Traitor and True. John Bloundelle-Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ engage a maid who should attend to her every want-the wants of a woman who, not a month ago, had nightly to mend and brush her rags ere she could sally forth the next day! – the means to be able to sleep warm and soft. Paid-and even this thought was better though still bitter-by a smile, a kind word from a man whom she had allowed herself to love without that love having been solicited, without its being returned.

      She had done, must go on doing for a time, that which she was paid to do. Alas! even as, more than once on this journey, she, all unknown to those others, had been in the same inns with them; as she had crept about dark corridors and staircases endeavouring to hear what they might be saying, above all if they were meditating treachery to him, her adoré; as, too, she had tried to see and sometimes to possess herself of a letter here and there that had been written by any one of them-so she must continue to do. That those others would put up at the Krone in this city, she knew: she had not failed to learn that, either through her maid's gossip or her purse. The purse that was filled with Spanish gold as payment for her treason to her country and her King, or, doubly bitter thought, might, for aught she knew, be filled by the man of whom her mad love had made her the slave!

      "The shame of it," she murmured now. "Oh! the shame, the shame of it. I, a woman of gentle blood, well-born, well-nurtured, to sink to this. To this!" and, as she so thought and mused, her eyes would turn furtively towards the window-curtains that shut out the sight of the river though not the sound of its rushing, and she wondered if in the swollen, turbulent stream, there was not a more fitting ending to be found to all her mad folly, her wicked treachery, than in aught else.

      "If he knew all," she continued to muse now. "If he knew what La Truaumont knows; if he should hear of what I have been in my time accused, would he trust me-a spy! – to spy upon those others? Would he have treated me kindly, or ever, even in his softer moments, have spoken gently to me. Ah! would he! To me, 'Emérance de Villiers-Bordéville,'" and she smiled bitterly, "whose name is false, whose title and rank are spurious. Yet," she went on, endeavouring perhaps to excuse herself to herself; "my own, my real, name is the equal of those assumed ones, if he did but know. Ay! as good as those and, in spite of the cloud that once lowered over it, not smirched and blackened then with the names of spy, intrigueuse, adventuress."

      The logs burnt low and fell together with many a soft clash, while making the woman feel drowsy with their balmy warmth as she sat before the hearth; the cathedral bells from above sounded dreamily to her ears and as though afar off. Even the tall, well-knit and superbly moulded figure and the handsome, dark face of the man whose image was never absent from her mind, were vanishing into the light mists of sleep when, suddenly, she sprang to her feet, startled by what she had heard outside.

      A bugle had rung below in the open place between the inn and the Rhine; there was the tramping of many horses' hoofs on the rough stones beneath the windows; orders were being shouted, and, mixed with these sounds, the shuffling of feet inside and along the corridors of the inn and the clatter of the chains of the main door being unloosed and the bolts drawn back.

      "What is it?" the woman cried to herself, her hand to her breast, her face white. "What? Nothing can be known yet, nothing discovered to warrant their taking me, and-pshaw! – this is a Republican city not a French one. They can do nothing here."

      Yet, notwithstanding, Emérance went towards the window and endeavoured to see as much as was possible through the long-since uncleaned, diamond panes of the window, and between the rusty iron bars outside.

      What she could perceive was a dozen or so of horsemen clad in scarlet and green and armed with swords and musquetoons, who surrounded a coach bigger than that in which she had herself journeyed; a coach which had a table inside it and, on that table, a fixed travelling lamp that shone upon and lit up the faces of two women. One, a woman, dark, soft-eyed and rich in colouring, who was superbly dressed; the other, also well favoured but of a more fair complexion and not so handsomely attired.

      The noise and hubbub below continued as she gazed out; the voice of the landlord was heard yelling orders downstairs and the voice of the landlady screaming similar ones above; the escort-for an escort it was, with which the Duke of Lorraine had furnished the Duchess from Nancy to Basle-had dismounted and were leading their horses away. A moment later, Emérance understood that the Duchess and her following were being shown upstairs.

      "To the next suite to this," she whispered to herself as she heard voices in the rooms adjoining her own. "Ah! we shall be neighbours. 'Tis well if we encounter each other that she does not know who and what I am."

      Listening to the sounds proceeding from the next set of rooms, she endeavoured to discover what person might have taken possession of the chamber on the other side of the partition wall.

      What she heard, however, gave her no clue to that. Something she did hear flung down on a table which, by the rattle and clash it made, gave her, who well knew the sound of such things, the impression of a rapier being thrown on the table after having been unlooped from the wearer's body. And she heard also a man's voice giving orders, and a call from one woman to another in rooms still farther off; but little more than this. Nothing more than the ordinary sounds which, in all times, travellers staying in inns and hotels have heard on the arrival of new-comers in the same house.

      CHAPTER VIII

      Meanwhile, the sounds that Emérance had heard in that next set of rooms shut off by the wall from those which she occupied (while being served outside by the same corridor running at right angles from the main passage) had been made by Humphrey West in the room appropriated to him.

      For the Duchesse de Castellucchio besides being a timorous woman in some things, although one bold enough in others, was by no means sure whether-even now that she was in a free Swiss Canton and in a city that claimed to be one of the most free and independent in Europe-some steps might not be taken to seize upon her and drag her back to France and into the clutches of her awe-inspiring husband. She knew that, but a league or so off was the frontier of France, while she did not know what the myrmidons of that powerful country might not be able to do against a woman of her position who had fled from a husband possessing the influence which her husband undoubtedly possessed, maniac though he might be. And, not knowing what she feared, she feared doubly. Italian-like, she was naturally superstitious, while, at the same time, her mind was filled with wild romances dealing with beautiful and unfortunate heroines shut up in gloomy castles, or beset in strange inns and out-of-the-way places at night and hidden in dungeons, or thrown into torrents and rivers not unlike the rapid swirling river now rushing beneath, or almost beneath, her windows.

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