Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 17

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It was one thing, I found, to contemplate seeing Ellen Phipps, but another thing to do it; for the truth was that I was no sooner in a canoe, headed across the river to Iberville and the whitewashed Château de St. Auge than I realised I could never talk with Ellen until I had provided Madame St. Auge with a reason for my presence.

I walked slowly up the hillslope from the river, then back to the river again, trying to think what to say, and at the same time trying to look as though I knew what I was doing. The more I walked, the more uncomfortable and like a fool I felt; and so, in desperation, I went boldly up to the door and pounded on it, trusting to something I had learned in storms at sea: that no matter what a captain may beforehand plan to do, he will surprise himself by behaving differently and more effectively when the emergency is actually upon him.

The same spectacled nun answered my knock; and when I asked for Ellen Phipps, she slammed the door in my face. I stood there, perspiring somewhat and saying to myself that now I would not let them keep me from seeing the girl, even though I had to sit on the doorstep for a week. Almost immediately, however, the door opened again and Madame St. Auge stood there in her gray dress, staring at me, her eyes slipping and roaming about me, darting from my face to my feet, off into space behind and back to my clothes again.

“You asked to see Ellen?”

“Yes,” I said, and was suddenly elated with what popped into my head. “About her brother.”

“About her brother?” Madame St. Auge asked. “Tell me what it is, please, and I will tell it to her.”

“Your pardon,” I said. “I think I must tell her myself.”

Madame St. Auge folded her hands over the heavy leather strap that belted her gray gown, and contemplated my shoes long and silently. At length she raised expressionless eyes to mine. “I am sorry. It is not possible. You will have to tell me.”

“Not possible!” I cried. “You mean she’s ill? What is it you mean?”

“She is not here,” Madame St. Auge said. “She has gone away.”

The woman’s behaviour puzzled me, and I only half believed her. “Where’s she gone? When did she go? How did she go?” I demanded, surprised at my own persistence.

Madame St. Auge’s reply was both calm and cold. “You will excuse if I do not answer your questions. It is not our custom to reveal such information without excellent reason.”

“Of course,” I said, “of course, and quite rightly, too. But there’d be no harm, now, in saying when she’ll be back, would there?”

“When she’ll be back?” Madame St. Auge repeated. “When she’ll be back?” Her voice seemed to me unnecessarily loud, almost as if she wanted it to carry all the way across the Richelieu and into General Sullivan’s headquarters.

At the thought I cast a glance over my shoulder. Within a few paces of me, just turning off from the path as if to escape me by going around to the rear of the château, was Marie de Sabrevois.

I knew her at once, even in her dress of sober blue and her stylish little sunbonnet of gray silk, all very different from the billowing pink gown in which I had first seen her; but what was more remarkable was that she recognised me as well, notwithstanding my shapeless tow-cloth smock.

In spite of the dislike for her that had grown and grown in me since our London meeting, I was pleased at coming across a friendly face in this dreary settlement; and my pleasure was increased when she turned back into the path again and came to me with an exclamation of surprise. “To think,” she cried, “that we should meet here! Here of all places! Now how does it happen you’re here?”

“It just happens,” I said. “I was ordered to come here, and so I came.”

“You were ordered to come here to this house?” she asked. She laughed, as if at the thought; and her blue eyes clung to mine with a singular intentness.

“No,” I said. “I was ordered to come to St. John’s. Having come here, it occurred to me—I had some time to spare—I thought that Ellen——” Beneath her fixed stare I became uncomfortable.

Madame St. Auge’s voice was cold in my ear. “He has a message for Ellen. A message about her brother.”

“Indeed!” Marie de Sabrevois exclaimed. “Some one sends you to her with a message about her brother? Who?”

Both women seemed to be looking at me suspiciously; and I felt the more uncomfortable. I had put myself in a false position, which prevented the ordinary processes of conversation that might have taken place between Mademoiselle de Sabrevois and myself, wherein I would have inquired about her voyage, and told her of Nathaniel’s and mine. And being in that false position of my own contriving, I stood conscious of a tensity between these women and myself, and wondered how it had come about that I seemed to be a liar. Nevertheless I perceived that I had lied: not to them, but to myself when I persuaded myself that my errand to Ellen was in the hope that I might be of service to her. I wanted to see her again, and that was the whole truth about what brought me.

