The Last Vendée; or, the She-Wolves of Machecoul
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Title: The Last Vendée; or, the She-Wolves of Machecoul
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Release date: August 26, 2015 [eBook #49784]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST VENDÉE; OR, THE SHE-WOLVES OF MACHECOUL ***
Transcriber's Notes:
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VOL I & II (University of California Libraries) Published 1894
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe]
[Frontispiece: Dumas]
Illustrated Sterling edition
THE LAST VENDÉE
OR, THE
SHE-WOLVES OF MACHECOUL
TWO VOLUMES IN ONE
BY
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
ILLUSTRATED
BOSTON
DANA ESTES & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1894_,
BY ESTES AND LAURIAT.
CONTENTS.
I. Charette's Aide-de-camp.
II. The Gratitude of Kings.
III. The Twins.
IV. How Jean Oullier, coming to see the Marquis
for an Hour, would be there still if they
had not both been in their Grave these ten
years.
V. A Litter of Wolves.
VI. The Wounded Hare.
VII. Monsieur Michel.
VIII. The Baronne de la Logerie.
IX. Galon-d'or and Allégro.
X. In which Things do not Happen precisely as
Baron Michel Dreamed they would.
XI. The Foster-father.
XII. Noblesse Oblige.
XIII. A Distant Cousin.
XIV. Petit-Pierre.
XV. An Unseasonable Hour.
XVI. Courtin's Diplomacy.
XVII. The Tavern of Aubin Courte-Joie.
XVIII. The Man from La Logerie.
XIX. The Fair at Montaigu.
XX. The Outbreak.
XXI. Jean Oullier's Resources.
XXII. Fetch! Pataud, fetch!
XXIII. To whom the Cottage belonged.
XXIV. How Marianne Picaut mourned her Husband.
XXV. In which Love lends Political Opinions to
those who have none.
XXVI. The Springs of Baugé.
XXVII. The Guests at Souday.
XXVIII. In which the Marquis de Souday bitterly regrets
that Petit-Pierre is not a Gentleman.
XXIX. The Vendéans of 1832.
XXX. The Warning.
XXXI. My Old Crony Loriot.
XXXII. The General eats a Supper which had not been
Prepared for him.
XXXIII. In which Maître Loriot's Curiosity is not
exactly satisfied.
XXXIV. The Tower Chamber.
XXXV. Which ends quite otherwise than as Mary
expected.
XXXVI. Blue and White.
XXXVII. Which shows that it is not for Flies only
that Spiders' Webs are dangerous.
XXXVIII. In which the Daintiest Foot of France and
of Navarre finds that Cinderella's Slipper
does not fit it as well as Seven-league Boots.
XXXIX. Petit-Pierre makes the best Meal he ever
made in his Life.
XL. Equality in Death.
XLI. The Search.
XLII. In which Jean Oullier speaks his mind
About young Baron Michel.
XLIII. Baron Michel becomes Bertha's Aide-de-camp.
XLIV. Maître Jacques and his Rabbits.
XLV. The Danger of Meeting bad Company in the Woods.
XLVI. Maître Jacques proceeds to keep the Oath
he made to Aubin Courte-Joie.
CONTENTS.
I. In which it appears that all Jews are not
from Jerusalem, nor all Turks from Tunis.
II. Maître Marc.
III. How Persons travelled in the Department
of the Lower Loire in May, 1832.
IV. A little History does no Harm.
V. Petit-Pierre resolves on keeping a Brave
Heart against Misfortune.
VI. How Jean Oullier proved that when the
Wine is drawn it is best to drink it.
VII. Herein is explained how and why Baron
Michel decided to go to Nantes.
VIII. The Sheep, returning to the Fold, tumbles
into a Pit-fall.
IX. Trigaud proves that if he had been Hercules
He would probably have accomplished
Twenty-four labors instead of twelve.
X. Giving the Slip.
XI. Mary is victorious after the Manner of
Pyrrhus.
XII. Baron Michel finds an Oak instead of a
Reed on which to lean.
XIII. The Last Knights of Royalty.
XIV. Jean Oullier lies for the Good of the
Cause.
XV. Jailer and Prisoner escape together.
XVI. The Battlefield.
XVII. After the Fight.
XVIII. The Chateau de la Pénissière.
XIX. The Moor of Bouaimé.
XX. The Firm of Aubin Courte-Joie & Co.
does Honor to its Partnership.
XXI. In which Succor comes from an Unexpected
Quarter.
XXII. On the Highway.
XXIII. What became of Jean Oullier.
XXIV. Maître Courtin's Batteries.
XXV. Madame la Baronne de la Logerie,
Thinking to serve her Son's interests,
serves those of Petit-Pierre.
XXVI. Marches and Counter-marches.
XXVII. Michel's Love Affairs seem to be taking
a Happier Turn.
XXVIII. Showing how there may be Fishermen
and Fishermen.
XXIX. Interrogatories and Confrontings.
XXX. We again meet the General, and find
he is not changed.
XXXI. Courtin meets with Another Disappointment.
XXXII. The Marquis de Souday drags for
Oysters and brings up Picaut.
XXXIII. That which happened in Two Dwellings.
XXXIV. Courtin fingers at last his Fifty Thousand
Francs.
XXXV. The Tavern of the Grand Saint-Jacques.
XXXVI. Judas and Judas.
XXXVII. An Eye for an Eye, and a Tooth for
a Tooth.
XXXVIII. The Red-Breeches.
XXXIX. A Wounded Soul.
XL. The Chimney-back.
XLI. Three Broken Hearts.
XLII. God's Executioner.
XLIII. Shows that a Man with Fifty Thousand
Francs about him may be much Embarrassed.
EPILOGUE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
VOL. I.
Portrait of Dumas _Frontispiece_
Portrait of Charette
Castle Souday
Portrait of Louis XVIII.
Portrait of Dermoncourt
VOL. II.
Portrait of Louis Philippe
Cathedral of Nantes
Château of Nantes
THE LAST VENDÉE;
OR,
THE SHE-WOLVES OF MACHECOUL
VOLUME I.
THE LAST VENDÉE;
OR,
THE SHE-WOLVES OF MACHECOUL
----------
I.
CHARETTE'S AIDE-DE-CAMP.
If you ever chanced, dear reader, to go from Nantes to Bourgneuf you
must, before reaching Saint-Philbert, have skirted the southern corner
of the lake of Grand-Lieu, and then, continuing your way, you arrived,
at the end of one hour or two hours, according to whether you were on
foot or in a carriage, at the first trees of the forest of Machecoul.
There, to left of the road, among a fine clump of trees belonging,
apparently, to the forest from which it is separated only by the main
road, you must have seen the sharp points of two slender turrets and
the gray roof of a little castle hidden among the foliage.
The cracked walls of this manor-house, its broken windows, and its
damp roofs covered with wild iris and parasite mosses, gave it, in
spite of its feudal pretensions and flanking turrets, so forlorn an
appearance that no one at a passing glance would envy its possessor,
were it not for its exquisite situation opposite to the noble trees of
the forest of Machecoul, the verdant billows of which rose on the
horizon as far as the eye could reach.
In 1831, this little castle was the property of an old nobleman named
the Marquis de Souday, and was called, after its owner, the château of
Souday.
Let us now make known the owner, having described the château.
The Marquis de Souday was the sole representative and last descendant
of an old and illustrious Breton family; for the lake of Grand-Lieu,
the forest of Machecoul, the town of Bourgneuf, situated in that part
of France now called the department of the Loire-Inférieure, was then
part of the province of Brittany, before the division of France into
departments. The family of the Marquis de Souday had been, in former
times, one of those feudal trees with endless branches which extended
themselves over the whole department; but the ancestors of the
marquis, in consequence of spending all their substance to appear with
splendor in the coaches of the king, had, little by little, become so
reduced and shorn of their branches that the convulsions of 1789
happened just in time to prevent the rotten trunk from falling into
the hands of the sheriff; in fact, they preserved it for an end more
in keeping with its former glory.
When the doom of the Bastille sounded, and the demolition of the old
house of the kings foreshadowed the overthrow of royalty, the Marquis
de Souday, having inherited, not great wealth,--for nothing of that
was left, as we have said, except the old manor-house,--but the name
and title of his father, was page to his Royal Highness, Monsieur le
Comte de Provence. At sixteen--that was then his time of life--events
are only accidental circumstances; besides, it would have been
extremely difficult for any youth to keep from being heedless and
volatile at the epicurean, voltairean, and constitutional court of the
Luxembourg, where egotism elbowed its way undisguisedly.
It was M. de Souday who was sent to the place de Grève to watch for
the moment when the hangman tightened the rope round Favras's neck,
and the latter, by drawing his last breath, restored his Royal
Highness to his normal peace of mind, which had been for the time
being disturbed. The page had returned at full speed to the
Luxembourg.
"Monseigneur, it is done," he said.
And monseigneur, in his clear, fluty voice, cried:--
"Come, gentlemen, to supper! to supper!"
And they supped as if a brave and honorable gentleman, who had given
his life a sacrifice, to his Royal Highness, had not just been hanged
as a murderer and a vagabond.
Then came the first dark, threatening days of the Revolution, the
publication of the Red Book, Necker's retirement, and the death of
Mirabeau.
One day--it was the 22d of February, 1791--a great crowd surrounded
the palace of the Luxembourg. Rumors were spread. Monsieur, it was
said, meant to escape and join the _émigrés_ on the Rhine. But
Monsieur appeared on the balcony, and took a solemn oath never to
leave the king.
He did, in fact, start with the king on the 21st of June, possibly to
keep his word never to leave him. But he did leave him, to secure his
own safety, and reached the frontier tranquilly with his companion,
the Marquis d'Avaray, while Louis XVI. and his family were arrested at
Varennes.
Our young page, de Souday, thought too much of his reputation as a man
of fashion to stay in France, although it was precisely there that the
monarchy needed its most zealous supporters. He therefore emigrated,
and as no one paid any heed to a page only eighteen years old, he
reached Coblentz safely and took part in filling up the ranks of the
musketeers who were then being remodelled on the other side of the
Rhine under the orders of the Marquis de Montmorin. During the first
royalist struggles he fought bravely under the three Condés, was
wounded before Thionville, and then, after many disappointments and
deceptions, met with the worst of all; namely, the disbanding of the
various corps of _émigrés_,--a measure which took the bread out of the
mouths of so many poor devils. It is true that these soldiers were
serving against France, and their bread was baked by foreign nations.
The Marquis de Souday then turned his eyes toward Brittany and La
Vendée, where fighting had been going on for the last two years. The
state of things in La Vendée was as follows:--
All the first leaders of the great insurrection were dead. Cathélineau
was killed at Vannes, Lescure at Tremblay, Bonchamps at Chollet;
d'Elbée had been, or was to be, shot at Noirmoutiers; and, finally,
what was called the Grand Army had just been annihilated in Le Mans.
This Grand Army had been defeated at Fontenay-le-Comte, at Saumur,
Torfou, Laval, and Dol. Nevertheless, it had gained the advantage in
sixty fights; it had held its own against all the forces of the
Republic, commanded successively by Biron, Rossignol, Kléber, and
Westermann. It had seen its homes burned, its children massacred, its
old men strangled. Its leaders were Cathélineau, Henri de la
Rochejaquelein, Stofflet, Bonchamps, Forestier, d'Elbée, Lescure,
Marigny, and Talmont. In spite of all vicissitudes it continued
faithful to its king when the rest of France abandoned him; it
worshipped its God when Paris proclaimed that there was no God. Thanks
to the loyalty and valor of this army, La Vendée won the right to be
proclaimed in history throughout all time "the land of giants."
Charette and la Rochejaquelein alone were left. Charette had a few
soldiers; la Rochejaquelein had none.
It was while the Grand Army was being slowly destroyed in Le Mans that
Charette, appointed commander-in-chief of Lower Poitou and seconded by
the Chevalier de Couëtu and Jolly, had collected his little army.
Charette, at the head of this army, and la Rochejaquelein, followed by
ten men only, met near Maulevrier. Charette instantly perceived that
la Rochejaquelein came as a general, not as a soldier; he had a strong
sense of his own position, and did not choose to share his command
with any one. He was therefore cold and haughty in manner, and went to
his own breakfast without even asking Rochejaquelein to share it with
him.
The same day eight hundred men left Charette's army and placed
themselves under the orders of la Rochejaquelein. The next day
Charette said to his young rival:--
"I start for Mortagne; you will follow me."
"I am accustomed," replied la Rochejaquelein, "not to follow, but to
be followed."
He parted from Charette, and left him to operate his army as he
pleased. It is the latter whom we shall now follow, because he is the
only Vendéan leader whose last efforts and death are connected with
our history.
Louis XVII. was dead, and on the 26th of June, 1795, Louis XVIII. was
proclaimed king of France at the headquarters at Belleville. On the
15th of August, 1795,--that is to say, two months after the date of
this proclamation,--a young man brought Charette a letter from the new
king. This letter, written from Verona, and dated July 8, 1795,
conferred on Charette the command of the royalist army.
Charette wished to reply by the same young messenger and thank the
king for the honor he had done him; but the young man informed the
general that he had re-entered France to stay there and fight there,
and asked that the despatch he had brought might serve as a
recommendation to the commander-in-chief. Charette immediately
attached him to his person.
This young messenger was no other than Monsieur's former page, the
Marquis de Souday.
As he withdrew to seek some rest, after doing his last sixty miles on
horseback, the marquis came upon a young guard, who was five or six
years older than himself, and was now standing, hat in hand, and
looking at him with affectionate respect. Souday recognized the son of
one of his father's farmers, with whom he had hunted as a lad with
huge satisfaction; for no one could head off a boar as well or urge on
the hounds after the animal was turned with such vigor.
"Hey! Jean Oullier," he cried; "is that you?"
"Myself in person, and at your service, monsieur le marquis," answered
the young peasant.
"Good faith! my friend, and glad enough, too. Are you still as keen a
huntsman?"
"Oh, yes, monsieur le marquis; only, just now it is other game than
boars we are after."
"Never mind that. If you are willing, we'll hunt this game together as
we did the other."
"That's not to be refused, but much the contrary, monsieur le
marquis," returned Jean Oullier.
From that moment Jean Oullier was attached to the Marquis de Souday,
just as the marquis was attached to Charette,--that is to say, that
Jean Oullier was the aide-de-camp of the aide-de-camp of the
commander-in-chief. Besides his talents as a huntsman he was a
valuable man in other respects. In camping he was good for everything.
The marquis never had to think of bed or victuals; in the worst
of times he never went without a bit of bread, a glass of water,
and a shake-down of straw, which in La Vendée was a luxury the
commander-in-chief himself did not always enjoy.
We should be greatly tempted to follow Charette, and consequently our
young hero, on one of the many adventurous expeditions undertaken by
the royalist general, which won him the reputation of being the
greatest partisan leader the world has seen; but history is a
seductive siren, and if you imprudently obey the sign she makes you to
follow her, there is no knowing where you will be led. We must
simplify our tale as much as possible, and therefore we leave to
others the opportunity of relating the expedition of the Comte
d'Artois to Noirmoutiers and the Île Dieu, the strange conduct of the
prince, who remained three weeks within sight of the French coast
without landing, and the discouragement of the royalist army when it
saw itself abandoned by those for whom it had fought so gallantly for
more than two years.
