The Devil’s Laughter
Page 18
“Lend me your comb, darling,” Lucienne drawled. “I think I have enough pins left to keep it up while I bathe. . . .”
Jean tested the water while she combed her hair. It was almost hot enough. He waited until it was little short of scalding and poured it in, knowing that the iron of the tub would cool it enough.
“Ready,” he called, and stepped aside to let her pass. With a grateful sigh she sank into the tub, made so that the bather had to assume a sitting position, with his feet and legs far deeper than his trunk. Jean brought her a cloth and soap, then went back to his wine.
“Jeannot,” she called,”come wash my back for me. I can’t reach. But please be careful—I am so sore. . . .”
“May I ask,” Jean asked mockingly, “who was your personal valet before I came to Paris?”
“Oh, I’ve had many,” Lucienne said airily. “You really couldn’t expect me to remember them all, could you? Now be a dear and dry me. You really are quite gentle for all your strength.”
When she was dry, she stretched up her arms and yawned. “I’m so sleepy,” she said; “come put the salves on my back—so that I can sleep. I hope you’re not an early riser. I mean to sleep until noon.”
Jean sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed the salve into her bruises.
“And where,” he asked, “am I expected to sleep?”
“Beside me, of course. That shouldn’t bother you. You must be very tired after your day.”
“And if I tell you I am not tired?”
She smiled at him. Her smile, Jean thought, is absolutely the wickedest thing in the world.
“You may lie awake and listen to the music of my gentle breathing. I don’t snore, I’ve been told. Some other time I may be more wakeful. But tonight, darling Jeannot, I’m as sore as a boil—besides, you really haven’t been very amusing today, now have you?”
And without another word, she burrowed deeper into the pillows and closed her eyes.
Jean sat there looking at her.
She was always too much for me, he thought bitterly. She defeats me utterly and without effort. She knows just how, and she does it with so much éclat. What superb technique! She has walled me off now behind the mountain of my own pride. She knows I’d never touch her unless she came to me willingly. Oh damn your eyes, Lucienne—I——
The knocking on the door brought him upright. He opened it, and Fleurette stood there, smiling at him.
“May I come in, Jean?” she said. “Oh, I know it’s late, far after midnight, really; but I’ll only stay a minute. . . . I brought you something—a letter—I was here earlier, and the facteur gave it to me.”
“Why were you here?” Jean asked, more to gain time than for any other reason.
“I—I wanted to apologise for the things I said today. But no matter. It can wait. I would have waited until tomorrow, anyway; but I thought the letter might be important. . . .”
Jean heard the creak of the bed as Lucienne stirred. “Darling,” she drawled, “have you forgotten I am here? Get rid of that Poule and come to bed. . . .”
Fleurette stiffened. Jean saw death coming into her sightless eyes.
“Oh!” she breathed; then: “Take your letter, Jean!” Jean took it and stood there in dumb misery, listening to the clatter of her slippers upon the stairs. She went down very fast and with complete recklessness.
Behind him, Lucjenne was laughing softly.
“You witch!” Jean swore.
“Sorry,” she laughed; “but I do find you interesting, Jeannot. And who knows how great and famous you might become? Better to cut off the competition at the beginning, n’est-ce pas?”
“You are absolutely impossible!” Jean said. Then he tore open the letter. It came from Bertrand, and had been written from Austria Jean read it very quickly, his face growing darker, until the scar made a white blaze against his skin. He folded it Slowly and with great care and put it into the pocket of his frockcoat. Then he bent down and picked up his pistols from the table.
“You’re going out,” Lucienne said, “now?”
Jean didn’t answer her. He slipped on the coat. In the interval of silence a musket-shot sounded, heavy and close at hand. Somewhere farther off, a woman screamed.
Yes,” Jean said very quietly, “I’m going out.”
Lucienne stared at him, her eyes questioning. Then, very slowly, she smiled.
