The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  “But,” Marie half wept, “to so expose this shameful thing. . . . Think you my lord would not rather . . .”

  “I expose nothing!” Augustin laughed. “The Duc was among the first of the noblemen who broke into this very chamber and found your lady, whose nobility does not extend to her morals, in the arms of that peasant swine!”

  “You speak of swine!” Marie snapped. “That boy has the looks and Mariners of a prince.”

  “Not any more,” Augustin grinned; “you should see him now!”

  Then he was gone, making a great clatter on the stair.

  I shall freeze within the hour, Jean thought. But he pushed on through the snow. If Nicole did not get my letter, I’ll find a quick death in these mountains. Stupid to keep to the trail. But Gerade has no guards to spare to send after me. Besides, I think he meant me to flee. He put the idea into my head himself.

  He stumbled on. It was January now, and here in the Bas Alpes the snow had begun to fall in November. His boots were good enough, but the rest of his clothing had long since been reduced to rags. He was blue with cold, and his breath made a cloud of vapour in the frosty air. Where he was going, on the trail through Carpentras, Gap and Briançon, the road climbed all the way to Gap, its highest point, which was more than three thousand feet high. Below Carpentras it wasn’t very high, and even there it was bitterly cold. He didn’t like to think what it was going to be like at that pass through Gap—if he ever lived to reach it.

  By nightfall he was already beginning to fall from weakness and fatigue. Each time he found it harder and harder to get up. Death by freezing is a seductive thing; the victim has little sensation of discomfort. He hadn’t had time to steal a tinderbox, so he had no means of making a fire. Even if I had got one, he thought wryly, I’d have scant chance of getting this ice-coated timber burning.

  His only chance lay in his ability to keep moving, to keep the blood circulating through his body. He pounded his body with his arms, but even this effort weakened him. The freshly healed stripe across his face ached damnably.

  He fell, got up, stumbled on, fell again, clawed his way to his hands and knees, fought his way upright and swayed there, knowing in his heart he hadn’t the strength to make one more quarter-mile. He stood there swaying on his feet, thinking:

  There is only one certainty in this world and that is that life always cheats you. Whatever it gives with one hand it takes away with the other, and always more than it gives. And I was overjoyed at the prospect of escape, never dreaming that it was into death that I was escaping . . . well, Jean Paul Marin, once again you’ve proved yourself a fool! And with that he threw back his head and laughed aloud, sending the boom of his mocking laughter echoing against the snowy hills. . . .

  And it was his laughter that saved him, for, but for the sound of it, Nicole never would have found him in that gathering dark. Two minutes later, she had pulled up her mare beside him, sending up clods of snow all over him, hurled herself down from the saddle and was locked in his arms.

  She kissed his dirty, bearded, half-frozen face all over, clinging to him, crying:

  “Jeannot, my Jeannot, oh my own, I have found you, I’ve found you, and now you’ll never go away from me again—never!”

  Jean Paul pushed her away with the last of his fading strength, and standing there holding her by the shoulders he smiled at her, seeing her as beautiful as an angel with the snow crystals powdering her fur cap, dusting her lashes with white, and the big tears freezing on her cheeks.

  “If,” he laughed weakly, “you don’t give me something to wrap myself in, and a spot of brandy, I shall go away from you—permanently.”

  “Oh,” she gasped, “you’re freezing—my poor darling, and I was chattering on. . . .”

  “You’re still chattering on,” Jean mocked, “and I’m still freezing.”

  She whirled back to her mare and loosed the straps of her saddle-roll. From it she took a magnificent greatcoat with a fur collar, and a fur cap, and helped Jean into them. Then she brought a bottle of brandy from the saddle-bags. Jean had some difficulty opening it with his half-frozen fingers, but he got it open at last and poured a good three fingers of it down his throat, feeling it like fire going down, then curling warmly in his belly, sending the good warmth out through his limbs, and the strength coming back to him amazingly.