In spite of which discouragement, however, Charette not long after won
his terrible victory at Les Quatre Chemins. It was his last; for
treachery from that time forth took part in the struggle. De Couëtu,
Charette's right arm, his other self after the death of Jolly, was
enticed into an ambush, captured, and shot. In the last months of his
life Charette could not take a single step without his adversary,
whoever he was, Hoche or Travot, being instantly informed of it.
Surrounded by the republican troops, hemmed in on all sides, pursued
day and night, tracked from bush to bush, springing from ditch to
ditch, knowing that sooner or later he was certain to be killed in
some encounter, or, if taken, to be shot on the spot,--without
shelter, burnt up with fever, dying of thirst, half famished, not
daring to ask at the farmhouses he saw for a little water, a little
bread, or a little straw,--he had only thirty-two men remaining with
him, among whom were the Marquis de Souday and Jean Oullier, when, on
the 25th of March, 1796, the news came that four republican columns
were marching simultaneously against him.
"Very good," said he; "then it is here, on this spot, that we must
fight to the death and sell our lives dearly."
The spot was La Prélinière, in the parish of Saint-Sulpice. But with
thirty-two men Charette did not choose to await the enemy; he went to
meet them. At La Guyonnières he met General Valentin with two hundred
grenadiers and chasseurs. Charette's position was a good one, and he
intrenched it. There, for three hours, he sustained the charges and
fire of two hundred republicans. Twelve of his men fell around him.
The Army of the Chouannerie, which was twenty-four thousand strong
when M. le Comte d'Artois lay off the Île Dieu without landing, was
now reduced to twenty men.
These twenty men stood firmly around their general; not one even
thought of escape. To make an end of the business, General Valentin
took a musket himself, and at the head of the hundred and eighty men
remaining to him, he charged at the point of the bayonet.
Charette was wounded by a ball in his head, and three fingers were
taken off by a sabre-cut. He was about to be captured when an
Alsatian, named Pfeffer, who felt more than mere devotion to Charette,
whom he worshipped, took the general's plumed hat, gave him his, and
saying, "Go to the right; they'll follow me," sprang to the left
himself. He was right; the republicans rushed after him savagely,
while Charette sprang in the opposite direction with his fifteen
remaining men.
He had almost reached the wood of La Chabotière when General Travot's
column appeared. Another and more desperate fight took place, in which
Charette's sole object was to get himself killed. Losing blood from
three wounds, he staggered and fell. A Vendéan, named Bossard, took
him on his shoulders and carried him toward the wood; but before
reaching it, Bossard himself was shot down. Then another man,
Laroche-Davo, succeeded him, made fifty steps, and he too fell in the
ditch that separates the wood from the plain.
Then the Marquis de Souday lifted Charette in his arms, and while Jean
Oullier with two shots killed two republican soldiers who were close
at their heels, he carried the general into the wood, followed by the
seven men still living. Once fairly within the woods, Charette
recovered his senses.
"Souday," he said, "listen to my last orders."
The young man stopped.
"Put me down at the foot of that oak."
Souday hesitated to obey.
"I am still your general," said Charette, imperiously. "Obey me."
The young man, overawed, did as he was told and put down the general
at the foot of the oak.
[Illustration: Portrait of Charette.]
"There! now," said Charette, "listen to me. The king who made me
general-in-chief must be told how his general died. Return to his
Majesty Louis XVIII., and tell him all that you have seen; I demand
it."
Charette spoke with such solemnity that the marquis did not dream of
disobeying him.
"Go!" said Charette, "you have not a minute to spare; here come the
Blues. Fly!"
As he spoke the republicans had reached the edge of the woods. Souday
took the hand which Charette held out to him.
"Kiss me," said the latter.
The young man kissed him.
"That will do," said the general; "now go."
Souday cast a look at Jean Oullier.
"Are you coming?" he said.
But his follower shook his head gloomily.
"What have I to do over there, monsieur le marquis?" he said. "Whereas
here--"
"Here, what?"
"I'll tell you that if we ever meet again, monsieur le marquis."
So saying, he fired two balls at the nearest republicans. They fell.
One of them was an officer of rank; his men pressed round him. Jean
Oullier and the marquis profited by that instant to bury themselves in
the depths of the woods.
But at the end of some fifty paces Jean Oullier, finding a thick bush
at hand, slipped into it like a snake, with a gesture of farewell to
the Marquis de Souday.
The marquis continued his way alone.
II.
THE GRATITUDE OF KINGS.
The Marquis de Souday gained the banks of the Loire and found a
fisherman who was willing to take him to Saint-Gildas. A frigate hove
in sight,--an English frigate. For a few more louis the fisherman
consented to put the marquis aboard of her. Once there, he was safe.
Two or three days later the frigate hailed a three-masted merchantman,
which was heading for the Channel. She was Dutch. The marquis asked to
be put aboard of her; the English captain consented. The Dutchman
landed him at Rotterdam. From Rotterdam he went to Blankenbourg, a
little town in the duchy of Brunswick, which Louis XVIII. had chosen
for his residence.
The marquis now prepared to execute Charette's last instructions. When
he reached the château Louis XVIII. was dining; this was always a
sacred hour to him. The ex-page was told to wait. When dinner was over
he was introduced into the king's presence.
He related the events he had seen with his own eyes, and, above all,
the last catastrophe, with such eloquence that his Majesty, who was
not impressionable, was enough impressed to cry out:--
"Enough, enough, marquis! Yes, the Chevalier de Charette was a brave
servant; we are grateful to him."
He made the messenger a sign to retire. The marquis obeyed; but as he
withdrew he heard the king say, in a sulky tone:--
"That fool of a Souday coming here and telling me such things after
dinner! It is enough to upset my digestion!"
The marquis was touchy; he thought that after exposing his life for
six months it was a poor reward to be called a fool by him for whom he
had exposed it. One hundred louis were still in his pocket, and he
left Blankenbourg that evening, saying to himself:--
"If I had known that I should be received in that way I wouldn't have
taken such pains to come."
He returned to Holland, and from Holland he went to England. There
began a new phase in the existence of the Marquis de Souday. He was
one of those men who are moulded by circumstances,--men who are strong
or weak, brave or pusillanimous, according to the surroundings among
which fortune casts them. For six months he had been at the apex of
that terrible Vendéan epic; his blood had stained the gorse and the
moors of upper and lower Poitou; he had borne with stoical fortitude
not only the ill-fortune of battle, but also the privations of that
guerilla warfare, bivouacking in snow, wandering without food, without
clothes, without shelter, in the boggy forests of La Vendée. Not once
had he felt a regret; not a single complaint had passed his lips.
And yet, with all these antecedents, when isolated in the midst of
that great city of London, where he wandered sadly regretting the
excitements of war, he felt himself without courage in presence of
enforced idleness, without resistance under ennui, without energy to
overcome the wretchedness of exile. This man, who had bravely borne
the attacks and pursuits of the infernal columns of the Blues, could
not bear up against the evil suggestions which came of idleness. He
sought pleasure everywhere to fill the void in his existence caused by
the absence of stirring vicissitudes and the excitements of a deadly
struggle.
Now such pleasures as a penniless exile could command were not of a
high order; and thus it happened that, little by little, he lost his
former elegance and the look and manner of gentleman as his tastes
deteriorated. He drank ale and porter instead of champagne, and
contented himself with the bedizened women of the Haymarket and Regent
Street,--he who had chosen his first loves among the duchesses.
Soon the looseness of his principles and the pressure of his needs
drove him into connections from which his reputation suffered. He
accepted pleasures when he could not pay for them; his companions in
debauchery were of a lower class than himself. After a time his own
class of _émigrés_ turned away from him, and by the natural drift of
things, the more the marquis found himself neglected by his rightful
friends, the deeper he plunged into the evil ways he had now entered.
He had been leading this existence for about two years, when by chance
he encountered, in an evil resort which he frequented, a young
working-girl, whom one of those infamous women who infest London had
enticed from her poor home and produced for the first time. In spite
of the changes which ill-luck and a reckless life had produced in the
marquis, the poor girl perceived the remains of a gentleman still in
him. She flung herself at his feet, and implored him to save her from
an infamous life, for which she was not meant, having always been good
and virtuous till then.
The young girl was pretty, and the marquis offered to take her with
him. She threw herself on his neck and promised him all her love and
the utmost devotion. Without any thought of doing a good action the
marquis defeated the speculation on Eva's beauty,--the girl was named
Eva. She kept her word, poor, faithful creature that she was; the
marquis was her first and last and only love.
The matter was a fortunate thing for both of them. The marquis was
getting very tired of cock-fights and the acrid fumes of beer, not to
speak of frays with constables and loves at street-corners. The
tenderness of the young girl rested him; the possession of the pure
child, white as the swans which are the emblem of Brittany, his own
land, satisfied his vanity. Little by little, he changed his course of
life, and though he never returned to the habits of his own class, he
did adopt a life which was that of a decent man.
He went to live with Eva on the upper floor of a house in Piccadilly.
She was a good workwoman, and soon found employment with a milliner.
The marquis gave fencing-lessons. From that time they lived on the
humble proceeds of their employments, finding great happiness in a
love which had now become powerful enough to gild their poverty.
Nevertheless, this love, like all things mortal, wore out in the end,
though not for a long time. Happily for Eva, the emotions of the
Vendéan war and the frantic excitements of London hells had used up
her lover's superabundant sap; he was really an old man before his
time. The day on which the marquis first perceived that his love for
Eva was waning, the day when her kisses were powerless, not to satisfy
him but to rouse him, habit had acquired such an influence over him
that even had he sought distractions outside his home he no longer had
the force or the courage to break a connection in which his
selfishness still found the monotonous comforts of daily life.
The former _viveur_, whose ancestors had possessed for three centuries
the power of life and death in their province, the ex-_brigand_, the
aide-de-camp to the _brigand_ Charette, led for a dozen years the
dull, precarious, drudging life of a humble clerk, or a mechanic more
humble still.
Heaven had long refrained from blessing this illegitimate marriage;
but at last the prayers which Eva had never ceased to offer for twelve
years were granted. The poor woman became pregnant, and gave birth to
twin daughters. But alas! a few hours of the maternal joys she had so
longed for were all that were granted to her. She died of puerperal
fever.
Eva's tenderness for the Marquis de Souday was as deep and warm at the
end of twelve years' devotion as it was in the beginning of their
intercourse; yet her love, great as it was, did not prevent her from
recognizing that frivolity and selfishness were at the bottom of her
lover's character. Therefore she suffered in dying not only the
anguish of bidding an eternal farewell to the man she had loved so
deeply, but the terror of leaving the future of her children in his
hands.
This loss produced impressions upon the marquis which we shall
endeavor to reproduce minutely, because they seem to us to give a
distinct idea of the nature of the man who is destined to play an
important part in the narrative we are now undertaking.
He began by mourning his companion seriously and sincerely. He could
not help doing homage to her good qualities and recognizing the
happiness which he owed to her affection. Then, after his first grief
had passed away, he felt something of the joy of a schoolboy when he
gets out of bounds. Sooner or later his name, rank, and birth must
have made it necessary for him to break the tie. The marquis felt
grateful to Providence for relieving him of a duty which would
certainly have distressed him.
This satisfaction, however, was short-lived. Eva's tenderness, the
continuity, if we may say so, of the care and attention she had given
him, had spoilt the marquis; and those cares and attentions, now that
he had suddenly lost them, seemed to him more essential to his
happiness than ever. The humble chambers in which they had lived
became, now that the Englishwoman's fresh, pure voice no longer
enlivened them, what they were in reality,--miserable lodging-rooms;
and, in like manner, when his eyes sought involuntarily the silky hair
of his companion lying in golden waves upon the pillow, his bed was
nothing more than a wretched pallet. Where could he now look for the
soft petting, the tender attention to all his wants, with which, for
twelve good years, Eva had surrounded him. When he reached this stage
of his desolation the marquis admitted to himself that he could never
replace them. Consequently, he began to mourn poor Eva more than ever,
and when the time came for him to part with his little girls, whom he
sent into Yorkshire to be nursed, he put such a rush of tenderness
into his grief that the good country-woman, their foster-mother, was
sincerely affected.
After thus separating from all that united him with the past, the
Marquis de Souday succumbed under the burden of his solitude; he
became morose and taciturn. As his religious faith was none too solid,
he would probably have ended, under the deep disgust of life which now
took possession of him, by jumping into the Thames, if the catastrophe
of 1814 had not happened just in time to distract him from his
melancholy thoughts. Re-entering France, which he had never hoped to
see again, the Marquis de Souday very naturally applied to Louis
XVIII., of whom he had asked nothing during his exile in return for
the blood he had shed for him. But princes often seek pretexts for
ingratitude, and Louis XVIII. was furnished with three against his
former page: first, the tempestuous manner in which he had announced
to his Majesty Charette's death,--an announcement which had in fact
troubled the royal digestion; secondly, his disrespectful departure
from Blankenbourg, accompanied by language even more disrespectful
than the departure itself; and thirdly (this was the gravest pretext),
the irregularity of his life and conduct during the emigration.
Much praise was bestowed upon the bravery and devotion of the former
page; but he was, very gently, made to understand that with such
scandals attaching to his name he could not expect to fulfil any
public functions. The king was no longer an autocrat, they told him;
he was now compelled to consider public opinion; after the late period
of public immorality it was necessary to introduce a new and more
rigid era of morals. How fine a thing it would be if the marquis were
willing to sacrifice his own personal ambitions to the necessities of
the State.
In short, they persuaded him to be satisfied with the cross of
Saint-Louis, the rank and pension of a major of cavalry, and to take
himself off to eat the king's bread on his estate at Souday,--the sole
fragment recovered by the poor _émigré_ from the wreck of the enormous
fortune of his ancestors.
What was really fine about all this was that these excuses and
hypocrisies did not hinder the Marquis de Souday from doing his
duty,--that is, from leaving his poor castle to defend the white flag
when Napoleon made his marvellous return from Elba. Napoleon fell
again, and for the second time the marquis re-entered Paris with the
legitimate princes. But this time, wiser than he was in 1814, he
merely asked of the restored monarchy for the place of Master of
Wolves to the arrondissement of Machecoul,--an office in the royal
gift which, being without salary or emolument, was willingly accorded
to him.
Deprived during his youth of a pleasure which in his family was an
hereditary passion, the marquis now devoted himself ardently to
hunting. Always unhappy in a solitary life, for which he was totally
unfitted, yet growing more and more misanthropic as the result of his
political disappointments, he found in this active exercise a
momentary forgetfulness of his bitter memories. Thus the position of
Master of Wolves, which gave him the right to roam the State forests
at will, afforded him far more satisfaction than his ribbon of
Saint-Louis or his commission as major of cavalry.
So the Marquis de Souday had been living for two years in the mouldy
little castle we lately described, beating the woods day and night
with his six dogs (the only establishment his slender means
permitted), seeing his neighbors just enough to prevent them from
considering him an absolute bear, and thinking as little as he could
of his past wealth and his past fame, when one morning, as he was
starting to explore the north end of the forest of Machecoul, he met
on the road a peasant woman carrying a child three or four years old
on each arm.
