Scaramouche

by Rafael Sabatini

  The friendly mayor carried his complaisance a step farther, and dispatched the letter to Paris by the hands of his own son, an intelligent lad of nineteen. It was late in the afternoon of that perfect August day when young Rougane presented himself at the Hotel Plougastel.

  He was graciously received by Mme. de Plougastel in the salon, whose splendours, when combined with the great air of the lady herself, overwhelmed the lad's simple, unsophisticated soul. Madame made up her mind at once.

  M. de Kercadiou's urgent message no more than confirmed her own fears and inclinations. She decided upon instant departure.

  "Bien, madame," said the youth. "Then I have the honour to take my leave."

  But she would not let him go. First to the kitchen to refresh himself, whilst she and mademoiselle made ready, and then a seat for him in her carriage as far as Meudon. She could not suffer him to return on foot as he had come.

  Though in all the circumstances it was no more than his due, yet the kindliness that in such a moment of agitation could take thought for another was presently to be rewarded. Had she done less than this, she would have known—if nothing worse—at least some hours of anguish even greater than those that were already in store for her.

  It wanted, perhaps, a half-hour to sunset when they set out in her carriage with intent to leave Paris by the Porte Saint-Martin. They travelled with a single footman behind. Rougane—terrifying condescension—was given a seat inside the carriage with the ladies, and proceeded to fall in love with Mlle. de Kercadiou, whom he accounted the most beautiful being he had ever seen, yet who talked to him simply and unaffectedly as with an equal. The thing went to his head a little, and disturbed certain republican notions which he had hitherto conceived himself to have thoroughly digested.

  The carriage drew up at the barrier, checked there by a picket of the National Guard posted before the iron gates.

  The sergeant in command strode to the door of the vehicle. The Countess put her head from the window.

  "The barrier is closed, madame," she was curtly informed.

  "Closed!" she echoed. The thing was incredible. "But... but do you mean that we cannot pass?"

  "Not unless you have a permit, madame." The sergeant leaned nonchalantly on his pike. "The orders are that no one is to leave or enter without proper papers."

  "Whose orders?"

  "Orders of the Commune of Paris."

  "But I must go into the country this evening." Madame's voice was almost petulant. "I am expected."

  "In that case let madame procure a permit."

  "Where is it to be procured?"

  "At the Hotel de Ville or at the headquarters of madame's section."

  She considered a moment. "To the section, then. Be so good as to tell my coachman to drive to the Bondy Section."

  He saluted her and stepped back. "Section Bondy, Rue des Morts," he bade the driver.

  Madame sank into her seat again, in a state of agitation fully shared by mademoiselle. Rougane set himself to pacify and reassure them. The section would put the matter in order. They would most certainly be accorded a permit. What possible reason could there be for refusing them? A mere formality, after all!

  His assurance uplifted them merely to prepare them for a still more profound dejection when presently they met with a flat refusal from the president of the section who received the Countess.

  "Your name, madame?" he had asked brusquely. A rude fellow of the most advanced republican type, he had not even risen out of deference to the ladies when they entered. He was there, he would have told you, to perform the duties of his office, not to give dancing-lessons.

  "Plougastel," he repeated after her, without title, as if it had been the name of a butcher or baker. He took down a heavy volume from a shelf on his right, opened it and turned the pages. It was a sort of directory of his section. Presently he found what he sought. "Comte de Plougastel, Hotel Plougastel, Rue du Paradis. Is that it?"

  "That is correct, monsieur," she answered, with what civility she could muster before the fellow's affronting rudeness.

  There was a long moment of silence, during which he studied certain pencilled entries against the name. The sections had been working in the last few weeks much more systematically than was generally suspected.

  "Your husband is with you, madame?" he asked curtly, his eyes still conning that page.

  "M. le Comte is not with me," she answered, stressing the title.

  "Not with you?" He looked up suddenly, and directed upon her a glance in which suspicion seemed to blend with derision. "Where is he?"

