helpless man. Laurent could not think at first why he was feebly moving his head first to one side, then to the other, but when L'Oiseleur began slowly to try to disengage a hand from beneath the bedclothes to deal with the annoyance Laurent jumped up, murmuring, "Let me do that for you!" But as he gently put aside the recalcitrant lock he felt La Rocheterie shrink—most indubitably shrink—from his touch, flashing up at him as he did so an extraordinary glance of hostility—it could be nothing else. And Laurent had gone instantly away without a word.

He went to bed that night feeling almost desperate. His patient had intimated in the most icy tones that he did not wish for anything during the night, and that he would be extremely obliged if the light might not be kept burning as hitherto. Laurent knew that he was doing very wrong in acceding to these requests (which partook more of the nature of commands), but he simply had not the courage to contravene them.

(8)

At the end of his visit next morning M. Perrelet managed to whisper to Laurent, under cover of washing his hands, "Is he being very difficult?"

"A little," answered M. de Courtomer, colouring.

"I thought so! But you know, in some way or other he's going through hell, that young man! I should know that as a doctor, if I had not heard that dark story about him. So hold on, there's a good lad, and one day he will realize what you are doing for him and thank you for it."

"Going through hell." The phrase recurred to Laurent as he sat by the window that afternoon. Yes, he looked as if he were. And the strain, whatever it was, was not lessening but increasing. All the hours, reflected Laurent, that he lies there motionless, he is thinking, thinking . . . and of what? Why will he not tell me—tell me at least something . . . tell me that he is in a great strait? For whatever he is going through cannot be caused by his own misdoing; yet in this horrible tale there is misdoing—someone else's, of which the blame has fallen on him.

Then it came to him like a flash of lightning. No, he has taken it on himself!

An immense cloud whose existence he had hardly acknowledged rolled away from Laurent's mind. Of course that was it! How could he have been so dense? That would fully account for La Rocheterie's not having denied the imputation when the Colonel made it so brutally to his face. Some other man had committed the traitorous act which had brought about Pont-aux-Rochers, and L'Oiseleur, for some reason, had shouldered the blame. He was enduring all this vicarious shame for someone else . . . and suffering bitterly under it.

His mind full of this illumination, Laurent looked thoughtfully across the room at the rococo clock on the mantelpiece, for at three o'clock he was to take La Rocheterie's pulse, a task entrusted to him in M. Perrelet's absence. As the timepiece had marked half-past two when last he looked at it, it must have stopped. He went over to it to make sure, and thus came into full view of the bed, and was aware that its occupant was awake, and watching him as he put his ear to the glass. It was unlikely that he would address him, for he hardly ever spoke. Nothing could have surprised him more than to hear what he did.

"The clock stopped quite half an hour ago, Monsieur de Courtomer.—It is Monsieur de Courtomer, is it not?"

Laurent turned round, hoping that he was not showing his amazement, aware as he was that the real recognition had been made four days ago.

"Yes, Monsieur, I was taken prisoner a week since."

"And wounded, too, I see," observed M. de la Rocheterie gravely.

"Wounded?" queried Laurent, quite forgetting the plaster on his forehead.

"Your head."

"Oh, that!" exclaimed the young man, putting up a hand to his adornment. "That is nothing—a scratch from a hedge."

"But a scratch honourably come by."

Laurent winced at the tone, and hurriedly said, "If you will permit me, Monsieur de la Rocheterie," he could bring out the name now, "I will take your pulse—M. Perrelet's orders."

A tiny frown appeared between the slender eyebrows, and Laurent felt instantly that he did not want one of his bandaged wrists exposed to the light of day—for both his hands were under the bedclothes. "Do not move your arm, pray," he remarked quickly. "I can get at your pulse quite well as you are." And, watch in hand, he knelt down by the bed and slipped his hand in at the side. His fingers nevertheless fumbled about the wrappings as they sought for the artery.

"It will be more convenient for you when those bandages are off," observed the chilling voice.

Laurent was saved any reply to this remark by the fact that, his eyes glued to his watch, he was counting, as he had recently been instructed. Then he got up and went to the table to write down the result of his computations.

"You saw yesterday why I have to have my wrists bandaged?" said L'Oiseleur abruptly.

Laurent had his back to him. "I did not look particularly," he very truthfully replied.

"Then I advise you to do so next time," said Aymar de la Rocheterie. "You may not, then, perhaps, care to . . . continue your ministrations."

Laurent was momentarily tempted to retort, "Would that please you?" but he was too much afraid of the answer to risk it. Oh, why would he, with the scrap of strength he had gained, use it in torturing himself and his fellow-captive? Inspired by sheer desperation the guardian turned round with an air of authority and said, "Monsieur de la Rocheterie, I am under strict orders not to let you talk. If you will allow me, I will try to arrange you more comfortably, and perhaps you could sleep a little."

The bloodless lips almost twitched into a smile as the wounded man looked up at him. "When last we met, Monsieur de Courtomer, under very different circumstances——"

"Excuse me, but would you not like your pillow turned?"

"No, thank you. As I was saying——"

"If only you would not talk!" interjected Laurent.

"When last I had the pleasure of seeing you . . . at M. de Saint-Séverin's reception . . . I little guessed that at our next meeting you would be what you are . . . and I—" he drew a long breath "—and I . . . what I am!"

"—Surgeon's assistant and patient," struck in Laurent gallantly. "No, I little thought that myself!"

"It was not purely in that role . . . that I was considering myself," commented L'Oiseleur. He did smile this time, a rather terrible smile. And then, spent by his unwonted effort at conversation—and such a conversation, thought the unhappy Laurent—he shut his eyes, and relapsed once more into complete silence and immobility.

M. Perrelet was not pleased with his patient that evening. He explained to Laurent that what he had rather anticipated was happening—the bullet in his shoulder was poisoning him. He thought that M. de la Rocheterie could stand the extraction now; indeed there was no choice in the matter. He would perform it next day; his victim need not know of his intention till the morning.

Poor Laurent wished that the same reticence had been exercised with regard to himself; he fancied that he needed it far more. He spent an apprehensive and L'Oiseleur a restless night.

(9)

"Well, I am glad that is satisfactorily over," remarked M. Perrelet next morning as he washed his instruments at the table in the middle of the room. "All the same, as I told you, I have put him to sleep because that shoulder will hurt for some time like the devil, and I am very anxious to avoid unnecessary heroism—it's bad for his heart. We have had quite enough of necessary this morning as it is."

For though it was out of his power to drug his patient for the operation itself, he had given him a strong opiate immediately afterwards, and to this La Rocheterie had very quickly succumbed.

"Yes, it has been worrying me," went on the old surgeon, "how to get that ball out without too much shock. . . . You look a bit white, my boy. Are you all right?"

"I am very much all right, thank you, sir," returned Laurent, pallid but smiling. For he, at any rate, had derived from the detestable business something which made what he had gone through worth while.

"And in the process of becoming quite a useful assistant to me you have not lost your zeal as a champion, eh?"

"Not a bit," said Laurent. "Though I admit that I would give a very great deal to get to the bottom of the business."

M. Perrelet flashed a shrewd glance at him. "You still don't think you would be sorry when you got there?"

Laurent drew himself up. "Not in the sense you mean, Monsieur. And surely you yourself, who have saved his life——"

"That's my job, Monsieur de Courtomer. It's nothing to me that the bullet I have just fished out of that young man's shoulder came from some old Chouan musket of the year one—look at it—nor that that young man was found lashed to a beech tree outside his own headquarters, nor that he has, undoubtedly, something very grave on his mind—my business is to set him on his legs again, if I can."

"Monsieur Perrelet," said Laurent earnestly, "I believe I can account for everything. He is shielding someone else. I am positive of it. It cannot be an agreeable thing to do; it has cost him terribly in the past, it is costing him terribly now, and as for the future——" He broke off rather abruptly.

M. Perrelet gave a little shake of the head; his smile was half amused, but half touched, too. "My dear boy, excuse my saying so, but you are very young! It is only in romances that men do that sort of thing. In real life, when they see what it may lead to, they are not so quixotic. And, in my opinion, M. de la Rocheterie's demeanour is not consistent with innocence. He is in too much personal agony of mind—can you deny it? Why, otherwise, when I warned him just now that I was going to hurt him, should he have said to himself, 'So much the better?' If he were merely playing the scapegoat a young man as sensitively organized as he would hardly have welcomed my probe and scalpel because they gave him something else to think about! No, I am afraid your theory won't hold water." He put away his instruments, then suddenly walked back to the bed and stood for some time with his hands behind him, studying the unconscious face, with its strong, delicate features, much less as a doctor studies a patient than as one man scrutinizes another to see what of his character he can read on his visage. Then he bent over the drugged sleeper, satisfied himself as to his condition, and came back again.

"The best argument for your view of the case, my young friend," he admitted, "lies, of course, on the pillow there. One can't, after all, look at that face and believe him capable of anything infamous—it was my thought when I first saw him, all blood and dust, on the floor in the hall more than a week ago. . . . Yet, if he is innocent, he has no right to my thinking, to have deprived his party of his services to cover another man's misdoing. . . . Well, keep an eye on him. I will look in again about the hour he should wake."

Slowly the sunlight moved down the bed from the side window as Laurent sat by it, a book on his knee which he made no attempt to read. From time to time he took out and fingered at leisure his own private gain—the fall of the barrier which L'Oiseleur maintained between them . . . for how could he interpret the episode otherwise when Aymar's clenched right hand, suddenly and blindly putting itself forth, had encountered his wrist where he bent over the bed ready for emergencies, and had closed on it, gripping it hard. Moved by that significant act, Laurent had grasped the bandaged wrist in return. So when, under contracted brows, the red-brown eyes, unclosing, looked up desperately for a moment into his, though they were alight with pain and he was torn with concern, his heart had leapt to greet the moment. . . . Then M. Perrelet's hand made a movement, the bullet tinkled into the basin, and, the second after, with a deep sigh, Aymar's grip on the friendly wrist relaxed and his head rolled sideways. . . . Yes, how could he interpret otherwise that appeal in the hour of need?

As for M. Perrelet's arguments, Laurent was entirely unmoved by them. So far from considering La Rocheterie's demeanour incompatible with innocence, he thought it a marked proof of it. Would a man capable of betraying his own troops be so bitter and sensitive about his own subsequent position? Surely he would expect some measure of contumely for his deed! But in Aymar's desolation of soul there was a fierce resentment. "He dared to ask me!" he had said. No, that theory of his shielding another, once enunciated, gained immensely in probability. A man like the Aymar de la Rocheterie he had known last year would have done a thing like that without counting the terrible cost to himself, even as he had jumped without hesitation into the flooded river. If this Aymar, who had been so near death after paying part of it, found what remained almost more than he could endure, who could wonder? For whom had he done it—a friend, a comrade? He must love him extraordinarily. But how could any one accept such a sacrifice, greater than that of life itself? Perhaps the unknown was not aware of it. Perhaps he was dead. It was to be hoped so, for then this immolation could, surely, cease.