The marquis instantly recognized the woman and blushed as he did so.
It was the nurse from Yorkshire, to whom he had regularly for the last
thirty-six months neglected to pay the board of her two nurslings. The
worthy woman had gone to London, and there made inquiries at the
French legation. She had now reached Machecoul with the assistance of
the French minister, who of course did not doubt that the Marquis de
Souday would be most happy to recover his two children.
The singular part of it is that the ambassador was not entirely
mistaken. The little girls reminded the marquis so vividly of his poor
Eva that he was seized with genuine emotion; he kissed them with a
tenderness that was not assumed, gave his gun to the Englishwoman,
took his children in his arms, and returned to the castle with this
unlooked-for game, to the utter stupefaction of the cook, who
constituted his whole household, and who now overwhelmed him with
questions as to the singular accession thus made to the family.
These questions alarmed the marquis. He was only thirty-nine years of
age, and vague ideas of marriage still floated in his head; he
regarded it as a duty not to let a name and house so illustrious as
that of Souday come to an end in his person. Moreover, he would not
have been sorry to turn over to a wife the management of his household
affairs, which was odious to him. But the realization of that idea
would, of course, be impossible if he kept the little girls in his
house.
He saw this plainly, paid the Englishwoman handsomely, and the next
day despatched her back to her own country.
During the night he had come to a resolution which, he thought, would
solve all difficulties. What was that resolution? We shall now see.
III.
THE TWINS.
The Marquis de Souday went to bed repeating to himself the old
proverb, "Night brings counsel." With that hope he fell asleep. When
asleep, he dreamed.
He dreamed of his old wars in La Vendée with Charette,--of the days
when he was aide-de-camp; and, more especially, he dreamed of Jean
Oullier, his attendant, of whom he had never thought since the day
when they left Charette dying, and parted in the wood of Chabotière.
As well as he could remember, Jean Oullier before joining Charette's
army had lived in the village of La Chevrolière, near the lake of
Grand-Lieu. The next morning the Marquis de Souday sent a man of
Machecoul, who did his errands, on horseback with a letter, ordering
him to go to La Chevrolière and ascertain if a man named Jean Oullier
was still living and whether he was in the place. If he was, the
messenger was to give him the letter and, if possible, bring him back
with him. If he lived at a short distance the messenger was to go
there. If the distance was too great he was to obtain every
information as to the locality of his abode. If he was dead the
messenger was to return at once and say so.
Jean Oullier was not dead; Jean Oullier was not in distant parts; Jean
Oullier was in the neighborhood of La Chevrolière; in fact, Jean
Oullier was in La Chevrolière itself.
Here is what had happened to him after parting with the marquis on the
day of Charette's last defeat. He stayed hidden in the bush, from
which he could see all and not be seen himself. He saw General Travot
take Charette prisoner and treat him with all the consideration a man
like General Travot would show to a man like Charette. But,
apparently, that was not all that Jean Oullier expected to see, for
after seeing the republicans lay Charette on a litter and carry him
away, Jean Oullier still remained hidden in his bush.
It is true that an officer with a picket of twelve men remained in the
wood. What were they there for?
About an hour later a Vendéan peasant passed within ten paces of Jean
Oullier, having answered the challenge of the sentinel with the word
"Friend,"--an odd answer in the mouth of a royalist peasant to a
republican soldier. The peasant next exchanged the countersign with
the sentry and passed on. Then he approached the officer, who, with an
expression of disgust which it is quite impossible to represent, gave
him a bag that was evidently full of gold. After which the peasant
disappeared, and the officer with his picket guard also departed,
showing that in all probability they had only been stationed there to
await the coming of the peasant.
In all probability, too, Jean Oullier had seen what he wanted to see,
for he came out of his bush as he went into it,--that is to say,
crawling; and getting on his feet, he tore the white cockade from his
hat, and, with the careless indifference of a man who for the last
three years had staked his life every day on a turn of the dice, he
buried himself still deeper in the forest.
The same night he reached La Chevrolière. He went straight to his own
home. On the spot where his house had stood was a blackened ruin,
blackened by fire. He sat down upon a stone and wept.
In that house he had left a wife and two children.
Soon he heard a step and raised his head. A peasant passed. Jean
Oullier recognized him in the darkness and called:--
"Tinguy!"
The man approached.
"Who is it calls me?" he said.
"I am Jean Oullier," replied the Chouan.
"God help you," replied Tinguy, attempting to pass on; but Jean
Oullier stopped him.
"You must answer me," he said.
"Are you a man?"
"Yes."
"Then question me and I will answer."
"My father?"
"Dead."
"My wife?"
"Dead."
"My two children?"
"Dead."
"Thank you."
Jean Oullier sat down again, but he no longer wept. After a few
moments he fell on his knees and prayed. It was time he did, for he
was about to blaspheme. He prayed for those who were dead.
Then, restored by that deep faith that gave him hope to meet them in a
better world, he bivouacked on those sad ruins.
The next day, at dawn, he began to rebuild his house, as calm and
resolute as though his father were still at the plough, his wife
before the fire, his children at the door. Alone, and asking no help
from any one, he rebuilt his cottage.
There he lived, doing the humble work of a day laborer. If any one had
counselled Jean Oullier to ask a reward from the Bourbons for doing
what he, rightly or wrongly, considered his duty, that adviser ran
some risk of insulting the grand simplicity of the poor peasant.
It will be readily understood that with such a nature Jean Oullier, on
receiving the letter in which the marquis called him his old comrade
and begged him to come to him, he did not delay his going. On the
contrary, he locked the door of his house, put the key in his pocket,
and then, as he lived alone and had no one to notify, he started
instantly. The messenger offered him his horse, or, at any rate, to
take him up behind him; but Jean Oullier shook his head.
"Thank God," he said, "my legs are good."
Then resting his hand on the horse's neck, he set the pace for the
animal to take,--a gentle trot of six miles an hour. That evening Jean
Oullier was at the castle. The marquis received him with visible
delight. He had worried all day over the idea that Jean Oullier might
be absent, or dead. It is not necessary to say that the idea of that
death worried him not for Jean Oullier's sake but for his own. We have
already informed our readers that the Marquis de Souday was slightly
selfish.
The first thing the marquis did was to take Jean Oullier apart and
confide to him the arrival of his children and his consequent
embarrassment.
Jean Oullier, who had had his own two children massacred, could not
understand that a father should voluntarily wish to part with his
children. He nevertheless accepted the proposal made to him by the
marquis to bring up the little girls till such a time as they were of
age to go to school. He said he would find some good woman at La
Chevrolière who would be a mother to them,--if, indeed, any one could
take the place of a mother to orphaned children.
Had the twins been sickly, ugly, or disagreeable, Jean Oullier would
have taken them all the same; but they were, on the contrary, so
prepossessing, so pretty, so graceful, and their smiles so engaging,
that the good man instantly loved them as such men do love. He
declared that their fair and rosy faces and curling hair were so like
those of the cherubs that surrounded the Madonna over the high altar
at Grand-Lieu before it was destroyed, that he felt like kneeling to
them when he saw them.
It was therefore decided that on the morrow Jean Oullier should take
the children back with him to La Chevrolière.
Now it so happened that, during the time which had elapsed between the
departure of the nurse and the arrival of Jean Oullier, the weather
had been rainy. The marquis, confined to the castle, felt terribly
bored. Feeling bored, he sent for his daughters and began to play with
them. Putting one astride his neck, and perching the other on his
back, he was soon galloping on all fours round the room, like Henri of
Navarre. Only, he improved on the amusement which his Majesty afforded
his progeny by imitating with his mouth not only the horn of the
hunter, but the barking and yelping of the whole pack of hounds. This
domestic sport diverted the Marquis de Souday immensely, and it is
safe to say that the little girls had never laughed so much in their
lives.
Besides, the little things had been won by the tenderness and the
petting their father had lavished upon them during these few hours, to
appease, no doubt, the reproaches of his conscience at sending them
away from him after so long a separation. The children, on their side,
showed him a frantic attachment and a lively gratitude, which were not
a little dangerous to the fulfilment of his plan.
In fact, when the carriole came, at eight o'clock in the morning, to
the steps of the portico, and the twins perceived that they were about
to be taken away, they set up cries of anguish. Bertha flung herself
on her father, clasped his knees, clung to the garters of the
gentleman who gave her sugar-plums and made himself such a capital
horse, and twisted her little hands into them in such a manner that
the poor marquis feared to bruise her wrists by trying to unclasp
them.
As for Mary, she sat down on the steps and cried; but she cried with
such an expression of real sorrow that Jean Oullier felt more touched
by her silent grief than by the noisy despair of her sister. The
marquis employed all his eloquence to persuade the little girls that
by getting into the carriage, they would have more pleasure and more
dainties than by staying with him; but the more he talked, the more
Mary cried and the more Bertha quivered and passionately clung to him.
The marquis began to get impatient. Seeing that persuasion could do
nothing, he was about to employ force when, happening to turn his
eyes, he caught sight of the look on Jean Oullier's face. Two big
tears were rolling down the bronzed cheeks of the peasant into the
thick red whiskers which framed his face. Those tears acted both as a
prayer to the marquis and as a reproach to the father. Monsieur de
Souday made a sign to Jean Oullier to unharness the horse; and while
Bertha, understanding the sign, danced with joy on the portico, he
whispered in the farmer's ear:--
"You can start to-morrow."
As the day was very fine, the marquis desired to utilize the presence
of Jean Oullier by taking him on a hunt; with which intent he carried
him off to his own bedroom to help him on with his sporting-clothes.
The peasant was much struck by the frightful disorder of the little
room; and the marquis continued his confidences with bitter complaints
of his female servitor, who, he said, might be good enough among her
pots and pans, but was odiously careless as to all other household
comforts, particularly those that concerned his clothes. On this
occasion it was ten minutes before he could find a waistcoat that was
not widowed of its buttons, or a pair of breeches not afflicted with a
rent that made them more or less indecent. However, he was dressed at
last.
Wolf-master though he was, the marquis, as we have said, was too poor
to allow himself the luxury of a huntsman, and he led his little pack
himself. Therefore, having the double duty of keeping the hounds from
getting at fault, and firing at the game, it was seldom that the poor
marquis, passionate sportsman that he was, did not come home at night
tired out.
With Jean Oullier it was quite another thing. The vigorous peasant, in
the flower of his age, sprang through the forest with the agility of a
squirrel; he bounded over bushes when it took too long to go round
them, and, thanks to his muscles of steel, he never was behind the
dogs by a length. On two or three occasions he supported them with
such vigor that the boar they were pursuing, recognizing the fact that
flight would not shake off his enemies, ended by turning and standing
at bay in a thicket, where the marquis had the happiness of killing
him at one blow,--a thing that had never yet happened to him.
The marquis went home light-hearted and joyful, thanking Jean Oullier
for the delightful day he owed to him. During dinner he was in fine
good-humor, and invented new games to keep the little girls as gay as
himself.
At night, when he went to his room, the marquis found Jean Oullier
sitting cross-legged in a corner, like a Turk or a tailor. Before him
was a mound of garments, and in his hand he held a pair of old velvet
breeches which he was darning vigorously.
"What the devil are you doing there?" demanded the marquis.
"The winter is cold in this level country, especially when the wind is
from the sea; and after I get home my legs will be cold at the very
thought of a norther blowing on yours through these rents," replied
Jean Oullier, showing his master a tear which went from knee to belt
in the breeches he was mending.
"Ha! so you're a tailor, too, are you?" cried the marquis.
"Alas!" said Jean Oullier, "one has to be a little of everything when
one lives alone as I have done these twenty years. Besides, an old
soldier is never at a loss."
"I like that!" said the marquis; "pray, am not I a soldier, too?"
"No; you were an officer, and that's not the same thing."
The Marquis de Souday looked at Jean Oullier admiringly. Then he went
to bed and to sleep, and snored away, without in the least
interrupting the work of his old Chouan. In the middle of the night he
woke up. Jean Oullier was still at work. The mound of garments had not
perceptibly diminished.
"But you can never finish them, even if you work till daylight, my
poor Jean," said the marquis.
"I'm afraid not."
"Then go to bed now, old comrade; you needn't start till you have
mended up all my old rags, and we can have another hunt to-morrow."
IV.
HOW JEAN OULLIER, COMING TO SEE THE MARQUIS FOR AN HOUR,
WOULD BE THERE STILL IF THEY HAD NOT BOTH BEEN IN THEIR
GRAVE THESE TEN YEARS.
The next morning, before starting for the hunt, it occurred to the
marquis to kiss his children. He therefore went up to their room, and
was not a little astonished to find that the indefatigable Jean
Oullier had preceded him, and was washing and brushing the little
girls with the conscientious determination of a good governess. The
poor fellow, to whom the occupation recalled his own lost young ones,
seemed to be taking deep satisfaction in the work. The marquis changed
his admiration into respect.
For eight days the hunts continued without interruption, each finer
and more fruitful than the last. During those eight days Jean Oullier,
huntsman by day, steward by night, not only revived and restored his
master's wardrobe, but he actually found time to put the house in
order from top to bottom.
The marquis, far from urging his departure, now thought with horror of
parting from so valuable a servitor. From morning till night, and
sometimes from night till morning, he turned over in his mind which of
the Chouan's qualities was most serviceable to him. Jean Oullier had
the scent of a hound to follow game, and the eye of an Indian to
discover its trail by the bend of the reeds or the dew on the grass.
He could even tell, on the dry and stony roads about Machecoul,
Bourgneuf, and Aigrefeuille, the age and sex of a boar, when the trail
was imperceptible to other eyes. No huntsman on horseback had ever
followed up the hounds like Jean Oullier on his long and vigorous
legs. Moreover, on the days when rest was actually necessary for the
little pack of hounds, he was unequalled for discovering the places
where snipe abounded, and taking his master to the spot.
"Damn marriage!" cried the marquis to himself, occasionally, when he
seemed to be thinking of quite other things. "Why do I want to row in
that boat when I have seen so many good fellows come to grief in it?
Heavens and earth! I'm not so young a man--almost forty; I haven't any
illusions; I don't expect to captivate a woman by my personal
attractions. I can't expect to do more than tempt some old dowager
with my three thousand francs a year,--half of which dies with me. I
should probably get a scolding, fussy, nagging wife, who might
interfere with my hunting, which that good Jean manages so well; and I
am sure she will never keep the house in such order as he does.
Still," he added, straightening himself up, and swaying the upper part
of his body, "is this a time to let the old races, the supporters of
monarchy, die out? Wouldn't it be very pleasant to see my son restore
the glory of my house? Besides, what would be thought of me,--who am
known to have had no wife, no legitimate wife,--what will my neighbors
say if I take the two little girls to live with me?"
When these reflections came, which they ordinarily did on rainy days,
when he could not be off on his favorite pastime, they cast the
Marquis de Souday into painful perplexity, from which he wriggled, as
do all undecided temperaments and weak natures,--men, in short, who
never know how to adopt a course,--by making a provisional
arrangement.
At the time when our story opens, in 1831, Mary and Bertha were
seventeen, and the provisional arrangement still lasted; although,
strange as it may seem, the Marquis de Souday had not yet positively
decided to keep his daughters with him.
