Tales Of Adventure. Robert Louis Stevenson
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a hoarse and ragged peal of cockcrow rose to their ears from the dark valley below the windows. And this shattering noise in the silence of all around was like a light in a dark place, and shook them both out of their reflections.
‘Alas, can I do nothing to help you?’ she said, looking up.
‘Madam,’ replied Denis, with a fine irrelevancy, ‘if I have said anything to wound you, believe me, it was for your own sake and not for mine.’
She thanked him with a tearful look.
‘I feel your position cruelly,’ he went on. ‘The world has been bitter hard on you. Your uncle is a disgrace to mankind. Believe me, madam, there is no young gentleman in all France but would be glad of my opportunity to die in doing you a momentary service.’
‘I know already that you can be very brave and generous,’ she answered. ‘What I want to know is whether I can serve you – now or afterwards,’ she added, with a quaver.
‘Most certainly,’ he answered with a smile. ‘Let me sit beside you as if I were a friend, instead of a foolish intruder; try to forget how awkwardly we are placed to one another; make my last moments go pleasantly; and you will do me the chief service possible.’
‘You are very gallant,’ she added, with a yet deeper sadness … ‘very gallant … and it somehow pains me. But draw nearer, if you please; and if you find anything to say to me, you will at least make certain of a very friendly listener. Ah! Monsieur de Beaulieu,’ she broke forth – ‘ah! Monsieur de Beaulieu, how can I look you in the face?’ And she fell to weeping again with a renewed effusion.
‘Madam,’ said Denis, taking her hand in both of his, ‘reflect on the little time I have before me, and the great bitterness into which I am cast by the sight of your distress. Spare me, in my last moments, the spectacle of what I cannot cure even with the sacrifice of my life.’
‘I am very selfish,’ answered Blanche. ‘I will be braver, Monsieur de Beaulieu, for your sake. But think if I can do you no kindness in the future – if you have no friends to whom I could carry your adieux. Charge me as heavily as you can; every burden will lighten, by so little, the invaluable gratitude I owe you. Put it in my power to do something more for you than weep.’
‘My mother is married again, and has a young family to care for. My brother Guichard will inherit my fiefs; and if I am not in error, that will content him amply for my death. Life is a little vapour that passeth away, as we are told by those in holy orders. When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of windows as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard – sometimes by express in a letter – sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten. It is not ten years since my father fell, with many other knights around him, in a very fierce encounter, and I do not think that any one of them, nor so much as the name of the fight, is now remembered. No, no, madam, the nearer you come to it, you see that death is a dark and dusty corner, where a man gets into his tomb and has the door shut after him till the judgment day. I have few friends just now, and once I am dead I shall have none.’
‘Ah, Monsieur de Beaulieu!’ she exclaimed, ‘you forget Blanche de Malétroit.’
‘You have a sweet nature, madam, and you are pleased to estimate a little service far beyond its worth.’
‘It is not that,’ she answered. ‘You mistake me if you think I am so easily touched by my own concerns. I say so, because you are the noblest man I have ever met; because I recognise in you a spirit that would have made even a common person famous in the land.’
‘And yet here I die in a mouse-trap – with no more noise about it than my own squeaking,’ answered he.
A look of pain crossed her face, and she was silent for a little while. Then a light came into her eyes, and with a smile she spoke again.
‘I cannot have my champion think meanly of himself. Anyone who gives his life for another will be met in Paradise by all the heralds and angels of the Lord God. And you have no such cause to hang your head. For … Pray, do you think me beautiful?’ she asked, with a deep flush.
‘Indeed, madam, I do,’ he said.
‘I am glad of that,’ she answered heartily. ‘Do you think there are many men in France who have been asked in marriage by a beautiful maiden – with her own lips – and who have refused her to her face? I know you men would half despise such a triumph; but believe me, we women know more of what is precious in love. There is nothing that should set a person higher in his own esteem; and we women would prize nothing more dearly.’
‘You are very good,’ he said; ‘but you cannot make me forget that I was asked in pity and not for love.’
‘I am not so sure of that,’ she replied, holding down her head. ‘Hear me to an end, Monsieur de Beaulieu. I know how you must despise me; I feel you are right to do so; I am too poor a creature to occupy one thought of your mind, although, alas! you must die for me this morning. But when I asked you to marry me, indeed, and indeed, it was because I respected and admired you, and loved you with my whole soul, from the very moment that you took my part against my uncle. If you had seen yourself, and how noble you looked, you would pity rather than despise me. And now,’ she went on, hurriedly checking him with her hand, ‘although I have laid aside all reserve and told you so much, remember that I know your sentiments towards me already. I would not, believe me, being nobly born, weary you with importunities into consent. I too have a pride of my own: and I declare before the holy mother of God, if you should now go back from your word already given, I would no more marry you than I would marry my uncle’s groom.’
Denis smiled a little bitterly.
‘It is a small love,’ he said, ‘that shies at a little pride.’
She made no answer, although she probably had her own thoughts.
‘Come hither to the window,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘Here is the dawn.’
And indeed the dawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky was full of essential daylight, colourless and clean; and the valley underneath was flooded with a grey reflection. A few thin vapours clung in the coves of the forest or lay along the winding course of the river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of stillness, which was hardly interrupted when the cocks began once more to crow among the steadings. Perhaps the same fellow who had made so horrid a clangour in the darkness not half-an-hour before, now sent up the merriest cheer to greet the coming day. A little wind went bustling and eddying among the tree-tops underneath the windows. And still the daylight kept flooding insensibly out of the east, which was soon to grow incandescent and cast up that red-hot cannon-ball, the rising sun.
Denis looked out over all this with a bit of a shiver. He had taken her hand, and retained it in his almost unconsciously.
‘Has the day begun already?’ she said; and then, illogically enough: ‘the night has been so long! Alas! what shall we say to my uncle when he returns?’
‘What you will,’ said Denis, and he pressed her fingers in his.
She was silent.
‘Blanche,’ he said, with a swift, uncertain, passionate utterance, ‘you have seen whether I fear death. You must know well enough that I would as gladly leap out of that window into the empty air as lay a finger on you without your free and full consent. But if you care for me at all do not let me lose my life in a misapprehension; for I love you better than the whole world; and though I will die for you blithely, it would be like all the joys of Paradise to live on and spend my life in your service.’
As he stopped speaking, a bell began to ring loudly in the interior of the house; and a clatter of armour