To both women this portion of his narrative caused great excitement.

For, stately as the marquise was, environed, so to speak, by all the dignity of the _haute n.o.blesse_ of the days of the Great King, she could not prevent her agitation from being apparent to him. Her white, jewelled hand quivered as she raised it to her breast; her eyes sparkled as they might have sparkled when she was her daughter's age; while, as for that daughter, her bosom rose and fell with her rapid breathing, her colour came and went--once she was as pale as death, the next moment her face suffused.

"The cowards!" exclaimed the marquise; "the base, cowardly dogs, to attack two men thus, and one hampered with a defenceless child! _Quel tour de lache!_ Oh! sir, I would to G.o.d your brand or that of your brave companion had struck the poltroon, the craven who sheltered himself behind his visor, his death blow! I would to G.o.d one of your swords had found out his heart as they found out the hearts of his mercenaries!"

The sympathy of this graceful woman--sympathy that roused her from the well-bred calmness which was her natural state, to one of almost fury--earned the deepest respect and grat.i.tude of St. Georges; yet he looked at her almost with amazement as he bowed and murmured some words of appreciation. For there was no acting here, he knew; yet she was De Roquemaure's stepmother, the kinswoman of the man whom he believed to be his and his child's attempted a.s.sa.s.sin!

And Aurelie de Roquemaure, too--what of her? A glance from under his eyes showed him that still the beauteous face was agitated as it had been before, that all which her mother had said was re-echoed by her.

Again the marquise spoke, though now she rose from the table as she did so.

"Sir," she said, "never rest until that man and you stand face to face, point to point; since, until that happens, your child's life will not be safe. For you, a man, a soldier, it matters not--is best, indeed, that you should meet him and end his miserable existence forever. I pray you may do ere long. And, when you do meet him, slay him like a dog! It is the only way."

Still astonished, almost appalled, by her vehemence, St. Georges took the hand she extended him and bent over it, and next, that of her daughter, ere the two pa.s.sed out of the room.

"Forgive," said the marquise, "that I should feel so strongly.

I--I--have a child myself." Then, after a pause, and turning round as she reached the corridor, she added: "If we do not meet to-morrow ere you return to the city to fetch your child, remember, sir, I pray you, that my answer to the king or his minister is precisely different from that of the bishop. It is 'No.'"

"I will remember, madame."

Then, with a last glance from each, both were gone. And St. Georges, standing in front of the great fireplace waiting for the old servitor to come and escort him to his room, was more overwhelmed with amazement than he had been at aught which had occurred since he set out from Pontarlier.

"What does it mean?" he whispered to himself. "What does it mean?"

In a room at the opposite end of the corridor from that where the apartment was situated which had been bestowed on St. Georges, the mother and daughter sat. It was the sleeping-room of madame la marquise, large, vast, and sombre--save that here, too, a fire burnt in the grate, and that there were many candles alight in the sconces set about the room.

And the marquise, lying back in her deep fauteuil before the fire, her face white and drawn, and with tears upon her cheeks, was speaking to her daughter who knelt by her side.

"The wolf!" she said, "the wolf! How know it? How find out? G.o.d! I thought that I alone, of all living people, knew, until I divulged my story to you, until I wrote to Louis asking him to do justice to a much-wronged man. Who--who has betrayed my confidence? Not the king, surely. Oh! not he, not he! Nay, more, I doubt if the letter ever reached his hands."

"Mother," Aurelie said, as she stroked her hand, "there must be some other who knows."

"There was no living soul on earth. Listen, even you do not know all."

The girl seated herself against her mother's knee and gazed up into her face. Then she whispered: "Tell me all now, mother. From to-night let me understand exactly with what he is encompa.s.sed. Tell me, I beg."

"You know," the marquise said, "for I have told you often, that the Duc de Vannes and I loved each other when we were young--yet that we never married. No matter for the reason now--it was my fault! Let that suffice. And we parted--he to go his way, I mine. Then, some years later, not many it is true, but still long enough for us to have forgotten what had separated us, we met again, and once more he asked me to be his wife, to renew the love vows we once had made. But it was then impossible. I was affianced to your father--the day was fixed, and I had come to admire him, to respect him; in no case would I have gone back from my plighted word. So again we parted to meet only once more in life."

The girl touched her hand--perhaps--who knows?--in admiration of her mother's strength in keeping her vow to the man who was not her first love and in discarding the man who was. And the marquise continued:

"It was one night a few weeks before he set out to join Turenne in the Palatinate. A great _fete_ was given by Louis to celebrate his birthday at St. Germain-en-Laye, his birthplace, and it was there we met again. Presently, when both of us were able to escape from the great crowd of courtiers, marshals, and ministers who surrounded the king, he told me that he was glad he had met me once more--that he wished to confide a secret to me if I would hear it, a charge if I would accept it. At first I hesitated, then--when I found it would not thrust against your father's honour"--again the girl stroked her mother's hand--"I told him he might confide in me. Aurelie, he told me that, embittered by having lost me, he had married in private an English lady, daughter of a refugee, that he had learned to love her, and that death had parted them after a few years of marriage. Also, he told me, she left him a son, whom he had brought up in ignorance of the position that must be his, but that--should he return from the Palatinate--he meant to acknowledge him. He never did return, and his son has never been acknowledged."

"Why, my mother?" asked Aurelie, with an upward glance. "Why?"

