Complete Poetical Works of Charlotte Smith

by Charlotte Smith

  The poor man was so affected, that his voice failed.

  D’Alonville, however fearful of betraying himself, could not conceal that he sympathised with this unfortunate father. “Perhaps,” said he, “your fears may be groundless; though you have not heard from him, your fourth son may survive.”

  “I have no hope,” replied he, “had he not been dead, I am sure he would have found some means of letting me hear of him; for he was a dutiful boy, and knew what his mother and I suffered about his brothers — Ah! no; I have none left now, unless Pierre should survive a long imprisonment: I have none left but that lad you see there; and as soon as he is old enough to carry arms, he too will be put under requisition, and be compelled to serve, whether he likes it or no.”

  “But your daughter,” said D’Alonville —

  “My daughter,” resumed the poor man; “My daughter was the hope of my life; my commander’s lady took her, and brought her up to be about her person; and she was pretty, and every body admired her: a reputable tradesman at Paris would have married her, but Madame de Blanzac, her mistress, thought her too young, and desired her to stay a year or two, till her lover was got a little forwarder in the world. She was at Paris at the dreadful time when her poor brother was murdered; she was not indeed in prison, but remained with her mistress at an hotel, where she saw four people killed before her eyes; she was so terrified, as to be immediately deprived of her senses, and was rather, I fear, a burthen, than of any use to the lady she served — when she found means to escape to England, after the murder of her husband. During the voyage, my poor girl recovered some recollection; but on the vessel’s arriving in the port of Pool, where the were to land, the cries of the sailors, and the loud voices of the people who surrounded the ship, brought so strongly to her mind the noises she had heard at Paris during the massacre, that in the frenzy which this terror occasioned she flew upon deck, and before any one was ware of what she intended, she threw herself into the sea.

  A dead silence ensued for a moment, the old man could not proceed.

  D’Alonville, at length said, “And was there no attempt made to save her?”

  “Oh! yes,” replied he; “and she was saved from the water, but her senses were quite gone. I do not know how Madame de Blanzac, distressed as she was herself, was able to sustain the additional burthen of my poor girl, in such a condition; but she promised never to forsake her, and she kept her word. Some ladies in England, to whom her melancholy story became known, were very kind to my unfortunate daughter, and tried to get her restored to her senses, but it was all in vain; they were irrecoverable; and she is now in one of the public hospitals of London, where lunatics are received.”

  The laborious life to which the old sailor had been injured, had not hardened his heart — Nature had still a powerful influence; and his voice bore testimony of the tribute he paid it, as he thus concluded his mournful narrative.

  D’Alonville would have spoken comfort to him, but he could find none. For these wounds to domestic happiness he knew there could be no cure. He remained silent, therefore, reflecting on the dreadful havoc that civil war had made in his country within so short a space; and he shuddered when he trusted his imagination for a moment with the horrors that were yet to come. He was now ashamed of having suspected his conductor of designs against him, and of having mistaken the sad silence of sorrow, for the sullen mediation of the assassin. They were, by this time, at some distance from the place where the report of fire arms had been heard; and D’Alonville, endeavouring to shake off the melancholy impression his companion’s history had left on his mind, enquired why he had kept his boat so near the shore as they passed under the rocks of Granville?

  The sailor replied, “that there were frequently centinels placed on the cliffs, to prevent those from escaping who were called disaffected; and that had the boat been discerned, or heard, they would have been fired upon with very little ceremony; but that under the cliffs they were less likely to be perceived.

  D’Alonville then entered into conversation on the present appearance of France, and received an account of the desolation that reigned throughout the northern provinces, which, when he landed, and surveyed the state of the ground, did not appear to have been exaggerated.