Not for the first time in his vigil, Laurent bent forward and felt L'Oiseleur's pulse. This time the fingers of the sleeper suddenly twined themselves round his wrist again. Laurent let his hand stay in the unconscious clasp, and it was because it was there that he found the hot words of protest forming on his lips, though they went unuttered—Why did you do it? It is killing you, L'Oiseleur. You are of too fine stuff to stand the strain, the obloquy, the contempt of the contemptible!

The drugged sleep, however seemed to be breaking, for Laurent had not long sat so, his hand a prisoner, when Aymar began to stir. A contraction passed over his face. Another moment, and his eyes slowly unclosed, and he was looking at the watcher, half dreamily.

"It is over," said Laurent gently.

"Over? What is over?"

"The extraction—your shoulder. You fainted at the end, then the doctor gave you an opiate. You have slept for nearly four hours."

"I remember. Yes." His eyes fell on his own hand, and he immediately loosed his clasp and moved the hand away. Laurent reddened; but the next instant L'Oiseleur's lashes dropped again and he relapsed into slumber.

A little later M. Perrelet came in, expressed himself satisfied, and said that Laurent need not sit by him like a sentry unless he pleased. So the young man went over to his own side of the room and threw himself on his bed. Why had La Rocheterie moved his hand away like that? Was he, after giving that glimpse of his necessity, going on as before? Laurent was sore, disappointed, and beginning to realize that the combined strain of anxiety, want of sleep, and his charge's attitude was making him curiously tired.

He lay there some time till, hearing Aymar move, he jumped up and went round the screen and found him fully sensible, staring up at the ceiling with a rather set mouth.

"I did not know you were awake," said Laurent somewhat timidly. "Is the pillow all right for your shoulder? Is there anything I can do?"

"If it is not troubling you too much, I should like a drink," was the frigid reply.

Laurent lifted his head and gave him some water. To judge from the way he drank it, he must have come out from under the opiate parched with thirst. Why could he not have called for such a simple thing? Laurent suppressed a desire to ask, and when he had finished merely enquired if his shoulder were paining him much.

"Nothing out of the way, thank you." So Laurent, with an inward sigh, went round the bed to replace the glass. He suspected that the reply was far from the truth. When he got to the bottom of the bed Aymar de la Rocheterie spoke again.

"I am quite at a loss to know why you should do all this for me, Monsieur de Courtomer."

Laurent was goaded into replying, "All this! You do not give me much chance of doing anything!"

But Aymar, disregarding him, went on in his weak, uneven voice, "You put me under a very heavy obligation to you."

Laurent flushed. "I had much rather you did not look at it in that light. To do anything for you—although I know I am clumsy and inexperienced . . . I mean . . . you need not feel . . ." He stumbled; the set, unsmiling visage disconcerted him.

"It is very good of you," repeated L'Oiseleur in the same unmoved tones. "And you must not think that because I took advantage of your charity this morning I do not realize, equally with yourself . . . especially since Colonel Guitton's visit——"

But even he could get no further for the moment. Laurent removed his eyes from his face; it was suddenly tortured.

"—that you are dealing with an outcast, a leper," finished the voice inexorably.

"How can you talk like that!" broke out Laurent, half choking. "I—charity—you think I—" But adequate expression of his feelings was beyond him; besides, L'Oiseleur would not listen—merely overrode him. What could it be that made him behave like this? Was it possible that his brain was becoming affected by what he had been through, or that the pain which he would not now acknowledge, or the drug, or both, had flung him into a sort of delirium? But it was such a cold purposeful delirium. . . . Laurent plucked feverishly at the coverlet, and at last lifted his eyes for an instant. "I do not believe a word of what that blackguard said. . . . I should have liked to kill him!" he added between his teeth. "Of course," he went on after a second or two, studying the floor again, "it is obvious that you have been shot. I realize that it must have been done. . . ." But no reference, after all, to trees and tying up was possible.

"Exactly," said L'Oiseleur with a horrible calm. "You realize how—do you realize by whom it was done? . . . Yes, evidently you have been told that it was my own men, though perhaps you did not believe it. But . . . it is quite true!"

Laurent had the sensation that about five squares of the parquet flooring flew up and hit him on the head. He could feel the blood rushing to his face. It was not true!

He looked up, dazed, and saw Aymar de la Rocheterie scanning him in a way he could not interpret. "I see, indeed, that you had not believed it," came his voice, cool and faint. "Well, now I have convinced you. But in justice to my . . . my executioners, I should like you to know that they were not directly responsible for the state of my wrists. I did that myself, trying to get free—afterwards. . . . Have you ever been tied to a tree, Monsieur de Courtomer, and left there? Hardly, I suppose."

This must be stopped somehow. "Monsieur de la Rocheterie," said Laurent firmly, "I refuse to hear another word. But I am going to say just one thing myself. Your men may have shot you—since you tell me so I suppose I must believe you—but even you cannot make me think that they did it otherwise than under a misapprehension. The sun must fall from heaven before I can believe that you did—what rumour accuses you of! Surely you know that!"

He spoke with passion. The Vicomte de la Rocheterie stared at him out of his great sunken eyes, words visibly smitten from him. Then he dragged up his right hand and covered them. "You are . . . very hard to convince," he said with a catch of the breath. And at that moment, to Laurent's intense relief, M. Perrelet came in.

He looked from one to the other. "You have been talking to him," he said sharply to Laurent.

"No, I have been talking to him," put in his patient quickly.

"Then you will kindly not do it any more," grumbled the little doctor, stooping over him. "A nice state you have got yourself into! M. de Courtomer should have stopped you!"

Laurent had turned blindly away to the window. So it was true—his own men!

(10)

For about the sixth time that night Laurent dragged himself out of his bed and went over to his charge. The dawn was beginning. He was so tired that he could hardly stand, his eyes kept closing from lack of sleep, but his brain seemed to him unusually clear. Peering at the clock he saw that there wanted twenty minutes yet before La Rocheterie's bouillon was due. He dropped into the chair by the bed; it was not worth returning to his own again. Even yet, after half a day and a night, he could scarcely realize it, though he had tried hard to face the reversal of what he had so stoutly upheld. That haggard young man who lay there asleep before him had really been through the horrors of execution at the hands of his own followers—and survived. His men, his own men who followed him with passion, who would, as he once said, have cut their hands off for him, had fastened him to a tree and deliberately shot him—L'Oiseleur, their brilliant and adored leader! Now he understood why he had said that he would never need his floating locks again; the laurels were indeed cut down! Now he understood why he was so sensitive about his lacerated wrists, so terribly bitter about the whole affair, so unapproachable! Why, it was enough to have sent him crazy—quite enough to make him beg to be allowed to die, as with his own ears Laurent had heard him!

Yet, since their painful conversation of yesterday afternoon, La Rocheterie's demeanour towards him had undergone a certain change. He had not said the things that hurt so much, and, in the earlier part of the night, when he had been restless and in pain after the operation, he had even asked, and almost naturally, for such alleviation as Laurent could give, and had not paid him in those frigid thanks to which the young man would infinitely have preferred no thanks at all. Somehow, then, they were a little nearer to each other.

How thin he was getting to look—how increasingly transparent—worse than when Laurent had first seen him lying there like . . . what was it he had looked like? A Crusader. . . . Had a Crusader ever been shot by his men? If so, they would have used bows and arrows . . . or was it arquebuses? What exactly was an arquebus? . . . Arques. What had happened at Arques . . .

He woke, to his dismay, to find his head down on his arm across the foot of his patient's bed. The birds were singing, and the hour for bouillon well past, but the wounded man was fortunately still asleep.

His own stolen slumber, however, had not refreshed Laurent, and, by the time that M. Perrelet appeared, he was wondering how he should ever get through the dressings. He always hated the business, and, now that he knew for certain who had made those wounds. . . . Then he was ashamed of what he termed his womanish feelings. It was not he who had to bear the pain morning after morning—and without a murmur, as La Rocheterie always did . . . as he wished sometimes he would not. But then all along he had never uttered a syllable of complaint at any physical stress. "I'll be as quick as I can," he heard M. Perrelet whisper to his patient as he took up the forceps.

. . . At least Laurent supposed that he was whispering—or was it because there was suddenly such a loud buzzing in his own ears? The surgeon's figure swelled to a large size; then receded till it was about the measure of a doll. But, not realizing in the least what was happening to him, Laurent still stood at his post with a face, though he did not know it, very similar in hue to that on the pillow.

The next thing of which he was fully conscious was that he was seated in a chair right away from the bed, at the open window, and that M. Perrelet, now restored to his everyday dimensions, was undoing the collar of his uniform.

"What is the matter?" asked the young man in a dazed way. "Why am I here?"

"Because I didn't want you fainting and falling across the bed," responded M. Perrelet briskly. "Luckily my patient called my attention to you just in time. Drink this, and sit there quietly."

"But——" protested Laurent.

"Drink this!" repeated M. Perrelet firmly.

And so the brandy which was poured out ready for L'Oiseleur was drunk by his nurse.

"Fainting?" murmured Laurent. "Was that it? But the dressing . . . ?" And he tried to get up.

M. Perrelet pushed him back. "Sit there, I tell you. You are not indispensable. I will deal with you afterwards."

He disappeared behind the screen. Laurent, his head feeling like a ball of wool, sat there ashamed and confused, conscious that he had deserted his post, and still not quite understanding what had happened to him. Through the woolly mist he heard the murmur of Aymar's voice—it sounded like an interrogation—and the doctor's reply, quite clear: "It was a little too much for him this morning, I think. He was tired, I expect. I ought to have noticed sooner. . . . Now we will proceed with this shoulder of yours."

He proceeded, presumably, for there was no more conversation. Laurent gazed out of the window.

After a considerable interval M. Perrelet emerged, washed his hands, and came over to him.

"Now, young man, I want a few words with you. No, stay where you are. I have settled M. de la Rocheterie quite comfortably. But I don't want a second patient on my hands." He dropped his voice. "How much sleep did you have last night?—I thought so. And the night before? You are getting worn out. I am an old fool, but I never meant you to do without sleep like this—no one, of course, could stand it. Why have you been doing it?—it's not necessary now."

The answer was very simple—because his charge would not call him, so he must be on the alert the whole time. But Laurent was not going to give it.

M. Perrelet's little eyes scrutinized his downcast visage. "H'm, perhaps I can guess! . . . And yet I fancy you would really rather have this old butcher hurting you than him, eh?" (Laurent, aghast at his insight, turned crimson.) "Well, it is clear that I have been very inconsiderate of you. You are to lie down at once and have a nap; I will stay here with him for a little." And, to ensure his commands being obeyed, he stood over Laurent till he had stretched himself on the bed.

