"I am certain of it; and when two people like one another, all goes easily."

"Well, not always," said the Captain, whose position made him less optimistic.

The Count felt in his waistcoat-pocket. Dieppe sat looking down towards the floor with a frown on his face. He raised his eyes to find the Count holding out his hand towards him; in the open palm of it lay a wedding-ring.

"Take it back to her," said the Count.

"Really had n't you better do that yourself?" expostulated the Captain, who felt himself hard driven by fate.

"No," said the Count, firmly. "I leave it all to you. Put it on her finger and say, 'This is the pledge of love--of love renewed--of Andrea's undying love for you.'" He thrust the symbol of bliss into Captain Dieppe's most reluctant hand. The Captain sat and looked at it in a horrified fascination.

"You will do it for me?" urged the Count. "You can't refuse! Ah, my friend, if my sorrow does n't move you, think of hers. She is alone there in that wing of the house--even her cousin, who was with her, was obliged to leave her three days ago. There she sits, thinking of her faults, poor child, in solitude! Alas, it is only too likely in tears!

I can't bear to think of her in tears."

The Captain quite understood that feeling; he had seen her in them.

"You will help us? Your n.o.ble nature will force you to it!"

After a moment's hesitation, pardonable surely in weak humanity, Dieppe put the Countess's wedding-ring in his pocket, rose to his feet, and with a firm unfaltering face held out his hand to his friend and host.

"I can refuse you nothing," he said, in most genuine emotion. "I will do what you ask. May it bring happiness to--to--to all of us!" He wrung the Count's hand with a grip that spoke of settled purpose. "You shall hear how I fare very soon," he said, as he made for the door.

The Count nodded hopefully, and, when he was left alone, set to work on a little lyric of joy, with which to welcome the return of his forgiven and forgiving spouse.

But it was hard on Captain Dieppe; the strictest moralist may admit that without endangering his principles. Say the Captain had been blameworthy; still his punishment was heavy--heavy and most woefully prompt. His better nature, his finer feelings, his instincts of honour and loyalty, might indeed respond to the demand made on them by the mission with which his friend entrusted him. But the demand was heavy, the call grievous. Where he had pictured joy, there remained now only renunciation; he had dreamed of conquest; there could be none, save the hardest and least grateful, the conquest of himself. Firm the Captain might be, but sad he must be. He could still serve the Countess (was not Paul de Roustache still dangerous?), but he could look for no reward. Small wonder that the meeting, whose risks and difficulty had made it seem before only the sweeter, now lost all its delight, and became the hardest of ordeals, the most severe and grim of duties.

If this was the Captain's mood, that of the lady whom he was to meet could be hardly more cheerful. If conscience seemed to trouble her less, and unhappy love not to occupy her mind as it governed his, the external difficulties of her position occasioned her greater distress and brought her near despair. Paul de Roustache's letter had been handed to her by her servant, with a smile half reproachful, half mocking, she had seized it, torn it open, and read it. She understood its meaning; she saw that the dreaded crisis had indeed come; and she was powerless to deal with it, or to avert the catastrophe it threatened. She sat before it now, very near to doing just what Count Andrea hated to think of and Captain Dieppe could not endure to see; and as she read and re-read the hateful thing she moaned softly to herself:

"Oh, how could I be so silly! How could I put myself in such a position? How could I consent to anything of the sort? I don't know what 'll happen. I have n't got fifty thousand francs! Oh, Emilia, how could you do it? I don't know what to do! And I 'm all alone--alone to face this fearful trouble!" Indeed the Count, led no doubt by the penetrating sympathy of love, seemed to have divined her feelings with a wonderful accuracy.

She glanced up at the clock, it was nearly five. The smile that came on her face was sad and timid; yet it was a smile of hope. "Perhaps he 'll be able to help me," she thought. "He has no money, no--only fifty francs, poor man! But he seems to be brave--oh, yes, he 's brave. And I think he's clever. I 'll go to the meeting-place and take the note.

He 's the only chance." She rose and walked to a mirror. She certainly looked a little less woe-begone now, and she examined her appearance with an earnest criticism. The smile grew more hopeful, a little more a.s.sured, as she murmured to herself, "I think he 'll help me, if he can, you know; because--well, because--" For an instant she even laughed. "And I rather like him too, you know," she ended by confiding to the mirror. These latter actions and words were not in such complete harmony with Count Andrea's mental picture of the lady on the other side of the barricade.

Betaking herself to the room from which she had first beheld Captain Dieppe's face--not, as the Count would have supposed, as a consequence of any design, but by the purest and most unexpected chance--she arrayed herself in a short skirt and thick boots, and wrapped a cloak round her, for a close, misty rain was already falling, and the moaning of the wind in the trees promised a stormy evening. Then she stole out and made for the gate in the right wall of the gardens. The same old servant who had brought the note was there to let her out.

"You will be gone long, Contessa?" she asked.

"No, Maria, not long. If I am asked for, say I am lying down."

"Who should ask for you? The Count?"

"Not very likely," she replied with a laugh, in which the servant joined. "But if he does, I am absolutely not to be seen, Maria." And with another little laugh she began to skirt the back of the gardens so as to reach the main road, and thus make her way by the village to the Cross on the hill, and the little hut in the hollow behind it.

Almost at the same moment Captain Dieppe, cursing his fortune, his folly, and the weather, with the collar of his coat turned up, his hat crashed hard on his head, and (just in case of accidents) his revolver in his pocket, came out into the garden and began to descend the hill towards where the stepping-stones gave him pa.s.sage across the river.

Thus he also would reach the village, pa.s.s through it, and mount the hill to the Cross. His way was shorter and his pace quicker. To be there before the lady would be only polite; it would also give him a few minutes in which to arrange his thoughts and settle what might be the best way to open to her the new--the very new--things that he had to say. In the preoccupation of these he thought little of his later appointment at seven o'clock--although it was in view of this that he had slipped the revolver into his pocket.

