CHAPTER XXV.

MARIE HAS LOUISE IN HER POWER--THE LAST CAROUSAL

Not a word was exchanged between Marie and Louise Gauthier during their journey from the Hôtel de Cluny to the Rue St. Paul. Once only was the silence broken, when the Marchioness desired the driver, with some impatience, to urge his horses onward with something more of speed than the leisure progression which then, as now, was the chief attribute of the _voitures de remise_ of the good city of Paris. During this period she never removed the mask from her face, and Louise was not particularly anxious to know the station of her new acquaintance. It was sufficient cause for congratulating herself to find that she was away from the trysting-place of Lauzun’s debauched companions, and once more breathing the pure air of the streets, instead of the tainted atmosphere of the _hôtel_.

The Pont de la Tournelle was at that period the highest up the river, with respect to the stream, for crossing to the other side; now, the bridges of Austerlitz, Constantine, and Bercy span the Seine beyond this, which still exists. The carriage lumbered across the Ile St. Louis, and, traversing the other arm of the river by the Pont Marie, passed along the quay, until it stopped at the Hôtel d’Aubray in the Rue St. Paul.

As they stopped at the _porte-cochère_, the Marchioness looked out, and perceived to her dismay that it was open, and that the windows which opened into the court were lighted up, whilst forms could be seen passing and repassing, showing that there was a large company assembled within.

The vehicle had scarcely arrived at the foot of the staircase when Marie’s own maid, Françoise Roussel, appeared at the entrance. The light of the carriage-lamp fell upon her face, which was ghastly pale, and, to all appearance, distorted with pain. She was breathing in agony, and could not speak for some seconds after she had opened the door.

‘Heaven be praised that you are returned, madame!’ at length she said. ‘Your brothers have come back from Offemont this evening, with a party of gentlemen living near the chateau. Monsieur François inquired after you; but I told him you had retired.’

‘Something ails you, Françoise,’ observed the Marchioness. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I have been in agony, madame, the whole afternoon, as if I had swallowed some pins that were red-hot.’

‘You have taken something that has done you harm,’ continued Marie, as she descended from the carriage. ‘What have you eaten to-day?’

‘Nothing, madame,’ replied her domestic, ‘but the confiture you gave me for breakfast; and that could not have hurt me.’

‘Oh no,’ answered Marie, as if she thought the subject too insignificant for further notice. But, after a moment or two, she added, ‘Besides, I partook of that myself, you know.’

As she spoke, she turned a gaze of the most intense scrutiny upon Françoise’s face; but no trace of any emotion would have been visible upon her own features had she been unmasked. Then bidding Louise, who was reassured by the apparent respectability of the house, to follow her, they went upstairs, preceded by the panting girl, who could scarcely hold the light lamp she carried before them.

As she reached her chamber--the one in which her interview with Sainte-Croix took place, after the scene at Theria’s apartments, that in its sequel led to so much of crime and misery--she took a small cabinet down from the top of a bureau, and opening it, discovered a row of little bottles. From one of these she let fall a few drops of some colourless fluid into a glass of water, and told Françoise to drink it, when she would, without doubt, experience immediate relief. The girl took the draught and swallowed it--in the course of a minute or two declaring herself to be comparatively free from pain, as she poured forth expressions of gratitude to her mistress for this prompt remedy. She was then told that she might retire to bed, without any fear of a recurrence of her malady; and she accordingly withdrew.

No sooner had the door closed upon her than Marie took the mask from her face, and advancing towards Louise, who was standing close to the mantelpiece, where she had kept during the short conversation between Françoise and her mistress, seized her arm, and, looking full at her, exclaimed--

‘Do you recollect me? We met before at Versailles.’

‘You are the Marchioness of Brinvilliers,’ replied the Languedocian, after a momentary start of surprise, in a tone the calmness of which astonished Marie. And she endeavoured to withdraw her arm.