  Without hazarding too much be confidence in his boatman, they became much better acquainted before they had finished their voyage; D’Alonville discovered, in the course of their conversation, that his conductor would more willingly put him on shore at any place near St. Maloes than in the port; and D’Alonville was much more willing to land in some more remote part of the coast. They therefore perfectly agreed in their plans, and keeping at some miles distance from land the whole day, as if they were engaged in fishing, as night approached, they drew towards the shore, about five miles to the west of St. Maloes; where, in a small creek, formed by projecting rocks, they might land, and by a winding path gain the country.

  The wind, which had hitherto been extremely favourable, still blew to the shore; but it had risen as the sun set, and the water, curling and whitening as it rolled towards the beach, threatened an approaching storm. The vessel, therefore, could carry no sail; and the old man taking in his canvas, rowed slowly and laboriously towards the point where they had agreed to land. As the boat mounted the dark waves, or sunk between them, and as the coast before him rose indistinctly, or wholly disappeared, D’Alonville could not help reflecting on his strange situation, returning thus to the land of his ancestors. The cliffs, whose rugged forms were distinguishable through the gloom of evening, were the boundaries of Brittany! Once before he had seen them in returning from an excursion of pleasure, when in his early youth he had with his father visited Brest, and gone back by water with several ladies and friends. He recollected all the parties; not one, perhaps, now survived, unless it was his brother, of whom he dreaded to hear; but with whom, in the part of Britanny to which he was going, he comforted himself that it was improbable he should meet. At length, with very painful emotions, he saw himself once more on shore on the coast of France. He paid his conductor more than their agreement, and took his name, and the name of his son, whom he supposed to be a prisoner in England. There was a possibility that should he ever return thither, he might find the young man living, and relieve the anguish of his unfortunate father, to whom, however, he forbore to hold out an hope that might never be realised.

  It was about four in the morning when he parted with the old sailor; and hastened to leave the coast, scrambling along as well as he could till he gained a beaten road, which he concluded led to some village, or small town. As the encreasing light made the objects distinct around him, he surveyed, with a mixture of regret and satisfaction, the uncultured ground, where little or no labour seemed to be going forward, though this was the season when the plough should have been most busy. A few women, and decrepit old men, were feebly exerting themselves here and there, to supply the deficiency of hands more able; their work was such as necessity only drove them to undertake, and they seemed dejected and unhappy, though some of the women and girls concealed their reluctance by the wild ribaldry with which they attacked D’Alonville, and by singing their patriotic songs.

  The better to conceal himself, he answered them in their own way; and at length, from one group, obtained a direction to a village which was, he found, about six miles from the shore. He there entered a cabaret which was tolerable for that country: where, as the story he told, seemed to be from troublesome enquiries. And he resigned himself to short repose, intending to resume his journey towards Merol the evening of the following day.

  CHAPTER V.

  I come, from exile come,

  Revisiting my country; Thou “dear” shade

  At whose “lone” tomb I box; shade of my father!

  Hear me, Oh Hear! —

  Potter’s Eschylus.

  IN apostrophizing the spirit of his father, in looking back with painful recollection on the past, and with uneasy conjectures towards the future, D’Alonvill
e continued his way, avoiding, as far as was possible, towns, and even villages; and as night came on, seeking shelter in the lone cottages of the peasantry, many of which he found deserted by all their male inhabitants; while the women and children who remained, were suffering the severest extremes of poverty. “And these,” cried he, frequently as he witnessed scenes of want and woe, as he saw the human figure deformed by famine, and the human character rendered ferocious by despair, “these are the boasted blessings of that liberty for which they have been four years contending — infatuated, misled people! The taille, the gabelle, the corves, even the feudal services, however heavily imposed, what were they when compared to the oppressions under which you now labour! If ye had burthens under the government of an arbitrary monarch, ye danced gaily under them; but the yoke ye have put on yourselves weighs ye down to the earth — its iron points are stained with blood, and dipped in poison!” — Such were the reflections to which the desolate state of his country gave rise in the breast of D’Alonville; and such reflections were natural to a native of France. An Englishman would perhaps have beheld the same scenes with different sensations — an Englishman might have thought the experiment right; and that the attempt to shake off such burthens as the taille, the gabelle, the corvés, and vassalage, was a glorious attempt, and failed only because the headlong vehemence of the French national character, and the impossibility of finding (in a very corrupt nation, and among men never educated in notions of real patriotism) a sufficient weight of abilities and integrity to guide the vessel in the revolutionary tempest, has occasioned it to fall into the hands of pirates, and utterly to destroy it. A coarser Briton, a plain John Bull, would say— “Those French fellows have not sense enough to be as free as we are;” and both would unquestionably agree in deprecating, in regard to his own country, any attempt at change, if the most complete reform was to be purchased by one week, or even one day, of such scenes as have been exhibited in France. They would, most undoubtedly, unite in declaring that even if the constitution of England had not proved itself to be the most calculated for general happiness, as it undoubtedly has, if its dilapidations from time were greater, and its defects more visible, yes, that since there must be faults and errors in every human institution, it is far wiser “To bear the ills we have

