The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  Pierre calls me illusioned, says I am drunk with words; but no drunkenness under high heaven can equal the intoxication of acting strongly, boldly, when the time to act has come.

  Lucienne half turned on the high seat where she sat beside the woodcutter. From where he lay Jean could see the sunlight like a halo in her hair, the white clouds sweeping by but inches above her head, across a sky bluer than any sky has been since time began or would ever be again. Wisps of pine needles broke it, dancing in the wind, bare branches of oak and sycamore, the crying white of birch. Everything was oddly broken, foreshortened, viewed from that position from which a man rarely sees his world.

  But it’s good for thinking, Jean mused; it lends itself to long, slow thoughts. What measure do ye measure, that ye be not measured by? Lucienne has loved and cherished me; and that love to me was a thing above all price. But—and he smiled a little gazing up at her—’tis you who put the valuation upon it, my sweet; it was you made of it a thing that could be bought and sold, and at thieves’ market prices. Ah, Lucienne, Lucienne—the thing you want can never be bought, always and for ever it must be earned. And the sweat and tears you put into it are the measure of its value. . . . For were the King himself to set you upon the stage, before the footlights that have for you more lustre than diamonds, only your own skill, your own talent, could keep you there—and these you have or have not beyond the hope of purchasing.

  She turned again, and tucked the blankets firmly up around his neck, for it was December now, and cold, despite the clarity of the sky. Her fingers strayed lingeringly across his cheek, and at their touch he knew with aching bitterness how little right he had to be called philosopher.

  For the pain was back again; not the bad, the crippling pain from his wound, but the other, the very bad, the unthinkable, the unbearable hurt that was inside him. It had no definite location, but filled up the whole of him. It was inside him and outside him, around him expanding until the sky was alive with it, contracting to a single white-hot blade of anguish that probed and twisted and tore until all his blood ran screaming through his veins.

  He wondered why she couldn’t hear that screaming. To him it was real and definite and echoed in his ears. It died to the whimpering of a frightened child, and rose to the sick, insufferable screeching of a criminal dying under torture. It was bad, very bad, almost the worst thing in the whole world. Almost, but not quite.

  He knew what the worst thing was, and every time she touched him it came back to him and lived inside his mind. The worst thing, the thing he tried to shut from his mind, was memory. And he could not. He could not at all.

  It was alive. More alive than he was. More living than the poor, bruised and broken thing he called his body. It was visual and tactile; it had warmth, softness, texture, even odour. And it had been perfect. Darkly, beautifully perfect.

  And because it had been so, her act of betrayal became for him a double profanation, both of herself, her body which was the very fount and temple of his idolatry, and of the integrity of love itself. He would go on; he would live, eat food, breathe air; but his death, when finally it came, would be but the culmination of the act of dying that began the night he had lit the candles with trembling hands and found her sleeping beside the Lord of Gravereau.

  I will not even leave her, he realised bitterly; because I cannot. Except by the door of death itself, I am powerless to leave her side. But what we will have from now on will be like a priceless vase that has been smashed upon the floor, and skilfully mended—all of a piece, perhaps, but God, how ugly the cracks show in the light!

  She turned and saw his face, and what was in it troubled her. “Jeannot,” she whispered, “do not think of that . . . it’s all gone—finished. Don’t you understand that, my Jeannot? I—I was dazzled. A noble, a great noble—and so wondrously fair, too, you comprehend. . . . I was weak and foolish. But when the two of you were put to the test, ‘twas you who behaved nobly, nay, gallantly even, giving him an honourable chance to defend himself, and he . . .”

  “For God’s love, shut up!” Jean screamed at her.

  She looked at him, and her mouth quivered. Then, very slowly and with great dignity, she started to cry.

  The woodcutter stared at him curiously.

  “We’d best hurry,” he croaked; “he’s in fever again.”

  Lucienne stopped crying, accepting this easy explanation.

