CHAPTER XIII.

AT EGMOND.

Within ten days everything was settled: the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, burnt out of Château Grönland, came to an arrangement with Monseigneur Piscari (who had already got from her the lease of Egmond in Brittany on behalf of the League), to go down there for the wedding of Miss Eve without interfering with the prelate’s house-party; and Lepsius, for his part, on hearing now that Miss Eve would be at Egmond, agreed to go down, too, to meet the other political intriguers.

By the last day of June all the party were there, except a Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, and Lepsius, who had arranged to come on the 2nd of July for two days, the date of the wedding remaining fixed for the 5th of July.

As for this Monsieur Brisson, who lived not far from Brittany, why he did not appear was not very clear, for though he had been written to by Monseigneur Piscari, he had sent no reply.

However, about an hour after dinner on the 1st of July, Monsieur Brisson was announced just as a council which met to consider last details as to Lepsius had sat round a table in a chamber in a tower. The door was already locked when the card of Monsieur Brisson was brought, who, on being admitted, was seen to be the embodiment of the _bourgeois_ in glasses, one of his legs bowed and booted with a sole inches deep, on which he steeply limped. As he was unknown by sight to the others, he had to produce some of his notes from the League before being given leave to assume his seat; and the conference then began in a gloaming still unlighted by any lamp, present being Monsieur de Courcy, the Abbé Sauriau, Monsieur Leflô, the Duc de Rey-Drouilhet; the bent back of Dr. Lepsius sat sideways to the table, dumb; Monseigneur Piscari, a lank and stark inquisitor, presided; Isabeau Thiéry was absent; but there were some ten more, men of wit or weight.

The difficulty was to get Lepsius into Egmond without scandal: for if he once came in as a guest, and was seen, his disappearance would naturally excite comment and unrest; but after much discussion one Captain Pertius, a spark of the _beau sabreur_ type, who had five _pioupious_ (privates) at command in the château, proposed that as Lepsius came, his capture should take place outside a summer-house in a south avenue, and Lepsius there kept till everybody was abed; and this was carried.

But now Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, with a rasping throat of the _nouveau riche_, at last gave a croak, saying, “It will be a great risk to keep him idling there for hours in that summer-house.”

And now, too, for the first time, Dr. Lepsius breathed a weary word, “I agree.”

However, their votes were overborne on the authority of Pertius, who, having thoroughly examined the summer-house, had found it strong and sound.

Then, till it was almost dark, many details were discussed, many proposals put to the vote, everybody knew what his own duty was to be, and the council was now about to be broken up when anew the throat of Monsieur Brisson of Rouen was croaking, “But I feel uneasy.... _Who_ chose the chamber in which Lepsius is to be kept?”

“It was Captain Pertius,” said Monseigneur Piscari.

“And you have all inspected it?” asked Monsieur Brisson.

“Most of us,” remarked Monsieur de Courcy; “it is a good, good place, monsieur.”

“It may be good,” said Monsieur Brisson, “but is it the best? Oh, believe me, messieurs, in everything there is a bad, a good, a better, and a best, the best ever more grievous than the rest, but so greatly better than the better.”

“True,” murmured the Abbé Sauriau: “_is_ it the best?”

“I propose that we search the château in a body first,” suggested Monsieur Brisson.

“I agree,” murmured Dr. Lepsius, and after some talk this was done. Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet took with alacrity a blue candle from a candelabrum of ormolu, and with it led the procession, first up the tower’s stair to the chamber prepared for the prisoner’s sojourn, and then down and through almost the whole building, down to the vaults, up other towers, through crowds of halls and corridors, now with sounding footsteps, now with muffled, everyone chattering with some other in sets nonchalantly, Monsieur de Courcy and Monseigneur with their heads together before, and, behind, the Abbé Sauriau with the good bonhomme Brisson, whose right side, as along he stumped, stooped at every step of his right bow-leg. He was giving the abbé a reason why he must needs leave Egmond that very evening, having come merely to attend the committee-meeting, when for the twentieth time he stopped to stare at a painting; and since he had already explained that he was then buying, he was left to pursue his hobby by the abbé, who did not observe that behind each of the pictures that Monsieur Brisson peered at he left a certain little object resembling a night-light; and behind one picture he left a vial and his handkerchief.