The young man himself was surprised to find how desirable that bed was. . . . He floated away into slumber . . . delicious! Then he came out of it again to find M. Perrelet almost in the same place, looking at him.

"I fell asleep for a moment," he said apologetically.

The surgeon smiled. "Mon enfant, you have slept for an hour and ten minutes. I should not wake you now but that your dinner is just coming up and that I have something to tell you. You need fresh air and a little change of scene, so I have arranged with Major Aubert that you are to go out for a walk every day on the terrace. No, there is no question of parole, and there is a sentry posted, so don't try to escape and get yourself shot. You can take your first promenade this afternoon."

Laurent gave Aymar his dinner and had his own. When the orderly had removed it he approached his charge to settle him for the sleep which he was supposed to have in the afternoon. No reference had yet been made to his own morning's performance, and he hoped that none would be. But he had been conscious for the last five minutes that L'Oiseleur's eyes were following him very intently, and, as he now came round the bed to pull the curtain over the window beside it, La Rocheterie suddenly said, in a very different voice from any in which he had yet addressed him—at Arbelles:

"Do you think, Monsieur de Courtomer, that you can ever forgive me?"

It was really less the words than the tone which surprised Laurent. He half turned, his hand on the curtain.

"On the contrary, Monsieur de la Rocheterie," he said with an embarrassed little laugh, "it is I who ought to make the most humble apologies to you!"

"For what?" asked Aymar, looking up at him. "For having worn yourself out with looking after me night and day? For having robbed yourself of your sleep, endangered your health perhaps—at any rate, brought yourself to this pass of fatigue . . . and all for a man who . . ." He did not finished the sentence. "On my soul, I cannot think why you should have done it, nor why I should have been possessed by such a demon of ingratitude. . . . Monsieur de Courtomer, it was not wholly ingratitude! Do you know what it is to resent pity? Yet I ought to be on my knees in thankfulness that any one in the world should do anything for me—now; and that any one should really care what happens to me . . ."

His voice broke and he turned his head away; his hand on the coverlet clenched and unclenched itself.

And Laurent, to his great comfort, was deserted at this crisis by his British heritage. He abandoned the curtain, his rather constrained attitude, everything. "Oh, La Rocheterie, how could you ever doubt it! Don't you know that I would give a great deal more than a few nights' rest to see you well again? Why, I came by way of Locmélar in the hopes of meeting with you, and when, after I was captured, by an extraordinary coincidence I saw you being brought here, unconscious, I tried to get sent back with you—only I tried too late. Pity—no! You surely do not think that I have looked after you for any other reason than because I . . . wanted to!"

He had gripped the transparent, tell-tale hand. For the first time it stayed in his grasp. And L'Oiseleur turned his head back again, and looked at him, tears in his eyes.

"I suppose I must believe it! You have proved it, God knows! Do you know I had a dream—at first I thought it was a dream—of your having fallen asleep, tired out, against the foot of my bed early this morning? But it was true! And you nearly collapsed just now. . . . It is I who ought to be adjuring you not to talk! . . ." He gave a weak little laugh, and his fingers moved in Laurent's. "And M. Perrelet tells me that you choose to be in here when you might have had a room to yourself elsewhere! I thought you were obliged to be here, and though you . . . though they had told you . . . you were humane—and you had met me before, and felt perhaps that here was a means of repaying what you insisted on calling a debt, and so——"

Laurent, inspired to rather a bold course, broke in: "If you will forgive me for saying so, was not our having met before just why you disliked my being here? Could you not either forget that fact, or—what I should prefer—try to realize that to me you are, and always will be, exactly what you were in England, or in Paris last year?"

"Oh, my God!" said Aymar to himself, and tried to take his hand away.

But Laurent would not let it go. He knelt down by the bed. "Yes, I know that you feel there is a difference. But I knew—I knew about the slur on you before I entered the room. Nothing that these people say has any effect on me—if you would only believe that! Does not that make it possible for you to take . . . anything I may have the good fortune to do for you, as you would from any other . . . friend?"

He brought out the word rather low, for he felt that it was a little presumptuous, after all.

"Friend!" Aymar caught him up unsteadily. "No, you must not call yourself my friend, de Courtomer! You will not find me desirable, even as an acquaintance, now. Do you forget that I have lost my good name . . . and not only with the enemy?"

"I do not forget it," replied Laurent gravely. "But I know that you can recover it when you wish."

A bitter astonishment dawned in the face on the pillow.

"After what happened to me in the Bois des Fauvettes? No; my reputation is as much damaged by those bullets as my body."

He made himself say it, evidently, but he said it.

"But you cannot deny," urged Laurent, "that that horrible business was a misapprehension. You must pardon my conjecture, but I fancy I know of what kind it was."

Aymar de la Rocheterie shut his eyes and slightly shook his head. "Impossible!" He lay so a moment without moving, his hand still in Laurent's, and then, reopening his eyes, said in a rather exhausted voice, "Some day, perhaps, I will tell you the story. But . . . just now . . . there are things which I cannot tell any one. I have to ask your forbearance for that, just as I most sincerely ask your pardon for my behaviour, my want of consideration. I daresay unhappiness makes one blind, and I have not been . . . very happy."

His hand stiffened. Laurent put his other over it. "There is nothing to forgive. And I shall never ask you for an explanation. For I can guess your secret, La Rocheterie You have taken someone else's guilt upon your shoulders. How long you intend to shield this other person at such a heavy cost to yourself is not my affair—but I hope it will not be for long," he added ingenuously. "I am not going to ask you if my theory is true, for to be quite consistent you would have to say that it was not. . . . I shall leave you to sleep now."

"Monsieur de Courtomer, I assure you——" began L'Oiseleur in a very low voice as his hand was loosed.

Laurent smiled as he got up and drew the curtain over the window. Of course he would deny it! But his smile died to concern as he looked at the bed again.

"I have been tiring you," he said remorsefully. "It is a good thing that I hear the guard coming to remove me. Just let me turn the pillow over, and if there is nothing you want I will leave you in peace."

But peace was not the predominant expression on Aymar de la Rocheterie's face as Laurent took a last look at it before leaving the room.

(11)

The terrace at Arbelles was wide, bounded at each end by a wall. It had the house itself for frontier on one side; on the other it fell sharply to a long bowling green, which in its turn gave way to meadow. Only one flight of steps led down from it, and at the top of these paced an armed sentry. But after eight days' confinement in one room, and that a sick-room, merely to be in the open again gave Laurent an illusory sense of freedom which was slightly intoxicating. And his mind was full of a deep content—the barrier between him and L'Oiseleur was down . . . at last!

Presently there sauntered out the tall young officer of chasseurs à cheval whom he had seen on the day of his arrival. They saluted each other with much punctiliousness, and the young man, naming himself as Lieutenant Rigault, asked if he might join him. So they walked up and down together, commenting at first on nothing more significant than the fine weather. Laurent yawned once or twice.

"I suppose I ought not to tell you," said the chasseur, flicking at the gravel with his switch, "but we have just received bad news this morning. Your party has had a thumping success."

"Ah!" said Laurent, brightening.

"Yes; du Tremblay has captured Chalais and effected his junction with some other leaders; the far side of the Aven will be very uncomfortable for us now unless we can dislodge them. I expect there's some language flying about in our poor Colonel's vicinity to-day—especially as he has got a nasty wound in the leg. He was so set on getting the better of du Tremblay."

"He was indeed," answered Laurent meaningly. "And M. du Tremblay has got the better of him! I am delighted!"

Opponent though he was, the young officer could not help smiling. "Yes, your . . . your not very reputable room-mate upstairs played him a fine trick when he refused to give him a hint of du Tremblay's plans! The Colonel had been absolutely counting on his . . . cooperation. He is rather a dark horse, that gentleman! By the way, since he is, I hear, out of danger, you will be parting company, I suppose. As it is, I——"

"Shall we break off this conversation?" interposed Laurent very coldly. "If you cannot speak in less offensive terms of my friend the Vicomte de la Rocheterie——"

The most naked astonishment looked out at him from Lieutenant Rigault's countenance. "What!" he exclaimed, "you call him friend—the man who betrayed his own followers!"

"If he had done that I certainly should not call him friend," retorted Laurent. "But that is, of course, the most outrageous slander. And there he lies, helpless! . . . Would you mind telling me the exact form in which this calumny reached you here? or did your commanding officer first put it about?"

"Certainly not," responded the young chasseur rather stiffly. "What happened was that Colonel Richard, over at Saint-Goazec, sent an officer here last Saturday week to say that he had disposed of the bulk of L'Oiseleur's force by an ambush at Pont-aux-Rochers. (It was important for us to know this, because they had been a menace to us, lying where they did.) The officer told us how it had occurred—in fact, he was full of it. L'Oiseleur himself had sent the information!"

"How patently absurd!" said Laurent contemptuously. "As if a man would run his own head into the lion's mouth in that manner!"

"But M. de la Rocheterie's head was quite safe," observed Rigault drily. "He was not present at the affair of the bridge—you did not know that? I assure you that it is true. . . And it is certain that Colonel Richard did not invent the story about the information, for his officer said he was rather distressed about it.—And indeed, if it was false, why did La Rocheterie's men shoot him?"

"Why? Because the lie had already been well circulated," retorted Laurent, who could not meet this thrust by the indignant denial of the fact which he would have given yesterday.—"Now I will ask you a question in my turn, Monsieur. Granting for a moment the possibility of L'Oiseleur's ever doing such an incredible thing, what do you suppose he did it for? He must have had some motive!"

Rigault shook his head. "Ah, there you have me. Nobody knows that—except, presumably, Colonel Richard."

"And again," said Laurent eagerly, "do you think that a man who had sunk to such a depth as that would be likely to resist, at the risk of his life, the abominable inquisition about M. du Tremblay's plans to which your Colonel subjected him last Friday, when he was scarcely able to speak? Do you know that the proceeding all but killed him, and that by a few words—one word—he could have saved himself? If, as you pretend to believe, he betrayed his own men, why should he go to the last extremity not to betray du Tremblay's?"

The Imperialist shrugged his shoulders. "Possibly because the necessary inducement, whatever it was, was lacking in this case."

"What the devil do you mean by that, Monsieur?" asked Laurent, firing up.

"I don't mean anything in particular," replied the young officer. "How could I? But I think the Colonel was fully justified in expecting La Rocheterie to make no difficulty about deciphering those notes, and though perhaps he went rather far, you must remember that the knowledge of their contents, could we have had it, might have——"

"Tell me," interrupted Laurent ruthlessly, "was it purely for the sake of those cursed notes that your Colonel wanted M. de la Rocheterie kept alive?"

