CHAPTER VII

Into the open cobble-stone place, which, at that period, was in front of the Krone--at this time the principal hostelry of Basle--rolled the great travelling carriage in which Emérance sat as the night was falling over the city. The coachman cracked his whip loudly as he approached the door, in accordance with the immemorial custom of drivers bringing travellers to any house kept for the accommodation of such persons, and the footman blew upon the bugle which he wore slung round him, partly with the object of warning pedestrians to get out of the way of the carriage, and partly to announce to the villages they passed through that some one of importance was on the road. Now, when the inn was reached, the man sprang from the box to hold the door open and the maid clambered down from the banquette, while the landlord rushed out of the door of the inn followed by two or three faquins and stood bowing bareheaded before the handsomely arrayed lady who had descended.

"Madame la Marquise de Villiers-Bordéville," the footman said, while madame herself entered the porch, "requires rooms for herself and following. Also accommodation for the carriage and horses. Madame la Comtesse will repose for some days in Basle."

The landlord's bows and congees increased in force from the time the rank of the visitor was proclaimed until he had learnt all her requirements--which must necessarily be remunerative!--after which he said in an oily, deferential tone:--

"Madame la Marquise shall have one of the best. A suite of apartments au premier; all that Madame la Comtesse can desire. There is accommodation for all that madame requires."

"Show me to this suite," Emérance said, speaking now; "let the luggage be taken off the coach and the animals attended to."

After which she followed the still bowing host up the extremely narrow stairs, common enough in those days, to the suite of which he had spoken.

Perhaps it was not as elegant a set of rooms as his enthusiastic words might have led the woman to expect; perhaps the Darneux curtains and the green printed stuff-hangings were not as fresh as they had once been, or the narrow windows as clean as they might be; or the iron bars outside them--which reminded Emérance, she knew not why, of a gaol-window--as free of rust as they should have been kept. Yet, as she told herself, this was but the salon of an inn in which she would pass some week or two ere flying once more to Paris and the man she loved; therefore it would do very well. The great leather chairs, picked out with gilt, and threadbare by the constant use of strangers, would serve her to sit upon as they had served other travellers before; the odious, awful carpet, with the most horrible subjects from scripture woven into it--and almost worn out of it again by countless feet--at least covered the stone floor; while--had she not often sheltered in worse places! The H?tel des Muses of Van den Enden, to wit, was worse and more shabby; the Schwarzer Adler at Nancy was nothing like so good.

"It will suffice," she said to herself, "to receive Van den Enden in; to harbour in till I can go back to him to learn all that is a-doing and to be done. And then--then--to Louis, my bien-aimé, to fortune and happiness extreme, or--to death. Yet, what matters death, if it be shared with him. With him! Ah! how I would welcome it if we may not have life together."

And now, an hour later, the woman who called herself the Marquise de Villiers-Bordéville sat over the great fire of pine logs drawn from the forests on the banks of the Rhine, and ate her supper while her maid attended to her. As she made that meal she pondered on what her life was to be in the future, and whether De Beaurepaire would always be as kind and gentle to her as he was now, and would let her have some share in his great fortune or great downfall, whichever might come to him.

Ere she quitted Paris, the man she had allowed herself to love with an unsought love had told her that the Spanish Governor of Brussels, with whom he was in communication through Van den Enden with regard to the scheme which was on foot for invading France and for the appropriation of Normandy at least, had at last sent a large sum of money for use in the scheme.

"A sum so ample," De Beaurepaire said, "that all employed in helping this cause may now be well equipped. Therefore, you, my fairest of conspirators, must take your share of the spoil," while, as he spoke, he drew from his pocket a wallet stuffed full of drafts and traites drawn by the Bank of Amsterdam and honoured wherever presented, and tossed it into the woman's lap.

"It is not yours?" she asked, looking into his eyes. "If so, I will take nought."

"Not even from me--the Chief?"

"From you less than any. I must be paid to live by those who will profit most--the Spaniards. For the rest, I am Norman. I shall profit as well as you."

"Emérance, you may take it from me. Yet," seeing a look of dissent on her face at this, "it is not mine. It comes straight from De Montérey and is to be expended in furtherance of the--the--well! conspiracy in Normandy. You are one of the intriguers, ay! and the sweetest and best of all, therefore you must be well paid. Now, listen to what I have done. A coach is prepared for you to travel in; 'tis yours, and, when you have no further use for it, yours to dispose of with the horses."

"Monsieur! I will not----"

"Tush! It is bought with the money of Spain. With you goes a footman, a trusty vagabond speaking many tongues; one who will serve you well both as servant and courier. Also, though he may rob you he will allow none other to do so. As for a maid, you must find her at some halting-place at which you stay, saying your own has fallen sick and been left behind."

"I require no maid. I can do my own hair a dozen ways myself, and--I have been used to poverty."

"You must forget that you have ever been aught but well-to-do. Remember that you serve Spain now, and Spain pays handsomely for service. Her instruments, too, must make a brave appearance. Therefore, provide yourself also with rich apparel at some halting-place----"

"I want it, heaven above knows," the adventuress muttered to herself.

"--while," the Prince continued, "for gems and jewels befitting your assumed station I will bring you some."

