"That would be to destroy yourself," said Marius with an attempted note of confidence.
"I should be no less destroyed by delay," answered Garnache; and added more sharply, "Give the word, monsieur, or I will make an end."
From the movement behind him Marius guessed almost by instinct that Garnache had drawn back for a lunge. At his side Valerie looked over her shoulder, with eyes that were startled but unafraid. For a second Marius considered whether he might not attempt to elude Garnache by a wild and sudden dash towards his men. But the consequences of failure were too fearful.
He shrugged his shoulders, and gave the order. The men hesitated a moment, then shuffled away in the direction indicated. But they went slowly, with much half-whispered, sullen conferring and many a backward glance at Marius and those with him.
"Bid them go faster," snapped Garnache. Marius obeyed him, and the men obeyed Marius, and vanished into the gloom of the archway. After all, thought Monsieur de Condillac, they need go no farther than that doorway; they must have appreciated the situation by now; and he was confident they would have the sense to hold themselves in readiness for a rush in the moment of Garnache's mounting.
But Garnache's next order shattered that last hope.
"Rebecque," said he, without turning his head, "go and lock them in." Before bidding the men go that way, he had satisfied himself that there was a key on the outside of the door. "Monsieur de Condillac," he resumed to Marius, "you will order your men in no way to hinder my servant. I shall act upon any menace of danger to my lackey precisely as I should were I, myself, in danger."
Marius's heart sank within him, as sinks a stone through water. He realized, as his mother had realized a little while before, that in Garnache they had an opponent who took no chances. In a voice thick with the torturing rage of impotence he gave the order upon which the grim Parisian insisted. There followed a silence broken by the fall of Rabecque's heavily shod feet upon the stones of the yard, as he crossed it to do his master's bidding. The door creaked on its hinges; the key grated screaming in its lock, and Rabecque returned to Garnache's side even as Garnache tapped Marius on the shoulder.
"This way, Monsieur de Condillac, if you please," said he, and as Marius turned at last to face him, he stood aside and waved his left hand towards the door through which they had lately emerged. A moment stood the youth facing his stern conqueror; his hands were clenched until the knuckles showed white; his face was a dull crimson. Vainly he sought for words in which to vent some of the malicious chagrin that filled his soul almost to bursting-point. Then, despairing, with a shrug and an inarticulate mutter, he flung past the Parisian, obeying him as the cur obeys, with pendant tail and teeth-revealing snarl.
Garnache closed the door upon him with a bang, and smiled quietly as he turned to Valerie.
"I think we have won through, mademoiselle," said he, with pardonable vanity. "The rest is easy, though you may be subjected to some slight discomfort between this and Grenoble."
She smiled back at him, a pale, timid smile, like a gleam of sunshine from a wintry sky. "That matters nothing," she assured him, and strove to make her voice sound brave.
There was need for speed, and compliments were set aside by Garnache, who, at his best, was not felicitous with them. Valerie felt herself caught by the wrist, a trifle roughly she remembered afterwards, and hurried across the cobbles to the tethered horses, with which Rabecque was already busy. She saw Garnache raise his foot to the stirrup and hoist himself to the saddle. Then he held down a hand to her, bade her set her foot on his, and called with an oath to Rabecque to lend her his assistance. A moment later she was perched in front of Garnache, almost on the withers of his horse. The cobbles rattled under its hooves, the timbers of the drawbridge sent up a booming sound, they were across—out of Condillac—and speeding at a gallop down the white road that led to the river; after them pounded Rabecque, bumping horribly in his saddle, and attempting wildly, and with awful objurgations, to find his stirrups.
They crossed the bridge that spans the Isere and took the road to Grenoble at a sharp pace, with scarce a backward glance at the grey towers of Condillac. Valerie experienced an overwhelming inclination to weep and laugh, to cry and sing at one and the same time; but whether this odd emotion sprang from the happenings in which she had had her part, or from the exhilaration of that mad ride, she could not tell. No doubt it sprang from both, owing a part to each. She controlled herself, however. A shy, upward glance at the stern, set face of the man whose arm encircled and held her fast had a curiously sobering effect upon her. Their eyes met, and he smiled a friendly, reassuring smile, such as a father might have bestowed upon a daughter.
"I do not think that they will charge me with blundering this time," he said.
"Charge you with blundering?" she echoed; and the inflection of the pronoun might have flattered him had he not reflected that it was impossible she could have understood his allusion. And now she bethought her that she had not thanked him—and the debt was a heavy one. He had come to her aid in an hour when hope seemed dead. He had come single-handed—save for his man Rabecque; and in a manner that was worthy of being made the subject of an epic, he had carried her out of Condillac, away from the terrible Dowager and her cut-throats. The thought of them sent a shiver through her.
"Do you feel the cold?" he asked concernedly; and that the wind might cut her less, he slackened speed.
"No, no," she cried, her alarm waking again at the thought of the folk of Condillac. "Make haste! Go on, go on! Mon Dieu! if they should overtake us!"
He looked over his shoulder. The road ran straight for over a half-mile behind them, and not a living thing showed upon it.
"You need have no alarm," he smiled. "We are not pursued. They must have realized the futility of attempting to overtake us. Courage, mademoiselle. We shall be in Grenoble presently, and once there, you will have nothing more to fear."
"You are sure of that?" she asked, and there was doubt in her voice.
He smiled reassuringly again. "The Lord Seneschal shall supply us with an escort," he promised confidently.
"Still," she said, "we shall not stay there, I hope, monsieur."
"No longer than may be necessary to procure a coach for you."
"I am glad of that," said she. "I shall know no peace until Grenoble is a good ten leagues behind us. The Marquise and her son are too powerful there."
"Yet their might shall not prevail against the Queen's," he made reply. And as now they rode amain she fell to thanking him, shyly at first, then, as she gathered confidence in her subject, with a greater fervour. But he interrupted her ere she had gone far, "Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye," said he, "you overstate the matter." His tone was chilling almost; and she felt as she had been rebuked. "I am no more than the emissary of Her Majesty—it is to her that your thanks are due."
"Ah, but, monsieur," she returned to the assault, "I owe some thanks to you as well. What other in your place would have done what you have done?"
"I know not that, nor do I greatly care," said he, and laughed, but with a laugh that jarred on her. "That which I did I must have done, no matter whom it was a question of saving. I am but an instrument in this matter, mademoiselle."
His thought was to do no more than belittle the service he had rendered her, to stem her flow of gratitude, since, indeed, he felt, as he said, that it was to the Queen-Regent her thanks were due. All unwitting was it—out of his ignorance of the ways of thought of a sex with which he held the view that it is an ill thing to meddle—that he wounded her by his disclaimer, in which her sensitive maiden fancy imagined a something that was almost contemptuous.