Lieutenant Rigault looked uncomfortable. "Naturally the Colonel was anxious for the information, and du Tremblay's name was at the top, and as La Rocheterie had——"

"You admit it! Permit me to tell you then——"

"No, I can't permit it!" exclaimed Rigault, interrupting in his turn, and somewhat heated. "I can't stand here and listen to abuse of my commanding officer, and I can't call you to account for it because you are a prisoner. I think, Monsieur, that you are rather taking advantage of your immunity!"

This view did silence the critic, who made some kind of apology, on which his companion observed that they had better not discuss L'Oiseleur any more. So for the rest of the time they spoke of other matters.

Nevertheless, Laurent reentered his place of captivity tingling with exultation, for there was no doubt that the Royalists had scored heavily. Also, it was heaven to know that Guitton was baffled—and damaged.

"I hope you have enjoyed your walk, Monsieur de Courtomer," observed the phantom of L'Oiseleur, who was not asleep, but lying just as he had left him.

"Immensely, thank you. And I have brought you some very good news."

"Good news—for me!" The tone gave Laurent pause, but only for a moment. With much enthusiasm he repeated the tidings.

For the first time the drawn face lit up. "Chalais! He has captured Chalais! It is authentic, the news?"

"Evidently. And he has you to thank for his success!"

"Me to thank for his success!" La Rocheterie was obviously startled. "He might have had me to thank for his failure.—But that, at least, has been spared me," he added, as if to himself.

"But, La Rocheterie," exclaimed the herald, somewhat carried off his feet, "do you not realize that you almost gave your life to keep his secret inviolate? Perhaps I ought not to tell you, but it was touch and go with you afterwards, you know! If M. Perrelet——"

But such a change had come over Aymar's face that Laurent was brought to a standstill. The visible relief—the more than relief—was wiped out in an instant, and without a word he put the back of his bandaged right wrist across his eyes. Laurent had laid too rash a hand upon Friday's bitter wound.

Yet, out of his abhorrence of its author, a thing came to his lips which carried, in its unconscious boyishness and simplicity, a sort of balm of its own. For when, standing there embarrassed and hesitating, he suddenly blurted out, "That scoundrel has got a bullet or something in his leg, thank God!" L'Oiseleur removed his screening arm and looked at him. And, to Laurent's surprise, the mouth which seemed to have forgotten how to smile relaxed after a moment into a semblance of amusement.

"Monsieur de Courtomer," he said slowly, "I think you must have the gift of . . . of partisanship in excelsis!"

And, whether he or the young man standing above him made the first movement, their fingers certainly met.

CHAPTER IV - THE CAPTIVE HAWK

"Altho' his back be at the wa',

Another was the fautor;

Altho' his back be at the wa',

Yet here's his health in water

He gat the skaith, he gat the scorn,

I lo'e him but the better;

Tho' in the muir I hide forlorn,

I'll drink his health in water.

Altho' his back be at the wa',

Yet here's his health in water!"

Jacobite Ballad.

"In short, sir, though you can be infernally provoking, it has been a pleasure to serve you."

STEVENSON, St. Ives.

(1)

M. Perrelet, followed by an orderly with an armful of pillows, came briskly down the corridor one afternoon ten days later, and entered a certain guarded room.

"Well, my children, and what are you doing now?" he demanded benignantly of its inhabitants.

"I am having my knowledge of English extended, sir," responded one of them from the bed, smiling faintly. "M. de Courtomer found an English book on the shelf there, and he is reading it to me. . . . Are those the pillows you promised me this morning?"

He still looked extraordinarily bloodless, and even thinner, but there was more life about him. Laurent had got up, and stood glancing from M. Perrelet to L'Oiseleur with an air of being rather proud of his charge. Indeed, to-day was an important milestone; having, a couple of days ago, been promoted from his recumbent position to about three pillows, La Rocheterie was now going to be propped up with many into a sitting posture for an hour or two—hence the orderly's load. And in a few minutes the little doctor and Laurent proceeded so to prop him.

"You may feel a trifle giddy at first," remarked the former, surveying him critically. "When you are tired, ask your nurse to take them away again. . . . And this is your English book? H'm. Le Vicaire de Vackfeel. What is this Vackfeel—a place or a person? Once I could read English, though not speak it. I read the poet Shackspeer."

"Monsieur Perrelet," observed Laurent, "you are a mine of knowledge, and of everything desirable. And, as you have brought M. de la Rocheterie all those plump pillows, you could no doubt bring me what I want."

"And what is that, my boy?" asked the surgeon, looking up from the pages of Goldsmith which, sitting on the edge of his patient's bed, he was turning over, his lips very much pursed.

"A letter," responded M. de Courtomer. "A letter from a lady—from my mother, in short. Though I do not know why you should play postman. I suppose that if I get a reply to mine, which I wrote—oh, a fortnight ago—it will come through the same channel, those gentlemen downstairs?"

"You had left yours open, I suppose?"

"Yes, but I contrived to put in a good deal of what I wanted to say. And now I wish to hear how my dear mother is bearing my loss."

"I cannot tell you that," replied the little doctor, twinkling, "but any ordinary—or extraordinary—outside news I can supply you with, if you are pining for it. To-day, however, I have heard nothing in particular."

"But might you not get into trouble for telling us, if there were?"

The bounce which M. Perrelet gave shook the bed. "Sacrebleu, young man, am I a soldier? I thank God, no! Do I care, either, whether King or Emperor rules this distracted country, provided he makes haste and does it, and I get my drugs delivered when I order them? If I could hope that those confounded diligence-robbing Chouans of yours had swallowed what I was having sent last week I might feel consoled, for in that event some of those long-haired gentry would still be suffering from stomach-ache. But I have not forgiven the Imperialists either for opening a case because they pretended to think it contained smuggled ammunition. There's nothing to choose between the adherents of either side. No; I am like a character in one of le Shackspeer's plays—I forget which, but this book brings back my little English. He says, à propos of some quarrel (and I say it with him), 'A pla-gué on bot' your 'ousses!'"

The linguist making of the first noun a dissyllable with, as was natural, the continental "a", and of the second the French word which means a horse-cloth, Laurent stooped hurriedly to the floor after nothing in particular, and even L'Oiseleur bit his lip.

"Is not M. Perrelet's pronunciation of English rather singular?" he enquired after the doctor had gone. "You are not always very polite about mine, but even I had not the faintest idea what he was saying just now."

"I should not have known myself, but that it was a quotation," confessed his instructor, laughing. "Are you comfortable like that—not too high?"

"Quite comfortable—but a little out of my bearings. Still, I was coming to know the geography of the ceiling rather overwell. . . . And now that I am thus erected, I suppose you will insist on my reading that book to myself? I wonder, de Courtomer, what is the next reformation that you will try to work on me, after my health and my English?"

And, as he held out his blanched hand with its seamed wrist for the Vicar of Wakefield, he suddenly gave his companion a brief glimpse of his once enchanting smile.

Laurent went red with pleasure. Yes, this was indeed a day to be remembered—the first time that L'Oiseleur had smiled in earnest since he was brought to Arbelles. He gave him the book, and said that he did not really expect him to struggle with it.

"But," said his charge, "I shall like to read more about this pastor who has his living wife's epitaph framed over his mantelpiece to encourage her in virtue! It seems to me that he must be a person of humour."

Highly pleased at this unwonted manifestation of interest, Laurent sat down by the window. Captivity had hardly yet had time to be irksome; he had been too much occupied. But, even if La Rocheterie's life no longer depended on his care, he had no visions of escape, though obviously the climb down from the unbarred window presented only one difficulty to a young and vigorous man—the sentry below. Laurent's heart, however, was chained for the present in this room, where he had acquired something personally more precious than what he had lost. It still seemed strange and wonderful to him that his hero had been given over to him like a child—like an infant, indeed, at one stage, requiring to be fed from a spoon. He was not so helpless now, though he was still very weak. But, since the day when they had come to an understanding, it was nothing but a pleasure to do things for him. And L'Oiseleur was so good, so patient, so grateful!

All at once L'Oiseleur's own voice, with the lightness gone out of it, broke in on these reflections. "You were speaking just now about having written a letter, Comte. Have you writing materials there, and if so might I——"

"Of course," replied Laurent, jumping and fetching them.

M. de la Rocheterie did not get on very fast, however—whether from physical or mental disabilities was not clear. At last his pencil ceased its labours altogether, and the writer put his head back against his high pillows. Perhaps the letter was a difficult one; it might well be!

After a few minutes' inaction he tried again; added a word or two, and desisted a second time. Then he looked in Laurent's direction.

"I am so sorry, de Courtomer," he said rather breathlessly. "I suppose it is these pillows . . . it's ridiculous, but I feel . . ."

What he felt was pretty obvious now. Laurent grabbed away M. Perrelet's erection and laid him flat again where, after a little, he got the better of his faintness. On this, rather to Laurent's surprise, he asked if he might dictate the rest of his letter, as he wanted to finish it.

So Laurent retrieved the pencil and paper and sat down by the bed. Very little was on the paper.

"Please read it over to me," said the writer. And Laurent read these words aloud:

"MY DEAR GRANDMOTHER,—You will, I expect, have heard that my little force was almost annihilated about three weeks ago, and you may have been wondering——"

Laurent looked enquiringly at the bed.

"—'Why you have had no news from me,'" finished its occupant slowly. And Laurent completed the sentence, trying to guess what the next would be. What would he—what could he—tell his grandmother about his plight?

"'I was slightly wounded,'" resumed Aymar in a colourless tone (Laurent involuntarily raising his eyebrows as he transcribed this statement) "'and am now a prisoner, but I have been and am very well looked after.'" He let his eyes dwell for a second on his amanuensis as he dictated this, and his voice had a different inflection though his expression did not change. "'There is therefore no need for anxiety on my behalf.'"

In the pause that followed Laurent wondered whether it were of set purpose that he had not mentioned his place of captivity. L'Oiseleur resumed:

"'Please tell Avoye that her letter reached me just before I—'" he paused again—"'before I was captured. She will understand that I cannot answer it at present as I should have wished. And do not be uneasy if you do not hear from me again for some time.'"

"That is all," said the letter-writer, suddenly appearing exhausted. "If you will kindly give it to me I will sign it."

"Well, there could hardly be a balder letter of reassurance," thought Laurent. "Shall I address it?" he asked.

"If you please," said L'Oiseleur. "'Madame la Vicomtesse de la Rocheterie, Château de Sessignes, près Merléac.' I am going to ask M. Perrelet to post it. If he does not feel justified in doing so I shall tear it up. It is not going through their hands downstairs!"

And, as Laurent assented sympathetically, he added, "But I am afraid you will think that I am not a very candid person, de Courtomer! It would hardly be kind, however, to tell my grandmother the truth about my 'capture,' would it? And there is no actual lie, as you can see, in that letter."

