"But----"

"And I run no risk. M. de Vlaye knows me, and this"--with a gesture which drew attention to her conventual garb--"will protect me."

The Duke gazed at the object of his adoration in a kind of rapture, seeing already the wings on her shoulders, the aureole about her head.

"Mademoiselle, you will do that?" he cried. "Then you are no woman!

You are an angel!" In his enthusiasm he knelt--not without difficulty, for he was still weak--and kissed her hand. To him the thing seemed an act of pure heroism, pure self-denial, pure good-doing.

But Roger, who knew more of his sister's nature and past history, and whose knowledge left less room for fancy's gilding, stood lost in gloomy thought. What did she mean? Was she going as friend or enemy?

Influence with Vlaye she had, or lately had; but, the Countess released, in what a position would she, his sister, stand? Could he, could her father, could her friends let her do this thing?

Yet the chance--to a lover--was too good to reject; the position, moreover, was too desperate for niceties. The thought that she was going, not for the sake of the Countess, but of the Captain of Vlaye, the suspicion that she was not unwilling to take the Countess's place and the Countess's risks, occurred to him. But he thrust, he strove to thrust the suspicion and the thought from him. Her motive and her meaning, even though that motive and meaning were to save the Captain of Vlaye, were small things beside the Countess's safety.

"At any rate I shall go with you," he said at length, and with more of suspicion than of grat.i.tude in his tone. "When will you be ready?"

"I think it likely that he will have bidden Father Benet to be with him at sunset," she answered. "If we are at the priest's, therefore, an hour earlier, it should do."

"And for safe-conduct?"

"I will answer for that," she replied with boldness, "so far as M. de Vlaye's men are concerned."

The answer chafed Roger anew. Her reliance on her influence with Vlaye and Vlaye's people--he hated it; and for an instant he hesitated. But in the end he swallowed his vexation: had he not made up his mind to shut his eyes? And the three separated after a few more words relating to the arrangements to be made. The Duke, standing with a full heart in the doorway, watched her to her quarters, marked the grace of her movements, and in his mind doomed the Captain of Vlaye to unspeakable deaths if he harmed her; while she, as she pa.s.sed away, thought--but we need not enter into her thoughts. She was doing this, lest a worse thing happen; doing it in a pa.s.sion of jealousy, in a frenzy of disgust. But she had one consolation. She would see the Captain of Vlaye! She would see the man she loved. Through the dark stuff of her thoughts that prospect ran like a golden thread.

Roger, on the other hand, should have been content. He should have been more than satisfied, as an hour later he rode beside her down the river valley to the chapel beside the ford, and thence to the open country about Villeneuve. For if things were still dark, there was a prospect of light. A few hours earlier he had despaired; he had seen no means of saving the woman he adored, save at the expense of his own life. Now he had hope and a chance, now he had prospects, now he might look, if fortune favoured him, to be her escort into safety before the sun rose again.

Surely, then, he should have been content; yet he was not. Not even when after a journey of four hours the two, having pa.s.sed Villeneuve, gained without misadventure the summit of that hill on the scarped side of which the Countess had met with her first misfortune. From that point, they and the two armed servants who followed them could look down upon the wide green valley that framed the town of Vlaye, and that, somewhat lower, opened into the wide plain of the Dronne.

They could discern the bridge over the river; they could almost count the red roofs of the small town that crept up from the water to the coronet of grey walls and towers that crowned all. Those walls and towers basking in the sunshine were the eyrie that lorded it over leagues of country seen and unseen--the hawk's nest, the _plebis flagellum_, as the old chronicler has it. They might, in sight of those towers, count the preliminaries over and all but the supreme risk run.

For quite easily they might have fallen in with Vlaye's people on the road and been taken; or with M. de Vlaye himself, and with that there had been an end of the plan. But they had escaped these dangers. And yet Roger was not content; still he rode with a gloomy brow and pinched lips. The longer he thought of his sister's plan, the more he suspected and the less he liked it. There was in it a little which he did not understand, and more which he understood too well. His sister and M. de Vlaye! He hated the collocation; he hated to think that she must be left, willingly and by her own act, in the adventurer's power; and this at a moment when disappointment would aggravate a temper tried by the attack on him and by the part which the Vicomte had played in it. On what did she depend for her safety, for her honour, for all that she put wantonly at stake? On his respect? His friendship? Or his love?

"I will take her place," she had said. Could it be that she was willing, that she desired, to take it altogether? Was she, after the rebuffs, after the scornful and contumelious slight which M. de Vlaye had put upon her, willing still to seek him, willing still to be in his power?

It seemed so. Certainly it could not be denied that she was seeking him, and that he, her brother, was escorting her. In that light people would look upon his action.