  “Than trust to others that we know not of.”

  Without any accident worth recording, for he was fortunately unsuspected the whole way, D’Alonville at length arrived at Merol, where it was probable he might undergo a stricter examination. In these small towns the lowest of the people had emerged into municipal officers; and in every country it is equally true that no set of men are so offensively insolent as those who have acquired unexpected fortune, or unexpected authority.

  Of this D’Alonville had soon a proof. Not many hours after his arrival at Merol, he was strolling through the streets in hopes of meeting St. Remi, or some other person he knew, when he was addressed by one of these newly-elected magistrates, who seeing in the national uniform a man who did not belong to that department, and whose air perhaps betrayed him not to be of the class of common soldiers, he stopped him and rudely enquired, whence he came and whither he was going? and it was not till he had gone through a very rude interrogatory, and even been confined two hours in the guardhouse, that he was released on telling the same story he had before told, and producing his certificate as Philippe Joseph Coudé, that he was released from the impertinent enquiries and vulgar insults of this guardian of French liberty. It was, indeed, with the utmost difficulty that he conquered the indignation he felt at being questioned by such a low-born mechanic, and of being compelled, by self-preservation, to descend to the mean evasions of concealing his name and falsifying conduct, in which he gloried; while the blood of a long line of illustrious ancestors, whom he had been taught to number till they were lost in the remote royalty of Merovingian kings, rose indignantly, and tempted him to spurn, rather than to conciliate citizen Careau the white-smith.

  This was but an ill omened beginning. He found, that to continue at Merol would be unsafe; yet should he quite it without meeting the party that had induced him to go thither, he knew not where to seek them, unless at the Castle of Vaudrecour; which the Abbé de St. Remi had informed him, was something more than two leagues from Merol; but from the vague directions he had received, either from Madame de Touranges, or in the obscure description of the Abbé, he doubted whether he should find his way to the place; and he feared to enquired, left his purposes should be suspected. Melancholy, and uncertain how to act, he continued to wander about the streets of his small bourgh ; examining every face that passed him — but he saw none that he knew — in many, he thought he observed marks of reluctant acquiescence under the present government — in other, expressions of stifled rage and resentment. The people in whose house he had taken up his temporary lodging, were extremely poor: the man had kept a little shop at Rennes; but since the revolution, his business, which depended on the assembling of this parliament, that tow, on the persons who at that time frequented it, had failed. One of his sons had taken, much against his consent, a commission in the national army; and the other, who had been his assistant in his business, had emigrated. The father and mother, ruined in their circumstances by the loss of their former customers, and the heavy tax they were condemned to pay for their emigrant son (from which the patriotism of the other did not exempt them,) retired, quite broken-hearted to Merol; where they possessed a small house; and where they sought, in devotion, for the consolation which the world seemed to withdraw from their old age.

