CHAPTER XXVII
BETRAYAL
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF APRIL the wind-swept, ice-tormented Pyrenees had been exchanged for the Spanish lowlands, vexed by the drought and heat of those spring days. If the army had suffered from frostbite and pneumonia before, it groaned now under a plague of dysentery, but it was still, and increasingly, victorious. An approving Convention sent congratulatory messages to Dugommier, who enjoyed the distinction—somewhat unusual for a general in those days—of having been neither superseded nor recalled to suffer an insulting trial and an ignoble death.
France had a short way with her public servants just then. Was an army in retreat? To Paris with the traitor who commanded it. Was an advantage insufficiently followed up? To the guillotine with the officer responsible. Dumouriez saved his head by going to Austria with young Égalité at his heels, but many and many a general who had led the troops of France looked out of the little window, and was flung into the common trench, to be dust in dust with nobles, great ladies, common murderers, and the poor Queen herself. Closer and closer shaved the national razor, heavier and heavier fell the pall upon blood-soaked Paris. Marat, long since assassinated, and canonised as first Saint of the New Calendar, with rites of an impiety quite indescribable, would, had he lived, have seen his prophecy fulfilled. Paris had drunk and was athirst again, and always with that drunkard’s craving which cannot be allayed—no, not by all the floods of the infernal lake. Men were no longer men, but victims of a horrible dementia. Listen to Hébert demanding the Queen’s blood.
“Do you think that any of us will be able to save ourselves?” he cries. “I tell you we are all damned already, but if my blood must flow, it shall not flow alone. I tell you that if we pass, our passing shall devastate France, and leave her ruined and bloody, a spectacle for the nations!” And this at the beginning of the Terror!
A curious thought comes to one. Are these words, instinct with pure, fate-driven tragedy, the fruit of Hébert’s mind—Hébert gross with Paris slime, sensual, self-seeking, flushed with evil living? or is he, too, unwillingly amongst the prophets, mouthpiece only of an immutable law, which, outraged by him and his like, pronounces thus an irrevocable doom?
Well might Danton write—“This is chaos, and the worlds are a-shaping. One cannot see one’s way for the red vapour. I am sick of it—sick. There is nothing but blood, blood, blood. Camille says that the infernal gods are athirst. If they are not glutted soon there will be no blood left to flow. They may have mine before long. Maximilian eyes my head as if it irked him to see it higher than his own. If it were off he would seem the taller. I am going home to Arles—with my wife. The spring is beautiful there, and the Aube runs clean from blood. It were better to fish its waters than to meddle with the governing of men.”
Dangeau sighed heavily as he destroyed the letter. Surely the strong hand would be able to steer the ship to calmer waters, and yet there was a deep sense of approaching fatality upon him.
His fellow-Commissioner was of Robespierre’s party,—a tall man, wonderfully thin, with grizzled hair, and a nose where the bony ridge showed yellow under the tight skin. He had a cold, suspicious eye, light grey, with a green under-tinge, and was, as Dangeau knew beyond a doubt, a spy both on himself and on Dugommier. There came an April day full of heat, and sullen with brooding thunder. Dangeau in his tent, writing his report, found the pen heavy in his hand, and for once was glad of the interruption, when Vibert’s shadow fell across the entrance, and his long form bent to enter at the low door.
“Ah, come in,” he said, pushing his inkstand away; and Vibert, who had not waited for the invitation, sat down and looked at him curiously for a moment. Then he said:
“A courier from Paris came in an hour ago.”
Dangeau stretched out his hand, but the other held his papers close.
“There is news,—weighty news,” he continued; and Dangeau felt his courage leap to meet an impending blow.
“What news?” he asked, quite quietly, hand still held out.
“You are Danton’s friend?”
“As you very well know, Citizen.”
Vibert flung all his papers on the table.
“You’ll be less ready to claim his friendship in the future, I take it,” he said, with a sudden twang of steel in his voice. Dangeau turned frightfully pale, but the hand that reached for the letters was controlled.
“Your meaning, Citizen?”
Vibert’s strident laugh rang out.
“Danton was—somebody, and your friend. Danton is—a name and nothing more. Once the knife has fallen there is not a penny to choose between him and any other carrion. A good riddance to France, and all good patriots will say ‘Amen’ to that.”
