The Honor of the Name by Emile Gaboriau (free ebook novel TXT) 📖

While he was telling his story, Mme. d’Escorval felt that she was going mad.

She saw—yes, positively, she saw her son and her husband, dead—or still worse, mortally wounded upon the public highway—they were lying with their arms crossed upon their breasts, livid, bloody, their eyes staring wildly—they were begging for water—a drop of water.

“I will find them!” she exclaimed, in frenzied accents. “I will go to the field of battle, I will seek for them among the dead, until I find them. Light some torches, my friends, and come with me, for you will aid me, will you not? You loved them; they were so good! You would not leave their dead bodies unburied! oh! the wretches! the wretches who have killed them!”

The servants were hastening to obey when the furious gallop of a horse and the sound of carriage-wheels were heard upon the drive.

“Here they are!” exclaimed the gardener; “here they are!”

Mme. d’Escorval, followed by the servants, rushed to the door just in time to see a cabriolet enter the court-yard, and the horse, panting, exhausted, and flecked with foam, miss his footing, and fall.

Abbe Midon and Maurice had already leaped to the ground and were lifting out an apparently lifeless body.

Even Marie-Anne’s great energy had not been able to resist so many successive shocks; the last trial had overwhelmed her. Once in the carriage, all immediate danger having disappeared, the excitement which had sustained her fled. She became unconscious, and all the efforts of Maurice and of the priest had failed to restore her.

But Mme. d’Escorval did not recognize Mlle. Lacheneur in the masculine habiliments in which she was clothed.

She only saw that it was not her husband whom they had brought with them; and a convulsive shudder shook her from head to foot.

“Your father, Maurice!” she exclaimed, in a stifled voice; “and your father!”

The effect was terrible. Until that moment, Maurice and the cure had comforted themselves with the hope that M. d’Escorval would reach home before them.

Maurice tottered, and almost dropped his precious burden. The abbe perceived it, and at a sign from him, two servants gently lifted Marie-Anne, and bore her to the house.

Then the cure approached Mme. d’Escorval.

“Monsieur will soon be here, Madame,” said he, at hazard; “he fled first——”

“Baron d’Escorval could not have fled,” she interrupted. “A general does not desert when face to face with the enemy. If a panic seizes his soldiers, he rushes to the front, and either leads them back to combat, or takes his own life.”

“Mother!” faltered Maurice; “mother!”

“Oh! do not try to deceive me. My husband was the organizer of this conspiracy—his confederates beaten and dispersed must have proved themselves cowards. God have mercy upon me; my husband is dead!”

In spite of the abbe’s quickness of perception, he could not understand such assertions on the part of the baroness; he thought that sorrow and terror must have destroyed her reason.

“Ah! Madame,” he exclaimed, “the baron had nothing to do with this movement; far from it——”

He paused; all this was passing in the court-yard, in the glare of the torches which had been lighted up by the servants. Anyone in the public road could hear and see all. He realized the imprudence of which they were guilty.

“Come, Madame,” said he, leading the baroness toward the house; “and you, also, Maurice, come!”

It was with the silent and passive submission of great misery that Mme. d’Escorval obeyed the cure.

Her body alone moved in mechanical obedience; her mind and heart were flying through space to the man who was her all, and whose mind and heart were even then, doubtless, calling to her from the dread abyss into which he had fallen.

But when she had passed the threshold of the drawing-room, she trembled and dropped the priest’s arm, rudely recalled to the present reality.

She recognized Marie-Anne in the lifeless form extended upon the sofa.

“Mademoiselle Lacheneur!” she faltered, “here in this costume—dead!”

One might indeed believe the poor girl dead, to see her lying there rigid, cold, and as white as if the last drop of blood had been drained from her veins. Her beautiful face had the immobility of marble; her half-opened, colorless lips disclosed teeth convulsively clinched, and a large dark-blue circle surrounded her closed eyelids.

Her long black hair, which she had rolled up closely to slip under her peasant’s hat, had become unbound, and flowed down in rich masses over her shoulders and trailed upon the floor.

“She is only in a state of syncope; there is no danger,” declared the abbe, after he had examined Marie-Anne. “It will not be long before she regains consciousness.”

And then, rapidly but clearly, he gave the necessary directions to the servants, who were astonished at their mistress.

Mme. d’Escorval looked on with eyes dilated with terror. She seemed to doubt her own sanity, and incessantly passed her hand across her forehead, thickly beaded with cold sweat.

“What a night!” she murmured. “What a night!”

“I must remind you, Madame,” said the priest, sympathizingly, but firmly, “that reason and duty alike forbid you thus to yield to despair! Wife, where is your energy? Christian, what has become of your confidence in a just and beneficial God?”

“Oh! I have courage, Monsieur,” faltered the wretched woman. “I am brave!”

The abbe led her to a large arm-chair, where he forced her to seat herself, and in a gentler tone, he resumed:

“Besides, why should you despair, Madame? Your son, certainly, is with you in safety. Your husband has not compromised himself; he has done nothing which I myself have not done.”

And briefly, but with rare precision, he explained the part which he and the baron had played during this unfortunate evening.

But this recital, instead of reassuring the baroness, seemed to increase her anxiety.

“I understand you,” she interrupted, “and I believe you. But I also know that all the people in the country round about are convinced that my husband commanded the insurrectionists. They believe it, and they will say it.”

“And what of that?”

“If he has been arrested, as you give me to understand, he will be summoned before a court-martial. Was he not the friend of the Emperor? That is a crime, as you very well know. He will be convicted and sentenced to death.”

“No, Madame, no! Am I not here? I will appear before the tribunal, and I