For a moment they looked dull and dead; then gradually they quickened into that bewildered look of inquiry, betraying the ignorance of his surroundings which is inevitably the immediate sequel to unconsciousness. But when his vague glance fell upon Angèle, who was still supporting his head, he awakened fully.
“My regrets,” he excused himself. “It grieves me to incommode you, but—” He smiled wanly.
Vidal went down upon knee beside him. “Let us look at your wound, citizen-chevalier.”
“Tush! It is nothing. One of those dogs flung a knife after me as I was rounding the corner. It is a mere scratch, and I have paid no heed to it. I must have fainted from sheer weakness. I have not eaten since yesterday morning.”
Now, in reality, Vidal was of a kindly and generous nature, and this glimpse of Seyrac’s desperately reduced condition stirred in him a pity which eclipsed much of the memory of what the past had left between them. It scarcely needed the ready pleadings of Angèle to move him into playing the good Samaritan to his sometime enemy.
Between them, Vidal and his wife assisted the chevalier to his feet and supported him to a chair. Vidal laid bare the man’s wounded shoulder, and Angèle herself bathed and tended the wound, which was in reality as slight as Seyrac himself had said.
Next Angèle made haste to prepare a meal, and very soon there was a steaming, odorous omelet before the fugitive. He fell to at once, and not all his dainty breeding could restrain him from eating ravenously. And he drank as greedily as he ate.
Vidal plied him with a rough, red wine of a fiery quality that in happier days the chevalier would have accounted sheer poison. But misfortune and privation had humbled at least his physical arrogance. He drank until the bottle was done, relishing that vitriolic fluid with a proper thankfulness.
Even as he was the first to begin his supper, so was he the last to finish. It was with a little sigh of utter satisfaction that he sank back into his chair, warmed and heartened by his food and exalted a little by the wine.
The friendliness toward him evoked by pity in his host and hostess set him completely at his ease.
“A man,” he said, “is the creature of his own stomach. That is the whole philosophy of life. A half-hour ago I was weary of lurking and hiding to preserve a life that had grown empty simply because emptiness was my physical condition. I was ready to go and yield myself up to that canaille simply that I might make an end.
“But having eaten and drunk, I am as one born again. Revitalized, I desire, above all things, almost at any price, to prolong my life. By that, citoyenne, and you, colonel, may measure the depth of my gratitude.”
They questioned him as to what he did in Paris.
“I came on a fool’s errand,” he informed them. “I have planned to cross to England. A friend in Nantes will help me to that whenever I say the word. Then, so that I should not go destitute in a foreign country, I came back to pay a visit to my hotel in the hope of recovering certain deeds and some jewels that were stored there.
“I might have known the futility of such a quest.
“Of course the mob had been through the place before me, and what the mob had left your friends of the convention had raked into the storehouse of the nation. I have had my journey for nothing, just as it is possible that you have but wasted kindness upon me, and that the trouble you took to revive me is just so much trouble thrown away.
“It is almost impossible that I should ever get out of Paris again with my head on my shoulders.”
He fell into a gloomy abstraction again.
“When all is said,” he resumed presently “I was a fool to have fled before that rabble this evening. The mere animal instinct of self-preservation conquered my reason for the time. I see now how much better it would have been to have quietly surrendered and let them finish me.”
In kindness, as in all else, it is only the first steps that are difficult.
Once those are taken it is not easy to turn back. Angèle was moved to still greater depths of pity for the fugitive. His resigned despondency — and, who knows, perhaps also his good looks, for he was a handsome man, bearing upon him the stamp of distinction pursuant from his high breeding — completely effaced all that was past, and so stirred her compassion that she longed now to complete his rescue. She turned to Vidal.
“Can you not help him, Jerome?” she asked. “Is there no way you could smuggle him out of Paris?”
“I?” quoth Vidal, staring.
“No, no,” said Seyrac. “You ask too much of him, citoyenne. Whatever I may be to-day, in my youth I was guilty of follies and worse, and in the course of those I would have wronged you both. It is not human to return good for evil.”
“But it is Christian,” said Angèle.
The chevalier smiled wearily, “Christian! Ah! But then the republic, you see, has proscribed Christianity. No, no; you are asking Colonel Vidal to do more than lies in his nature to perform — perhaps more than it lies in my nature to accept.”
There was compassion now on Vidal’s rugged honest face. “Whether it lies in your nature to accept it, citizen, it lies in mine to offer you a way out,” he said. “One of my tasks here in Paris is to marshal the reenforcements for the army of General Dumouriez. Recruits are urgently wanted, and the rawest of material will go with me to the frontier when I leave Paris a week hence.
“Do you see the door I open for you?
“Recruit, citizen-chevalier. Come to me, and I will enroll you, and no questions asked. Once we have you in a blue coat, you will be immune from every peril. You march out of Paris in my ranks, and once outside it I can readily send you upon some special trumped-up mission that will give you an opportunity to desert and make your way to your friends in Nantes.”
Angèle was warm and eager in her approval of the plan. As for Seyrac, he could only stare at the soldier, a great wonder in his somber eyes.