“Patriots!” muttered Dangeau, and then fell to reading the papers with bent head and eyes resolutely calm. When he looked up no one would have guessed that he was moved, and the sneering look which dwelt upon his face glanced off again. He met Vibert’s eyes full, his own steady with a cold composure, and after a moment or two the thin man shuffled with his feet, and spat noisily.
“Well,” he said, “Robespierre for my money; but, of course, Danton was backing you, and you stand to lose by his fall.”
“Ah,” said Dangeau softly, “you think so?”
He looked to the open door of the tent as he spoke. The flap was rolled high to let in the air, and showed a slope, planted with vines in stiff rows, and, above, a space of sky. This seemed to consist of one low, bulging cloud, dark with suppressed thunder, and in the heavy bosom of it a pulse of lightning throbbed continually. With each throb the play of light grew more vivid, whilst out of the distance came a low, answering boom, the far-off heart-beat of the storm. Dangeau’s eyes rested on the prospect with a strange, sardonic expression. Danton was dead, and dead with him all hopes that he might lead a France, purged terribly, and regenerate by fire and blood, to her place as the first, because the freest, of nations. Danton was dead, and Paris adrift, unrestrained, upon a sea of blood. Danton was dead, and the last, lingering, constructive purpose had departed from a confederacy given over to a mere drunken orgy of destruction—slaves to an ignoble passion for self-preservation. To Dangeau’s thought death became suddenly a thing honourable and to be desired. From the public services of those days it was the only resignation, and he saw it now before him, inevitable, more dignified than life beneath a squalid yoke. All the ideals withered, all the idols shattered, youth worn through, patriotism chilled, disenchantment, disintegration, decay,—these he saw in sombre retrospect, and nausea, long repressed, broke upon him like a flood.
A flash brighter than any before shot in a vicious fork across the blackening sky, and the thunder followed it close, with a crash that startled Vibert to his feet.
Dangeau sat motionless, but when the reverberations had died away, he leaned across the table, still with that slight smile, and said:
“And what do you say of me in your report, Vibert?”
Still dazed with the noise, the man stared nervously.
“My report, Citizen?”
“Your report, Vibert.”
“My report to the Convention?”
Dangeau laughed, with the air of a man who is enjoying himself. After the dissimulation, the hateful necessity for repression and evasion, frankness was a luxury.
“Oh, no, my good Vibert, not your report to the Convention. It is your report to Robespierre that I mean. I have a curiosity to know how you mean to put the thing. ‘Emotion at hearing of Danton’s death,’ is that your line, eh?”
“Citizen——”
“What, protestations? Really, Vibert, you underrate my intelligence. Shall I tell you what you said about me last time?”
Vibert shifted his eyes to the door, and seemed to measure his distance from it.
“What I said last time, Citizen?” he stammered. Once out of the tent he knew he could break Dangeau easily enough, but at present, alone with a man who he was aware must be desperate, he felt a creeping
in his bones, and a strong desire to be elsewhere.
Dangeau’s lip lifted.
“Be reassured, my friend. I am not a spy, and I really have no idea what it was that you said, though now that you have been so obligingly transparent I think I might hazard a guess. It would be a pity if this week’s report were to contain nothing fresh. Robespierre might even be bored—in the intervals of killing his betters.”
Vibert’s lips closed with a snap. Here was recklessness, here was matter enough to condemn a man who stood firmer than Dangeau.
Dangeau leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.
“You agree with me that that would be a pity? Very well then, you may get out your notebook and write the truth for once. Tell the incorruptible Maximilian that he is making the world too unpleasant a place for any self-respecting Frenchman to care about remaining in it, and, if that is not enough, you can inform him that Danton’s blood will yet call loud enough to bid him down to hell.”
There was no emotion at all in his voice. He spoke drily, as one stating facts too obvious to require any stress of tone, or emphasis.
Vibert was puzzled, but his nerves were recovering, and he wrote defiantly, looking up with a half-start at every other word as if he expected to see Dangeau’s arm above him, poised to strike.
Dangeau shrugged his shoulders.
“You needn’t be afraid,” he said, with hard contempt. “You are too obviously suited to the present débâcle for me to wish to remove you from it. No doubt your time will come, but I have no desire to play Sanson’s part.”
Vibert winced. Perhaps he saw the red-edged axe of the Revolution poised above him. When, four months later, he was indeed waiting for it to fall, they say he cursed Dangeau very heartily.
