Rosalie was rocking to and fro, counting on her fingers. His emotion seemed to please her, for she gave a foolish smile.
“She has a little white neck, very smooth and soft,” she muttered.
A terrible sound broke from Dangeau’s ghastly lips; a sound that steadied for a moment the woman’s tottering mind. She looked up curiously, as if recalling something, smoothed the hair from her forehead, and touched the rigid hand which lay upon her shoulder.
“Tiens, Citizen,” she said in a different tone, “she is not dead yet”; and the immense relief gave Dangeau’s anger rein.
“Woman!” he said violently, “what has happened? Where is she? At once——”
Rosalie twitched away her shoulder, shrinking back against the wall. This blaze of anger kept her sane for the moment.
“She is in prison, at the Abbaye,” she said. Under the excitement her brain cleared, and she was thinking now, debating how much she should tell him.
“Since when?”
“A month—six weeks—what do I know?”
“How came she to be arrested?”
“How should I know, Citizen?”
“Did you betray her? You knew who she was. Take care and do not lie to me.”
“I lie, I—Citizen! But I was her best friend, and when that beast Hébert came hanging round——”
“Hébert?”
“She took his fancy, Heaven knows why, and you know her proud ways. Any other girl would have played with him a little, given a smile or two, and kept him off; but she, with her nose in the air, and her eyes looking past him, as if he was n’t fit for her to see,—why, she made him feel as if he were the mud under her feet, and what could any one expect? He got her clapped into the Abbaye, to repent at leisure.”
Dangeau was a man of clean lips, but now he called down damnation upon Hébert’s black soul with an earnestness that frightened Rosalie.
“What more do you know? Tell me at once!”
She turned uneasily from the look in his eyes.
“She will be tried to-day.”
“You are sure?”
“Thérèse told me, and she and Hébert are thick as thieves again.”
“What hour? Dieu! what hour? It is ten o’clock now.”
“Before noon, I think she said, but I can’t be sure of that.”
“You are lying?”
“No, no, Citizen—I do not know—indeed I do not.”
He saw that she was speaking the truth, and turned from her with a despairing gesture. As he stumbled out of the shop he knocked over a great basket of potatoes, and Rosalie, with a sort of groan of relief, went down on her knees and began to gather them up. As the excitement of the scene she had been through subsided her eyes took that dull glaze again. Her movements became slower, and she stared oddly at the brown potatoes as she handled them.
“One—two—three,” she counted in a monotonous voice, dropping them into the basket. At each little thud she started slightly, then went on counting.
“Four—five—six—seven—eight—” Suddenly she stared at them heavily. “There’s no blood,” she muttered, “no blood.”
Half an hour later Thérèse found her with a phlegmatic smile upon her face and idle hands folded over something that lay beneath her coarse apron.
“Come along then, Rosalie,” she called out impatiently. “Have you forgotten the trial?—we’ve not too much time.”
“Ah!” said Rosalie, nodding slowly; “ah, the trial.”
Thérèse tapped impatiently with her foot.
“Come then, for Heaven’s sake! or we shall not get places.”
“Places,” said Rosalie suddenly; “what for?”
“Ma foi, if you are not stupid to-day. The trial, I tell you, that Rochambeau girl’s trial—white-faced little fool. Ciel! if I could not play my cards better than that,” and she laughed.
Rosalie’s hands were hidden by her apron. One of them clutched something. The fingers lifted one by one, and in her mind she counted, “One—two—three—four—five”—and then back again—“One—two—three—four—five—” Thérèse was staring at her.
“What’s the matter with you to-day?” she said. “Are you coming or no? It will be amusing, Hébert says; but if you prefer to sit here and sulk, do so by all means. For me, I go.”
She turned to do so, but Rosalie was already getting out of her chair.
“Wait then, Thérèse,” she grumbled. “Is no one to have any amusement but you? There, give me your arm, come close. Now tell me what’s going to happen?”
“Oh, just the trial, but I thought you wanted to see it. For me, I always think it makes the execution more interesting if one has seen the trial also.”
