Cadet, eager to get his painful task over, took from the slender finger of Caroline a ring, a love-gift of Bigot, and from her neck a golden locket containing his portrait and a lock of his hair. A rosary hung at her waist; this Cadet also detached, as a precious relic to be given to the Intendant by and by. There was one thread of silk woven into the coarse hempen nature of Cadet.
Bigot stooped down and gave her pale lips and eyes, which he had tenderly closed, a last despairing kiss, before veiling her face with the winding-sheet as she lay, white as a snow-drift, and as cold. They wrapped her softly in the blankets, and without a word spoken, lowered the still, lissom body into its rude grave.
The awful silence was only broken by the spasmodic sobs of Bigot as he leaned over the grave to look his last upon the form of the fair girl whom he had betrayed and brought to this untimely end. "Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!" said he, beating his breast. "Oh, Cadet, we are burying her like a dog! I cannot, I cannot do it!"
The Intendant's feelings overcame him again, and he rushed from the chamber, while Cadet, glad of his absence for a few moments, hastily filled up the grave and, replacing with much care the stone slabs over it, swept the debris into the passage and spread the carpet again smoothly over the floor. Every trace of the dreadful deed was obliterated in the chamber of murder.
Cadet, acutely thinking of everything at this supreme moment, would leave no ground of suspicion for Dame Tremblay when she came in the morning to visit the chamber. She should think that her lady had gone away with her master as mysteriously as she had come, and no further inquiry would be made after her. In this Cadet was right.
It was necessary for Cadet and Bigot now to depart by the secret passage to the tower. The deep-toned bell of the chateau struck three.
"We must now be gone, Bigot, and instantly," exclaimed Cadet. "Our night work is done! Let us see what day will bring forth! You must see to it to-morrow, Bigot, that no man or woman alive ever again enter this accursed chamber of death!"
Cadet fastened the secret door of the stair, and gathering up his spades and bar of iron, left the chamber with Bigot, who was passive as a child in his hands. The Intendant turned round and gave one last sorrowful look at the now darkened room as they left it. Cadet and he made their way back to the tower. They sallied out into the open air, which blew fresh and reviving upon their fevered faces after escaping from the stifling atmosphere below.
They proceeded at once towards their horses and mounted them, but Bigot felt deadly faint and halted under a tree while Cadet rode back to the porter's lodge and roused up old Marcele to give him some brandy, if he had any, "as of course he had," said Cadet.
"Brandy was a gate-porter's inside livery, the lining of his laced coat which he always wore. Cadet assumed a levity which he did not really feel.
Marcele fortunately could oblige the Sieur Cadet. "He did line his livery a little, but lightly, as his Honor would see!" said he, bringing out a bottle of cognac and a drinking-cup.
"It is to keep us from catching cold!" continued Cadet in his peculiar way. "Is it good?" He placed the bottle to his lips and tasted it.
Marcele assured him it was good as gold.
"Right!" said Cadet, throwing Marcele a louis d'or. "I will take the bottle to the Intendant to keep him from catching cold too!
Mind, Marcele, you keep your tongue still, or else--!" Cadet held up his whip, and bidding the porter "good-night!" rejoined Bigot.
Cadet had a crafty design in this proceeding. He wanted not to tell Marcele that a lady was accompanying them; also not to let him perceive that they left Beaumanoir without one. He feared that the old porter and Dame Tremblay might possibly compare notes together, and the housekeeper discover that Caroline had not left Beaumanoir with the Intendant.
Bigot sat faint and listless in his saddle when Cadet poured out a large cupful of brandy and offered it to him. He drank it eagerly.
Cadet then filled and gulped down a large cupful himself, then gave another to the Intendant, and poured another and another for himself until, he said, he "began to feel warm and comfortable, and got the damnable taste of grave-digging out of his mouth!"
The heavy draught which Cadet forced the Intendant to take relieved him somewhat, but he groaned inwardly and would not speak. Cadet respected his mood, only bidding him ride fast. They spurred their horses, and rode swiftly, unobserved by any one, until they entered the gates of the Palace of the Intendant.
The arrival of the Intendant or the Sieur Cadet at the Palace at any untimely hour of the night excited no remark whatever, for it was the rule, rather than the exception with them both.
Dame Tremblay was not surprised next morning to find the chamber empty and the lady gone.
She shook her head sadly. "He is a wild gallant, is my master! No wilder ever came to Lake Beauport when I was the Charming Josephine and all the world ran after me. But I can keep a secret, and I will! This secret I must keep at any rate, by the Intendant's order, and I would rather die than be railed at by that fierce Sieur Cadet! I will keep the Intendant's secret safe as my teeth, which he praised so handsomely and so justly!"
The fact that Caroline never returned to the Chateau, and that the search for her was so long and so vainly carried on by La Corne St.
Luc and the Baron de St. Castin, caused the dame to suspect at last that some foul play had been perpetrated, but she dared not speak openly.
The old woman's suspicions grew with age into certainties, when at last she chanced to talk with her old fellow servant, Marcele, the gatekeeper, and learned from him that Bigot and Cadet had left the Chateau alone on that fatal night. Dame Tremblay was more perplexed than ever. She talked, she knew not what, but her talk passed into the traditions of the habitans.
It became the popular belief that a beautiful woman, the mistress of the powerful Intendant Bigot, had been murdered and buried in the Chateau of Beaumanoir.
