The Grey Cloak - Harold MacGrath (smallest ebook reader .txt) 📗

/> "You are guilty of beautiful eyes."

"I should have thrown myself upon Mazarin's mercy."

"Which is like unto the flesh of the fish-little blood and that cold. You forget your beauty, Madame, and your wit. Mazarin would have found you very guilty of these. And is not Madame de Montbazon your mother? Mazarin loves her not overwell. Ah, but that paper! What the devil did we sign it for? I would give a year of my life could I but put my hands upon it."

"Or the man who stole it."

"Or the man who stole it," repeated he.

"When I return to France, I shall have a deal to revenge," her hands clenching.

"Let me be the sword of wrath, Madame. You have but to say the word. You love no one, you say. You are young; I will devote my life to teaching you."

Madame's gesture was of protest and of resignation. "Monsieur, if you address me again, I shall appeal to Father Le Mercier or Father Chaumonot. I will not be persecuted longer."

"Ah, well!" He moved aside for her and leaned against a tree, watching her till she disappeared within the palisade. "Now, that is a woman! She lacks not one attribute of perfection, save it be a husband, and that shall be found. I wonder what that fool of a D'Hérouville was doing this morning with those dissatisfied colonists and that man Pauquet? I will watch. Something is going on, and it will not harm to know what." He laughed silently.

Before the women entered the wilderness to create currents and eddies in the sluggish stream which flowed over the colonists, Victor began to compile a book on Indian lore. He took up the work the very first night of his arrival; took it up as eagerly as if it were a gift from the gods, as indeed it was, promising as it did to while away many a long night. He depended wholly upon Father Chaumonot's knowledge of the tongue and the legends; and daring the first three nights he and Chaumonot divided a table between them, the one to scribble his lore and the other to add a page to those remarkable memoirs, the Jesuit Relations. The Chevalier watched them both from a corner where he sat and gravely smoked a wooden pipe.

And then the manuscript of the poet was put aside.

"Why?" asked Chaumonot one night. He had been greatly interested in the poet's work.

Victor flushed guiltily. "Perhaps it may be of no value. There are but half a dozen thoughts worth remembering."

"And who may say that immortality does not dwell in these thoughts?" said the priest. "All things are born to die save thought; and if in passing we leave but a single thought which will alleviate the sufferings of man or add beauty to his existence, one does not live and die in vain." Chaumonot's afterthought was: "This good lad is in love with one or the other of these women."

But Clio knew Victor no more. On the margins he drew faces or began rondeaux which came to no end.

"Laughter has a pleasant sound in my ears, Paul," said Victor; "and I have not heard you laugh in some time."

"Perhaps the thought has not occurred to me," replied the Chevalier, glancing at the entrance to the palisade. Madame had only that moment passed through, having left the vicomte. "I have lost the trick of laughing. No thought of mine is spontaneous. With a carpenter's ell I mark out each thought; it is all edges and angles."

"Something must be done, then, to make you laugh. Madame and mademoiselle have promised to take a canoe trip back into the hills this afternoon. Come with us."

"They suggested . . . ?" the Chevalier stammered.

"No. But haven't you the right? At least you know madame."

"Madame?"

"Madame, always madame. Here formalities would only be ridiculous. You will go with us for safety's sake, if for nothing more."

"I will go . . . with that understanding. Ah, lad, if only I knew what you know!"

"We should still be where we are," evasively. The poet had a plan in regard to madame and the Chevalier. It twisted his brave heart, yet he clung to it.

Caprice is an exquisite trait in a woman; a woman who has it-and what woman has not?-is all the seasons of the year compressed into an hour-the mildness of spring, the warmth of summer, the glory of autumn, and the chill of winter. And when madame saw the Chevalier that afternoon, she put a foot into the canoe, and immediately withdrew it.

"What is it?" asked Victor.

"Is Monsieur le Chevalier going?"

"Yes." Victor waited. "Why?" he said finally.

"Nothing, nothing." Madame took her place in the canoe.

"It is necessary for our general safety, Madame, that the Chevalier goes with us."

"There is danger, then?"

"There will he none," emphatically.

"Let us be off," was madame's rejoinder.

