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The Trampling of the Lilies

by Rafael Sabatini · English · Gutenberg #2783 · 414,790 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Trampling of the Lilies

Author: Rafael Sabatini


        
Release date: August 1, 2001 [eBook #2783]
                Most recently updated: March 10, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2783

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAMPLING OF THE LILIES ***




Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer





THE TRAMPLING OF THE LILIES

By Rafael Sabatini




CONTENTS



     PART I

     THE OLD RULE


     CHAPTER

         I.  MONSIEUR THE SECRETARY

        II.  LORDS OF LIFE AND DEATH

       III.  THE WORD OF BELLECOUR

        IV.  THE DISCIPLES OF ROUSSEAU



     PART II

     THE NEW RULE


         V.  THE SHEEP TURNED WOLVES

        VI.  THE CITIZEN COMMISSIONER

       VII.  LA BOULAYE DISCHARGES A DEBT

      VIII.  THE INVALIDS AT BOISVERT

        IX.  THE CAPTIVES

         X.  THE BAISER LAMOURETTE

        XI.  THE ESCAPE

       XII.  THE AWAKENING

      XIII.  THE ROAD TO LIEGE

       XIV.  THE COURIER

        XV.  LA BOULAYE BAITS HIS HOOK



     PART III

     THE EVERLASTING RULE


       XVI.  CECILE DESHAIX

      XVII.  LA BOULAYE'S PROMISE

     XVIII.  THE INCORRUPTIBLE

       XIX.  THE THEFT

        XX.  THE GRATITUDE OF OMBREVAL

       XXI.  THE ARREST

      XXII.  THE TRIBUNAL

     XXIII.  THE CONCIERGERIE




PART I. THE OLD RULE

     These are they
     Who ride on the court gale, control its tides;

     ***

     Whose frown abases and whose smile exalts.
     They shine like any rainbow--and, perchance,
     Their colours are as transient.

        Old Play




CHAPTER I. MONSIEUR THE SECRETARY


It was spring at Bellecour--the spring of 1789, a short three months
before the fall of the Bastille came to give the nobles pause, and
make them realise that these new philosophies, which so long they have
derided, were by no means the idle vapours they had deemed them.

By the brook, plashing its glittering course through the park of
Bellecour, wandered La Boulaye, his long, lean, figure clad with a
sombreness that was out of harmony in that sunlit, vernal landscape.
But the sad-hued coat belied that morning a heart that sang within his
breast as joyously as any linnet of the woods through which he strayed.
That he was garbed in black was but the outward indication of his
clerkly office, for he was secretary to the most noble the Marquis de
Fresnoy de Bellecour, and so clothed in the livery of the ink by which
he lived. His face was pale and lean and thoughtful, but within his
great, intelligent eyes there shone a light of new-born happiness. Under
his arm he carried a volume of the new philosophies which Rousseau had
lately given to the world, and which was contributing so vastly to the
mighty change that was impending. But within his soul there dwelt
in that hour no such musty subject as the metaphysical dreams of old
Rousseau. His mood inclined little to the “Discourses upon the Origin of
Inequality” which his elbow hugged to his side. Rather was it a mood of
song and joy and things of light, and his mind was running on a string
of rhymes which mentally he offered up to his divinity. A high-born
lady was she, daughter to his lordly employer, the most noble Marquis
of Bellecour. And he a secretary, a clerk! Aye, but a clerk with a great
soul, a secretary with a great belief in the things to come, which in
that musty tome beneath his arm were dimly prophesied.

And as he roamed beside the brook, his feet treading the elastic,
velvety turf, and crushing heedlessly late primrose and stray violet,
his blood quickened by the soft spring breeze, fragrant with hawthorn
and the smell of the moist brown earth, La Boulaye's happiness gathered
strength from the joy that on that day of spring seemed to invest all
Nature. An old-world song stole from his firm lips-at first timidly,
like a thing abashed in new surroundings, then in bolder tones that
echoed faintly through the trees

  “Si le roi m'avait donne
   Paris, sa grande ville,
   Et qui'il me fallut quitter
   L'amour de ma mie,
   Je dirais au roi Louis
   Reprenez votre Paris.
   J'aime mieux ma mie, O gai!
   J'aime mieux ma mie!”

How mercurial a thing is a lover's heart! Here was one whose habits were
of solemnity and gloomy thought turned, so joyous that he could sing
aloud, alone in the midst of sunny Nature, for no better reason than
that Suzanne de Bellecour had yesternight smiled as--for some two
minutes by the clock--she had stood speaking with him.

“Presumptuous that I am,” said he to the rivulet, to contradict himself
the next moment. “But no; the times are changing. Soon we shall be
equals all, as the good God made us, and--”

He paused, and smiled pensively. And as again the memory of her
yesternight's kindness rose before him, his smile broadened; it became
a laugh that went ringing down the glade, scaring a noisy thrush into
silence and sending it flying in affright across the scintillant waters
of the brook. Then that hearty laugh broke sharply off, as, behind
him, the sweetest voice in all the world demanded the reason of this
mad-sounding mirth.

La Boulaye's breath seemed in that instant to forsake him and he grew
paler than Nature and the writer's desk had fashioned him. Awkwardly he
turned and made her a deep bow.

“Mademoiselle! You--you see that you surprised me!” he faltered, like a
fool. For how should he, whose only comrades had been books, have
learnt to bear himself in the company of a woman, particularly when she
belonged to the ranks of those whom--despite Rousseau and his other
dear philosophers--he had been for years in the habit of accounting his
betters?

“Why, then, I am glad, Monsieur, that I surprised you in so gay a
humour--for, my faith, it is a rare enough thing.”

“True, lady,” said he foolishly, yet politely agreeing with her, “it is
a rare thing.” And he sighed--“Helas!”

At that the laughter leapt from her young lips, and turned him hot and
cold as he stood awkwardly before her.

“I see that we shall have you sad at the thought of how rare is
happiness, you that but a moment back were--or so it seemed--so joyous.
Or is it that my coming has overcast the sky of your good humour?” she
demanded archly.

He blushed like a school-girl, and strenuously protested that it was not
so. In his haste he fell headlong into the sin of hastiness--as was but
natural--and said perhaps too much.

“Your coming, Mademoiselle?” he echoed. “Nay but even had I been sad,
your coming must have dispelled my melancholy as the coming of the sun
dispels the mist upon the mountains.”

“A poet?” She mocked him playfully, with a toss of black curls and a
distracting glance of eyes blue as the heavens above them. “A poet,
Monsieur, and I never suspected it, for all that I held you a great
scholar. My father says you are.”

“Are we not all poets at some season of our lives?” quoth he, for
growing accustomed to her presence--ravished by it, indeed--his courage
was returning fast and urging him beyond the limits of discretion.

“And in what season may this rhyming fancy touch us?” she asked.
“Enlighten me, Monsieur.”

He smiled, responsive to her merry mood, and his courage ever swelling
under the suasion of it, he answered her in a fearless, daring fashion
that was oddly unlike his wont. But then, he was that day a man
transformed.

“It comes, Mademoiselle, upon some spring morning such as this--for is
not spring the mating season, and have not poets sung of it, inspired
and conquered by it? It comes in the April of life, when in our hearts
we bear the first fragrant bud of what shall anon blossom into a
glorious summer bloom red as is Love's livery and perfumed beyond all
else that God has set on earth for man's delight and thankfulness.”

The intensity with which he spoke, and the essence of the speech
itself, left her a moment dumb with wonder and with an incomprehensible
consternation, born of some intuition not yet understood.

“And so, Monsieur, the Secretary,” said she at last, a nervous laugh
quivering in her first words, “from all this wondrous verbiage I am to
take it that you love?”

“Aye, that I love, dear lady,” he cried, his eyes so intent upon her
that her glance grew timid and fell before them. And then, a second
later, she could have screamed aloud in apprehension, for the book of
Jean Jacques Rousseau lay tumbled in the grass where he had flung it,
even as he flung himself upon his knees before her. “You may take it
indeed that I love--that I love you, Mademoiselle.”

The audacious words being spoken, his courage oozed away and
anti-climax, followed. He paled and trembled, yet he knelt on until
she should bid him rise, and furtively he watched her face. He saw it
darken; he saw the brows knit; he noted the quickening breath, and in
all these signs he read his doom before she uttered it.

“Monsieur, monsieur,” she answered him, and sad was her tone, “to what
lengths do you urge this springtime folly? Have you forgotten so your
station--yes, and mine--that because I talk with you and laugh with you,
and am kind to you, you must presume to speak to me in this fashion?
What answer shall I make you, Monsieur--for I am not so cruel that I can
answer you as you deserve.”

An odd thing indeed was La Boulaye's courage. An instant ago he had felt
a very coward, and had quivered, appalled by the audacity of his own
words. Now that she assailed him thus, and taxed him with that same
audacity, the blood of anger rushed to his face--anger of the quality
that has its source in shame. In a second he was on his feet before her,
towering to the full of his lean height. The words came from him in
a hot stream, which for reckless passion by far outvied his erstwhile
amatory address.

“My station?” he cried, throwing wide his arms. “What fault lies in
my station? I am a secretary, a scholar, and so, by academic right, a
gentleman. Nay, Mademoiselle, never laugh; do not mock me yet. In what
do you find me less a man than any of the vapid caperers that fill your
father's salon? Is not my shape as good? Are not my arms as strong, my
hands as deft, my wits as keen, and my soul as true? Aye,” he pursued
with another wild wave of his long arms, “my attributes have all these
virtues, and yet you scorn me--you scorn me because of my station, so
you say!”

How she had angered him! All the pent-up gall of years against the
supercilia of the class from which she sprang surged in that moment to
his lips. He bethought him now of the thousand humiliations his proud
spirit had suffered at their hands when he noted the disdain with which
they addressed him, speaking to him--because he was compelled to carve
his living with a quill--as though he were less than mire. It was not so
much against her scorn of him that he voiced his bitter grievance, but
against the entire noblesse of France, which denied him the right to
carry a high head because he had not been born of Madame la Duchesse,
Madame la Marquise, or Madame la Comtesse. All the great thoughts of a
wondrous transformation, which had been sown in him by the revolutionary
philosophers he had devoured with such appreciation, welled up now, and
such scraps of that infinity of thought as could find utterance he cast
before the woman who had scorned him for his station. Presumptuous he
had accounted himself--but only until she had found him so. By that the
presumption, it seemed, had been lifted from him, and he held that what
he had said to her of the love he bore her was no more than by virtue of
his manhood he had the right to say.

She drew back before him, and shrank in some measure of fear, for he
looked very fierce. Moreover, he had said things which professed him a
revolutionist, and the revolutionists, whilst being a class which she
had been taught to despise and scorn, dealt, she knew, in a violence
which it might be ill to excite.

“Monsieur,” she faltered, and with her hand she clutched at her
riding-habit of green velvet, as if preparing to depart, “you are not
yourself. I am beyond measure desolated that you should have so spoken
to me. We have been good friends, M. La Boulaye. Let us forget this
scene. Shall we?” Her tones grew seductively conciliatory.

La Boulaye half turned from her, and his smouldering eye fell upon “The
Discourses” lying on the grass. He stooped and picked up the volume.
The act might have seemed symbolical. For a moment he had cast aside
his creed to woo a woman, and now that she had denied him he returned to
Rousseau, and gathered up the tome almost in penitence at his momentary
defection.

“I am quite myself, Mademoiselle,” he answered quietly. His cheeks were
flushed, but beyond that, his excitement seemed to have withered. “It
is you who yesternight, for one brief moment and again to-day--were not
yourself, and to that you owe it that I have spoken to you as I have
done.”

Between these two it would seem as the humour of the one waned, that of
the other waxed. Her glance kindled anew at his last words.

“I?” she echoed. “I was not myself? What are you saying, Monsieur the
Secretary?”

“Last night, and again just now, you were so kind, you--you smiled so
sweetly--”

“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed, angrily interrupting him. “See what you are
for all your high-sounding vaunts of yourself and your attributes! A
woman may not smile upon you, may not say one kind word to you, but
you must imagine you have made a conquest. Ma foi, you and yours do
not deserve to be treated as anything but vassals. When we show you a
kindness, see how you abuse it. We extend to you our little finger and
you instantly lay claim to the whole arm. Because last night I permitted
myself to exchange a jest with you, because I chance to be kind to you
again to-day, you repay me with insults!”

“Stop!” he cried, rousing himself once more. “That is too much to say,
Mademoiselle. To tell a woman that you love her is never to insult her.
To be loved is never to be slighted. Upon the meanest of His creatures
it is enjoined to love the same God whom the King loves, and there is
no insult to God in professing love for Him. Would you make a woman more
than that?”

“Monsieur, you put questions I have no mind to answer; you suggest
a discussion I have no inclination to pursue. For you and me let it
suffice that I account myself affronted by your words, your tone, and
your manner. You drive me to say these things; by your insistence you
compel me to be harsh. We will end this matter here and now, Monsieur,
and I will ask you to understand that I never wish it reopened, else
shall I be forced to seek protection at the hands of my father or my
brother.”

“You may seek it now, Suzanne,” quoth a voice from the thicket at her
back, a voice which came to startle both of them though in different
ways. Before they had recovered from their surprise the Marquis de
Bellecour stood before them. He was a tall man of some fifty years of
age, but so powerful of frame and so scrupulous in dress that he might
have conveyed an impression of more youth. His face, though handsome
in a high-bred way, was puffed and of an unhealthy yellow. But the eyes
were as keen as the mouth was voluptuous, and in his carefully dressed
black hair there were few strands of grey.

He came slowly forward, and his lowering glance wandered from his
daughter to his secretary in inquiry. At last--

“Well?” he demanded. “What is the matter?”

“It is nothing, Monsieur,” his daughter answered him. “A trifling affair
'twixt M. la Boulaye and me, with which I will not trouble you.”

“It is not nothing, my lord,” cried La Boulaye, his voice vibrating
oddly. “It is that I love your daughter and that I have told her of it.”
 He was in a very daring mood that morning.

The Marquis glanced at him in dull amazement. Then a flush crept into
his sallow cheeks and mounted to his brow. An inarticulate grunt came
from his thick lips.

“Canaille!” he exclaimed, through set teeth. “Can you have presumed so
far?”

He carried a riding-switch, and he seemed to grasp it now in a manner
peculiarly menacing. But La Boulaye was nothing daunted. Lost he already
accounted himself, and on the strength of the logic that if a man must
hang, a sheep as well as a lamb may be the cause of it, he took what
chances the time afforded him to pile up his debt.

“There is neither insolence nor presumption in what I have done,” he
answered, giving back the Marquis look for look and scowl for scowl.
“You deem it so because I am the secretary to the Marquis de Bellecour
and she is the daughter of that same Marquis. But these are no more than
the fortuitous circumstances in which we chance to find ourselves. That
she is a woman must take rank before the fact that she is your daughter,
and that I am a man must take rank before the fact that I am your
secretary. Not, then, as your secretary speaking to your daughter have
I told this lady that I love her, but as a man speaking to a woman. To
utter that should be--nay, is--the right of every man; to hear it
should be honouring to every woman worthy of the name. In a primitive
condition--”

“A thousand devils!” blazed the Marquis, unable longer to contain
himself. “Am I to have my ears offended by this braying? Miserable scum,
you shall be taught what is due to your betters.”

His whip cracked suddenly, and the lash leapt serpentlike into the air,
to descend and coil itself about La Boulaye's head and face. A cry broke
from the young man, as much of pain as of surprise, and as the lash was
drawn back, he clapped his hands to his seared face. But again he felt
it, cutting him now across the hand with which he had masked himself.
With a maddened roar he sprang upon his aggressor. In height he was the
equal of the Marquis, but in weight he seemed to be scarce more than
the half of his opponent's. Yet a nervous strength dwelt unsuspected in
those lean arms and steely wrists.

Mademoiselle stood by looking on, with parted lips and eyes that were
intent and anxious. She saw that figure, spare and lithe as a greyhound,
leap suddenly upon her father, and the next instant the whip was in the
secretary's hands, and he sprang back from the nobleman, who stood white
and quivering with rage, and perhaps, too, with some dismay.

“That I do not break it across your back, M. le Marquis, said the young
man,” as he snapped the whip on his knee, “you may thank your years.”
 With that he flung the two pieces wide into the sunlit waters of the
brook. “But I will have satisfaction, Monsieur. I will take payment for
this.” And he pointed to the weal that disfigured his face.

“Satisfaction?” roared the Marquis, hoarse in his passion. “Would you
demand satisfaction of me, animal?”

“No,” answered the young man, with a wry smile. “Your years again
protect you. But you have a son, and if by to-morrow it should come
to pass that you have a son no more, you may account yourself, through
this”--and again he pointed to the weal--“his murderer.”

“Do you mean that you would seek to cross swords with the Vicomte?”
 gasped the nobleman, in an unbelief so great that it gained the
ascendency over his anger.

“That is what I mean, Monsieur. In practice he has often done so. He
shall do so for once in actual earnest.”

“Fool!” was the contemptuous answer, more coldly delivered now, for the
Marquis was getting himself in hand. “If you come near Bellecour again,
if you are so much as found within the grounds of the park, I'll have
you beaten to death by my grooms for your presumption. Keep you the
memory of that promise in mind, Sir Secretary, and let it warn you to
avoid Bellecour, as you would a plague-house. Come, Suzanne,” he said,
turning abruptly to his daughter, “Enough of this delightful morning
have we already wasted on this canaille.”

With that he offered her his wrist, and so, without so much as another
glance at La Boulaye, she took her departure.

The secretary remained where they had left him, pale of face--saving the
fortuitous crimson mark which the whip had cut--and very sick at heart.
The heat of the moment being spent, he had leisure to contemplate his
plight. A scorned lover, a beaten man, a dismissed secretary! He looked
sorrowfully upon his volume of “The Discourses,” and for the first time
a doubt crossed his mind touching the wisdom of old Jean Jacques. Was
there would there ever be any remedy for such a condition of things as
now prevailed?

Already the trees had hidden the Marquis and his daughter from La
Boulaye's sight. The young revolutionist felt weary and lonely--dear
God, how lonely! neither kith nor kin had he, and of late all the
interest of his life--saving always that absorbed by Jean Jacques--had
lain in watching Suzanne de Bellecour, and in loving her silently and
distantly. Now that little crumb of comfort was to be his no more, he
was to go away from Bellecour, away from the sight of her for all time.
And he loved her, loved her, loved her!

He tossed his arms to Heaven with a great sigh that was a sob almost,
then he passed his hands over his face, and as they came in contact
with the swollen ridge that scored it, love faded from his mind, and
vindictiveness came to fill its room.

“But for this,” he cried aloud. “I shall take payment--aye, as there is
a God!”

Then turning, and with “The Discourses” held tightly to his side, he
moved slowly away, following the course of the gleaming waters.




CHAPTER II. LORDS OF LIFE AND DEATH


One friend did La Boulaye count in the village of Bellecour. This
was old Duhamel, the schoolmaster, an eccentric pedant and a
fellow-worshipper of the immortal Jean Jacques. It was to him that La
Boulaye now repaired intent upon seeking counsel touching a future that
wore that morning a singularly gloomy outlook.

He found Duhamel's door open, and he stepped across the threshold into
the chief room of the house. But there he paused, and hesitated. The
chamber was crowded with people in holiday attire, and the centre of
attraction was a well-set-up peasant with a happy, sun-tanned face,
whose golden locks were covered by a huge round hat decked with a score
of gaily-coloured ribbons.

At sight of him La Boulaye remembered that it was Charlot's wedding-day.
Popular amongst the women by virtue of his comeliness, and respected
by the men by virtue of his strength, Charlot Tardivet was a general
favourite of the countryside, and here, in the room of old Duhamel, the
schoolmaster, was half the village gathered to do him honour upon his
wedding morn. It was like Duhamel, who, in fatherliness towards the
villagers, went near out-rivalling M. le Cure, to throw open his house
for the assembling of Charlot's friends, and La Boulaye was touched by
this fresh sign of kindliness from a man whose good heart he had not
lacked occasion to observe and appreciate. But it came to the secretary
that there was no place for him in this happy assemblage. His advent
would, probably, but serve to cast a gloom upon them, considering the
conditions under which he came, with the signs of violence upon his face
to remind them of the lords of life and death who dwelt at the Chateau
up yonder. And such a reminder must fall upon them as does the reminder
of some overhanging evil clutch suddenly at our hearts in happy moments
of forgetfulness. To let them be happy that day, to leave their feasts
free of a death's head, La Boulaye would have withdrawn had he not
already been too late. Duhamel had espied him, and the little, wizened
old man came hurrying forward, his horn-rimmed spectacles perched on
the very end of his nose, his keen little eyes beaming with delight and
welcome.

“Ah, Caron, you are very choicely come,” he cried, holding out both
hands to La Boulaye. “You shall embrace our happy Hercules yonder, and
wish him joy of the wedded life he has the audacity to exploit.” Then,
as he espied the crimson ridge across the secretary's countenance, “Mon
Dieu!” he exclaimed, “what have you done to yourself, Caron?”

“Pish! It is nothing,” answered La Boulaye hurriedly, and would have had
the subject dismissed, but that one of the onlooking peasants swore
by the memory of some long-dead saint that it was the cut of a whip.
Duhamel's eyes kindled and his parchment-like skin was puckered into a
hundred evil wrinkles.

“Who did it, Caron?” he demanded.

