St. George's Cross Part 4

It had long grown dusk, and Tom knew that he was absent without leave.

His visit must be cut short. If he glanced significantly at Marguerite as he bent over Rose's hand, if he hoped that Marguerite would follow him to the door and allow an integration of former toys, he was only building on a precocious knowledge of the s.e.x. "I will but lock the door after Mr. Elliot," said she to Rose, in patois, "be tranquil, my sister, he is but an infant."

The dismissal of the infant appeared a work of time. In the meanwhile Rose opened the wainscot door, and called softly up the narrow stair to which it led. Alain heard her, and came down, looking anxiously round the parlour as he came inside.

"Is Marguerite gone out," he asked, "with yonder _polisson_ of the Court?"

"Thou knowest her, my friend," answered Madame de Maufant, kindly; "ever since her mother's death she has been a daughter to me. But a sister is not a mother at the end of the account; and our little one will not be kept a prisoner. She has learned English ideas in her girlhood, pa.s.sed as you know with our London kinsfolk. Once she is married her husband will find her faithful, in life and to the death."

"Such freedoms are not according to our island ways."

"Be not stupid, my good Alain. Mr. Elliot is an old friend; though her dealings with him--or with others--be never so little to thy taste, I advertise thee to seek no cause of quarrel upon them; unless thou wouldst lose her altogether."

"I do not understand how a girl that is promised can do such things.

Moreover, his coming here at all is what Michael would not find well."

"He has done us a very friendly act in coming here, and has told us of a matter which it may cost him dear to have revealed. For the rest, we can take very good care of ourselves."

Alain was not a man of the world. With something of a poet's nature, he was born to be the slave of women. Pa.s.sionately attached to the mother who had brought him up--and who was lately dead--and wholly unacquainted with the coa.r.s.er aspects of feminine character, he had a romantic ideal of womanhood. The ladies in whose company he might chance to find himself were usually quick enough to discover this; and seeing him at their feet were always trampling upon him, reserving their wiles and fascinations for men who were more artful or less chivalrous. The case was by no means singular in those days, and is believed to be occasionally reproduced even in more recent times.

He was now thoroughly annoyed; and Rose's reasoning, far from composing his mind, had rendered it only the more anxious. Therefore, when Marguerite returned into the parlour, with a somewhat heightened colour, Alain affected to take no notice of her, and sate gazing moodily at the fire.

"I have been plucking these roses," said the girl, offering Alain a bunch of flowers wet with early dew.

He took them with a negligent air, stuck one of the buds into the band of his broad-brimmed hat that lay on the table, and allowed the rest to fall upon the rushes that strewed the stone floor. Marguerite, with a slight and mocking grimace, watched the ill-tempered action without taking any audible notice of it. Then resuming her seat, she took up her wool and needles and applied herself to her interrupted knitting.

Meantime the page, apparently well satisfied with the circ.u.mstances of his visit, including those of his parting from the fair Marguerite, pursued his way to S. Helier. The darkness of the autumn evening was relieved by the mult.i.tudinous illumination of a cloudless sky. The lanes, bordered by the fortress-like enclosures of the fields, were shaded overhead by tunnels of interlacing boughs still in the full thickness of their summer foliage. A bird, disturbed by Elliot's brus.h.i.+ng against the branch on which she roosted, gave a solitary cry of angry alarm; the dogs barked in the distant farms; the grazing cows, tethered in the wayside pastures, made soft noises as they cropped the gra.s.s. Pa.s.sing on by the old grammar school of S. Manelier and then through the village of Five Oaks, where he scared a quiet family a.s.sembled in their parlour by looking in at their window with a grimace and a wild scream, he ran on rapidly by the Town Mills and through the town towards the quay. When he reached the bridge-head the tide was ebbing; but partly walking, partly wading, he made good his footing on the Castle-rock. A sleepy sentry challenged, but the page crept through the darkness without deigning a reply. A ball whizzed through his hat, but did not check his progress. Availing himself of projections in the wall with which he seemed well acquainted, he entered his own little room by the open cas.e.m.e.nt, and throwing himself on the pallet soon slept the sleep of youth and healthy fatigue.