  "He is not in Paris, monsieur.

  "Ah! Is he at Coblenz, do you think?"

  Madame felt herself turning cold. There was something ominous in all this. To what end had the sections informed themselves so thoroughly of the comings and goings of their inhabitants? What was preparing? She had a sense of being trapped, of being taken in a net that had been cast unseen.

  "I do not know, monsieur," she said, her voice unsteady.

  "Of course not." He seemed to sneer. "No matter. And you wish to leave Paris also? Where do you desire to go?"

  "To Meudon."

  "Your business there?"

  The blood leapt to her face. His insolence was unbearable to a woman who in all her life had never known anything but the utmost deference from inferiors and equals alike. Nevertheless, realizing that she was face to face with forces entirely new, she controlled herself, stifled her resentment, and answered steadily.

  "I wish to conduct this lady, Mlle. de Kercadiou, back to her uncle who resides there."

  "Is that all? Another day will do for that, madame. The matter is not pressing."

  "Pardon, monsieur, to us the matter is very pressing."

  "You have not convinced me of it, and the barriers are closed to all who cannot prove the most urgent and satisfactory reasons for wishing to pass. You will wait, madame, until the restriction is removed. Good-evening."

  "But, monsieur..."

  "Good-evening, madame," he repeated significantly, a dismissal more contemptuous and despotic than any royal "You have leave to go."

  Madame went out with Aline. Both were quivering with the anger that prudence had urged them to suppress. They climbed into the coach again, desiring to be driven home.

  Rougane's astonishment turned into dismay when they told him what had taken place. "Why not try the Hotel de Ville, madame?" he suggested.

  "After that? It would be useless. We must resign ourselves to remaining in Paris until the barriers are opened again."

  "Perhaps it will not matter to us either way by then, madame," said Aline.

  "Aline!" she exclaimed in horror.

  "Mademoiselle!" cried Rougane on the same note. And then, because he perceived that people detained in this fashion must be in some danger not yet discernible, but on that account more dreadful, he set his wits to work. As they were approaching the Hotel Plougastel once more, he announced that he had solved the problem.

  "A passport from without would do equally well," he announced. "Listen, now, and trust to me. I will go back to Meudon at once. My father shall give me two permits—one for myself alone, and another for three persons—from Meudon to Paris and back to Meudon. I reenter Paris with my own permit, which I then proceed to destroy, and we leave together, we three, on the strength of the other one, representing ourselves as having come from Meudon in the course of the day. It is quite simple, after all. If I go at once, I shall be back to-night."

  "But how will you leave?" asked Aline.

  "I? Pooh! As to that, have no anxiety. My father is Mayor of Meudon. There are plenty who know him. I will go to the Hotel de Ville, and tell them what is, after all, true—that I am caught in Paris by the closing of the barriers, and that my father is expecting me home this evening. They will pass me through. It is quite simple."

  His confidence uplifted them again. The thing seemed as easy as he represented it.

  "Then let your passport be for f
our, my friend," madame begged him. "There is Jacques," she explained, indicating the footman who had just assisted them to alight.

  Rougane departed confident of soon returning, leaving them to await him with the same confidence. But the hours succeeded one another, the night closed in, bedtime came, and still there was no sign of his return.

  They waited until midnight, each pretending for the other's sake to a confidence fully sustained, each invaded by vague premonitions of evil, yet beguiling the time by playing tric-trac in the great salon, as if they had not a single anxious thought between them.

  At last on the stroke of midnight, madame sighed and rose.

  "It will be for to-morrow morning," she said, not believing it.

  "Of course," Aline agreed. "It would really have been impossible for him to have returned to-night. And it will be much better to travel to-morrow. The journey at so late an hour would tire you so much, dear madame."

  Thus they made pretence.

