“No, madame. I saw him. I implored him. But he would not listen.”
“Oh, this is horrible!” Mme. de Plougastel shuddered as she spoke. “I heard of it only half an hour ago, and I came at once, to prevent it at all costs.”
The two women looked blankly, despairingly, at each other. In the sunshine-flooded street one or two shabby idlers were pausing to eye the handsome equipage with its magnificent bay horses, and the two great ladies on the doorstep of the fencing-academy. From across the way came the raucous voice of an itinerant bellows-mender raised in the cry of his trade:
“A raccommoder les vieux soufflets!”
Madame swung to the housekeeper.
“How long is it since monsieur left?”
“Ten minutes, maybe; hardly more.” Conceiving these great ladies to be friends of her invincible master’s latest victim, the good woman preserved a decently stolid exterior.
Madame wrung her hands. “Ten minutes! Oh!” It was almost a moan. “Which way did he go?”
“The assignation is for nine o’clock in the Bois de Boulogne,” Aline informed her. “Could we follow? Could we prevail if we did?”
“Ah, my God! The question is should we come in time? At nine o’clock! And it wants but little more than a quarter of an hour. Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!” Madame clasped and unclasped her hands in anguish. “Do you know, at least, where in the Bois they are to meet?”
“No—only that it is in the Bois.”
“In the Bois!” Madame was flung into a frenzy. “The Bois is nearly half as large as Paris.” But she swept breathlessly on, “Come, Aline: get in, get in!”
Then to her coachman. “To the Bois de Boulogne by way of the Cours la Reine,” she commanded, “as fast as you can drive. There are ten pistoles for you if we are in time. Whip up, man!”
She thrust Aline into the carriage, and sprang after her with the energy of a girl. The heavy vehicle—too heavy by far for this race with time—was moving before she had taken her seat. Rocking and lurching it went, earning the maledictions of more than one pedestrian whom it narrowly avoided crushing against a wall or trampling underfoot.
Madame sat back with closed eyes and trembling lips. Her face showed very white and drawn. Aline watched her in silence. Almost it seemed to her that Mme. de Plougastel was suffering as deeply as herself, enduring an anguish of apprehension as great as her own.
Later Aline was to wonder at this. But at the moment all the thought of which her half-numbed mind was capable was bestowed upon their desperate errand.
The carriage rolled across the Place Louis XV and out on to the Cours la Reine at last. Along that beautiful, tree-bordered avenue between the Champs Élysées and the Seine, almost empty at this hour of the day, they made better speed, leaving now a cloud of dust behind them.
But fast to danger-point as was the speed, to the women in that carriage it was too slow. As they reached the barrier at the end of the Cours, nine o’clock was striking in the city behind them, and every stroke of it seemed to sound a note of doom.
Yet here at the barrier the regulations compelled a momentary halt. Aline enquired of the sergeant-in-charge how long it was since a cabriolet such as she described had gone that way. She was answered that some twenty minutes ago a vehicle had passed the barrier containing the deputy M. le Chapelier and the Paladin of the Third Estate, M. Moreau. The sergeant was very well informed. He could make a shrewd guess, he said, with a grin, of the business that took M. Moreau that way so early in the day.
They left him, to speed on now through the open country, following the road that continued to hug the river. They sat back mutely despairing, staring hopelessly ahead, Aline’s hand clasped tight in madame’s. In the distance, across the meadows on their right, they could see already the long, dusky line of trees of the Bois, and presently the carriage swung aside following a branch of the road that turned to the right, away from the river and heading straight for the forest.
Mademoiselle broke at last the silence of hopelessness that had reigned between them since they had passed the barrier.
“Oh, it is impossible that we should come in time! Impossible!”
“Don’t say it! Don’t say it!” madame cried out.
“But it is long past nine, madame! André would be punctual, and these … affairs do not take long. It … it will be all over by now.”
Madame shivered, and closed her eyes. Presently, however, she opened them again, and stirred. Then she put her head from the window. “A carriage is approaching,” she announced, and her tone conveyed the thing she feared.
“Not already! Oh, not already!” Thus Aline expressed the silently communicated thought. She experienced a difficulty in breathing, felt the sudden need of air. Something in her throat was throbbing as if it would suffocate her; a mist came and went before her eyes.
In a cloud of dust an open caleche was speeding towards them, coming from the Bois. They watched it, both pale, neither venturing to speak, Aline, indeed, without breath to do so.
As it approached, it slowed down, perforce, as they did, to effect a safe passage in that narrow road. Aline was at the window with Mme. de Plougastel, and with fearful eyes both looked into this open carriage that was drawing abreast of them.
“Which of them is it, madame? Oh, which of them?” gasped Aline, scarce daring to look, her senses swimming.
On the near side sat a swarthy young gentleman unknown to either of the ladies. He was smiling as he spoke to his companion. A moment later and the man sitting beyond came into view. He was not smiling. His face was white and set, and it was the face of the Marquis