At Maufant matters were not quite so peaceful. The ladies there, it may be feared, were ready enough to regret the page's visit and its consequences, if not to express that regret to the old friend who might with some cause have complained.

Pretending indifference, he sate silently in a seat further from the ladies than that which he had occupied before the page's intrusion.

Finding him disinclined for talk, Rose read her husband's letter without taking any further notice of him by whom it had been brought.

At length she broke the awkward silence; replacing the letter in her bosom and turning to Alain, she said:--

"I must go and get your chamber ready. I shall be back anon." And she left the room by the concealed door.

Left alone with his mistress, Alain fell into a great embarra.s.sment.

Marguerite, for her part, felt a qualm of conscience, had he only known it. But her _amour-propre_ was, none the less, extremely hurt by his cavalier treatment of her flowers. She was by no means in love with the saucy Scot, who had indeed given her some offence by the frankness of his leave-taking, though this was a matter of which she was not likely to complain, least of all to her official adorer.

"_Pourquoi me boudez-vous, Monsieur_?" at last she said; "are you perhaps permitting yourself to be offended at my seeing M. Elliot to the door? Do you not know that he is our old friend?"

"He is nothing to me," answered Alain, moodily, "it is you of whom I am thinking."

"As Rose says, we can take care of ourselves. Do you for one moment think that I acknowledge any restraining right on your part, any privilege of question even? But come, if M. Elliot is an old friend you are a much older. Do not let us quarrel."

"It takes two to make a quarrel," said the foolish fellow, not observing the olive-branch.

If his display of annoyance was only a mask of jealousy she fancied that she could deal with it, and forgive it, but if it should be really a sign of indifference? so reasoned her rapid female brain; the cruder masculine mind was but too ready to supply the solution of the problem.

"_Voyons, Marguerite_," said her lover, almost blubbering. "I have loved you all your life. Ever since you were a little totterer whom I carried in my arms and planted on the top of the garden wall to pick coquelicots, I have thought of you as one to be some day mine. I see now how foolish I have been. I will put the sea between us; and I hope my boat will go to the bottom; and then perhaps you will be sorry." ... And in the fervour of self-pity he actually shed tears.

Marguerite watched him, with a joyous sense of triumph. Secure of her victory, she could now a.s.sume her turn to show anger. But she did not feel it; and she had not much skill in the feigning of unbecoming pa.s.sions.

"That is ungenerous, Monsieur. You do not think of the poor boatmen who would go to the bottom with you. They are not sulky young men who have quarrelled with harmless women. The Race of Alderney will do without them; _dame_! it may afford to wait for you too."

If Alain had but caught the look with which these final words were accompanied! But he was still sitting in the distant darkness, with his moistened eyes bent obstinately on the ground.

And so the misunderstanding widened and deepened; and presently Rose returned. Taking in the situation with a rapid glance, she pa.s.sed through the room and out into the b.u.t.tery, whence she soon returned with the materials of a modest supper. "We must be our own domestics,"

she said with an attempt at lightness: but the attempt was hollow; a cloud seemed to fill the low room, and press upon the inmates. The _three_ sate down, but neither of the young people did much justice to her hospitality. After supper she held a brief consultation with Alain; and after giving him a bag of gold and a letter for her husband, dismissed him, to rest if not to slumber, in the chamber that stood at the head of the stair on which the door in the wainscot opened. Then she and Marguerite retired by the other door to their own part of the upper floor, where I fear the young lady received a lecture before she went to her virgin couch.

ACT III.

THE STATES.