Laurent grew hot in a moment. A faint, half-tortured amusement showed in the red-brown eyes. "Well, perhaps M. Perrelet will refuse to take it, and that will end the matter," said their owner. And Laurent had the strange idea that, on the whole, he would be glad of it.

But M. Perrelet, when asked next morning, made no bones about it at all, merely repeating his Shackspeer quotation rather more execrably than before.

(2)

It was, indeed, M. Perrelet who reigned supreme over the affairs of the two prisoners, and, thanks to him, L'Oiseleur had the best of everything. Aubert, the impassive Major, remained in command of the garrison during this fortunately prolonged absence of Colonel Guitton—Aubert who, according to Laurent, was a mere shell of a man and did not really exist. Certainly they never saw him, nor wished to do so. But with Lieutenant Rigault Laurent was striking up quite a friendship.

In these last ten days M. de Courtomer had ceased to exercise himself deeply over the problem of Pont-aux-Rochers, though he had by no means ceased entirely to think about it. And even if speculation had quite died down it would have been revived by two nocturnal surprises which occurred about this time.

The first was a perfectly unheralded and abrupt ejaculation made by L'Oiseleur in his sleep one night. Laurent was lying wide awake when his companion's voice suddenly cut the silence with—"Tell the truth, de Fresne!"—that, and no more. After a second or two's amazement, Laurent tiptoed over to his bed to discover that he was, undoubtedly, talking in his sleep. But that clueless fragment—more like a command than an entreaty—out of the brain which held the secret, which was busy with it, evidently, in dreams, had it given the name of the man whom L'Oiseleur was shielding at such cost . . . or had it not? Nor, having heard it as he did, dared Laurent ask.

But two nights later he was wakened out of a very sound slumber to hear a thick and agonized voice saying in the darkness, "I shall never be there in time now! . . . Get on, you brute! . . . Six miles yet . . . O God! O God!" Then came actual sounds of struggle, and Laurent jumped half terrified out of bed and struck a light, to find Aymar writhing about, repeating between clenched teeth, "I can't get my hands free—I can't get my hands free!" and then, gasping, "Make them be quick about it, for God's sake!"

Laurent set down the candle and laid hold of the scarred wrists. "La Rocheterie, La Rocheterie, wake up!"

"How dare you touch me!" cried the sleeper excitedly, trying to throw off the grasp, his eyes still shut. Then the bonds of nightmare suddenly loosed, and he opened his eyes and lay there panting.

After a moment he put his hand to his damp forehead. "I was dreaming," he got out confusedly. "It was nothing . . . I am so sorry I disturbed you . . . if you would just take these ropes away—no, what am I talking about! I am awake now . . . go back to bed, de Courtomer."

But he could not, surely, have been thoroughly awake, for when Laurent, with an exclamation of "I believe you have started your shoulder bleeding!" tore open his shirt and began to repair the slight mischief caused by the bandages having slipped, Aymar, with a sudden gleam in his eyes, seized his wrists and tried mutely but passionately to hold him off. And Laurent could not bear to master him by force, as he might so easily have done.

"La Rocheterie!" he said, looking down at him almost sternly, "this is not worthy of you! Take your hands away!"

For a second the weak, half-frenzied grip tightened, then it relaxed altogether, and L'Oiseleur obeyed him—to Laurent's secret amazement—and turned his unhappy face away while measures were taken that the dressings should not slip a second time.

In fact, when M. Perrelet came next morning he exclaimed at his assistant's bandaging. "You might have been lashing something to a mast!" he observed, and asked why his patient had not complained. But Aymar said gravely, "I should not dare to question anything M. de Courtomer did to me. He is too commanding." And he gave the confused Laurent a look oddly compounded of sadness, mischief, and affection.

(3)

Another week passed. Laurent received a letter from his mother, containing sympathetic messages to L'Oiseleur, and the information that the Aunts considered Laurent honoured as sharing his captivity, both of which announcements L'Oiseleur had received very stiffly. And for the rest of the day he had looked . . . Laurent had seen that look before, but he had never put a name to it . . . he had looked haunted.

That night, after Laurent was in bed, his fellow-captive suddenly asked, "What was M. Perrelet saying to you this morning about Napoleon's despatching troops to the west?"

"That something like twenty-five battalions of the line are being sent against Brittany and Vendée, besides cavalry and what not. It is flattering . . . if only one were free!"

"If you were—yes!"

"But I was only an aide-de-camp," faltered Laurent.

"The more lucky you! You had no men to throw away!"

He was tormenting himself about those miserable "Eperviers" of his, then—those scoundrels who did not deserve it! It was not easy for Laurent to realize that L'Oiseleur's lost legion consisted of two parts—the victims of the disaster at the bridge, and those who had subsequently made their leader a victim, too—and he tended to confound them both in one burning horror and hatred.

"Eveno, for instance," went on the sad voice in the darkness, "Eveno, who used to follow me like a dog—you remember, perhaps, my speaking of him in England—I do not know whether he is killed or a prisoner; he is just missing, like so many others . . ."

"I remember about Eveno," said Laurent gently. The name brought the "fairy tale" back to him at once. "I suppose," he proceeded, almost without reflecting, "that the jartier is now in the possession of our friends downstairs—much good may it do them! I noticed long ago, of course, that it was not on your arm."

"The jartier!" exclaimed its late possessor, and gave a harsh little laugh. "No, the Imperialists have not got it, nor my men either. I once told you that I put no faith in it, de Courtomer. Nevertheless, if I had it now, I should not be lying here, despised even by my enemies. . . . No, I do not refer to the running water legend; I should rather say again—did I believe in the amulet at all—that the jartier had carried me safely through that river of yours. . . . I wish it had not! . . . Good-night."

Laurent lay silent after that, looking from his bed at the summer stars. Yes, there could be no doubt that Aymar was bitterly regretting the too-heavy sacrifice he had made. If only, only he would throw down the burden he had assumed! . . . But what if he could not throw it down—what if he were entangled in a situation from which it was no longer in his power to extricate himself at will, if, by some trick of Fate not anticipated when he took his generous resolution, he were a prisoner indeed, in the most terrible kind of captivity . . . and knew it!

The idea came on Laurent like a blow over the heart, and Arcturus, pulsating out there in the limitless heavens, had passed out of sight before he made any effort after slumber.

(4)

But whatever truth there might be in Laurent's most unwelcome theory, L'Oiseleur's relapses into gloom and bitterness were separated by periods when someone resembling the old and charming Aymar was visible once more. After all, he was young, and Laurent, too, was young—younger still—and at times the youth of both of them surged up and over. Such a time was that day when, returning from his promenade on the terrace, Laurent announced to his companion that their captivity would henceforth be shared by a third individual—and then, at sight of his dismayed face, burst out laughing, and told him to wait until he had shown him the individual in question. He thereupon fetched a drinking-glass, turned his back, and after a moment deposited on the bed, in this transparent prison, an enormous grasshopper, as green as a leaf.

"Take it away!" said L'Oiseleur, recoiling. "It will get out . . . and I don't want it on me!"

Laurent sat himself down on the bed, too. "No, it won't. Besides, I'm going to tame it. You know that it is de rigueur for prisoners to tame mice and spiders, and this is better—of such a pleasing sylvan colour. I found him on the terrace. We will call him Vert-Vert; the parrot in the poem could not have been greener.—'Il était beau, brillant, leste et volage.' Look how he is feeling about with those enormous horns!"

"Poor devil!" said Aymar, studying the captive. "I should let it go again if I were you, de Courtomer."

"Very well," quoth Laurent and lifted the glass.

"Not here, you imbecile!" But Vert-Vert, after one second's reflection, had vanished into space. Yet, as his colour quickly betrayed him on the white quilt, he was recaptured without much difficulty at the foot of the bed, amid protests from its occupant, who did not, however, seem really annoyed—rather on the verge of being amused.

And indeed it was through Vert-Vert's agency that the next day was rendered remarkable; for it was the day on which L'Oiseleur actually laughed.

Laurent had been racking his brains for the most striking means of introducing Vert-Vert to M. Perrelet's notice, the great difficulty, however, being that the lively insect would not stay where he was put. All at once an idea came to him.

"I have it, Aymar!" he exclaimed . . . and pulled himself up short as the name slipped out. "—I beg your pardon!"

"Why?" asked L'Oiseleur, smiling. "I should like it. May I venture to do the same?"

"Yes, indeed!" said Laurent, colouring. And he added ingenuously, "I only wish my name were as beautiful as yours."

"Is it beautiful?" asked its possessor, raising his eyebrows. "I never thought of it. There have been so many in our family since the first, who was a Crusader.—But go on with your plan for introducing M. Perrelet to Vert-Vert."

Laurent was staring at him. That vivid impression of his own on his first entry to this room had justification then . . . He came back with a jump to his proposal. It needed some argument to get Aymar to agree to it, but when M. Perrelet came into the room half an hour later Laurent was chuckling to think how little one would have imagined that the grave young man who greeted him so demurely from his pillows was cherishing under the bedclothes, like any schoolboy, a large green grasshopper to let fly in his physician's face when he started to dress his wounds.

Not only, indeed, had L'Oiseleur entered into this childishness, but he had, as the event showed, planned an improvement upon it. For he withheld the insect enclosed in his hand from M. Perrelet altogether, and launched it instead, at an unexpected moment during the dressing of his shoulder, at his partner in guilt on the other side of the bed. Laurent started back with an exclamation as the ill-starred acrobat blundered against his chin and then fell into the little bowl of water which he held, and Aymar buried his face in the pillow, laughing like a boy.

A slow smile came over M. Perrelet's countenance as the situation dawned upon him. "Ah!" he said to himself in a tone of satisfaction. "But if there are any more of the Locustidae in your bed, Monsieur de la Rocheterie——"

"Do forgive me, sir!" pleaded Aymar, emerging from the pillow. "It was this follower of Buffon here. . . . Oh, it's gone again . . . it's on me!"

"Locusta viridissima, extremely agile," commented M. Perrelet. "For goodness' sake get the insect under control again, Monsieur de Courtomer, if I'm ever to finish this dressing!"

(5)

But Vert-Vert, who was to have enlivened their captivity, stayed with them only three days. On the third he sprang through the open window by Aymar's bed and was no more seen. Aymar blamed Laurent for letting him loose on the counterpane, Laurent retorted that the person under the counterpane was in charge. He was always in hopes of finding another on the terrace, but he did not succeed.

The days went on. It was June now. Aymar was slowly gaining strength, but he had not yet left his bed. Almost every day Laurent would read to him a little, but though he always had a courteous appearance of attention, the reader sometimes wondered whether he were really listening. He would occasionally read himself, but never for long; if one turned round after a while the book had invariably slipped from his hands, and he was lying absorbed in thought . . . and looking haunted.