  Jean smiled at her, thinking: It’s not so simple, Lucienne. Nothing in life is ever so simple—or exactly what we expect, or what we want it to be. Perhaps that’s why our language is full of labels: noble, priest, bourgeois, peasant, madman, saint. We have to simplify, don’t we? Say a noble, and at once we think of Gervais la Moyte, Comte de Gravereau, forgetting at that instant Robert Roget Marie la Moyte, his father, a man as different from him as day is from night. I remember how all the peasants wept the night he died . . . Say peasant, and the picture is of a dumb, beaten animal, earth-stained, smelling of the stable; but Pierre du Pain is a peasant, just as I am a bourgeois—and a madman. . . .

  Au, yes, we’ll go on inventing our labels that never fit anything, manufacturing our oversimplifications because we weary of the ceaseless pain of thinking, of having to weigh and measure every man on the face of earth, having to sort out the subtle differences that mark him off from every other man. . . .

  But so much thinking tired him. He dozed off and on, aware even in his sleep of the jolting of the cart, the creaking of the harness, and the fitful gusts of the wind.

  What awakened him finally was the fact that the cart had stopped. Voices came over to him. They were familiar voices; he knew that he had heard them before.

  “Nom de Dieu! It’s the young master! M’sieur Marin has had an army of police searching for him! He lives? Thank God for that, or else I would not have had the heart to hear the news. . . .”

  He lay there with his eyes closed, in a blissful lassitude of surrender to his weakness, in the unexpected luxury of complete absence of pain. Perhaps he slept again, for surely Thérèse could not have appeared instantly over the mile-long distance that separated the villa from the iron gate.

  “Jean!” she got out, her voice high, taut, strangling. “Merciful God, what have they done to you?”

  He tried to find his voice, to tell them it was nothing, an accident—but he was tired, so tired, and no sound came out of his throat, though his lips moved, shaping the words.

  “You!” Thérèse whispered, her voice hoarse with unutterable loathing; “you’ve killed him! You unspeakable streetwalker! Oh, God, God, how many times have I begged him to stay away from you—I knew in my heart. . . .”

  “What did you know, little sister?” Jean croaked, but the laughter moved through his voice, shaking it like dry reeds in the wind. “That Lucienne would one day kill me? But not so quickly, sweet sister, and surely not by so wild and barbaric a means. She is more subtle than that, and there are pleasanter ways. . . .”

  “He raves,” Thérêse said. “Oh, Jean, Jean . . .”

  “I didn’t do this,” Lucienne said. “Ask him, he will tell you.”

  “He would lie,” she said. “For you, he would lie—as he has so many times before.”

  “There’s no use talking to you,” Lucienne said bitterly. “Take him, Mademoiselle, take your precious brother who has cost me a thousand times more than he is worth!”

  Jean Paul raised himself up on one elbow, and hung there long enough to see his sister’s face contorted with rage; but the effort was too much for him, and again he had the now familiar sensation of being borne out upon a tide of darkness, sinking fathoms deep into utter night.

  When he fought his way upward into light and air again, he was in his own room, and his whole family was standing around his bed.

  “Lucienne?” he whispered.

  “She is in prison,” his brother snapped, “where she belongs. We need only a statement from you before we can press the charges.”

  Jean Paul looked at his
brother, and his mouth made the shape of laughter; but he was too weak to let it out.

  “You are fantastic, Bertrand,” he got out, “really fantastic. Go and have her released this instant!”

  “Son,” Henri Marin rumbled, “we’ve forgiven you your folly. You’re young, and of my blood, so this wildness of yours is natural. But this misplaced gallantry becomes you but ill. That vixen must have the punishment she deserves!”

  Jean smiled.

  “For what, Father?” he murmured. “For saving my life?”

  “She saved your life?” Simone snapped. “Now really, Jean . . .”

  “I assure you, my revered and honoured sister-in-law, that she did. She saw the assassin take aim and struck his arm so that the shot that would have surely killed me was deflected. Afterwards she had me placed in her own bed and nursed me night and day until the life came back to me.”

  “It was not the first time you’ve been in her bed, I’ll warrant,” Simone said.

  Jean looked at her.