“I,” she murmured, “don’t think I’m sleepy any more— Jeannot. . . .”
Jean looked at her, and what she saw in his eyes startled her. He walked on to the door. In the doorway he turned. “The next time you see Gervais la Moyte,” he said, “you might tell him that—his sister is—dead.”
Then he went down the stairs and out into the flame-shot, terror-ridden night.
8
NEVER, in all the rest of his life, was Jean Paul Marin able to determine precisely where he went and what he did in those twelve hours between midnight, July 12, and noon, July 13, 1789. It appeared to him afterwards, listening to Pierre du Pain’s account of the things that happened in Paris during those hours, that he must have borne a charmed life. For he had wandered in a daze through streets echoing with musket-fire and blazing from one end to the other, without getting so much as a scratch.
“Life is a gamble,” he said wryly to Pierre; “and every gambler knows you never win when you need the money.”
“What the devil do you mean by that?” Pierre said. “A musket-ball through the head would be a kindness,” Jean whispered, “for which I’d thank the assassin who sped it home.”
Pierre stared at him.
“Now what ails you?” he growled.
“Nicole—” Jean croaked, and passed Bertrand’s letter to him.
Pierre read it with frowning concentration. Then he straightened up, his face a satyr’s mask once more.
“And it is for this you court death?” he mocked. “Jean, Jean, how big a fool can a man be?”
“Big enough, no doubt,” Jean said. “But by God’s love don’t tell me there are other women in France as fair, or any other such nonsense. There was only one Nicole
“I don’t doubt it. The point I’m trying to make is a thing that should have been instantly apparent to your trained legal mind. According to the evidence in your brother’s letter, there is not one iota of proof that the Comtesse de Saint Gravert is dead. Where are your witnesses? Upon what does your brother base his belief—which he plainly states is belief only—that, to the best of his knowledge, she has never reached Austria? What kind of evidence is that?”
“Read further,” Jean whispered; “read the words of her own maître d’hôtel. . . .”
“I saw that. This man escaped the mob, fled to Villa Marin, because he knew of your friendship with the Lady Nicole, and believed that your influence among the peasants would make your house a safe refuge. . . .”
“He was wrong,” Jean said dryly. “They burned it too.”
“I know. But, why, by all the lies in the Breviary of Saints, did he wait until after the Lady Simone had taken him along with them as a servant—all of yours having fled, it appears—to produce his curious evidence?”
“I don’t know,” Jean said.
“He found in the woods the bloodstained clothing of the children, and a part of the house sacque, also bloodstained, that the Lady Nicole was wearing. What manner of man was he to preserve his bloody trophies? To whom did he intend to show them?”
“To Gervais la Moyte, perhaps. Pierre, for the love of heaven—can’t you see? This senile fool must have believed that all the nobles of the Côte had fled abroad, and hoped to gain some credit with the Comte with his gruesome relics and the tale of his own devotion there being none to gainsay him. . . .
“There is,” Jean pointed out, “a darker interpretation which appears to have escaped you, Pierre. Augustin, my lady’s coachman, was in league with the mobs. Why not, then, others among her servants—perhaps Robert, the old maître d’hôtel, himself?”
“That,” Jean said, “is what I have been trying to believe.” But there was no hope at all in his voice.
They were passing by this time the hostel of the Lazarists—or rather, what was left of that refuge. The belongings of the monks—chairs tables, pictures, religious objects, the clothes-presses, curtains dishes, drapes—were piled up in the street in a broken mound so big that the street was half choked by it. The mob was busily engaged in hauling off the grain that the Lazarists by law had been entitled to keep, since the chief function of that order was the care and feeding of the indigent sick.
“Fifty-one loads since this morning!” a bearded villain told Jean and Pierre triumphantly; “come, Citizens! Have a drink of the shaven ones’ good wine—there is plenty more where this came from!”
Jean and Pierre drank. They were but two against fifty; and they had long since learned when discretion must triumph over valour.