It was impossible to pretend that L'Oiseleur was an exhilarating comrade of captivity. And though he made efforts, as was plain—rather pathetic efforts—to be cheerful, the gaiety which is pumped up from the depths of a heavy heart lacks sparkle. In fact, even ordinary conversation was often extremely difficult, for with a man under such a cloud and so sensitive, there was scarcely a subject in the past, present, or future which was not capable of wounding. Laurent's own short and uneventful history had always seemed an innocuous topic, but one day he wished he had not dilated even on that.

He had been describing an incident in his childhood, when he thought he had lost his mother during a game of hide-and-seek in the garden, when Aymar suddenly began, "My last recollection of my mother is of looking for her in a garden—at least I suppose you would call it a garden, though it had high walls round, and no flowers. But I did not find her . . . ever."

Laurent looked over at him with a kind of catch at the heart. Aymar had taken out a spray of wallflower from the glass by his bed, and was holding it in his bloodless fingers.

"I was in the prison Port Libre, you know," he went on, his eyes fixed on the flower, "with my mother and father—and my uncle—in '94. I was five years old then. My mother could not bear to leave me behind in our house in Paris when my father and she were arrested. She must have thought that they would not be detained long. . . . My father was just my age when he was guillotined. Yes, I used to play in that flowerless garden when it was fine—and the summer of '94, I have been told since, was very fine. . . . But the day they left me it was too hot to play; I think I must have had a headache, for I remember my mother dipping her handkerchief in water and putting it round my head, and kissing me a great many times. She was only a girl. I have the handkerchief still. . . . And I looked for her that day in the garden, all round the great acacia tree that was there—I can see its rough, channelled bark now—I looked every day . . . and I asked everybody. . . . A week's delay would have saved them; they were executed on the second of Thermidor."

"And you . . . afterwards?" asked Laurent with some difficulty.

"After Robespierre's fall I was taken to my uncle's widow, who had not been arrested. She had one little girl, my cousin, now Mme de Villecresne. I was with my young aunt till she died—of grief, as I know now—two years later, and then my cousin and I went to our grandmother at Sessignes.—So you can imagine that a man with memories like mine——" And there he stopped and relapsed into silence, his hand closing convulsively over the wallflower, which Laurent found, later, on the floor, a mere crushed ball of petals.

All the rest of the day he was haunted by a picture of a forlorn little auburn-haired boy in a prison, ceaselessly asking and looking for the mother who had left it for a narrower. And now he who had been that little boy was once more a captive, and once more robbed of the most precious thing he had.

But Laurent was a captive, too, and often found it far from amusing to be cooped up summer day after summer day, when history was being made and battles fought without him. For that, as he gathered from M. Perrelet, was precisely what was happening in Vendée, where, since mid-May, when the Marquis Louis de la Rochejaquelein had arrived from England and assumed the leadership, things had really been moving. And Brittany, L'Oiseleur's Brittany, where they were held fast, was full of activity, too. Even if, as seemed likely, the decisive conflict would take place on the northeastern frontier, it was very bitter to be debarred from playing any part in this local struggle which, after all, was occupying many thousands of troops which Napoleon could well have utilized elsewhere for that great decision.

—But not so bitter for him, Laurent recognized, as for his fellow-captive. At times, for Aymar's sake, he really dreaded M. Perrelet's jovial, "Well, so your brigands have taken Redon!" or, "I hear that your general-in-chief is in straits for want of ammunition," since both good and bad tidings had almost equal power to stab the leader whose men had already been so uselessly sacrificed.

(6)

On June 9th, more than five weeks after he had been brought to the château, Aymar was at last allowed to leave his bed, and sat in an armchair looking, so Laurent privately thought, ten times as gaunt and hollow-eyed as he had done between the sheets. Indeed his quite natural state of weakness was a considerable disappointment to L'Oiseleur as well as to his nurse, since at first his legs would not support him for an instant. However, on the second day he managed to walk round the room between M. Perrelet and Laurent, and shortly afterwards was clad in a suit of clothes belonging to the absent owner of Arbelles, for every garment of his own, except his boots, had had to be destroyed. Though this did not fit him, in cut and texture it was well enough, and to Laurent it was a great thing to see his charge clothed. He cherished visions of taking him before long for a walk on the terrace.

But on the whole L'Oiseleur was even more depressed than he had been while in bed, and Laurent wondered whether this was due to the disappointment of finding himself so unexpectedly weak. He had hoped that his friend was getting the better of these periods of gloom, and now the haunted look was more apparent than ever.

"I wish to goodness that he would tell me the whole story and have done with it!" he thought, almost in despair, after a few days of this, as he went down one afternoon for his constitutional. "He half promised that he would, some day; it would be so much better if he talked about it instead of eternally brooding over it. Two heads might perhaps see a way out."

Personal matters apart, Laurent himself had really more cause for depression at the moment than La Rocheterie. For only this morning had M. Perrelet brought them the news of the death of the Marquis de la Rochejaquelein in a skirmish—a calamitous loss to the Vendean Royalists. It had indeed greatly shocked the late Vendean aide-de-camp. On the other hand, the good doctor reported a victory of Sol de Grisolles, the Breton general-in-chief, on June 10th, which had opened for him the way to the sea, and to the reception of much-needed arms from England. But this had not cheered L'Oiseleur.

Rigault and another young officer were already strolling on the terrace when his guard deposited Laurent there. The former hailed him; the latter he had met once or twice, and the three took a turn up and down together.

"Pleasant weather," remarked Rigault. "I'm glad, Monsieur de Courtomer, that you get at least this taste of it. He's a very thoughtful old boy, the Sieur Perrelet.—By the way, I hear that Saint Sebastian is out of bed at last."

Laurent stopped dead and looked him in the face. "I don't know to whom you are referring, Monsieur!" he said sharply. But the red which had mounted to his cheek showed that he had at any rate a very good idea.

"No offence!" said Rigault lightly. "The name is not of my originating."

"Though, parbleu, it is, from all accounts, strikingly appropriate," murmured the other officer.

"It is in strikingly bad taste!" retorted Laurent, turning upon him. And as the culprit did not appear penitent, but had a subdued grin on his face, he added, "I did not come out here to listen to offensive conversation," and began to move haughtily away. But Rigault came after him.

"It is I who ought to apologize, Monsieur de Courtomer," he said hastily. "I do apologize, sincerely. It slipped out without my meaning it."

Laurent writhed. Evidently the officers of the garrison were in the habit of referring to Aymar by this title; and it was, horribly, appropriate. Therein lay its offensiveness. The other officer made a half-laughing apology, too, and saluting, went off. Laurent looked after him, frowning.

"I must say you are a staunch champion," came Rigault's voice in his ear. "Please don't think I am insincere when I say that I admire you for it! Really, I hope I should be the same in your place. Saint Se—— La Rocheterie is your friend, and if a man does not believe his friend when he assures him that he is innocent, well . . ."

But Lieutenant Rigault's magnanimous attempt to take another's point of view fell disappointingly flat. For Laurent, biting his lip, was now frowning at the gravel of the terrace. It was an odd moment for the thought to strike him for the first time in all these weeks, that that was exactly what his friend had never done. Aymar never had assured him, in so many words, that he was innocent.

He shook off the impression in a moment—for why should Aymar have told him a thing of which, as he knew, Laurent was already convinced? And when he returned to their joint apartment he had forgotten it.

Aymar, lying back in his armchair by the window, doing nothing, exactly as he had left him, appeared so averse to conversation that Laurent gave up the attempt, and took up instead The Vicar of Wakefield, which he himself was rereading at odd moments, for the English lessons had soon been discontinued. It had not taken Laurent long to find out that his pupil's interest in them was only simulated—probably for his sake.

The innocent and amiable volume now opened of itself at the beginning of Chapter xxii, and Laurent found himself reading these words in large type, "NONE BUT THE GUILTY CAN BE LONG AND COMPLETELY MISERABLE."

They were only one of Goldsmith's sententious chapter-headings, but they might have been the inscription on Belshazzar's palace wall. Laurent was suddenly mesmerized, and remained staring at them. . . . He did not ask whether what they stated was axiomatically true; it was only that it fitted in so diabolically with—well, with all the profound depression of the last few days, with the whole attitude, even, of that silent figure now leaning its head on its nerveless hand, not even looking out of the window at the allurements of June. . . . And the page cast up at him further accusing scraps: "grief seemed formed for continuing . . . anxiety had taken strong possession . . . nothing gave her ease . . . in company she dreaded contempt, in solitude she only found anxiety. . . ."

—"Long and completely miserable . . . none but the guilty . . ." Good God, what was he thinking! Hot and cold by turns Laurent flung The Vicar of Wakefield violently on his bed. His action had at least the result of rousing Aymar, for it made him jump.

(7)

Next day, when Laurent came back from the terrace, he walked into an empty room. Aymar was not there.

One pang of wild dismay and, turning quickly, he inserted his foot into the closing door. "Where is M. de la Rocheterie?" he demanded fiercely of the sentry.

"A guard came and took him downstairs about half an hour ago," replied the man. "I must shut this door, sir."

"Took him downstairs!" ejaculated Laurent. "Downstairs! In Heaven's name, why?"

"The Colonel is back, and wished to see him—some kind of a council, I think. I shall get into trouble, sir, if you don't allow me——"

"I have a good mind to go down after him," declared Laurent, the light of combat coming into his eyes. "—No, all right," he added, as the empty-handed sentry thereupon made a grab for his musket. And he turned away.

Guitton back—and sending for L'Oiseleur! What could it mean? The cipher business again? No, that was all over. Oh, damn that scoundrel, why did he come back—why did he not die of that ball in his leg? And, as to making Aymar go downstairs in his present condition, when he had never done more than walk a little about this room—well, they would certainly have to carry him up again. It would set him back for ages, and M. Perrelet was away for a couple of days, too.

Thus Laurent fumed. But Aymar was not carried back, though when at last he came in he looked scarcely able to stand, and leant against the door for a moment with closed eyes, clutching the handle. Laurent, thinking he was going to fall, hurried to him.

"Aymar——" he began, putting out an arm.

But Aymar brushed aside his proffered assistance with small courtesy, and, staggering past him to his own bed, sat down, gripping the edge of it with both hands. Laurent took one glance at him and poured out brandy.

"Those stairs!" he muttered furiously. "Madness. . . . Drink this, and lie down quickly."

But Aymar did not seem to see the glass he held out. He was staring in front of him with eyes like live coals, his breath coming very fast; and in a moment Laurent realized that, as well as being physically spent, he was quivering with rage.

"You must take this, Aymar," he repeated.

The eyes blazed at him then. "You are becoming a veritable old woman, de Courtomer! There are times when one would really prefer to be allowed to lie down and perish in peace." After which ungracious remark he took the brandy from the slightly stunned Laurent, drank it off impatiently, and, pulling himself completely on to the bed, subsided there.