Jean Oullier, who had hung the key of his house at La Chevrolière to a
nail, had never, in fourteen years, had the least idea of taking it
down. He had waited patiently till his master gave him the order to go
home. But as, ever since his arrival, the château had been neat and
clean; as the marquis had never once missed a button; as the
hunting-boots were always properly greased; as the guns were kept with
all the care of the best armory at Nantes; as Jean Oullier, by means
of certain coercive proceedings, of which he learned the secret from a
former comrade of the "brigand army," had, little by little, brought
the cook not to vent her ill-humor on her master; as the hounds were
always in good condition, shiny of coat, neither fat nor thin, and
able to bear a long chase of eight or ten hours, ending mostly in a
kill; as the chatter and the pretty ways of his children and their
expansive affection varied the monotony of his existence; as his talks
and gossip with Jean Oullier on the stirring incidents of the old war,
now passed into a tradition (it was thirty-six years distant),
enlivened his dull hours and the long evenings and the rainy
days,--the marquis, finding once more the good care, the quiet ease,
the tranquil happiness he had formerly enjoyed with Eva, with the
additional and intoxicating joys of hunting,--the marquis, we say, put
off from day to day, from month to month, from year to year, deciding
on the separation.
As for Jean Oullier, he had his own reasons for not provoking a
decision. He was not only a brave man, but he was a good one. As we
have said, he at once took a liking to Bertha and Mary; this liking,
in that poor heart deprived of its own children, soon became tender
affection, and the tenderness fanaticism. He did not at first perceive
very clearly the distinction the marquis seemed to make between their
position and that of other children whom he might have by a legitimate
marriage to perpetuate his name. In Poitou, when a man gets a worthy
girl into trouble he knows of no other reparation than to marry her.
Jean Oullier thought it natural, inasmuch as his master could not
legitimatize the connection with the mother, that he should at least
not conceal the paternity which Eva in dying had bequeathed to him.
Therefore, after two months' sojourn at the castle, having made these
reflections, weighed them in his mind, and ratified them in his heart,
the Chouan would have received an order to take the children away with
very ill grace; and his respect for Monsieur de Souday would not have
prevented him from expressing himself bluffly on the subject.
Fortunately, the marquis did not betray to his dependant the
tergiversations of his mind; so that Jean Oullier did really regard
the provisional arrangement as definitive, and he believed that the
marquis considered the presence of his daughters at the castle as
their right and also as his own bounden duty.
At the moment when we issue from these preliminaries, Bertha and Mary
were, as we have said, between seventeen and eighteen years of age.
The purity of race in their paternal ancestors had done marvels when
strengthened with the vigorous Saxon blood of the plebeian mother.
Eva's children were now two splendid young women, with refined and
delicate features, slender and elegant shapes, and with great
distinction and nobility in their air and manner. They were as much
alike as twins are apt to be; only Bertha was dark, like her father,
and Mary was fair, like her mother.
Unfortunately, the education of these beautiful young creatures, while
developing to the utmost their physical advantages, did not
sufficiently concern itself with the needs of their sex. It was
impossible that it should be otherwise, living from day to day beside
their father, with his natural carelessness and his determination to
enjoy the present and let the future take care of itself.
Jean Oullier was the only tutor of Eva's children, as he was formerly
their only nurse. The worthy Chouan taught them all he knew
himself,--namely, to read, write, cipher, and pray with tender and
devout fervor to God and the Virgin; also to roam the woods, scale the
rocks, thread the tangle of holly, reeds, and briers without fatigue,
without fear or weakness of any kind; to hit a bird on the wing, a
squirrel on the leap, and to ride bareback those intractable horses of
Mellerault, almost as wild on their plains and moors as the horses of
the gauchos on the pampas.
The Marquis de Souday had seen all this without attempting to give any
other direction to the education of his daughters, and without having
even the idea of counteracting the taste they were forming for these
manly exercises. The worthy man was only too delighted to have such
valiant comrades in his favorite amusement, uniting, as they did, with
their respectful tenderness toward him a gayety, dash, and ardor for
the chase, which doubled his own pleasure from the time they were old
enough to share it.
And yet, in strict justice, we must say that the marquis added one
ingredient of his own to Jean Oullier's instructions. When Bertha and
Mary were fourteen years old, which was the period when they first
followed their father into the forest, their childish games, which had
hitherto made the old castle so lively in the evenings, began to lose
attraction. So, to fill the void he was beginning to feel, the Marquis
de Souday taught Bertha and Mary how to play whist.
On the other hand, the two children had themselves completed mentally,
as far as they could, the education Jean Oullier had so vigorously
developed physically. Playing hide-and-seek through the castle, they
came upon a room which, in all probability, had not been opened for
thirty years. It was the library. There they found a thousand volumes,
or something near that number.
Each followed her own bent in the choice of books. Mary, the gentle,
sentimental Mary, preferred novels; the turbulent and determined
Bertha, history. Then they mingled their reading in a common fund;
Mary told Paul and Virginia and Amadis to Bertha, and Bertha told
Mèzeray and Velly to Mary. The result of such desultory reading was,
of course, that the two young girls grew up with many false notions
about real life and the habits and requirements of a world they had
never seen, and had, in truth, never heard of.
At the time they made their first communion the vicar of Machecoul,
who loved them for their piety and the goodness of their heart, did
risk a few remarks to their father on the peculiar existence such a
bringing-up must produce; but his friendly remarks made no impression
on the selfish indifference of the Marquis de Souday. The education we
have described was continued, and such habits and ways were the result
that, thanks to their already false position, poor Bertha and her
sister acquired a very bad reputation throughout the neighborhood.
The fact was, the Marquis de Souday was surrounded by little newly
made nobles, who envied him his truly illustrious name, and asked
nothing better than to fling back upon him the contempt with which his
ancestors had probably treated theirs. So when they saw him keep in
his own house, and call his daughters, the children of an illegitimate
union, they began to trumpet forth the evils of his life in London;
they exaggerated his wrong-doing and made poor Eva (saved by a miracle
from a life of degradation) a common woman of the town. Consequently,
little by little, the country squires of Beauvoir, Saint-Leger,
Bourgneuf, Saint-Philbert, and Grand-Lieu, avoided the marquis, under
pretence that he degraded the nobility,--a matter about which, taking
into account the mushroom character of their own rank, they were very
good to concern themselves.
But soon it was not the men only who disapproved of the Marquis de
Souday's conduct. The beauty of the twin sisters roused the enmity of
the mothers and daughters in a circuit of thirty miles, and that was
infinitely more alarming. If Bertha and Mary had been ugly the hearts
of these charitable ladies and young ladies, naturally inclined to
Christian mercy, would perhaps have forgiven the poor devil of a
father for his improper paternity; but it was impossible not to be
shocked at the sight of two such spurious creatures, crushing by their
distinction, their nobility, and their personal charm, the well-born
young ladies of the neighborhood. Such insolent superiority deserved
neither mercy nor compassion.
The indignation against the poor girls was so general that even if
they had never given any cause for gossip or calumny, gossip and
calumny would have swept their wings over them. Imagine, therefore,
what was likely to happen, and did actually happen, when the masculine
and eccentric habits of the sisters were fully known! One universal
hue-and-cry of reprobation arose from the department of the
Loire-Inférieure and echoed through those of La Vendée and the
Maine-et-Loire; and if it had not been for the sea, which bounds the
coast of the Loire-Inférieure, that reprobation would, undoubtedly,
have spread as far to the west as it did to the south and east. All
classes, bourgeois and nobles, city-folk and country-folk, had their
say about it. Young men, who had hardly seen Mary and Bertha, and did
not know them, spoke of the daughters of the Marquis de Souday with
meaning smiles, expressive of hopes, if not of memories. Dowagers
crossed themselves on pronouncing their names, and nurses threatened
little children when they were naughty with goblin tales of them.
The most indulgent confined themselves to attributing to the twins the
three virtues of Harlequin, usually regarded as the attributes of the
disciples of Saint-Hubert,--namely, love, gambling, and wine. Others,
however, declared that the little castle of Souday was every night the
scene of orgies such as chronicles of the regency alone could show. A
few imaginative persons went further, and declared that one of
its ruined towers--abandoned to the innocent loves of a flock of
pigeons--was a repetition of the famous Tour de Nesle, of licentious
and homicidal memory.
In short, so much was said about Bertha and Mary that, no matter what
had been and then was the purity of their lives and the innocence of
their actions, they became an object of horror to the society of the
whole region. Through the servants of private houses, through the
workmen employed by the bourgeoisie, this hatred and horror of society
filtered down among the peasantry, so that the whole population in
smocks and wooden shoes (if we except a few old blind men and helpless
women to whom the twins had been kind) echoed far and wide the absurd
stories invented by the big-wigs. There was not a woodman, not a
laborer in Machecoul, not a farmer in Saint-Philbert and Aigrefeuille
that did not feel himself degraded in raising his hat to them.
The peasantry at last gave Bertha and Mary a nickname; and this
nickname, starting from the lower classes, was adopted by acclamation
among the upper, as a just characterization of the lawless habits
and appetites attributed to the young girls. They were called the
she-wolves (a term, as we all know, equivalent to _sluts_),--the
she-wolves of Machecoul.
V.
A LITTER OF WOLVES.
The Marquis de Souday was utterly indifferent to all these signs of
public animadversion; in fact, he seemed to ignore their existence.
When he observed that his neighbors no longer returned the few visits
that from time to time he felt obliged to pay to them, he rubbed his
hands with satisfaction at being released from social duties, which he
hated and only performed when constrained and forced to do so either
by his daughters or by Jean Oullier.
Every now and then some whisper of the calumnies that were circulating
about Bertha and Mary reached him; but he was so happy with his
factotum, his daughters, and his hounds, that he felt he should be
compromising the tranquillity he enjoyed if he took the slightest
notice of such absurd reports. Accordingly, he continued to course the
hares daily and hunt the boar on grand occasions, and play whist
nightly with the two poor calumniated ones.
Jean Oullier was far from being as philosophical as his master; but
then it must be said that in his position he heard much more than the
marquis did. His affection for the two young girls had now become
fanaticism; he spent his life in watching them, whether they sat,
softly smiling, in the salon of the château, or whether, bending
forward on their horses' necks, with sparkling eyes and animated
faces, they galloped at his side, with their long locks floating in
the wind from beneath the broad brims of their felt hats and
undulating feathers. Seeing them so brave and capable, and at the same
time so good and tender to their father and himself, his heart swelled
with pride and happiness; he felt himself as having a share in the
development of these two admirable creatures, and he wondered why all
the world should not be willing to kneel down to them.
Consequently, the first persons who risked telling him of the rumors
current in the neighborhood were so sharply rebuked for it that they
were frightened and warned others; but Bertha and Mary's true father
needed no words to inform him what was secretly believed of the two
dear objects of his love. From a smile, a glance, a gesture, a sign,
he guessed the malicious thoughts of all with a sagacity that made him
miserable. The contempt that poor and rich made no effort to disguise
affected him deeply. If he had allowed himself to follow his impulses
he would have picked a quarrel with every contemptuous face, and
corrected some by knocking them down, and others by a pitched battle.
But his good sense told him that Bertha and Mary needed another sort
of support, and that blows given or received would prove absolutely
nothing in their defence. Besides, he dreaded--and this was, in fact,
his greatest fear--that the result of some quarrel, if he provoked it,
might be that the young girls would be made aware of the public
feeling against them.
Poor Jean Oullier therefore bowed his head before this cruelly unjust
condemnation, and tears and fervent prayers to God, the supreme
redressor of the cruelties and injustices of men, alone bore testimony
to his grief; but in his heart he fell into a state of profound
misanthropy. Seeing none about him but the enemies of his two dear
children, how could he help hating mankind? And he prepared himself
for the day when some future revolution might enable him to return
evil for evil.
The revolution of 1830 had just occurred, but it had not given Jean
Oullier the opportunity he craved to put these evil designs into
execution. Nevertheless, as rioting and disturbances were not yet
altogether quelled in the streets of Paris, and might still be
communicated to the provinces, he watched and waited.
On a fine morning in September, 1831, the Marquis
de Souday, his daughters, Jean Oullier, and the
pack--which, though frequently renewed since we made its acquaintance,
had not increased in numbers--were hunting in the forest of Machecoul.
It was an occasion impatiently awaited by the marquis, who for the
last three months had been expecting grand sport from it,--the object
being to capture a litter of young wolves, which Jean Oullier had
discovered before their eyes were opened, and which he had, being a
faithful and knowing huntsman to a Master of Wolves, watched over and
cared for for several months. This last statement may demand some
explanations to those of our readers who are not familiar with the
noble art of venery.
When the Duc de Biron (beheaded, in 1602, by order of Henri IV.) was a
youth, he said to his father at one of the sieges of the religious
wars, "Give me fifty cavalry; there's a detachment of two hundred men,
sallying out to forage. I can kill every one of them, and the town
must surrender." "Suppose it does, what then?" "What then? Why, I say
the town will surrender." "Yes; and the king will have no further need
of us. We must continue _necessary_, you ninny!" The two hundred
foragers were not killed. The town was not taken, and Biron and his
son continued "necessary;" that is to say, being necessary they
retained the favor and the wages of the king.
Well, it is with wolves as it was with those foragers spared by the
Duc de Biron. If there were no longer any wolves how could there be a
Wolf-master? Therefore we must forgive Jean Oullier, who was, as we
may say, a corporal of wolves, for showing some tender care for the
nurslings and not slaying them, them and their mother, with the stern
rigor he would have shown to an elderly wolf of the masculine sex.
But that is not all. Hunting an old wolf in the open is impracticable,
and in a battue it is monotonous and tiresome; but to hunt a young
wolf six or seven months old is easy, agreeable, and amusing. So, in
order to procure this charming sport for his master, Jean Oullier, on
finding the litter, had taken good care not to disturb or frighten the
mother; he concerned himself not at all for the loss of sundry of the
neighbors' sheep, which she would of course inevitably provide for her
little ones. He had paid the latter several visits, with touching
solicitude, during their infancy, to make sure that no one had laid a
disrespectful hand upon them, and he rejoiced with great joy when he
one day found the den depopulated and knew that the mother-wolf had
taken off her cubs on some excursion.
The day had now come when, as Jean Oullier judged, they were in fit
condition for what was wanted of them. He therefore, on this grand
occasion, hedged them in to an open part of the forest, and loosed the
six dogs upon one of them.
The poor devil of a cub, not knowing what all this trumpeting and
barking meant, lost his head and instantly quitted the covert, where
he left his mother and brothers and where he still had a chance to
save his skin. He took unadvisedly to another open, and there, after
running for half an hour in a circuit like a hare, he became very
tired from an exertion to which he was not accustomed, and feeling his
big paws swelling and stiffening he sat down artlessly on his tail and
waited.
He did not have to wait long before he found out what was wanted of
him, for Domino, the leading hound, a Vendéan, with a rough gray coat,
came up almost immediately and broke his back with one crunch of his
jaw.