  Early in the morning they were awakened by a din of bells—the tocsins of the sections ringing the alarm. To their startled ears came later the rolling of drums, and at one time they heard the sounds of a multitude on the march. Paris was rising. Later still came the rattle of small-arms in the distance and the deeper boom of cannon. Battle was joined between the men of the sections and the men of the Court. The people in arms had attacked the Tuileries. Wildest rumours flew in all directions, and some of them found their way through the servants to the Hotel Plougastel, of that terrible fight for the palace which was to end in the purposeless massacre of all those whom the invertebrate monarch abandoned there, whilst placing himself and his family under the protection of the Assembly. Purposeless to the end, ever adopting the course pointed out to him by evil counsellors, he prepared for resistance only until the need for resistance really arose, whereupon he ordered a surrender which left those who had stood by him to the last at the mercy of a frenzied mob.

  And while this was happening in the Tuileries, the two women at the Hotel Plougastel still waited for the return of Rougane, though now with ever-lessening hope. And Rougane did not return. The affair did not appear so simple to the father as to the son. Rougane the elder was rightly afraid to lend himself to such a piece of deception.

  He went with his son to inform M. de Kercadiou of what had happened, and told him frankly of the thing his son suggested, but which he dared not do.

  M. de Kercadiou sought to move him by intercessions and even by the offer of bribes. But Rougane remained firm.

  "Monsieur," he said, "if it were discovered against me, as it inevitably would be, I should hang for it. Apart from that, and in spite of my anxiety to do all in my power to serve you, it would be a breach of trust such as I could not contemplate. You must not ask me, monsieur."

  "But what do you conceive is going to happen?" asked the half-demented gentleman.

  "It is war," said Rougane, who was well informed, as we have seen. "War between the people and the Court. I am desolated that my warning should have come too late. But, when all is said, I do not think that you need really alarm yourself. War will not be made on women." M. de Kercadiou clung for comfort to that assurance after the mayor and his son had departed. But at the back of his mind there remained the knowledge of the traffic in which M. de Plougastel was engaged. What if the revolutionaries were equally well informed? And most probably they were. The women-folk political offenders had been known aforetime to suffer for the sins of their men. Anything was possible in a popular upheaval, and Aline would be exposed jointly with Mme. de Plougastel.

  Late that night, as he sat gloomily in his brother's library, the pipe in which he had sought solace extinguished between his fingers, there came a sharp knocking at the door.

  To the old seneschal of Gavrillac who went to open there stood revealed upon the threshold a slim young man in a dark olive surcoat, the skirts of which reached down to his calves. He wore boots, buckskins, and a small-sword, and round his waist there was a tricolour sash, in his hat a tricolour cockade, which gave him an official look extremely sinister to the eyes of that old retainer of feudalism, who shared to the full his master's present fears.

  "Monsieur desires?" he asked, between respect and mistrust.

  And then a crisp voice startled him.

  "Why, Benoit! Name of a name! Have you completely forgotten me?"

  With a shaking hand the old man raised the lantern he carried so as to throw its light more fully upon that lean, wide-mouthed countenance.

  "M. Andre!" he cried. "M. Andre!" And then he looked at the sash and the cockade, and hesitated, apparently at a loss.

  But Andre-Louis stepped past him into the wide vestibule, with its tessellated floor of black-and-white marble.

  "If my godfather has not yet retired, take me to him. If he has retired, take me to him all the same."

  "Oh, but certainly, M. Andre—and I am sure he will be ravished to see you. No, he has not yet retired. This way, M. Andre; this way, if you please."

  The returning Andre-Louis, reaching Meudon a half-hour ago, had gone straight to the mayor for some definite news of what might be happening in Paris that should either confirm or dispel the ominous rumours that he had met in ever-increasing volume as he approached the capital. Rougane informed him that insurrection was imminent, that already the sections had possessed themselves of the barriers, and that it was impossible for any person not fully accredited to enter or leave the city.

