The sergeant’s voice broke in upon her misery.
The man had apparently done as the citizen agent had ordered, and had closely examined the little building that stood on the left—a vague, black mass more dense than the surrounding gloom.
“It is all solid stone, citizen,” he said; “iron gates in front, closed but not locked, rusty key in the lock, which turns quite easily; no windows or door in the rear.”
“You are quite sure?”
“Quite certain, citizen; it is plain, solid stone at the back, and the only possible access to the interior is through the iron gate in front.”
“Good.”
Marguerite could only just hear Heron speaking to the sergeant. Darkness enveloped every form and deadened every sound. Even the harsh voice which she had learned to loathe and to dread sounded curiously subdued and unfamiliar. Heron no longer seemed inclined to storm, to rage, or to curse. The momentary danger, the thought of failure, the hope of revenge, had apparently cooled his temper, strengthened his determination, and forced his voice down to a little above a whisper. He gave his orders clearly and firmly, and the words came to Marguerite on the wings of the wind with strange distinctness, borne to her ears by the darkness itself, and the hush that lay over the wood.
“Take half a dozen men with you, sergeant,” she heard him say, “and join citizen Chauvelin at the chateau. You can stable your horses in the farm buildings close by, as he suggests and run to him on foot. You and your men should quickly get the best of a handful of midnight prowlers; you are well armed and they only civilians. Tell citizen Chauvelin that I in the meanwhile will take care of our prisoners. The Englishman I shall put in irons and lock up inside the chapel, with five men under the command of your corporal to guard him, the other two I will drive myself straight to Crecy with what is left of the escort. You understand?”
“Yes, citizen.”
“We may not reach Crecy until two hours after midnight, but directly I arrive I will send citizen Chauvelin further reinforcements, which, however, I hope may not necessary, but which will reach him in the early morning. Even if he is seriously attacked, he can, with fourteen men he will have with him, hold out inside the castle through the night. Tell him also that at dawn two prisoners who will be with me will be shot in the courtyard of the guard-house at Crecy, but that whether he has got hold of Capet or not he had best pick up the Englishman in the chapel in the morning and bring him straight to Crecy, where I shall be awaiting him ready to return to Paris. You understand?”
“Yes, citizen.”
“Then repeat what I said.”
“I am to take six men with me to reinforce citizen Chauvelin now.”
“Yes.”
“And you, citizen, will drive straight back to Crecy, and will send us further reinforcements from there, which will reach us in the early morning.”
“Yes.”
“We are to hold the chateau against those unknown marauders if necessary until the reinforcements come from Crecy. Having routed them, we return here, pick up the Englishman whom you will have locked up in the chapel under a strong guard commanded by Corporal Cassard, and join you forthwith at Crecy.”
“This, whether citizen Chauvelin has got hold of Capet or not.”
“Yes, citizen, I understand,” concluded the sergeant imperturbably; “and I am also to tell citizen Chauvelin that the two prisoners will be shot at dawn in the courtyard of the guard-house at Crecy.”
“Yes. That is all. Try to find the leader of the attacking party, and bring him along to Crecy with the Englishman; but unless they are in very small numbers do not trouble about the others. Now en avant; citizen Chauvelin might be glad of your help. And—stay—order all the men to dismount, and take the horses out of one of the coaches, then let the men you are taking with you each lead a horse, or even two, and stable them all in the farm buildings. I shall not need them, and could not spare any of my men for the work later on. Remember that, above all, silence is the order. When you are ready to start, come back to me here.”
The sergeant moved away, and Marguerite heard him transmitting the citizen agent’s orders to the soldiers. The dismounting was carried on in wonderful silence—for silence had been one of the principal commands—only one or two words reached her ears.
“First section and first half of second section fall in, right wheel. First section each take two horses on the lead. Quietly now there; don’t tug at his bridle—let him go.”
And after that a simple report:
“All ready, citizen!”
“Good!” was the response. “Now detail your corporal and two men to come here to me, so that we may put the Englishman in irons, and take him at once to the chapel, and four men to stand guard at the doors of the other coach.”