‘Stop,’ replied the Marchioness; ‘we do not part yet.’ And she dragged her companion after her towards the door, turning the heavy lock and withdrawing the key. ‘There!’ she continued, ‘see how useless it is for you to attempt to leave me--how completely you are in my power. Now, listen to me, and attend as you would to the exhortations of a priest upon your dying bed.’

She threw the arm of Louise from her grasp, and regarded her for a few seconds with a look of the deadliest hate. The beauty of her features had disappeared in the contortions produced by the passions that were working within her; the terrible impassibility of her countenance gave way, and she gazed at Louise with an expression that was almost fiendish.

‘I have you, then, at last,’ she continued, in a low, deep voice, which, in spite of all her efforts, betrayed her emotion by its quivering. ‘The only amulet that could charm away Sainte-Croix’s affections is in my grasp. I can destroy it--with as little care as I would the paltry charm of a mountebank; and when it is once disposed of I can reign--alone--and queen of all his love. Do you understand me?’

‘How have I interfered with you?’ returned the Languedocian. ‘I never knew you until we met at Versailles, when I first learned by whom Gaudin’s love--or rather the feeling which I took for love--had been estranged from me. I did not wish to cross your path again. Heaven knows it was not my own doing that I met you this evening.’

She spoke these words in a tone that the Marchioness had hardly looked for. But Louise, gentle and retiring as was her nature, felt in whose presence she now stood, and her spirit rose with the circumstances, until her eye kindled and her cheek flushed with the emotion of the interview. She was no longer the pale and trembling girl; she felt that Marie had crushed her, by weaning away Gaudin’s affections, and she replied accordingly.

Marie was astonished at the manner in which she spoke. She went on--

‘You appear to forget in whose presence you now are, or you would not so address me.’

‘It is from feeling too keenly whom I thus address that I do so,’ replied Louise. ‘What would you have me say?’

‘I would have you recollect the wide difference that exists between our positions,’ answered Marie. ‘I am the Marchioness of Brinvilliers.’

‘We ought to know no difference of rank,’ returned Louise; ‘a hapless attachment has placed us all on the same level. Whatever Gaudin’s station is, or may have been, his love raised me to his own position--one which the Marchioness of Brinvilliers did not think beneath her. I thought she would have been above so petty a cause for quarrel.’

‘And from these set speeches,’ rejoined Marie, ‘which, doubtless, have been conned over until you got them by heart, to make an effect when they might be called for, you have lowered yourself. Sainte-Croix has long since forgotten you. Have you no spirit, thus to pursue a bygone lover who has discarded you?’

‘Alas, madame! I have loved,’ said Louise, with a tone so tearful, so hopeless, but so firm, that the Marchioness paused, baffled in her plan of attack, but not knowing what new ground to take up. Louise continued, after a short silence--‘And if love with a great lady be what it is to me, a poor country girl, you would not ask me why, despite Gaudin’s neglect, I still hang upon the memory, not of him, but of the love he first taught me to feel.’

As she spoke she sunk her face in her hands, and her tears flowed fast and freely.

The Marchioness paced impatiently up and down the room. At length, stopping before the seat on which Louise had fallen, she said abruptly--

‘Will you root out this passion?’

‘I cannot,’ replied the Languedocian through her tears.

‘Then life and it must end together,’ said the Marchioness half interrogatively.

‘It may be so,’ said Louise. But immediately, as if suddenly awakened to a new import in the words, shaking her long hair from her face, she exclaimed--

‘You would not kill me!’

A strange slow smile crept over Marie’s face, which had by this time recovered its usual stony impassiveness, as she said--

‘We are rivals!’

But as Louise’s eyes were fixed on her with a look of wonderment, at that moment a sudden burst of laughter from the room on the opposite side of the landing, in which François and Henri d’Aubray, with their companions, were carousing, arrested the attention of the Marchioness. She walked to the door, unclosed it, and listened. A voice was heard proposing the toast, ‘Success to your debut as a creditor, and a long incarceration to Sainte-Croix!’ Then followed the clink of glasses, and the _vivas_ of the guests as they honoured the pledge.