  He mounted Beau Prince, while she stood by anxiously, fearing that he would fall, but though he swayed a bit in the saddle, he displayed a practised horsemanship that calmed her fears.

  “Where to, my lady?” he laughed.

  “Up the road in the direction you were going,” Nicole said. “But we turn off just before we get to Carpentras—because my brother has a hunting-lodge there in the hills. You—we,” and her face flamed bright scarlet as she corrected herself, “will stay there tonight. . . .” She stopped, and the plume of her breath enveloped her face. She rode over close to him. “I hope,” she whispered, “that God will forgive me for my thought; but Jeannot, Jeannot—let us ride fast—for, love, I cannot wait!”

  They pounded up the snowy trail. This is madness, Jean Paul thought. To be safe, I should put a night’s ride between me and all pursuers. But, God in Heaven, she is worth risking death for!

  She seemed to have guessed his thought, for she turned in the saddle and called out:

  “My brother will be away for weeks! There won’t be any pursuit, my Jean!”

  He saw, to his vast astonishment, as they rode up to that lodge, the flicker of firelight showing through the windows.

  “I sent servants to make a fire,” Nicole said calmly, “and to leave food, and other supplies. But don’t trouble yourself, my Jeannot, they should be gone by now. I told them to . . .”

  “You,” Jean said incredulously, “entrusted your plans to servants? Oh, Nicole—don’t you see that you’ve condemned us both?”

  She stared at him.

  “You mean that they’ll fly to my brother with the news?” she laughed. “But how could they, Jeannot mine, when my brother is away upon his honeymoon—and they know not where he is?”

  “His honeymoon,” Jean whispered. “Dear God!”

  “Don’t just sit there!” Nicole said. “Get down and help me down—oh, Jean—hurry!”

  They stood beside each other before the roaring fire, with Nicole’s small head nestled upon his shoulder. She straightened up at last and looked at him.

  “It’s a good thing I love you so,” she laughed, “for I fear me I couldn’t stand you now. Truly, Jeannot, you are a sight!”

  Jean ran his hand ruefully through his thick, black beard.

  “My brother has razors here,” Nicole said, “and we can melt some snow for hot water. You get the snow and I’ll bring in the clothes I brought you. Then we’ll have supper—” She leaned forward, pure deviltry in her blue eyes. “Yes, yes, we’ll have supper, and much wine; for you, my Jeannot, are half starved and very weak—” She swayed there before him, her eyes filled with laughter and with tenderness. “That must be remedied,” she whispered, “for, by all the Saints, this night you’ll have need of strength!”

  Then she whirled away from him, and went out into the swirling snow.

  Seeing his face in the mirror as he shaved, Jean Paul was very troubled. It was the first time he had seen his reflection since the coachman had broken his face. With his wild black beard, he looked like a devil out of hell. His broken nose had healed crookedly, and as more and more of his face came into view as he removed the beard, he liked less what he saw. The ragged white scar, paler than the rest of his skin, zigzagged down his face like a bolt of lightning; starting between his eyes and crossing his broken nose, it drew one corner of his mouth upward into a permanent half smile.

  And yet, strangely, all this devastation did not destroy his good looks. It merely changed them. With his own deep sensitivity, Jean Paul hated his new face, but it was Nicole who defined it.

  “Oh!” she gasped, as he emerged from the little room,
washed and shaved, and wearing her brother’s good suit. “Oh, Jean—how changed you are!”

  “I know,” he said bitterly, “I look like a beast!”

  But she came up to him and ran her finger-tips lightly down that scar, and going up on tiptoe she kissed his strangely smiling mouth.

  “No, my love,” she whispered, “not like a beast—like a devil, rather. Like a strangely beautiful devil. . . .”

  “Beautiful?” Jean snorted.

  “Yes, yes! You were always the handsomest thing in the world, and they couldn’t destroy that. But they changed it. They’ve made Lucifer of you—Mephistopheles—I—I think I’m a little afraid of you now. Jeannot, promise me one thing. . . .”

  “Yes, love?”