Jean Oullier called in his dogs, took them back to the starting-point,
and ten minutes later a brother of the deceased was afoot, with the
hounds at his heels. This one however, with more sense than the other,
did not leave the covert, and various sorties and charges, made
sometimes by the other cubs and sometimes by the mother-wolf, who
offered herself voluntarily to the dogs, delayed for a time his
killing. But Jean Oullier knew his business too well to let such
actions compromise success. As soon as the cub began to head in a
straight line with the gait of an old wolf, he called off his dogs,
took them to where the cub had broken, and put them on the scent.
Pressed too closely by his pursuers, the poor wolfling tried to
double. He returned upon his steps, and left the wood with such
innocent ignorance that he came plump upon the marquis and his
daughters. Surprised, and losing his head, he tried to slip between
the legs of the horses; but M. de Souday, leaning from his saddle,
caught him by the tail, and flung him to the dogs, who had followed
his doubling.
These successful kills immensely delighted the marquis, who did not
choose to end the matter here. He discussed with Jean Oullier whether
it was best to call in the dogs and attack at the same place, or
whether, as the rest of the cubs were evidently afoot, it would not be
best to let the hounds into the wood pell-mell to find as they
pleased.
But the mother-wolf, knowing probably that they would soon be after
the rest of her progeny, crossed the road not ten steps distant from
the dogs, while the marquis and Jean Oullier were arguing. The moment
the little pack, who had not been re-coupled, saw the animal, they
gave one cry, and, wild with excitement, rushed upon her traces.
Calls, shouts, whips, nothing could hold them, nothing stop them. Jean
Oullier made play with his legs, and the marquis and his daughters put
their horses to a gallop for the same purpose; but the hounds had
something else than a timid, ignorant cub to deal with. Before them
was a bold, vigorous, enterprising animal, running confidently, as if
sure of her haven, in a straight line, indifferent to valleys, rocks,
mountains, or water-courses, without fear, without haste, trotting
along at an even pace, sometimes surrounded by the dogs, whom she
mastered by the power of an oblique look and the snapping of her
formidable jaws.
The wolf, after crossing three fourths of the forest, broke out to the
plain as though she were making for the forest of Grand'Lande. Jean
Oullier had kept up, thanks to the elasticity of his legs, and was now
only three or four hundred steps behind the dogs. The marquis and his
daughters, forced by the ditches to follow the curve of the paths,
were left behind. But when they reached the edge of the woods and had
ridden up the slope which overlooks the little village of Marne, they
saw, over a mile ahead of them, between Machecoul and La Brillardière,
in the midst of the gorse which covers the ground near those villages
and La Jacquelerie, Jean Oullier, his dogs, and his wolf, still in the
same relative positions, and following a straight line at the same
gait.
The success of the first two chases and the rapidity of the ride
stirred the blood of the Marquis de Souday.
"Morbleu!" he cried; "I'd give six years of life to be at this moment
between Saint-Étienne de Mermorte and La Guimarière and send a ball
into that vixen of a wolf."
"She is making for the forest of Grand'Lande," said Mary.
"Yes," said Bertha; "but she will certainly come back to the den, so
long as the cubs have not left it. She won't forsake her own wood
long."
"I think it would be better to go back to the den," said Mary. "Don't
you remember, papa, that last year we followed a wolf which led us a
chase of ten hours, and all for nothing; and we had to go home with
our horses blown, the dogs lame, and all the mortification of a dead
failure?"
"Ta, ta, ta!" cried the marquis; "that wolf wasn't a she-wolf. You can
go back, if you like, mademoiselle; as for me, I shall follow the
hounds. Corbleu! it shall never be said I wasn't in at the death."
"We shall go where you go, papa," cried both girls together.
"Very good; forward, then!" cried the marquis, vigorously spurring his
horse, and galloping down the slope. The way he took was stony and
furrowed with the deep ruts of which Lower Poitou keeps up the
tradition to this day. The horses stumbled repeatedly, and would soon
have been down if they had not been held up firmly; it was evidently
impossible to reach the forest of Grand'Lande before the game.
Monsieur de Souday, better mounted than his daughters, and able to
spur his beast more vigorously, had gained some rods upon them.
Annoyed by the roughness of the road, he turned his horse suddenly
into an open field beside it, and made off across the plain, without
giving notice to his daughters. Bertha and Mary, thinking that they
were still following their father, continued their way along the
dangerous road.
In about fifteen minutes from the time they lost sight of their father
they came to a place where the road was deeply sunken between two
slopes, at the top of which were rows of trees, the branches meeting
and interlacing above their heads. There they stopped suddenly,
thinking that they heard at a little distance the well-known barking
of their dogs. Almost at the same moment a gun went off close beside
them, and a large hare, with bloody hanging ears, ran from the hedge
and along the road before them, while loud cries of "Follow! follow!
tally-ho! Tally-ho!" came from the field above the narrow roadway.[1]
---------------
[Footnote 1: The English cry "tally-ho" comes from the French cry
_taillis au_,--"to the copse," or "covert."]
---------------
The sisters thought they had met the hunt of some of their neighbors,
and were about to discreetly disappear, when from the hole in the
hedge through which the hare had forced her way, came Rustaud, one of
their father's dogs, yelping loudly, and after Rustaud, Faraud,
Bellaude, Domino, and Fanfare, one after another, all in pursuit of
the wretched hare, as if they had chased that day no higher game.
The tail of the last dog was scarcely through the opening before
a human face appeared there. This face belonged to a pale,
frightened-looking young man, with touzled head and haggard eyes, who
made desperate efforts to bring his body after his head through the
narrow passage, calling out, as he struggled with the thorns and
briars, "Tally-ho! tally-ho!" in the same voice Bertha and Mary had
heard about five minutes earlier.
VI.
THE WOUNDED HARE.
Among the hedges of Lower Poitou (constructed, like the Breton hedges,
with bent and twisted branches interlacing each other) it is no
reason, because a hare and six hounds have passed through, that
the opening they make should be considered in the light of a
_porte-cochère_; on the contrary, the luckless young man was held fast
as though his neck were in the collar of the guillotine. In vain he
pushed and struggled violently, and tore his hands and face till both
were bloody; it was impossible for him to advance one inch.
And yet he did not lose courage; he fought on with might and main,
until suddenly two peals of girlish laughter arrested his struggles.
He looked round, and saw the two riders bending over the pommels of
their saddles, and making no effort either to restrain their amusement
or conceal the cause of it.
Ashamed of being laughed at by two such pretty girls (he was only
twenty), and perceiving how really grotesque his appearance must be,
the young man tried to withdraw his head from the hole; but it was
written above that that unlucky hedge should be fatal to him either
way. The thorns hooked themselves into his clothing and the branches
into his game-bag, so that it was literally impossible for him to get
back. There he was, caught in the hedge as if in a trap; and this
second misfortune only increased the convulsive hilarity of the two
spectators.
The luckless youth no longer used mere vigorous energy to free himself
from the thicket. His struggles became furious, almost frenzied, and
in this last and desperate attempt his face assumed an expression of
such pitiable despair that Mary, the gentle one, felt touched.
"We ought not to laugh, Bertha," she said; "don't you see it hurts
him?"
"Yes, I see," replied Bertha; "but how can we help it? I can't stop
myself."
Then, still laughing, she jumped off her horse and ran to the poor
fellow to help him.
"Monsieur," she said, "I think a little assistance may be useful in
getting you out of that hedge. Pray accept the help my sister and I
are most ready to offer."
But the girl's laughter had pricked the vanity of the youth even more
than the thorns had pricked his body; so that no matter how
courteously Bertha worded her proposal, it did not make the
unfortunate captive forget the hilarity of which he had been the
object. So he kept silence; and, with the air of a man resolved to get
out of his troubles without the help of any one, he made a last and
still more strenuous effort.
He lifted himself by his wrists and endeavored to propel himself
forward by the sort of diagonal motion with the lower part of his body
that all animals of the snake genus employ. Unluckily, in making this
movement his forehead came in contact with the branch of a wild
apple-tree, which the shears of the farmer who made the hedge had
sharpened like the end of a pike. This branch cut and scraped the skin
like a well-tempered razor; and the young man, feeling himself
seriously wounded, gave a cry as the blood, spurting freely, covered
his whole face.
When the sisters saw the accident, of which they were involuntarily
the cause, they ran to the young man, seized him by the shoulders, and
uniting their efforts, with a vigor and strength not to be met with
among ordinary women, they managed to drag him through the hedge and
seat him on the bank. Mary, who could not know that the wound was
really a slight one, and only judged by appearances, became very pale
and trembling, as for Bertha, less impressionable than her sister, she
did not lose her head for a single moment.
"Run to that brook," she said to Mary, "and wet your handkerchief, so
that I may wash off the blood that is blinding the poor fellow."
When Mary had done as she was told and had returned with the moistened
handkerchief, she asked the young man in her gentle way:--
"Do you suffer much, monsieur?"
"Excuse me, mademoiselle," replied the young man, "but I have so much
on my mind at this moment that I do not know whether I suffer most on
the inside or the outside of my head." Then suddenly bursting into
sobs, with difficulty restrained till then, he cried out, "Ah! the
good God has punished me for disobeying mamma!"
Although the youth who spoke was certainly young,--for, as we have
said, he was only twenty,--there was something so infantine in his
accent and so ludicrously out of keeping with his height and his
huntsman's dress in his words, that the sisters, in spite of their
compassion for his wound, could not restrain another peal of laughter.
The poor lad cast a look of entreaty and reproach, upon them, while
two big tears rolled down his cheeks; then he tore from his head,
impatiently, the handkerchief wet with water from the brook, which
Mary had laid upon his forehead.
"Don't do that!" said Bertha.
"Let me alone!" he cried. "I don't choose to receive attentions I have
to pay for in ridicule. I am sorry now I did not follow my first idea
and run away, at the risk of getting a worse wound."
"Yes; but as you had the sense not to do so," said Mary, "have sense
enough now to let me put that bandage back upon your head."
Picking up the handkerchief she went to him with such a kindly
expression of interest that he, shaking his head, not in sign of
refusal but of utter depression, said:--
"Do as you please, mademoiselle."
"Oh! oh!" exclaimed Bertha, who had not lost a single expression on
the countenance of the young man; "for a hunter you seem to me rather
easily upset, monsieur."
"In the first place, mademoiselle, I am not a hunter, and after what
has just happened to me I don't wish ever to become one."
"I beg your pardon," said Bertha, in the same laughing tone which had
already provoked the youth, "but judging by the fury with which you
assaulted the briers and thorns, and especially by the eagerness with
which you urged on our dogs, I think I had every right to at least
imagine you a hunter."
"Oh, no, mademoiselle; I am not a hunter. I was carried away by a
momentary excitement, which I cannot now at all understand. At present
I am perfectly cool, and I know how right my mother was to call the
amusement of hunting, which consists in finding pleasure and gratified
vanity in the agony and death of a poor, defenceless, dumb animal,
ridiculous and degrading."
"Take care, monsieur!" cried Bertha. "To us, who are ridiculous and
degraded enough to like that amusement, you seem a good deal like the
fox in the fable."
Just then Mary, who had gone a second time to the brook to wet her
handkerchief, was about to re-bandage the young man's forehead. But he
pushed her away from him angrily.
"In Heaven's name, mademoiselle," he cried, "spare me your attentions!
Don't you hear how your sister continues to laugh at me?"
"No, let me tie this on, I beg of you," said Mary.
But he, not allowing himself to be persuaded by the sweetness of her
voice, rose to his knees, with the evident intention of escaping
altogether. Such obstinacy, which was more that of a child than of a
man, exasperated the irascible Bertha; and her irritation, though
inspired by the purest feelings of humanity, was none the less
expressed in rather too energetic a way for one of her sex.
"Confound it!" she cried, as her father might have done under similar
circumstances, "the provoking little fellow won't hear reason! Put on
the bandage, Mary; I'll hold his hands, and we'll see if he stirs
then."
And Bertha, seizing the young man's wrists with a muscular strength
which paralyzed all his efforts to get away, managed to facilitate
Mary's task so that she was able to bind the wound and tie the
handkerchief, which she did with a nicety that might have done honor
to a pupil of Dupuytren or Jobert.
"Now, monsieur," said Bertha, "you are in a fit state to go home, and
get away from us, as you are longing to do, without so much as thank
you. You can go."
But in spite of this permission and his restored liberty, the youth
did not budge. He seemed surprised and also deeply humiliated at
having fallen into the hands of two such strong women; his eyes turned
from Bertha to Mary and from Mary to Bertha, and still he was unable
to find a word to say. At last, seeing no other way out of his
embarrassment, he hid his face in his hands.
"Oh!" said Mary, kindly; "do you feel ill?"
The youth made no answer. Bertha gently moved his hands from his face,
and finding that he was really weeping, she became as compassionate
and gentle as her sister.
"You are more hurt than you seemed to be; is it the pain that makes
you cry?" she said. "If so, get on my horse or my sister's, and we
will take you home."
But to this the young man eagerly made a sign in the negative.
"Come," said Bertha, "enough of this childish nonsense! We have
affronted you; but how could we know that the skin of a girl was under
your hunting-jacket. Nevertheless, we were wrong; we admit it, and we
beg your pardon. You may not think we do so in a proper manner; but
remember the situation, and say to yourself that sincerity is all you
can expect from two girls so neglected by Heaven as to spend their
time in the ridiculous amusement which your mother unfortunately
disapproves. Now, do you mean to be unforgiving?"
"No, mademoiselle," replied the youth; "it is only with myself that I
am annoyed."
"Why so?"
"I can hardly tell you. Perhaps it is that I am ashamed to be weaker
than you,--I, a man; perhaps, too, I am all upset at the thought of
going home. What can I say to my mother to explain this wound?"
The two girls looked at each other. Women as they were, they would
have cared little for such a trifle; but they refrained from laughing,
strong as the temptation was, seeing by this time the extreme nervous
susceptibility of the young man.
"Well, then," said Bertha, "if you are no longer angry with us, let us
shake hands and part friends."
And she held out her hand as a man might have done. The youth was
about to reply with a like gesture, when Mary made a sign to call
their attention, by lifting her finger in the air.
"Hush!" said Bertha, listening as her sister did, one hand half
extended toward that of the young man.
In the distance, but coming rapidly nearer, they heard the sharp,
eager, prolonged yelping of hounds,--of hounds that were scenting
game. It was the Marquis de Souday's pack, still in pursuit of the
wounded hare, which had now doubled on them. Bertha pounced on the
young man's gun, the right barrel of which was still loaded. He made a
gesture as if to stop a dangerous imprudence, but the young girl only
smiled at him. She ran the ramrod hastily down the loaded barrel, as
all prudent hunters do when about to use a gun they have not loaded
themselves, and finding that the weapon was in proper condition, she
advanced a few steps, handling the gun with an ease which showed she
was perfectly familiar with the use of it.
Almost at the same moment the hare darted from the hedge, evidently
with the intention of returning the way it came; then, perceiving the
three persons who stood there, it made a rapid somersault and doubled
back. Quick as the movement was Bertha had time to aim; she fired, and
the animal, shot dead, rolled down the bank into the middle of the
road.
Mary had, meantime, advanced like her sister to shake hands with the
young man, and the two stood looking on at what was happening with
their hands clasped. Bertha picked up the hare, and returning to the
unknown young man who still held Mary's hand, she said, giving him the
game:--
"There, monsieur, there's an excuse for you."