After all, it was found that the tower-chamber which Captain Pertius had chosen was the most eligible; and, everything at last arranged, the committee separated to come among the ladies.

At this hour, with the moon in the clouds, and groups of ladies and their gallants moving round the grounds, and sounds of music in the _salons_ and galleries, Egmond looked a stately and picturesque place. The Misses Vickery were strolling with Monsieur de Courcy along the brink of an oblong of water that stretched far-slumbering in boscage from the bottom of the terraces to a mosque of marble at its far end, when there came up to them Dr. Lepsius to take part in their walk; but presently a messenger from Monseigneur Piscari came to call Monsieur de Courcy, who with his lips just touched a finger-tip of his future-one with a great parade of grace, and went away; soon after which Miss Ruth, too, was called by another party of promenaders—a Schuré group, Fanny Schuré burnished in coloured fires like mother-of-pearl, with whom Miss Ruth stopped to gossip, the innocent with the guilty, Dr. Lepsius and Miss Eve meantime going on to the mosque.

And there, sitting alone in a casement, they two spoke some time in low tones, while more and more the moon imbued the night with the mood of her beauty and her quietude, and communed sleepily the lily-leaves of the pool. It was when they were getting up to go away that Dr. Lepsius said, “But I mustn’t trouble a bride with an old man’s sorrows—in three days’ time you will be a bride, and I rejoice in your choice, which I think a wise one.”

Miss Eve had risen, seeming in her white evening-dress, with whitest cheeks, even weird in that sheen, and she replied with a chuckle, “It was prophesied me that I should not be a bride for some time to come!”

“By my son?... Well, he has no little might in this lower world,” the old man murmured, “but have no fear, he is by no means omnipotent, and, as I have hinted, he is at this moment in extreme peril for his own skin.”

Sharply at this, with a haughty heave-up of her chin, Miss Eve asked, “Who could touch him?”

“Ah! it is dubious,” the old man said musingly, bending over his oak stick; “still—I believe—by many eyes, and by many hands, and by the agreement of many wits and wills of men and God, it shall be achieved!” and now he struck the stick sharply upon the _perron_ of steps down which they were now passing to the path, Miss Eve laughing a little with a meaning that was hardly understood, saying, “And his father, if I am rightly informed, is with his enemies?”

“That is so,” said Dr. Lepsius with an inclination of his head, whereat she stopped walking to face him, asking, “With your eyes quite open, Dr. Lepsius?”

“Well, I hope so,” the doctor answered.

“You have thought, then, of what will certainly happen, if—after—I am married on Friday?”

Dr. Lepsius glanced up at her, having noted her tones go shaky, and on beholding her face bony with agitation, said with some astonishment, “No, what will happen?”

“Your son will _kill_ himself.”

And while the doctor with an eye of scare stared at her, she with a certain roistering and hilarity added, “And since royalty should have servants rejoicing to join in its voyages, _two_ you may see, if not more, go to attend on his ghost.”

“Two—I do not quite——” the doctor stammered.

“I meant my poor father for one,” she sighed, continuing to walk.

But since her “kill himself” the doctor had but absently heard what was said, and “kill himself!” he cried suddenly, crimson with anger, “let him! let him! I will go to his funeral! For I’d sooner follow him to the tomb——”

“Now, Dr. Lepsius, a father ought not to be down on a son,” Miss Eve said, “though I know that he has been beastly to you.”

At this tears gushed to the old man’s eyes. “Oh, it isn’t that, dear Eve—it isn’t the bitter ingratitude, the bruise, the gash in here: but how shall I not be against him in what he undoubtedly aims to bring about, when the mouth of every gash which he gives our race will shout out in rage against me? You see, do you not——?”

But now the old man, touched on the shoulder, looked about, and saw Monsieur Leflô, who had come down an _allée_ in the leafage as a messenger of the Count de Courcy, seeking the doctor; so the doctor went off with Monsieur Leflô, while Miss Eve, spying Miss Ruth in a group ahead, moved to go to her; but suddenly became aware of a stump, stump, of one limping in an _allée_, and in some seconds was accosted with a murmur of the word, “Mademoiselle.”