The lightning stabbed with a blinding flame, the thunder crashed scarce a heart-beat behind, and with that the rain began. It fell in great gouts and splashes, with here and there a big hailstone, and for a minute or two the air seemed full of water, pierced now by a sudden flare of blue, and shattered again by the roar that followed. Then, as it had come, so it went, and in a moment the whirl of the wind swept the sky clear again.
Vibert pulled himself together. His long limbs had stiffened into a curious rigidity whilst the storm was at its height, but now they came out of it with a jerk. He thrust his notebook into the pocket which bulged against his thin form, and under his drooping lids he sent a queer, inquisitive glance at his companion. Dangeau was leaning back in his chair, one arm thrown carelessly over the back of it, his attitude one of acquiescence, his expression that of a man released from some distasteful task. Vibert had seen many a man under sentence of death, but this phase piqued him, and he turned in the doorway.
“Come then, Dangeau,” he said, with a would-be familiar air, “what made you do it? Between colleagues now? I may tell you, you had fairly puzzled me. When you read those papers, I could have sworn you did not care a jot, that it was all one to you who was at the top of the tree so you kept your own particular branch; and then, just as I was thinking you had bested me, and betrayed nothing, out you come with your ‘To hell with Robespierre.’ What the devil took you?”
Dangeau looked at him with a strange gleam in his eyes. The impulse to speak, to confide, attacks us at curious moments; years may pass, a man may be set in all circumstances that invite betrayal, he may be closeted with some surgeon skilled in the soul’s hurts, and the impulse may not wake,—and then, quite suddenly, at an untoward time, and to a listener the most unlikely, his soul breaks bounds and displays its secret springs.
Such an hour was upon Dangeau now, and he experienced its intoxication to the full.
“My reason?” he said slowly. “My good Vibert, is one a creature of reason? For me, I doubt it—I doubt it. Look at our reasonable town of Paris, our reasonable Maximilian, our reasonable guillotine. Heavens! how the infernal powers must laugh at us and our reason.”
Then of a sudden the sneer dropped out of his tone, and a ring almost forgotten came to it, and brought each word distinctly to Vibert’s ear, though the voice itself fell lower and lower, as he spoke less and less to the man in the tent-door and more and more to his own crystallising thoughts.
“My reason? Impulse,—just the sheer animal desire to strike at what hurts. What was reason not to do for us? and in the end we come back to impulse again. A vicious circle everywhere. The wheel turns, and we rise, fancying the stars are within our grasp. The wheel turns on, and we fall,—lose the stars and have our wage—a handful of bloody dust. Louis was a tyrant, and he fell. I had a hand in that, and said, ‘Tyranny is dead.’ Dead? Just Heaven! and in Paris to-day every man is a tyrant who is not a victim. Tyranny has the Hydra’s gift of multiplying in death. Better one tyrant than a hundred. Perhaps Robespierre thinks that, but God knows it is better a people should be oppressed than that they should become oppressors.” Here his head came up with a jerk, and his manner changed abruptly. “And then,” he continued, with a little bow, “and then, you see, I am so intolerably bored with your society, my good Vibert.”
Vibert scowled, cursed, and went out. Half an hour afterwards he thought of several things he might have said, and felt an additional rancour against Dangeau because they had not come to him at the time. A mean creature, Vibert, and not quick, but very apt for dirty work, and therefore worth his price to the Incorruptible Robespierre.
Dangeau, left alone, fell to thinking. His strange elation was still upon him, and he felt an unwonted lightness of spirit. He began to consider whether he should wait to be arrested, or end now in the Roman way. Suicide was much in vogue at the time, and was gilded with a strong halo of heroics. The doctrine of a purpose in the individual existence being rejected, the Stoic argument that life was a thing to be laid down at will seemed reasonable enough. It appealed to the dramatic sense, a thing very inherent in man, and the records of the times set down almost as many suicides as executions. Dangeau had often enough maintained man’s right to relinquish that which he had not asked to receive, but at this crisis in his life there came up in him old teachings, those which are imperishable, because they have their roots in an imperishable affection. His mother, whom he adored, had lived and died a devout Catholic, and there came back to him now a strange, faint sense of the dignity and purpose of the soul, of life as a trial, life as a trust. It seemed suddenly nobler to endure than to relinquish. An image of the deserter flitted through his brain, to be followed by another of the child that pettishly casts away a broken toy, and from that his mind went back, back through the years. For a moment his mother’s eyes looked quite clearly into his, and he heard her voice say, “Jacques, you do not listen.”
