By the time five out of six bottles had been consumed he knew that he had created something of an impression and that they now regarded him with a certain respect, even if their admiration was somewhat offset by a grudging envy; so he felt that if he played his cards well he might be able to secure a reasonable deal from them. With a view to further enhancing his prestige he launched into an account of his sword fight with De Roubec, although retailing the affair as though it had occurred in Strasbourg and had resulted from a chance encounter with a drunken rake on the way home one night.
At first they obviously believed him to be boasting and soon began to taunt him with half-drunken sneers of derision; but, quite good-humouredly, he pulled his long sword from under his bed, displayed it to their surprised gaze and said:
"Believe me or not as you like, but I am perfectly prepared to fight anyone here, either in a fencing school with buttoned foils or somewhere outside the town with naked steel."
His half-playful announcement was followed by a brief, strained silence. He doubted if any of them had ever handled a sword in their lives, and felt certain that his challenge would not be accepted; but he waited with interest to see how they would take it.
After a moment the hulking Hutot spoke up for the rest:
"I am of the people and the rapier is not for such as us; but I am strong enough to break you in half, my little man, and you would remember a good kick from me for a month afterwards. While 'I am here you'll show me the respect and service due to your elders."
Roger was quick to seize upon the point. He had known all along that he would never be able to intimidate Hutot, or overawe the others as long as they had the support of their senior; so he launched a project that he had in mind for splitting the party.
"Monsieur Hutot," he said with sudden gravity, "Believe me, you will never find me lacking in respect to you or unwilling to oblige you in anything you may require of me. But I am sure you will agree that, since I am not an articled apprentice, I am entitled to suggest that my age should be the governing factor in whom I serve here and whom I do not."
" 'Tis an innovation that I'll not stand for," declared Douie.
"You will hold your peace and do as you are bid," said Quatrevaux sharply. "How old are you, Breuc?"
"Seventeen and three months," Roger lied, once more stretching his age to the maximum which he thought might pass as credible; yet, had he known it, he could safely have added another six months, since so impressed were they by his savoir-faire and comparative breadth of knowledge, they would still have believed him.
"We celebrated Douie's name-day towards the end of September," Quatrevaux remarked, "so he can be but seventeen and a few weeks. I am eighteen and a half, and Hutot nearly twenty."
"Very well, then," said Roger. "I will serve you, Monsieur Quatrevaux, and Monsieur Hutot, to the best of my ability, but the other three must arrange matters among themselves."
" 'Tis all against our custom," demurred Hutot.
"And what of the cleaning of the office?" cried little Colas angrily. "I've done it daily for eight months and thought my time was nearing its end. Yet now, the sixth bed here is occupied, Maitre Leger cannot take another apprentice until Hutot leaves, and that will not be till next Whitsuntide. 'Tis unjust that I should be saddled with it for sixteen months when the normal period is something less than a year."
For a moment it looked as though Roger's plan for saving himself from becoming the general drudge hung again in the balance, but he said quickly:
"The office work I am prepared to share with you." Then picking up the last bottle of wine he refilled the glasses of the two seniors and added: "The decision rests with you, Monsieur Hutot, but in view of my age and the fact that I am not an articled apprentice I appeal to your sense of fairness."
Quatrevaux suddenly came to his assistance. "Breuc has made a good case. We are all lawyers here, and our rulings should be just ones."
"I'll not start to run my own errands again," Douie put in suddenly, and the silent, stupid-looking Monestot nodded agreement.
"Colas will continue to serve you two while Breuc looks after us," said Quatrevaux. "That is fair enough, is it not, Hutot?"
The burly Hutot shrugged his broad shoulders. "As you will. So long as my needs are attended to without question I care not how the juniors arrange matters between themselves."
So the question was settled and now, half befuddled by the wine they had drunk, they went to bed: Roger feeling no little pleased with himself that his skilful diplomacy had succeeded in at least reducing his new masters from five to two.
Next morning, having carried up the washing-water with Colas and helped him to dean out the office, Roger breakfasted with the others in the kitchen and, immediately afterwards, was set to work under Ruttot's supervision on copying Latin documents.
The senior copyist was a frail looking, bespectacled fellow of about thirty-five, who suffered from an habitual and irritating cough. He was a man of no ambition, having been a copyist for the past ten years and expecting to continue as one all his life. But he was competent at his work and evidently anxious that Roger should become so, too; as he took the trouble to make out a list for him of Latin legal expressions and helped him without grumbling whenever he found himself in difficulties.
As Roger bad feared, the work proved extremely monotonous and, as soon as its newness had worn off, he began to feel more than ever that Fate had played him a scurvy trick in forcing him to earn a pittance in such a manner.
He soon found, too, that although he had saved himself from becoming the slave of all his colleagues, fagging for Hutot alone was worse than anything he had endured as a new boy at Sherborne. The only interests of this coarse and powerfully built young Breton were drink and women. Brigitte, the fresh-faced cook, was his permanent stand-by, but on such nights as he did not creep down to the little room that she occupied on the ground floor, and they were many, he left the house by stealth after it had been locked up to spend the best part of the night with other girls of loose morals who lived in the neighbourhood.