“Since you insist, old master,” answered the secretary, still
endeavouring to make light of it, “learn that is the lord Marquis's
signature to his order of my dismissal from his service.”

“The dog!” ejaculated the school-master.

“Sh! let it be. Perhaps I braved him overmuch. I will tell you of it
when these good folks have gone. Do not let us cast a gloom over their
happiness, old master. And now to embrace this good Charlot.”

Though inwardly burning with curiosity and boiling with indignation,
Duhamel permitted himself to be guided by La Boulaye, and for the moment
allowed the matter to rest. La Boulaye himself laughingly set aside the
many questions with which they pressed him. He drank the health of the
bride-elect--who was not yet of the party--and he pledged the happiness
of the pair. He embraced Charlot, and even went so far as to urge upon
him, out of his own scanty store, a louis d'or with which to buy Marie a
trinket in memory of him.

Then presently came one with the announcement that M. le Cure was
waiting, and in answer to that reminder that there was a ceremony to be
gone through, Charlot and his friends flung out of the house in joyous
confusion, and went their way with laughter and jest to the little
church of St. Ildefonse.

“We will follow presently--M. la Boulaye and I--Charlot,” Duhamel had
said, as the sturdy bridegroom was departing. “We shall be there to
shake Madame by the hand and wish her joy of you.”

When at last they were alone in the schoolmaster's room, the old man
turned to La Boulaye, the very embodiment of a note of interrogation.
The secretary told him all that had passed. He reddened slightly when
it came to speaking of his love for Mlle. de Bellecour, but he realised
that if he would have guidance he must withhold nothing from his friend.

Duhamel's face grew dark as the young man spoke, and his eyes became sad
and very thoughtful.

“Alas!” he sighed, when La Boulaye had ended. “What shall I say to you,
my friend? The time is not yet for such as we--you and I--to speak of
love for a daughter of the Seigneurie. It is coming, I doubt it not. All
things have their climax, and France is tending swiftly to the climax
of her serfdom. Very soon we shall have the crisis, this fire that is
already smouldering, will leap into a great blaze, that shall lick the
old regime as completely from the face of history as though it had never
been. A new condition of things will spring up, of that I am convinced.
Does not history afford us many instances? And what is history but the
repetition of events under similar circumstances with different peoples.
It will come in France, and it will come soon, for it is very direly
needed.”

“I know, I know, old master,” broke in La Boulaye; “but how shall all
this help me? For all that I have the welfare of France at heart, it
weighs little with me at the moment by comparison with my own affairs.
What am I to do, Duhamel? How am I to take payment for this?” And he
pressed his finger to his seared cheek.

“Wait,” said the old man impressively. “That is the moral you might have
drawn from what I have said. Be patient. I promise you your patience
shall not be overtaxed. To-day they say that you presume; that you are
not one of them--although, by my soul, you have as good an air as any
nobleman in France.” And he eyed the lean height of the secretary with a
glance of such pride as a father might take in a well-grown son.

Elegant of figure, La Boulaye was no less elegant in dress, for all
that, from head to foot--saving the silver buckles on his shoes and the
unpretentious lace at throat and wrists--he was dressed in the black
that his office demanded. His countenance, too, though cast in a mould
of thoughtfulness that bordered on the melancholy, bore a lofty stamp
that might have passed for birth and breeding, and this was enhanced by
the careful dressing of his black unpowdered hair, gathered into a club
by a broad ribbon of black silk.

“But what shall waiting avail me?” cried the young man, with some
impatience. “What am I to do in the meantime?”

“Go to Amiens,” said the other. “You have learning, you have eloquence,
you have a presence and an excellent address. For success no
better attributes could be yours.” He approached the secretary, and
instinctively lowered his voice. “We have a little club there--a sort of
succursal to the Jacobins. We are numerous, but we have no very shining
member yet. Come with me, and I will nominate you. Beginning thus,
I promise you that you shall presently become a man of prominence
in Picardy. Anon we may send you to Paris to represent us in the
States-General. Then, when the change comes, who shall say to what
heights it may not be yours to leap?”

“I will think of it,” answered La Boulaye cordially, “and not a doubt of
it but that I will come. I did not know that you had gone so far--”

“Sh! You know now. Let that suffice. It is not good to talk of these
things just yet.”

“But in the meantime,” La Boulaye persisted, “what of this?” And again
he pointed to his cheek.

“Why, let it heal, boy.”

“I promised the Marquis that I would demand satisfaction of his son, and
I am tempted to do so and risk the consequences.”

“I am afraid the consequences will be the only satisfaction that you
will get. In fact, they will be anticipations rather than consequences,
for they'll never let you near the boy.”

“I know not that,” he answered. “The lad is more generous than his sire,
and if I were to send him word that I have been affronted, he might
consent to meet me. For the rest, I could kill him blindfolded,” he
added, with a shrug.

“Bloodthirsty animal!” rejoined Duhamel. “Unnatural tutor! Do you forget
that you were the boy's preceptor?”

With that Duhamel carried the argument into new fields, and showed La
Boulaye that to avenge upon the young Vicomte the insults received
at the hands of the old Marquis was hardly a worthy method of taking
vengeance. At last he won him to his way, and it was settled that on the
morrow La Boulaye should journey with him to Amiens.

“But, Caron, we are forgetting our friend Charlot and his bride,” he
broke off suddenly. “Come, boy; the ceremony will be at an end by this.”

He took La Boulaye by the arm, and led him out and down the street to
the open space opposite St. Ildefonse. The wedding-party was streaming
out through the door of the little church into the warm sunshine of that
April morning. In the churchyard they formed into a procession of happy
be-ribboned and nosegayed men and women--the young preceding, the old
following, the bridal couple. Two by two they came, and the air rang
with their laughter and joyous chatter. Then another sound arose, and if
the secretary and the pedagogue could have guessed of what that beating
of hoofs was to be the prelude, they had scarce smiled so easily as they
watched the approaching cortege.

From a side street there now emerged a gaily apparelled cavalcade. At
its head rode the Marquis de Bellecour, the Vicomte, and a half-dozen
other gentlemen, followed by, perhaps, a dozen lacqueys. It was a
hunting party that was making its way across the village to the open
country beyond. The bridal procession crossing their path caused them to
draw rein, and to wait until it should have passed--which argued a very
condescending humour, for it would not have been out of keeping with
their habits to have ridden headlong through it. Their presence cast
a restraint upon the peasants. The jests were silenced, the laughter
hushed, and like a flight of pigeons under the eye of the hawk, they
scurried past the Seigneurie, and some of them prayed God that they
might be suffered to pass indeed.

Bellecour eyed them in cold disdain, until presently Charlot and his
bride were abreast of him. Then his eye seemed to take life and his
sallow face to kindle into expression. He leant lightly from the saddle.

“Stay!” he commanded coldly, and as they came to a halt, daring not to
disobey him--“approach, girl,” he added.

Charlot's brows grew black. He looked up at the Marquis, but if his
glance was sullen and threatening, it was also not free from fear. Marie
obeyed, with eyes downcast and a heightened colour. If she conjectured
at all why they had been stopped, it was but to conclude that M. le
Marquis was about to offer her some mark of appreciation. Uneasiness, in
her dear innocence, she knew none.

“What is your name, child?” inquired the Marquis more gently.

“It was Marie Michelin, Monseigneur,” she made answer timidly. “But it
has just been changed to Marie Tardivet.”

“You have just been wed, eh?”

“We are on our way from church, Monseigneur.”

“C'est ca,” he murmured, as if to himself, and his eyes taking such
stock of her as made Charlot burn to tear him from his horse. Then, in a
kindly, fatherly voice, he added: “My felicitations, Marie; may you be a
happy wife and a happier mother.”

“Merci, Monseigneur,” she murmured, with crimson cheeks, whilst Charlot
breathed once more, and from his heart gave thanks to Heaven, believing
the interview at an end. But he went too fast.

“Do you know, Marie, that you are a very comely child?” quoth the
Marquis, in tones which made the bridegroom's blood run cold.

Some in that noble company nudged one another, and one there was who
burst into a loud guffaw.

“Charlot has often told me so,” she laughed, all unsuspicious.

The Marquis moved on his horse that he might bend lower. With his
forefinger he uptilted her chin, and now, as she met his glance thus at
close quarters, an unaccountable fear took possession of her, and the
colour died out of her plump cheeks.

“Yes,” said Bellecour, with a smile, “this Tardivet has good taste. My
congratulations, to him. We must find you a wedding gift, little woman,”
 he continued more briskly. “It is an ancient and honoured custom that is
falling somewhat into neglect. Go up to the Chateau with Blaise and Jean
there. This good Tardivet must curb his impatience until to-morrow.”

He turned in his saddle, and beckoning the two servants he had named, he
bade Marie to mount behind Blaise.

She drew back now, her cheeks white as those of the dead. With a wild
terror in her eyes she turned to Charlot, who stood the very picture of
anguish and impotent rage. In the cortege, where but a few moments ago
all had been laughter, a sob or two sounded now from some of the women.

“By my faith,” laughed Bellecour contemptuously eyeing their dejection,
“you have more the air of a burial than a bridal party.”

“Mercy my lord!” cried the agonised voice of Charlot, as, distraught
with grief, he flung himself before the Marquis.

“Who seeks to harm you, fool?” was Bellecour's half-derisive rejoinder.

“Do not take her from me, my lord,” the young man pleaded piteously.

“She shall return to-morrow, booby,” answered the noble. “Out of the
way!”

But Charlot was obstinate. The Marquis might be claiming no more than
by ancient law was the due of the Seigneur, but Charlot was by no means
minded to submit in craven acquiescence to that brutal, barbarous law.

“My lord,” he cried, “you shall not take her. She is my wife. She
belongs to me. You shall not take her!”

He caught hold of the Marquis's bridle with such a strength and angry
will that the horse was forced to back before him.

“Insolent clod!” exclaimed Bellecour, with an angry laugh and a sharp,
downward blow of the butt of his whip upon the peasant's head. Charlot's
hand grew nerveless and released the bridle as he sank stunned to the
ground. Bellecour touched his horse with the spur and rode over the
prostrate fellow with no more concern than had he been a dog's carcase.
“Blaise, see to the girl,” he called over his shoulder, adding to his
company: “Come, messieurs, we have wasted time enough.”

Not a hand was raised to stay him, not a word of protest uttered, as the
nobles rode by, laughing, and chatting among themselves, with the utmost
unconcern of the tragedy that was being enacted.

Like a flock of frightened sheep the peasants stood huddled together and
watched them go. In the same inaction--for all that not a little grief
was blent with the terror on their countenances--they stood by and
allowed Blaise to lift the half-swooning girl to the withers of his
horse. No reply had they to the coarse jest with which he and his
fellow-servant rode off. But La Boulaye, who, from the point where he
and Duhamel had halted, had observed the whole scene from its inception,
turned now a livid face upon his companion.

“Shall such things be?” he cried passionately. “Merciful God! Are we
men, Duhamel, and do we permit such things to take place?”

The old pedagogue shrugged his shoulders in despair. His face was
heavily scored by sorrow.

“Helas!” he sighed. “Are they not masters of all that they may take? The
Marquis goes no further than is by ancient law allowed his class. It
is the law needs altering, my friend, and then the men will alter.
Meanwhile, behold them--lords of life and death.”

“Lords of hell are they!” blazed the young revolutionist. “That is
where they belong, whence they are come, and whither they shall return.
Poltroons!” he cried, shaking his fist at the group of cowed peasants
that surrounded the prostrate Charlot “Sheep! Worthless clods! The
nobles do well to despise you, for, by my faith, you invite nothing but
contempt, you that will suffer rape and murder to be done under your
eyes, and never do more than look scared encouragement upon your
ravishers!”

“Blame not these poor wretches, Caron,” sighed the old man. “They dare
not raise a hand.”

“Then, pardieu! here, at least, is one who does dare,” he cried
furiously, as from the breast pocket of his coat he drew a pistol.

Blaise, with the girl across the withers of his horse, was approaching
them, followed by Jean.

“What would you do?” cried the old man fearfully, setting a restraining
hand upon La Boulaye's sleeve. But Caron shook himself free.

“This,” was all he answered, and simultaneously, he levelled his pistol
and fired at Blaise.

Shot through the head, the servant collapsed forward; then, as the horse
reared and started off at a gallop, he toppled sideways and fell. The
girl went down with him and lay in the road whilst he was dragged along,
his head bumping horribly on the stones as faster and faster went the
frightened horse.

With a shout that may have been either anger or dismay Jean reined
in his horse, and sat for a second hesitating whether to begin by
recovering the girl, or avenging his comrade. But his doubts were solved
for him by La Boulaye, who took a deliberate aim at him.

“Begone!” cried the secretary, “unless you prefer to go by the road I've
sent your fellow.” And being a discreet youth, Jean made off in silence
by the street down which poor Blaise had been dragged.

“Carom” cried Duhamel, in a frenzy of apprehension. “I tremble for you,
my son. Fly from Bellecour at once--now, this very instant. Go to my
friends at Amiens; they will--”

But Caron had already left his side to repair to the spot where Marie
was lying. The peasantry followed him, though leisurely, in their timid
hesitation. They were asking themselves whether, even so remotely as by
tending the girl, they dared participate in the violence La Boulaye had
committed. That a swift vengeance would be the Seigneur's answer
they were well assured, and a great fear possessed them that in that
vengeance those of the Chateau might lack discrimination. Charlot was
amongst them, and on his feet, but still too dazed to have a clear
knowledge of the circumstances. Presently, however, his faculties
awakening and taking in the situation, he staggered forward, and came
lurching towards La Boulaye, who was assisting the frightened Marie to
rise. With a great sob the girl flung herself into her husband's arms.

“Charlot, mon Charlot!” she cried, and added a moment later: “It was
he--this brave gentleman--who rescued me.”

“Monsieur,” said Charlot, “I shall remember it to my dying day.”

He would have said more, but the peasants, stirred by fear, now roused
themselves and plucked at his coat.

“Get you gone, Charlot, Get you gone quickly,” they advised him. “And if
you are wise you will leave Bellecour without delay. It is not safe for
you here.”

“It is not safe for any of us,” exclaimed one. “I have no mind to be
caught when the Seigneur returns. There will be a vengeance. Ah Dieu!
what a vengeance!”

The warning acted magically. There were hurried leave-takings, and then,
like a parcel of scuttling rabbits, they made for their burrows to hide
from the huntsman that would not be long in coming. And ere the last of
them was out of sight there arose a stamping of hoofs and a chorus
of angry voices. Down tine street thundered the Marquis's cavalcade,
brought back by the servant who had escaped and who had ridden after
them. Some anger there was--particularly in the heart of the Lord of
Bellecour--but greater than their anger was their excitement at the
prospect of a man-hunt, with which the chase on which they had been
originally bent made but a poor comparison.

“There he is, Monseigneur” cried Jean, as he pointed to La Boulaye. “And
yonder are the girl and her husband.”

“Ah! The secretary again, eh?” laughed the nobleman, grimly, as he
came nearer. “Ma foi, life must have grown wearisome to him. Secure the
woman, Jean.”

Caron stood before him, pale in his impotent rage, which was directed
as much against the peasants who had fled as against the nobles who
approached. Had these clods but stood there, and defended themselves and
their manhood with sticks and stones and such weapons as came to their
hands, they might have taken pride in being trampled beneath the hoofs
of the Seigneurie. Thus, at least, might they have proved themselves
men. But to fly thus--some fifty of them from the approach of less than
a score--was to confess unworthiness of a better fate than that of which
their seigneurs rendered themselves the instruments.

Himself he could do no more than the single shot in his pistol would
allow. That much, however, he would do, and like him whose resources
are reduced, and yet who desires to spend the little that he has to best
advantage, he levelled the weapon boldly at the advancing Marquis, and
pulled the trigger. But Bellecour was an old campaigner, and by an old
campaigner's trick he saved himself at the last moment. At sight of that
levelled barrel he pulled his horse suddenly on to its haunches, and
received the charge in the animal's belly. With a shriek of pain the
horse sought to recover its feet, then tumbled forward hurling the
Marquis from the saddle. La Boulaye had an inspiration to fling himself
upon the old roue and seek with his hands to kill him before they
made an end of himself. But ere he could move to execute his design a
horseman was almost on top of him. He received a stunning blow on the
head. The daylight faded in his eyes, he felt a sensation of sinking,
and a reverberating darkness engulfed him.




CHAPTER III. THE WORD OF BELLECOUR


When La Boulaye recovered consciousness he was lying on his back in the
middle of the courtyard of the Chateau de Bellecour. From a great stone
balcony above, a little group, of which Mademoiselle de Bellecour
was the centre, observed the scene about the captive, who was being
resuscitated that he might fittingly experience the Seigneur's
vengeance.

She had returned from the morning's affair in the park with a conscience
not altogether easy. To have stood by whilst her father had struck
Caron, and moreover, to have done so without any sense of horror, or
even of regret, was a matter in which she asked herself whether she had
done well. Certainly La Boulaye had presumed unpardonably in speaking
to her as he had spoken, and for his presumption it was fitting that
he should be punished. Had she interfered she must have seemed to
sympathise, and thus the lesson might have suffered in salutariness.
And yet Caron La Boulaye was a man of most excellent exterior, and, when
passion had roused him out of his restraint and awkwardness, of most
ardent and eloquent address. The very sombreness that--be it from his
mournful garments or from a mind of thoughtful habit--seemed to envelop
him was but an additional note of poetry in a personality which struck
her now as eminently poetical. In the seclusion of her own chamber, as
she recalled the burning words and the fall of her father's whip upon
the young man's pale face, she even permitted herself to sigh. Had he
but been of her own station, he had been such a man as she would have
taken pride in being wooed by. As it was--she halted there and laughed
disdainfully, yet with never so faint a note of regret. It was absurd!
She was Mademoiselle de Bellecour, and he her father's secretary;
educated, if you will--aye, and beyond his station--but a vassal withal,
and very humbly born. Yes, it was absurd, she told herself again: the
eagle may not mate with the sparrow.

And when presently she had come from her chamber, she had been
greeted with the story of a rebellion in the village, and an attempted
assassination of her father. The ringleader, she was told, had been
brought to the Chateau, and he was even then in the courtyard and about
to be hanged by the Marquis. Curious to behold this unfortunate, she had
stepped out on to the balcony where already an idle group had formed.
Inexpressible had been her shock upon seeing him that lay below, his
white face upturned to the heavens, his eyes closed.

“Is he dead?” she asked, when presently she had overcome her feelings.

“Not yet Mademoiselle,” answered the graceful Chevalier de Jacquelin,
toying with his solitaire. “Your father is bringing him to life that he
may send him back to death.”

And then she heard her father's voice behind her. The Marquis had
stepped out on to the balcony to ascertain whether La Boulaye had yet
regained consciousness.

“He seems to be even now recovering,” said someone.

“Ah, you are there, Suzanne,” cried Bellecour. “You see your friend the
secretary there. He has chosen to present himself in a new role to-day.
From being my servant, it seems that he would constitute himself my
murderer.”

However unfilial it might be, she could not stifle a certain sympathy
for this young man. She imagined that his rebellion, whatever shape it
had assumed, had been provoked by that weal upon his face; and it seemed
to her then that he had been less than a man had he not attempted to
exact some reparation for the hurt the whip had inflicted at once upon
his body and his soul.

“But what is it that he has done, Monsieur?” she asked, seeking more
than the scant information which so far she had received.

“Enough, at least, to justify my hanging him,” answered Bellecour
grimly. “He sought to withstand my authority; he incited the peasants
of Bellecour to withstand it; he has killed Blaise, and he would have
killed me but that I preferred to let him kill my horse.”

“In what way did he seek to withstand your authority!” she persisted.

He stared at her, half surprised, half angry.

“What doers the manner of it signify?” he asked impatiently. “Is not the
fact enough? Is it not enough that Blaise is dead, and that I have had a
narrow escape, at his hands?”

“Insolent hound that he is!” put in Madame la Marquise--a fleshly lady
monstrously coiffed. “If we allow such men as thus to live in France our
days are numbered.”

“They say that you are going to hang him,” said Suzanne, heedless of her
mother's words, and there was the faintest note of horror in her voice.

“They are mistaken. I am not.”

“You are not?” cried the Marquise. “But what, then, do you intend to
do?”

“To keep my word, madame,” he answered her. “I promised that canaille
that if he ever came within the grounds of Bellecour I would have him
flogged to death. That is what I propose.”

“Father,” gasped Suzanne, in horror, a horror that was echoed by the
other three or four ladies present. But the Marquise only laughed.

“He will be; richly served,” she approved, with a sage nod of her
pumpkin-like head-dress--“most richly served.”

A great pity arose now in the heart of Mademoiselle, as her father went
below that he might carry out his barbarous design. She was deaf to
the dainty trifles which the most elegant Chevalier de Jacquelin was
murmuring into her ear. She stood, a tall, queenly figure, at the
balcony's parapet and watched the preparations that were being made.

She heard her father's harshly-voiced commands. She saw them literally
tear the clothes from the unfortunate secretary's back, and lash
him--naked to the waist--to the pump that stood by the horse-trough at
the far end of the yard. His body was now hidden from her sight, but his
head appeared surmounting the pillar of the pump, his chin seeming to
rest upon its summit, and his face was towards her. At his side stood a
powerful knave armed with a stout, leather-thonged whip.