Yet I wondered also about another thing, and that was why the mere mention of a message for Ellen’s brother made these two rigid with some unguessable suspicion of me.

I hastened to clear myself of that suspicion. “Madame St. Auge is mistaken,” I said. “I didn’t say I had a message to Ellen from her brother or about her brother. I only said I wished to talk to her about her brother, which is true, because my wish was to talk with her about anything whatever.”

At that Mademoiselle de Sabrevois gave me a shrewd look, and unexpectedly smiled up into my face as though we were the best of friends. To Madame St. Auge she said: “But we have many things to talk over, this gentleman and I—more important things than Ellen’s brother; and a doorstep’s no place for such conversation!”

She nodded to me gaily. “Come, we’ll walk here on this quiet road. It’s pleasanter than the dark house.” She was right; for the country was fresh and green in the warm June sun after the rain of the day before. There was a smell of young grass and moist earth all around us, and the tremulous, halting songs of a million robins. It eased me, too, to be freed of the cold stare of Madame St. Auge, which I could feel on my back as we left the château behind us.

Marie de Sabrevois slipped her hand beneath my arm and looked up at me under the brim of her sunbonnet. Her eyes were wide and blue, and I found myself wondering, as I stared down into them, how she was able to open them so wide and keep them open so long without the need of blinking to keep them from drying up. It occurred to me, too, that there was a look about them as if the blue lay close to the surface, as does the blue in a doll’s eye; and in the same moment I had a quick sharp memory of Ellen Phipps’s brown eyes, and the gleam of gold deep within them.

“Now you must tell me everything!” she said, and her voice was prettily commanding. “When you arrived, and for what! I’m dying to know!”

“Lord!” I said. “There’s nothing interesting to be had out of me. Anyway, you must have had it all from Nathaniel.”

She stared up at me, silent, but with that same watchful intentness I had seen before, so that I almost thought she had failed to hear me.

“You had a letter from him, didn’t you?” I asked. “I saw him write it.”

She nodded. “Of course. Yes, of course I had his letter. A friendly letter, it was. It was thoughtful of him to write. You must tell him how much we appreciated his kindness, Madame St. Auge and I.”

Up to now I had thought that this girl, this Marie de Sabrevois, had perceived that I disliked her, and so, naturally, had mirrored my dislike. But when she spoke of Nathaniel’s letter as “friendly,” I knew she considered me a dolt. “Friendly!” I said to myself. “Friendly!” for God’s sake! If I knew Nathaniel at all, it was a letter that smelled of scorched paper from the fiery words he had put in it. Still, if she thought me a dolt, let her continue to think so.

“After all,” I reminded her, “there was no need of his carrying your message to Ellen Phipps. You might as well have brought it yourself. You were here almost as soon as we were.”

“But there was no way of telling!” she explained. “I might have arrived here a year from now instead of day before yesterday. It was only luck that my affairs were so soon settled.”

“You got here day before yesterday? You must have seen General Sullivan’s brigade come in.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I saw soldiers. It’s hard for me to tell one from the other.”

“You haven’t seen many of our men, then. You must have come by way of Quebec.”

She nodded, almost absently. “Yes. It’s not difficult. With a little money, a person does as he likes. And it saved me a difficult journey. I was glad not to be obliged to travel by way of Albany and all the way up the lake to reach my little Ellen.”

“And Burgoyne’s troops,” I asked her. “Did you see them? Have they arrived yet?”

“Heavens above!” she cried. “How should I know! I had a thousand things to do in the city without racing about looking for troops! There were soldiers, of course, as there always are in Quebec: but mercy knows whose they were!”

“Well, now,” I told her, “it was a pity you didn’t remember that your country’s at war with England. Not many Americans have the good fortune to pass through Quebec these days; and it’s too bad that those who do shouldn’t bring out as much valuable information as possible.”

She struck her hands together, her eyes fixed on mine almost piteously. “Lud! What a fool I was! You mean there would have been real value in such information as I might have brought?”