The Marchioness turned pale, and clenched the handle of the door she held until the blood forsook her fingers; she appeared to forget the presence of Louise, and reclosing the door, when the noise had subsided, she walked to the bureau, and opening the box which we have before described, began, half-mechanically, to arrange the small phials with which it was filled. All was now silence in the chamber, broken only by the measured ticking of the pendule on the chimney-piece. It might have lasted some five minutes, when Françoise Roussel entering the room cautiously by the _porte-derobée_, whispered to her mistress, who flushed at the tidings and hastily closed the box. Then, opening the door which led to a small room contiguous to the apartment, she said to Louise--

‘In here: not a word--not a motion as you value life.’ Louise obeyed mechanically, and as the door closed upon her, Gaudin de Sainte-Croix entered.

Marie threw herself into his arms; all her jealousy for the moment vanished on finding herself once more at his side.

‘You are free then?’ she asked, after this passionate greeting.

‘For the time, Marie,’ replied Gaudin. ‘I have appeased Desgrais with part of the money I raised on your carcanet. I did not find the exempt so relentless as my new creditor, your brother François.’

‘François!’ exclaimed the Marchioness. ‘He is here--in the next room!’

‘I knew it,’ said Sainte-Croix, ‘or I should not have employed four thousand francs to grease the palm of the exempt. I came to speak with him--to tell him to his teeth that he had disgraced the name of gentleman by that attempt to crush me.’

As he spoke he stepped towards the door communicating with the landing-place, as if to carry his threat into execution. Marie laid her hand upon his arm.

‘Do not go in, Gaudin,’ she said; ‘there will be bloodshed. He is surrounded by his friends and neighbours. You will be murdered!’

‘I care not,’ exclaimed Sainte-Croix, ‘I shall not fall alone,’ and he pressed on towards the door.

‘There is another way,’ said Marie, as she pointed to the casket which still stood on her table. ‘This.’

Sainte-Croix gazed at her with a gloomy and meaning smile. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘the suggestion is yours. Be it so: there will be no blood spilled, at all events; and we may rid ourselves of one who, whilst he lives, must ever be a serpent in our path. Is Henri with him?’

‘He is,’ answered Marie.

‘There is enough for two,’ muttered Sainte-Croix, who had taken a phial from its compartment, and was holding it up to the light of the candle.

‘Must Henri die too?’ said the Marchioness. ‘He is so young--so gay--has been so kind to me. We were almost playmates.’

And a trace of emotion passed over her brow.

‘Both or neither,’ replied Sainte-Croix; ‘decide at once. I shall await your determination.’

And he seated himself at the table, coolly humming the burden of a _chanson à boire_.

There was a fearful struggle in Marie’s mind. But the fiend triumphed, and no agitation was perceptible in her voice when, after a moment’s reflection, she replied, ‘Both.’

‘Now for an agent in the work. You cannot trust any of your own domestics. I foresaw something like this, and have brought my instrument,’ said Gaudin. He rose, and drawing aside the curtain beckoned from the window. The signal was answered by a cough from below, and followed by the appearance of Lachaussée, who had evidently expected the summons. He clumsily greeted the Marchioness, and dropping his hat awaited Gaudin’s orders.

‘Let Françoise find a livery of your brothers’ people, and give it to this honest fellow, Marie,’ said Sainte-Croix.

Marie went to give the order, and Gaudin developed his plan briefly, but clearly, to Lachaussée. It was, to mix with the attendants at the carouse, furnished with the phial, which Sainte-Croix took from the box and gave him; then, watching his opportunity, he was to mix a few drops of its contents with the wine of the brothers. Assuming the dress which Françoise soon brought, Lachaussée left the apartment, leaving Sainte-Croix and the Marchioness to await the result.