“How many strokes, Monseigneur?” she heard the man inquire.

“How many?” echoed the Marquise. “Do I know how many it will take to
make an end of him? Beat him to death, man. Allons! Set about it.”

She saw the man uncoil his lash and step forward. In that instant
Caron's eyes were raised, and they met hers across the intervening
space. He smiled a valedictory smile that seemed to make her heart stand
still. She and her mother were now the only women on the balcony.
The others had made haste to withdraw as soon as La Boulaye had
been pilloried. The Marquise remained because she seemed to find
entertainment in the spectacle. Suzanne remained because horror rooted
her to the spot--horror and a great pity for this unfortunate who had
looked so strong and brave that morning, when he had had the audacity to
tell her that he loved her.

The lash sang through the air, quivered, hummed, and cut with a
sickening crackle into the young man's flesh.

The hideous sound roused her. She shuddered from head to foot, and
turning she put her hands to her face and rushed within, followed by the
Marquise's derisive laughter.

“Mon Dieu! It is horrible! Horrible!” she cried as she sank into the
nearest chair, and clapped her hands to her ears. But she could not shut
it out. Still she heard the humming of the whip and the cruel sound of
the falling blows. Mechanically she counted them, unconsciously almost,
and at twenty she heard them cease. Was it over? Was he dead, this poor
unfortunate? Moved by a curiosity that was greater than her loathing,
she rose and went to the threshold of the balcony.

“Is it ended?” she asked.

“Ended?” echoed Monsieur de Jacquelin, with a shrug. “It is scarce
begun, it seems. The executioner is pausing for breath, that is all. The
fellow has not uttered a sound. He is as obstinate as a mule.”

“As enduring as a Spartan,” more generously put in the Vicomte, her
brother. “Look at him, Suzanne.”

Almost involuntarily she obeyed, and moved forward a step that she
might behold him. A face, deathly pale, she saw, which in the sunshine
glistened with the sweat of agony that bedewed it; but the lips were
tightly closed and the countenance grimly expressionless. Even as she
looked she heard her father command the man to lay on anew. Then, as
before, his eyes met hers; but this time no smile did she see investing
them.

Again the whip cracked and fell. She drew back, but his glance seemed
to haunt her even when she no longer saw his face. A sudden resolution
moved her, and in a frenzy of anger and compassion she flung out of
the room. A moment later she burst like a beautiful virago into the
courtyard.

“Stop!” she commanded shrilly, causing both her father and the
executioner to turn, and the latter pausing in his hideous work. But a
glance from the Marquis bade him resume, and resume he did, as though
there had been no interruption.

“What is this?” demanded Bellecour, half amused, half vexed, whilst a
sudden new light leapt to the eyes of La Boulaye, which but a moment
back had been so full of agony.

But Mademoiselle never paused to answer her father. Seeing the
executioner proceeding, despite her call to cease, she sprang upon him,
caught him by the arms and wrested the whip from hands that dared not
resist her.

“Did I not bid you stop?” she blazed, her face white, her eyes on fire;
and raising the whip she brought it down upon his head and shoulders,
not once but half-a-dozen times in quick succession, until he fled,
howling, to the other side of the horse trough for shelter. “It stings
you, does it” she cried, whilst the Marquis, from angered that at first
he had been, now burst into a laugh at her fury and at this turning of
tables upon the executioner. She made shift to pursue the fellow to his
place of refuge, but coming of a sudden upon the ghastly sight presented
by La Boulaye's lacerated back, she drew back in horror. Then, mastering
herself--for girl though she was, her courage was of a high order--she
turned to her father.

“Give this man to me, Monsieur,” she begged.

“To you!” he exclaimed. “What will you do with him?”

“I will see that you are rid of him,” she promised. “What more can you
desire? You have tortured him enough.”

“Maybe. But am I to blame that he dies so hard?”

She answered him with renewed insistence, and unexpectedly she received
an ally in M. des Cadoux--an elderly gentleman who had been observing
the flogging with disapproval, and who had followed her into the
courtyard.

“He is too brave a man to die like this, Bellecour,” put in the
newcomer. “I doubt if he can survive the punishment he has already
received. Yet I would ask you, in the name of courage, to give him the
slender chance he may have.”

“I promised him he should be flogged to death--” began the Marquis,
when Des Cadoux and Mademoiselle jointly interrupted him to renew their
intercessions.

“But, sangdieu,” the Marquis protested “you seem to forget that he has
killed one of my servants.”

“Why, then, you should have hanged him out of hand, not tortured him
thus,” answered Des Cadoux shortly.

For a moment it almost seemed as if the pair of them would have fallen
a-quarrelling. Their words grew more heated, and then, while they were
still wrangling, the executioner came forward to solve matters with the
news that the secretary had expired. To Bellecour this proved a very
welcome conclusion.

“Most opportunely!” he laughed “Had the rascal lived another minute I
think we had quarrelled, Cadoux.” He turned to the servant, “You are
certain that it is so?” he asked.

“Look, Monsieur,” said the fellow, as he pointed with his whip to the
pilloried figure of La Boulaye. The Marquis looked, and saw that the
secretary had collapsed, and hung limp in his bonds, his head fallen
back upon his shoulders and his eyes closed.

With a shrug and a short laugh Bellecour turned to his daughter.

“You may take the carrion, if you want to. But I think you can do no
more than order it to be flung into a ditch and buried there.”

But she had no mind to be advised by him. She had the young man's body
cut down from the pump, and she bade a couple of servants convey it to
the house of Master Duhamel, she for remembered that La Boulaye and the
old pedagogue were friends.

“An odd thing is a woman's heart,” grumbled the Marquis, who begrudged
La Boulaye even his last act of mercy. “She may care never a fig for a
man, and yet, if he has but told her that he loves her, be he never
so mean and she never so exalted, he seems thereby to establish some
measure of claim to her.”




CHAPTER IV. THE DISCIPLES OF ROUSSEAU


The Marquis of Bellecour would, perhaps have philosophised less
complacently had he known that the secretary was far from dead, and that
what the executioner had, genuinely enough, mistaken for death was no
more than a passing swoon. Under ordinary circumstances he might not
have been satisfied to have taken the fellow's word; he would himself
have ascertained the truth of the statement by a close inspection of the
victim. But, as we have seen, the news came as so desirable a solution
to the altercation that was waxing 'twixt himself and Des Cadoux that he
was more than glad to avail himself of it.

The discovery that Caron lived was made while they were cutting him down
from his pillory, and just as the Marquis was turning to go within. A
flutter of the eyelids and a gasp for breath announced the fact, and
the executioner was on the point of crying out his discovery when
Mademoiselle's eyes flashed him a glance of warning, and her voice
whispered feverishly:

“Hush! There are ten louis for each of you if you but keep silent and
carry him to Master Duhamel as I told you.”

The secretary opened his eyes but saw nothing, and a low moan escaped
him. She shot a fearful glance at the retreating figure of her father,
whilst Gilles--the executioner--hissed sharply into his ear:

“Mille diables! be still, man. You are dead.”

Thus did he escape, and thus was he borne--a limp, agonised, and
bleeding mass, to the house of Duhamel. The old schoolmaster received
them with tears in his eyes--nor were they altogether tears of sorrow,
for all that poor Caron's mangled condition grieved him sorely; they
were in a measure tears of thankfulness; for Duhamel had not dared hope
to see the young man alive again.

At the pedagogue's door stood a berline, and within his house there was
a visitor. This was a slight young man of medium stature, who had not
the appearance of more than twenty-five years of age, for all that, as
a matter of fact, he was just over thirty. He was dressed with so
scrupulous a neatness as to convey, in spite of the dark colour of his
garments, an impression almost of foppishness. There was an amplitude
about his cravat, an air of extreme care about the dressing of his wig
and the powdering of it, and a shining brightness about his buttons and
the buckles of his shoes which seemed to proclaim the dandy, just as
the sombreness of the colour chosen seemed to deny it. In his singularly
pale countenance a similar contradiction was observable. The weak,
kindly eyes almost appeared to give the lie to the astute prominence of
his cheekbones; the sensitiveness of the mouth seemed neutralised by the
thinness of the lips, whilst the oddly tip-tilted nose made a mock of
the austerity of the brow.

He was perfectly at ease in his surroundings, and as La Boulaye was
carried into the schoolmaster's study and laid on a couch, he came
forward and peered curiously at the secretary's figure, voicing an
inquiry concerning him.

“It is the young man of whom I was telling you, Maximilien,” answered
Duhamel. “I give thanks to God that they have not killed him outright.
It is a mercy I had not expected from those wolves, and one which, on my
soul, I cannot understand.”

“Monsieur,” said Gilles, “will understand it better perhaps if I tell
you that the Marquis believes him to be dead. He was cut down for dead,
and when we discovered that he still lived it was Mademoiselle who
prevailed upon us to save him. She is paying us to keep the secret, but
not a fortune would tempt me if I thought the Seigneur were ever likely
to hear of it. He must be got away from Bellecour; indeed, he must be
got out of Picardy at once, Monsieur. And you must promise me that this
shall be done or we will carry him back to the Chateau and tell the
Marquis that he has suddenly revived. I must insist, Monsieur; for if
ever it should transpire that he was not dead the Seigneur would hang
us.”

The stranger's weak eyes seemed to kindle in anger, and his lips curled
until they exaggerated the already preposterous tilt of his nose.

“He would hang you, eh?” said he. “Ma foi, Duhamel, we shall change all
this very soon, I promise you.”

“God knows it needs changing,” growled Duhamel. “It seems that it was
only in the Old Testament that Heaven interfered with human iniquity.
Why it does not rain fire and brimstone on the Chateau de Bellecour
passes the understanding of a good Christian. I'll swear that in neither
Sodom nor Gomorrah was villainy more rampant.”

The stranger plucked at his sleeve to remind him of the presence of the
servants from the Chateau. Duhamel turned to them.

“I will keep him concealed here until he is able to get about,” he
assured them. “Then I shall find him the means to leave the province.”

But Gilles shook his head, and his companion grunted an echo of his
disapproval.

“That will not serve, master,” he answered sullenly. “What if the
Seigneur should have word of his presence here? It is over-dangerous.
Someone may see him. No, no, Either he leaves Bellecour this very night,
and you swear that he shall, or else we carry him back to the Chateau.”

“But how can I swear this?” cried Duhamel impatiently.

“Why, easily enough,” put in the stranger. “Let me take him in my
berline. I can leave him at Amiens or at Beauvais, or any one of the
convenient places that I pass. Or I can even carry him on to Paris with
me.”

“You are very good, Maximilien,” answered the old man, to which the
other returned a gesture of deprecation.

In this fashion, then, was the matter settled to the satisfaction of the
Seigneur's retainers, and upon having received Duhamel's solemn promise
that Caron should be carried out of Bellecour, and, for that matter, out
of Picardy, before the night was spent, they withdrew.

Within the schoolmaster's study he whom Duhamel called Maximilien strode
to and fro, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bent, his chin
thrust forward, denouncing the seigneurial system, of whose atrocity he
had received that evening instances enough--for he had heard the whole
story of La Boulaye's rebellion against the power of Bellecour and the
causes that had led to it.

“We will mend all this, I promise you, Duhamel,” he was repeating. “But
not until we have united to shield the weak from oppression, to restrain
the arrogant and to secure to each the possession of what belongs to
him; not until all men are free and started upon equal terms in the race
of life; not until we shall have set up rules of justice and of peace,
to which all--rich and poor, noble and simple alike--shall be obliged
to conform. Thus only can we repair the evil done by the caprice of
fortune, which causes the one to be born into silk and the other into
fustian. We must subject the weak and the mighty alike to mutual
duties, collecting our forces into the supreme power to govern us
all impartially by the same laws, to protect alike all members of the
community, to repel our common foes and preserve us in never-ending
concord. How many crimes, murders, wars, miseries, horrors shall thus be
spared us, Duhamel? And it will come; it will come soon, never fear.”

Caron stirred on the couch where Duhamel was tending him, and raised his
head to glance at the man who was voicing the doctrines that for years
had dwelt in his heart.

“Dear Jean Jacques,” he murmured.

The stranger turned sharply and stepped to the young man's side.

“You have read the master?” he inquired, with a sudden, new-born
interest in the secretary.

“Read him?” cried Carom forgetting for the moment the sore condition of
his body in the delight of discovering one who was bound to him by such
bonds of sympathy as old Rousseau established.

“Read him, Monsieur? There is scarce a line in all his 'Discourses' that
I do not know by heart, and that I do not treasure, vaguely hoping
and praying that some day such a state as he dreamt of may find itself
established, and may sweep aside these corrupt, tyrannical conditions.”

Maximilien's eyes kindled.

“Boy,” he answered impressively, “Your hopes are on the eve of fruition,
your prayers are about to be heard. Yes--even though it should entail
trampling the Lilies of France into the very dust.

“Who are you, Monsieur?” asked La Boulaye, eyeing this prophet with
growing interest.

“Robespierre is my name,” was the answer, and to La Boulaye it
conveyed no enlightenment, for the name of Maximilien Marie Isidore de
Robespierre, which within so very short a time was to mean so much in
France, as yet meant nothing.

La Boulaye inclined his head as if acknowledging an introduction, then
turned his attention to Duhamel who was offering him a cup of wine.
He drank gratefully, and the invigorating effects were almost
instantaneous.

“Now let us see to your hurts,” said the schoolmaster, who had taken
some linen and a pot of unguents from a cupboard. La Boulaye sat up, and
what time Duhamel was busy dressing his lacerated back, the young man
talked with Robespierre.

“You are going to Paris, you say, Monsieur?”

“Yes, to the States-General,” answered Maximilien.

“As a deputy?” inquired Caron, with ever-heightening interest.

“As a deputy, Monsieur. My friends of Arras have elected me to the Third
Estate of Artois.”

“Dieu! How I envy you!” exclaimed La Boulaye, to cry out a moment
later in the pain to which Duhamel's well-intentioned operations were
subjecting him. “I would it might be mine,” he added presently, “to
take a hand in legislation, and the mending of it; for as it stands at
present it is inferior far to the lawless anarchy of the aborigines.
Among them, at least, the conditions are more normal, they offer better
balance between faculty and execution; they are by far more propitious
to happiness and order than is this broken wreck of civilisation that
we call France. It is to equality alone,” he continued, warming to
his subject, “that Nature has attached the preservation of our social
faculties, and all legislation that aims at being efficient should
be directed to the establishment of equality. As it is, the rich will
always prefer their own fortune to that of the State, whilst the poor
will never love--nor can love--a condition of laws that leaves them in
misery.”

Robespierre eyed the young man in some surprise. His delivery was
impassioned, and although in what he said there was perhaps nothing that
was fresh to the lawyer of Arras, yet the manner in which he said it was
impressive to a degree.

“But Duhamel,” he cried to the schoolmaster, “you did not tell me this
young patriot was an orator.”

“Nor am I, Monsieur,” smiled La Boulaye. “I am but the mouthpiece of the
great Rousseau. I have so assimilated his thoughts that they come from
me as spontaneously as if they were my own, and often I go so far as to
delude myself into believing that they are.”

No better recommendation than this could he have had to the attention
of Robespierre, who was himself much in the same case, imbued with
and inspired by those doctrines, so ideal in theory, but, alas! so
difficult, so impossible in practice. For fully an hour they sat and
talked, and each improved in his liking of the other, until at last,
bethinking him of the flight of time, Robespierre announced that he must
start.

“You will take him to Paris with you, Maximilien?” quoth the old
pedagogue.

“Ma foi, yes; and if with such gifts as Nature appears to have given
him, and such cultivation of them as, through the teachings of Rousseau,
he has effected, I do not make something of him, why, then, I am
unworthy of the confidence my good friends of Arras repose in me.”

They made their adieux, and the schoolmaster, opening his door, peered
out. The street was deserted save for de Robespierre's berline and his
impatient postillion. Between them Duhamel and Maximilien assisted Caron
to the door of the carriage. The moving subjected him to an excruciating
agony, but he caught his nether lip in his teeth, and never allowed them
to suspect it. As they raised him into the berline, however, he toppled
forward, fainting. Duhamel hastened indoors for a cordial, and brought
also some pillows with which to promote the young man's comfort on the
journey that was before him--or, rather, to lessen the discomfort which
the jolting was likely to occasion him.

Caron recovered before they started, and with tears in his eyes he
thanked old Duhamel and voiced a hope that they might meet again ere
long.

Then Robespierre jumped nimbly into the berline. The door closed, the
postillion's whip cracked briskly, and they set out upon a journey which
to La Boulaye was to be as the passing from one life to another.




PART II. THE NEW RULE

     Allons!  Marchons!
     Qu'un sang impur
     Abreuve nos sillons!
        La Marseillaise.




CHAPTER V. THE SHEEP TURNED WOLVES


There were roars of anger and screams of terror in the night, and above
the Chateau de Bellecour the inky blackness of the heavens was broken by
a dull red glow, which the distant wayfarer might have mistaken for the
roseate tint of dawn, were it possible for the dawn to restrict itself
to so narrow an area.

Ever and anon a tongue of flame would lick up into the night towards
that russet patch of sky, betraying the cause of it and proclaiming
that incendiaries were at work. Above the ominous din that told of
the business afoot there came now and again the crack of a musket,
and dominating all other sounds was the sullen roar of the revolted
peasants, the risen serfs, the rebellious vassals of the Siegneur de
Bellecour.

For time has sped and has much altered in the speeding. Four years have
gone by since the night on which the lacerated Caron la Boulaye was
smuggled out of Bellecour in Robespierre's berline and in that four
years much of the things that were prophesied have come to pass
--aye, and much more besides that was undreamt of at the outset by the
revolutionaries. A gruesome engine that they facetiously called
the National Razor--invented and designed some years ago by one Dr.
Guillotin--is but an item in the changes that have been, yet an item
that in its way has become a very factor. It stands not over-high, yet
the shadow of it has fallen athwart the whole length and breadth of
France, and in that shadow the tyrants have trembled, shaken to the very
souls of them by the rude hand of fear; in that shadow the spurned and
downtrodden children of the soil have taken heart of grace. The bonds
of servile cowardice that for centuries had trammelled them have been
shaken off like cobwebs, and they that were as sheep are now become the
wolves that prey on those that preyed on them for generations.

There is, in the whole of France, no corner so remote but that, sooner
or later, this great upheaval has penetrated to it. Louis XVI.--or
Louis Capet, as he is now more generally spoken of--has been arraigned,
condemned and executed. The aristocrats are in full emigratory flight
across the frontiers--those that have not been rent by the vassals they
had brought to bay, the people they had outraged. The Lilies of France
lie trampled under foot in the shambles they have made of that fair
land, whilst overhead the tricolour--that symbol of the new trinity,
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--is flaunted in the breeze.

A few of the more proud and obstinate--so proud and obstinate as to find
it a thing incredible that the order should indeed change and the old
regime pass away--still remain, and by their vain endeavours to lord
it in their castles provoke such scenes as that enacted at Bellecour in
February of '93 (by the style of slaves) or Pluviose of the year One
of the French Republic, as it shall presently come to be known in the
annals of the Revolution.

Bellecour, the most arrogant of arrogants, had stood firm, and
desperately contrived through all these months of revolution to maintain
his dominion in his corner of Picardy. But even he was beginning to
realise that the end was at hand, and he made his preparations to
emigrate. Too proud, however, to permit his emigration to savour of a
flight, he carried the leisureliness of his going to dangerous extremes.
And now, on the eve of departure, he must needs pause to give a fete
at once of farewell and in honour of his daughter's betrothal to the
Vicomte Anatole d'Ombreval. This very betrothal at so unpropitious a
season was partly no more than contrived by the Marquis that he might
mark his ignoring and his serene contempt of the upheaval and the new
rule which it had brought.

All that was left of the noblesse in Picardy had flocked that day to the
Chateau de Bellecour, and the company there assembled numbered perhaps
some thirty gallants and some twenty ladies. A banquet there had been,
which in the main was a gloomy function, for the King's death was too
recent a matter to be utterly lost sight of. Later, however, as the
generous supply of wine did its work and so far thawed the ice of
apprehension that bound their souls as to dispose them to enjoy, at
least, the present hour in forgetfulness, there was a better humour in
the air. This developed, and so far indeed did it go that in the evening
a Pavane was suggested, and, the musicians being found, it was held in
the great salon of the Chateau.

It was then that the first alarm had penetrated to their midst. It had
found them a recklessly merry crew, good to behold in their silks and
satins, powder and patches, gold lace and red heels, moving with waving
fans, or hand on sword, and laced beaver under elbow, through the
stately figures of the gavotte.

Scared, white-faced lackeys had brought the news, dashing wildly in
upon that courtly assembly. The peasants had risen and were marching on
Bellecour.

Some of his sudden rage the Marquis vented by striking the servants'
spokesman in the face.

“Dare you bring me such a message?” he cried furiously.

“But, my lord, what are we to do?” gasped the frightened lackey.

“Do, fool?” returned Bellecour. “Why, close the gates and bid them
return home as they value their lives. For if they give me trouble I'll
hang a round dozen of them.”

Still was there that same big talk of hanging men. Still did it seem
that the Marquis of Bellecour accounted himself the same lord of life
and death that he and his forbears had been for generations. But there
were others who thought differently. The music had ceased abruptly, and
a little knot of gentlemen now gathered about the host, and urged him to
take some measures of precaution. In particular they desired to ensure
the safety of the ladies who were being thrown into a great state of
alarm, so that of some of these were the screams that were heard in that
night of terror. Bellecour's temper was fast gaining, and as he
lost control of himself the inherent brutality of his character came
uppermost.

