Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/535

 affairs of the night, the coming skirmish, and its possible disaster. These were but everyday matters, familiar to his old habits, and scarce worth thinking of. But there was one scene beyond which his imagination could not be forced; it seemed, as it were, to limit his future in its bounds, and afterwards there would be no aim, no purpose, no relish in life. It represented a spit of sand on the coast of Picardy, and a man with shirt-sleeves rolled up, grasping a bloody rapier in his hand, who was smiling bitterly down on a dead face white and rigid at his feet.

Florian, too, sitting by his side, had his own vision. This, also, was of blood, but blood freely offered in atonement to friendship, and expiation for love.

The night was still, and the moonlight tempered by a misty sky that denoted there would be more snow before morning. The coachman dozed over his wheelers. The guard, overcome with brandy, laid his head on a hamper, and went fast asleep. The two seamen, silently consoling themselves with tobacco, shut an eye apiece, and screwed their faces into the expression of inscrutable sagacity affected by their class when they expect bad weather of any kind. The horses, taking counsel together, as such beasts do, jogged on at the slowest possible pace that could not be stigmatised for a walk, and the heavy machine lumbered wearily up the gradual ascent, which half a mile further on, where the hill became steeper and the road worse, was known as Borrodaile Rise.

Now the Abbé, in command of his little troop, had intended to conceal them behind a clump of thorns that diversified the plain surface of the moor, almost on the summit of this acclivity, and so pounce out upon his prey at the moment it was most hampered by the difficulties of its path; but, like other good generals, he suffered his plans to be modified by circumstances, and would change them, if advisable, at the very moment of execution.

On the right of the road, if road that could be called, which was but a soft and deeply-rutted track through the heather, stood the four walls of a roofless building, uninhabited within the memory of man, about twenty paces from a deep holding slough, through which the coach must pass; this post, with the concurrence of Bold and his con