  “You’re a great lady, aren’t you?” he chuckled. “Simone de Sainte Juste, Marquise de Beauvieux—but still, how much of a petite bourgeoise you have become!”

  “Jean,” Thérèse said, “look at me. Now tell me that again— that she saved your life.”

  Jean Paul looked at his sister gravely.

  “Yes, little sister,” he said gently. “She saved my life—and at great cost to herself, perhaps even at the risk of her own.”

  Thérèse straightened up, and met Simone’s eyes.

  “He’s telling the truth,” she said quietly.

  “I know,” Simone snapped. “God, what fools we women are!”

  “Bertrand—” Thérèse said.

  “All right, all right!” Bertrand growled. “I’ll go and have her freed, though the authorities will think me a precious fool, and wonder what hold she has on us!”

  Jean Paul gazed at Bertrand, and his eyes were filled with dark mockery.

  “Your reasons become you, my brother,” he murmured; “but then, your reasons always do, don’t they?”

  “Hush, Jean,” Thérèse said, “you mustn’t tire yourself.”

  He felt better now, very much better and stronger, but very sleepy. It was good to drift off into sleep, knowing it to be sleep, not unconsciousness, hearing their voices becoming bee-drone, breeze murmur. . . . He slept a long time, and very deeply. When he woke up, he was terribly hungry. And that, too, was good; for it was the first time he had felt any real desire for food since Gervais la Moyte had shot him.

  Thérèse was sitting by the bed, feeding him the scalding soup. He could feel the life flowing back into his body with every spoonful. It was good to be alive, to have feeling again, even though his wound ached damnably.

  Then Bertrand Marin strode into the room.

  “She’s free,” he announced without any preamble whatever.

  “Good!” Jean Paul said, and the strength of his own voice startled him. “Thank you infinitely, my brother.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Bertrand said. “I didn’t do it. She was already gone when I got there. I stopped at her house—I—I felt in honour bound to convey our apologies. She was gone. They said she had quit the village.”

  “But,” Thérêse said, “if you did not have her freed, Bertrand, then how—?”

  Bertrand’s face changed. A deep red appeared low on his jaw and climbed upward until it reached his ears. Then they reddened, too. Jean could almost see them burn.

  “A—a certain great lord,” he spluttered, “ordered it. . . . It seems he had a certain interest in the wench. . . .”

  Jean Paul stared at his brother. He stared at him a long time. Then he started to laugh. It was a faint ghost of his usual, rich baritone mirth. It was husk-dry, rasping, so low that they saw that he was laughing more than they heard the sound. But it was terrible, none the less. Bertrand couldn’t stand it. He turned on his heel and marched out of the room with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Thérèse’s face was white.

  “Jean,” she whispered, “he thinks—you think. . . . But it couldn’t be! Gervais left Saint Jule over a week ago.”

  Jean subsided. He reached over and patted her hand.

  “I never think, little sister,” he said gently; “ ‘tis a dangerous business, thinking—very apt to drive a man mad.”

  But after she had gone to her own chaste chamber, to worry the matter over in her mind, Jean lay very still and stared at the ceiling.

  And so, my Lord of Gravereau, he thought bitterly, again you show your hand. And always, with that fiendish luck of yours, you strike at the right time—just after my precious kindred have given another display of the unparalleled Marin stupidity. Dear God, how much of life is encompassed round about by the two small letters of that work ‘if’. . . . If Thérèse had greeted her kindly. If Bertrand and my father had not chosen to display their power and authority. If that ball had missed me entirely, or had been aimed more truly. . . .

  In the next room, Thérèse thought she heard him laughing. But it was not laughter that she heard.

  Thereafter, strangely enough, his recovery was rapid. The Abbé Gregoire called it a miracle.

  “I have seen men die,” he said, “of wounds less grave. God has laid His mark upon you, my son. He has destined you for great works.”

  “God?” Jean mocked; “or Satan? Which, good Father? I don’t believe in miracles. The devil, they say, takes care of his own.”