Finally, just about the same time also, Guillaume was rehearsing to Paul de Roustache exactly what they were to do and where their respective parts began and terminated. Paul was listening with deep attention, with a curious smile on his face, and with the inner reflection that things in the end might turn out quite differently from what his astute companion supposed would be the case. Moreover--also just in case of accidents--both of these gentlemen, it may be mentioned, had slipped revolvers into their pockets. Such things may be useful when one carries large sums of money to a rendezvous, equally so in case one hopes to carry them back from it. The former was M.

Guillaume's condition, the latter that of Paul de Roustache. On the whole there seemed a possibility of interesting incidents occurring by or in the neighbourhood of the Cross on the hillside above the village.

What recked the Count of Fieramondi of that? He was busy composing his lyric in honour of the return of his forgiven and forgiving Countess.

Of what was happening he had no thought.

And not less ignorant of these possible incidents was a lady who this same evening stood in the courtyard of the only inn of the little town of Sasellano, where the railway ended, and whence the traveller to the Count of Fieramondi's Castle must take a carriage and post-horses.

The lady demanded horses, protested, raged; most urgent business called her to pursue her journey, she said. But the landlord hesitated and shook his head.

"It 's good twelve miles and against collar almost all the way," he urged.

"I will pay what you like," she cried.

"But see, the rain falls--it has fallen for two hours. The water will be down from the hills, and the stream will be in flood before you reach the ford. Your Excellency had best sleep here to-night. Indeed your Excellency must."

"I won't," said her Excellency flatly.

And at that point--which may be called the direct issue--the dispute must now be left.

CHAPTER VI

THE HUT IN THE HOLLOW

Geography, in itself a tiresome thing, concerned with such soulless matters as lengths, depths, heights, breadths, and the like, gains interest so soon as it establishes a connection with the history of kingdoms, and the ambitions, pa.s.sions, or fortunes of mankind; so that men may pore over a map with more eagerness than the greatest of romances can excite, or scan a countryside with a keenness that the beauty of no picture could evoke. To Captain Dieppe, a soldier, even so much apology was not necessary for the careful scrutiny of topographical features which was his first act on reaching the Cross on the hillside. His examination, hindered by increasing darkness and mist, yet yielded him a general impression correct enough.

Standing with his back to the Cross, he had on his right hand the slope down to the village which he had just ascended; on his left the road fell still more precipitately in zigzag curves. He could not see it where it reached the valley and came to the river; had he been able, he would have perceived that it ran down to and crossed the ford to which the landlord of the inn at Sasellano had referred. But immediately facing him he could discern the river in its bottom, and could look down over the steep gra.s.sy declivity which descended to it from the point at which he stood; there was no more than room for the road, and on the road hardly room for a vehicle to pa.s.s another, or itself to turn. On all three sides the ground fell, and he would have seemed to stand on a watch-tower had it not been that behind him, at the back of the cross, the upward slope of gra.s.s showed that the road did not surmount the hill, but hung on to and skirted its side some fifty paces from the top. Yet even where he was he found himself exposed to the full stress of the weather, which had now increased to a storm of wind and rain. The time of his earlier appointment was not quite due; but the lady knew her way. With a shiver the Captain turned and began to scramble up towards the summit. The sooner he found the shepherd's hut the better: if it were open, he would enter; it not, he could at least get some shelter under the lee of it. But he trusted that the Countess would keep her tryst punctually: she must be come and gone before seven o'clock, or she would risk an encounter with her enemy, Paul de Roustache. "However I could probably smuggle her away; and at least he should n't speak to her," he reflected, and was somewhat comforted.

At the top of the hill the formation was rather peculiar. The crown once reached, the ground dipped very suddenly from all sides, forming a round depression in shape like a basin and at the lowest point some twenty feet beneath the top of its enclosing walls. In this circular hollow--not in the centre, but no more than six feet from the base of the slope by which the Captain approached--stood the shepherd's hut.

Its door was open, swinging to and fro as the gusts of wind rose and tell. The Captain ran down and entered. There was nothing inside but a rough stool, a big and heavy block, something like those one may see in butcher's shops (probably it had served the shepherds for seat or table, as need arose), and five or six large trusses of dry maize-straw flung down in a corner. The place was small, rude, and comfortless enough, but if the hanging door, past which the rain drove in fiercely, could be closed, the four walls of sawn logs would afford decent shelter from the storm during the brief period of the conference which the Captain awaited.

Dieppe looked at his watch; he could just see the figures--it was ten minutes to six. Mounting again to the summit, he looked round. Yes, there she was, making her way up the hill, painfully struggling with refractory cloak and skirt. A moment later she joined him and gave him her hand, panting out:

"Oh, I 'm so glad you 're here! There 's the most fearful trouble."

There was, of more than one kind; none knew it better than Dieppe.

"One need not, all the same, get any wetter," he remarked. "Come into the hut, madame."

She paid no heed to his words, but stood there looking forlornly round.

But the next instant the Captain enforced his invitation by catching hold of her arm and dragging her a pace or two down the hill, while he threw himself on the ground, his head just over the top of the eminence. "Hush," he whispered. His keen ear had caught a footstep on the road, although darkness and mist prevented him from seeing who approached. It was barely six. Was Paul de Roustache an hour too early?

"What is it?" she asked in a low, anxious voice. "Is anybody coming?

Oh, if it should be Andrea!"

"It's not the Count, but-- Come down into the hut, madame. You must n't be seen."

Now she obeyed his request. Dieppe stood in the doorway a moment, listening. Then he pushed the door shut--it opened inwards--and with some effort set the wooden block against it.