“Mesdames,” he cried rudely, “this screeching will profit us nothing.
Even if we must die, let us die becomingly, not shrieking like butchered
geese.”

A dozen men raised their voices angrily against him in defence of the
women he had slighted. But he waved them impatiently away.

“Is this an hour in which to fall a-quarrelling among ourselves?” he
exclaimed. “Or do you think it one in which a man can stop to choose his
words? Sang-dieu! That screaming is a more serious matter than at first
may seem. If these rebellious dogs should chance to hear it, it will be
but so much encouragement to them. A fearless front, a cold contempt,
are weapons unrivalled if you would prevail against these mutinous
cravens.”

But his guests were insistent that something more than fearless fronts
and cold contempts should be set up as barriers between themselves and
the advancing peasantry. And in the end Bellecour impatiently quitted
the room to give orders for the barricading of the gates and the
defending of the Chateau, leaving behind him in the salon the very
wildest of confusions.

From the windows the peasantry could now be seen, by the light of their
torches, marching up the long avenue that fronted the Chateau, and
headed by a single drum on which the bearer did no more than beat the
step. They were a fierce, unkempt band, rudely armed--some with scythes,
some with sickles, some with hedge-knives, and some with hangers; whilst
here and there was one who carried a gun, and perhaps a bayonet as well.
Nor were there men only in the rebellious ranks. There were an almost
equal number of women in crimson caps, their bosoms bare, their heads
dishevelled, their garments filthy and in rags--for the tooth of poverty
had bitten deeply into them during the past months.

As they swung along to the rhythmical thud of the drum, their voices
were raised in a fearful chorus that must have made one think of the
choirs of hell, and the song they sang was the song of Rouget de l'Isle,
which all France had been singing these twelve months past:

   “Aux armes, citoyens!
    Formez vos bataillons.
    Allons, marchons!
    Qu'un sang inpur
    Abreuve nos sillons!”

Ever swelling as they drew nearer came the sound of that terrible
hymn to the ears of the elegant, bejewelled, bepowdered company in the
Chateau. The gates were reached and found barred. An angry roar went up
to Heaven, followed by a hail of blows upon the stout, ironbound oak,
and an imperious call to open.

In the courtyard below the Marquis had posted the handful of servants
that remained faithful--for reasons that Heaven alone may discern--to
the fortunes of the house. He had armed them with carbines and supplied
them with ammunition. He had left them orders to hold off the mob from
the outer gates as long as possible; but should these be carried, they
were to fall back into the Chateau itself, and make fast the doors.
Meanwhile, he was haranguing the gentlemen--some thirty of them, as we
have seen--in the salon and urging them to arm themselves so that they
might render assistance.

His instances were met with a certain coldness, which at last was given
expression by the most elegant Vicomte d'Ombreval--the man who was about
to become his son-in-law.

“My dear Marquis,” protested the young man, his habitually supercilious
mouth looking even more supercilious than usual as he now spoke, “I beg
that you will consider what you are proposing. We are your guests, we
others, and you ask us to defend your gates against your own people
for you! Surely, surely, sir, your first duty should have been to have
ensured our safety against such mutinies on the part of the rabble of
Bellecour.”

The Seigneur angrily stamped his foot. In his choler he was within
an ace of striking Ombreval, and might have done so had not the
broad-minded and ever-reasonable old Des Cadoux interposed at that
moment to make clear to the Marquis's guests a situation than which
nothing could have been clearer. He put it to them that the times
were changed, and that France was no longer what France had been; that
allowances must be made for M. de Bellecour, who was in no better case
than any other gentleman in that unhappy country! and finally, that
either they must look to arming and defending themselves or they must
say their prayers and submit to being butchered with the ladies.

“For ourselves,” he concluded calmly, tapping his gold snuffbox and
holding it out to Bellecour, for all the world with the air of one
who was discussing the latest fashion in wigs, “I can understand your
repugnance at coming to blows with this obscene canaille. It is doing
them an honour of which they are not worthy. But we have these ladies
to think of, Messieurs, and--” he paused to apply the rappee to
his nostrils--“and we must exert ourselves to save them, however
disagreeable the course we may be compelled to pursue. Messieurs, I am
the oldest here; permit that I show you the way.”

His words were not without effect; they kindled chivalry in hearts that,
after all, were nothing if not prone to chivalry--according to their own
lights--and presently something very near enthusiasm prevailed. But the
supercilious and very noble Ombreval still grumbled.

“To ask me to fight this scum!” he ejaculated in horror “Pardi! It is
too much. Ask me to beat them off with a whip like a pack of curs, and
I'll do it readily. But fight them--!”

“Nothing could delight us more, Vicomte, than to see you beat them off
with a whip,” Des Cadoux assured him. “Arm yourself with a whip, by all
means, my friend, and let us witness the prodigies you can perform with
it.”

“See what valour inflames the Vicomte, Suzanne,” sneered a handsome
woman into Mademoiselle's ear. “With what alacrity he flies to arms that
he may defend you, even with his life.”

“M. d'Ombreval is behaving according to his lights,” answered Suzanne
coldly.

“Ma foi, then his lights are unspeakably dim,” was the contemptuous
answer.

Mademoiselle gave no outward sign of the deep wound her pride
was receiving. The girl of nineteen, who had scorned the young
secretary-lover in the park of Bellecour that morning four years ago,
was developed into a handsome lady of three-and-twenty.

“It would be beneath the dignity of his station to soil his hands in
such a conflict as my father has suggested,” she said at last.

“I wonder would it be beneath the dignity of his courage,” mused the
same caustic friend. “But surely not, for nothing could be beneath
that.”

“Madame!” exclaimed Suzanne, her cheeks reddening; for as of old, and
like her father, she was quickly moved to anger. “Will it please you to
remember that M. d'Ombreval is my affianced husband?”

“True,” confessed the lady, no whit abashed. “But had I not been told so
I had accounted him your rejected suitor, who, broken-hearted, gives no
thought either to his own life or to yours.”

In a pet, Mademoiselle gave her shoulder to the speaker and turned
away. In spite of the words with which she had defended him, Suzanne
was disappointed in her betrothed, and yet, in a way, she understood his
bearing to be the natural fruit of that indomitable pride of which she
had observed the outward signs, and for which, indeed as much as for the
beauty of his person, she had consented to become his wife. After all,
it was the outward man she knew. The marriage had been arranged, and
this was but their third meeting, whilst never for an instant had they
been alone together. By her mother she had been educated up to the
idea that it was eminently desirable she should become the Vicomtesse
d'Ombreval. At first she had endured dismay at the fact that she had
never beheld the Vicomte, and because she imagined that he would be,
most probably, some elderly roue, as did so often fall to the lot of
maidens in her station. But upon finding him so very handsome to behold,
so very noble of bearing, so lofty and disdainful that as he walked he
seemed to spurn the very earth, she fell enamoured of him out of very
relief, as well as because he was the most superb specimen of the other
sex that it had ever been hers to observe.

And now that she had caught a glimpse of the soul that dwelt
beneath that mass of outward perfections it had cost her a pang of
disappointment, and the poisonous reflection cast upon his courage by
that sardonic lady with whom she had talked was having its effect.

But the time was too full of other trouble to permit her to indulge her
thoughts overlong upon such a matter. A volley of musketry from below
came to warn them of the happenings there. The air was charged with the
hideous howls of the besieging mob, and presently there was a cry
from one of the ladies, as a sudden glare of light crimsoned the
window-panes.

“What is that?” asked Madame de Bellecour of her husband.

“They have fired the stables,” he answered, through set teeth. “I
suppose they need light to guide them in their hell's work.”

He strode to the glass doors opening to the balcony the same balcony
from which four years ago his guests had watched the flogging of La
Boulaye--and, opening them, he passed out. His appearance was greeted by
a storm of execration. A sudden shot rang out, and the bullet, striking
the wall immediately above him, brought down a shower of plaster on his
head. It had been fired by a demoniac who sat astride the great gates
waving his discharged carbine and yelling such ordures of speech as it
had never been the most noble Marquis's lot to have stood listening to.
Bellecour never flinched. As calmly as if nothing had happened, he leant
over the parapet and called to his men below.

“Hold, there! Of what are you dreaming slumberers. Shoot me that fellow
down.”

Their guns had been discharged, but one of them, who had now completed
his reloading, levelled the carbine and fired. The figure on the gates
seemed to leap up from his sitting posture, and then with a scream he
went over, back to his friends without.

The fired stables were burning gaily by now, and the cheeriest bonfire
man could have desired on a dark night, and in the courtyard it was
become as light as day.

The Marquis on the balcony was taking stock of his defences and making
rapid calculations in his mind. He saw no reason why, so well
protected by those stout oaken gates they should not--if they were but
resolute--eventually beat back the mob. And then, even as his courage
was rising at the thought, a deafening explosion seemed to shake the
entire Chateau, and the gates--their sole buckler, upon whose shelter he
had been so confidently building--crashed open, half blown away by the
gunpowder keg that had been fired against it.

He had a fleeting glimpse of a stream of black fiends pouring through
the dark gap and dashing with deafening yells into the crimson light
of the courtyard. He saw his little handful of servants retreat
precipitately within the Chateau. He heard the clang of the doors
that were swung to just as the foremost of the rabble reached the
threshold--With all this clearly stamped upon his mind, he turned, and
springing into the salon he drew his sword.

“To the stairs, Messieurs!” he cried “To the stairs!”

And to the stairs they went. The extremity was now too great for
argument. They dared not so much as look at their women-folk, lest they
should be unmanned by the sight of those huddled creatures--their finery
but serving to render them the more pitiable in their sickly affright.
In a body the whole thirty of them swept from the room, and with
Bellecour at their head and Ombreval somewhere in the rearmost rank,
they made their way to the great staircase.

Here, armed with their swords and a brace of pistols to each man, whilst
for a few the Marquis had even found carbines, they waited, with faces
set and lips tight pressed for the end that they knew approached.

Nor was their waiting long. As the peasants had blown down the gates so
now did they blow down the doors of the Chateau, and in the explosion
three of Bellecour's servants--who had stood too near--were killed. Over
the threshold they swarmed into the dark gulf of the great hall to the
foot of the staircase. But here they were at a disadvantage. The light
of the burning stables, shining through the open doorway, revealed them
to the defenders, whilst they themselves looked up into the dark. There
was a sudden cracking of pistols and a few louder reports from the guns,
and the mob fled, screaming, back into the yard, leaving a score of dead
and wounded on the polished floor of the hall.

Old M. des Cadoux laughed in the dark, as with his sword hanging from
his wrist he tapped his snuff-box.

“Ma foi,” said he to his neighbour, “they are discovering that it is
not to be the triumphal march they had expected. A pinch of rappee,
Stanislas?”

But the respite was brief. In a moment they saw the glare increase at
the door, and presently a half-dozen of the rabble entered with torches,
followed by some scores of their comrades. They paused at sight of
that company ranged upon the stairs, as well they might, for a more
incongruous sight could scarcely be imagined. Across the bodies of the
slain, and revealed by the lifting powder smoke, stood that little band
of thirty men, a blaze of gay colours, a sheen of silken hose, their
wigs curled and powdered, their costly ruffles scintillant with jewels;
calm, and supercilious, mocking to a man. There was a momentary gasp
of awe, and then the spell was broken by the aristocrats themselves. A
pistol spoke, and a volley followed. In the hall some stumbled forward,
some hurtled backward, and some sank down in nerveless heaps. But those
that remained did not again retreat. Reinforced by others, that crowded
in behind, they charged boldly up the stairs, headed by a ragged,
red capped giant named Souvestre--a man whom the Marquis had once
irreparably wronged.

The sight of him was a revelation to Bellecour. This assault was
Souvestre's work; the fellow had been inciting the people of Bellecour
for the past twelve months, long indeed before the outbreak of the
revolution proper, and at last he had roused them to the pitch of
accompanying him upon his errand of tardy but relentless vengeance.

With a growl the Marquis raised his pistol. But Souvestre saw the
movement, and with a laugh he did the like. Simultaneously there were
two reports, and Bellecour's arm fell shattered to his side. Souvestre
continued to advance, his smoking pistol in one hand and brandishing
a huge sabre with the other. Behind him, howling and roaring like the
beasts of prey they were become, surged the tenantry of Bellecour to pay
the long-standing debt of hate to their seigneur.

“Here,” said Des Cadoux, with a grimace, “endeth the chapter of our
lives. I wonder, do they keep rappee in heaven?” He snapped down the lid
of his gold snuffbox--that faithful companion and consoler of so
many years--and cast it viciously at the head of one of the oncoming
peasants. Then tossing back the lace from his wrist he brought his sword
into guard and turned aside a murderous stroke which an assailant aimed
at him.

“Animal,” he snapped viciously, as he set to work, “it is the first time
that my chaste blade has been crossed with such dirty steel as yours. I
hope, for the honour of Cadoux, that it may not be quite the last.”

Up, and ever up, swept that murderous tide. The half of those that
had held the stairs lay weltering upon them as if in a last attempt to
barricade with their bodies what they could no longer defend with their
hands. A bare half-score remained standing, and amongst these
that gallant old Cadoux, who had by now accounted for a half-dozen
sans-culottes, and was hence in high glee, a man rejuvenesced. His
sallies grew livelier and more barbed as the death-tide rose higher
about him. His one regret was that he had been so hasty in casting his
snuff box from him, for he was missing its familiar stimulus. At his
side the Marquis was fighting desperately, fencing with his left arm,
and in the hot excitement seeming oblivious of the pain his broken right
must be occasioning.

“It is ended, old friend,” he groaned at last, to Des Cadoux. “I am
losing strength, and I shall be done for in a moment. The women,” he
almost sobbed, “mon Dieu, the women!”

Des Cadoux felt his old eyes grow moist, and the odd, fierce mirth that
seemed to have hitherto infected him went out like a candle that
is snuffed. But suddenly before he could make any answer, a new and
unexpected sound, which dominated the din of combat, and seemed to cause
all--assailants and defenders alike--to pause that they might listen,
was wafted to their ears.

It was the roll of the drum. Not the mere thudding that had beaten the
step for the mob, but the steady and vigorous tattoo of many sticks upon
many skins.

“What is it? Who comes?” were the questions that men asked one another,
as both aristocrats and sansculottes paused in their bloody labours. It
was close at hand. So close at hand that they could discern the tramp
of marching feet. In the infernal din of that fight upon the stairs
they had not caught the sound of this approach until now that the
new-comers--whoever they might be--were at the very gates of Bellecour.

From the mob in the yard there came a sudden outcry. Men sprang to the
door of the Chateau and shouted to those within.

“Aux Armes,” was the cry. “A nous, d nous!”

And in response to it the assailants turned tail, and dashed down the
stairs, overleaping the dead bodies that were piled upon them, and many
a man slipping in that shambles and ending the descent on his back. Out
into the courtyard they swept: leaving that handful of gentlemen, their
fine clothes disordered, splashed with blood and grimed with powder,
to question one another touching this portent, this miracle that seemed
wrought by Heaven for their salvation.




CHAPTER VI. THE CITIZEN COMMISSIONER


It was, after all, no miracle, unless the very timely arrival upon
the scene of a regiment of the line might be accepted in the light of
Heaven-directed. As a matter of fact, a rumour of the assault that was
to be made that night upon the Chateau de Bellecour had travelled as far
as Amiens, and there, that evening, it had reached the ears of a certain
Commissioner of the National Convention, who was accompanying this
regiment to the army of Dumouriez, then in Belgium.

Now it so happened that this Commissioner had meditated making a descent
upon the Chateau on his own account, and he was not minded that any
peasantry should forestall or baulk him in the business which he
proposed to carry out there. Accordingly, he issued certain orders
to the commandant, from which it resulted that a company, two hundred
strong, was immediately despatched to Bellecour, to either defend or
rescue it from the mob, and thereafter to await the arrival of the
Commissioner himself.

This was the company that had reached Bellecour in the eleventh hour,
to claim the attention of the assailants. But the peasants, as we have
seen, were by no means disposed to submit to interference, and this they
signified by the menacing front they showed the military, abandoning
their attack upon the Chateau until they should be clear concerning the
intentions of the newcomers. Of these intentions the Captain did not
leave them long in doubt. A brisk word of command brought his men into a
bristling line of attack, which in itself should have proved sufficient
to ensure the peasantry's respect.

“Citizens” cried the officer, stepping forward, “in the name of the
French Republic I charge you to withdraw and to leave us unhampered in
the business we are here to discharge.”

“Citizen-captain,” answered the giant Souvestre, constituting himself
the spokesman of his fellows, “we demand to know by what right you
interfere with honest patriots of France in the act of ridding it of
some of the aristocratic vermin that yet lingers on its soil?”

The officer stared at his interlocutor, amazed by the tone of the man as
much as by the sudden growls that chorused it, but nowise intimidated by
either the one or the other.

“I proclaimed my right when I issued my charge in the name of the
Republic,” he answered shortly.

“We are the Republic,” Souvestre retorted, with a wave of the hand
towards the ferocious crowd of men and women behind him. “We are the
Nation--the sacred people of France. In our own name, Citizen-soldier,
we charge you to withdraw and leave us undisturbed.”

Here lay the basis of an argument into which, however, the Captain,
being neither politician nor dialectician, was not minded to be drawn.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned to his men.

“Present arms!” was the answer he delivered, in a voice of supreme
unconcern.

“Citizen-captain, this is an outrage,” screamed a voice in the mob. “If
blood is shed, upon your own head be it.”

“Will you withdraw?” inquired the Captain coldly.

“To me, my children,” cried Souvestre, brandishing his sabre, and
seeking to encourage his followers. “Down with these traitors who
dishonour the uniform of France! Death to the blue-coats!”

He leapt forward towards the military, and with a sudden roar his
followers, a full hundred strong sprang after him to the charge.

“Fire!” commanded the Captain, and from the front line of his company
fifty sheets of flame flashed from fifty carbines.

The mob paused; for a second it wavered; then before the smoke had
lifted it broke, and shrieking in terror, it fled for cover, leaving the
valorous Souvestre alone, to revile them for a swarm of cowardly rats.

The Captain put his hands to his sides and laughed till the tears
coursed down his cheeks. Checking his mirth at last, he called to
Souvestre, who was retreating in disgust and anger.

“Hi! My friend the patriot! Are you still of the same mind or will you
withdraw your people?”

“We will not withdraw,” answered the giant sullenly. “You dare not fire
upon free citizens of the French Republic.”

“Dare I not? Do you delude yourself with that, nor think that because
this time I fired over your heads I dare not fire into your ranks. I
give you my word that if I have to command my men to fire a second time
it shall not be mere make-believe, and I also give you my word that if
at the end of a minute I have not your reply and you are not moving out
of this--every rogue of you shall have a very bitter knowledge of how
much I dare.”

Souvestre was headstrong and angry. But what can one man, however
headstrong and however angry, do against two hundred, when his own
followers refuse to support him. The valour of the peasants was
distinctly of that quality whose better part is discretion. The thunder
of that fusillade had been enough to shatter their nerve, and to
Souvestre's exhortations that they should become martyrs in the noble
cause, of the people against tyranny, in whatsoever guise it came, they
answered with the unanswerable logic of caution.

The end was that a very few moments later saw them in full retreat,
leaving the military in sole and undisputed possession of Bellecour.

The officer's first thought was for the blazing stables, and he at once
ordered a detachment of his company to set about quenching the fire, a
matter in which they succeeded after some two hours of arduous labour.

Meanwhile, leaving the main body bivouacked in the courtyard, he entered
the Chateau with a score of men, and came upon the ten gentlemen still
standing in the shambles that the grand staircase presented. With the
Marquis de Bellecour the Captain had a brief and not over courteous
interview. He informed the nobleman that he was acting under the orders
of a Commissioner, who had heard at Amiens, that evening, of the attack
that was to be made upon Bellecour. Not unnaturally the Marquis was
mistrustful of the ends which that Commissioner, whoever he might be,
looked to serve by so unusual an act. Far better did it sort with
the methods of the National Convention and its members to leave the
butchering of aristocrats to take its course. He sought information
at the Captain's hands, but the officer was reticent to the point of
curtness, and so, their anxiety but little relieved, since it might seem
that they had but escaped from Scylla to be engulfed in Charbydis, the
aristocrats at Bellecour spent the night in odious suspense. Those that
were tending the wounded had perhaps the best of it, since thus their
minds were occupied and saved the torture of speculation.

The proportion of slain was mercifully small: of twenty that had fallen
it was found that but six were dead, the others being more or less
severely hurt. Conspicuous among the men that remained, and perhaps the
bravest of them all was old Des Cadoux. He had recovered his snuff-box,
than which there seemed to be nothing of greater importance in the
world, and he moved from group to group with here a jest and there a
word of encouragement, as seemed best suited to those he addressed.
Of the women, Mademoiselle de Bellecour and her sharp tongued mother,
showed certainly the most undaunted fronts.

Suzanne had not seen her betrothed since the fight upon the stairs. But
she was told that he was unhurt, and that he was tending a cousin of his
who had been severely wounded in the head.

It was an hour or so after sunrise when he sought her out, and they
stood in conversation together--a very jaded pair--looking down from one
of the windows upon the stalwart blue-coats that were bivouacked in the
quadrangle.

