A MASTER STROKE--Continued I took from my breast a little packet wrapped in soft leather, and I held it towards her.
'Will you open this?' I said. 'I believe that it contains what your brother lost. That it contains all I will not answer, Mademoiselle, because I spilled the stones on the floor of my room, and I may have failed to find some. But the others can be recovered; I know where they are.'
She took the packet slowly and began to unroll it, her fingers shaking. A few turns and the mild lustre of the stones shone out, making a kind of moonlight in her hands--such a shimmering glory of imprisoned light as has ruined many a woman and robbed many a man of his honour. MORBLEU! as I looked at them and as she stood looking at them in dull, entranced perplexity--I wondered how I had come to resist the temptation.
While I gazed her hands began to waver.
'I cannot count,' she muttered helplessly. 'How many are there?'
'In all, eighteen.'
'There should be eighteen,' she said.
She closed her hand on them with that, and opened it again, and did so twice, as if to reassure herself that the stones were real and that she was not dreaming. Then she turned to me with sudden fierceness, and I saw that her beautiful face, sharpened by the greed of possession, was grown as keen and vicious as before.
'Well?' she muttered between her teeth.
'Your price, man? Your price?'
'I am coming to it now, Mademoiselle,' I said gravely. 'It is a simple matter. You remember the afternoon when I followed you --clumsily and thoughtlessly perhaps--through the wood to restore these things? In seeming that happened about a month ago. I believe that it happened the day before yesterday. You called me then some very harsh names, which I will not hurt you by repeating. The only price I ask for the restoration of your jewels is that you on your part recall those names.'
'How?' she muttered. 'I do not understand.'
I repeated my words very slowly. 'The only price or reward I ask, Mademoiselle, is that you take back those names and say that they were not deserved.'
'And the jewels?' she exclaimed hoarsely.
'They are yours. They are not mine. They are nothing to me.
Take them, and say that you do not think of me--Nay, I cannot say the words, Mademoiselle.'
'But there is something--else! What else?' she cried, her head thrown back, her eyes, bright as any wild animal's, searching mine. 'Ha! my brother? What of him? What of him, sir?'
'For him, Mademoiselle--I would prefer that you should tell me no more than I know already,' I answered in a low voice. 'I do not wish to be in that affair. But yes; there is one thing I have not mentioned. You are right.'
She sighed so deeply that I caught the sound.
'It is,' I continued slowly, 'that you will permit me to remain at Cocheforet for a few days while the soldiers are here. I am told that there are twenty men and two officers quartered in your house. Your brother is away. I ask to be permitted, Mademoiselle, to take his place for the time, and to be privileged to protect your sister and yourself from insult. That is all.'
She raised her hand to her head. After a long pause,--'The frogs!' she muttered, 'they croak! I can not hear.'
Then, to my surprise, she turned quickly and suddenly on her heel, and walked over the bridge, leaving me standing there. For a moment I stood aghast, peering after her shadowy figure, and wondering what had taken her. Then, in a minute or less, she came quickly back to me, and I understood. She was crying.
'M. de Barthe,' she said, in a trembling voice, which told me that the victory was won, 'is there nothing else? Have you no other penance for me?'
'None, Mademoiselle.'
She had drawn the shawl over her head, and I no longer saw her face.
'That is all you ask?' she murmured.
'That is all I ask--now,' I answered.
'It is granted,' she said slowly and firmly. 'Forgive me if I seem to speak lightly--if I seem to make little of your generosity or my shame; but I can say no more now. I am so deep in trouble and so gnawed by terror that--I cannot feel anything keenly to-night, either shame or gratitude. I am in a dream; God grant that it may pass as a dream! We are sunk in trouble. But for you and what you have done, M. de Barthe--I--' she paused and I heard her fighting with the sobs which choked her--'forgive me... I am overwrought. And my--my feet are cold,' she added, suddenly and irrelevantly. 'Will you take me home?'
'Ah, Mademoiselle,' I cried remorsefully, 'I have been a beast!
You are barefoot, and I have kept you here.'
'It is nothing,' she said in a voice which thrilled me. 'My heart is warm, Monsieur--thanks to you. It is many hours since it has been as warm.'
She stepped out of the shadow as she spoke--and there, the thing was done. As I had planned, so it had come about. Once more I was crossing the meadow in the dark to be received at Cocheforet, a welcome guest. The frogs croaked in the pool and a bat swooped round us in circles; and surely never--never, I thought, with a kind of exultation in my breast--had man been placed in a stranger position.
Somewhere in the black wood behind us--probably in the outskirts of the village--lurked M. de Cocheforet. In the great house before us, outlined by a score of lighted windows, were the soldiers come from Auch to take him. Between the two, moving side by side in the darkness, in a silence which each found to be eloquent, were Mademoiselle and I: she who knew so much, I who knew all--all but one little thing!
We reached the house, and I suggested that she should steal in first by the way she had come out, and that I should wait a little and knock at the door when she had had time to explain matters to Clon.
'They do not let me see Clon,' she answered slowly.
'Then your woman must tell him,' I rejoined, 'or he may do something and betray me.'
'They will not let our women come to us.'
'What?' I cried, astonished. 'But this is infamous. You are not prisoners!'
Mademoiselle laughed harshly.
'Are we not? Well, I suppose not; for if we wanted company, Captain Larolle said that he would be delighted to see us--in the parlour.'