The necessary orders were given, and after that there came the curt command:
“En avant!”
The sergeant, with his squad and all the horses, was slowly moving away in the night. The horses’ hoofs hardly made a noise on the soft carpet of pine-needles and of dead fallen leaves, but the champing of the bits was of course audible, and now and then the snorting of some poor, tired horse longing for its stable.
Somehow in Marguerite’s fevered mind this departure of a squad of men seemed like the final flitting of her last hope; the slow agony of the familiar sounds, the retreating horses and soldiers moving away amongst the shadows, took on a weird significance. Heron had given his last orders. Percy, helpless and probably unconscious, would spend the night in that dank chapel, while she and Armand would be taken back to Crecy, driven to death like some insentient animals to the slaughter.
When the grey dawn would first begin to peep through the branches of the pines Percy would be led back to Paris and the guillotine, and she and Armand will have been sacrificed to the hatred and revenge of brutes.
The end had come, and there was nothing more to be done. Struggling, fighting, scheming, could be of no avail now; but she wanted to get to her husband; she wanted to be near him now that death was so imminent both for him and for her.
She tried to envisage it all, quite calmly, just as she knew that Percy would wish her to do. The inevitable end was there, and she would not give to these callous wretches here the gratuitous spectacle of a despairing woman fighting blindly against adverse Fate.
But she wanted to go to her husband. She felt that she could face death more easily on the morrow if she could but see him once, if she could but look once more into the eyes that had mirrored so much enthusiasm, such absolute vitality and whole-hearted self-sacrifice, and such an intensity of love and passion; if she could but kiss once more those lips that had smiled through life, and would smile, she knew, even in the face of death.
She tried to open the carriage door, but it was held from without, and a harsh voice cursed her, ordering her to sit still.
But she could lean out of the window and strain her eyes to see. They were by now accustomed to the gloom, the dilated pupils taking in pictures of vague forms moving like ghouls in the shadows. The other coach was not far, and she could hear Heron’s voice, still subdued and calm, and the curses of the men. But not a sound from Percy.
“I think the prisoner is unconscious,” she heard one of the men say.
“Lift him out of the carriage, then,” was Heron’s curt command; “and you go and throw open the chapel gates.”
Marguerite saw it all. The movement, the crowd of men, two vague, black forms lifting another one, which appeared heavy and inert, out of the coach, and carrying it staggering up towards the chapel.
Then the forms disappeared, swallowed up by the more dense mass of the little building, merged in with it, immovable as the stone itself.
Only a few words reached her now.
“He is unconscious.”
“Leave him there, then; he’ll not move!”
“Now close the gates!”
There was a loud clang, and Marguerite gave a piercing scream. She tore at the handle of the carriage door.
“Armand, Armand, go to him!” she cried; and all her self-control, all her enforced calm, vanished in an outburst of wild, agonising passion. “Let me get to him, Armand! This is the end; get me to him, in the name of God!”
“Stop that woman screaming,” came Heron’s voice clearly through the night. “Put her and the other prisoner in irons—quick!”
But while Marguerite expended her feeble strength in a mad, pathetic effort to reach her husband, even now at this last hour, when all hope was dead and Death was so nigh, Armand had already wrenched the carriage door from the grasp of the soldier who was guarding it. He was of the South, and knew the trick of charging an unsuspecting adversary with head thrust forward like a bull inside a ring. Thus he knocked one of the soldiers down and made a quick rush for the chapel gates.
The men, attacked so suddenly and in such complete darkness, did not wait for orders. They closed in round Armand; one man drew his sabre and hacked away with it in aimless rage.
But for the moment he evaded them all, pushing his way through them, not heeding the blows that came on him from out the darkness. At last he reached the chapel. With one bound he was at the gate, his numb fingers fumbling for the lock, which he could not see.
