CHAPTER XLIII. THE DREARY JOURNEY
Rain! Rain! Rain! Incessant, monotonous and dreary! The wind had changedround to the southwest. It blew now in great gusts that sent weird,sighing sounds through the trees, and drove the heavy showers into thefaces of the men as they rode on, with heads bent forward against thegale.
The rain-sodden bridles slipped through their hands, bringing out soresand blisters on their palms; the horses were fidgety, tossing theirheads with wearying persistence as the wet trickled into their ears, orthe sharp, intermittent hailstones struck their sensitive noses.
Three days of this awful monotony, varied only by the halts at waysideinns, the changing of troops at one of the guard-houses on the way, thereiterated commands given to the fresh squad before starting on the nextlap of this strange, momentous way; and all the while, audible abovethe clatter of horses' hoofs, the rumbling of coach-wheels--two closedcarriages, each drawn by a pair of sturdy horses; which were changed atevery halt. A soldier on each box urged them to a good pace to keep upwith the troopers, who were allowed to go at an easy canter or lightjog-trot, whatever might prove easiest and least fatiguing. And fromtime to time Heron's shaggy, gaunt head would appear at the window ofone of the coaches, asking the way, the distance to the next city orto the nearest wayside inn; cursing the troopers, the coachman, hiscolleague and every one concerned, blaspheming against the interminablelength of the road, against the cold and against the wet.
Early in the evening on the second day of the journey he had met with anaccident. The prisoner, who presumably was weak and weary, and not oversteady on his feet, had fallen up against him as they were both about tore-enter the coach after a halt just outside Amiens, and citizen Heronhad lost his footing in the slippery mud of the road. His head came inviolent contact with the step, and his right temple was severely cut.Since then he had been forced to wear a bandage across the top of hisface, under his sugar-loaf hat, which had added nothing to his beauty,but a great deal to the violence of his temper. He wanted to push themen on, to force the pace, to shorten the halts; but Chauvelin knewbetter than to allow slackness and discontent to follow in the wake ofover-fatigue.
The soldiers were always well rested and well fed, and though the delaycaused by long and frequent halts must have been just as irksome to himas it was to Heron, yet he bore it imperturbably, for he would have hadno use on this momentous journey for a handful of men whose enthusiasmand spirit had been blown away by the roughness of the gale, or drownedin the fury of the constant downpour of rain.
Of all this Marguerite had been conscious in a vague, dreamy kind ofway. She seemed to herself like the spectator in a moving panoramicdrama, unable to raise a finger or to do aught to stop that final,inevitable ending, the cataclysm of sorrow and misery that awaited her,when the dreary curtain would fall on the last act, and she and all theother spectators--Armand, Chauvelin, Heron, the soldiers--would slowlywend their way home, leaving the principal actor behind the fallencurtain, which never would be lifted again.
After that first halt in the guard-room of the Rue Ste. Anne she hadbeen bidden to enter a second hackney coach, which, followed the otherat a distance of fifty metres or so, and was, like that other, closelysurrounded by a squad of mounted men.
Armand and Chauvelin rode in this carriage with her; all day she satlooking out on the endless monotony of the road, on the drops of rainthat pattered against the window-glass, and ran down from it like aperpetual stream of tears.
There were two halts called during the day--one for dinner and onemidway through the afternoon--when she and Armand would step out ofthe coach and be led--always with soldiers close around them--to somewayside inn, where some sort of a meal was served, where the atmospherewas close and stuffy and smelt of onion soup and of stale cheese.
Armand and Marguerite would in most cases have a room to themselves,with sentinels posted outside the door, and they would try and eatenough to keep body and soul together, for they would not allow theirstrength to fall away before the end of the journey was reached.
For the night halt--once at Beauvais and the second night atAbbeville--they were escorted to a house in the interior of the city,where they were accommodated with moderately clean lodgings. Sentinels,however, were always at their doors; they were prisoners in all butname, and had little or no privacy; for at night they were both so tiredthat they were glad to retire immediately, and to lie down on the hardbeds that had been provided for them, even if sleep fled from theireyes, and their hearts and souls were flying through the city in searchof him who filled their every thought.
Of Percy they saw little or nothing. In the daytime food was evidentlybrought to him in the carriage, for they did not see him get down, andon those two nights at Beauvais and Abbeville, when they caught sight ofhim stepping out of the coach outside the gates of the barracks, he wasso surrounded by soldiers that they only saw the top of his head and hisbroad shoulders towering above those of the men.
Once Marguerite had put all her pride, all her dignity by, and askedcitizen Chauvelin for news of her husband.
"He is well and cheerful, Lady Blakeney," he had replied with hissarcastic smile. "Ah!" he added pleasantly, "those English areremarkable people. We, of Gallic breed, will never really understandthem. Their fatalism is quite Oriental in its quiet resignation to thedecree of Fate. Did you know, Lady Blakeney, that when Sir Percy wasarrested he did not raise a hand. I thought, and so did my colleague,that he would have fought like a lion. And now, that he has no doubtrealised that quiet submission will serve him best in the end, he isas calm on this journey as I am myself. In fact," he concludedcomplacently, "whenever I have succeeded in peeping into the coach Ihave invariably found Sir Percy Blakeney fast asleep."
"He--" she murmured, for it was so difficult to speak to this callouswretch, who was obviously mocking her in her misery--"he--you--you arenot keeping him in irons?"
"No! Oh no!" replied Chauvelin with perfect urbanity. "You see, nowthat we have you, Lady Blakeney, and citizen St. Just with us we have noreason to fear that that elusive Pimpernel will spirit himself away."
A hot retort had risen to Armand's lips. The warm Latin blood in himrebelled against this intolerable situation, the man's sneers in theface of Marguerite's anguish. But her restraining, gentle hand hadalready pressed his. What was the use of protesting, of insulting thisbrute, who cared nothing for the misery which he had caused so long ashe gained his own ends?
And Armand held his tongue and tried to curb his temper, tried tocultivate a little of that fatalism which Chauvelin had said wascharacteristic of the English. He sat beside his sister, longing tocomfort her, yet feeling that his very presence near her was an outrageand a sacrilege. She spoke so seldom to him, even when they were alone,that at times the awful thought which had more than once found birth inhis weary brain became crystallised and more real. Did Marguerite guess?Had she the slightest suspicion that the awful cataclysm to which theywere tending with every revolution of the creaking coach-wheels had beenbrought about by her brother's treacherous hand?
And when that thought had lodged itself quite snugly in his mind hebegan to wonder whether it would not be far more simple, far more easy,to end his miserable life in some manner that might suggest itself onthe way. When the coach crossed one of those dilapidated, parapetlessbridges, over abysses fifty metres deep, it might be so easy to throwopen the carriage door and to take one final jump into eternity.
So easy--but so damnably cowardly.
Marguerite's near presence quickly brought him back to himself. His lifewas no longer his own to do with as he pleased; it belonged to the chiefwhom he had betrayed, to the sister whom he must endeavour to protect.
Of Jeanne now he thought but little. He had put even the memory of herby--tenderly, like a sprig of lavender pressed between the faded leavesof his own happiness. His hand was no longer fit to hold that of anypure woman--his hand had on it a deep stain, immutable, like the brandof Cain.
Yet Marguerite
beside him held his hand and together they looked out onthat dreary, dreary road and listened to of the patter of the rain andthe rumbling of the wheels of that other coach on ahead--and it was allso dismal and so horrible, the rain, the soughing of the wind in thestunted trees, this landscape of mud and desolation, this eternally greysky.