The smell of wine was everywhere. It ran down the gutters in a purple flood. Ragged, filthy men lay on their bellies, lapping it up like dogs.
Jean stared at these men. He was sure he had never seen their like in Paris by daylight. Their rags, visibly crawling with vermin, barely hid their nakedness. And their stench, even in that open street, was well-nigh overpowering. Most of them were bearded, many were hideously scarred, or wanting an eye or an ear.
“They look,” he whispered to Pierre, “like fiends from hell.”
“They are,” Pierre said grimly.
While they waited for the wagon-loads of grain to work their way past the debris piled up in the street, a great outcry burst from the cave or cellar of the hostel. They turned towards the sound. A horde of the sewer rats of Paris, as bearded and filthy as the ones Jean and Pierre had seen in the street, came out of the hostel, bearing on their shoulders sodden, shapeless burdens that had been men and women like themselves. The bodies were all stained deep purple, and their rags dripped wine.
“Drowned!” one of their pall-bearers howled; “some fool stove in the casks in the cellar, and they drowned in the wine! Ma foi, what a happy way to die!”
One of the women they carried, Jean saw, had been far gone with child.
“Dear God!” he whispered to Pierre, “let’s get out of here!” At the corner of the next street an ape-like brute was standing by a pile of muskets, sabres, and pistols.
“Come, Citoyens!” he was bawling; “arms! The best—taken this morning from the Garde Meuble by patriots for the defence of our liberties! Come—buy! Muskets—three livres apiece! Pistols_twelve sous! Sabres—likewise! Powder and ball—I leave to the generosity of you good Citizens!”
“Got any money?” Pierre said.
“Yes,” Jean told him, “why?”
“I left my pistols with Marianne this morning when I came to look for you. She can use them, too; I taught her how. But a man’s a fool to wander through Paris unarmed today. I’d like a brace of pistols and a musket, too—it’ll carry a lot further, and discourage these madmen quicker.”
“Here,” Jean said, and gave him the money.
“You’d better buy a musket, too. That’s why I was looking for you. Bailly has called upon all good citizens to enrol in the militia and put down disorder; Lafayette is heading it.”
“Very well,” Jean said, “buy me some powder and pistol-shot. And a sabre. I think that whatever fighting we’ll see will be at close quarters. I’d rather have a blade in my hands.”
“Aristocrat!” Pierre mocked; but he bought the arms all the same.
Half an hour later they were marching in a company of sober bourgeois, grim, determined men, bent upon their duty. By nightfall the forty-eight thousand men that Bailly had called to arms had put down the rioting and pillage. Jean had acted as legal adviser to his company. As such, he sent three brigands, whose only interest in the tumult was the wonderful opportunities for thievery it presented, to impromptu gallows on the lamp-posts; but he had also saved by acquittal the lives of five sturdy citizens who had taken part in the rioting under the belief they had been fighting for the Third Estate.
They could not, of course, halt the revolt. But they could and did keep it largely political, instead of allowing it to degenerate into wholesale anarchy and brigandage, as it was rapidly threatening to do.
But by midnight of that terrible July thirteenth the entire company was half dead of fatigue. The things they had been called upon to do would have taxed the strength of giants and demi-gods. They were quartered by then in the Hôtel de Vile, having lived through that hour when LeGrand, their captain and one of the Paris electors, had sent for three barrels of gunpowder and stood beside them with a lighted taper, threatening to blow the building, his company, and himself to kingdom come for the privilege of taking a sizeable portion of the mob along with them, if those howling madmen did not cease from attacking.
Things like that, Jean thought bitterly, age a man twenty years in as many minutes. . . . By the eyes of God, I’ve had enough!
But his relief, when it came, brought him no rest. He heard LeGrand calling his name, and got wearily to his feet.
Here, he croaked.
“There’s a lad here, Marin,” the Captain said, “with a note for you. Says it’s important.”