“Dangeau is back,” said Rosalie irrelevantly.
Thérèse laughed loud.
“He has a fine welcome home,” she said. “Well, are you coming, for I’ve no mind to wait?”
“It is only the trial,” said Rosalie vaguely. “Just a trial—and what is that? I do not care for a trial, there is no blood.”
She laughed a little and rocked, cuddling what lay beneath her apron.
“Just a trial,” she muttered; “but whose trial did you say?”
Thérèse lost patience. She stamped on the floor.
“What, again? What the devil is the matter with you to-day? Are you drunk?”
Rosalie turned her big head and looked at her cousin. They were standing close together, and her left hand, with its strong, stumpy fingers, closed like a vice upon the girl’s arm.
“No, I’m not drunk, not drunk, Thérèse,” she said in a thick voice.
Thérèse tried to shake her off.
“Well, you sound like it, and behave like it, you old fool,” she said furiously. “Drunk or crazy, it’s all one. Let go of me, I shall be late.”
“Yes,” said Rosalie, nodding her head—“yes, you will be late, Thérèse.”
“Va, imbécile!” cried the girl in a passion.
As she spoke she hit the nodding face sharply, twitching violently to one side in the effort to free her arm.
The ponderous hand closed tighter, and Thérèse, turning again with a curse, saw that upon Rosalie’s heavily flushed face that stopped the words half-way, and changed them to a shriek.
“Oh, Mary Virgin!” she screamed, and saw the hidden right hand come swinging into sight, holding a long, sharp knife such as butchers use at their work. Her eyes were all black, dilated pupil, and she choked on the breath she tried to draw in order to scream again. Oh, the hand! the knife!
It flashed and fell, wrenched free and fell again, and Thérèse went down, horribly mute, her hands grasping in the air, and catching at the basket across which she fell.
She would scream no more now. The knife clattered to the floor from Rosalie’s suddenly opened hand, and, as if the sound were a signal, Thérèse gave one convulsive shudder, which passed with a gush of crimson.
Rosalie went down on her knees, and gathered a handful of the brown tubers from the piled basket. She had to push the corpse aside to get at them, and she did it without a glance.
Then she threw the potatoes back into the basket one by one. She wore a complacent smile. Her eyes were intent.
“Now, there is blood,” she said, nodding as if satisfied. “Now, there is blood.”
CHAPTER XVIII
A TRIAL AND A WEDDING
OF THE HOURS THAT PASSED after that death-like swoon of hers Mlle de Rochambeau never spoke. Never again could she open the door behind which lurked madness, and an agony such as women have had to bear, time and again, but of which no woman whom it has threatened can speak. Hébert had given his orders, and she was thrust into an empty cell, where she lay cowering, with hidden face, and lips that trembled too much to pray.
Hébert’s threat lay in her mind like a poison in the body. Soon it would kill—but not in time, not soon enough. She could not think, or reason, and hope was dead. Something else had come in its place, a thing un
formulated and dreadful, not to be thought of, unbelievable, and yet unbearably, irrevocably present.
Oh, the long, shuddering hours, and yet, by a twist of the tortured brain, how short—how brief—for now she saw them as barriers between her and hell, and each as it fell away left her a thing more utterly unhelped.
When they brought her out in the morning, and she stepped from the dark prison into the warm, sunny daylight, she raised her head and looked about her a little wonderingly.
Still a sun in the sky! Still summer shine and breath, and beautiful calm space of blue ethereal light above. A sort of stunned bewilderment fell upon her, and she sat very still and quiet all the way.
Inside the hall citizens crowded and jostled one another for a place; plump, respectable mothers of families, cheek by jowl with draggled wrecks of the slums, moneyed shopkeepers, tattered loafers, a wild-eyed Jacobin or two, and everywhere women, women, women. Women with their children, lifting a round-eyed starer high to see the white-faced aristocrat go past; women with their work, whose chattering tongues kept pace with the clattering needles; women fiercer and more cruel than men, to whom death and blood and anguish were become a stimulant more fatally potent than any alcohol.