Laurent went and looked out of the window, undeniably wounded, but telling himself that something extremely unpleasant had been taking place downstairs, and that a man on the border-line of endurance will sometimes strike out at the very person he would least desire to hurt, if that person be on the spot. Nor had he ever judged Aymar's to be a very patient nature. He stole a look at him now, and saw that he was lying face downwards. For the first time he realized what an affliction it must be never to have solitude in hours of strain. But as he could not take himself off he tried to bury himself in a book.

It might have been ten minutes later, or twenty, that Aymar suddenly turned over and raised himself on an elbow.

"I want to ask your pardon for the way I spoke to you just now, Laurent," he said, in a voice not quite free from constraint. "I hope you know that I did not mean it for an instant. I was . . . annoyed . . . but not, God knows, with you."

The blood seemed to come back to Laurent's heart again. "Of course I knew that you did not mean it," he replied cheerfully. "I saw that you were . . . annoyed . . ." And, longing to ask why, but not quite daring, he took refuge in a triviality. "Convalescents are allowed to be irritable. So, if it means that you are getting stronger, you are welcome to call me an old woman as much as you like."

Aymar struggled off the bed back to his sitting posture on the edge. "Did I really say that? I deserve to be——" He stopped abruptly, and a wave of red passed over his colourless face. It became still more sombre; he shut his mouth tight, and dragging himself to his feet went over to the window, stood a moment looking out, and then let himself fall into the big chair there.

"Laurent," he said presently, "as an excuse for my rudeness and ingratitude I will tell you why they had me down." But there was struggle in his voice, and with one hand he was twisting a tassel of the chair. "It was the same thing over again. Colonel Guitton asked me what I meant to do henceforward, since I could hope for no mercy from my own side. He was therefore kind enough to promise me a commission with his." And, as Laurent made an angry exclamation, he went on, "But that is nothing new. Have you forgotten his visit here that day? Only this time it was much more public"—he caught his breath for a second—"and this time he did not, I think, really expect me to accept. . . . Then they went through my few papers at great length, and questioned me about them. That's all. Don't ask me any more about it."

He put his head back in the chair; his arms fell to his sides. Laurent, kneeling by him, carried away on far too deep a tide of anger and pity to remember his own recent repulse, began to chafe the cold hands, cursing under his breath the man who had devised so public an indignity.

For a moment Aymar roused himself.

"Coals of fire," he said, looking at him with a world of expression in his tragic eyes. "Yes, as Guitton announced just now, shooting is too good for me!"

(8)

They were nearer to each other that evening than they had ever been before. Afterwards, Laurent thought that had Aymar not been so spent in body and so quivering in soul he would probably have told him his secret. As it was, he lay silent on his bed and watched the sky through the window, and Laurent watched him, and had a kind of happiness from it.

But at the same time he was deeply uneasy. What would that devil do next, now that he was back? He had not waited long to strike. But, short of imprisoning them in different rooms—a most distasteful possibility—the young man did not see what he could do.

It was about two o'clock next afternoon, a little before the time when Laurent usually took his walk on the terrace, that steps outside the door roused him from the book he was reading.

"My escort," he said with a yawn. "The fellows are early."

But there entered instead—Colonel Guitton.

Laurent's heart descended to his boots. Aymar immediately pulled himself out of his chair, and stood looking out of the window.

"Good afternoon, Monsieur de Courtomer," said the Bonapartist, taking on his side no notice of L'Oiseleur. "A pleasant day, is it not?" He came forward into the room, limping a little, as Laurent was delighted to see. "You have not yet gone out for your constitutional, then? It was really à propos of that that I came—to suggest that you should, if you wished, have liberty to extend it."

"You are very kind, Monsieur le Colonel," murmured Laurent, taken aback.

"In fact, I have been reflecting that it would perhaps be more agreeable for you to become a prisoner on parole altogether now."

"But why should I suddenly become a prisoner on parole?"

"Because," responded the Colonel, showing his teeth in his false smile, "you will henceforward be alone in captivity, and, as an alleviation, I thought——"

"Alone!" exclaimed Laurent, glancing at the figure against the window. He did mean to separate them, then!

"Yes," said the Imperialist. "You are going to lose your patient to-day. I am afraid that we cannot keep him any longer.—Monsieur de la Rocheterie!"

Aymar was forced to turn round. He wore an icy and disdainful face.

"Here, Monsieur," said the Colonel, advancing to the table, "are most of the papers and all the money and other effects found on you after . . . after your unfortunate experience in the Bois des Fauvettes. We had the pleasure of going through the former together yesterday. Here, in particular, is a letter which I am sure you will be very glad to recover. There is now nothing to keep you longer from the fair writer—unless, of course, she has rather stricter views on honour than yours!" And, with his eyes on him, he laid a purse, a leather case, and a stained letter on the table.

Aymar had not moved from the window. But at the last words Laurent saw his hands shut themselves with a jerk. After a very tense second he demanded curtly, "Why are you giving me back those things?"

"Because it is usual to return his effects to a liberated prisoner—and you are free, Monsieur de la Rocheterie."

"Free!" exclaimed L'Oiseleur, taking a step forward.

"Free!" echoed Laurent, not believing his ears.

"You are surprised, Monsieur de Courtomer," enquired the Colonel suavely, turning to him. "But of what advantage can it be to us to house, feed, and give medical attendance to this gentleman any longer? After yesterday's interview we have no choice but to ask him to seek lodging elsewhere. As it is highly improbable that he will find it among his own friends we do not run any risk in this step.—I regret, Monsieur de la Rocheterie, that with these possessions I cannot return to you your sword. You had, I fancy, already been deprived of it before your . . . accident."

And at that Aymar strode forward to the table.

"If you were only a gentleman I would call you out for that!" he said, in a voice of intense and quiet fury; and he looked so dangerous that Laurent all but made a movement to intervene.

"Any gentleman would hold me absolved from accepting your challenge if you sent it," retorted the Bonapartist, undisturbed. "I think you will realize that state of affairs when you are free, Monsieur le Vicomte!—Be ready, please, to leave this room in a quarter of an hour."

In the stunned silence brought about by his last words he turned as if to go, then, apparently remembering something, swung round again, and, putting his hand into his pocket, took out a small object.

"'The reward of martial valour,' if I mistake not," he said drily, looking down at it and evidently reading off the phrase. Then he lifted his eyes to his released prisoner, and, taking the little object from the palm of one hand, held it out dangling from the finger and thumb of the other. Laurent then saw what it was—Aymar's Cross of St. Louis, held out to its owner in silence, but with a look and a smile which made a more hateful commentary than any words. Colonel Guitton, who had come in person to announce his decree, intended that L'Oiseleur should be made to receive his dishonoured decoration from him in person; and that, in fact, was what did happen, for after a moment or two of waiting Aymar was obliged to advance and take the order from the outstretched hand. And, having forced him to this, the Colonel turned away with a broadening of his contemptuous smile.

But Laurent managed to intercept him before he got to the door.

"Monsieur le Colonel," he protested, "you cannot do such an inhuman thing! It is unheard of! M. de la Rocheterie is only just out of a sick-bed where he has lain, as you know, in danger of his life—he can hardly stand . . . he is not fit to travel. It is little short of murder!"

The dragoon shrugged his shoulders. "That is not my business, Monsieur de Courtomer. We have returned him his money; it is open to him to procure further medical care. I do not think, however," he added with a sneer, "that he will go to the nearest Royalist headquarters for it; that might lead him to a beech tree again! Anyhow, Monsieur le Comte, I am sorry to deprive you of his society, as you seem to like it. So, if you care to give me your parole——"

"I'll see you in hell first!" cried Laurent, exploding. And the force of his passion was such that he barely heard the Colonel, with a darkened and furious face, saying something, as he went out, about the place in which he would shortly find himself. . . .

And Aymar? Aymar had laid down the cross near his other little possessions, and with bowed head was supporting himself, close to the table, by the back of a chair. As soon as he heard the door close he dropped into the chair, put his elbows on the table, and covered his face. The next moment his hands slid, locked, from his face, and his head went down on his outstretched arms.

"Aymar," said Laurent in an almost awe-struck voice, "he cannot mean this—it's impossible!"

No answer—except that given by the objects lying on the table near the humiliated head. The obscurest soldier would have been too valuable to the other side to release, but L'Oiseleur was henceforth worthless; they could safely afford themselves the satisfaction of flinging him out. And the realization of this had beaten him to his knees.

"It is impossible," repeated Laurent, but with less assurance. "Did he—did he threaten this yesterday?"

The bronze head stirred, and then raised itself. But Aymar's expression was dazed, and after staring at him a moment he dropped his face again on his arms.

A wave of fierce, indignant pity surged over Laurent. Yes, that butcher and devil had knocked him out of time. Mercifully he could not witness his achievement. He knelt down and threw an arm across the bowed shoulders.

"Aymar," he said desperately, "let us think what is to be done. There is not very long."

But Aymar said in a choked voice, "I wonder you can bring yourself to touch me."

As an answer to that Laurent put his arm closer about him. "Do you think I pay a moment's heed to what that blackguard said? I have your secret. But, Aymar, the cost is too heavy!"

The locked hands twisted a moment. "The cost—my God!—the cost!" said the voice brokenly. Then L'Oiseleur lifted his head, his eyes fixed on the window. "You still think that of me? You will not think it much longer!"

"Am I so changeable?" asked Laurent gently. He possessed himself of a hand. "Yes, Aymar, the cost is too heavy. It is more than one man ought to pay for another . . . it is not right. I do implore you to reconsider, now, and—clear yourself!"

There was no answer for a moment. L'Oiseleur's hand lay impassive in his. He put his other over his eyes. Then, between a gasp and a sigh, he said, "I cannot. I cannot clear myself."

Laurent set his teeth. His fingers closed on the faintly scarred wrist. "I have thought that sometimes," he answered. "You have got entangled in another's dishonour. Then, as I am a living man, that other shall clear you.—Tell me, who is this de Fresne who would not admit the truth?"

Aymar's hand dropped from his eyes. He looked at the speaker with haggard astonishment. "De Fresne—where did you hear his name?" And without giving him time to reply he went on, "Oh, my dear Laurent, you are on the wrong road! No, no; de Fresne was . . . the victim, not the culprit. The truth . . ." A little shudder went through him, and he withdrew his hand from Laurent's grasp. "I have no one but myself to thank for my situation—that is the truth. I ought to have told you everything before this . . . and now there is no time . . ." He took a deep breath. "How much longer? I must be ready."

"Only a few minutes more," faltered Laurent, glancing away to the clock.—No one but myself to thank. . . . If he would only give him the clue! . . . But this was not the moment. If in a few instants Aymar de la Rocheterie was to be thrust out from the shelter of a roof, some preparation must be made—but what preparation? He had nothing but the ill-fitting clothes he wore. And as to provisions, there were none in the room. Laurent sprang up from his knees.