It was Monsieur Brisson of Rouen.

And when Miss Eve looked at him without seeming to know him, he, though undoubtedly agitated, said with a coarse chuckle that she and he had been shoulder to shoulder at the Quai d’Orsay that evening when a particular individual had dared to take a liberty with her lips: at which thing Miss Eve stood like a queen who stands astonished at so much insolence under the sun, then silently went on her way.

But this Monsieur Brisson was not one who could be banished with a chin; he followed to breathe near Miss Eve’s ear, “I wish to speak to you of him, he may be here to-morrow, and I have a message....”

“_Here?_”

“Let us go down that _allée_.”

She hesitated, and he glanced like lightning at his watch. “Only three minutes to be with you—come.”

Now she walked with him into the dark of the _allée_, looking down at the ground, like one magnetised, drawn with a cord.

“For what reason will he be here?” she breathed.

“On business.”

“You are to inform your master, monsieur,” she then said in a haughty manner, “if Monsieur Lepsius happens to be your master, that I know him to be in much danger, so that he should have a care.”

“Oh, trust in him!” said Monsieur Brisson imploringly, stumping along by her side with dippings of his right shoulder; “do you imagine that, loving you, he can miscarry? He feels that the breath of his love is vibrant enough by itself to heave mountains out of their beds, and bear them as bubbles to the sea. Nor is his danger so much; it will be nothing, if you will consent to fly with me this instant.”

“This instant?” she whispered furtively: “to fly? Away? With you?... But what, then, am I? A beast, with a beast’s soul? Evil to the core? Reckless, furious, moon-struck? Is there no Christ for me on high, I wonder? No right? No wrong?”

“If you came,” said her companion with some bitterness, though touched by her trouble, “it would save much time; and you would come, if hypocrisy was not your breath and bread,” upon which she rushed into an irritation not to be restrained, crying, “That is monstrously untrue and unkind! I mean well!”

“Well,” he said, “I did not expect you to come with me, for I know you. But you have to show me the windows of your bed-chamber.”

Now she stopped walking, standing tall, gaunt, her heart galloping up in her gorge, asking, “Why my windows?”

“Oh, nothing: just show,” he muttered; and when she had stared a little while at him, she paced on in silence.

Presently she went down another _allée_ which led them to the terraces at the front and south of the house, and hence went on to the brink of a lake which laved with its waters a platform of marble at the château-back. Not a soul was thereabouts, no sound, only the spirit of the moon brooding upon the face of the lake and down the solitude of avenues of yews; and here immediately Monsieur Brisson stooped to whip off that thick-soled boot of his, whipped off his frock-coat, wrapped his two boots, with his top-hat, his spectacles, and his waist-coat in the coat, and cast all into the water, where they sank; in doing which very hurriedly, he asked, “Well, which are your windows?”

She, with her back toward the house and toward him, her brow bent downward, replied to the ground in a proud guttural that trembled, “I am sure I do not know why such a question should be asked of me.... My windows happen to be those two on the first floor immediately over the balcony-end near by the statue—since it seems that the knowledge is desired.”

The plash of the coat with its weight sounded now in the lake, and “Monsieur Brisson,” that bow of his right leg quite gone, stood now limber on his bare feet, his elbow suddenly about Miss Eve’s waist: whereat she, feeling his lips stealing near her face, went fearfully pale; nearer, and she shivered with sickness; nearer, and she sucked in her breath as at luscious juice and shooting pangs, sighed “By heaven,” and had his lips.

He put her to lie on a bench of marble by the waterside, whence she through her half-shut eyelids watched him run away with a deer’s ease up an avenue of the park, and disappear in darkness.