There were men there too, gaping, yawning, telling horrible tales, men whose hands had dripped innocent blood in September. There was a reek of garlic, the air was abominably hot and close, and wherever citizens could get an elbow free one saw a mopping of greasy faces going forward.
As Mademoiselle de Rochambeau was brought in, a sort of growling murmur went round. The crowd was in a dangerous mood: on the verge of ennui, it wanted something fresh—a sauce piquante to its daily dish—and here was only another cursed aristocrat with nothing very remarkable about her.
She looked round, not curiously, but in some vague, helpless fashion, which might have struck pity from hearts less inured to suffering. On the raised stage to which they had brought her there were a couple of rough tables. At the nearest of the two sat a number of men, very dirty and evil-eyed—Fouquier Tinville’s carefully packed jury; and at the farther one, Herman, the great tow-haired Judge President, with his heavy air of being half asleep; and Tinville himself, the Public Prosecutor, low-browed, with retreating chin—Renard the Fox, as a contemporary squib has it, the perpetrator of which lost his head for his pains. Behind him lounged Hébert, hands in pockets, light eyes roving here and there. She saw him and turned her head away with the wince of a trapped animal, looking through a haze of misery to the sea of faces below.
There is a peculiar effluence from any large body of people. Their encouragement, or their hostility, radiates from them, and has an overwhelming influence upon the mind. When the crowd cheers how quickly enthusiasm spreads, until, like a rising tide, it covers its myriad human grains of sand! And a multitude in anger?—No one who has heard it can forget!
Imagine, then, one bruised, tormented human speck, girl in years, gently nurtured, set high in face of a packed assemblage, every upturned face in which looked at her with appraising lust, bloodthirsty cruelty, or inhuman curiosity. A wild panic unknown before swept in upon her soul. She had not thought it could feel again, but between Hébert’s glance, which struck her like a shameful blow, and all these eyes staring with hatred, her reason rocked, and she felt a scream rise shuddering from the very centre of her being.
Those watching saw both slender hands catch suddenly at the white throat, whilst for a minute the darkened eyes stared wildly round; then, with a supreme effort, she drew herself up, and stood quietly, and if the blood beat a mad tune on heart and brain, there was no outward sign, except a pallor more complete, and a tightening of the clasped, fallen hands that left the knuckles white.
It was thus, after months of absence, that Dangeau saw her again, and the rage and love and pity in his heart boiled up until it challenged his utmost self-control to keep his hands from Hébert’s throat.
Hébert smiled, but uneasily. This was what he had planned—wished for—and yet— Face to face with Dangeau again, he felt the old desire to slink past, and get out of the range of the white, hot anger in the eyes that for a moment seemed to scorch his face.
Dangeau had come in quietly enough, and stood first at the edge of the crowd, by the steps which led to the raised platform on which accused and judges were placed. He had shot his bolt, had made a vain effort to see Danton, and was now come here to do he knew not what.
Mademoiselle looking straight before her, with eyes that now saw nothing, was not aware of his presence, as in a strained, far-away voice she answered the questions Fouquier Tinville put to her.
“Your name?”
“Aline Marie de Rochambeau.”
“You are a cousin of the late ci-devant and conspirator Montargis?”
“Yes.”
A sort of howl went up from the back of the room, where a knot of filthy men stood gesticulating.
“And you were betrothed to that other traitor Sélincourt?”
“Yes.”
The answers dropped almost indifferently from the scarcely parted lips, but she shrank and swayed a little, as a second shout followed her reply, and she caught curses, cries for her death, and a woman’s scream of, “Down with Sélincourt’s mistress! Give her to us! Throw her down!”
Tinville waved for silence and gradually the noise lessened, the audience settling down with the reflection that perhaps it would be a pity to cut the play short in its first act.
“You have conspired against the Republic?”
“No.”
