Part 29 (2/2)

”She means to marry her to Ratoneau,” he thought, ”and she will do it, unless Heaven interferes by a miracle. Uncle Joseph is my only friend, and he cannot help me--at least--if I do not act at once, we are lost.”

He lifted Helene's fair head a little, and its pale beauty, in the dim gleam from the open window, seemed to fill his whole being as he gazed.

He drew her towards him and kissed her again and again; it might have been a last embrace, a last good-bye, but he did not mean it for that.

”Will you come with me now?” he said.

”Yes!” Helene said faintly.

”Are you afraid?”

”No”--she hesitated--”not with you. I can be brave when I am with you--but when you are not here--”

”They shall not part us again,” Angelot said.

”But how are we to get out?”

Though her lover was there, still holding her, the girl trembled as she asked the question.

”I can unbar the door,” he said. ”Come to the top of the stairs and wait there till I whistle; then come down to me.”

This seemed enough for the moment, and the wild fellow had no further plan at all. To have her outside these prison walls, in the free air he loved, under the trees in the starlight, to make a right to her, as he vaguely thought, by running off with her in this fas.h.i.+on--that was all that concerned him at the moment. Where was he to take her? Would Uncle Joseph receive them? Such thoughts just flashed through the tumult of his brain, but seemed of no present importance. Angelot was mad that night, mad with love of his cousin, with the desperate necessity which needed to be met by desperate daring.

Helene followed him, trembling very much, to the top of the stairs.

”You have a candle there? Fetch it for me,” he said.

She obeyed him, slipping through the tapestry into her own room. Once there, she looked round with a wild wonder. Could this be herself--Helene de Sainfoy--about to escape into the wide world with her lover--and empty-handed? She looked down vaguely at her white evening gown and thin shoes, s.n.a.t.c.hed up her watch and chain and a diamond ring, which were lying on the table, and slipped them into her pocket. It was the work of a moment, yet when she carried the candle to Angelot, he was white as death, and stamping with impatience; the flame in his eyes frightened her.

He took the candle without a word and disappeared down the first steep winding of the stairs. His moving shadow danced gigantic on the wall, then was gone. Helene waited in the darkness. Even love and faith, with hope added, were not strong enough to keep her brave and happy during the terrible minutes of lonely waiting there. Her limbs trembled, her heart thumped so that she had to lean for support against the cold damp wall. She bent her head forward, eagerly listening. Why had she not gone down with him? Somebody might hear him whistle. However, no whistle came; only a dull sound of banging, which echoed strangely, alarmingly, up the narrow staircase in the thickness of the wall.

It seemed to Helene that she had waited long and was becoming stupefied with anxiety, when a light flashed suddenly upon her eyes, and she opened them wide; she had never lost the childish fear which made her shut them in the dark. Angelot had leaped up the stairs again and was standing beside her, white and frowning.

”It is impossible,” he said, in a hurried whisper. ”I cannot move the bar without tools. Come back into the chapel.”

He set down the candlestick on the altar step, walked distractedly to the end of the low vaulted room, then back to where she stood gazing at him with a pitiful terror in her eyes.

”What is to be done! Is there no other way!” he said, half to himself.

”Mon Dieu, Helene, how beautiful you are! Ah, what is that? Listen!”

His ears, quicker than hers, had caught steps and a rustling sound in the pa.s.sage that ended at the chapel door.

”Dear--go back to your room,” he said. ”They must not find you here. We shall meet again--Good-night, my own!”

He was gone. The bewildered girl looked after him silently, and he was across the floor, on the window-sill, disappearing hand over head down his ladder of old twisted ivy stems, before she realised anything. Then, not the least aware that some one was knocking at her bedroom door in the pa.s.sage, shaking the latch, calling her name, she flew after him to the window and leaned out, crying to him low and wildly, ”Angelot, come back, come back! Why did you go? Ah, don't leave me! Help me to climb down, too,--please, please, darling!”

Angelot was out of sight, though not out of hearing. Forty feet of thick ivy and knotted stems, shelter of generations of owls, stretched between the chapel window and the moat's green floor; ivy two centuries old, the happy hunting-ground of many a lad of Lancilly and La Mariniere. But that night, perhaps, the hospitable old tree reached the most romantic point of its history.

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