“You would do this for me?” he said at length, He had risen, and stood leaning across the table.
“If it lies in your nature to accept it,” said Vidal, with faint irony.
“Citizen-colonel, you take a nobler vengeance. I have no words in which to—”
“No words are needed. For to-night you had best remain here. We have no bed to offer you, for our quarters, as you see, are limited. But if the floor and a rug will serve your turn, you will at least be secure, and you may sleep in peace. To-morrow, then, we turn you into soldier of the republic; one and indivisible!”
Seyrac sat down, and whether from emotion alone, or because he was physically reduced, he took his head in his hands and fell to weeping.
CHAPTER III — Before the Assembly
SOON after noon on the following day Vidal presented himself at the Tuileries on the business with which his general had charged him, and there he fell into the grave error of not only answering idle questions concerning the affair that had brought him to Paris, bur, further, of answering them truthfully.
Had he but used discreetness none would have known of it until he had delivered himself at the bar of the assembly to the representatives of the nation.
If St. Just had then resented the matter — as he must have done — at least he could have had no personal grievance against Vidal. He must have aimed all his resentment at General Dumouriez himself, passing over Vidal, who would have remained but the unconscious instrument of his superior officer.
By his talkativeness, however, the colonel brought himself into direct conflict with St. Just, and so thrust himself neck-deep into the peril that threatened to overwhelm and destroy him.
It was in the hall of the palace on that gusty day of Fructidor that the twain came into conflict. Vidal had swaggered up the steps with great click of spurs and rattle of trailing saber; he had taken a greasy usher by the shoulder in a grip that made the rascal squirm, and in that clarion voice of his he had announced himself.
“Go tell the representatives of the nation that Colonel Vidal, of the Army of Holland, has come to lay a
plaint from General Dumouriez before that august assembly.”
The hall was thronged with the usual mob of idlers and men of affairs; red-bonneted patriots of a truly patriotic uncleanliness lounged, smoking foul pipes; black-coated men of law flitted hither and thither in the quest for, or execution of, business; here and there a citizen-representative would be the center of a little crowd of clamant republicans of both sexes: blue-coated members of the national guard, a few soldiers, a plentiful sprinkling of spies and sectional agents, came and went or moved about the hall, passing from group to group.
But at the sound of Vidal’s brazen voice a silence fell, as sudden as it was general, and the soldier found himself the focus of every eye.
It did not discompose him in the least. He had looked on war and death, and was not to be put out of countenance by the stare of a crowd of ragamuffins. Moreover, he was conscious that he was a fine figure of a man, some inches taller than the tallest present, and he was still young enough at thirty to be vain of his appearance and to relish attention to it.
He loosed his grip on the usher, who departed to carry his message, and stood there staring back over his tall, white stock, the least suspicion of haughtiness upon that rugged, not unhandsome face of his, and of rakishness about the angle at which he had set his enormous cocked hat.
A Captain of the national guard detached himself from a group of which he had formed a part.
“Why, Vidal, mon colonel!” he exclaimed, advancing, “You fall from heaven.”
Vidal glowered down at him. “Most apt,” said he, “I am an avenging angel.”
Now, that was a promising preface, and many drew quietly near in the hope that there might be more to follow that would fulfil this promise.
Duchatel, the captain of the national guard, questioned our colonel in exclamations, and Vidal saw no reason for secrecy upon a matter that soon must be the common talk of Paris.
“A filthy dog of a shopkeeper has been fattening upon the blood of French soldiers,” — said he, “I am come to administer a pinch of snuff that will make him sneeze his head into the national basket.”
The image was novel, and it was couched in truly patriotic vein. One or two guffaws applauded it.
A patriot in a cockaded red bonnet and garments that were unutterably foul removed a long-stemmed pipe from between his teeth and spat deliberately upon the gown of a lawyer that no doubt seemed to him too spruce for a good republican.
“Pig!” said the lawyer fiercely.
“Brother,” replied the patriot, unruffled; “if you get in my way, such things must happen.”
And he turned bloodshot eyes upon Vidal, clamoring in a hoarse voice to know the name and precise crime of the unutterable rogue concerned in the indictment.
Vidal complied without hesitation. As a soldier he was naturally filled with indignation by the crime he came to denounce, and he cared not how soon all the world were possessed of the infamous details.
“The traitor of whom I speak is a government contractor, paid by the nation to supply the army with boots. In his foul greed of wealth this unspeakable dog has sent us boots that are made more of paper than of leather, with the consequence that the soldiers of France go barefooted, and so, many a hundred lives have been lost — lives valuable to France in her hour of stress — sacrificed that this thief may enrich himself.”
A murmur of indignation spread. “Name! Name!” clamored several.
Belatedly Vidal grew prudent. “I reserve his name for the citizen-representatives,” said he; and as they pressed more closely about him, he set his elbows to his sides, exerted his great strength, and made a space clear about him. “St. Guillotine!” he roared. “Give me air.”
Came the usher with the announcement that the assembly was in debate. The citizen-president desired Colonel Vidal to wait, holding himself in readiness. He should be informed when the national convention permitted him to be heard.