His method of doing so was to lower himself by a rope from the attic window to the roof of the out-jutting kitchen and, from there, scramble down into the courtyard. But lest the rope should be seen from one of the lower windows during his absence it had to be hauled up after his descent and lowered again on his return. This now became one of Roger's duties and, since Hutot rarely returned till the early morning, his abettor bad to sleep with a piece of string attached to his little finger, the other end of which, having been passed through the window, hung down into the yard so that Hutot could pull it as a signal that he had returned.
Roger intensely resented being violently woken three or four nights a week by a painful jerking of his hand, and even more the fact that Hutot often returned drunk, which necessitated putting him to bed and afterwards clearing up the disgusting mess he had made when he had been sick. Yet there was nothing to be done about it as, on the only occasion that he had had the temerity to protest, Hutot had knocked him down and kicked him savagely.
Another less unpleasant but irritating duty that Roger was called on to perform was, during the midday recess, to carry Hutot's billet-doux to his latest conquests. As the senior apprentice was not the least particular about looks or class these ranged from washerwomen to girls who were known to be the common property of the town.
They were a coarse and vicious lot, and several of them, having made advances to Roger himself without success, then took a special delight in jeering at him as a prude and trying to make him blush by obscene remarks every time he had to visit them. Not only did he come to hate these missions but they took much of his free time that he would have otherwise employed in studying his German. He dared not let his books be seen by anyone at Maitre Leger's, so his only opportunity of getting down to them,, except on Sundays, was on fine days when he could spend an hour after dejeuner sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes.
Quatrevaux c
ontinued to treat him as a friend when the others were not about but, possibly from fear of losing his own prestige, was also exacting in his requirements of service. Nevertheless, his demands were much less onerous than Hutot's and mainly consisted in buying ribbons, bonbons and other presents for Mademoiselle Manon Prudhot.
Roger met Manon occasionally, going in or out of the house or on the stairs, and he did not consider her particularly pretty; but she had a beautiful figure, dressed with great elegance and had dark, roguish eyes. She was about twenty-two and, for those times, old not to be already married; but rumour had it that a scandal resulting from her having had an illegitimate child had hampered her chances in Paris; hence her coming to live with her uncle at Rennes. In any case, Roger knew that she could be no prude as often, when he was roused in the early hours of the morning by Hutot returning home, he saw that Quatrevaux's bed was empty.
After three weeks of his boring and humiliating existence at Maitre Leger's Roger felt that he could not possibly bear it much longer. The thought of Athenais had alone sustained him so long, but he had known her for only one evening and even the indelible impression made upon him by her fairy-like yet imperious beauty was becoming slightly blunted in his memory. She would, he knew, remain his dream divinity for years to come, yet his prospects of seeing much of her in the future now seemed remote, and those of his ever being able to make her his wife, positively nil.
While pondering his unhappy state one day towards the end of October it occurred to him that it was now just on three months since he had left home. By this time his father should have been re-posted and, if despatched to a distant station, would not be back in England for another year or more. If that were the case the coast was now clear for his own return. His homecoming, it was true, would not have the glamour with which he had once hoped to invest it, but at least he could say that he had succeeded in supporting himself in a foreign country for three months, which, at his age, was no small achievement. And while he was still not prepared to face his outraged father he felt that he could quite well bring himself to eat humble pie before his mother.
With this in mind he decided to write to her and, as he was apt to act at once on any impulse he felt to be a good one, he set about it that very day.
In his letter he said nothing of his nearly disastrous crossing with the smugglers, or of poor old Aristotle Fenelon, and he made his position sound considerably better than it was in fact. He once more begged pardon for the anxiety that his running away must have caused her, then went on to say that he was in excellent health and had obtained a good position with the leading lawyer in Rennes. It was, he admitted, a come-down for a gentleman to serve in a lawyer's office as a clerk, but even that was, in his eyes, an infinitely better condition of life than the miserable existence led by a midshipman in a man-o'-war. He added that while he had no intention of making law his career he should certainly stick to it until something better offered rather than return if his father was still at home. But that if the Admiral had been given a command and gone to sea again he was quite willing to take ship for England and discuss with her any ideas which she might have as to a more promising future for him. He refrained from informing her that he lacked the necessary funds to get back as he did not wish to admit that he was practically penniless, and he felt that it would be time enough to ask her to send him the money for his passage if her reply was favourable.
Having completed his letter he was anxious to get a reply to it as speedily as possible. On inquiring at the Hotel des Postes he learned that his missive might take anything up to a month to reach England, but that if he sent it by express it should get there, depending on the state of the weather, in a week to ten days; so he spent his last two crowns in sending it by the faster service.
His father having so recently been made a Rear-Admiral could be taken as a sure sign that he would be fairly speedily re-posted, so Roger felt that all the odds were on his parent being already once more at sea. It had cost him a lot to propose returning, as he would still have to face a possibly scornful Georgina and tell her what a poor figure he had cut in the matter of her jewels. But now that he had taken the decision he was glad of it and, much comforted by the thought that he would, almost certainly, be back in his own comfortable home by the end of November, he returned to face his daily drudgery and Hutot's outrageous demands with a more cheerful countenance than he had been able to put upon them for some time.
