“Nothing, for months, has given me so much pleasure as this,” he said, saluting me with overwhelming cordiality. “By my faith, M. le Vicomte, you have outdone us all! You will have such a reception yonder! and you have brought two good knaves, I see. It is not fair,” he continued, nodding his head with senile jocularity. “I declare it is not fair. But you know the text? ‘There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than — —’ Ha! ha! Well, we must not be jealous. You have taught them a lesson; and now we are united.”
“But, M. le Baron,” I said in amazement, as, obeying his gesture, I moved on, while he limped jauntily beside me, “I do not understand you in the least!”
“You don’t?”
“No!” I said.
“Ah! you did not think that we should hear it so soon,” he replied, shaking his head sagely. “Oh, I can tell you we are well provided. The campaign has begun, and the information department has not been neglected. Little escapes us, and we shall soon set these rogues right. But, for the fact, that damned rascal Doury let it out. I hear you told them some fine home-truths. A Committee, the insolents! And in our teeth! But you gave them a sharp set-back, I hear, M. le Vicomte. If you had joined it, now — —”
He stopped abruptly. A man crossing the street had slightly jostled him. The old noble lost his temper, and on the instant raised his stick with a passionate oath, and the man cowered away begging his pardon. But M. de Gontaut was not to be appeased.
“Vagabond!” he cried after him, in a voice trembling with rage, “you would throw me down again, would you? We will put you in your place by-and-by. We will; why, Dieu! when I was young — —”
“But, M. le Baron,” I said to divert his attention, for two or three bystanders were casting ugly looks at us, and I saw that it needed little to bring about a fracas, “are you quite sure that we shall be able to keep them in check?”
The old noble still trembled, but he drew himself up with a gesture of pathetic gallantry.
“You shall see!” he cried. “When it comes to hard knocks, you shall see, Monsieur. But here we are; and there is Madame St. Alais on the balcony with some of her bodyguard.” He paused to kiss his hand, with the air of a Polignac. “Up there, M. le Vicomte, you will see what you will see,” he continued. “And I — I shall be in luck, too, for I have brought you.”
It seemed to me more like a dream than a reality. A fortnight before, I had been spurned from this house with insults; I had been bidden never to enter it again. Now, on the balconies, from which pretty faces and powdered heads looked down, handkerchiefs fluttered to greet me. On the stairs, which, crowded with servants and lackeys, shook under the constant stream of comers and goers, I was received with a hum of applause. In every corner snuff-boxes were being tapped and canes handled; the flashing of roguish eyes behind fans vied with the glitter of mirrors. And through all a lane was made for me. At the door Louis met me. A little farther on, Madame came half-way across the room to me. It was a triumph — a triumph which I found inexplicable, unintelligible, until I learned that the rebuff which I had administered to the deputation had been exaggerated a dozen times, nay, a hundred times, until it met even the wishes of the most violent; while the sober and thoughtful were too glad to hail in my adhesion the proof of that reaction, which the Royalist party, from the first day of the troubles, never ceased to expect.
No wonder that, taken by surprise and intoxicated with incense, I let myself go. To have declared in that company and with Madame’s gracious words in my ears, that I had not come to join them, that I had come on a different errand altogether, that though I had repelled the deputation I had no intention of acting against it, would have required a courage and a hardness I could not boast; while the circumstances of the deputation, Doury’s presumption and Buton’s hints, to say nothing of the violence of the Parisian mob, had not failed to impress me unfavourably. With a thousand others who had prepared themselves to welcome reform, I recoiled when I saw the lengths to which it was tending; and, though nothing had been farther from my mind when I entered Cahors than to join myself to the St. Alais faction, I found it impossible to reject their apologies on the spot, or explain on the instant the real purpose with which I had come to them.
I was, in fact, the sport of circumstances; weak, it will be said, in the wrong place and stubborn in the wrong; betraying a boy’s petulance at one time, and a boy’s fickleness at another; and now a tool and now a churl. Perhaps truly. But it was a time of trial; nor was I the only man or the oldest man who, in those days, changed his opinions, and again within the week went back; or who found it hard to find a cockade, white, black, red or tricolour, to his taste.