  “Don’t try to live up to this face—or else I shall lose you. There isn’t a woman alive who won’t be intrigued by it. They—they’ll all think—”

  “What will they think, little Nicole?”

  “They’ll wonder how it would be to bed with Satan,” Nicole whispered. “They’ll dream of terrible, unimaginable delights they could not even put in words, for there aren’t any words—Oh, Jeannot, Jeannot—you see? Look now at what that face of yours has already made me say!”

  It was time now, Jean saw, to relieve the tension.

  “If,” he mocked, “you don’t get me my supper, you’ll see what a devil I am!”

  “Yes, my lord,” she murmured. “My lord and master—and you are, you know—for always. . . .”

  There was good wine, and bread and cheese, and a huge roast, slices of which they toasted over the fire. An hour later, Jean had half forgotten his imprisonment, his suffering, all the things that had happened to him. He stretched out in his chair before the fire, filled with contentment.

  Then Nicole came up behind his chair and put her arms around his neck.

  “Come,” she whispered. “There is so little time, my Jean—so precious little time. . . .”

  The other room had a fire in it too, because Jean had made one there to dress and shave by. It had burned low, but there was light enough for him to see her by. Her body was like snow with the glow of sunset on it. But she ran away from him quickly, and dived among the icy bedclothes, and lay there shivering.

  “I’m freezing!” she whispered; “oh, Jeannot, Jeannot, hurry before I die of cold—

  “And of wanting you,” she murmured, when he took her in his arms. “Oh, Jean, my Jean, be gentle with me—for I’m afraid! Be the angel that you are, not like that devil-mask you wear now. For you aren’t a devil, are you, Jean? You aren’t, you aren’t, you ar—”

  First in the morning, before it was light, Jean Paul got up very quietly without awakening her, and made a fire in the fireplace. But the noise he made brought her upright in the little bed, then she lay back again, staring at him. He turned towards her with a smile, gathering the greatcoat he was wearing like a robe de chambre about his naked body.

  “It will be warm soon,” he said gently, “then we can get up.”

  “Jean,” she whispered, “come here.”

  He went over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She put up her bare arm and touched his face again.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice had something in it like—like awe, Jean decided. “Yes, yes—this is your face! Remember what I said last night—that every woman who looked at you would wonder . . .”

  “How it is to bed with Satan?” Jean mocked.

  “Yes. And now I know—God help me, I know!”

  Jean’s black eyes were troubled.

  “You think me evil, then!” he murmured.

  “No—no. I think you wild and terrible and wonderful beyond belief, and I am now truly afraid. . . .”

  “Don’t be, little Nicole,” Jean said tenderly. “I would never harm you.”

  “But you have harmed me, Jean! You—you’ve destroyed me, so that I am no more me, but a woman I don’t know, a creature I never dreamed existed. I took you in my arms and into my body and that should have been a simple thing. But it was not, for nothing with you is ever simple, or what anyone would expect it to be. . . . Oh, Jeannot, Jeannot, I am branded with your love! You are a part of me now, burned in with fire upon the very tissue of my soul, so that never again shall I be free of you.”

  “Hush,” Jean whispered, holding her, stroking her bright hair.

  “What will become of me now, Jeannot?” she sobbed. “What will happen when you have fled, and I am left to watch the night fall without you beside me in the dark? I—I can stand the days—but when it is night, I think I shall go mad—mad of wanting you, needing you, my body starving for you, my arms aching to hold you, Jeannot—so close, so close!—my eyes blind, not seeing anyone else, not wanting to— Oh, Jeannot, Jeannot—I shall die!”

  “I shall come back to you, Nicole,” Jean whispered, “though it be from hell itself!”

  He had no way of knowing, when he spoke, how much truth there was in his words.

  She lay there looking at him, and some of the grief went out of her eyes. It was warmer in the room now, for the fire had blazed up. Then Jean Paul caught the coverlet she was holding against her throat and drew it down until it lay about her feet.

  She made an effort to cover herself, but lay there, watching his face.

