It was his gaiety, that strange unusual gaiety, still continuing, which
on the following day began by perplexing and ended by terrifying the
Countess. She could not doubt that he had missed the packet on which so
much hung and of which he had indicated the importance. But if he had
missed it, why, she asked herself, did he not speak? Why did he not cry
the alarm, search and question and pursue? Why did he not give her that
opening to tell the truth, without which even her courage failed, her
resolution died within her?
Above all, what was the secret of his strange merriment? Of the snatches
of song which broke from him, only to be hushed by her look of
astonishment? Of the parades which his horse, catching the infection,
made under him, as he tossed his riding-cane high in the air and caught
it?
Ay, what? Why, when he had suffered so great a loss, when he had been
robbed of that of which he must give account--why did he cast off his
melancholy and ride like the youngest? She wondered what the men
thought, and looking, saw them stare, saw that they watched him
stealthily, saw that they laid their heads together. What were they
thinking of it? She could not tell; and slowly a terror, more insistent
than any to which the extremity of violence would have reduced her, began
to grip her heart.
Twenty hours of rest had lifted her from the state of collapse into which
the events of the night had cast her; still her limbs at starting had
shaken under her. But the cool freshness of the early summer morning,
and the sight of the green landscape and the winding Loir, beside which
their road ran, had not failed to revive her spirits; and if he had shown
himself merely gloomy, merely sunk in revengeful thoughts, or darting
hither and thither the glance of suspicion, she felt that she could have
faced him, and on the first opportunity could have told him the truth.
But his new mood veiled she knew not what. It seemed, if she
comprehended it at all, the herald of some bizarre, some dreadful
vengeance, in harmony with his fierce and mocking spirit. Before it her
heart became as water. Even her colour little by little left her cheeks.
She knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it
was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now
guiltily sought and now avoided his. And feeling sure that he did read
it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which
plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her
perplexity.
This, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful
thoughts. On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in
steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent. On the other
the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-
deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. Again the
travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through
the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last
year's leaves. And out again and down again they passed, and turning
aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall
of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces
half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through
the glare and heat. Down to the river-level again, where a squalid
anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them,
and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the
hour of Nones.