Besides, flattery is sweet, and I was young; moreover, I had Mademoiselle in my head and nothing could exceed Madame’s graciousness. I think she valued me the more for my late revolt, and prided herself on my reduction in proportion as I had shown myself able to resist.
“Few words are better, M. le Vicomte,” she said, with a dignity which honoured me equally with herself. “Many things have happened since I saw you. We are neither of us quite of the same opinion. Forgive me. A woman’s word and a man’s sword do no dishonour.”
I bowed, blushing with pleasure. After a fortnight spent in solitude these moving groups, bowing, smiling, talking in low, earnest tones of the one purpose, the one aim, had immense influence with me. I felt the contagion. I let Madame take me into her confidence.
“The King” — it was always the King with her— “in a week or two the King will assert himself. As yet his ear has been abused. It will pass; in the meantime we must take our proper places. We must arm our servants and keepers, repress disorder and resist encroachment.”
“And the Committee, Madame?”
She tapped me, smiling, with the ends of her dainty fingers.
“We will treat it as you treated it,” she said.
“You think that you will be strong enough?”
“We,” she answered.
“We?” I said, correcting myself with a blush.
“Why not? How can it be otherwise?” she replied, looking proudly round her. “Can you look round and doubt it, M. le Vicomte?”
“But France?” I said.
“We are France,” she retorted with a superb gesture.
And certainly the splendid crowd that filled her rooms was almost warrant for the words; a crowd of stately men and fair women such as I have only seen once or twice since those days. Under the surface there may have been pettiness and senility; the exhaustion of vice; jealousy and lukewarmness and dissension; but the powder and patches, the silks and velvets of the old régime, gave to all a semblance of strength, and at least the appearance of dignity. If few were soldiers, all wore swords and could use them. The fact that the small sword, so powerful a weapon in the duel, is useless against a crowd armed with stones and clubs had not yet been made clear. Nothing seemed more easy than for two or three hundred swordsmen to rule a province.
At any rate I found nothing but what was feasible in the notion; and with little real reluctance, if no great enthusiasm, I pinned on the white cockade. Putting all thoughts of present reform from my mind, I agreed that order — order was the one pressing need of the country.
On that all were agreed, and all were hopeful. I heard no misgivings, but a good deal of vapouring, in which poor M. de Gontaut, with the palsy almost upon him, had his part. No one dropped a hint of danger in the country, or of a revolt of the peasants. Even to me, as I stood in the brilliant crowd, the danger grew to seem so remote and unreal, that, delicacy as well as the fear of ridicule, kept me silent. I could not speak of Mademoiselle without awkwardness, and so the warning which I had come to give died on my lips. I saw that I should be laughed at, I fancied myself deceived, and I was silent.
It was only when, after promising to return next day, I stood at the door prepared to leave, and found myself alone with Louis, that I let a word fall. Then I asked him with a little hesitation if he though
t that his sister was quite safe at St. Alais.
“Why not?” he said easily, with his hand on my shoulder.
“The ‘trouble is not in the town only,” I hinted. “Nor perhaps the worst of the trouble.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You think too much of it, mon cher,” he answered. “Believe me, now that we are at one the trouble is over.”
And that was the evening of the 4th of August, the day on which the Assembly in Paris renounced at a single sitting all immunities, exemptions, and privileges, all feudal dues, and fines, and rights, all tolls, all tithes, the salt tax, the game laws, capitaineries! At one sitting, on that evening; and Louis thought that the trouble was over!
CHAPTER VII.
THE ALARM.
At that time, a brazier in the market-place, and three or four lanterns at street crossings, made up the most of the public lighting. When I paused, therefore, to breathe my horse on the brow of the slope, beyond the Valandré bridge, and looked back on Cahors, I saw only darkness, broken here and there by a blur of yellow light; that still, by throwing up a fragment of wall or eaves, told in a mysterious way of the sleeping city.