"How so?" he asked.
"You can tell your mother that the hare ran between your legs and your
gun went off without your knowledge; and you can swear, as you did
just now, that it shall never happen again. The hare will plead
extenuating circumstances."
The young man shook his head in a hopeless way.
"No," he said, "I should never dare tell my mother I have disobeyed
her."
"Has she positively forbidden you to hunt?"
"Oh, dear, yes!"
"Then you are poaching!" said Bertha; "you begin where others finish.
Well, you must admit you have a vocation for it."
"Don't joke, mademoiselle. You have been so good to me I don't want to
get angry with you; I should only be twice as unhappy then."
"You have but one alternative, monsieur," said Mary; "either tell a
lie--which you will not do, neither do we advise it--or acknowledge
the whole truth. Believe me, whatever your mother may think of your
amusing yourself in defiance of her wishes, your frankness will disarm
her. Besides, it is not such a great crime to kill a hare."
"All the same I should never dare to tell her."
"Is she so terrible as all that?" inquired Bertha.
"No, mademoiselle; she is very kind and tender. She indulges all my
wishes and foresees my fancies; but on this one matter of guns she is
resolute. It is natural she should be," added the young man, sighing;
"my father was killed in hunting."
"Then, monsieur," said Bertha, gravely, "our levity has been all the
more misplaced, and we regret it extremely. I hope you will forget it
and remember only our regrets."
"I shall only remember, mademoiselle, the kind care you have bestowed
upon me; and I, in turn, hope you will forget my silly fears and
foolish susceptibility."
"No, no, we shall remember them," said Mary, "to prevent ourselves
from ever hurting the feelings of others as we hurt yours; for see
what the consequences have been!"
While Mary was speaking Bertha had mounted her horse. Again the youth
held out his hand, though timidly, to Mary. She touched it with the
points of her fingers and sprang into her own saddle. Then, calling in
the dogs, who came at the sound of their voices, the sisters gave rein
to their horses and rode rapidly away.
The youth stood looking after them, silent and motionless, until they
had disappeared round a curve of the road. Then he dropped his head on
his breast and continued thoughtful. We will remain a while with this
new personage, for we ought to become fully acquainted with him.
VII.
MONSIEUR MICHEL.
What had just happened produced such a powerful impression on the
young man's mind that after the girls had disappeared he fancied it
must have been a dream.
He was, in fact, at that period of life when even those who are
destined to become later the most practical of men pay tribute to the
romantic; and this meeting with two young girls, so different from
those he was in the habit of seeing, transported him at once into the
fantastic world of youth's first dreams, where the imagination wanders
as it pleases among the castles built by fairy hands, which topple
over beside the path of life as we advance along it.
We do not mean to say, however, that our young man had got as far as
falling in love with either of the two amazons, but he felt himself
spurred to the keenest curiosity; for this strange mixture of
distinction, beauty, elegance of manner, and cavalier virility struck
him as extraordinary. He determined to see these girls again, or, at
any rate, to find out who they were.
Heaven seemed disposed to satisfy his curiosity at once. He had hardly
started on his way home, and was not more than a few hundred steps
from the spot where the young girls had left him, when he met an
individual in leather gaiters, with a gun and a hunting-horn slung
over his blouse and across his shoulders, and a whip in his hand. The
man walked fast and seemed much out of temper. He was evidently the
huntsman who belonged to the young women. Accordingly the youth,
assuming his most gracious and smiling manner, accosted him.
"Friend," he said, "you are searching for two young ladies, I
think,--one on a brown-bay horse, the other on a roan mare."
"In the first place, I am not your friend, for I don't know you," said
the man, gruffly. "I am looking for my dogs, which some fool turned
off the scent of a wolf they were after and put on that of a hare,
which he missed killing, like the blunderer that he is."
The young man bit his lips. The man in the blouse, whom our readers no
doubt recognize as Jean Oullier, went on to say:--
"Yes, I saw it all from the heights of Benaste, which I was coming
down when our game doubled, and I'd willingly have given the premium
which the Marquis de Souday allows me on the hunt if I could have had
that lubber within reach of my whip."
The youth to whom he spoke thought it advisable to make no sign that
he was concerned in the affair; he listened, therefore, to Jean
Oullier's allocution as if it were absolutely of no interest to him,
and said merely:--
"Oh! do you belong to the Marquis de Souday?"
Jean Oullier looked askance at his blundering questioner.
"I belong to myself," said the old Chouan. "I lead the hounds of the
Marquis de Souday, as much for my pleasure as for his."
"Dear me!" said the young man, as if speaking to himself, "Mamma never
told me the marquis was married."
"Well then," interrupted Oullier, "I tell it you now, my good sir; and
if you have anything to say against it, I'll tell you something else,
too. Do you hear me?"
Having said these words in a threatening tone, which his hearer seemed
not to understand, Jean Oullier, without further concerning himself as
to what the other might be thinking, turned on his heel and walked off
rapidly in the direction of Machecoul.
Left to himself the young man took a few more steps in the path he had
taken when the young girls left him; then turning to the left he went
into a field. In that field was a peasant ploughing. The peasant was a
man about forty years of age, who was distinguishable from the
peasants of Poitou by a shrewd and sly expression of countenance
peculiarly Norman. He was ruddy in complexion, his eyes were keen and
piercing; but his constant effort seemed to be to diminish, or rather
to conceal, their keenness by perpetually blinking them. He probably
thought that proceeding gave a look of stupidity, or at least of good
humor, which checked the distrust of others; but his artful mouth,
with its corners sharply defined, and curling up like those of an
antique Pan, betrayed, in spite of him, that he was one of those
wonderful products that usually follow the crossing of Mans and Norman
blood.
Although the young man made directly for him, he did not stop his
work; he knew the cost of the effort to his horses to start the plough
when its motion was arrested in that tough and clayey soil. He
therefore continued his way as though he were alone, and it was only
at the end of the furrow, when he had turned his team and adjusted his
instrument to continue the work, that he showed a willingness to enter
into conversation while his horses recovered their wind.
"Well," he said, in a tone that was almost familiar, "have you had
good sport, Monsieur Michel?"
The youth, without replying, took the game bag from his shoulder, and
dropped it at the peasant's feet. The latter, seeing through the thick
netting the yellowish, silky fur of a hare, exclaimed:--
"Ho, ho! pretty good for your first attempt, Monsieur Michel."
So saying, he took the animal from the bag, and examined it knowingly,
pressing its belly as if he were not very sure of the precautions so
inexperienced a sportsman as Monsieur Michel might have taken.
"Ha! _sapredienne!_" he cried; "the fellow is worth three francs and a
half, if he is a farthing. You made a fine shot there, Monsieur
Michel; do you know it? You must have found out by this time that it
is more amusing to be out with a gun than reading a book, as you are
always doing."
"No, upon my word, Courtin, I prefer my books to your gun," said the
youth.
"Well, perhaps you are right," replied Courtin, whose face expressed
some slight disappointment. "If your late father had thought as you do
it might have been better for him, too. But all the same, if I had
means and were not a poor devil obliged to work for a living twelve
hours out of the twenty-four, I would spend more than my nights in
hunting."
"Do you still hunt at night, Courtin?"
"Yes, Monsieur Michel, now and then, for amusement."
"The gendarmes will catch you some night."
"Pooh! they're do-nothings, those fellows; they don't get up early
enough in the morning to catch me." Then, allowing his face to express
all its natural cunning, he added, "I know a thing more than they,
Monsieur Michel; there are not two Courtins in this part of the
country. The only way to prevent me from poaching is to make me a
game-keeper like Jean Oullier."
Monsieur Michel made no reply to this indirect proposal, and as he was
totally ignorant of who Jean Oullier might be, he did not notice the
last part of the sentence any more than the beginning of it.
"Here is your gun, Courtin," he said, holding out the weapon. "Thank
you for your idea of lending it to me; you meant well, and it isn't
your fault if I don't find as much amusement in hunting as other
people do."
"You must try again, Monsieur Michel, and get a liking for it; the
best dogs are those that show points last. I've heard men who will eat
thirty dozen oysters at a sitting say they couldn't even bear to look
at them till they were past twenty. Leave the château with a book, as
you did this morning; Madame la baronne won't suspect anything. You'll
find me at work about here, and my gun is always at your service.
Besides, if I am not too busy, I'll beat the bushes for you. Meantime
I'll put the tool in the rack."
Courtin's "rack" was merely the hedge which divided his field from his
neighbors. He slipped the gun into it and drew the twigs and briers
together, so as to hide the place from a passing eye, and also to keep
his piece from rain and moisture,--two things, however, to which a
true poacher pays little attention, so long as he still has
candle-ends and a bit of linen.
"Courtin," said Monsieur Michel, endeavoring to assume a tone of
indifference, "did you know that the Marquis de Souday was married?"
"No, that I didn't," said the peasant.
"And has two daughters?" continued Michel.
Courtin, who was still finishing his work of concealment by twisting a
few rebellious branches, raised his head quickly and looked at the
young man with such fixedness that although the latter had only asked
his question out of vague curiosity he blushed to the very whites of
his eyes.
"Have you met the she-wolves?" asked Courtin. "I thought I heard that
old Chouan's horn."
"Whom do you call the she-wolves?" said Michel.
"I call those bastard girls of the Marquis de Souday the she-wolves,"
replied Courtin.
"Do you mean to say you call those two young girls by such a name?"
"Damn it! that's what they're called in all the country round. But
you've just come from Paris, and so you don't know. Where did you meet
the sluts?"
The coarseness with which Courtin spoke of the young ladies frightened
the timid youth so much that, without exactly knowing why, he lied.
"I have not met them," he said.
By the tone of his answer Courtin doubted his words.
"More's the pity for you," he answered. "They are pretty slips of
girls, good to see and pleasant to hug." Then, looking at Michel and
blinking as usual, he added, "They say those girls are a little too
fond of fun; but that's the kind a jolly fellow wants, doesn't he,
Monsieur Michel?"
Without understanding the cause of the sensation, Michel felt his
heart more and more oppressed as the brutal peasant spoke with
insulting approval of the two charming amazons he had just left under
a strong impression of gratitude and admiration. His annoyance was
reflected in his face.
Courtin no longer doubted that Michel had met the
she-wolves, as he called them, and the youth's denial made the man's
suspicions as to what the truth might be go far beyond reality. He was
certain that the marquis had been within an hour or two close to La
Logerie, and it seemed quite probable that Monsieur Michel should have
seen Bertha and Mary, who almost always accompanied their father when
he hunted. Perhaps the young man might have done more than see them,
perhaps he had spoken with them; and, thanks to the estimation in
which the sisters were held, a conversation with the Demoiselles de
Souday would only mean the beginning of an intrigue.
Going from one deduction to another, Courtin, who was logical in mind,
concluded that his young master had reached that point. We say "his
young master," because Courtin tilled a farm which belonged to
Monsieur Michel. The work of a farmer, however, did not please him;
what he coveted was the place of keeper or bailiff to the mother and
son. For this reason it was that the artful peasant tried by every
possible means to establish a strong relation of some kind between
himself and the young man.
He had evidently just failed of his object in persuading Michel to
disobey his mother in the matter of hunting. To share the secrets of a
love affair now struck him as a part very likely to serve his
interests and his low ambitions. The moment he saw the cloud on
Monsieur Michel's brow he felt he had made a mistake in echoing the
current calumnies, and he looked about him to recover his ground.
"However," he said, with well-assumed kindliness, "there are always
plenty of people to find more fault, especially in the matter of
girls, than there is any occasion for. Mademoiselle Bertha and
Mademoiselle Mary--"
"Mary and Bertha! Are those their names?" asked the young man,
eagerly.
"Mary and Bertha, yes. Mademoiselle Bertha is the dark one, and
Mademoiselle Mary the fair one."
He looked at Monsieur Michel with all the acuteness of which his eyes
were capable, and he thought the young man slightly blushed as he
named the fair one.
"Well, as I was saying," resumed the persistent peasant, "Mademoiselle
Mary and Mademoiselle Bertha are both fond of hunting and hounds and
horses; but that doesn't prevent them from being very good girls. Why,
the late vicar of Benaste, who was a fine sportsman, didn't say mass
any the worse because his dog was in the vestry and his gun behind the
altar."
"The fact is," said Monsieur Michel, forgetting that he gave the lie
to his own words,--"the fact is, they both look sweet and good,
particularly Mademoiselle Mary."
"They are sweet and good, Monsieur Michel. Last year, during that
damp, hot weather, when the fever came up from the marshes and so many
poor devils died of it, who do you think nursed the sick without
shirking, when even some of the doctors and the veterinaries deserted
their posts? Why, the she-wolves, as they call them. They didn't do
their charity in church, no! They went to the sick people's houses;
they sowed alms and reaped blessings. Though the rich hate them, and
the nobles are jealous of them, I make bold to say that the poor folk
are on their side."
"Why should any one think ill of them?" asked Michel.
"Who knows? Nobody gives any real reason. Men, don't you see, Monsieur
Michel, are like birds. When one is sick and in the dumps all the
others come about him and pluck out his feathers. What is really true
in all this is that people of their own rank fling mud and stones at
those poor young ladies. For instance, there's your mamma, who is so
good and kind,--isn't she, Monsieur Michel? Well, if you were to ask
her she would tell you, like all the rest of the world, 'They are bad
girls.'"
But, in spite of this change of front on Courtin's part, Monsieur
Michel did not seem disposed to enter into the subject farther. As for
Courtin himself, he thought enough had been said to pave the way for
future confidences. As Monsieur Michel seemed ready to leave him, he
started his horses and accompanied him to the end of the field. He
noticed, as they went along, that the young man's eyes were often
turned on the sombre masses of the Machecoul forest.
VIII.
THE BARONNE DE LA LOGERIE.
Courtin was respectfully lowering for his young master the bars which
divided his field from the road when a woman's voice, calling Michel,
was heard beyond the hedge. The young man stopped short and trembled
at the sound.
At the same moment the owner of the voice appeared on the other side
of the hedge fence which separated Courtin's field from that of his
neighbor. This person, this lady, may have been forty to forty-five
years of age. We must try to _explain_ her to the reader.
Her face was insignificant, and without other character than an air of
haughtiness which contrasted with her otherwise common appearance. She
was short and stout; she wore a silk dress much too handsome for the
fields, and a gray cambric hat, the floating ends of which fell upon
her forehead and neck. The rest of her apparel was so choice that she
might have been paying a visit in the Chaussée-d'Antin or the faubourg
Saint-Honoré. This was, apparently, the person of whose reproaches the
young man stood so much in awe.
"What!" she exclaimed, "you here, Michel? Really, my son, you are very
inconsiderate, and you show very little regard for your mother. The
bell has been ringing more than an hour to call you in to dinner. You
know how I dislike to be kept waiting, and how particular I am that
our meals should be regular; and here I find you tranquilly talking to
a peasant."
Michel began to stammer an excuse; but, almost at the same instant his
mother's eye beheld what Courtin had either not noticed or had not
chosen to remark upon,--namely, that the young man's head was bound up
with a handkerchief, and that the handkerchief had blood-stains upon
it, which his straw hat, although its brim was wide, did not
effectually conceal.