  Andre-Louis bowed his head, his thoughts of the gravest. He had for some time perceived the danger of this second revolution from within the first, which might destroy everything that had been done, and give the reins of power to a villainous faction that would plunge the country into anarchy. The thing he had feared was more than ever on the point of taking place. He would go on at once, that very night, and see for himself what was happening.

  And then, as he was leaving, he turned again to Rougane to ask if M. de Kercadiou was still at Meudon.

  "You know him, monsieur?"

  "He is my godfather."

  "Your godfather! And you a representative! Why, then, you may be the very man he needs." And Rougane told him of his son's errand into Paris that afternoon and its result.

  No more was required. That two years ago his godfather should upon certain terms have refused him his house weighed for nothing at the moment. He left his travelling carriage at the little inn and went straight to M. de Kercadiou.

  And M. de Kercadiou, startled in such an hour by this sudden apparition, of one against whom he nursed a bitter grievance, greeted him in terms almost identical with those in which in that same room he had greeted him on a similar occasion once before.

  "What do you want here, sir?"

  "To serve you if possible, my godfather," was the disarming answer.

  But it did not disarm M. de Kercadiou. "You have stayed away so long that I hoped you would not again disturb me."

  "I should not have ventured to disobey you now were it not for the hope that I can be of service. I have seen Rougane, the mayor..."

  "What's that you say about not venturing to disobey?"

  "You forbade me your house, monsieur."

  M. de Kercadiou stared at him helplessly.

  "And is that why you have not come near me in all this time?"

  "Of course. Why else?"

  M. de Kercadiou continued to stare. Then he swore under his breath. It disconcerted him to have to deal with a man who insisted upon taking him so literally. He had expected that Andre-Louis would have come contritely to admit his fault and beg to be taken back into favour. He said so.

  "But how could I hope that you meant less than you said, monsieur? You were so very definite in your declaration. What expressions of contrition could have served me without a purpose of amendment? And I had no notion of amending. We may yet be thankful for that."

  "Thankful?"

  "I am a representative. I have certain powers. I am very opportunely returning to Paris. Can
I serve you where Rougane cannot? The need, monsieur, would appear to be very urgent if the half of what I suspect is true. Aline should be placed in safety at once."

  M. de Kercadiou surrendered unconditionally. He came over and took Andre-Louis' hand.

  "My boy," he said, and he was visibly moved, "there is in you a certain nobility that is not to be denied. If I seemed harsh with you, then, it was because I was fighting against your evil proclivities. I desired to keep you out of the evil path of politics that have brought this unfortunate country into so terrible a pass. The enemy on the frontier; civil war about to flame out at home. That is what you revolutionaries have done."

  Andre-Louis did not argue. He passed on.

  "About Aline?" he asked. And himself answered his own question: "She is in Paris, and she must be brought out of it at once, before the place becomes a shambles, as well it may once the passions that have been brewing all these months are let loose. Young Rougane's plan is good. At least, I cannot think of a better one."

  "But Rougane the elder will not hear of it."

  "You mean he will not do it on his own responsibility. But he has consented to do it on mine. I have left him a note over my signature to the effect that a safe-conduct for Mlle. de Kercadiou to go to Paris and return is issued by him in compliance with orders from me. The powers I carry and of which I have satisfied him are his sufficient justification for obeying me in this. I have left him that note on the understanding that he is to use it only in an extreme case, for his own protection. In exchange he has given me this safe-conduct."

  "You already have it!"

  M. de Kercadiou took the sheet of paper that Andre-Louis held out. His hand shook. He approached it to the cluster of candles burning on the console and screwed up his short-sighted eyes to read.

  "If you send that to Paris by young Rougane in the morning," said Andre-Louis, "Aline should be here by noon. Nothing, of course, could be done to-night without provoking suspicion. The hour is too late. And now, monsieur my godfather, you know exactly why I intrude in violation of your commands. If there is any other way in which I can serve you, you have but to name it whilst I am here."