Next morning the Militia Captain left before the house was awake, to return to Lempriere in London. When the ladies went, later in the forenoon, to arrange the chamber in which he had pa.s.sed the night, they found that the bed had not been used during Le Gallais' occupation. A copy of Ben Jonson's Poems lay on the table; by the side of which were pen and ink, and a burnt-out candle. On opening the book, Mdlle. de St.

Martin found some lines written on the fly-leaf, which ran as follows:--

"What tho' the floures be riche and rare of hue and fragrancie, What tho' the giver be kinde and fair, they have no charme for me.

The wreathe whose brightest budde is gone is not ye wreathe I'de prise: I'de pluck another, and so pa.s.se on, with unregardfull eyes.

And so the heart whose sweet resorte an hundred rivalls share May yielde a moment's pa.s.sing sporte, but Love's an alyen there."

"He is unpolite, my sister," cried Marguerite, laughing. "But that is only because he is sore. The wounded bird has moulted a feather in his empty nest."

"All the same, he is flown," answered Mdme. de Maufant, gravely.

"_N'importe_," answered the damsel. "Leave him to me. I can whistle him back when I want him--if I ever do."

Leaving the ladies to the discussion of the topic thus set afoot, let us turn to the more prosaic combinations of the rougher, if not harder, s.e.x. _Majora canamus!_

About four miles south-east of the manor-house, the old Castle of Gorey arose out of the sea, almost as if it grew there, a part of the granite crag. A survival of the rude warfare of Plantagenet times, it bore--as it still does--the self a.s.sertive name of "Mont Orgueil," and boasted itself the only English fortress that had ever resisted the avenger of France, the constable Bertrand du Guesclin. But, in spite of its pride, it proved to be commanded by a yet higher point, sufficiently near to throw round shot into the Castle in the more advanced days to which our tale relates. For this reason, and also because of the smallness of the harbour at its feet, Mont Orgueil had given way to the growing importance of S. Helier, protected by its virgin Castle. Hence the place, though not quite in ruins, had sunk to a minor and subordinate character; the Hall, in which the States had once a.s.sembled, was neglected and dirty; the chambers formerly appropriated to the Governor and his family were used as cells, or not used at all; the garden was unweeded; and Mont Orgueil in general had sunk to be a prison and a watch-tower. None the less proudly did it rise--as it does still--with a protecting air above its little town and port, and look defiance upon the opposite sh.o.r.es of Normandy.

In a narrow guard-room on the South side of this castle, a few days later than the visit of La Cloche to the King, the Lieutenant-Governor was sitting at a heavy oaken table, with his steel cap before him and his basket-hilted sword hung by the belt from the back of his carven chair. A writer sate at the left-hand side of the same table, and between them lay militia muster-rolls and other papers. At the further end of the room, between two halberdiers in scarlet doublets, stood a tall Jerseyman in squalid garments, his legs in fetters, his wrists in manacles. Keen little grey eyes peered through the neglected black hair that fell over his narrow brow; and his iron-grey beard showed signs of long neglect.

"Now, Pierre Benoist," said Sir George, "for the last time I give you warning. If you do not speak, freely and to the purpose, it will be the worse for you. There be those who can tell me what I desire to know. As for you, I shall deliver you to the Provost-Sergeant, who will need no words from me to tell him how to deal with you. I ask you, is Michael Lempriere in correspondence with Henry Dumaresq?"

"_Palfrancordi!_ Messire; you press me hard," said the prisoner, but his eye was scarcely that of a pressed man. "When you examined me a week ago in secret I think I answered that. I know of no letters that have pa.s.sed between M. de Samares and M. de Maufant. That is," he added hastily, as the Governor began to look impatient, "I have carried none myself."

"Who has?" asked the Governor.

The Greffier, at a signal from Carteret, plunged his pen into the ink; the halberdiers s.h.i.+fted their legs and leaned upon their weapons; the prisoner moistened his lips with his tongue.

"Speak, Benoist; who carried the letters?"