  “Am I so beautiful?” she whispered. “Tell me, Jeannot— am I?”

  “Yes,” he said; “oh, God, yes!”

  She stretched out her arms to him, like slender wands of snow in the firelight.

  “Come to me, my Jean,” she said.

  And thereby, she condemned him, for else they would have been up and away by the time the Due de Gramont and his armed retainers surrounded the lodge.

  Jean Paul had no arms with which to fight, and it would have been useless anyway, because by so doing he would only have endangered Nicole.

  The Due de Gramont had the decency to give them time to dress; then he took Nicole la Moyte back to his own Château. But the worst of it was, he sent Jean Paul Marin directly to Toulon in a locked coach, surrounded by armed guards, so that he had no chance to escape again.

  It was four full years before Jean Paul saw the light of day again unbroken by prison bars, or unshadowed by the high wall of a work camp. Four full years—in hell.

  5

  THE prisoners were strung out along the unfinished road-bed like ants in the sun. There were no clouds, no trees, no shade. The sky was yellow-white with sun, the blue washed out with sun-glare, and from the rocks the convicts were crushing with hammers a white dust rose shimmering into the air unstirred by any breeze.

  Prisoner Number Thirteen Thousand Two Hundred Eleven, called, by the other convicts and the guards alike, Nez Cassé, Broken Nose, lifted his heavy sledge, the muscles of his biceps coiling and knotting like great pythons, and brought it whistling downward. The rock exploded under the impact, pieces of it flying out in every direction. And Nez Cassé laughed aloud.

  “Damn it, Nez!” one of the others growled, “stop that crazy laughing! Fair sets a man’s teeth on edge, it does . . . What in the name of all the Saints do you find to laugh at, anyhow?”

  “Something I thought about,” Nez Cassé said quietly.

  He had remembered then, at that moment, how an old convict had spat on the ground at the sight of the thin provincial lawyer with the battered face the first day they had brought him into Toulon.

  “He,” the old villain rasped, “won’t last the year.”

  And he hadn’t. For Jean Paul Marin changed in that year into something else—something new, different. He no longer stooped; he had gained eight inches about his chest, and two about each arm; he could stand a blow from the fist of a powerful man in the pit of his stomach without giving a breath. He was bronzed all over from the sun, except the white lightning of the scar tissue that zigzagged down his face, and the red, livid letters, T.F., for Temps Forçat, or time prisoner, branded upon his forearm.

  He flexed his arms, feeling the play of the great ropes of
muscle under the satiny bronze of his skin. It was a thing he often did, because it pleased him.

  Proud of yourself, aren’t you? he mocked himself; it’s an accomplishment of some magnitude to have become a great animal like the rest.

  He saw the boys coming up the road, carrying the big kettles of food for the prisoners. Then the whistle blew and they all dropped picks and hammers, and shuffled forward awkwardly, with the curious, muscle-bound motions of men who are being slowly worked to death under a tropical sun.

  One of the boys passed out the filthy, forever unwashed wooden bowls, and the other ladled up the unspeakably vile mess that served the forçats as food.

  Jean Paul wiped the rock-dust and sweat from his face with one grimy hand. Then he began to eat very slowly, without actually tasting the abomination they had given him, his eyes squinting against the sun-glare. He could feel the heat against the tender stripes on his back where they had lashed him bloody after the last of his many attempts to escape. That had been nearly a year ago—but his back was still tender in the sun.

  It’s nearly time now, he mused. August, 1788—the people have had time enough to ponder this business of the Estates-General, and the listing of complaints. . . . Yes, yes—’tis time! Exit the man of action, and re-enter the philosopher! For certainly to fight a man with his own weapons is a species of folly that has cost me dearly. Not brawn—brains! Now to try a blade the like of which they have not in their scabbards. . . . These guards are but tools of the noblesse, but what happens when they become aware that they exist only to serve another’s pleasures?

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sergeant Lampe, one of their guards, approaching. He raised his head and grinned at the sergeant.