And then, before he could reply, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to confront a slender fellow with a white, freckled face and sneering mouth. He was bareheaded, and his hair was red as the coat of a fox. In dress, such was the scrupulous care bestowed upon it, he might have been an aristocrat.
“A word with you, Colonel Vidal,” he said quietly, the sneering curl of his mouth becoming more pronounced.
“As many as you please,” said Vidal, “though I know not who the devil you may be.”
“My name is St. Just,” the man replied. “I am the most obscure and insignificant of the representatives of the august people.”
The description of himself was entirely superfluous. His name would have been enough for any man; it was more than enough for Vidal, who had been warned against him by Dumouriez, warned that St. Just was a friend of the fraudulent contractor Vidal was sent to denounce.
The soldier perceived that he had been indiscreet. But the perception left him undismayed and unruffled.
“I am listening,” he invited the other.
“This way,” said the representative, motioning him to step aside,
Vidal shrugged, almost contemptuously — he disliked this foxy-looking fellow with his foppish blue coat, his lacquered boots, and his immaculate buckskins that fitted him without a wrinkle. Nevertheless he obeyed the command of those hard, pale eyes and that white hand so languidly waved.
The crowd made way with alacrity, St. Just was credited with the most bloodthirsty nature, the bitterest tongue, and the fiercest eloquence in the assembly.
There was something of the wolf under that foxy exterior, and he was more feared, perhaps, than any man his day. It was notorious, too, that he stood high in the favor of the incorruptible Robespierre, that in matters of policy the twain had but one voice.
He drew Vidal apart, and paced with him near the door across the lozenge of sunlight that gleamed brightly one moment to be obscured the next as the gusty August wind drive its regiment of cloud-packs across the face of the sun.
“You were speaking of Lemoine, I think,” said St. Just, softly.
“The readiness of your guess in itself confirms my accusation,” was the uncompromising answer.
It staggered the deputy for a moment. He raised his eyebrows.
“You reason like a soldier, which is to say that you do not reason at all. Since Lemoine is the only contractor in the last three months who had been charged by the government with the supply of footgear to the army it inevitably follows that your accusation must be aimed at him.” He paused a moment, and those inhumanely cold eyes scanned the face of the stalwart soldier, “Tell me, Colonel Vidal, is this accusation the only business that has brought you from the army?”
“It is the chief business?”
“What is the other?”
“My general is anxious to receive the reenforcernents promised him. I am charged to conduct the new levies back to Holland with me.”
“Will you take a word of advice from me, colonel?”
“That,” said Vidal, “will depend upon its nature.”
“Turn your entire attention to what you deem — quite unjustly — the lesser part of your task. Obtain the assembly’s sanction to conduct the recruits to the army. As for the affair of Lemoine and the boots — leave it alone. You can do no good by—”
Vidal impatiently broke in. “You are speaking to a soldier, citizen.” he said, half angrily. “I have received orders from my general, and none but my general may relieve me of them. Do you realize that were I to do as you are suggesting, Dumouriez could have me shot for disobedience?”
“I will see to that,” St Just assured him. “I speak not only with my own voice, but with that of the citizen Robespierre himself. You shall have complete immunity from any consequence of your omission, or rather, of your compliance with my — request.”
Vidal stood still and squarely faced the representative, “Will you tell me what affair this may be of yours?” he asked so truculently that a faint flush showed in the other’s pale cheeks.
“I am concerned with the interests of the nation,” replied St. Just, and he made it plain that he kept his patience with difficulty under this opposition. “I am convinced that the best interests of the nation would not be served by your denunciation.”
“That is not my affair.” said Vidal, stubbornly disliking this fellow more and more. “My affair is to obey orders, I am an instrument; no more.”
St. Just set his teeth, “You are receiving orders now,” he said. “The army of France — your general himself, are subject to the representatives of the people — the sovereign people of France.”
“Permit me to observe, citizen, that you are not the representatives of the sovereign people. You are only one of the representatives. The others are inside there.
“And my business is with them in collective assembly, not with any single member of them who obviously is endeavoring to serve ends of his own behind their backs. Aye, you may glare at me, ci-devant Chevalier de St. Just, who began life by rifling your own father’s money-box. You’re a thief, my friend, and the friend of thieves, as witness your concern for Lemoine.”
“Citizen-soldier,” said St. Just between his teeth. He was livid and his eyes blazed with fury. “You insult me!
“It is you who insult me by supposing that I am of your own dishonest kidney.”
“Crédieu!” swore the representative. “You dog! A word from me can destroy you.”
“Speak up,” Vidal bade him now in a voice of thunder. “Let the people hear your threats that they may ask themselves whether we have returned to the days of Capet when any knave of a court flunky might threaten an honest nan. A word from you to destroy me! Bah!” he laughed.
“I should have something to say to that. I am a soldier, Cadedi. I have five wounds, all of them in front, made with clean steel. Do you think a stab in the back from the dirty tongue of a politician is going to trouble me?”
St. Just recoiled before the fierce vehemence of the man.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 562
