'And you say that you love me?' she cried.
'Helas!' he sighed. 'It is a weakness I cannot conquer.
'Look well down into your heart, M. La Boulaye,' she answered him, 'and you will find how egregious is your error. You do not love me; you love yourself, and only yourself. If you loved me you would not seek to have me when I am unwilling. Above all things, you would desire my happiness—it is ever so when we truly love—and you would seek to promote it. If, indeed, you loved me you would grant my prayer, and not torture me as you are doing. But since you only love yourself, you minister only to yourself, and seek to win me by force since you desire me.'
She ceased, and her eyes fell before his glance, which remained riveted upon her face. Immovable he stood a moment or two, then he turned from her with a little sigh, and leaning his elbow upon the window-sill, he gazed down into the crowds surging about the second tumbril. But although he saw much there that was calculated to compel attention, he heeded nothing. His thoughts were very busy, and he was doing what Mademoiselle had bidden him. He was looking into himself. And from that questioning he gathered not only that he loved her, but that he loved her so well and so truly that—in spite even of all that was passed—he must do her will, and deliver up to her the man she loved.
His resolve was but half taken when he heard her stirring in the room behind him. He turned sharply to find that she had gained the door.
'Mademoiselle!' he called after her. She stopped, and as she turned, he observed that her lashes were wet. But in her heart there arose now a fresh hope, awakened by the name by which he had recalled her. 'Whither are you going?' he asked.
'Away, Monsieur,' she answered. 'I was realising that my journey had indeed been in vain.'
He looked at her a second in silence. Then stepping forward:
'Mademoiselle,' he said, very quietly, 'your arguments have prevailed, and it shall be as you desire. The ci- devant Vicomte d'Ombreval shall go free.'
Her face seemed to grow of a sudden paler, and for an instant she stood still as if robbed of understanding. Then she came forward with hands outheld.
'Said I not that you were good and generous? Said I not that you could be noble, Monsieur?' she cried, as she caught his resisting hand and sought to carry it to her lips. 'God will bless you, Monsieur—'
He drew his hand away, but without roughness. 'Let us say no more, Mademoiselle,' he begged.
'But I will,' she answered him. 'I am not without heart, Monsieur, and now that you have given me this proof of the deep quality of your love, I—' She paused, as if at a loss for words.
'Well, Mademoiselle?' he urged her.
'I have it in my heart to wish that—that it were otherwise,' she said, her cheeks reddening under his gaze. 'If it were not that I account myself in honour bound to wed M. le Vicomte—'
'Stop!' he interrupted her. He had caught at last the drift of what she was saying. 'There is no need for any comedy, Suzanne. Enough of that had we at Boisvert.'
'It is not comedy,' she cried with heat. 'It was not altogether comedy at Boisvert.'
'True,' he said, wilfully misunderstanding her that he might the more easily dismiss the subject, 'it went nearer to being tragedy.' Then abruptly he asked her:
'Where are you residing?'
She paused before replying. She still wanted to protest that some affection for him dwelt in her heart, although curbed (to a greater extent even than she was aware) by the difference in their stations, and checked by her plighted word to Ombreval. At last, abandoning a purpose which his countenance told her would be futile:
'I am staying with my old nurse at Choisy,' she answered him. 'Henriette Godelliere is her name. She is well known in the village, and seems in good favour with the patriots, so that I account myself safe. I am believed to be her niece from the country.'
'Hum!' he snorted. 'The Citoyenne Godelliere's niece from the country in silks?'
'That is what someone questioned, and she answered that it was a gown plundered from the wardrobe of some emigrated aristocrats.'
'Have a care, Suzanne,' said he. 'The times are dangerous, and it is a matter of a week ago since a man was lanterne for no other reason than because he was wearing gloves, which was deemed an aristocratic habit. Come, Mademoiselle, let us gather up your gems. You were going without them some moments ago.'
And down upon his knees he went, and, taking up the little bag which had been left where he had flung it, he set himself to restore the jewels to it. She came to his assistance, in spite of his protestations, and so, within a moment or two, the task was completed, and the little treasure was packed away in the bosom of her gown.
'To-morrow,' he said, as he took his leave of her at the door, 'I shall hope to bring the ci-devant Vicomte to Choisy, and I will see that he is equipped with a laissez-passer that will carry both of you safely out of France.'
She was beginning to thank him all over again, but he cut her short, and so they parted.
Long after she was gone did he sit at his writing-table, his head in his hands and his eyes staring straight before him. His face looked grey and haggard; the lines that seared it were lines of pain.
'They say,' he murmured once, thinking aloud, as men sometimes will in moments of great stress, 'that a good action brings its own reward. Perhaps my action is not a good one, after all, and that is why I suffer.'
And, burying his head in his arms, he remained thus with his sorrow until his official entered to inquire if he desired lights.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE INCORRUPTIBLE
It was towards noon of the following day when Caron La Boulaye presented himself at the house of Duplay, the cabinet-maker in the Rue St. Honore, and asked of the elderly female who admitted him if he might see the Citizen-deputy Robespierre.
A berline stood at the door, the postillion at the horses' heads, and about it there was some bustle, as if in preparation of a departure. But La Boulaye paid no heed to it as he entered the house.
He was immediately conducted upstairs to the Incorruptible's apartment—for he was too well known to so much as need announcing. In answer to the woman's knock a gentle, almost plaintive voice from within bade them enter, and thus was Caron ushered into the humble dwelling of the humble and ineffective-looking individual whose power already transcended that of any other man in France, and who was destined to become still more before his ephemeral star went out.
Into that unpretentious and rather close-smelling room—for it was bed-chamber as well as dining-room and study—stepped La Boulaye unhesitatingly, with the air of a man who is intimate with his surroundings and assured of his welcome in them. In the right-hand corner stood the bed on which the clothes were still tumbled; in the centre of the chamber was a table all littered with the disorder of a meal partaken; on the left, by the window, sat Robespierre at his writing-table, and from the overmantel at the back of the room a marble counterpart of Robespierre's own head and shoulders looked down upon the newcomer. There were a few pictures on the whitewashed walls, and a few objects of art about the chamber, but in the main it had a comfortless air, which may in part have resulted from the fact that no fire had been lighted.
The great man tossed aside his pen, and rose as the door closed after the entering visitor. Pushing his horn-rimmed spectacles up on to his forehead he stretched out his hand to La Boulaye.
'It is you, Caron,' he murmured in that plaintive voice of his. It was a voice that sorted well with the humane man who had resigned a judgeship at Arras sooner than pass a death-sentence, but hardly so well with him who, as Public Prosecutor in Paris, had brought some hundreds of heads to the sawdust. 'I have been desiring to congratulate you upon your victory of yesterday,' he continued, 'even as I have been congratulating myself upon the fact that it was I who found you and gave you to the Nation. I feared that I might not see you ere I left.'
'You are leaving Paris?' asked La Boulaye, without heeding the compliments in the earlier part of the other's speech.
'For a few days. Business of the Nation, my friend. But you—let us talk of you. Do you know that I am proud of you, cher Caron? Your eloquence turned Danton green with jealousy, and as for poor Vergniaud, it extinguished