Some way down that avenue was a summer-house in a bower, and there the runner stopped his career some seconds to conceal beneath the seat some sheets of paper, a piece of pencil, and two tiny tools of steel like keys, then shot on. And it was there that at 6 p.m. the next day, as Lepsius was driving from St. Brieuc station to the château in a carriage of Monseigneur Piscari, the carriage stopped, and was at once surrounded by a crowd of _pioupious_ and others. When he demanded of them what was the matter, they answered that he was a captive, and Captain Pertius, who was with them, then proceeded, with a perfectly ashen visage and hands which shivered like leaves, to search each nook of Lepsius’ costume, even his shoes, searching especially for a certain little key, which, however, was not to be found. Lepsius’ trunk was sent on to the house, and everything taken from him. “Oh, let one have his watch,” he protested, but without effect. However, by an act one might say infinite in deftness, he contrived as he was being hustled down out of the carriage to snatch behind him the watch of Shan Healy who attended him, and was not seen. He was then imprisoned in the summer-house with a sentry of some ten mounted upon him; and in there, having taken the paper and pencil from their place of concealment beneath the seat, he threw himself, face down, on the seat, and in a brown light began to draw diagrams.

On the day commencing to dim, he took out his collar-stud, touched it, and it shed round his sheets an electric sheen.

Soon after two in the morning he was removed to the room fitted out for him in the tower; the same hour the members of the League being met in council to congratulate each other and resolve on the next measures.

But early the next day their joys suffered much alloy through the turning up at the château of a certain Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, who had no resemblance to that first Monsieur Brisson of the conference! this new Brisson having the story to tell that, on going to a bogus business interview in Rouen, he had been imprisoned in a room by a gang of men, his papers grabbed, and he made to write a letter to his family saying that he was safe, and in Amiens on affairs. Only after four and forty hours had he been set free. So now the problem arose—_who_ could have been that Brisson-of-the-limp who had attended the conference?

Lepsius, however, was there in the tower, safe enough, which was everything.... It was an eight-cornered chamber where he was, arranged with some little luxury, and large; but he suffered, being unaccustomed to be between walls, and here was but one window, with bars in it, while, as to the lush carpet, the eye of his consciousness was at every moment open to the microbic hordes that must be at barracks within it, nor could he bathe with ease, he who bathed frequently each day, nor was the food such as was usual with him, being much too luscious.

This was first served to him by a person who had a beard and appeared to be a man, but was not so loosely costumed but that certain curves of the womanly could be observed in him—or her. On seeing her when she bore in his breakfast, Lepsius moaned, and flew to the other extremity of the chamber, where he held a chair-back, ready if she attacked; but when she had put down the breakfast without glancing at him, and had gone, his brow reddened, and having begged one of four guards for pen and ink, he wrote to Monseigneur Piscari, asking whether monseigneur was privy to the fact that one Jeanne Auvache, a convict with a mania, who had been aided by his, Lepsius’, enemies, to evade prison, had been sent to attend upon him. He received no answer to this, but the woman ceased to appear at meals.

It was a superb day—the third of July—and by springing up to his little window-ledge, and hanging on, as he twice did, he could see groups of elegant folk moving remotely over the terraces or gossiping in retreats of greenery, appearing pigmy far down below all that half-globe of sky and tabernacle-hall of cloud, like spirits idling in paradise; and once he was able to make out the face of Mr. Vickery, and once knew Miss Ruth, but of that form that his eyes sought saw no sign.

Most of the day he spent on his face on his table over plans of buildings and machines, which he concealed when the meals came in at one o’clock and at seven in the evening—for it was not suspected that he had any pencil and paper; and when the meals—none of which he touched—had been cleared away, he bathed at a basin of delf ware that stood on a tripod of iron under the window. This window looked toward the west, though the tower itself formed the south-east corner of the château, which looked eastward. So as the afternoon’s heat waxed fierce in the room, he drew down his blind of dimity, and now continued his labour cooler in a cave of shade which the blind’s maroon colour imbrued with a blush of ruby; but when the sun had well declined, he anew drew up the blind, sprang up to the window, and, like a monkey peering keenly into something never previously seen among its trees, clung on long to peer into the scene of the sunset—a sight rather high and tragic really for the heart of a man, the sun going down all among bars of crimson, the brow of God drooped, disgloried, His arms far outcast in gory crucifixion. Then the door opened and the meal of the evening came in, to be immediately taken away untasted; and now with feet of impatience, frowning, the prisoner paced about the chamber. No light was brought him when it became dark, for his jailers, having an apprehension that he might turn objects to unusual uses, took care that as few objects as might be should be in the chamber, not even a knife having been taken him with the meals. But by the aid of an electric stud, he spent some time in prying into the make of the lock of the door, though he had already looked into it two nights before, after the conference, in his rôle of “Monsieur Brisson”: which done, near eight o’clock, shunning the bed with its bed-clothes, he chose a part of the floor where no carpet was, cast a look at Shan Healy’s watch, and went to sleep there.