Suddenly on the still morning air came the sound of hoof-beats, and as
they looked they espied a man in a cocked hat and an ample black cloak
riding briskly up the avenue.

“See?” exclaimed Ombreval; “yonder at last comes the great man we
are awaiting--the Commissioner of that rabble they call the National
Convention. Now we shall know what fate is reserved for us.”

“But what can they do?” she asked.

“It is the fashion to send people of our station to Paris,” he replied,
“to make a mock of us with an affair they call a trial before they
murder us.”

She sighed.

“Perhaps this gentleman is more merciful,” was the hope she expressed.

“Merciful?” he mocked. “Ma foi, a ravenous tiger may be merciful before
one of these. Had your father been wise he had ordered the few of us
that remained to charge those soldiers when they entered, and to have
met our end upon their bayonets. That would have been a merciful fate
compared with the mercy of this so-called Commissioner is likely to
extend us.”

It seemed to be his way to find fault, and that warp in his character
rendered him now as heroic--in words--as he had been erstwhile scornful.

Suzanne shuddered, brave girl though she was.

“Unless you can conceive thoughts of a pleasanter complexion,” she said,
“I should prefer your silence, M. d'Ombreval.”

He laughed in his disdainful way--for he disdained all things, excepting
his own person and safety--but before he could make any answer they were
joined by the Marquis and his son.

In the courtyard the horseman was now dismounting, and a moment or two
later they heard the fall of feet, upon the stairs. A soldier threw open
the door, and holding it, announced:

“The Citizen-deputy La Boulaye, Commissioner of the National Convention
to the army of General Dumouriez.”

“This,” mocked Ombreval, to whom the name meant nothing, “is the
representative of a Government of strict equality, and he is announced
with as much pomp as was ever an ambassador of his murdered Majesty's.”

Then a something out of the common in the attitude of his companions
arrested his attention. Mademoiselle was staring with eyes full of the
most ineffable amazement, her lips parted, and her cheeks whiter than
the sleepless night had painted them. The Marquis was scowling in a
surprise that seemed no whit less than his daughter's, his head thrust
forward, and his jaw fallen. The Vicomte, too, though in a milder
degree, offered a countenance that was eloquent with bewilderment. From
this silent group Ombreval turned his tired eyes to the door and took
stock of the two men that had entered. One of these was Captain Juste,
the officer in command of the military; the other was a tall man, with
a pale face, an aquiline nose, a firm jaw, and eyes that were very
stern--either of habit or because they now rested upon the man who four
years ago had used him so cruelly.

He stood a moment in the doorway as if enjoying the amazement which had
been sown by his coming. There was no mistaking him. It was the same La
Boulaye of four years ago, and yet it was not quite the same. The face
had lost its boyishness, and the strenuous life he had lived had scored
it with lines that gave him the semblance of a greater age than was his.
The old, poetic melancholy that had dwelt in the secretary's countenance
was now changed to strength and firmness. Although little known as yet
to the world at large, the great ones of the Revolution held him in high
esteem, and looked upon him as a power to be reckoned with in the near
future. Of Robespierre--who, it was said, had discovered him and brought
him to Paris--he was the protege and more than friend, a protection and
friendship this which in '93 made any man almost omnipotent in France.

He was dressed in a black riding-suit, relieved only by the white
neck-cloth and the tricolour sash of office about his waist. He removed
his cocked hat, beneath which the hair was tied in a club with the same
scrupulous care as of old.

Slowly he advanced into the salon, and his sombre eyes passed from the
Marquis to Mademoiselle. As they rested upon her some of the sternness
seemed to fade from their glance. He found in her a change almost as
great as that which she had found in him. The lighthearted, laughing
girl of nineteen, who had scorned his proffered love when he had wooed
her that April morning to such disastrous purpose, was now ripened into
a stately woman of three-and-twenty. He had thought his boyish passion
dead and buried, and often in the years that were gone had he smiled
softly to himself at the memory of his ardour, as we smile at the
memory of our youthful follies. Yet now, upon beholding her again, so
wondrously transformed, so tall and straight, and so superbly beautiful,
he experienced an odd thrill and a weakening of the stern purpose that
had brought him to Bellecour.

Then his glance moved on. A moment it rested on the supercilious,
high-bred countenance of the Vicomte d'Ombreval, standing with so
proprietary an air beside her, then it passed to the kindly old face of
Des Cadoux, and he recalled how this gentleman had sought to stay the
flogging of him. An instant it hovered on the Marquis, who--haggard of
face and with his arm in a sling--was observing him with an expression
in which scorn and wonder were striving for the mastery; it seemed to
shun the gaze of the pale-faced Vicomte, whose tutor he had been in the
old days of his secretaryship, and full and stern it returned at last to
settle upon the Marquis.

“Citizen Bellecour,” he said, and his voice, like his face, seemed to
have changed since last the Marquis had heard it, and to have grown more
deep and metallic, “you may marvel, now that you behold the Commissioner
who sent a company of soldiers to rescue you and your Chateau from the
hands of the mob last night, what purpose I sought to serve by extending
to you a protection which none of your order merits, and you least of
any, in my eyes.”

“The times may have wrought sad and overwhelming changes,” answered the
Marquis, with cold contempt, “but it has not yet so utterly abased us
that we bring ourselves to speculate upon the purposes of the rabble.”

A faint crimson flush crept into Caron's sallow cheeks.

“Indeed, I see how little you have changed!” he answered bitterly. “You
are of those that will not learn, Citizen. The fault lies here,” he
added, tapping his head, “and it will remain until we remove the ones
with the other. But now for the business that brings me,” he proceeded,
more briskly. “Four years ago, Citizen Bellecour, you laid your whip
across my face in the woods out yonder, and when I spoke of seeking
satisfaction action you threatened me with your grooms. I will not speak
of your other brutalities on that same day. I will confine myself to
that first affront.”

“Be brief, sir,” cried the Marquis offensively. “Since you have the
force to compel us to listen to you, let me beg that you will at least
display the generosity of detaining us no longer than you need.”

“I will be as brief as it lies within the possibility of words,”
 answered Caron coldly. “I am come, Citizen Bellecour, to demand of you
to-day the satisfaction which four years ago you refused me.”

“Of me?” cried the Marquis.

“Through the person of your son, the Vicomte, as I asked for it four
years ago,” said Caron. “You are am old man, Citizen, and I do not fight
old men.”

“I am yet young enough to cut you into ribbons, you dog, if I were
minded to dishonour myself by meeting you.” And turning to Ombreval for
sympathy, he vented a low laugh of contemptuous wonder.

“Insolence!” sneered Ombreval sympathetically, whilst Mademoiselle stood
looking on with cheeks that were growing paler, for that this event
would end badly for either her father or her brother she never doubted.

“Citizen Bellecour,” said Caron, still very coldly, “you have heard what
I propose, as have you also, Citizen-vicomte.”

“For myself,” began the youth “I am--”

“Silence, Armand!” his father commanded, laying a hand upon his
sleeve. “Understand me, citizen-deputy, or citizen-commissioner, or
citizen-blackguard or whatever you call your vile self, you are come on
a fruitless journey to Bellecour. Neither I nor my son is so lost to the
duty which we owe our rank as to so much as dream of acceding to your
preposterous request. I think, sir, that you had been better advised to
have left the mob to its work last night, if you but restrained it for
this purpose.”

“Is that your last word?” asked La Boulaye, still calmly weathering that
storm of insults.

“My very last, sir.”

“There are more ways than one of taking satisfaction for that affront,
Citizen Bellecour,” rejoined La Boulaye, “and if the course which I
now pursue should prove more distasteful to you than that which I
last suggested, the blame of it must rest with you.” He turned to the
bluecoat at the door. “Citizen-soldier, my whip.”

There was a sudden movement among the aristocrats--a horrified
recoiling--and even Bellecour was shaken out of his splendid arrogance.

“Insolent cur!” exclaimed Ombreval with withering scorn; “to what
lengths is presumption driving you?”

“To the length of a horsewhip,” answered La Boulaye pleasantly.

He received the whip from the hands of the soldier and he now advanced
towards Bellecour, unwinding the lash as he came. Ombreval barred his
way with an oath.

“By Heaven: you shall not!” he cried.

“Shall not?” echoed La Boulaye, his lips curling. “You had best stand
aside--you that are steeped in musk and fierceness.” And before the
stern and threatening contempt of La Boulaye's glance the young nobleman
fell back. But his place was taken by the Vicomte de Bellecour, who
advanced to confront Caron.

“Monsieur la Boulaye,” he announced, “I am ready and willing to meet
you.” And considering the grim alternative with which the Republicans
had threatened him, the old Marquis had not the courage to interfere
again.

“Ah!” It was an exclamation of satisfaction from the Commissioner. “I
imagined that you would change your minds. I shall await you, Citizen,
in the garden in five minutes' time.”

“I shall not keep you waiting, Monsieur,” was the Vicomte's answer.

Very formally La Boulaye bowed and left the room accompanied by the
officer and followed by the soldier.

“Mon Dieu!” gasped the Marquise, fanning herself as the door closed
after the Republicans. “Open me a window or I shall stifle! How the
place reeks with them. I am a calm woman, Messieurs, but, on my honour,
had he addressed any of you by his odious title of 'citizen' again, I
swear that I had struck him with my own hands.”

There were some that laughed. But Mademoiselle was not of those.

Her eyes travelled to her brother's pale face and weakly frame, and her
glance was such a glance as we bend upon the beloved dead, for in him
she saw one who was going inevitably to his death.




CHAPTER VII. LA BOULAYE DISCHARGES A DEBT


Along the northern side of the Chateau ran a terrace bordered by a
red sandstone balustrade, and below this the Italian garden, so called
perhaps in consequence of the oddly clipped box-trees, its only feature
that suggested Italy. At the far end of this garden there was a strip of
even turf that might have been designed for a fencing ground, and which
Caron knew of old. Thither he led Captain Juste, and there in the
pale sunshine of that February morning they awaited the arrival of the
Vicomte and his sponsor.

But the minutes went by and still they waited-five, ten, fifteen minutes
elapsed, yet no one came. Juste was on the point of returning within to
seek the reason of this delay when steps sounded on the terrace above.
But they were accompanied by the rustle of a gown, and presently it
was Mademoiselle who appeared before them. The two men eyed her with
astonishment, which in the case of La Boulaye, was tempered by another
feeling.

“Monsieur la Boulaye,” said she, her glance wandering towards the
Captain, “may I speak with you alone?”

Outwardly impassive the Commissioner bowed.

“Your servant, Citoyenne,” said he, removing his cocked hat. “Juste,
will you give us leave?”

“You will find me on the terrace when you want me, Citizen-deputy,”
 answered the officer, and saluting, he departed.

For a moment or two after he was gone Suzanne and Caron stood
confronting each other in silence. She seemed smitten with a sudden
awkwardness, and she looked away from him what time he waited, hat in
hand, the chill morning breeze faintly stirring a loose strand of his
black hair.

“Monsieur,” she faltered at last, “I am come to intercede.”

At that a faint smile hovered a second on the Republican's thin lips.

“And is the noblesse of France fallen so low that it sends its women to
intercede for the lives of its men? But, perhaps,” he added cynically,
“it had not far to fall.”

Her cheeks reddened. His insult to her class acted upon her as a spur
and overcame the irresoluteness that seemed to have beset her.

“To insult the fallen, sir, is worthy of the new regime, whose
representative you are, Enfine! We must take it, I suppose, as we take
everything else in these disordered times--with a bent head and a meek
submission.”

“From the little that I have seen, Citoyenne,” he answered, very coldly,
roused in his turn, “it rather seems that you take things on your knees
and with appeals for mercy.”

“Monsieur,” she cried, and her eyes now met his in fearless anger, “if
you persist in these gratuitous insults I shall leave you.”

He laughed in rude amusement, and put on his hat. The spell that for a
moment her beauty had cast over him when first she had appeared had been
attenuating. It now broke suddenly, and as he covered himself his whole
manner changed.

“Is this interview of my seeking?” he asked. “It is your brother I
am awaiting. Name of a name, Citoyenne, do you think my patience
inexhaustible? The ci-devant Vicomte promised to attend me here. It was
the boast of your order that whatever sins you might be guilty of you
never broke your word. Have you lost even that virtue, which served you
as a cloak for untold vices? And is your brother fled into the woods
whilst you, his sister, come here to intercede with me for his wretched
life? Pah! In the old days you aroused my hatred by your tyrannies
and your injustices; to-day you weary and disgust me by your ineffable
cowardices, from that gentleman in Paris who now calls himself
Orleans-Egalite downwards.”

“Monsieur,” she began But he was not yet done. His cheeks were flushed
with a reflection of the heart within.

“Citoyenne, I have a debt to discharge, and I will discharge it in full.
Intercessions are vain with me. I cannot forget. Send me your brother
within ten minutes to meet me here, man to man, and he shall have--all
of you shall have--the chance that lies in such an encounter. But woe
unto every man at Bellecour if he should fail me. Citoyenne, you know my
mind.”

But she overlooked the note of dismissal in his voice.

“You speak of a debt that you must discharge,” said she, with no whit
less heat than he had exhibited. “You refer to the debt of vengeance
which you look to discharge by murdering that boy, my brother. But do
you not owe me a debt also?”

“You?” he questioned. “My faith! Unless it be a debt of scorn, I know of
none.”

“Aye,” she returned wistfully, “you are like the rest. You have a long
memory for injuries, but a short one for benefits. Had it not been for
me, Monsieur, you would not be here now to demand this that you call
satisfaction. Have you forgotten how I--”

“No,” he broke in. “I well remember how you sought to stay them when
they were flogging me in the yard there. But you came too late. You
might have come before, for from the balcony above you had been watching
my torture. But you waited overlong. I was cast out for dead.”.

She flashed him a searching glance, as though she sought to read his
thoughts, and to ascertain whether he indeed believed what he was
saying.

“Cast out for dead?” she echoed. “And by whose contrivance? By mine,
M. la Boulaye. When they were cutting you down they discovered that you
were not dead, and but that I bribed the men to keep it secret and carry
you to Duhamel's house, they had certainly informed my father and you
would have been finished off.”

His eyes opened wide now, and into them there came a troubled look--the
look of one who is endeavouring to grasp an elusive recollection.

“Ma foi,” he muttered. “It seems to come to me as if I had heard
something of the sort in a dream. It was--” He paused, and his brows
were knit a moment. Then he looked up suddenly, and gradually his face
cleared. “Why, yes--I have it!” he exclaimed. “It was in Duhamel's
house. While I was lying half unconscious on the couch I heard one of
the men telling Duhamel that you had paid them to carry me there and to
keep a secret.”

“And you had forgotten that?” she asked, with the faintest note of
contempt.

“Not forgotten,” he answered, “for it was never really there to be
remembered. That I had heard such words had more than once occurred to
me, but I have always looked upon it as the recollection of something
that I had dreamt. I had never looked upon it as a thing that had had a
real happening.”

“How, then, did you explain your escape?”

“I always imagined that I had been assumed dead.”

There was a brief spell of silence. Then--

“And now that you know, Monsieur--?”

She left the question unfinished, and held out her hands to him in a
gesture of supplication. His face paled slightly and overclouded. Her
influence, against which so long he had steeled himself, reinforced
by the debt in which she had shown him that he stood towards her,
was prevailing with him despite himself. Stirred suddenly out of the
coldness that he had hitherto assumed, he caught the outstretched hands
and drew her a step nearer. That was his undoing. Strong man though he
unquestionably was, like many another strong man his strength seemed to
fall from him at a woman's touch. He had led so austere and stern a life
during the past four years; of women he had but had the most passing of
glances, and intercourse with none save an old female who acted as his
housekeeper in Paris. And here was a woman who was not only beautiful,
but the woman who years ago had embodied all his notions of what was
most perfect in womanhood; the woman who ever since, and despite all
that was past, had reigned in his heart and mind almost in spite of
himself, almost unknown to him.

The touch of her hand now, the closeness of her presence, the faint
perfume that reached him from her, and that was to him as a symbol of
her inherent sweetness, the large blue eyes meeting his in expectation,
and the imploring half-pout of her lips, were all seductions against
which he had not been human had he prevailed.

Very white in the intensity of the long-quiescent passion she had
resuscitated, he cried:

“Mademoiselle, what shall I say to you?”

The four years that were gone seemed suddenly to have slipped away. It
was as if they stood again by the brook in the park on that April
morn when first he had dared to word his presumptuous love. Even the
vocabulary of the Republic was forgotten, and the interdicted title of
“Mademoiselle” fell naturally from his lips.

“Say that you can be generous,” she implored him softly. “Say that you
prefer the debt you owe to the injury you received.”

“You do not know the sacrifice you ask,” he exclaimed still fighting
with himself. “I have waited four years for this, and now--”

“He is my brother,” she whispered, in so wonderful a tone that words
which of themselves may have seemed no argument at all became the
crowning argument of her intercession.

“Soit!” he consented. “For your sake, Mademoiselle, and in payment
of the debt I owe you, I will go as I came. I shall not see the
Citizen-marquis again. But do you tell him from me that if he sets any
value on his life, he had best shake the dust of France from his feet.
Too long already has he tarried, and at any moment those may arrive
who will make him emigrate not only out of France but out of the world
altogether. Besides, the peasantry that has risen once may rise again,
and I shall not be here to protect him from its violence. Tell him he
had best depart at once.”

“Monsieur, I am grateful--very, very deeply grateful. I can say no
more. May Heaven reward you. I shall pray the good God to watch over you
always. Adieu, Monsieur!”

He stood looking at her a moment still retaining his hold of her hands.

“Adieu, Mademoiselle,” he said at last. Then, very slowly--as if so
that realising his intent she might frustrate it were she so minded--he
raised her right hand. It was not withdrawn, and so he bent low, and
pressed his lips upon it.

“God guard you, Mademoiselle,” he said at last, and if they were strange
words for a Republican and a Deputy, it must be remembered that his
bearing during the past few moments had been singularly unlike a
Republican's.

He released her hand, and stepping back, doffed his hat. With a final
inclination of the head, she turned and walked away in the direction of
the terrace.

At a distance La Boulaye followed, so lost in thought that he did not
observe Captain Juste until the fellow's voice broke upon his ear.

“You have been long enough, Citizen-deputy,” was the soldier's greeting.
“I take it there is to be no duel.”

“I make you my compliments upon the acuteness of your perception,”
 answered La Boulaye tartly. “You are right. There is to be no
encounter.”

Juste's air was slightly mocking, and words of not overdelicate banter
rose to his lips, to be instantly quelled by La Boulaye.

“Let your drums beat a rally, Citizen-captain,” he commanded briskly.
“We leave Bellecour in ten minutes.”.

And indeed, in less than that time the blue-coats were swinging briskly
down the avenue. In the rear rode La Boulaye, his cloak wrapped about
him, his square chin buried in his neck-cloth, and his mind deep in
meditation.

From a window of the Chateau the lady who was the cause of the young
Revolutionist's mental absorption watched the departing soldiers. On
either side of her stood Ombreval and her father.

“My faith, little one,” said Bellecour good-humouredly. “I wonder what
magic you have exercised to rid us of that infernal company.”

“Women have sometimes a power of which men know nothing,” was her
cryptic answer.

Ombreval turned to her with a scowl of sudden suspicion.

“I trust, Mademoiselle, that you did not--” he stopped short. His
thoughts were of a quality that defied polite utterance.

“That I did not what, Monsieur?” she asked.

“I trust you remembered that you are to become the Vicomtesse
d'Ombreval” he answered, constructing his sentence differently.

“Monsieur!” exclaimed Bellecour angrily.

“I was chiefly mindful of the fact that I had my brother's life to
save,” said the girl, very coldly, her eye resting upon her betrothed in
a glance of so much contempt that it forced him into an abashed silence.

In her mind she was contrasting this supercilious, vacillating weakling
with the stern, strong man who lode yonder. A sigh fluttered across her
lips. Had things but been different. Had Ombreval been the Revolutionist
and La Boulaye the Vicomte, how much better pleased might she not have
been. But since it was not so, why sigh? It was not as if she had loved
this La Boulaye. How was that possible? Was he not of the canaille,
basely born, and a Revolutionist--the enemy of her order--in addition?
It were a madness to even dream of the possibility of such a thing, for
Suzanne de Bellecour came of too proud a stock, and knew too well the
respect that was due to it.




CHAPTER VIII. THE INVALIDS AT BOISVERT


There had been friction between the National Convention and General
Dumouriez, who, though a fine soldier, was a remarkably indifferent
Republican. The Convention had unjustly ordered the arrest of his
commissariat officers, Petit-Jean and Malus, and in other ways irritated
a man whose patience was never of the longest.

On the eve, however, of war with Holland, the great ones in Paris
had suddenly perceived their error, and had sought--despite the many
enemies, from Marat downwards, that Dumouriez counted among their
numbers--to conciliate a general whose services they found that they
could not dispense with. This conciliation was the business upon
which the Deputy La Boulaye had been despatched to Antwerp, and as
an ambassador he proved signally successful, as much by virtue of the
excellent terms he was empowered to offer as in consequence of the
sympathy and diplomacy he displayed in offering them.

The great Republican General started upon his campaign in the Low
Countries as fully satisfied as under the circumstances he could hope to
be. Malus and Petit-Jean were not only enlarged but reinstated, he was
promised abundant supplies of all descriptions, and he was assured that
the Republic approved and endorsed his plan of campaign.