"Never," Emérance said. "I will have none of them. I," she said, "am not a De Beaurepaire, yet I, too, am proud. But--but--there is one thing that I would have. Something, no matter how poor a daub, that I can wear close to me by day and night; something, if I can have it so, that shall prick and sting me when I move or turn, and thereby remind me that the Chief of all is near. Give me your picture and let me wear it, and I will cherish it. Thus, though I need no spur to that which I have to do, there will ever be one close to me."

That which she had to do! Well, she told herself now, she had done it, or partly done it, and was yet to do more; was to continue doing it until the Duchess had left Basle far behind her.

She had done what she had been paid to do--and her face would have been awful for any one to see as she reflected thus, while sitting before the logs of the fire and hearing the booming of the quarters from the old Cathedral tower. Paid to do! by money, with clothes and the wherewithal to travel sumptuously; with the means to engage a maid who should attend to her every want--the wants of a woman who, not a month ago, had nightly to mend and brush her rags ere she could sally forth the next day!--the means to be able to sleep warm and soft. Paid--and even this thought was better though still bitter--by a smile, a kind word from a man whom she had allowed herself to love without that love having been solicited, without its being returned.

She had done, must go on doing for a time, that which she was paid to do. Alas! even as, more than once on this journey, she, all unknown to those others, had been in the same inns with them; as she had crept about dark corridors and staircases endeavouring to hear what they might be saying, above all if they were meditating treachery to him, her adoré; as, too, she had tried to see and sometimes to possess herself of a letter here and there that had been written by any one of them--so she must continue to do. That those others would put up at the Krone in this city, she knew: she had not failed to learn that, either through her maid's gossip or her purse. The purse that was filled with Spanish gold as payment for her treason to her country and her King, or, doubly bitter thought, might, for aught she knew, be filled by the man of whom her mad love had made her the slave!

"The shame of it," she murmured now. "Oh! the shame, the shame of it. I, a woman of gentle blood, well-born, well-nurtured, to sink to this. To this!" and, as she so thought and mused, her eyes would turn furtively towards the window-curtains that shut out the sight of the river though not the sound of its rushing, and she wondered if in the swollen, turbulent stream, there was not a more fitting ending to be found to all her mad folly, her wicked treachery, than in aught else.

"If he knew all," she continued to muse now. "If he knew what La Truaumont knows; if he should hear of what I have been in my time accused, would he trust me--a spy!--to spy upon those others? Would he have treated me kindly, or ever, even in his softer moments, have spoken gently to me. Ah! would he! To me, 'Emérance de Villiers-Bordéville,'" and she smiled bitterly, "whose name is false, whose title and rank are spurious. Yet," she went on, endeavouring perhaps to excuse herself to herself; "my own, my real, name is the equal of those assumed ones, if he did but know. Ay! as good as those and, in spite of the cloud that once lowered over it, not smirched and blackened then with the names of spy, intrigueuse, adventuress."

The logs burnt low and fell together with many a soft clash, while making the woman feel drowsy with their balmy warmth as she sat before the hearth; the cathedral bells from above sounded dreamily to her ears and as though afar off. Even the tall, well-knit and superbly moulded figure and the handsome, dark face of the man whose image was never absent from her mind, were vanishing into the light mists of sleep when, suddenly, she sprang to her feet, startled by what she had heard outside.

A bugle had rung below in the open place between the inn and the Rhine; there was the tramping of many horses' hoofs on the rough stones beneath the windows; orders were being shouted, and, mixed with these sounds, the shuffling of feet inside and along the corridors of the inn and the clatter of the chains of the main door being unloosed and the bolts drawn back.

"What is it?" the woman cried to herself, her hand to her breast, her face white. "What? Nothing can be known yet, nothing discovered to warrant their taking me, and--pshaw!--this is a Republican city not a French one. They can do nothing here."

Yet, notwithstanding, Emérance went towards the window and endeavoured to see as much as was possible through the long-since uncleaned, diamond panes of the window, and between the rusty iron bars outside.

What she could perceive was a dozen or so of horsemen clad in scarlet and green and armed with swords and musquetoons, who surrounded a coach bigger than that in which she had herself journeyed; a coach which had a table inside it and, on that table, a fixed travelling lamp that shone upon and lit up the faces of two women. One, a woman, dark, soft-eyed and rich in colouring, who was superbly dressed; the other, also well favoured but of a more fair complexion and not so handsomely attired.

The noise and hubbub below continued as she gazed out; the voice of the landlord was heard yelling orders downstairs and the voice of the landlady screaming similar ones above; the escort--for an escort it was, with which the Duke of Lorraine had furnished the Duchess from Nancy to Basle--had dismounted and were leading their horses away. A moment later, Emérance understood that the Duchess and her following were being shown upstairs.

"To the next suite to this," she whispered to herself as she heard voices in the rooms adjoining her own. "Ah! we shall be neighbours. 'Tis well if we encounter each other that she does not know who and what I am."

Listening to the sounds proceeding from the next set of rooms, she endeavoured to discover what person might have taken possession of the chamber on the other side of the partition wall.

What she heard, however, gave her no clue to that. Something she did hear flung down on a table which, by the rattle and clash it made, gave her, who well knew the sound of such things, the impression of a rapier being thrown on the table after having been unlooped from the wearer's body. And she heard also a man's voice giving orders, and a call from one woman to another in rooms still farther off; but little more than this. Nothing more than the ordinary sounds which, in all times, travellers staying in inns and hotels have heard on the arrival of new-comers in the same house.