I saw there was nothing to be got in that direction, and inside myself I damned her. For what I damned her, I was not exactly sure; but I had a persistent feeling that she deserved damning. She deserved it for meddling with my brother Nathaniel, if for nothing else; for if she was not a lady who had seen a thing or two in her day, I had never known one; and I could not bear to think what might happen to Nathaniel if she set her mind to him.

“Surely,” she said, “surely you don’t mean that those soldiers across the river, in St. John’s, haven’t yet learned whether Burgoyne’s troops have landed in Canada!”

“Well,” I said, “that’s something I don’t need to bother my head about. What worries me is why a mystery should be made out of Ellen Phipps! Anybody’d think it was a crime to ask where she’s gone and when she’s coming back—and worse than a crime to know about her brother.”

She laughed lightly. “There’s no mystery to it. You see, Ellen went to tell her brother she expects to go soon to Albany—to tell him and to bid him farewell. That’s why we questioned you about her brother, you see. We were afraid he might have sent word he was going elsewhere, so that Ellen might have her journey for nothing.” Her blue eyes were wide and frank.

“So that was all!” I hoped my voice sounded both innocent and relieved. “There was no secret about it, then.”

“No, no!” she cried. “Nothing could be more absurd!”

“Then when did she go, and when is she coming back?”

Marie de Sabrevois raised her hands and eyes in mock despair. “She went yesterday morning. She’ll return when her errand is done—to-morrow, it may be; or the day after.”

“Well,” I said, “it seems strange to me that you no sooner arrive here than you let her go running off alone to such a wilderness as St. Francis must be—you, who have been so eager to see her for months and months. Strange, too, that you let her go just after Sullivan’s troops had come. Didn’t you know the roads would be crowded with horsemen and supply carts—crowded and difficult!”

She sighed and looked up at me a little sadly. “It’s quite safe. Quite safe, because she went to Three Rivers; and it’s at the convent she’ll stay. The nuns, you know, will send a canoe across to St. Francis to bring back her brother. But I’m not surprised it seems strange to you! When she felt she had to go, I longed to go with her, but I was exhausted from my voyage—exhausted! Even this little walk has quite overcome me! You see, I’m not strong, and fear me I must return to Madame St. Auge’s already!”

She sighed pathetically; but to me she looked as though she had known nothing of exhaustion for many a long year. She was as shapely and elastic as a sleek young cat; and sleek young cats have extraordinary powers of endurance.

“I wonder you didn’t send word for Ellen’s brother to come here?” I said, as if absently.

She made a quick response. “No: it would be unsafe for him to travel through American troops—through our troops. They mightn’t understand that he isn’t really an Indian, and might not believe him friendly to our cause.” Then she added softly, “I’m glad you take this interest in Ellen. I’m sure you’ll help us on our way to Albany if you should have the chance.”

She could not help knowing, as well as I, that I was a nobody in the army, and little able to help Ellen Phipps or any one else. I wondered what lay behind those clear blue eyes; but there was no way, so far as I was able to see, of finding out.

“Your uncle,” I said, “should be able to make everything easy for you. I had expected him to be here before now.”

“My uncle?” she asked, and seemed surprised. “You haven’t heard from him? You didn’t know? Poor man, he’s got a broken leg, and cannot travel.”

“A broken leg!” I said to myself. “A broken leg! You’ve got an answer for everything, as slick as a whistle!” To her I only nodded gravely and said I was sorry to hear of Mr. Leonard’s misfortune. Then I asked her: “When shall you go to Albany, ma’am?”

“As soon as we can. As soon as I’ve got a little of my strength back after the long sea journey.” She coughed delicately, to let me see how weak she was.

And then, as we had reached the door of the château again, I found nothing more to do but bid her a polite farewell and cross the river to the shipyard, speculating helplessly concerning many things—why she should take no interest in military matters, when in London she had spoken so knowingly of them: why she should have permitted Ellen Phipps to go to Three Rivers at such a time as this: above all whether Mademoiselle de Sabrevois would have been as guarded in her speech and as overcome by exhaustion if I had been Nathaniel.