La Boulaye, his mission satisfactorily discharged, turned homewards once
more, and with an escort of six men and a corporal he swiftly retraced
his steps through that blackened, war-ravaged country. They had slept a
night at Mons, and they were within a short three leagues of French
soil when they chanced to ride towards noon into the little hamlet of
Boisvert. Probably they would have gone straight through without drawing
rein, but that, as they passed the Auberge de l'Aigle, La Boulaye espied
upon the green fronting the wayside hostelry a company of a half-dozen
soldiers playing at bowls with cannon-balls.

The sight brought Caron to a sudden halt, and he sat his horse observing
them and wondering how it chanced that these men should find themselves
so far from the army. Three of them showed signs of having been recently
wounded. One carried his arm in a sling, another limped painfully and
by the aid of a stick, whilst the head of the third was swathed in
bandages. But most remarkable were they by virtue of their clothes. One
fellow--he of the bandaged head--wore a coat of yellow brocaded silk,
which, in spite of a rent in the shoulder, and sundry stains of wine and
oil, was unmistakably of a comparative newness. Beneath this appeared
the nankeens and black leggings of a soldier. Another covered his greasy
locks with a three-cornered hat, richly laced in gold. A third flaunted
under his ragged blue coat a gold-broidered waistcoat and a Brussels
cravat. A valuable ring flashed from the grimy finger of a fourth,
who, instead of the military white nankeens, wore a pair of black
silk breeches. There was one--he of the injured arm--resplendent in a
redingote of crimson velvet, whilst he of the limp supported himself
upon a gold-headed cane of ebony, which was in ludicrous discord with
the tattered blue coat, the phrygian cap, and the toes that peeped
through his broken boots.

They paused in their game to inspect, in their turn, the newcomers,
and to La Boulaye it seemed that their glances were not free from
uneasiness.

“A picturesque company on my life,” he mused aloud. Then beckoned the
one in the crimson coat.

“Hola, Citizen,” he called to him.

The fellow hesitated a moment, then shuffled forward with a sullen air,
and stood by Caron's stirrup.

“In God's name, what are you and who are you?” the Deputy demanded.

“We are invalided soldiers from the army of Dumouriez,” the man answered
him.

“But what are you doing here, at Boisvert?”

“We are in hospital, Citizen.”

“Yonder?” asked La Boulaye derisively, pointing with his whip to the
“Eagle Inn.”

The fellow nodded.

“Yes, Citizen, yonder,” he answered curtly.

La Boulaye looked surprised. Then his eyes strayed to the others on the
green.

“But you are not all invalids?” he questioned.

“Many of us are convalescent.”

“Convalescent? But those three braves yonder are something more than
convalescent. They are as well as I am. Why do they not rejoin the
troops?”

The fellow looked up with a scowl.

“We take our orders from our officer,” he answered sourly.

“Ah!” quoth the Deputy. “There is someone in charge here, then? Who may
it be?”

“Captain Charlot,” the fellow answered, with an impudent air, which
clearly seemed to ask: “What have you to say to that?”

“Captain Charlot?” echoed La Boulaye, in astonishment, for the name was
that of the sometime peasant of Bellecour, who had since risen in life,
and who, as an officer, had in a few months acquired a brilliant fame
for deeds of daring. “Charlot Tardivet?” he inquired.

“Is there any other Captain Charlot in the army of the Republic?” the
fellow asked insolently.

“Is he invalided too?” inquired Caron, without heeding the soldier's
offensiveness of manner.

“He was severely wounded at Jemappes,” was the answer.

“At Jemappes? But, voyons my friend, Jemappes was fought three months
ago.”

“Why, so all the world knows. What then? The General sent Captain
Charlot here to rest and be cured, giving him charge of the invalided
soldiers who came with him and of others who were already here.”

“And of these,” cried La Boulaye, his amazement growing, “have none
returned to Dumouriez?”

“Have I not said that we are invalids?”

Caron eyed him with cold contempt.

“How many of you are there?” he asked. And for all that the man began to
mislike this questioning, he had not the hardihood to refuse an answer
to the stern tones of that stern man on horseback.

“Some fifty, or thereabouts.”

La Boulaye said nothing for a moment, then touching the fellow's sleeve
with his whip.

“How came you into this masquerade?” he inquired.

“Ma foi,” answered the man, shrugging his shoulders, “we were in rags.
The commissariat was demoralised, and supplies were not forthcoming. We
had to take what we could find, or else go naked.”

“And where did you find these things?”

“Diable! Will your questions never come to an end, Citizen? Would you
not be better advised in putting them to the Captain himself?”

“Why, so I will. Where is he?”

In the distance a cloud of dust might be perceived above the long, white
road. The soldier espied it as La Boulaye put his question.

“I am much at fault if he does not come yonder.” And he pointed to the
dust-cloud.

“I think,” said La Boulaye, turning to his men, “that we will drink a
cup of wine at the 'Eagle Inn.'”

Mean though the place was, it was equipped with a stable-yard, to which
admittance was gained by a porte-cochere on the right. Wheeling his
horse, La Boulaye, without another word to the soldier he had been
questioning, rode through it, followed by his escort.

The hostess, who came forward to receive them, was a tall, bony woman of
very swarthy complexion, with beady eyes and teeth prominent as a rat's.
But if ill-favoured, she seemed, at least, well-intentioned, in addition
to which the tricolour scarf of office round La Boulaye's waist was a
thing that commanded respect and servility, however much it might be the
insignia of a Government of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

She bade the ostler care for their horses, and she brought them her best
wine, seeking under an assumed geniality to conceal the unrest born of
her speculations as to what might happen did Captain Charlot return ere
the Deputy departed.

Charlot did return. Scarce were they seated at their wine when the
confused sounds that from the distance had been swelling took more
definite shape. The hostess looked uneasy as La Boulaye rose and went to
the door of the inn. Down the road marched now a numerous company from
which--to judge by their odd appearance--the players at bowls had been
drawn. They numbered close upon threescore, and in the centre of them
came a great lumbering vehicle, which puzzled La Boulaye. He drew away
from the door and posted himself at the window, so that unobserved he
might ascertain what was toward. Into the courtyard came that company,
pele-mele, an odd mixture of rags and gauds, yet a very lusty party,
vigorous of limb and loud of voice. With them came the coach, and there
was such a press about the gates that La Boulaye looked to see some of
them crushed to death. But with a few shouts and oaths and threats at
one another they got through in safety, and the unwieldy carriage was
brought to a standstill.

They were clamouring about its doors, and to La Boulaye it seemed that
they were on the point of quarrelling among themselves, some wanting to
enter the coach and others seeking to restrain them, when through the
porte-cochere rode Charlot Tardivet himself.

He barked out a sharp word of command, and they grew silent and still,
testifying to a discipline which said much for the strength of character
of their captain. He was strangely altered, was this Tardivet, and
his appearance now was worthy of his followers. Under a gaudily-laced,
three-cornered hat his hair hung dishevelled and unkempt, like wisps of
straw. He wore a coat of flowered black silk, with a heavy gold edging,
and a very bright plum-coloured waistcoat showed above the broad
tricolour scarf that sashed his middle. His breeches were white (or
had been white in origin), and disappeared into a pair of very lustrous
lacquered boots that rose high above his knees. A cavalry sabre of
ordinary dimensions hung from a military belt, and a pistol-butt,
peeping from his sash, completed the astonishing motley of his
appearance. For the rest, he was the same tall and well-knit fellow;
but there was more strength in his square chin, more intelligence in the
keen blue eyes, and, alas! more coarseness in the mouth, which bristled
with a reddish beard of some days' growth.

La Boulaye watched him with interest. He had become intimate with him
in the old days in Paris, whither Tardivet had gone, and where, fired
by the wrongs he had suffered, he had been one of the apostles of the
Revolution. When the frontiers of France had been in danger Tardivet
had taken up arms, and by the lustre which he had shed upon the name of
Captain Charlotas he was come to be called throughout the army--he had
eclipsed the fame of Citizen Tardivet, the erstwhile prophet of liberty.
Great changes these in the estate of one who had been a simple peasant;
but then the times were times of great changes. Was not Santerre, the
brewer, become a great general, and was not Robespierre, the obscure
lawyer of Arras, by way of becoming a dictator? Was it, therefore,
wonderful that Charlot should have passed from peasant to preacher, from
preacher to soldier, and from soldier to--what?

A shrewd suspicion was being borne in upon La Boulaye's mind as he
stood by that window, his men behind him watching also, with no less
intentness and some uneasiness for themselves--for they misliked the
look of the company.

In five seconds Charlot had restored order in the human chaos without.
In five minutes there were but ten men left in the yard. The others
were gone at Charlot's bidding--a bidding, couched in words that went to
confirm La Boulaye's suspicions.

“You will get back to your posts at once,” he had said. “Because we
have made one rich capture is no reason why you should neglect the
opportunities of making others no less rich. You, Moulinet, with twenty
men, shall patrol the road to Charleroi, and get as near France as
possible. You Boligny, station yourself in the neighbourhood of Conde,
with ten men, and guard the road from Valenciennes. You, Aigreville,
spread your twenty men from Conde to Tournay, and watch the frontiers
closely. Make an inspection of any captures you may take, and waste no
time in bringing hither worthless ones. Now go. I will see that each
man's share of this is assured him. March!”

There were some shouts of “Vive la Republique!” some of “Vive le
Captaine Charlot!” and so they poured out of the yard, and left him to
give a few hurried directions to the ten men that remained.

“Sad invalids these, as I live!” exclaimed La Boulaye over his shoulder
to his followers. “Ha! There is my friend of the red redingote!”

The fellow with the bandaged head had approached Charlot and was tugging
at his sleeve.

“Let be, you greasy rascal,” the Captain snapped at him, to add: “What
do you say? A Deputy? Where?” The fellow pointed with his thumb in the
direction of the hostelry.

“Sacred name of a name!” growled Charlot, and, turning suddenly from the
men to whom he had been issuing directions, he sprang up the steps and
entered the inn. As he crossed the threshold of the common room he was
confronted by the tall figure of La Boulaye.

“I make you my compliments, Charlot,” was Caron's greeting, “upon the
vigorous health that appears to prevail in your hospital.”

Tardivet stood a moment within the doorway, staring at the Deputy. Then
his brow cleared, and with a laugh, at once of welcome and amusement, he
strode forward and put out his hand.

“My good Caron!” he cried. “To meet you at Boisvert is a pleasure I had
not looked for.”

“Are you so very sure,” asked La Boulaye sardonically, as he took the
outstretched hand, “that it is a pleasure?”

“How could it be else, old friend? By St. Guillotine!” he added,
clapping the Deputy on the back, “you shall come to my room, and we will
broach a bottle of green seal.”

In some measure of wonder, La Boulaye permitted himself to be led up the
crazy stairs to a most untidy room above, which evidently did duty as
the Captain's parlour. A heavy brass lamp, hanging from the ceiling, a
few untrustworthy chairs and a deal table, stained and unclean, were the
only articles of furniture. But in almost every corner there were untidy
heaps of garments Of all sorts and conditions; strewn about the floor
were other articles of apparel, a few weapons, a saddle, and three or
four boots; here an empty bottle, lying on its side, yonder a couple of
full ones by the hearth; an odd book or two and an infinity of playing
cards, cast there much as a sower scatters his seeds upon the ground.

There may be a hundred ways of apprehending the character of a man, but
none perhaps is more reliable than the appearance of his dwelling, and
no discerning person that stepped into Captain Tardivet's parlour could
long remain in doubt of its inhabitant's pursuits and habits.

When Dame Capoulade had withdrawn, after bringing them their wine and
casting a few logs upon the fire, La Boulaye turned his back to the
hearth and confronted his host.

“Why are you not with the army, Charlot?” he asked in a tone which made
the question sound like a demand.

“Have they not told you,” rejoined the other airily, engrossed in
filling the glasses.

“I understand you were sent here to recover from a wound you received
three months ago at Jemappes, and to take charge of other invalided
soldiers. But seemingly, your invalids do not number more than a
half-dozen out of the fifty or sixty men that are with you. How is it
then, that you do not return with these to Dumouriez?”

“Because I can serve France better here,” answered Charlot, “and at the
same time enrich myself and my followers.”

“In short,” returned La Boulaye coldly, “because you have degenerated
from a soldier into a brigand.”

Charlot looked up, and for just a second his glance was not without
uneasiness. Then he laughed. He unbuckled his sword and tossed it into a
corner, throwing his hat after it.

“It was ever your way to take extreme views, Caron,” he observed, with
a certain whimsical regret of tone. “That, no doubt, is what has made
a statesman of you. You had chosen more wisely had you elected to serve
the Republic with your sword instead. Come, my friend,” and he pointed
to the wine, “let us pledge the Nation.”

La Boulaye shrugged his shoulders slightly, and sighed. In the end he
came forward and took the wine.

“Long live the Republic!” was Charlot's toast, and with a slight
inclination of the head La Boulaye drained his glass.

“It is likely to live without you, Charlot, unless you mend your
conduct.”

“Diable!” snapped the Captain, a trifle peevishly. “Can you not
understand that in my own way I am serving my country. You have called
me a brigand. But you might say the same of General Dumouriez himself.
How many cities has he not sacked?”

“That is the way of war.”

“And so is this. He makes war upon the enemies of France that dwell in
cities, whilst I, in a smaller way, make war upon those that travel in
coaches. I confine myself to emigres--these damned aristocrats whom
it is every good Frenchman's duty to aid in stamping out. Over
the frontiers they come with their jewels, their plate, and their
money-chests. To whom belongs this wealth? To France. Too long already
have they withheld from the sons of the soil that which belongs equally
to them, and now they have the effrontery to attempt to carry these
riches out of the country. Would any true Republican dare to reproach me
for what I do? I am but seizing that which belongs to France, and here
dividing it among the good patriots that are with me, the soldiers that
have bled for France.”

“A specious argument,” sneered La Boulaye.

“Specious enough to satisfy the Convention itself if ever I should be
called to task,” answered Charlot, with heat. “Do you propose to draw
the attention of the Executive to my doings?”

La Boulaye's grey eyes regarded him steadily for a moment.

“Know you of any reason why I should not?” he asked.

“Yes, Caron, I do,” was the ready answer. “I am well aware of the extent
of your power with the Mountain. In Paris I can see that it might go
hard with me if you were minded that it should, and you were able to
seize me. On the other hand, that such arguments that I have advanced
to you would be acceptable to the Government I do not doubt. But whilst
they would approve of this that you call brigandage, I also do not doubt
that they would claim that the prizes I have seized are by right the
property of the Convention, and they might compel me to surrender them.
Thus they would pass from my hands into those of some statesman-brigand,
who, under the plea of seizing these treasures for the coffers of the
nation, would transfer them to his own. Would you rather help such an
one to profit than me, Caron? Have you so far forgotten how we suffered
together--almost in the self-same cause--at Bellecour, in the old days?
Have you forgotten the friendship that linked us later, in Paris, when
the Revolution was in its dawn? Have you forgotten what I have endured
at the hands of this infernal class that you can feel no sympathy for
me? Caron, it is a measure of revenge, and as there is a Heaven, a very
mild one. Me they robbed of more than life; them I deprive but of their
jewels and their plate, turning them destitute upon the world. Bethink
you of my girl-wife, Caron,” he added, furiously, “and of how she died
of grief and shame a short three months after our hideous nuptials.
God in Heaven! When the memory of it returns to me I marvel at my own
forbearance. I marvel that I do not take every man and woman of them
that fall into my hands and flog them to death as they would have
flogged you when you sought--alas to so little purpose--to intervene on
my behalf.”

He grew silent and thoughtful, and the expression of his face was not
nice. At last: “Have I given you reason enough,” he asked, “why you
should not seek to thwart me?”

“Why, yes,” answered La Boulaye, “more than was necessary. I am
desolated that I should have brought you to re-open a sorrow that I
thought was healed.”

“So it is, Caron. How it is I do not know. Perhaps it is my nature;
perhaps it is that in youth sorrow is seldom long-enduring; perhaps
it is the strenuous life I have lived and the changes that have been
wrought in me--for, after all, there is a little in this Captain
Tardivet that is like the peasant poor Marie took to husband, four years
ago. I am no longer the same man, and among the other things that I
have put from me are the sorrows that were of the old Charlot. But some
memories cannot altogether die, and if to-day I no longer mourn that
poor child, yet the knowledge of the debt that lies 'twixt the noblesse
of France and me is ever present, and I neglect no opportunity of
discharging a part of it. But enough of that, Caron. Tell me of
yourself. It is a full twelvemonth since last we met, and in that time,
from what I have heard, you have done much and gone far. Tell me of it,
Caron.”

They drew their chairs to the hearth, and they sat talking so long that
the early February twilight came down upon them while they were still at
their reminiscences. La Boulaye had intended reaching Valenciennes that
night; but rather than journey forward in the dark he now proposed to
lie at Boisvert, a resolution in which he did not lack for encouragement
from Charlot.




CHAPTER IX. THE CAPTIVES


Amid the sordid surroundings of Charlot's private quarters the Captain
and the Deputy supped that evening. The supper sorted well with the
house--a greasy, ill-cooked meal that proved little inviting to the
somewhat fastidious La Boulaye. But the wine, plundered, no doubt, in
common with the goblets out of which they drank it--was more than good,
and whilst La Boulaye showed his appreciation of it, Charlot abused it
like a soldier. They sat facing each other across the little deal table,
whose stains were now hidden by a cloth, and to light them they had four
tapers set in silver candlesticks of magnificent workmanship, and most
wondrous weight, which Tardivet informed his guest had been the property
of a ci-devant prince of the blood.

As the night wore on Captain Charlot grew boisterous and more
confidential. He came at length to speak of the last capture they had
made.

“I have taken prizes, Caron,” said he, “which a king might not despise.
But to-day--” He raised his eyes to the ceiling and wagged his head.

“Well?” quoth La Boulaye. “What about to-day?”

“I have made a capture worth more than all the others put together. It
was an indifferent-looking berline, and my men were within an ace of
allowing it to pass. But I have a nose, mon cher”--and he tapped the
organ with ludicrous significance--“and, bon Dieu, what affair! I can
smell an aristocrat a league off. Down upon that coach I swooped like a
hawk upon a sparrow. Within it sat two women, thickly veiled, and I give
you my word that in a sense I pitied them, for not a doubt of it, but
they were in the act of congratulating themselves upon their escape from
France. But sentiment may become fatal if permitted to interfere with
enterprise. Stifling my regrets I desired them to alight, and they being
wise obeyed me without demur. I allowed them to retain their veils. I
sought the sight of things other than women's faces, and a brief survey
of the coach showed me where to bestow my attention. I lifted the back
seat. It came up like the lid of the chest it was, and beneath it I
discovered enough gold and silver plate to outweigh in value almost
everything that I had ever taken. But that was by no means all. Under
the front seat there was a chest of gold--louis d'ors they were, some
two or three thousand at least--and, besides that, a little iron-bound
box of gems which in itself was worth more than all the rest of the
contents of that treasure-casket of a coach. I tell you, Caron, I
dropped the lid of that seat in some haste, for I was not minded that
my men should become as wise as I. I stepped down and bade, the women
re-enter, and hither under strong escort I have brought them.”

“And these treasures?” asked La Boulaye.

“They are still in the coach below, with the women. I have told these
that they shall spend the night there. To-morrow I shall see to them and
give them their liberty--which is a more generous proceeding than
might befall them at the hands of another. When they are gone comes the
division of the spoil.” He closed one eye slowly, in a very ponderous
wink. “To my men I shall relegate the gold and silver plate as well as
the money. For myself I shall only retain the little iron-bound box. My
followers will account me more than generous and themselves more than
satisfied. As for me, La Boulaye--by St. Guillotine, I am tempted to
emigrate also and set up as an aristocrat myself in Prussia or England,
for in that little box there is something more than a fortune. I asked
you to-day whether you were minded to lay information against me in
Paris. My faith, I am little concerned whether you do or not, for I
think that before you can reach Paris, Captain Charlot Tardivet will be
no more than a name in the Republican army. Abroad I shall call myself
Charlot du Tardivet, and I shall sleep in fine linen and live on
truffles and champagne. Caron, your health!”

He drained his glass, and laughed softly to himself as he set it down.

“Do you trust your men?” asked La Boulaye.

“Eh? Trust them? Name of a name! They know me. I have placed the ten
most faithful ones on guard. They answer to the rest of us with their
necks for the safety of their charge. Come hither, Caron.”

He rose somewhat unsteadily, and lurched across to the window. La
Boulaye followed him, and gazing out under his indication, he beheld the
coach by the blaze of a fire which the men had lighted to keep them from
freezing at their post.

“Does that look secure?”

“Why, yes--secure enough. But if those fellows were to take it into
their heads that it would be more profitable to share the prize among
ten than among sixty?”

“Secreanom!!” swore Charlot impatiently. “You do my wits poor credit.
For what do you take me? Have I gone through so much, think you,
without learning how little men are to be trusted? Faugh! Look at the
porte-cochere. The gates are closed--aye, and locked, mon cher, and
the keys are here, in my pocket. Do you imagine they are to be broken
through without arousing anyone? And then, the horses. They are in the
stables over there, and again, the keys are in my pocket. So that, you
see, I do not leave everything to the honesty of my ten most faithful
ones.”