Jean stumbled forward. He recognised the boy at once. He was one of the printer’s devils in the shop, which meant that Marianne had sent him. Jean glanced towards Pierre, half asleep with back leaning against one of the barrels of gunpowder. But, he reasoned, if there were anything wrong, she’d have addressed it to Pierre—not to me.
“This came for you this evening,” the boy said. “Madame du Pain said I was to bring it to you at once, but I couldn’t find you, sir, before now.”
“You’ve done well,” Jean said, and gave him a five-franc note.
The note was only one line. It read:
“They’ve got me in L’Abbaye; for God’s sake come get me out!” It was signed, “Lucienne.”
Jean looked at LeGrand.
“A friend of mine,” he said, “has been arrested by mistake. She’s of the people—of peasant stock on both sides, but now she talks and dresses like a lady.”
“Where is she?” LeGrand demanded.
“L’Abbaye,” Jean told him.
“She’ll be safe enough there. But you’ve done enough for one day. You look like hell, Marin.”
“I know,” Jean smiled.
“You’re relieved from duty until tomorrow. What you do after you leave here is your affair. But I advise you to leave the wench in jail. There are any number of soft bedfellows in Paris; no point in arousing the ire of the people trying to befriend anyone who has fallen out of favour.”
Jean grinned at him, a touch of his old diablerie showing in his crooked smile.
“I thank you for your advice, M’sieur le Capitaine,” he said.
“But you don’t intend to follow it,” LeGrand said.
“No,” Jean laughed, “I don’t. Perhaps one day soon you’ll see why.”
“Perhaps,” LeGrand sighed, staring out into a night sky shot through with flame and smoke, “if any of us lives that long.”
Once more, at that grim prison called l’Abbaye, Jean’s soiled and dusty uniform of a deputy of the National Assembly served him well. He was admitted at once to see the prisoner.
Lucienne came forward to greet him. Her tawny hair hung loose about her shoulders. Her face was exceedingly dirty. A great bruise ran from her cheek-bone to the point of her chin on the left side of her face. She was wearing one of Jean’s suits. She was so tall that it didn’t fit her badly in length, though it much too big for her in all the o
ther dimensions. Don’t just stand there!” she snapped at him; “get me out of here!”
Jean stared at her. Then very softly he started to laugh.
She put her hands on the bars and shook them furiously.
“Let me out, damn you!” she screamed.
Jean threw back his head and roared.
The Prefect of the prison stared at them both in wonder.
“Perhaps,” he ventured, “there has been some mistake, Citizen Marin.”
“Oh no!” Jean laughed; “no mistake at all. This woman is a dangerous enemy of the people. I think you should put her in irons as well.”
Lucienne was speechless with rage.
The Prefect looked at Jean. He had a suspicion that he was being put upon, but he didn’t know quite how.
“But, M. Marin—” he began.
“When I do get out,” Lucienne spat, “I’m going to scratch out both your eyes, Jean!”
“Jean is your first name, M’sieur?” the Prefect said.
“It is,” Jean chuckled. “And the lady is my wife. She, unfortunately, M. le Prefet, is one of your modern women—given to marked disrespect for husbandly authority.”
“I begin to see,” the Prefect smiled.
“I told her to stay at home—that the streets were dangerous. She disobeyed my commands not once, but twice. So I took away her clothes. The result you see. I think you will even find my name sewed into the lining of that frock-coat.”
“Oh, your word is enough for me, Citizen!” the Prefect laughed. “We only had your wife here under protective custody, anyway. It seemed that the mob found her masculine dress highly suspicious, and were about to tear her to pieces as a disguised noblewoman. But I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with her after this—eh, Madame? Surely after all your experiences . . .”
“He’ll have trouble enough, thank you!” Lucienne said. “Pretending to be out guarding the city while actually he’s consorting with the wenches at the Palais Royal—a fine husband, I tell you, M. le Prefet! Thought I wouldn’t find you out, eh, Jeannot? Just wait until I get you home!”