"You must take my cloak. There is brandy in the flask, I think."

"Your cloak?" repeated Aymar tonelessly. "It is uniform—I cannot wear it." He pulled himself to his feet and stood looking down at his returned possessions. "What am I to do with these?" he said, as though to himself, touching them stupidly. But as he took up the letter a spasm of pain came over his face. "I know what I will do with this. . . . Have you a tinderbox there?"

Laurent gave him his. With hands whose shaking he tried vainly to control Aymar at last obtained a light, set fire to the stained letter, and held it flaming till it fell in flakes on the table, till his own hand was almost burned. And Laurent stood dumb before an agony of soul which he felt to be as consuming as the mounting flame that was so strange in the daylight . . . and before the immediate vision of his own great loss. In a few moments—unless it were a cruel jest of authority—his friend would be torn from him. It was quite possible that he should never see him again. . . . And in that second he took his resolve: if he got a bullet in him, if he broke his neck over it, he would leave the château Arbelles himself that night.

"Aymar," he said abruptly, "tell me quickly in what direction you will go, for I mean to follow you."

"Direction?" repeated Aymar, staring at the ashes of the letter. "Direction—I don't know. Just away somewhere—where they do not know me. . . . A firing-party would have been so much more merciful," he added to himself.

He slowly put his money and the wallet into one pocket, while Laurent, with smarting eyes, slipped the brandy-flask into the other. The cross, with the laurel-encircled sword uppermost, still lay on the table by the ashes of the letter, only a small piece of its red ribbon, oddly jagged and torn, still adhering to it. Aymar looked down at it.

"Perhaps you would rather not have any remembrance of me—a man who can be insulted with impunity," he said, his lip curling. "But, if you care to, will you take this?" And he suddenly held out the decoration to his companion.

Laurent was staggered. Aymar was too stunned, of course, to realize what he was doing. He caught him by the arm.

"No!" he cried fervently. "What, take what you won so gloriously, and will wear again as gloriously some day! Put it in your pocket, Aymar. I want no remembrance of you, for we shall not long be separated. I mean to escape from Arbelles to-night and follow you. But I must know in what direction you intend to go."

L'Oiseleur did mechanically put the order into a pocket, but to the question he shook his head. "Have you not heard that neither side will give me shelter?"

"For God's sake don't talk like that!" cried Laurent. "Do you not realize that in your state you cannot walk half a mile? Will you go to the inn in the village, and we can arrange——No, I have a better idea! Of course you will go to M. Perrelet—why did I not think of that before? Then you will be properly cared for. Aymar, go there at once; any one will direct you to his house."

But Aymar once more shook his head. "He is away. I would not ask such a favour of him if he were at home. I cannot install myself there in his absence."

"Very well, then, the inn; and we must arrange quickly how I am to meet you when I escape——"

For the first time Aymar showed animation. "When you escape! My dear Laurent, you are much more likely to find yourself a prisoner in earnest to-night! That man will not forgive your outburst. Oh, Laurent, why did you do it?"

"For Heaven's sake, listen, Aymar! Will you go to the village till I——"

"The village! To face the soldiers? Enough that I shall have to face them here . . . and now," he added, as a heavy tread was audible along the corridor. They both listened for a second.

"It does not matter where I go," went on Aymar. "You will never see me again, Laurent. So much the better. I would not have you touched with the shadow of my disgrace. . . . For what you have been to me I cannot even thank you." He held out his hand rather blindly. "I have taken so much from you . . . and repaid it so ill. . . ."

There throbbed in the last words a veritable naked nerve of pain, more than Laurent could comprehend. All he knew was that he had enough pain of his own. . . . As the tread stopped, and voices were heard outside the door, he caught his friend by the shoulders. "I shall see you again—I shall find you! I am coming after you—to-night! This is only au revoir, L'Oiseleur!" And he kissed him on both cheeks.

"No, it is adieu," replied Aymar, his hands on the hands that held him, as if to disengage himself. But all at once Laurent felt himself pulled closer, his friend's, his hero's head was down for a moment on his shoulder, and he heard, close to his ear, the whispered words, "Try to go on believing that I am not a traitor!"—farewell and appeal in one. Then the clasp loosened, and he himself turned to see four soldiers with fixed bayonets coming through the door. He was dully surprised; had they expected resistance?

Aymar drew himself up, and looked at them gravely. The quiet personal dignity which it seemed impossible for him ever quite to lose shone out the more clearly, as he braced himself to meet fresh humiliation—so clearly, in fact, that the escort, rather surprisingly, saluted him. But to Laurent the scene was horribly that of a man going out to execution. Had La Rocheterie's father, "just my age when he was guillotined," worn an air like that? But no one had thrown mud at him! Aymar gave his friend an unforgettable look and held out his hand once more. "Adieu!" he said again. Laurent wrung the hand hard. "I shall follow!" he repeated, slowly and clearly, in English.

The next moment the door was locked again, the tramp of feet was dying away, and Laurent was alone—alone in the room which never yet, save for a short space yesterday, had he known destitute of Aymar's presence.

CHAPTER V - FREE—WITH A BROKEN WING

"I swear I will not ask your meaning in it:

I do believe yourself against yourself,

And will henceforward rather die than doubt."

TENNYSON, Geraint and Enid.

(1)

The first moments of Laurent's grief were savage. He stood for some time at the window, his hands clenched together before him, his head against the grey panelling at the side, choking down the spasms of grief and fury which rose in his throat. He could not bear to look at the silent room. At last he stumbled over to Aymar's deserted bed and flung himself there, face downwards. God only knew where Aymar would lie to-night!

But very soon his mind was plotting the details of his own escape. This window here by Aymar's bed, after dark, because it looked out round the corner, not on the facade; it would be quite easy. If he could only have elicited from L'Oiseleur where he intended to go! But Aymar seemed to have no plan—how could he? The fiat had been to them both like an unforeseen sentence of death.

Laurent stirred and gripped the pillow—Aymar's pillow—where his face was buried. The remembrance of the offer of Aymar's cross—a death-bed action—was not comforting. That Aymar could attempt such a thing showed—what did it show? Laurent clutched the pillow harder. For L'Oiseleur had at last definitely confessed that he could not clear himself. Did he then know himself to be irretrievably ruined over this black business, in which, after all, that shadowy de Fresne had not played the villain? And could it be that in consequence he contemplated taking his own life? Was that why he had tried to bestow on his friend that significant gift, and was that why he had said: "You will never see me again"?

Laurent sprang up and threw open the window by the bed. The sentry very rarely paced round this corner. If he did, there was a convenient bush almost under the window. And the prisoner had not wasted his opportunities for observation during his walks on the terrace, so that he knew roughly the extent and lie of M. d'Arbelles' domain, was aware that it was not hampered with walls, and had a very good idea at what points the sentries were posted. But there were hours yet to get through before dark.

At about eight o'clock, as he was sitting in gloom and fever, watching the rain which had now come on, there unexpectedly entered to him Lieutenant Rigault. He looked concerned and somewhat shamefaced, but Laurent soon discovered that this embarrassment was not, as he at first supposed, on Aymar's account, but on his, Laurent's. The Colonel, it appeared, had given orders that one of the old dungeons which survived from the original château was to be prepared for M. de Courtomer's reception, but this retreat was in such a condition that it could not be ready till the morrow. Rigault feared, however, that this would be M. de Courtomer's last night in his present quarters.

Laurent (who was privately of the same opinion), while thanking him for the interest he took in his fate, intimated that he considered no dungeon was deep enough for Colonel Guitton to expiate the turning out of a wounded prisoner, scarcely able to stand, to die, perhaps, of exposure. But the young chasseur, while admitting that this had seemed to him rather inhuman, asked whether Laurent, in their place, would be disposed to condone treachery by making much of a traitor.

"Making much of!" exclaimed Laurent contemptuously. "You haven't run much risk of that at Arbelles, have you? What about yesterday's proceedings?—Were you there?"

"We all were; we had to be—orders. But do not go away with the idea, pray, Monsieur de Courtomer"—as Monsieur de Courtomer bent upon him a very pregnant look—"that the Colonel had it all his own way at that interview! There is not much of the Early Christian martyr about the modern Saint Sebas—— I beg your pardon! He said some pretty stinging things himself."

"He could hardly say anything stinging enough in reply to that suggestion that he should accept a commission with you!"

"Oh, he simply said he would rather die than do that. It was not very judicious," commented Rigault reflectively, "because then the Colonel was able to retort, 'I daresay you would rather like me to have you shot, since you think, no doubt, that the balls of an enemy firing-party would efface the marks of your own. I should never do that; a soldier's death is too good for you.' And," finished the young officer, as Laurent flushed hotly, "if the facts are as Colonel Richard reported them, I quite agree with that opinion."

"If you talked till next year, Monsieur," retorted Laurent scornfully and impolitely, "you would not get me to believe that it is Colonel Guitton's excessive highmindedness which has led him to do what he has done to-day! He has never forgiven M. de la Rocheterie for baulking him over du Tremblay's plans. There is personal vengeance behind his abominable action."

"Yes," said Rigault thoughtfully, "I believe you are right. It is not so much what La Rocheterie has done, as what he refused to do. . . . But, with regard to his turning out, he had his money, you know, Monsieur de Courtomer. He could have gone to the village inn, if he had chosen, instead of starting off to nowhere along the Saint-Caradec road."

Laurent became very attentive. "He went along the Saint-Caradec road?"

"Yes. He turned to the right at the château gates."

"You are sure of that? Naturally I am interested to know where he has gone."

"Naturally. Yes, I know he did. The fact is," said Lieutenant Rigault, looking out of the window, "that I happened to be in the avenue at the time—by pure chance, I assure you; I was not there as a spectator of . . . misfortune. Well, when La Rocheterie got to the gates—he had no escort then—the sentry would not let him pass; evidently he had no orders to that effect. I foresaw that he might be turned back, and have to come up the avenue again, and that would have been cruel. So I hurried down and told the sentry that he was released; and I saw, therefore, that he turned along the Saint-Caradec road."

At that absence of explicit orders—intentional, he felt sure—Laurent had ground his teeth. And how many had been in the avenue to watch him? "I wonder he ever reached the gates at all," he muttered savagely. "Did he look very much exhausted?"

"I must confess that I would not have backed him to go much farther," admitted the young Imperialist. "Indeed, I think he was holding on to the gate when I got there, but when he saw me he stood up straight and thanked me very civilly." He paused a moment, and then added, it seemed against his will, "I admit that I am puzzled by him. I cannot square what he has done with . . . what he seems to be."

But Laurent was not so elated by this confession as he might have been in earlier days. What did it matter now? He said nothing, and Rigault went on, "I watched him to the bend—about a furlong it is—he was walking very slowly, but fairly steadily."

"What is along that road?" enquired Laurent in a gloomy and exasperated voice.