“You have learned wisdom, not a doubt of it,” laughed the Deputy.

“In a hard school, Caron,” answered the Captain soberly. “Aye, name of a
name, in a monstrous hard school.”

He turned from the window, and the light of the tapers falling on his
face, showed it heavily scored with lines of pain, testifying to the
ugly memories which the Deputy's light words had evoked. Then suddenly
he laughed, half-bitterly, half humourously.

“La, la!” said he. “The thing's past. Charlot Tardivet the bridegroom of
Bellecour and Captain Charlot of Dumouriez' army are different men-very
different.”

He strode back to the table, filled his goblet, and gulped down the
wine. Then he crossed to the fire and stood with his back to La Boulaye
for a spell. When next he faced his companion all signs of emotion had
cleared from his countenance. It was again the callous, reckless face
of Captain Charlot, rendered a trifle more reckless and a trifle more
callous by the wine-flush on his cheeks and the wine-glitter in his eye.

“Caron” said he, with a half-smile, “shall we have these ladies in to
supper?”

“God forbid!” ejaculated La Boulaye.

“Nay, but I will,” the other insisted, and he moved across to the
window.

As he passed him, La Boulaye laid a detaining hand upon his arm.

“Not that, Charlot,” he begged impressively, his dark face very set.
“Plunder them, turn them destitute upon the world, if you will, but
remember, at least, that they are women.”

Charlot laughed in his face.

“It is something to remember, is it not? They remembered it of our
women, these aristocrats!”

There was so much ugly truth in the Captain's words, and such a
suggestion of just, if bitter, retribution in his mental attitude, that
La Boulaye released his arm, at a loss for further arguments wherewith
to curb him.

“Paydi!” Charlot continued, “I have a mind for a frolic. Does not
justice give me the right to claim that these aristocrats shall amuse
me?”

With an oath he turned abruptly, and pulled the casement open.

“Guyot!” he called, and a voice from below made answer to him.

“You will make my compliments to the citoyennes in the coach, Guyot, and
tell them that the Citizen-captain Tardivet requests the honour of their
company to supper.”

Then he went to the door, and calling Dame Capoulade, he bade her set
two fresh covers; in which he was expeditiously obeyed. La Boulaye stood
by the fire, his pale face impassive now and almost indifferent. Charlot
returned to the window to learn from Guyot that the citoyennes thanked
the Citizen-captain, but that they were tired and sought to be excused,
asking nothing better than to be allowed to remain at peace in their
carriage.

“Sacred name of a name!” he croaked, a trifle thickly, for the wine he
had taken was mastering him more and more. “Are they defying us? Since
they will not accept an invitation, compel them to obey a command. Bring
them up at once, Guyot.”

“At once, Captain,” was the answer, and Guyot went about the business.

Charlot closed the window and approached the table.

“They are coquettish these scented dames,” he mocked, as he poured
himself out some wine. “You are not drinking Caron.”

“It is perhaps wise that one of us should remain sober,” answered the
Deputy quietly, for in spite of a certain sympathy with the feelings by
which Charlot was actuated, he was in dead antipathy to this baiting of
women that seemed toward.

Charlot made no answer. He drained his goblet and set it down with a
bang. Then he flung himself into a chair, and stretching out his long,
booted legs he began to hum the refrain of the “Marseillaise.” Thus a
few moments went by. Then there came a sound of steps upon the creaking
stairs, and the gruff voice of the soldier urging the ladies to ascend
more speedily.

At last the door opened and two women entered, followed by Guyot.
Charlot lurched to his feet.

“You have come, Mesdames,” said he, forgetting the mode of address
prescribed by the Convention, and clumsily essaying to make a leg. “Be
welcome! Guyot, go to the devil.”

For a moment or two after the soldier's departure the women remained
in the shadow, then, at the Captain's invitation, which they dared not
disobey, they came forward into the halo of candle-light. Simultaneously
La Boulaye caught his breath, and took a step forward. Then he drew back
again until his shoulders touched the overmantel and there he remained,
staring at the newcomers, who as yet, did not appear to have observed
him.

They wore no headgear, and their scarfs were thrown back upon their
shoulders, revealing to the stricken gaze of La Boulaye the countenances
of the Marquise de Bellecour and her daughter.

And now, as they advanced into the light, Charlot recognised them too.
In the act of offering a chair he stood, arrested, his eyes devouring
first one, then the other of then, with a glance that seemed to have
grown oddly sobered. The flush died from his face, and his lips twitched
like those of a man who seeks to control his emotions. Then slowly the
colour crept back into his cheeks, a curl of mockery appeared on the
coarse mouth, and the eyes beamed evilly.

They tense silence was broken by the bang with which he dropped the
chair he had half raised. As he leaned forward now, La Boulaye read in
his face the thought that had leapt into the Captain's mind, and had it
been a question of any woman other than Zuzanne de Bellecour, the Deputy
might have indulged in the consideration of what a wonderful retribution
was there here. Into the hands of the man whose bride the Marquis de
Bellecour had torn from him were now delivered by a wonderful chance
the wife and daughter of that same Bellecour. And at Boisvert this
briganding Captain was as much to-night the lord of life and death,
and all besides, as had been the Marquis of Bellecour of old. But
he pondered not these things, for all that the stern irony of the
coincidence did not escape him. That evil look in Charlot's eyes, that
sinister smile on Charlot's lips, more than suggested what manner of
vengeance the Captain would exact--and that, for the time, was matter
enough to absorb the Deputy's whole attention.

And the women did not see him. They were too much engrossed in the
figure fronting them, and agonisedly, with cheeks white and bosoms
heaving, they waited, in their dread suspense. At last, drawing himself
to the full of his stalwart height, the Captain laughed grimly and
spoke.

“Mesdames,” said he, his very tone an insult in its brutal derision,
“we Republicans have abolished God, and until tonight I have held the
Republic right, arguing that if a God there was, His leanings must
be aristocratic, since He never seemed to concern Himself with the
misfortunes of the lowly-born. But tonight, mesdames, I know that the
Republic is at fault. There is a God--a God of justice and retribution,
who has delivered you, of all people in the world, into my hands. Look
on me well, Ci-devant Marquise de Bellecour, and you, Mademoiselle de
Bellecour. Look in my face and see if you know me again. Not you. You
never heeded me as you rode by in those proud days. But heard you ever
tell of one Charlot Tardivet, a base vassal whose wife your husband,
Madame, and your father, Mademoiselle, took from him on his bridal morn?
Heard you ever tell of that poor girl--one Marie Tardivet--who died of
grief as a consequence of that brutality? But no; such matters were too
trivial for your notice if you saw them, or for your memory if you ever
heard tell of them. What was the life of a peasant more than that of
any other animal of the land, that the concern of it should perturb the
sereneness of your aristocratic being? Mesdames, that Charlot Tardivet
am I; that Marie Tardivet was my wife. I knew not whom you were when I
bade you sup at my table but now that I know it--what do you look for at
my hands?”

It was the Marquise who answered him. She was deathly pale, and her
words came breathlessly: for all that their import was very bold.

“We look for the recollection that we are women and unless you are as
cowardly as--”

“Citoyenne,” he broke in harshly, answering her as he had answered La
Boulaye, “was my wife less a woman think you? Pah! There is yet another
here who was wronged,” he announced, and he waved his hand in the
direction of La Boulaye, who stood, stiff and pale, by the hearth.

The women turned, and at sight of the Deputy a cry escaped Suzanne. It
was a cry of hope, for here was one who would surely lend them aid. It
was a fact, she thought, upon which the Captain had not counted. But La
Boulaye stood straight and cold, and not by so much as an inclination of
the head did he acknowledge that grim introduction. Charlot, mistaking
Mademoiselle's exclamation, laughed softly.

“Well may you cry out, Citoyenne,” said he, “for him I see you
recognise. He is the man who sought to rescue my wife from the clutches
of your lordly and most noble father. For his pains he was flogged until
they believed him dead. Is it not very fitting that he should be with me
now to receive you?”

“But he, at least, is in my debt,” cried Mademoiselle, now making a step
forward, and sustained by an excitement born of hope. “Whatever may be
my father's sins, M. la Boulaye, at least, will not seek to visit them
upon the daughter, for he owes his life to me, and he will not forget
the debt.”

Charlot's brows were suddenly knit with vexation. He half-turned to La
Boulaye, as if to speak; but ere he could utter a word--

“The debt has been paid, Citoyenne,” said Caron impassively.

Before that cold answer, so coldly delivered, Mademoiselle recoiled.

“Paid!” she echoed mechanically.

“Aye, paid,” he rejoined. “You claimed your brother's life in payment,
and I gave it to you. Do you not think that we are quits? Besides,”
 he ended suddenly, “Captain Tardivet is the master here. Address your
appeals to him, Citoyenne.”

With terror written on her face, she turned from him to meet the flushed
countenance of Charlot, who, with arms akimbo and his head on one side,
was regarding her at once with mockery and satisfaction.

“What do you intend by us, Monsieur?” she questioned in a choking voice.

He smiled inscrutably.

“Allay your fears, Citoyenne; you will find me very gentle.”

“I knew you would prove generous,” she cried.

“But, yes, Citoyenne,” he rejoined, in the tones we employ to those who
fear unreasonably. “I shall prove generous; as generous as--as was my
lord your father.”

La Boulaye trembled, but his face remained calmly expressionless as he
watched that grim scene.

“Monsieur!” Suzanne cried out in horror.

“You will not dare, you scum!” blazed the Marchioness.

Charlot shrugged his shoulders and laughed, whereupon Madame de
Bellecour seemed to become a being transformed. Her ample flesh, which
but a moment back had quivered in fear, quivered now more violently
still in anger. The colour flowed back into her cheeks until they flamed
an angry crimson, and her vituperations rang in so loud and fierce a
voice that at last, putting his hands to his ears, Charlot crossed to
the door.

“Silence!” he roared at her, so savagely that her spirit forsook her
on the instant. “I will put an end to this,” he swore, as he opened the
door. “Hold there! Is Guyot below?”

“Here, Captain,” came a voice.

Charlot retraced his steps, leaving the door wide, his eyes dwelling
upon Suzanne until she shrank under its gaze, as she might have done
from the touch of some unclean thing. She drew near to her mother, in
whom the brief paroxysm of rage was now succeeded by a no less violent
paroxysm of weeping. On the stairs sounded Guyot's ascending steps.

“Mother,” whispered Suzanne, setting her arms about her in a vain
attempt to comfort. Then she heard Charlot's voice curtly bidding Guyot
to reconduct the Marquise to her carriage.

Madame de Bellecour heard it also, and roused herself once more.

“I will not go,” she stormed, anger flashing again from the tear-laden
eyes. “I will not leave my daughter.”

Charlot shrugged his shoulders callously.

“Take her away, Guyot,” he said, shortly, and the sturdy soldier obeyed
him with a roughness that took no account of either birth or sex.

When the Marquise's last scream had died away in the distance, Charlot
turned once more to Suzanne, and it seemed that he sought to compose
his features into an expression of gentleness beyond their rugged
limitations. But the glance of his blue eyes was kind, and mistaking
the purport of that kindness, Mademoiselle began an appeal to his better
feelings.

Straight and tall, pale and delicate she stood, her beauty rendered,
perhaps, the more appealing by virtue of the fear reflected on her
countenance. Her blue eyes were veiled behind their long black lashes,
her lips were tremulous, and her hands clasped and unclasped as she now
made her prayer to the Republican. But in the hardened heart of Charlot
no breath of pity stirred. He beheld her beauty and he bethought him of
his wrongs. For the rest, perhaps, had she been less comely he had been
less vengeful.

And yonder by the hearth stood La Boulaye like a statue, unmoved and
immovable. The Captain was speaking to her, gently and soothingly, but
her thoughts became more taken with the silence of La Boulaye than with
the speech of Charlot. Even in that parlous moment she had leisure to
despise herself for having once--on the day on which, in answer to her
intercessions, he had spared her brother's life--entertained a kindly,
almost wistful, thought concerning this man whom she now deemed a
dastard.




CHAPTER X. THE BAISER LAMOURETTE


Presently Charlot turned to La Boulaye, and for all that he uttered
no word, his glance left nothing to be said. In response to it Caron
stirred at last, and came leisurely over to the table.

“A mouthful of wine, and I'm gone, Charlot,” said he in level,
colourless tones, as taking up a flagon he filled himself a goblet.

“Fill for me, too,” cried the Captain; “aye, and for the Citoyenne here.
Come, my girl, a cup of wine will refresh you.”

But Suzanne shrank from the invitation as much as from the tenor of
it and the epithet he had applied to her. Observing this, he laughed
softly.

“Oh! As you will. But the wine is good-from cellar of a ci-devant Duke.
My service to you, Citoyenne,” he pledged her, and raising his cup, he
poured the wine down a throat that was parched by the much that he had
drunk already, But ere the goblet was half-empty, a sharp, sudden cry
from La Boulaye came to interrupt his quaffing. He glanced round, and
at what he saw he spilled the wine down his waistcoat, then let the cup
fall to the ground, as with an oath he flung himself upon the girl.

She had approached the table whilst both men were drinking, and quietly
possessed herself of a knife; and, but that it was too blunt to do the
service to which she put it, Charlot's intervention would have come too
late. As it was he caught her wrist in time, and in a rage he tore the
weapon from her fingers, and flung it far across the room.

“So, pretty lady!” he gasped, now gripping both her wrists. “So! we are
suicidally inclined, are we! We would cheat Captain Charlot, would we?
Fi donc!” he continued with horrid playfulness. “To shed a blood so blue
upon a floor so unclean! Name of a name of a name!”

Accounting herself baffled at every point, this girl, who had hitherto
borne herself so stoutly as to have stoically sought death as a last
means of escape, began to weep softly. Whereupon:

“Nay, nay, little-woman,” murmured the Captain, in such accents as are
employed to a petted child, and instinctively, in his intent to soothe
he drew her nearer. And now the close contact thrilled him; her beauty,
and some subtle perfume that reached him from her, played havoc with his
senses. Nearer he drew her in silence, his face white and clammy, and
his hot, wine laden breath coming quicker every second. And unresisting
she submitted, for she was beyond resistance now, beyond tears even.
From between wet lashes her great eyes gazed into his with a look of
deadly, piteous affright; her lips were parted, her cheeks ashen, and
her mind was dimly striving to formulate a prayer to the Holy Mother,
the natural protectress of all imperilled virgins.

Nearer she felt herself drawn to her tormentor, in whose thoughts there
dwelt now little recollection of the vengeful character of his purpose.
For a second her wrists were released; then she felt his arms going
round her as the coils of a snake go round its prey. With a sudden
reassertion of self, with a panting gasp of horror, she tore herself
free. An oath broke from him as he sprang after her. Then the unexpected
happened. Above his head something bright flashed up, then down. There
was a dull crack, and the Captain stopped short in his rush; his hands
were jerked to the height of his breast, and like a pole-axed beast he
dropped and lay prone at her feet.

Across his fallen body she beheld La Boulaye standing impassively, the
ghost of a smile on his thin lips, and in his hand one of the heavy
silver candlesticks from the table.

Whilst a man might count a dozen they stood so with no word spoken.
Then:

“It was a cowardly blow, Citoyenne,” said the Deputy in accents of
regret; “but what choice had I?” He set down the candlestick, and
kneeling beside Charlot, he felt for the Captain's heart. “The door,
Citoyenne,” he muttered. “Lock it.”

Mechanically, and without uttering a word, she hastened to do his
bidding. As the key grated in the lock he rose.

“It has only stunned him,” he announced. “Now to prepare an explanation
for it.”

He drew a chair under the old brass lamp, that hung from the ceiling. He
mounted the chair, and with both hands he seized the chain immediately
above the lamp. Drawing himself up, he swung there for just a second;
then the hook gave way, and amid a shower of plaster La Boulaye
half-tumbled to the ground.

“There,” said he, as he dropped the lamp with its chain and hook upon
the floor by Charlot. “It may not be as convincing as we might wish,
but I think that it will prove convincing enough to the dull wits of
the landlady, and of such of Charlot's followers as may enter here. I am
afraid,” he deplored, “that it will be some time before he recovers. He
was so far gone in wine that it needed little weight to fell him.”

Her glance met his once more, and she took a step towards him with hands
outstretched.

“Monsieur, Monsieur!” she cried. “If you but knew how in my thoughts I
wronged you a little while ago.”

“You had all reason to,” he answered, taking her hands, and there came
the least softening of his stern countenance. “It grieved me to add to
your affliction. But had I permitted him to do so much as suspect that
I was anything but your implacable enemy, I had no chance of saving you.
He would have dismissed me, and I must have obeyed or been compelled,
for he is master here, and has men enough to enforce what he desires.”

And now she would have thanked him for having saved her, but he cut her
short almost roughly.

“You owe me no thanks,” he said. “I have but done for you what my
manhood must have bidden me do for any woman similarly situated. For
to-night I have saved you, Citoyenne. I shall make an effort to smuggle
you and your mother out of Boisvert before morning, but after that you
must help yourselves.”

“You will do this?” she cried, her eyes glistening.

“I will attempt it.”

“By what means, Monsieur Caron?”

“I do not yet know. I must consider. In the meantime you had best return
to your coach. Later to-night I shall have you and your mother brought
to me, and I will endeavour to so arrange matters that you shall not
again return to your carriage.

“Not return to it?” she exclaimed. “But are we then to leave it here?”

“I am afraid there is no help for that.”

“But, Monsieur, you do not know; there is a treasure in that carriage.
All that we have is packed in it, and if we go without it we go
destitute.”

“Better, perhaps, to go destitute than not to go at all, Mademoiselle. I
am afraid there is no choice for you.”

His manner was a trifle impatient. It irritated him that in such a
moment she should give so much thought to her valuables. But in reality
she was thinking of them inasmuch as they concerned her mother, who was
below, and her father and brother who awaited them in Prussia, whither
they had separately emigrated. The impatience in his tone stung her into
a feeling of resentment, that for the moment seemed to blot out the much
that she owed him. A reproachful word was trembling on her lips, when
suddenly he put out his hand.

“Hist!” he whispered, the concentrated look of one who listens stamped
upon his face. His sharp ears had detected some sound which--perhaps
through her preoccupation--she had not noticed. He stepped quickly to
the Captain's side, and taking up the lamp by its chain, he leapt into
the air like a clown, and came down on his heels with a thud that shook
the chamber. Simultaneously he dropped the lamp with a clatter, and sent
a shout re-echoing through the house.

The girl stared at him with parted lips and the least look of fear in
her eyes. Was he gone clean mad of a sudden?

But now the sound which had warned him of someone's approach reached
her ears as well. There were steps on the stairs, which at that alarming
noise were instantly quickened. Yet ere they had reached the top La
Boulaye was at the door vociferating wildly.

Into the room came the hostess, breathless and grinning with anxiety,
and behind her came Guyot, who, startled by the din, had hastened up to
inquire into its cause.

At sight of the Captain stretched upon the floor there was a scream from
Mother Capoulade and an oath from the soldier.

“Mon Dieu! what has happened?” she cried, hurrying forward.

“Miserable!” exclaimed La Boulaye, with well-feigned anger. “It seems
that your wretched hovel is tumbling to pieces, and that men are not
safe beneath its roof.” And he indicated the broken plaster and the
fallen lamp.

“How did it happen, Citoyenne-deputy?” asked Guyot; for all that he drew
the only possible inference from what he saw.

“Can you not see how it happened?” returned La Boulaye, impatiently.
“As for you, wretched woman, you will suffer for it, I promise you. The
nation is likely to demand a high price for Captain Charlot's injuries.”

“But, bon Dieu, how am I to blame?” wailed the frightened woman.

“To blame,” echoed La Boulaye, in a furious voice. “Are you not to blame
that you let rooms in a crazy hovel? Let them to emigres as much as you
will, but if you let them to good patriots and thereby endanger their
lives you must take the consequences. And the consequences in this case
are likely to be severe, malheureuse.”

He turned now to Guyot, who was kneeling by the Captain, and looking to
his hurt.

“Here, Guyot,” he commanded sharply, “reconduct the Citoyenne to her
coach. I will perhaps see her again later, when the Captain shall have
recovered consciousness. You, Citoyenne Capoulade, assist me to carry
him to bed.”

Each obeyed him, Guyot readily, as became a soldier, and the hostess
trembling with the dread which La Boulaye's words had instilled into
her. They got Charlot to bed, and when a half-hour or so later he
recovered consciousness, it was to find Guyot watching at his bed-side.
Bewildered, he demanded an explanation of his present position and
of the pain in his head, which brought him the memory of a sudden and
unaccountable blow he had received, which was the last thing that he
remembered. Guyot, who had never for a moment entertained a doubt of the
genuineness of the mise-en-scene La Boulaye had prepared, answered him
with the explanation of how he had been struck by the falling lamp,
whereupon Charlot fell to cursing lamps and crumblings with horrid
volubility. That done he would have risen, but that La Boulaye, entering
at that moment, insisted that he should remain abed.

“Are you mad?” the Deputy expostulated, “or is it that you do not
appreciate the nature of your hurt? Diable! I have known a man die
through insisting to be about with a cracked skull that was as nothing
to yours.”

“Name of a name!” gasped Charlot, who in such matters was profoundly
ignorant and correspondingly credulous. “Is it so serious?”