The room in which François and Henri d’Aubray with their country friends were assembled was large and handsome. Lights sparkled upon the table, and played brilliantly among the flasks, cups, and salvers which covered it, in all the rich profusion of one of those luxurious suppers, which, although not carried to perfection until the subsequent reign, were already admirably organised, and most popular among the gay youth of the Parisian noblesse.

François d’Aubray was seated at the head of a long table; his stern and somewhat sullen features contrasting strongly with the boyish and regular face of his younger brother Henri, who sat on his right. The company consisted almost entirely of provincial aristocracy--those whose estates joined that of D’Aubray at Offemont, in Compiègne. There was more of splendour than taste in their costumes; the wit was coarser, too, and the laughter louder than Parisian good-breeding would have sanctioned.

‘And so you have run down your game at last,’ said the Marquis of Villeaume, one of the guests, to François.

‘Yes--thanks to Desgrais,’ was the reply. ‘Sainte-Croix is at this moment in the hands of the lieutenant-civil, and, if I know aught of his affairs, he will not soon reappear to trouble the peace of our family.’

‘_Mon dieu!_ François, you are too severe,’ gaily interrupted Henri. ‘Gaudin de Sainte-Croix is a _bon garçon_, after all; and I am half inclined to quarrel with you for tracking him down as if he were a paltry bourgeois.’

‘Henri,’ said François, turning sharply towards him; ‘no more of this. Our sisters honour must not be lightly dealt with. Sainte-Croix is a villain, and deserves a villain’s doom.’

‘A truce to family grievances!’ roared a red-faced Baron, heavily booted and spurred; one of those Nimrods who were quite as ridiculous, and much more numerous in the France of Louis Quatorze, than their imitators of the ‘Jockey Club’ of the present day. ‘Debtor-hunting is a bourgeois sport compared to stag-hunting, after all; the only amusement for young gentlemen.’

‘Where is Antoine Brinvilliers?’ asked another guest of François. ‘He ought to be very grateful to you, for your care of Madame la Marquise’s reputation.’

‘Once for all, messieurs,’ said François, who turned crimson at the implied taunt: ‘no more words of our sister, or our family concerns, or harm may come of it.’

‘A toast!’ cried Henri, rising. ‘_Aux Amours!_’

‘In Burgundy!’ roared a chorus of voices. ‘And _les hanapes_.’

The large cups so called--heirlooms in the family of D’Aubray, were brought forward by the attendants. Lachaussée had entered the room whilst the conversation we have narrated was in progress; and, taking his place at the buffet, had silently and sedulously officiated amongst the other attendants, without exciting notice. Almost every guest had his servants there, and such was the confusion of liveries that the presence of a strange valet, wearing the Brinvilliers’ colours, was not likely to call forth remark. He it was who, taking a bottle of Burgundy, now stationed himself behind the chair of François, who, mechanically lifting his cup, did not observe that the hand which filled it held a phial, and that some drops of the contents mingled with the wine.

The number of _hanapes_ was four, and they were passed from hand to hand. François, after drinking, handed his to Henri, who honoured his own toast like a hardy drinker. As he passed it to De Villeaume, Lachaussée, pretending to reach over him for something, contrived to knock the goblet from his hand and spill its contents. A storm of abuse for his awkwardness was the result, under which he managed to leave the room with as little notice as he had caused by entering it.

Chafed by the wine they had drunk, the mirth of the party waxed wilder and louder. Songs were sung; games at tennis and ombre arranged; bets settled; _parties de chasses_ organised. The revelry was at its highest pitch, when a series of loud and sudden shrieks was heard from the staircase. It was a woman’s voice that uttered them, and a rush was directly made by the guests in the direction of the sound.