Ah, those tricks of the brain! How at a touch, a turn of the head, a breath, a scent, the past rises quick, and the brain, phonograph and photograph in one, shows us our dead again, and brings their voices to our ears. Dangeau saw the chimney corner, and a crooked log on the fire. The resin in it boiled up, and ran down all ablaze. He watched it with wondering, childish eyes, and heard the gentle voice at his ears say, “Jacques, you do not listen.”
It was there and gone between one breath and the next, but it took with it the dust of years, and left the old love very fresh and tender. Ah—the dear woman, the dear mother. “Que Dieu te bénisse,” he said under his breath.
The current of thought veered to Aline, and at that life woke in him, the desire to live, the desire of her, the desire to love. Then on a tide of bitterness, “She will be free.” Quickly came the answer, “Free and defenceless.”
He sank his head in his hands, and, for the first time for months, deliberately evoked her image.
It seemed as if Fate were concerning herself with Dangeau’s affairs, for she sent a bullet Vibert’s way next morning. It ripped his scalp, and sent him bleeding and delirious to a sick-bed from which he did not rise for several weeks. It was, therefore, not until late in June that Robespierre stretched out his long arm, and haled Dangeau from his post in Spain to Paris and
the prison of La Force.
Meanwhile there was trouble at Rancy-les-Bois. Mr. and Mrs. Desmond, after a series of most adventurous adventures, had arrived at Bâle, and there, with characteristic imprudence, proceeded to narrate to a much interested circle of friends and relatives the full and particular details of their escape. Rancy was mentioned, Mlle Ange described and praised, Aline’s story brought in, Madelon’s part in the drama given its full value. Such imprudence may seem inconceivable, but it had more than one parallel.
In this instance trouble was not long in breeding. Three years previously Joseph Pichon of Bâle had gone Paris-wards to seek his fortune. Circumstances had sent him as apprentice to M. Bompard, the watchmaker of Rancy’s market-town. Here he stayed two years, years which were enlivened by tender passages between him and Marie, old Bompard’s only child. At the end of two years M. Pichon senior died, having lost his elder son about six months before. Joseph, therefore, came in for his father’s business, and immediately made proposals for the hand of Mlle Marie. Bompard liked the young man, Marie declared she loved him; but the times were ticklish. It was not the moment for giving one’s heiress to a foreigner. Such an action might be unfavourably construed, deemed unpatriotic; so Joseph departed unbetrothed, but with as much hope as it is good for a young man to nourish. His views were Republican, his sentiments ardent. By the time his own affairs were settled it was to be hoped that public matters would also be quieter, and then—why, then Marie Bompard might become Marie Pichon, no one forbidding. Imagine, then, the story of the Desmonds’ escape coming to the ears of Joseph the Republican. He burned with interest, and, having more than a touch of the busybody, sat down and wrote Bompard a full account of the whole affair. Bompard was annoyed. He crackled the pages angrily, and stigmatised Joseph as a fool and a meddler. Bompard was fat, and a good, kind, easy man; he desired to live peaceably, and really the times made it very difficult. His first impulse was to put the paper in the fire and hold his tongue. Then he reflected that he was not Joseph’s only acquaintance in the place. If the young man were to write to Jean Dumont, the Mayor’s son, for instance, and then it was to come out that the facts had been known to Bompard, and concealed by him. “Seigneur!” exclaimed Bompard, mopping his brow, which had become suddenly moist. Men’s heads had come off for less than that. He read the letter again, drumming on his counter the while, with a stubby, black-nailed hand; at any rate, risk or no risk, Madelon must not be mentioned. He had known her from a child; there was, in fact, some very distant connection between the families, and she was a good, pretty girl. Bompard was a fatherly man. He liked to chuck a pretty girl under the chin, and see her blush, and Madelon had a pleasant trick of it; and then, just now, all the world knew she was expecting the birth of her first child. No, certainly he would hold his tongue about Madelon. He burnt the letter, feeling like a conspirator, and it was just as he was blowing away the last compromising bit of ash that Mathieu Leroux walked in upon him.
A Marriage Under the Terror Page 29