He knew (having been at the council), that at the hour of two he was to be roused to go on board a brig, bound for the bastille on the Ile de Bas; so he had commanded Shan Healy to conceal himself in the château and come to the prison-door exactly at 1.50, so as to help Lepsius to carry a load which Lepsius conceived that he would have need to carry. Ten minutes, then, before that 1.50, at a moment when preparations were being made in the château below to take him to the ship, Lepsius awoke to act. He was still at the lock of the door with the two little tools that he had hidden in the summer-house before his capture, when howls of “Help! help!” broke out without the door, and he was made aware that Shan Healy must be engaged in a struggle with the greenhorn _pioupiou_ on guard out there; but the _pioupiou’s_ howls were at once drowned in the sound of a disturbance resembling the bursting of some tremendous drum somewhere, which just then made the château to tremble through its breadth and length; and before that roaring was well over, Shan, who had felled the _pioupiou_ with the _pioupiou’s_ lantern, broke blithely with the lantern-light into the room, the lock of whose door had at that moment opened to the key of Lepsius.

But the poor fellow’s blitheness had no long life. He did not enter the chamber alone—at least, scarcely less closely than a shadow follows did the feet of a female follow him in. No word had yet been uttered between Shan Healy and Lepsius, and Lepsius was just going to call out “Come!” (in a din now as dreadful as all the guns of Armageddon mouthing, the house racking its frame to fragments, the ground quaking) when he changed his “Come” into a shout of “Out with the light!” at the same moment bolting to the other side of the chamber. But either Healy did not hear, or stood in a condition of mind too flurried for sprightly action (for he, too, had spied the woman as she had slammed the door after her); at all events, nothing was done as to the light, and Lepsius, as he pelted, moaned, the ogress after him, staring, her hair cut close, ugly, ghostly, grim as the very grave. “Shoot!” shrieked the fugitive to Healy, who, too, was in hot pursuit; but, even assuming that Healy was able to hear in the blare of that tumult, he must have perceived that he lacked the time to fire—unless, indeed, he was quite wondrously quick—because at that moment the woman’s arm was drawn back to throw her liquid; he saw it; did not see that by this time Lepsius was safe, having a chair with which to hide his face; and as the fluid was starting from the vial, wildly Healy flew between, receiving the bath of vitriol all over his right cheek and throat.

He could not help shrieking...!

“Idiot!” hissed Lepsius, who, as he now darted away, caught a weapon out of Shan’s pocket, sent with one glance backward and a nervous gurgle of chuckling a bullet into the woman’s bosom, which, however, chanced not to end her, and was out and away.

Right through the howling hell of the house from east to west he had now to hie: and fleet were his feet and alight his eye. Twice only he stopped a moment, once when, in pelting up a stair, he met flying down in a nightgown a girl whom with his lowered head he felled by butting her, knowing that if she descended she would be butchered; and a second time he stopped in a corridor to take the vial and handkerchief which as “Monsieur Brisson” he had placed there behind a painting. No want of light anywhere: for at various places the building was already in flames, which flames, serving as flambeaux, reddened the chambers where no flame burned; but as he spurted onward with his vial, the flooring violently sprang beneath his feet, and he was thrown against a wall, where he remained rather aghast some moments, until smoke in his throat caused him to cough, and anew he flew, though at one point forced to win his way with toil and patience over floorless joists. And afresh every forty seconds or so all the house started at a sound which opened its mouth to appal the heart and astound the darkness with the message of its solemnity, after each of which deep-mouthed sounds count one second’s pause and waiting, and now came downfalls crackling, like the brittle outbreaks of arrays of rifles prattling: for the bombs resembling night-lights that “Monsieur Brisson” had left behind statues, etc., had been timed to fuse, not in a mass, but one by one; and though he had so placed them in the below-stairs as not much to imperil the lives of the château slumberers, they were many, and were meant by him thoroughly to wreck the structure wherein men in their vanity had ventured to hem him. Anon he was aware of fugitives, single or in groups, staring, conscious of sin and of doomsday come: the Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, all toothless now, his nightshirt aflaunt, flying down a curving stair, calling out upon the rocks and hills to cover him; then the stout Abbé Sauriau clambering over a mound of débris, his trousers unbraced; then through the fumes that rolled all round a courtyard Miss Ruth Vickery in a dressing-gown on a gallery, dragging her father faster than he could go, Monsieur de Courcy, too, with them, Lepsius himself then flying along a lower gallery on the opposite side of the court; and as they were going west—to see to Miss Eve, he guessed—and were well ahead of him, never did his feet so fleetly speed. The delay of some seconds occasioned by the invasion of his chamber by Jeanne Auvache had disturbed the course of events as forecasted by him, and he had hardly burst into his darling’s apartments and turned the outer key, when her father’s poundings were sounding at the panels without.