  When D’Alonville applied to them for a lodging, it seemed as if they received him rather through fear, as he had the appearance of a soldier, than because they wished for any such inmate in their house: but the ingenuous countenance, and mild manners of their guest, so little resembling what they had been accustomed to set of late among the young men who had adopted the enthusiasm of the times, soon reconciled the ancient couple to this stay with them; the mistrust, with which they had at first considered him, was changed imperceptibly into kindness; and the old Sieur la Barre, often looked at him as if he regretted to see him in the uniform he wore; at least, such was the interpretation that D’Alonville put on the pensive and sorrowful expression his countenance wore, when he fixed his eyes upon him, as he sometimes, did, for many minutes together. Other interpretations, however, might be put upon his behaviour: La Barre always scrupulously avoided all conversation whatever, on the state of public affairs; and whenever D’Alonville seemed disposed to lead the discourse to that subject, he only shrugged up his shoulder, and uttered a short ejaculation of pious resignation to the will of Le bon Dieu! so that D’Alonville could not discover what were his real opinions, and was afraid of trusting him: though after a few days, this fear would have worn off from his being almost convinced, that the sentiments of his house were the same as his own, had he not observed something of mystery about the whole house, which he could not comprehend. The only servant these poor old people kept, was a girl about seventeen, who was their orphan relation. This young person seemed often in confusion and terror; and once, when D’Alonville was sitting with La Barre and his wife, partaking rather a better dinner than they generally had, which he had purchased for them, the girl cam in as pale as death; and trembling so that she could hardly speak, told La Barre, that she had just heard there was a search going to be made throughout the town for refractory priests. La Barre changed countenance; but recovering himself, answered, “Well Denise, we have no such persons you know — Monsieur here, who is certainly no priest, is our only lodger.” His tranquillity, however, seemed to be much disturbed by this intelligence; he could not finish his dinner, but hurrying it over, went out on pretence of business; and his wife retired to her devotions; at which she passed great part of every day: she had often told D’Alonville that she had a little Oratory at the top of her house; and all these circumstances, together with footsteps he had heard in the night, over the room where he slept
, now made him entertain a strong suspicion, that some unhappy priest was hidden by La Barre, even at the risk of his own life, from the rage of his persecutors; perhaps St. Remi himself, or some one from whom he might learn where to seek the friends he so anxiously desired to find. Still, however probable this appeared, it was not certain; but D’Alonville, whose impatience became hourly greater, was determined to be satisfied, and examine from whence came the low noises he had heard of a night, at a time when he was almost sure La Barre and his wife were in bed.

  Sleep had never been very propitious to him since he had had so many subjects of anxiety, and he was not little disposed to indulge it. The clock at the town-house struck one; and all had long since been quiet in the house of La Barre, when D’Alonville thought he heard light footsteps pass near his door; but the stair-case was of brick, and the sound did not echo as from wood. A door, however, was softly opened above him; and (as he thought the moment was now come to satisfy himself, as to the real principles of the man whose house he was in) he arose from his bed, where he had thrown himself without undressing, and went as softly as possible up stairs, till he came to a door which opened into a room over his own; he saw a light through the crevices, and pushing it gently, it opened. His appearance threw into the most extreme consternation a venerable pale figure, who sitting at the foot of a very mean bed, was eating from a few pieces of board placed on tressels before it, some of the remains of La Barre’s dinner of the day before; while Denise, the servant of the house, held a candle near him. The old priest on the appearance of a stranger, and a stranger of D’Alonville’s appearance, gave himself up for lost: he cast his eyes to Heaven, as in submission to its decrees; and endeavoured to prevent Denise, who threw herself at D’Alonville’s feet, as he yet remained at the door, and implored his mercy for Le bon Prieur — and for them all — She would then have flown down stairs to call for the intercession of her master and mistress, but D’Alonville detaining her by force, shut the door, and assuring her she entirely mistook his intentions, desired her to be calm, and to hear what he had to say.