It was eight days after he had written and despatched his letter that he again saw Athenais. His flair for foreign languages made his study of German sufficiently interesting for him to continue working at it after lunch each day, although he now counted on getting home in the near future; and, having left the Jardin des Plantes, he was on his way back through the Rue St. Mélaine when he recognised her coach. He knew it at once from the liveries of the servants, and as it passed him a moment later at a fast trot he caught sight of her inside. She did not see him, as she was sitting bolt upright, beside Madame Marie-Ange Velot, staring straight in front of her, but the one glimpse of her lovely and imperious profile was enough to set his heart thumping like a sledge-hammer.
As he turned to gape after the coach he felt that she was ten, nay a hundred, times more beautiful than the picture he had kept of her in his memory; a little goddess who had descended to this sordid earth on which no mortal was even fitted to be a footstool for her feet. Yet, before the coach had turned the corner of the street he had determined that he must kiss her hand that very night.
That afternoon, for the first time, Monsieur Ruttot had to upbraid him severely for really slipshod work in his copying, but he simply could not keep his mind on his task and, that evening, having smartened himself up as well as he could, he bolted his dinner with the avidity of the other apprentices in order the more quickly to get out of the house.
On his arriving at the Hotel de Rochambeau one of the footmen answered the door to him and went to summon Monsieur Aldegonde. The major-domo greeted him with his usual look of haughty disapproval and when Roger asked for his name to be taken up to Mademoiselle de
Rochambeau replied that Mademoiselle could not be disturbed at present as she was still at dinner.
His ardour somewhat damped by this rebuff Roger set to slowly pacing back and forth across the great marble-floored hall, while Aldegonde reascended the staircase to resume supervising the service of the meal. For over half an hour he waited, at first somewhat consoled for the delay from having learned that his divinity was definitely at home and had not merely been in Rennes on a flying visit that afternoon; then with ever-growing impatience to have sight of her.
At last footsteps sounded again at the top of the stairs and, to his surprise, he saw young Count Lucien, followed by Aldegonde, coming down towards him. Ceasing his pacing he greeted the Count with a smile and made him a low bow.
The little Count halted two steps from the bottom of the staircase and returned the bow only with the faintest inclination of the head, then he said in a shrill voice:
"I am told that you have requested an audience with Mademoiselle, my sister, Monsieur. For what purpose do you require it?"
"Why, Monsieur le Count, to pay my respects to her," Roger replied a trifle uneasily.
"Is it true that you have become a clerk in our lawyer's office?"
"Yes, and I do not seek to bide it. But 'tis only a temporary measure. You will recall, no doubt, the straits in which I was left on the death of Doctor Aristotle Fenelon, and I was forced to take the only employment that offered, or starve."
"I care not if you starve or no," cried the young Count, giving vent to his anger. "How dare you presume on the fact that Mademoiselle de Rochambeau was impulsive enough to bring you here one night out of charity. You were then naught but a penniless vagabond, and you are little better now. The de Rochambeaux do not consort with lawyer's clerks and your request to wait upon Mademoiselle is an outrageous insult."
Roger had gone pale to the lips. "You stuck-up
little fool!" he suddenly burst out. "Whatever work I may do I'm as much a gentleman as you any day. Keep your tongue between your teeth, or 'twill be the worse for you!"
Count Lucien's hand shot out, and he shrilled to Aldegonde: "Seize that impudent upstart and throw him out!"
At Aldegonde's signal the tall footman advanced upon Roger, grasped him by the shoulders and, swivelling him round, thrust him towards the door.
"By God!" he shouted over his shoulder, "I'll get even with you for this!"
Next moment he was at the top of the steps. He heard Count Lucien cry: "If you dare to show your face here again I'll have you whipped by my lackeys."
Then the footman's knee caught Roger a hefty biff on the behind. He pitched forward down the short flight of steps and fell sprawling in the courtyard; the door was slammed to behind him.
Picking himself up he turned round and shook his fist in impotent fury at the dark facade of the mansion; then, literally sobbing with rage, he staggered out into the street.
For a week he could scarcely think of anything but the abominable humiliation to which he had been subjected. He came from a country where there were still very marked class distinctions, but in which there had grown up during the centuries a feeling that all classes were necessary to a well-ordered society, and that each was worthy of respect from the others as long as in the main its representatives contributed their quota to the common good. The better educated and more fortunately placed planned and ordered the way of life of the majority. They gave of their blood unstintingly in leading the defence of the country in time of war, meted out impartial, unbribable justice to their equals and inferiors alike, and tided the country people over times of difficulty whenever there was a failure of the crops. The others gave loyal service in peace and war and did not question the wisdom of their intellectual superiors in directing the affairs of the nation. Yet all stood fairly on their own feet with a true sense of their own dignity as individuals and proper rights as free men; and all had a ready word of good cheer for the others in their daily lives. The humblest labourer would talk as an equal about the prospects of crops or village affairs with his landlord and the noblest in the land was not ashamed to crack a joke with the yokels over a cup of ale in the village inn.
The Launching of Roger Brook rb-1 Page 26
