Читать книгу The Yellow Poppy - D. K. Broster - Страница 15

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All this while the occupants of M. Charlot’s attic, which the Abbé had so abruptly quitted, were taken up with their own anxieties, and though they had at last fallen silent, the chiaroscuro of their abode was fairly throbbing with uneasiness. What made their leader, with a guide above suspicion, so late in finding his way from Scaër?

At last, just about the moment that M. Chassin, next door, had finished the Proficiscere and was calling for “Clotilde,” the Vicomte de Céligny exclaimed, not for the first time, “This must be they!” The four men strained their ears, for a noise could certainly be heard on the staircase.

“Dame! it sounds as though Le Blé-aux-Champs were drunk!” observed Artamène.

“Or hurt!” added the Comte de Brencourt, listening uneasily.

The heavy, shuffling footsteps which they had heard ascending the stairs paused outside the door. Roland sprang up and opened it, drawing back instantly with a little cry. Two men, both in Breton costume, stood on the threshold, the elder and taller supporting the other, a young saturnine-looking peasant, whose face was sulky with pain, and whose unshod left foot was enveloped in a stained and muddy handkerchief.

“Monsieur le Marquis!” cried Roland and Artamène together, “What has happened?”

“Nothing very serious,” replied the elder newcomer cheerfully. “We startled a colonne mobile in the dusk, that is all, and our poor Blé-aux-Champs has a ball through his foot.”

“But you yourself are unhurt, de Kersaint, I hope?” asked the Comte de Brencourt, not without anxiety, as he came forward from his corner. “We were getting very uneasy about you.”

“I am untouched, thank you. But this lad of mine——”

“Let him lie down on my mattress, sir,” suggested the Vicomte de Céligny, and, as it happened to be the nearest to the door, the young Chouan, after vain protests, hobbled towards it, his arm still round his leader’s neck.

“Yes, lie down, mon gars,” said M. de Kersaint, lowering him to the pallet, “and we will see what can be done for this foot.” He looked round. “Where is our surgeon-in-chief, the Abbé?”

“Confessing or otherwise ministering to a dying woman next door,” replied M. de Brencourt. “M. Charlot came in for him.”

The Marquis de Kersaint raised his eyebrows a trifle, but made no comment. “I am afraid that we are somewhat of an infirmary here altogether,” he remarked. “What of your injuries, Comte—and yours, La Vergne?”

“I do not deny that I have a headache,” returned M. de Brencourt. “But, as for the cause, the Abbé dressed the scratch this afternoon, and reported that it was doing excellently. My wrist” he showed a bandage “will, he says, take a little longer to heal.”

“And your safe arrival, Monsieur le Marquis, has done even more for my arm than the Abbé’s ministrations,” said Artamène.

M. de Kersaint smiled at him and shook his head, as he knelt down by the prostrate guide and began to take the handkerchief off his foot. He would have been more or less than human if he had not known that he was idolised, as well as feared, by these well-born young followers of his.

“Let me do that, Monsieur le Marquis!” now begged Roland, while the thoughtful Lucien produced from the recesses of the attic a bowl of water and some torn linen.

But the Marquis de Kersaint, asking Roland when he had ever dressed a gunshot wound, went through the process with a deftness which suggested that he himself had dressed not a few. The young peasant, who had lain with his face hidden in the pillow, caught his hand as he finished and carried it dumbly to his lips.

“There, mon gars,” said his leader kindly, as he withdrew it. “Lie there and be as comfortable as you can under the circumstances. The ball has gone clean through, which is a great mercy. Roland, put a covering of some kind over him.—Thank you, Lucien; yes, I should like some fresh water. You can put it on that convenient chest of drawers yonder.”

As he stood there, washing the blood off his hands, it was not difficult to understand the attraction that the Marquis de Kersaint might possess for either sex or any age. As a young man he must have been superlatively handsome, and now the grey at his temples only served to emphasize his appearance of extreme distinction. Just as his dark, slightly rippling hair gained by contrast with that touch of Time’s powder, so the peasant’s dress which he wore merely set off the natural air of command that hung about him—an air of which it was plainly impossible for him to divest himself, even for purposes of disguise. It was innate in the whole poise of his tall figure, in the aquiline nose with its delicate nostrils, in the imperious glance of the fine grey eyes. Yet there was a measure of geniality about the mouth—of the kind that it is not wise to presume upon. Everybody in the attic knew that.

“Well, my children, and what have you been doing since you arrived?” he asked, looking round as he dried his hands. “Lucien, I see, has got hold of a book as usual. What have you been reading, Lucien?”

“This is what he has been reading, Monsieur le Marquis!” cried the young Chevalier de la Vergne, snatching up du Boisfossé’s Virgil whence he had laid it, face downwards, on his chair. And holding the book with the hand which rested in the sling, of which he still had the use, he flourished his other arm at Roland, who was standing near, and began to declaim at him the famous lament out of the sixth book for the untimely dead Marcellus—