They found Louise Gauthier struggling in the hands of some of the valets on the landing-place. The room into which she had been hurried by the Marchioness had another exit, which was unlocked. This she had soon discovered on regaining her presence of mind, and in attempting to leave the _hôtel_ by it, she had been seen and rudely seized by the servants, who were amused by her terror. To D’Aubray’s guests, flushed as they were with wine, the sight of a woman was a new incentive, and poor Louise would have fared worse at the hands of the masters than of the servants had it not been for the interposition of François d’Aubray, who, pressing through the crowd that surrounded the frightened and fainting girl, bade all stand back in a tone that enforced obedience.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, ‘and what business brings you here?’

‘I am a poor girl; brought here for what reason I know not, by Madame la Marquise, not an hour since,’ replied Louise, reassured by the calmness of his manner, which contrasted strangely with the wildness and recklessness of all around.

‘_Mort de ma vie!_ by Madame la Marquise!’ cried Henri. ‘She is here, then?’

‘We entered together,’ said Louise.

‘Ha!’ exclaimed François, with a savage ferocity, that made him fearful to look upon, ‘she is playing fast and loose with us. On your life, girl, is this the truth?’

‘It is the truth,’ replied Louise.

‘And where is the Marchioness?’ he asked thickly, and in a voice almost inarticulate from passion.

‘In her apartment, when I left her,’ said the Languedocian.

‘Alone?’ asked François.

‘Some one entered the room as I quitted it,’ was the answer.

Francois d’Aubray hardly awaited her reply. Springing like a tiger across the landing-place to the door of Marie’s boudoir he cried--

‘Stand by me, gentlemen, for the honour of Compiègne! De Villeaume! down into the court-yard, and see that no one leaves the _hôtel_ by that way. You, messieurs, guard the issues here. Henri! come you with me.’

And he attempted to pass into his sister’s apartment.

‘Open!’ he roared, rather than shouted,--‘open! harlot! adultress!--open!’

There was no reply. He shook the door, but it was locked within, and resisted his frantic efforts to break it open.

‘By the ante-chamber!’ said Henri, pointing to the open door by which Louise had arrived. François comprehended the direction, although rage had almost mastered his senses. Rapidly the brothers entered, and, passing through the apartment of Louise’s captivity, found the entrance communicating with Marie’s boudoir unfastened. Flinging it open, they rushed into the room.

Marie de Brinvilliers was standing by the fireplace; pale, but calm. By the secret door, which he held open, listening to the steps and voices in the court, stood Sainte-Croix, his sword drawn, his teeth set--a desperate man at bay.

François d’Aubray strode across the room, and with his open hand struck his sister on the face, hissing through his clenched teeth, ‘Fiend!’

Marie uttered no cry, made no motion, though Gaudin, with a terrible oath, sprang forward, and would have run François through the body had not a sign from the Marchioness restrained him.

‘You--you--Sainte-Croix!’ cried Henri, crossing swords immediately with the other, as his brother, stopping short in his progress towards him, reeled, and stumbled against the chimney-piece.

‘Look to your brother,’ said Sainte-Croix, as he put by the furious thrusts of Henri--‘and to yourself,’ he muttered, as with a sudden expert wrench he disarmed him.

Marie crossed to Sainte-Croix. ‘It works!’ she whispered.

‘Henri!’ gasped François, as the froth gathered round his leaden lips, and the cold sweat rose in thick beads upon his forehead, ‘what is this?--Give me some water.’

He made a spring at a glass vase that stood on a bracket near him filled with water; but, as if blinded at the instant, missed his mark, and fell heavily on the floor. His brother raised his arm, and on letting it go sank passively by his side.

‘He is dead!’ exclaimed Henri, as a pallor, far beyond that which horror would have produced, overspread his own features.

‘It is apoplexy!’ said one of the bystanders. ‘In his passion he has ruptured a vessel of the brain.’

The guests crowded round the body. Sainte-Croix and Marie looked at one another as they awaited the pangs of the other victim.