Erect on her bare soles in an alcove, robed in a bedroom-robe of lace, a stone stone-still, her hair a rope plaited to a bow of ribbon at her knees, Miss Eve stood, waiting, aware of his tumults, but beauteously dead, as one who has interviewed the stare of Medusa; and all in a tick, like a cat fawning, Lepsius was cast at her feet, kissing them, pleading, “Dear, will you come with me?”

Her friends were pressingly clamouring at the entrance; they screamed, “_Eve!_”

She took no notice of them, if she heard; as to Lepsius, she hurled up her right hand to strike him dead, crying, “You brute!”

“Oh, do—for us two—beloved——”

“I bitterly hate and abhor the pair of us!”

“But you will get us both killed——”

“Thank God!”

Now he started up, an arm about her. “I have to make you faint,” his handkerchief at her face; and like fate she took it, did not fight, or very slightly, resigned herself, smiled, sighed, closed her eyes ... and in some moments, by means of a sheet, he had reached the platform of marble thirty feet beneath, heard through the turmoil in his rear the noise of guns booming before—a signal from his yacht in the bay—leapt the balusters with his burden into the lake waters, waded, swam a bit, obliquely north-westward, reached the lake’s bank, and there among reeds and bulrushes sat down to breathe and rest, her brow on his breast.

Southward, a smoke that soared to the clouds was being poured out steadily from the château, which ever throed inwardly with loud-bursting noises and sounds of rumbling like poisoned bowels and Etna boiling; and that plume of fume-and-fire slanted continually from point to point of the compass, for a wind boisterously blew, drizzle sprayed the face, and the moon, while suffusing the night wildly with the whiteness of her light, was herself quite hidden away out of sight in cloud.

Lepsius was soon up and gone again with his load, knowing that pursuit would not be slow: but it was a great labour; the country there is rugged; Miss Eve, drugged, could not, or would not, keep on her feet; Healy, with whose help the load would have been easy, moaned in his agonies somewhere; and the bay lay nearly a league away.

However, half-way to the shore he found waiting in a gorge where the gloom was gross under crags the Hindoo Nundcumar, together with four of his mariners, their eyes raised to the inflamed sky; nor was it long before a little half-harbour snoring in sleep between the arms of beetling crags, a brig’s green and crimson beams, a steam-yacht’s three beams, lay before them, and near a little pier of stone the men of two boats who lay on their oars for him, one a boat of his foes, one his own; and flushing the vault of heaven, even here, a false dawn flung far abroad from the château, and over the shore the breakers making their snoring, Miss Eve’s feet bleeding, and streamlets of drizzle-spray in haste on her face.

They lodged her, still unconscious (as it seemed), among cushions, and plied to the ship, which, lying with steam at a moment’s notice, immediately steamed away, turning toward the west: and rushing she went, urgently churning the sea—a long boat burnished with Tobin-bronze, burning the eye like a strip of the sun; and as the dawn worked and began gradually to overspread all the world of waters and of coast, Lepsius, prying a port on the stern, spied like pearl the pinnacles of Serapis.