  But it was a miracle, none the less—of a kind that neither Abbé Gregoire nor Jean Paul Marin understood. The miraculous lay in how far the human will can dominate the weakness of the flesh; and in this the strength of a man’s purpose counts far more than whether it be good or ill.

  Jean Paul’s purpose was very strong. He meant simply to kill the Comte de Gravereau.

  He waited a fortnight to be sure of his strength. It was not long enough, but his hatred was stronger than his judgment. He dressed himself in the middle of the night and went down to the stables, armed with pistols, a dagger, and a sabre. He had no plan, but the various weapons he bore would fit almost any contingency. For provisions he took along a loaf, a flagon of wine, and a cheese. Then he mounted Roland, his black stallion, and rode away from the Villa Marin.

  He reached the Château de Gravereau late in the afternoon of the next day. Although it was long before night, the great hall was loud with revelry. Chevaliers and their ladies passed in and out with little more than a salute from the Comte’s guard.

  At nightfall, Jean Paul knew, it would be much more difficult to gain access to the château than it was now. He glanced at his clothes. Were he to wear a banner of scarlet about his neck, it would not have drawn the attention of the guards more quickly than the way he was dressed. Among the proud and wealthy mercantile classes of the third estate, nothing was more galling than the laws which forced them to dress in sober browns, blacks, and greys, while the nobility could and did attire itself in all the colours of the rainbow. Jean Paul’s lean, aristocratic looks would have passed muster, but not his good suit of black broadcloth. His hair was out of the question. He wore it loose, hanging down about his shoulders. To mingle with that throng, it should have been clubbed into a Cadogan, with a pigtail tied with velvet ribbons, or even the back hair gathered into a small velvet bag. He didn’t need a wig, for after Rousseau and the other philosophers had set the vogue for simplicity, most of the younger nobles wore their own hair; even powder was beginning to go out of fashion.

  Still, to have to climb the high wall, topped with spikes and broken glass, in the dead of night without making a sound was quite a proposition. And once inside the wall, how was he to get into the château itself?

  He sat there on his horse, frowning.

  If I were dressed right, he mused, if I could match their foppery, I could stroll in without being noticed and hide myself until night comes. Maybe I could buy a cast-off suit in the village— But he dismissed that idea as soon a
s it came. The noblesse always passed their cast-off clothing to their servants. He had the money to buy a suit, but that involved a week’s wait at best while the tailor made it to his measure—if, indeed, he could find a tailor daring enough to make him a kind of clothes he had no legal right to wear. A bribe—of course. But there still remained the element of time.

  Your man of action, he told himself, is always basically an improvisateur . . . there must be yet another way. . . .

  There was. He saw it as soon as he heard a group of noble young roisterers singing. All of them were far gone with wine.

  “Now,” Jean breathed, “all I have to do is to wait until one of them passes this way alone. Pray God it’s one near my size. . . .”

  He didn’t have long to wait. A tall youth broke away from the others and made his way towards a thicket about twenty yards from where Jean sat on his horse. His face was greenish, his purpose evident.

  “Enfer!” Jean swore; “I hope he doesn’t spoil that suit!” He touched Roland with his heels, and that well-trained beast moved silently forward. When they came up behind the young noble, he was bending over, retching with wine-sickness. Jean Paul waited until he straightened up, then brought the barrel of his pistol down with considerable force upon the young noble’s head.

  The man crumpled soundlessly to earth. Jean dismounted, thanking his stars for the infernal racket the rest of them were making, and stripped the young nobleman to the skin, taking away even his small-clothes, for which he had no use.

  I rather think he’ll give some consideration to the matter, he mused gleefully, before reappearing before the ladies in his authentically noble hide.

  But to make the matter doubly sure, he bound the young nobleman’s wrists and ankles together with some tough vine, and gagged him with his own simple cravat, reserving the noble’s elaborate lacy one for his coming disguise.

  A few minutes later the transformation was complete, except for the nobleman’s red-heeled shoes, which were much too tight for Jean Paul’s somewhat plebeian feet, and the lank black horse’s mane that grew upon his head.