"Good God!" she cried, raising a voice, which in its ordinary key was
much too high. "You are wounded! What has happened to you? Speak,
unfortunate boy! don't you see that I am dying of anxiety?"
Climbing the fence with an impatience, and, above all, an agility
which could scarcely have been expected of one of her age and
corpulence, the mother of the youth came up to him, and before he
could prevent her, took the hat and the handkerchief from his head.
The wound, thus disturbed by the tearing away of the bandage, began to
bleed again. Monsieur Michel, as Courtin called him, unprepared for
the explanation he so much dreaded, and which was now forced upon him
suddenly, stood silent and confused, unable to reply. Courtin came to
his aid. The wily peasant saw at once that the youth, fearing to tell
his mother that he had disobeyed her, was also unwilling to tell a
lie. As he himself had no scruples on that point, he resolutely
burdened his conscience with the sin that, in his innocence, Michel
dared not commit.
"Oh! Madame la baronne need not be anxious; it is nothing, absolutely
nothing."
"But I wish to know how it happened. Answer for him yourself, Courtin,
if monsieur is determined to keep silence."
The young man was still dumb.
"It is easily told, Madame la baronne," replied Courtin. "I had a
bundle of branches I took off last autumn; it was so heavy I couldn't
lift it on to my shoulders alone, and Monsieur Michel had the kindness
to help me. One branch of the cursed thing got loose and scratched him
on the forehead, as you see."
"Scratch! that's more than a scratch! you came near putting his eye
out. Another time, Maître Courtin, get your equals to load your
fagots; do you hear me? It was a very improper proceeding in itself,
besides nearly maiming my son."
Courtin humbly bowed his head, as if recognizing the enormity of his
offence; but that did not prevent him from giving the hare, which lay
near the game-bag, a vigorous kick, which threw it out of sight under
the hedge.
"Come, Monsieur Michel," said the baroness, who seemed appeased by the
peasant's submissiveness, "you must go and see the doctor about that
wound." Then turning back, after she had taken a few steps, she added,
"By the bye, Courtin, you have not paid your mid-summer rent, and yet
your lease expires at Easter. Remember that. I am determined not to
keep tenants who are not regular in their payments."
Courtin's expression of countenance was more humble than ever; but it
changed when the mother, getting over the fence with less agility than
before, left the son free to whisper to Courtin:--
"I'll be here to-morrow."
In spite of the threat just made to him, Courtin seized the handle of
his plough with more gayety than usually belonged to his disposition,
and started upon a new furrow, while his betters returned to the
château. For the rest of the day's work he enlivened his horses by
singing to them "La Parisienne," a patriotic song then much in vogue.
While Courtin sings the above-mentioned hymn, much to the satisfaction
of his steeds, let us say a few words as to the Michel family. You
have seen the son, my dear readers, and you have seen the mother. The
mother was the widow of one of those government purveyors who had
made, at the cost of the State, rapid and considerable fortunes out of
the Imperial armies; the soldiers nicknamed them "Rice-bread-salt."
The family name of this purveyor was Michel. He came originally from
the department of Mayenne, and was the son of a peasant and the nephew
of a village schoolmaster. The latter, by adding a few notions of
arithmetic to the reading and writing he imparted to him gratuitously,
did actually decide his nephew's future career.
Taken by the first draft, in 1794, Michel the peasant joined the 22d
brigade with very little enthusiasm. This man, who later became a
distinguished accountant, had already calculated his chances of being
killed and of becoming a general. The result of his calculation did
not altogether satisfy him, and he therefore, with much adroitness,
made the most of his fine handwriting (also due to his uncle, the
schoolmaster) to get a place as clerk in the quartermaster's
department. He felt as much satisfaction in obtaining that position as
another man would have felt at promotion.
It was there, at the base of supplies, that Michel, the father, went
through the campaigns of 1792 and 1793. Toward the middle of the
latter year General Rossignol, who was sent to either pacify or
exterminate La Vendée, having accidentally come across Michel, the
clerk, in one of the offices, and hearing from him that he was a
native of those regions and that all his friends were in the Vendéan
ranks, bethought himself of utilizing this providential circumstance.
He gave Michel an indefinite furlough, and sent him home with no other
instructions than to take service among the Chouans and do for him,
from time to time, what Monsieur de Maurepas did for His Majesty Louis
XV.,--that is to say, give him the _news of the day_. Michel, who
found great pecuniary advantages in this commission, fulfilled it with
scrupulous fidelity, not only for General Rossignol but for all his
successors.
This anecdotical correspondence was at its height, when General Travot
was sent to La Vendée. We all know the result of his operations; they
were the subject of the opening chapters of this book. Here is a
recapitulation of them: the Vendéan army defeated, Jolly killed,
Couëtu enticed into an ambush and taken by a traitor whose name has
never been known, Charette made prisoner in the woods of La Chabotière
and shot in the market-place of Nantes.
What part did Michel play in the successive vicissitudes of that
terrible drama? We may find an answer to that question later; it is
certain that soon after the last bloody episodes Michel, still
recommended for his beautiful handwriting and his infallible
arithmetic, entered, as clerk, the office of a very celebrated army
contractor.
There he made rapid progress, for in 1805 we find him contracting on
his own account to supply forage to the army of Germany. In 1806 his
shoes and gaiters took an active part in the heroic campaign of
Prussia. In 1809 he obtained the entire victualling of the army that
entered Spain. In 1810 he married the only daughter of another
contractor and doubled his fortune with her dowry.
Besides all this, he changed his name,--or rather lengthened
it,--which was, for those whose names were too short, the great
ambition of that period. This is how the coveted addition was managed.
The father of Monsieur Michel's wife was named Baptiste Durand. He
came from the little village of La Logerie, and to distinguish him
from another Durand who often crossed his path, he called himself
Durand de la Logerie. At any rate, that was the pretext he gave. His
daughter was educated at one of the best schools in Paris, where she
was registered on her arrival as Stéphanie Durand de la Logerie. Once
married to this daughter of his brother contractor, Monsieur Michel
thought that his name would look better if his wife's name were added
to it. He accordingly became Monsieur Michel de la Logerie.
Finally, at the Restoration, a title of the Holy Roman Empire, bought
for cash, enabled him to call himself the Baron Michel de la Logerie,
and to take his place, once for all, in the financial and territorial
aristocracy of the day.
A few years after the return of the Bourbons,--that is to say, about
1819 or 1820,--Baron Michel de la Logerie lost his father-in-law,
Monsieur Durand de la Logerie. The latter left to his daughter, and
consequently to her husband, his estate at La Logerie, standing, as
the details given in preceding chapters will have told the reader,
about fifteen miles from the forest of Machecoul. The Baron Michel de
la Logerie, like the good landlord and seigneur that he was, went to
take possession of his estate and show himself to his vassals. He was
a man of sense; he wanted to get into the Chamber. He could do that
only by election, and his election depended on the popularity he might
gain in the department of the Lower Loire.
He was born a peasant; he had lived twenty-five years of his life
among peasants (barring the two or three years he was in the
quartermaster's office), and he knew exactly how to deal with
peasants. In the first place, he had to make them forgive his
prosperity. He made himself what is called "the good prince," found a
few old comrades of the Vendéan days, shook hands with them, spoke
with tears in his eyes of the deaths of poor Monsieur Jolly and dear
Monsieur Couëtu and the worthy Monsieur Charette. He informed himself
about the needs of the village, which he had never before visited, had
a bridge built to open important communication between the department
of the Lower Loire and that of La Vendée, repaired three county roads
and rebuilt a church, endowed an orphan asylum and a home for old men,
received so many benedictions, and found such pleasure in playing this
patriarchal part that he expressed the intention of living only six
months of the year in Paris and the other six at his Château de la
Logerie.
Yielding, however, to the entreaties of his wife, who, being unable to
understand the violent passion for country life which seemed to have
come over him, wrote letter after letter from Paris to hasten his
return, he yielded, we say, to her so far as to promise to return on
the following Monday. Sunday was to be devoted to a grand battue of
wolves in the woods of La Pauvrière and the forest of Grand'Lande,
which were infested by those beasts. It was, in fact, another
philanthropic effort on the part of Baron Michel de la Logerie.
At the battue Baron Michel still continued to play his part of a rich,
good fellow. He provided refreshments for all, ordered two barrels of
wine to be taken on handcarts after the trail, that every one might
drink who would; he ordered a positive banquet for the whole party to
be ready at an inn on their return, refused the post of honor at the
battue, expressed the wish to be treated as the humblest huntsman, and
his ill-luck in drawing lots having bestowed upon him the worst place
of all, bore his misfortune with a good-humor that delighted
everybody.
The battue was splendid. From every covert the beasts came; on all
sides guns resounded with such rapidity that the scene resembled a
little war. Bodies of wolves and boars were piled up beside the
handcarts bearing the wine-barrels, not to speak of contraband game,
such as hares and squirrels, which were killed in this battue, as at
other battues, under the head of _vermin_, and carefully hidden away,
to be fetched during the night.
The intoxication of success was such that the hero of the day was
forgotten. It was not until after the last beating-up was over that
Baron Michel was missed. Inquiries were made. No one had seen him
since the morning; in fact, not since he had drawn the lot which gave
him the worst place at the extreme end of the hunt. On making this
discovery, it was supposed that finding his chance of amusement very
slight, and being solicitous for the entertainment of his guests, he
had gone back to the little town of Légé, where the feast was to be
given.
But when the huntsmen arrived at Légé they found that the baron was
not there. Most of them being tired and hungry sat down to the supper
table without him; but a few--five or six--others, feeling uneasy,
returned to the woods of La Pauvrière with torches and lanterns and
began to search for him.
At the end of two hours' fruitless effort, he was found dead in the
ditch of the second covert they had drawn. He was shot through the
heart.
This death caused great excitement and many rumors. The police of
Nantes investigated it. The huntsman whose place was directly below
that of the baron was arrested. He declared that, although he was
distant only one hundred and fifty steps from the baron, a corner of
the wood concealed them from each other, and he had seen and heard
nothing. It was also proved that this man's gun had not been fired
that day; moreover, from the place where he stood he could only have
hit Baron Michel on the right, whereas the latter had, as a matter of
fact, been shot on the left.
The inquiry, therefore, went no farther. The death of the
ex-contractor was attributed to accident; it was supposed that a stray
ball had struck him (as sometimes happens when game is driven),
without evil intention on the part of whoever fired it. And yet, in
spite of this explanation, a vague rumor got about of some
accomplished revenge. It was said--but said in the lowest whisper, as
if each tuft of gorse still concealed the gun of a Chouan--it was said
that a former soldier of Jolly or Couëtu or Charette had made the
unfortunate purveyor expiate the betrayal and death of those
illustrious leaders; but there were too many persons interested in the
secret to let it ever be openly asserted.
The Baronne Michel de la Logerie was left a widow, with one son. She
was one of those women of negative virtues of which the world is full.
Of vices she did not possess a spark; of passions she was so far
ignorant of their very name. Harnessed at seventeen to the marriage
plough, she had plodded along in the conjugal furrow without swerving
to the right nor yet to the left, and never so much as asking herself
if there were any other road. The idea had never crossed her mind that
a woman could revolt against the goad. Relieved of the yoke, she was
frightened by her liberty, and instinctively looked about her for new
chains. These chains religion gave her; and then, like all narrow
minds, she took to vegetating in false, exaggerated, and, at the same
time, conscientious devotion.
Madame la Baronne Michel sincerely believed herself a saint; she went
regularly to church, kept all the fasts, and was faithful to all the
injunctions of the Church. Had any one told her that she sinned seven
times a day she would have been greatly astonished. Yet nothing was
more true. It is certain that if the humility of Madame la Baronne de
la Logerie had been dissected she would have been found at every hour
of the day to disobey the precepts of the Saviour of men; for (little
ground as she had for it) her pride of rank amounted to mania. We have
seen how the sly peasant Courtin, who called the son Monsieur Michel,
never failed to give the mother her title of baroness.
Naturally, Madame de la Logerie held the world and the epoch in holy
horror; she never read a police report in her newspaper without
accusing both (the world and the epoch) of the blackest immorality. To
hear her, one would suppose the Iron age dated from 1800. Her utmost
care was therefore directed to save her son from the contagion of the
ideas of the day by bringing him up at a distance from the world and
all its dangers. Never would she listen to the idea of his entering
any sort of public school; even those of the Jesuits were dangerous in
her eyes, from the readiness of the good fathers to accommodate
themselves to the social obligations of the young men confided to
their care. Though the heir of all the Michels received some lessons
from masters, which, so far as arts and sciences go, were
indispensable to the education of a young man it was always in
presence of the mother and on a plan approved by her; for she alone
directed the course of ideas and instruction, especially on the moral
side, which were given to her son.
A strong infusion of intelligence, which by great good luck nature had
placed in the youth's brain, was needed to bring him safe and sound
out of the torture to which she had subjected him for over ten years.
He did come through it, as we have seen, though feeble and undecided,
and with nothing of the strength and resolution which should
characterize a man,--the representative of vigor, decision, and
intellect.
IX.
GALON-D'OR AND ALLÉGRO.
As Michel had foreseen and feared, his mother scolded him vigorously.
She was not duped by Courtin's tale; the wound on her son's forehead
was by no means a scratch made by a thorn. Ignorant of what interest
her son could have in concealing the matter from her, and quite
convinced that even if she questioned him she should not get at the
truth, she contented herself by fixing her eyes steadily from time to
time on the mysterious wound, and shaking her head with a sigh and a
scowl of the maternal forehead.
During the whole dinner Michel was ill at ease, lowering his eyes and
scarcely eating; but it must be said that his mother's incessant
examination was not the only thing that troubled him. Hovering between
his lowered eyelids and his mother's suspecting eyes were two forms,
two visions. These visions were the twin shadows of Bertha and of
Mary.
Michel thought of Bertha with some slight irritation. Who was this
Amazon who handled a gun like a trained huntsman, who bandaged wounds
like a surgeon, and who, when she found her patient refractory,
twisted his wrists with her white and womanly hands as Jean Oullier
might have done with his hard and calloused ones?
But on the other hand, how charming was Mary, with her fine blond hair
and her beautiful blue eyes! how sweet her voice, how persuasive its
accents! With what gentleness she had touched his wound, washed off
the blood, and bound the bandage! Michel scarcely regretted the wound,
for without it there was no reason why the young ladies should have
spoken to him or, indeed, have taken any notice of him.
It was true that his mother's displeasure and the doubts he had raised
in her mind were really the more serious matter; but he persuaded
himself that her anger would soon pass off, whereas the thing that
would not pass was the impression left on his heart during the few
seconds when he held Mary's hand clasped closely in his own. All
hearts when they begin to love and yet are not aware of it crave
solitude; and for this reason no sooner was dinner over than,
profiting by a moment when his mother was discoursing with a servant,
he left the room, not hearing or not heeding the words with which she
called after him.
And yet those words were important. Madame de la Logerie forbade her
son to go near the village of Saint-Christophe-du-Ligneron, where, as
she had learned from a servant, a bad fever was raging. She at once
put the château under quarantine, and forbade that any one from the
infected village should approach it. The order was enforced
immediately in the case of a young girl who came to ask assistance of
the baroness for her father, just attacked by the fever.