It was a vigorous blow from Heron’s fist that brought him at last to his knees, and even then his hands did not relax their hold; they gripped the ornamental scroll of the gate, shook the gate itself in its rusty hinges, pushed and pulled with the unreasoning strength of despair. He had a sabre cut across his brow, and the blood flowed in a warm, trickling stream down his face. But of this he was unconscious; all that he wanted, all that he was striving for with agonising heart-beats and cracking sinews, was to get to his friend, who was lying in there unconscious, abandoned—dead, perhaps.
“Curse you,” struck Heron’s voice close to his ear. “Cannot some of you stop this raving maniac?”
Then it was that the heavy blow on his head caused him a sensation of sickness, and he fell on his knees, still gripping the ironwork.
Stronger hands than his were forcing him to loosen his hold; blows that hurt terribly rained on his numbed fingers; he felt himself dragged away, carried like an inert mass further and further from that gate which he would have given his lifeblood to force open.
And Marguerite heard all this from the inside of the coach where she was imprisoned as effectually as was Percy’s unconscious body inside that dark chapel. She could hear the noise and scramble, and Heron’s hoarse commands, the swift sabre strokes as they cut through the air.
Already a trooper had clapped irons on her wrists, two others held the carriage doors. Now Armand was lifted back into the coach, and she could not even help to make him comfortable, though as he was lifted in she heard him feebly moaning. Then the carriage doors were banged to again.
“Do not allow either of the prisoners out again, on peril of your lives!” came with a vigorous curse from Heron.
After which there was a moment’s silence; whispered commands came spasmodically in deadened sound to her ear.
“Will the key turn?”
“Yes, citizen.”
“All secure?”
“Yes, citizen. The prisoner is groaning.”
“Let him groan.”
“The empty coach, citizen? The horses have been taken out.”
“Leave it standing where it is, then; citizen Chauvelin will need it in the morning.”
“Armand,” whispered Marguerite inside the coach, “did you see Percy?”
“It was so dark,” murmured Armand feebly; “but I saw him, just inside the gates, where they had laid him down. I heard him groaning. Oh, my God!”
“Hush, dear!” she said. “We can do nothing more, only die, as he lived, bravely and with a smile on our lips, in memory of him.”
“Number 35 is wounded, citizen,” said one of the men.
“Curse the fool who did the mischief,” was the placid response. “Leave him here with the guard.”
“How many of you are there left, then?” asked the same voice a moment later.
“Only two, citizen; if one whole section remains with me at the chapel door, and also the wounded man.”
“Two are enough for me, and five are not too many at the chapel door.” And Heron’s coarse, cruel laugh echoed against the stone walls of the little chapel. “Now then, one of you get into the coach, and the other go to the horses’ heads; and remember, Corporal Cassard, that you and your men who stay here to guard that chapel door are answerable to the whole nation with your lives for the safety of the Englishman.”
The carriage door was thrown open, and a soldier stepped in and sat down opposite Marguerite and Armand. Heron in the meanwhile was apparently scrambling up the box. Marguerite could hear him muttering curses as he groped for the reins, and finally gathered them into his hand.
The springs of the coach creaked and groaned as the vehicle slowly swung round; the wheels ploughed deeply through the soft carpet of dead leaves.
Marguerite felt Armand’s inert body leaning heavily against her shoulder.
“Are you in pain, dear?” she asked softly.
He made no reply, and she thought that he had fainted. It was better so; at least the next dreary hours would flit by for him in the blissful state of unconsciousness. Now at last the heavy carriage began to move more evenly. The soldier at the horses’ heads was stepping along at a rapid pace.
Marguerite would have given much even now to look back once more at the dense black mass, blacker and denser than any shadow that had ever descended before on God’s earth, which held between its cold, cruel walls all that she loved in the world.
But her wrists were fettered by the irons, which cut into her flesh when she moved. She could no longer lean out of the window, and she could not even hear. The whole forest was hushed, the wind was lulled to rest; wild beasts and night-birds were silent and still. And the wheels of the coach creaked in the ruts, bearing Marguerite with every turn further and further away from the man who lay helpless in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre.
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