"Nay, child," the marquise replied. "Think no evil of me. No base thoughts entered my mind. No remembrance that his son stood in the way of your half-brother's inheritance--he and your father being ostensibly De Vannes's heir. No! no! no! But in that hurried interval both he and I had made one fatal slip--had committed one hideous act of forgetfulness. He had forgotten to tell me--I to ask--where this son was, and in what name he was known."

The girl dropped her hands with a despairing action into her lap; then a moment later she turned the soft hazel eyes up again toward her mother's face and said: "Yet now you know! You have found out!"

"Yes, I have found out. That son is the man who sleeps beneath our roof to-night--Lieutenant St. Georges."

"But how? How? How?"

"Again, listen. For years I sought to find him, made inquiries in every quarter I could think of, asked--quietly and cautiously--of all who might by chance possess any information. Then, at last, it came--from the quarter least to be imagined. From your half-brother."

"Raoul?"

"Ay, Raoul, your father's heir--also heir to the fortune of the Duc de Vannes, as all the world thought and still thinks. He came to me one day--three months ago--when he had been privately to Paris; for what reason I know not, although I know that his visit was a secret one, since he had not been presented to the king. He came in, I say, and standing before me, he said, 'Madame, who is Monsieur St. Georges?' I answered that I had never heard of the gentleman before, to which he replied: ''Tis strange, madame. He is an officer of the Regiment de Nivernois. And his commission was given him by the king at the request of your late--friend, shall I say?--the Duc de Vannes!'

"Aurelie, I fell to trembling then, for I thought to myself, 'I have found his son.' De Vannes had told me that son was being educated for his own profession of arms--nay, more, that he sought for him a commission from the king. Meanwhile, Raoul was watching me carefully, so that I disguised as best I could my agitation, while I replied: 'It seems to me you need not to demand information of me. You know of Monsieur St. Georges's existence--of the calling he follows. On my part, I have never heard of him before!' 'Nor perhaps,' he replied, 'ever will again!' and with that he left me."

"It must be the man," Mademoiselle de Roquemaure murmured. "It must be he."

"It is he," the marquise replied emphatically. "It is he. As he stood before me to-night I saw his father in his eyes, in his glance--nay, in his bearing. That man is the son of De Vannes--is the De Vannes himself. And if more proof was wanted, is it not forthcoming when we have learned that not only his life, but the life of his child, is thrust against? His father died without a will, without naming him; _your_ father was therefore the heir, and--after him--your brother Raoul. In another year, when he is thirty, De Vannes's wealth is his, if--if," and her eyes glistened as she spoke, "no direct heir bars the way. You understand?"

"Yes," the girl said slowly. "Yes, I understand."

CHAPTER XII.

LOST.

A considerable hubbub outside the manoir--the crying of a woman, and the voices of various men all talking together--aroused St. Georges from his sleep as the wintry dawn broke through the fogs and mists of the night.

"_Fichte_," he heard the old servitor say, "you are a fool, my girl, to come here and thrust your head in the lion's jaws. Better make off another way; he will kill you, I warrant, when he hears how you have kept your promise."

"Let him," he heard next a woman's voice reply, a voice all broken and rendered indistinct by her tears and sobs, "let him. O _mon Dieu_!"

she wailed, "have pity on me! I would have shielded the little thing with my life. I left it but a few, nay, not ten, minutes, and then--then it was gone. Oh, pity me, pity me, _mon Dieu_!"

With a bound St. Georges had flung himself from out of his bed, and was hastily putting on his clothes. For the words of the weeping woman in the roadway, as they rose to his ears--above all, the voice which he recognised--told him the worst. The child, his child, was missing; the woman below was the one to whom he had confided Dorine overnight.

Huddling on his garments, therefore, while still he heard arising the voices from a short distance below him (for the first floor of the manoir, on which his room was situated, was not more than twelve or fourteen feet from the ground) and the girl's sobs and weeping as she exclaimed, "Not more than ten minutes did I leave it alone, not more, while I regarded the troops coming in," he descended rapidly to the great hall below. He met no one on his way as he did so--doubtless, neither the marquise nor her daughter were yet risen--and finding the door in the tourelle with little difficulty, he emerged into the roadway.

Standing in it were those two whose voices he had already heard--the old servitor and the girl from the inn in Troyes--and by them was the youth, Gaston, his arm this morning being bound up in a sling, as though he had met with some hurt. He was gazing silently at the girl as she sobbed and wept before the old man, listening evidently with interest to all she said, and with a look of sympathy on his face for the evident distress of mind she was in.

But now, as St. Georges appeared before her, his face stern and fierce--though already there was on it a look of misery and foreboding--she flung herself upon her knees before him in the hard, frost-bound road, and lifting up her clasped hands she cried:

"Oh, monsieur, forgive me, pardon me! I did but leave the child for ten moments, and----"

"And," said St. Georges, his face growing almost darker than before, "it is stolen, or dead! Is that what you have come to tell me?"

"Alas! alas!" she moaned, "that it should be so. Stolen, not dead, thank G.o.d. Oh, monsieur," and again the coa.r.s.e, hard-working hands were clasped and lifted up before his face, "_ayez pitie, je_----"

"Be brief," the _chevau-leger_ interrupted, taking no heed of her wailings, while the old and young man started at the misery revealed by the changed tones of his voice. "Be brief. I confided my child to you, and you have failed in your trust. Tell me how. Then I may know how to act. Proceed."