“But I say yes,” said Tinville loudly. “Citizen Hébert discovered you under an assumed name. Why did you take a name that was not your own if you had no intention of plotting? Are honest citizens ashamed of their names?”
Dangeau swung himself on to the platform and came forward.
“Citizen President,” he said quietly. “I claim to represent the accused, who has, I see, no counsel.”
Herman looked up stupidly, a vague smile on his broad, blond face.
“We have done away with counsel for the defence,” he observed, with a large, explanatory wave of the hand. “It took too much time. The Revolutionary Tribunal now has increased powers, and requires only to hear and to be convinced of the prisoners’ crimes. We have simplified the forms since you went south, Citizen.”
Fouquier Tinville glanced at him with venomous intention. “And the Citizen delays us,” he said politely.
Aline had let one only sign of feeling escape her,—a soft, quick gasp as Dangeau came within the contracting circle of her consciousness,—but the sound reached him and came sweetly to his ears.
He turned again to Herman.
“But you still hear witnesses, or whence the conviction?” he said in a carefully controlled voice.
“It is Dangeau, our Dangeau!” shouted a woman near the front. “Let him speak if he wants to: what does he know of the girl?”
He recognised little Louison, hanging to her big husband’s arm, and sent her a smiling nod of thanks.
“Witnesses, by all means,” shrugged Tinville, to whom Hébert had been whispering. “Only be quick, Citizen, and remember it is a serious thing to try to justify a conspirator.” He turned and whispered back, “He’ll talk his head off if we give him the chance—devil speed him!” then leaned across the table and inquired:
“What do you know of the accused?”
“I know her motive for changing her name.”
“Oh, you know her motive—eh?”
Dangeau raised his voice.
“A patriotic one. She came to Paris, she witnessed the corruption and vice of aristocrats, and she determined to come out from among them and throw in her lot with the people.”
Mademoiselle turned slowly and faced him. Now if she spoke, if she demurred, if she even looked a contradiction of his words, they were both lost—both.
His eyes implored, commanded her, but her lips were already opening, and he could see denial shaping there, denial which wo
uld be a warrant of death, when of a sudden she met Hébert’s dull, anxious gaze, and, shuddering, closed her lips, and looked down again at the uneven, dusty floor. Dangeau let out his breath with a gasp of relief, and spoke once more.
“She called herself Marie Roche because her former name was hateful to her. She worked hard, and went hungry. I call on Louison Michel to corroborate my words.”
Hébert raised a careless hand, and instantly there was a clamour of voices from the back. He congratulated himself in having had the forethought to install a claque, as they listened to the cries of, “Death to the aristocrat! Down with the conspirator! Death! Death!”
Dangeau turned from the bar to the people.
“Citizens,” he cried, “I turn to you for justice. What did they say in the bad old days?—‘The King’s voice is God’s voice,’ and I say it still.” The clamour rose again, but his voice dominated it.
“I say it still, for, though the King is dead, a new king lives whose reign will never end,—the Sovereign People,—and at their bar I know there will be equal justice shown, and no consideration of persons. Why did Capet fall? Why did I vote for his death? Because of oppression and injustice. Because there was no protection for the weak—no hearing for the poor. But shall not the People do justice? Citizens, I appeal to you—I am confident in your integrity.”
A confused uproar followed, some shouting, “Hear him!” and others still at their old parrot-cry of, “Death! Death!”
Above it all rang Louison’s shrill cry:
“A speech, a speech! Let Dangeau speak!” and by degrees it was taken up by others.
“The girl is innocent. Will you, just Citizens, punish her for a name which she has discarded, for parents who are dead, and relations from whom she shrank in horror? I vouch for her, I tell you—I, Jacques Dangeau. Does any one accuse me? Does any one cast a slur upon my patriotism? I tell you I would cut off my right hand if it offended those principles which I hold dearer than my life; and saying that, I say again, I vouch for her.”
“All very fine that,” called a man’s voice, “but what right have you to speak for her, Citizen? Has n’t the girl a tongue of her own?”
A Marriage Under the Terror Page 18
