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I have a dim recollection, Citoyenne, of something uncommonly like your troth which you plighted me one night at Boisvert. But so little did that promise bind you that when I sought to enforce your fulfilment of it you broke my head and left me to die in the road." His words shook her out of her calm. Her bosom rose and fell, her eyes seemed to grow haggard and her hands were clasped convulsively.
And now she would have thanked him for having saved her, but he cut her short almost roughly. "You owe me no thanks," he said. "I have but done for you what my manhood must have bidden me do for any woman similarly situated. For to-night I have saved you, Citoyenne. I shall make an effort to smuggle you and your mother out of Boisvert before morning, but after that you must help yourselves."
"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."
La Boulaye had intended reaching Valenciennes that night; but rather than journey forward in the dark he now proposed to lie at Boisvert, a resolution in which he did not lack for encouragement from Charlot. Amid the sordid surroundings of Charlot's private quarters the Captain and the Deputy supped that evening.
Into the hands of the man whose bride the Marquis de Bellecour had torn from him were now delivered by a wonderful chance the wife and daughter of that same Bellecour. And at Boisvert this briganding Captain was as much to-night the lord of life and death, and all besides, as had been the Marquis of Bellecour of old.
He opined that the men, failing to pick up the trail at Charleroi, would probably go on as far as Dinant before abandoning the chase; then they would return to Boisvert to announce their failure, and by that time it would be too late to reorganise the pursuit.
And now, in that hour of her grief, it came to her as the sun pierces the mist that she loved La Boulaye; that she had loved him, indeed, since that night at Boisvert, although she had stifled the very thought, and hidden it even from herself, as being unworthy in one of her station to love a man so lowly-born as Caron. But now, on the eve of his death, the truth would no longer be denied.
A few moments later they clattered briskly out of Boisvert, the thick grey mud flying from their horses' hoofs as they went, and took the road to France. For a couple of miles they rode steadily along under the unceasing rain and in the teeth of that bleak February wind. Then at a cross-road La Boulaye unexpectedly called a halt.
"In God's name, what are you and who are you?" the Deputy demanded. "We are invalided soldiers from the army of Dumouriez," the man answered him. "But what are you doing here, at Boisvert?" "We are in hospital, Citizen." "Yonder?" asked La Boulaye derisively, pointing with his whip to the "Eagle Inn." The fellow nodded. "Yes, Citizen, yonder," he answered curtly. La Boulaye looked surprised.
Ruefully he passed his hand across his bandaged brow, and in pondering over all that had taken place since yesternight at Boisvert, his cheeks grew flushed at once with anger and with shame. "To have been so duped!" And now his mind growing clearer as he recovered in vigour it occurred to him that by to-morrow it would be too late to give pursuit.
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