The river, a faint, shimmering line, conjectured rather than seen, wound round all. Above, clouds were flying across the sky, and a wind, cold for the time of year — cold, at least, after the heat of the day — chilled the blood, and slowly filled the mind with the solemnity of night.
As I stood listening to the breathing of the horses, the excitement in which I had passed the last few hours died away, and left me wondering — wondering, and a little regretful. The exaltation gone, I found the scene I had just left flavourless; I even presently began to find it worse. Some false note in the cynical, boastful voices and the selfish — the utterly selfish — plans, to which I had been listening for hours, made itself heard in the stillness. Madame’s “We are France,” which had sounded well amid the lights and glitter of the salon, among laces and fripons and rose-pink coats, seemed folly in the face of the infinite night, behind which lay twenty-five millions of Frenchmen.
However, what I had done, I had done. I had the white cockade on my breast; I was pledged to order — and to my order. And it might be the better course. But, with reflection, enthusiasm faded; and, by some strange process, as it faded, and the scene in which I had just taken part lost its hold, the errand that had brought me to Cahors recovered importance. As Madame St. Alais’ influence grew weak, the memory of Mademoiselle, sitting lonely and scared in her coach, grew vivid, until I turned my horse fretfully, and endeavoured to lose the thought in rapid movement.
But it is not so easy to escape from oneself at night, as in the day. The soughing of the wind through the chestnut trees, the drifting clouds, and the sharp ring of hoofs on the road, all laid as it were a solemn finger on the pulses and stilled them. The men behind me talked in sleepy voices, or rode silently. The town lay a hundred leagues behind. Not a light appeared on the upland. In the world of night through which we rode, a world of black, mysterious bulks rising suddenly against the grey sky, and as suddenly sinking, we were the only inhabitants.
At last we reached the hill above St. Alais, and I looked eagerly for lights in the valley; forgetting that, as it wanted only an hour of midnight, the village would have retired hours before. The disappointment, and the delay — for the steepness of the hill forbade any but a walking pace — fretted me; and when I heard, a moment later, a certain noise behind me, a noise I knew only too well, I flared up.
“Stay, fool!” I cried, reining in my horse, and turning in the saddle. “That mare has broken her shoe again, and you are riding on as if nothing were the matter! Get down — and see. Do you think that I — —”
“Pardon, Monsieur,” Gil muttered. He had been sleeping in his saddle.
He scrambled down. The mare he rode, a valuable one, had a knack of breaking her hind shoe; after which she never failed to lame herself at the first opportunity. Buton had tried every method of shoeing, but without success.
I sprang to the ground while he lifted the foot. My ear had not deceived me; the shoe was broken. Gil tried to remove the jagged fragment left on the hoof, but the mare was restive, and he had to desist.
“She cannot go to Saux in that state,” I said angrily.
The men were silent for a moment, peering at the mare. Then Gil spoke.
“The St. Alais forge is not three hundred yards down the lane, Monsieur,” he said. “And the turn is yonder. We could knock up Petit Jean, and get him to bring his pincers here. Only — —”
“Only what?” I said peevishly.
“I quarrelled with him at Cahors Fair, Monsieur,” Gil answered sheepishly; “and he might not come for us.”
“Very well,” I said gruffly, “I will go. And do you stay here, and keep the mare quiet.”
André held the stirrup for me to mount. The smithy, the first hovel in the village, was a quarter of a mile away, and, in reason, I should have ridden to it. But, in my irritation, I was ready to do anything they did not propose, and, roughly rejecting his help, I started on foot. Fifty paces brought me to the branch road that led to St. Alais, and, making out the turning with a little difficulty, I plunged into it; losing, in a moment, the cheerful sound of jingling bits and the murmur of the men’s voices.