The Chevalier stepped in and took the paddle, while Victor pushed the canoe into the water. He and Anne followed presently. Madame sat in the bow, her back to the Chevalier, her hands resting lightly on the sides. The rings which the Chevalier had seen on those beautiful hands while in Quebec were gone, even to the wedding ring. They were doubtless bedecking the pudgy digits of one Corn Planter's wife, far away in the Seneca country. The canoe quivered as the Chevalier's strong arms swung the narrow-bladed paddle. Past marshes went the painted canoes; they swam the singing shallows; they glided under shading willow; they sped by wild grape-vine and spreading elm. The stream was embroidered with a thousand grasses, dying daisies, paling goldenrod, berry bushes, and wild-rose thorn. A thousand elusive perfumes rose to greet them, a thousand changing scenes. October, in all her gorgeous furbelows, sat upon her throne. The Chevalier never uttered a word, but studied madame's half-turned cheek. Once he was conscious that the color on that cheek deepened, then faded.

"It is the wind," he thought. "She is truly the most beautiful woman in all the world; and fool that I am, I have vowed to her face that I shall make her love me!" He could hear Victor's voice from time to time, coming with the wind.

"Monsieur," madame said abruptly, when the silence Could no longer be endured, "since you are here . . . Well, why do you not speak?"

The paddle turned so violently that the canoe came dangerously near upsetting.

"What shall I say, Madame?"

"Eh! must I think for you?" impatiently.

The fact that her eye was not upon him, gave him a vestige of courage. "It is a far cry from the galleries of the Louvre, Madame, to this spot."

"We have gone back to the beginning of the world. No music save Nicot's violin, which he plays sadly enough; no masks, no parties, no galloping to the hunt, no languishing in the balconies. Were it not pregnant with hidden dangers, I should love this land. I wonder who is the latest celebrity at the old Rambouillet; a poet possibly, a swashbuckler, more probably."

"Move back a little, Madame. We shall land on that stretch of sand by the willows."

Madame did as he required, and with a dexterous stroke the Chevalier sent the craft upon the beach and jumped out. This manoeuver to assist her did not pass, for she was up and out almost as soon as he. In a moment Victor came to the spot. The two canoes were hidden with a cunning which the Chevalier had learned from the Indian.

Above them was a hill which was almost split in twain by a gorge or gully, down through which a brook leaped and hounded and tumbled, rolling its musical "r's." The four started up the long incline, the women gathering the belated flowers and the men picking up curious sticks or sending boulders hurtling down the hillside. Higher and higher they mounted till the summit was reached. Hill after hill rolled away to the east, to the south, to the west, while toward the north the lake glittered with all the brilliancy of a cardinal's plate.

"Can it be," said Victor, breaking the spell, "can it be that we once knew Paris?"

"Paris!" repeated madame. Her eyes took in her beaded skirt and moccasins and replaced them with glowing silks and shimmering laces.

Paris! Many a phantom was stirred from its tomb at the sound of this magic name.

Anne perched herself upon a boulder and the Chevalier rested beside her, while madame and the poet strolled a short distance away.

"Shall we ever see our dear Paris again, Gabrielle?" asked the poet.

"I hope so; and soon, soon!"

"How came you to sign that paper?"

"He would have broken my arm, else. How I hated him! Tricks, subterfuges, lies, menaces; I was surrounded by them. And I believed in so many things those early days!"

"How softly breathes this last, lingering ghost of summer," he said. "How lovingly the pearls and opals and amethysts of heaven linger on the crimsoning hills! See how the stream runs like a silver thread, laughing and singing, to join the grave river. We can not see the river from here, but we know how gravely it journeys to the sea. Can you not smell the odor of mint, of earth, of the forest, and the water? Hark! I hear a bird singing. There he goes, a yellow bird, a golden rouleau of song. How the yellow flower stands out against the dark of the grasses! It is all beautiful. It is the immortality in us which nature enchants. See how the wooded lands fade and fade till they and the heavens meet and dissolve! And all this is yours, Gabrielle, for the seeing and the hearing. Some day I shall know all things, but never again shall I know the perfect beauty of this day. Some day I shall know the reason for this and for that, why I made a bad step here and a short one there; but never again, this hour." He picked up a chestnut-bur and opened it, extending the plump chestnuts to her.

How delicately this man was telling her that he still loved her! Absently her hand closed over the chestnuts, and the thought in her eyes was far away. If only it had been written that she might love him!

"Monsieur de Saumaise," said Anne, "will you take me to the pool? You told me that it would make a fine mirror, and I have not seen my face in so long a time that I declare I have quite forgotten how it looks."

"Come along, Mademoiselle; into the heart of the wood. I had a poem to recite to you, but I have forgotten part of it. It is heroic, and begins like this:

" Laughing at fate and her chilling frown,
Plunging through wilderness, cavern, and cave,
Building the