The thought stung him, and he halted midway on the woodland track that descended the farther side of the hill. His face wore a mixture of shame and appeal--with ill-humour underlying both. "See here, Odette,"

he said abruptly, "I do not see the end of this."

Though she raised her eyebrows contemptuously, a faint tinge of colour crept into her face.

"I thought," she replied, "that the end was to save this little fool who is too weak to save herself!"

"But you?"

"Oh, for me?" contemptuously. "Take no heed of me. I am of other stuff, and can manage my own affairs."

"You think so," he retorted. "But the Captain of Vlaye, he, too, is of other stuff."

"Do you fancy I am afraid of M. de Vlaye?" she answered. And her eyes flashed scorn on him. "You may be! You should be!" with a glance which marked his deformity and stabbed the sense of it deep into his heart.

"How should you be otherwise, seeing that in no circ.u.mstances could you be a match for him! But I? I say again that I am of other stuff."

"All the same," he muttered darkly, "I would not go on----"

"Would not go on?" she retorted in mockery. "Not with your sweet Countess in danger? Not with the dear light of your eyes in Vlaye's arms? Not go on? Oh, brave lover! Oh, brave man! Not go on, and your Countess, your pretty Countess----"

"Be silent!" he cried. She stung him to rage.

"Ah! We go back then?"

But he could not face that, he could not say yes to that; and, defeated, he turned in dumb sullen anger and resumed the road.

Necessarily the danger of arrest increased as they approached the town. The last mile, which brought them to the bridge over the river, was traversed under the eyes of the castle; it would not have surprised Roger had they been met and stopped long before they came to the town gate. But the Captain of Vlaye, it seemed, held the danger still remote, and troubled his followers with few precautions. The place lay drowsing in the late heat of the summer afternoon. It was still as the dead, and though their approach was doubtless seen and noted, no one issued forth or challenged them. Even the men who lounged in the shade of the low-browed archway--that still bore the scutcheon of its ancient lords--contented themselves with a long stare and a sulky salute. The bridge pa.s.sed, a narrow street paved and steep, and overhung by ancient houses of brick and timber, opened before them. It led upwards in the direction of the castle, but after pursuing it in single file some fifty paces, the Abbess turned from it into a narrow lane that brought them in a bow-shot--for the town was very small--to the wall again. This was their present destination. For crowded into an angle of the wall under the shadow of one of the old brick watch-towers stood the chapel and cell that owned the lax rule of M. de Vlaye's chaplain, Father Benet.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CASTLE OF VLAYE.

Roger had little faith in the priest's power, and less in his willingness to aid them. But at worst he was not to be kept in suspense. By good luck, Father Benet was walking at the moment of their arrival in his potherb garden. As they dismounted, they espied the Father peeping at them between the tall sunflowers and budding hollyhocks; his ruddy face something dismayed and fallen, and his mien that of a portly man caught in the act of wrong-doing. Finding himself detected, he came forward with an awkward show of joviality.

"Welcome, sister," he said. "There is naught the matter at the Abbey, I trust, that I see you thus late in the day?"

"No, the matter is here," the Abbess replied, with a look in her eyes that told him she knew all. "And we are here to see about it. Let us in, Father. The time is short, for at any moment your master"--she indicated the castle by a gesture--"may hear of our arrival and send for us."

"I am sure," the priest answered glibly, "that anything that I can do for you, sister----"

She cut him short. "No words, no words, but let us in!" she said sharply. And when with pursed lips and a shrug of resignation he had complied, and they stood in the cool stone-floored room--communicating by an open door with the chapel--in which he received his visitors, she came with the same abruptness to the point.

"At what hour are you going up to the castle?" she asked.

He tried to avoid her eyes. "To the castle?" he repeated.

"Ay," she said, watching him keenly. "To the castle. Are there more castles than one? Or first, when were you there last, Father?"

His look wandered, full of calculation. "Last?" he said. "When was I at the castle last?"

"The truth! The truth!" she cried impatiently.

He chid her, but with a propitiatory smile akin to those which the augurs exchanged. "Sister! Sister!" he said. "_Nil nisi verum clericus!_ I was there no more than an hour back."

"And got your orders? And got your orders, I suppose?" she repeated with rude insistence. "Out with it, Father. I see that you are no more easy than I am!"

He flung out his hands in sudden abandonment. "G.o.d knows I am not!" he said. "G.o.d knows I am not! And that is the truth, and I am not hiding it. G.o.d knows I am not! But what am I to do? He is a violent man--you know him!--and I am a man of peace. I must do his will or go. And I am better than nothing! I may"--there was a whine in his voice--"I may do some good still. You know that, sister. I may do some good. I baptise.

I bury. But if I go, there is no one."

"And if you go, you are no one," she answered keenly. "For your suffragan has you in no good favour, I am told. So that if you go you happen on but a sackcloth welcome. So it is said, Father. I know not if it be said truly."