Poplars rose on high banks on either side of the lane, and made the place as dark as a pit, and I had almost to grope my way. A stumble added to my irritation, and I cursed the St. Alais for the ruts, and the moon for its untimely setting. The ceaseless whispering of the poplar leaves went with me, and, in some unaccountable way, annoyed me. I stumbled again, and swore at Gil, and then stopped to listen. I was in the road, and yet I heard the jingling of bits again, as if the horses were following me.
I stopped angrily to listen, thinking that the men had disobeyed my orders. Then I found that the sound came from the front, and was heavier and harder than the ringing of bit or bridle. I groped my way forward, wondering somewhat, until a faint, ruddy light, shining on the darkness and the poplars, prepared me for the truth — welcome, though it seemed of the strangest — that the forge was at work.
As I took this in, I turned a corner, and came within sight of the smithy; and stood in astonishment. The forge was in full blast. Two hammers were at work; I could see them rising and falling, and hear, though they seemed to be muffled, the rhythmical jarring clang as they struck the metal. The ruddy glare of the fire flooded the road and burnished the opposite trees, and flung long, black shadows on the sky.
Such a sight filled me with the utmost astonishment, for it was nearly midnight. Fortunately something else I saw astonished me still more, and stayed my foot. Between the point where I stood by the hedge and the forge a number of men were moving, and flitting to and fro; men with bare arms and matted heads, half-naked, with skins burned black. It would have been hard to count them, they shifted so quickly; and I did not try. It was enough for me that one half of them carried pikes and pitchforks, that one man seemed to be detailing them into groups, and giving them directions; and that, notwithstanding the occasional jar of the hammers, an air of ferocious stealth marked their movements.
For a moment I stood rooted to the spot. Then, instinctively, I stepped aside into the shadow of the hedge, and looked again. The man who acted as the leader carried an axe on his shoulder, the broad blade of which, as it caught the glow of the furnace, seemed to be bathed in blood. He was never still — this man. One moment he moved from group to group, gesticulating, ordering, encouraging. Now he pulled a man out of one troop and thrust him forcibly into another; now he made a little speech, which was dumb play to me, a hundred paces away; now he went into the forge, and his huge bulk for a moment intercepted the light. It was Petit Jean, the smith.
I made use of the momentary darkness which he caused on one of these occasions, and stole a little nearer. For I knew now what was before me. I knew perfectly that all this meant blood, fire, outrage, flames rising to heaven, screams startling t
he stricken night! But I must know more, if I would do anything. I went nearer therefore, creeping along the hedge, and crouching in the ditch, until no more than twelve yards separated me from the muster. Then I stood still, as Petit Jean came out again, to distribute another bundle of weapons, clutched instantly and eagerly by grimy hands. I could hear now, and I shuddered at what I heard. Gargouf was in every mouth. Gargouf, the St. Alais’ steward, coupled with grisly tortures and slow deaths, with old sins, and outrages, and tyrannies, now for the first time voiced, now to be expiated!
At last, one man laid the torch by crying aloud, “To the Château! To the Château!” and in an instant the words changed the feelings with which I had hitherto stared into immediate horror. I started forward. My impulse, for a moment, was to step into the light and confront them — to persuade, menace, cajole, turn them any way from their purpose. But, in the same moment, reflection showed me the hopelessness of the attempt. These were no longer peasants, dull, patient clods, such as I had known all my life; but maddened beasts; I read it in their gestures and the growl of their voices. To step forward would be only to sacrifice myself; and with this thought I crept back, gained the deeper shadow, and, turning on my heel, sped down the lane. The ruts and the darkness were no longer anything to me. If I stumbled, I did not notice it. If I fell, it was no matter. In less than a minute I was standing, breathless, by the astonished servants, striving to tell them quickly what they must do.
“The village is rising!” I panted. “They are going to burn the Château, and Mademoiselle is in it! Gil, ride, gallop, lose not a minute, to Cahors, and tell M. le Marquis. He must bring what forces he can. And do you, André, go to Saux. Tell Father Benôit. Bid him do his utmost — bring all he can.”
For answer, they stared, open-mouthed, through the dusk. “And the mare, Monsieur?” one asked at last dully.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 213