“Not serious if you lie still and sleep. You will probably be quite
well by to-morrow. But if you move to-night the consequences may well be
fatal.”

“But I cannot sleep at this hour,” the Captain complained. “I am very
wakeful.”

“We will try to find you a sleeping potion, then,” said La Boulaye.
“I hope the hosteen may have something that will answer the purpose.
Meanwhile, Guyot, do not allow the Captain to talk. If you would have
him well to-morrow, remember that it is of the first importance that he
should have utter rest tonight.”

With that he went in quest of Dame Capoulade to ascertain whether she
possessed any potion that would induce sleep. He told her that the
Captain was seriously injured, and that unless he slept he might die,
and, quickened by the terror of what might befall her in such a case,
the woman presently produced a small phial full of a brown, viscous
fluid. What it might be he had no notion, being all unversed in the
mysteries of the pharmacopoeia; but she told him that it had belonged to
her now defunct husband, who had always said that ten drops of it would
make a man sleep the clock round.

He experimented on the Captain with ten drops, and within a quarter of
an hour of taking the draught of red wine in which it was administered,
Charlot's deep breathing proclaimed him fast asleep.

That done, La Boulaye sent Guyot below to his post once more, and
returning to the room in which they had supped, he paced up and down for
a full hour, revolving in his mind the matter of saving Mademoiselle and
her mother. At last, towards ten o'clock, he opened the casement, and
calling down to Guyot, as Charlot had done, he bade him bring the women
up again. Now Guyot knew of the high position which Caron occupied in
the Convention, and he had seen the intimate relations in which he stood
to Tardivet, so that unhesitatingly he now obeyed him.

La Boulaye closed the window, and crossed slowly to the fire. He stirred
the burning logs with his boot, then stood there waiting. Presently the
stairs creaked, next the door opened, and Guyot ushered in Mademoiselle.

“The elder citoyenne refuses to come, Citizen-deputy,” said the soldier.
“They both insisted that it was not necessary, and that the Citoyenne
here would answer your questions.”

Almost on the point of commanding the soldier to return for the
Marquise, Caron caught the girl's eye, and her glance was so significant
that he thought it best to hear first what motives she had for thus
disobeying him.

“Very well,” he said shortly. “You may go below, Guyot. But hold
yourself in readiness lest I should have need of you.”

The soldier saluted and disappeared. Scarce was he gone when
Mademoiselle came hurrying forward.

“Monsieur Caron,” she cried “Heaven is surely befriending us. The
soldiers are drinking themselves out of their wits. They will be keeping
a slack watch presently.”

He looked at her for a moment, fathoming the purport of what she said.

“But,” he demanded at last, “why did not the Marquise obey my summons,
and accompany you?”

“She was afraid to leave the coach, Monsieur. Moreover, she agreed with
me that it would not be necessary.”

“Not necessary?” he echoed. “But it is necessary. When last you were
here I told you I did not intend you should return to the coach. This is
my plan, Citoyenne. I shall keep Guyot waiting below while you and your
mother are fortifying yourselves by supper here. Then I shall dismiss
him with a recommendation that he keep a close watch upon the carriage,
and the information that you will not be returning to it to-night. A
half-hour later or so, when things are quiet, I shall find a way out for
you by the back, after which the rest must remain in your hands. More I
cannot do.”

“You can,” she cried; “you can.”

“If you will enlighten me,” said he, with the faintest touch of irony.

She looked at his stern, sardonic face and solemn grey eyes, and for a
moment it almost seemed to her that she hated him more than anybody in
the world. He was so passionless, so master of himself, and he addressed
her in a tone which, whilst it suggested that he accounted himself most
fully her equal, made her feel that he was really her better by much.
If one of these two was an aristocrat, surely that one was the
Citizen-deputy La Boulaye.

“If you had but the will you would do it, Monsieur,” she answered him.
“It is not mine to enlighten you; I know not how.”

“I have the very best will in the world, Citoyenne,” said he. “Of that I
think that I am giving proof.”

“Aye, the will to do nothing that will shame your manhood,” she
rejoined. “That is all you think of. It was because your manhood bade
you that you came to my rescue--so you said when you declined my thanks.
It is this manhood of yours, I make no doubt, that is now prevailing
upon you to deliver two unprotected women out of the hands of these
brigands.”

“In Heaven's name, Citoyenne,” quoth the astonished Deputy, “out of what
sentiment would you have me act, and, indeed, so that I save you, how
can it concern you by what sentiment I am prompted?”

She paused a moment before replying. Her eyes were downcast, and some of
the colour faded from her cheeks. She came a step nearer, which brought
her very close to him.

“Monsieur,” she faltered very shyly, “in the old days at Bellecour you
would have served me out of other sentiments.”

He started now in spite of himself, and eyed her with a sudden gleam of
hope, or triumph, or mistrust, or perhaps of all three. Then his glance
fell, and his voice was wistful.

“But the old days are dead, Mademoiselle.”

“The days, yes,” she answered, taking courage from his tone. “But love
Monsieur, is everlasting--it never dies, they say.”

And now it was La Boulaye who drew closer, and this man who had
so rigidly schooled himself out of all emotions, felt his breath
quickening, and his pulses throbbing faster and faster. To him it seemed
that she was right, and that love never died--for the love for her,
which he believed he had throttled out of existence long ago, seemed of
a sudden to take life as vigorously as ever. And then it was as if some
breeze out of the past bore to his nostrils the smell of the violets and
of the moist earth of that April morning when she had repulsed him in
the woods of Bellecour. His emotion died down. He drew back, and stood
rigid before her.

“And if it were to live, Citoyenne,” he said--the resumption of the
Republican form of address showed that he had stepped back into the
spirit as well as in the flesh “what manner of fool were I to again
submit it to the lash of scorn it earned when first it was discovered?”

“But that belonged to the old days,” she cried, “and it is dead with the
old days.'

“It is vain to go back, Citoyenne,” he cut in, and his voice rang harsh
with determination.

She bit her lip under cover of her bent head. If she had hated him
before how much more did she not hate him now? And but a moment back it
had seemed to her that she had loved him. She had held out her hands to
him and he had scorned them; in her eagerness she had been unmaidenly,
and all that she had earned had been humiliation. She quivered with
shame and anger, and sinking into the nearest chair she burst into a
passion of tears.

Thus by accident did she stumble upon the very weapon wherewith to make
an utter rout of all Caron's resolutions. For knowing nothing of the
fountain from which those tears were springing, and deeming them the
expression of a grief pure and unalloyed--saving, perhaps, by a worthy
penitence--he stepped swiftly to her side.

“Mademoiselle,” he murmured, and his tone was as gentle and beseeching
as it had lately been imperious. “Nay, Mademoiselle, I implore you!”

But her tears continued, and her sobs shook the slender frame as if to
shatter it. He dropped upon his knees. Scarcely knowing what he did, he
set his arm about her waist in a caress of protection.

A long curl of her black, unpowdered hair lay against his cheek.

“Mademoiselle,” he murmured, and she took comfort at the soothing tone.

From it she judged him malleable now, that had been so stern and
unyielding before. She raised her eyes, and through her tears she turned
their heavenly blue full upon the grey depths of his.

“You will not believe me, Monsieur,” she complained softly. “You will
not believe that I can have changed with the times; that I see things
differently now. If you were to come to me again as in the woods at
Bellecour--” She paused abruptly, her cheeks flamed scarlet, and she
covered them with her hands.

“Suzanne!” he cried, seeking to draw those hands away. “Is it true,
this? You care, beloved!”

She uncovered her face at last. Again their eyes met.

“I was right,” she whispered. “Love never dies, you see.”

“And you will marry me, Suzanne?” he asked incredulously.

She inclined her head, smiling through her tears, and he would have
caught her to him but that she rose of a sudden.

“Hist!” she cried, raising her finger: “someone is coming.”

He listened, holding his breath, but no sound stirred. He went to the
door and peered out. All was still. But the interruption served
to impress him with the fact that time was speeding, and that all
unsuspicious though Guyot might be as yet, it was more than possible
that his suspicions would be aroused if she remained there much longer.

He mentioned this, and he was beginning to refer to his plan for their
escape when she thrust it aside, insisting that they must depart in
their coach, so that their treasure might also be saved.

“Be reasonable, Suzanne,” he cried. “It is impossible.”

A cloud of vexation swept across her averted face.

“Nay, surely not impossible,” she answered. “Listen, Caron, there are
two treasures in that coach. One is in money and in gold and silver
plate; the other is in gems, and amounts to thrice the value of the
rest. This latter is my dowry. It is a fortune with which we can quit
France and betake ourselves wherever our fancy leads us. Would you ask
me to abandon that and come to you penniless, compelled thereby to live
in perpetual terror in a country where at any moment an enemy might cast
at me the word aristocrate, and thereby ruin me?”

There was no cupidity in La Boulaye's nature, and even the prospect of
an independent fortune would have weighed little with him had it not
been backed by the other argument she employed touching the terror that
would be ever with her did they dwell in France.

He stood deep in thought, his hand to his brow, thrusting back the long
black hair from his white forehead, what time she recapitulated her
argument.

“But how?” he exclaimed, in exasperation “Tell me how?”

“That is for you to discover, Caron.”

He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and set himself to pace the
chamber. And now his fingers came in contact with something foreign.
Idly he drew it forth, and it proved to be the phial Mother Capoulade
had given him, and from which he had poured the ten drops for the
Captain's sleeping potion. His eyes brightened with inspiration. Here
was a tool whose possibilities were vast. Then his brows were knit
again.

“Wait,” he said slowly. “Let me think.”




CHAPTER XI. THE ESCAPE


Resting his elbow on the table, and with his hand to his brow, Caron
sat deep in thought, his forefinger and thumb pressed against his closed
eyelids. From beyond the board Mademoiselle watched him anxiously and
waited. At last he looked up.

“I think I have it,” he announced, rising. “You say that the men are
drinking heavily. That should materially assist us.”

She asked him what plan he had conceived, but he urged that time
pressed; she should know presently; meanwhile, she had best return
immediately to her carriage. He went to the door to call Guyot, but she
stayed him.

“No, no, Monsieur,” she exclaimed. “I will not pass through the
common-room again in that fellow's company. They are all in there,
carousing, and--and I dare not.”

As if to confirm her words, now that he held the door open, he caught
some sounds of mirth and the drone of voices from below.

“Come with me, then,” said he, taking up one of the candles. “I will
escort you.”

Together they descended the narrow staircase, La Boulaye going first, to
guide her, since two might not go abreast. At the foot there was a door,
which he opened, and then, at the end of a short passage--in which the
drone of voices sounded very loud and in particular one, cracked voice
that was raised in song--they gained the door of the common-room. As La
Boulaye pushed it open they came upon a scene of Bacchanalian revelry.
On a chair that had been set upon the table they beheld Mother Capoulade
enthroned like a Goddess of Liberty, and wearing a Phrygian cap on her
dishevelled locks. Her yellow cheeks were flushed and her eyes watery,
whilst hers was the crazy voice that sang.

Around the table, in every conceivable attitude of abandonment, sat
Captain Charlot's guard--every man of the ten--and with them the six men
and the corporal of La Boulaye's escort, all more or less in a condition
of drunkenness.

“Le jour de gloire est arrive?” sang the croaking voice of Dame
Capoulade, and there it stopped abruptly upon catching sight of La
Boulaye and his companion in the doorway. Mademoiselle shivered out of
loathing; but La Boulaye felt his pulses quickened with hope, for surely
all this was calculated to assist him in his purpose.

At the abrupt interruption of the landlady's version of the
“Marseillaise” the men swung round, and upon seeing the Deputy they
sought in ludicrous haste to repair the disorder of their appearance.

“So!” thundered Caron. “This is the watch you keep? This is how you are
to be trusted? And you, Guyot,” he continued, pointing his finger at the
man. “Did I not bid you await my orders? Is this how you wait? You see
that I am compelled to reconduct the Citoyenne myself, for I might have
called you in vain all night.”

Guyot came forward sheepishly, and a trifle unsteady in his gait.

“I did not hear you call, Citizen,” he muttered.

“It had been a miracle if you had with this din,” answered La Boulaye.
“Here, take the Citoyenne back to her carriage.”

Obediently Guyot led the Citoyenne across the room and out into the
courtyard, and the men, restrained by La Boulaye's severe presence,
dared scarcely so much as raise their eyes to her as she passed out.

“And now to your posts,” was Caron's stern command. “By my soul, if you
were men of mine I would have you flogged for this. Out with you!” And
he pointed imperiously to the door.

“It is a bitter night, Citizen,” grumbled one of them.

“Do you call yourself soldiers, and does a touch of frost make cowards
of you? Outside, you old wives, at once! I'll see you at your post
before I go to bed.”

And with that he set himself to drive them out, and they went, until
none but his own half-dozen remained. These he bade dispose themselves
about the hearth, in which they very readily obeyed him.

On a side-table stood a huge steaming can which had attracted La
Boulaye's attention from the moment that he had entered the room. He
went to peer into this, and found it full almost to the brim of mulled
red wine.

With his back to those in the room, so as to screen his actions, he
had uncorked the phial as he was approaching the can. Now, as he made
pretence first to peer into it and then to smell its contents, he
surreptitiously emptied the potion into it, wondering vaguely to himself
whether the men would ever wake again if they had drunk it. Slipping
the phial into his sash he turned to Mother Capoulade, who had descended
from the table and stood looking very foolish.

“What is this?” he demanded angrily.

“It was a last cup of wine for the men,” she faltered. “The night is
bitterly cold, Citizen,” she added, by way of excusing herself.

“Bah!” snarled Caron, and for a moment he stood there as if
deliberating. “I am minded to empty it into the kennel,” he announced.

“Citizen!” cried the woman, in alarm. “It is good wine, and I have
spiced it.”

“Well,” he relented, “they may have it. But see that it is the last
to-night.”

And with that he strode across the room, and with a surly “Good-night”
 to his men, he mounted the stairs once more.

He waited perhaps ten minutes in the chamber above, then he went to the
casement, and softly opened the window. It was as he expected. With
the exception of the coach standing in the middle of the yard, and just
discernible by the glow of the smouldering fire they had built there
but allowed to burn low, the place was untenanted. Believing him to have
retired for the night, the men were back again in the more congenial
atmosphere of the hostelry, drinking themselves no doubt into a stupor
with that last can of drugged wine. He sat down to quietly mature his
plans, and to think out every detail of what he was about to do. At the
end of a half-hour, silence reigning throughout the house, he rose.
He crept softly into Charlot's chamber and possessed himself of the
Captain's outer garments. These he carried back to the sitting-room, and
extracted from the coat pocket two huge keys tied together with a piece
of string. He never doubted that they were the keys he sought, one
opening the stable door and the other the gates of the porte-cochere.

He replaced the garments, and then to make doubly sure, he waited
yet--in a fever of impatience--another half-hour by his watch.

It wanted a few minutes to midnight when, taking up his cloak and a
lantern he had lighted, he went below once more. In the common-room he
found precisely the scene he had expected. Both Charlot's men and
his own followers lay about the floor in all conceivable manner of
attitudes, their senses locked deep in the drunken stupor that possessed
them. Two or three had remained seated, and had fallen across the table,
when overcome. Of these was Mother Capoulade, whose head lay sideways
on her curled arms, and from whose throat there issued a resonant
and melodious snore. Most of the faces that La Boulaye could see were
horribly livid and bedewed with sweat, and again it came into his mind
to wonder whether he had overdone things, and they would wake no more.
On the other hand, an even greater fear beset him, that the drug might
have been insufficient. By way of testing it, he caught one fellow who
lay across his path a violent kick in the side. The man grunted in his
sleep, and stirred slightly, to relapse almost at once into his helpless
attitude, and to resume his regular breathing, which the blow had
interrupted.

La Boulaye smiled his satisfaction, and without further hesitancy passed
out into the yard. He had yet a good deal to say to Mademoiselle, but he
could not bring himself to speak to her before her mother, particularly
as he realised how much the Marquise might be opposed to him. He opened
the carriage door.

“Mademoiselle,” he called softly, “will you do me the favour to alight
for an instant? I must speak to you.”

“Can you not say what you have to say where you are?” came the
Marquise's voice.

“No, Madame,” answered La Boulaye coldly, “I cannot.”

“Oh, it is 'Madame' and 'Mademoiselle' now, eh? What have you done to
the man, child, to have earned us so much deference.”

“May I remind Mademoiselle,” put in La Boulaye firmly, “that time
presses, and that there is much to be done?”

“I am here, Monsieur” she answered, as without more ado, and heedless of
her mother's fresh remarks, she stepped from the carriage.

La Boulaye proffered his wrist to assist her to alight, then reclosed
the door, and led her slowly towards the stable.

“Where are the soldiers?” she whispered.

“Every soul in the inn is asleep,” he answered. “I have drugged them
all, from the Captain down to the hostess. The only one left is the
ostler, who is sleeping in one of the outhouses here. Him you must take
with you, not only because it is not possible to drug him as well, but
also because the blame of your escape must rest on someone, and it may
as well rest on him as another.”

“But why not on you?” she asked.

“Because I must remain.”

“Ah!” It was no more than a breath of interrogation, and her face was
turned towards him as she awaited an explanation.

“I have given it much thought, Suzanne, and unless someone remains to
cover, as it were, your retreat, I am afraid that your flight might be
vain, and that you would run an overwhelming risk of recapture. You must
remember the resourcefulness of this fellow, Tardivet, and his power in
the country here. If he were to awake to the discovery that I had duped
him, he would be up and after us, and I make little doubt that it would
not be long ere he found the scent and ran us to earth. Tomorrow I shall
discover your flight and the villainy of the ostler, and I shall so
organise the pursuit that you shall not be overtaken.”

There was a moment's pause, during which La Boulaye seemed to expect
some question. But none came, so he proceeded:

“Your original intention was to make for Prussia, where you say that
your father and your brother are awaiting you.”

“Yes, Monsieur. Beyond the Moselle--at Treves.”

“You must alter your plans,” said he shortly. “Your mother, no doubt,
will insist upon repairing thither, and I will see that the road is
left open for her escape. At Soignies you, Suzanne, can hire yourself a
berline, that will take you back to France.”

“Back to France?” she echoed.

“Yes, back to France. That is the unlikeliest road on which to think of
pursuing you, and thus you will baffle Charlot. Let your mother proceed
on her journey to Prussia, but tell her to avoid Charleroi, and to go
round by Liege. Thus only can she hope to escape Tardivet's men that are
patrolling the road from France. As for you, Suzanne, you had best go
North as far as Oudenarde, so as to circumvent the Captain's brigands
on that side. Then make straight for Roubaix, and await me at the 'Hotel
des Cloches.'”

“But, Monsieur, I shudder at the very thought of re-entering France.”

“As Mademoiselle de Bellecour, a proscribed aristocrat, that is every
reason for your fears. But I have given the matter thought and I can
promise you that as the Citoyenne La Boulaye, wife of the Citizen-deputy
Caron La Boulaye, you will be as safe as I should be myself, if you are
questioned, and, in response, you will find nothing but eagerness to
serve you on every hand.”

She spoke now of the difficulties her mother would make, but he
dismissed the matter by reminding her that her mother could not
detain her by force. Again she alluded to her dowry, but that also he
dismissed, bidding her leave it behind. Her family would need the money,
to be realised by the jewels. As for herself, he assured her that as his
wife she would not want, and showed her how idle was her dread of living
in France.

“And now, Mademoiselle,” he said, more briskly, “let us see to this
ostler.”

He opened the door of the outhouse, and uncovering his lantern he raised
it above his head. Its yellow light revealed to them a sleeper on the
straw in a corner. La Boulaye entered and stirred the man with his foot.

The fellow sat up blinking stupidly and dragging odd wisps of straw from
his grey hair.

“What's amiss?” he grunted.

As briefly as might be La Boulaye informed him that he was to receive a
matter of five hundred francs if he would journey into Prussia with the
ci-devant Marquise de Bellecour.

Five hundred francs? It was a vast sum, the tenth of which had never
been his at any one time of his wretched life. For five hundred francs
he would have journeyed into Hades, and La Boulaye found him willing
enough to go to Prussia, and had no need to resort to the more forcible
measures he had come prepared to employ.

Accompanied by the ostler, they now passed to the stables, and when
La Boulaye had unlocked the door and cut the bonds that pinioned the
Marquis's coachman, they got the horses, and together they harnessed
them as quietly as might be.

Then working with infinite precaution, and as little sound as possible,
they brought them out into the yard and set them in the shafts of the
carriage. The rest was easy work, and a quarter of an hour later the
heavy vehicle rumbled through the porte-cochere and started on its way
to Soignies.

La Boulaye dropped the keys into a bucket and went within. In the
common-room nothing had changed, and the men lay about precisely as he
had left them. Reassured, he went above and took a peep at the Captain,
whom he found snoring lustily.

Satisfied that all was well, Caron passed quietly to his own chamber,
and with an elation of soul such as had never been his since boyhood,
he fell asleep amid visions of Suzanne and the new life he was to enter
upon in her sweet company.




CHAPTER XII. THE AWAKENING


La Boulaye awakened betimes next morning. It may be that the matter on
his mind and the business that was toward aroused him; certainly it
was none of the sounds that are common to an inn at early morn, for the
place was as silent as a tomb.

Some seconds he remained on his back, staring at the whitewashed ceiling
and listening to the patter of the rain against his window. Then, as his
mind gathered up the threads of recollection, he

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