He, moreover, as he rode, had other thoughts; dark ones, which did not
touch her. And she, too, had other thoughts at times, dreams of her
young lover, spasms of regret, a wild revolt of heart, a cry out of the
darkness which had suddenly whelmed her. So that of the three only La
Tribe was single-minded.
This day they rode a long league after sunset, through a scattered oak-
wood, where the rabbits sprang up under their horses' heads and the
squirrels made angry faces at them from the lower branches. Night was
hard upon them when they reached the southern edge of the forest, and
looked across the dusky open slopes to a distant light or two which
marked where Vendome stood.
"Another league," Count Hannibal muttered; and he bade the men light
fires where they were, and unload the packhorses. "'Tis pure and dry
here," he said. "Set a watch, Bigot, and let two men go down for water.
I hear frogs below. You do not fear to be moonstruck, Madame?"
"I prefer this," she answered in a low voice.
"Houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "Give me God's
heaven."
"The earth is His, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her
thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.
He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the
gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but
she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to
give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared
aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor
of Nature's cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining
of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some
clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the
monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took
the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all
in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude
men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew
not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.
The Countess long remembered that vigil--for she lay late awake; the cool
gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft
glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and
the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke
indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its
insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.
"Yet, I believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself.
"Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!"