If Michel's mind had not been so pre-occupied he would undoubtedly
have paid attention to his mother's words, for the sick man was his
foster-father, a farmer named Tinguy, and the girl who had come to ask
help was his foster-sister, Rosine, for whom he had the greatest
affection. But at this moment his thoughts were all rushing toward
Souday, and more especially to that charming creature who bore the
name of Mary.
He buried himself in the remotest woodland of the park, taking with
him a book as an excuse; but though he read the book attentively till
he reached the edge of the forest he would have been puzzled to tell
you the name of it had you asked him. Once hidden from his mother's
eyes he sat down on a bench and reflected.
What was he reflecting about? Easy to answer. He was thinking how he
could contrive to see Mary and her sister again. Chance had thrown
them together once, but chance had taken her time about it, for he had
been over six months in the neighborhood. If it pleased chance to be
another six months without giving the young baron a second meeting
with his new friends the time would be too long for the present state
of his heart.
On the other hand, to open communications with the château de Souday
himself was hardly feasible. There had never been any sympathy between
the Marquis de Souday, an _émigré_ of 1790, and the Baron de la
Logerie, a noble of the Empire. Besides, Jean Oullier, in the few
words he had exchanged with him, had shown plainly there was no
disposition to make his acquaintance.
But the young girls, they who had shown him such interest, masterful
in Bertha, gentle in Mary, how could he reach the young girls? This
indeed was difficult, for though they hunted two or three times a
week, they were always in company of their father and Jean Oullier.
Michel resolved to read all the novels in the library of the château,
hoping to discover from them some ingenious method which, as he began
to fear, his own mind, limited to its own inspirations, could never
furnish. At this stage of his reflections a touch was laid upon his
shoulder; looking round with a quiver he saw Courtin; the farmer's
face expressed a satisfaction he did not take any pains to conceal.
"Beg pardon, excuse me, Monsieur Michel," said the man; "seeing you as
still as a milestone, I thought it was your statue instead of
yourself."
"Well, you see it is I, Courtin."
"And I'm glad of it, Monsieur Michel; I was anxious to hear what
passed between you and Madame la baronne."
"She scolded me a little."
"Oh! I was sure of that. Did you tell her anything about the hare?"
"I took good care not to."
"Or the wolves?"
"What wolves?" asked the young man not ill-pleased to bring the
conversation to this point.
"The she-wolves of Machecoul; I told you that was the nickname for the
young ladies at Souday."
"Of course I did not tell her; you know that, Courtin. I don't think
the Souday hounds and those of La Logerie can hunt together."
"In any case," replied Courtin, in the sneering tone which, in spite
of his best efforts, he was sometimes unable to conceal, "if your
hounds won't hunt with the Souday pack you, as it seems, can hunt with
theirs."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Look!" pulling toward him and, as it were, bringing on the stage two
coupled hounds which he held in a leash.
"What are they?" asked the young baron.
"They? Why, Galon-d'Or and Allégro, to be sure."
"I don't know who Galon-d'Or and Allégro are."
"The dogs of that brigand Jean Oullier."
"Why did you take his dogs?"
"I didn't take them; I simply put them in the pound."
"By what right?"
"By two rights: land-owner's rights, and mayor's rights."
Courtin was mayor of the village of La Logerie, which contained about
a score of houses, and he was very proud of the title.
"Please explain those rights, Courtin."
"Well, in the first place, Monsieur Michel, I confiscate them as mayor
because they hunt at an illegal season."
"I did not know there was an illegal season for hunting wolves;
besides as Monsieur de Souday is Master of wolves--"
"That's very true; as Master of wolves he can hunt wolves in the
forest of Machecoul, but not on the plain. Besides, as you know
yourself," continued Courtin, with a sneering smile, "as you saw
yourself, he was not hunting a wolf at all, but a hare--and moreover,
that hare was shot by one of his own _cubs_."
The young man was on the point of telling Courtin that the word _cub_
applied to the Demoiselles de Souday was offensive to him, and of
requesting him not to use it again, but he dared not make so firm a
remonstrance.
"It was Mademoiselle Bertha who killed it, Courtin," he said, "but I
had previously wounded it; so I am the guilty person."
"Pshaw! what do you mean by that? Would you have fired on the hare if
the hounds were not already coursing it? No, of course not. It is the
fault of the dogs that you fired, and that Mademoiselle Bertha killed
the game; and it is therefore the dogs that I punish as mayor for
pursuing hares under pretence of hunting wolves. But that's not all;
after punishing them as mayor I punish them as--proprietor. Do you
suppose I gave Monsieur le marquis' dogs the right to hunt over my
land?"
"Your land, Courtin!" said Michel, laughing; "you are a trifle
mistaken; it was over my land, or rather my mother's, that they were
trespassing."
"That's no matter, Monsieur le baron, inasmuch as I farm it. You must
remember that we are no longer in 1789, when the great lords had a
right to ride with their hounds over the harvests of the poor peasants
and trample everything down without paying for it; no, no, no, indeed!
this is the year 1832, Monsieur Michel; every man is master of the
soil he lives on, and game belongs to him who supports it. The hare
coursed by the dogs of the marquis is my hare, for it has fed on the
wheat in the fields I hire from Madame la baronne, and it is I alone
who have the right to eat that hare which you wounded and the she-wolf
killed."
Michel made an impatient movement which Courtin detected out of the
corner of his eye; but the youth did not dare to further express his
displeasure.
"There is one thing that surprises me," he said, "and that is why
those dogs that are straining so at the leash ever allowed you to
catch them."
"Oh!" said Courtin, "that did not give me any trouble. After I left
you and Madame la baronne at the bars, I came back and found these
gentlemen at dinner."
"At dinner?"
"Yes, in the hedge, where I left the hare; they found it and they were
dining. It seems they are not properly fed at the château de Souday.
Just see the state my hare is in."
So saying, Courtin took from the huge pocket of his jacket the
hindquarters of the hare, which formed the incriminating proof of the
misdemeanor; the head and shoulders were eaten off.
"And to think," said Courtin, "that they did it in just that minute of
time while I was with you and madame! Ah! you scamps, you'll have to
help me kill a good many to make me forget that."
"Courtin, let me tell you something," said the young baron.
"Tell away, don't be backward, Monsieur Michel."
"It is that as you are a mayor you ought to respect the laws."
"Laws! I wear them on my heart. Liberty! Public order! Don't you know
those words are posted over the door of the mayor's office, Monsieur
Michel?"
"Well, so much the more reason why I should tell you that what you are
doing is not legal, and threatens liberty and public order."
"What!" exclaimed Courtin. "Shall the hounds of those she-wolves hunt
over my land at a prohibited season, and I not be allowed to put them
in the pound?"
"They were not disturbing public order, Courtin; they were simply
injuring private interests; you have the right to lodge a complaint
against them, but not to put them in the pound."
"Oh! that's too round-about a way; if hounds are to be allowed to run
where they like and we can only lodge complaints against them, then it
isn't men who have liberty, but dogs."
"Courtin," said the youth, with, a touch of the assumption observable
in men who get a smattering of the Code, "you make the mistake that a
great many persons make; you confound liberty with independence;
independence is the liberty of men who are not free, my friend."
"Then what is liberty, Monsieur Michel?"
"Liberty, my dear Courtin, is the sacrifice that each man makes of his
personal independence for the good of all. It is from the general fund
of independence that each man draws his liberty; we are free, Courtin,
but not independent."
"Oh, as for me," said Courtin, "I don't know anything about all that.
I am a mayor and the holder of land; and I have captured the best
hounds of the Marquis de Souday's pack, Galon-d'Or and Allégro, and I
shall not give them up. Let him come after them, and when he does I
shall ask him what he has been doing in certain meetings at Torfou and
Montaigu."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, I know what I mean."
"Yes, but I don't."
"There is no reason why you should know; you are not a mayor."
"No, but I am an inhabitant of the place and I have an interest in
knowing what happens."
"As for that, it is easy to see what is happening; these people are
conspiring again."
"What people?"
"Why, the nobles! the--but I'd better hold my tongue, though you are
not exactly their style of nobility, you."
Michel reddened to the whites of his eyes.
"You say the nobles are conspiring, Courtin?"
"If not, why do they have these secret meetings at night. If they meet
in the daytime, the lazy fellows, to eat and drink, that's all well
enough; the law allows it and there's nothing to be said. But when
they meet at night it is for no good end, you may be sure. In any case
they had better look out; I've got my eye upon them, and I'm the
mayor; I may not have the right to put the dogs in the pound, but I
have the right to put the men in prison; I know the Code plain enough
as to that."
"And you say Monsieur de Souday frequents those meetings?"
"Goodness! do you suppose he doesn't?--an old Chouan and a former
aide-de-camp of Charette like him! Let him come and claim his dogs;
yes, let him come! and I'll send him to Nantes, him and his cubs; they
shall be made to explain what they are about, roaming the woods as
they do at night."
"But," exclaimed Michel, with an eagerness there was no mistaking,
"you told me yourself, Courtin, that if they went about at night it
was to help the poor sick people."
Courtin stepped back a pace and pointing his finger at his young
master he said with his sneering laugh:--
"Ha! ha! I've caught you."
"Me!" said the young man, coloring, "how have you caught me?"
"Well, they've caught you."
"Caught me!"
"Yes, yes, yes! And I don't blame you either; whatever else these
young ladies may be, I must say they are pretty. Come, you needn't
blush that way; you are not just out of a seminary; you are neither a
priest, nor a deacon, nor a vicar; you are a handsome lad of twenty.
Go ahead, Monsieur Michel; they'll have very poor taste if they don't
like you when you like them."
"But, my dear Courtin," said Michel, "even supposing what you say were
true, which it is not, I don't know these young ladies; I don't know
the marquis. I can't go and call there just because I have happened to
meet those young girls once on horseback."
"Oh, yes, I understand," said Courtin, in his jeering way; "they
haven't a penny, but they've fine manners. You want a pretext, an
excuse for going there, don't you? Well, look about and find one; you,
who talk Greek and Latin and have studied the Code, you ought to be
able to find one."
Michel shook his head.
"Oh!" said Courtin, "then you have been looking for one?"
"I did not say so," said the young baron, hastily.
"No, but I say so; a man isn't so old at forty that he can't remember
what he was at twenty."
Michel was silent and kept his head lowered; the peasant's eye weighed
heavily upon him.
"So you couldn't find a way? Well, I've found one for you."
"You!" cried the youth eagerly, looking up. Then, recognizing that he
had let his secret thoughts escape him, he added, shrugging his
shoulders: "How the devil do you know that I want to go to the
castle?"
"Well, the way to do it," said Courtin, seeing that his master made no
attempt to deny his wish, "the way is this--"
Michel affected indifference, but he was listening with all his ears.
"You say to me, 'Père Courtin, you are mistaken as to your rights; you
cannot, either as mayor or the holder of property put the Marquis de
Souday's dogs in the pound; you have a right to an indemnity, but this
indemnity must be amicably agreed upon.' To which I, Père Courtin,
reply: 'If you are concerned in it, Monsieur Michel, I agree; I know
your generosity.' On which you say: 'Courtin, you must give me those
dogs; the rest is my affair.' And I reply: 'There are the dogs,
Monsieur Michel; as for the indemnity, hang it! a gold piece or two
will play the game, and I don't want the death of the sinner.' Then,
don't you see? you write a bit of a note to the marquis; you have
found the dogs, and you send them back by Rousseau or La Belette, for
fear he should be anxious. He can't help thanking you and inviting you
to call and see him. Perhaps, however, to make quite sure, you had
better take the dogs back yourself."
"That will do, Courtin," said the young baron. "Leave the dogs with
me; I'll send them to the marquis, not to make him invite me to the
castle, for there's not a word of truth in all you have been
supposing, but because, between neighbors, it is a courteous thing to
do."
"Very good,--so be it; but, all the same, they are two pretty slips,
those girls. As for the indemnity--"
"Ah, yes," said the young baron, laughing, "that's fair; you want the
indemnity for the injury the hounds did you by passing over my land
and eating up half the hare which Bertha killed."
And he gave the farmer what he happened to have in his pocket, which
was three or four louis. It was lucky for him there was no more, for
he was so delighted at finding a way to present himself at the château
de Souday that he would willingly have given the farmer ten times that
sum if by chance it had been in his purse.
Courtin cast an appreciative eye on the golden louis he had just
received under the head of "indemnity," and putting the leash in the
hand of the young man he went his way.
But after going a few steps he turned round and came back to his
master.
"Don't mix yourself up too much with those people, Monsieur Michel,"
he said. "You know what I told you just now about those _messieurs_ at
Torfu and Montaigu; it is all true, and mark my words, in less than
fifteen days there'll be a fine row."
This time he departed for good, singing "La Parisienne," for the words
and tune of which he had a great predilection.
The young man was left alone with the two dogs.
X.
IN WHICH THINGS DO NOT HAPPEN PRECISELY AS BARON
MICHEL DREAMED THEY WOULD.
Our lover's first idea was to follow Courtin's original advice and
send the dogs back to the Marquis de Souday by Rousseau and La
Belette, two serving-men belonging partly to the château and partly to
the farm, who owed the nicknames by which Courtin has presented them
to the reader, one to the ruddy color of his hair, the other to the
resemblance of his face to that of a weasel whose obesity La Fontaine
has celebrated in one of his prettiest fables.
But after due reflection the young man feared that the Marquis de
Souday might content himself with sending a simple letter of thanks
and no invitation. If, unfortunately, the marquis should act thus, the
occasion was lost; he would have to wait for another; and one so
excellent as this could not be expected to happen every day. If, on
the contrary, he took the dogs back himself he must infallibly be
received; a neighbor would never be allowed to bring back valuable
strayed dogs in person, over a distance of ten or a dozen miles,
without being invited in to rest, and possibly, if it was late, to
pass the night at the castle.
Michel pulled out his watch; it was a little after six. We think we
mentioned that Madame la Baronne Michel had preserved, or rather had
taken a habit of dining at four o'clock. In her father's house Madame
la baronne had dined at mid-day. The young baron had therefore ample
time to go to the castle.
But it was a great resolution to take; and decision of character was
not, as we have already informed the reader, the predominating feature
in Monsieur Michel's character. He lost a quarter of an hour in
hesitation. Fortunately, in these May days the sun did not set till
eight o'clock. Besides, he could properly present himself as late as
nine.
But then--perhaps the young ladies after a hunting-day would go to bed
early? It was not, of course, the marquis whom the baron wanted to
see. He wouldn't have gone a mile for that purpose; whereas to see
Mary he felt he could march a hundred. So at last he decided to start
at once.
Only, and this was indeed a hindrance, he suddenly perceived that he
had no hat. To get it he must return to the château, at the risk of
encountering his mother and all her cross-questioning,--whose dogs
were those? where was he going? etc.
But did he really want a hat? The hat, that is, the lack of it, would
be set down to neighborly eagerness; or else the wind had taken it; or
else a branch had knocked it down a ravine, and he could not follow it
on account of the dogs. At any rate, it was worse to encounter his
mother than to go without his hat; accordingly he started, hatless,
leading the dogs in the leash.
He had hardly made a dozen steps before he discovered that it would
not take him the seventy-five minutes he had calculated to get to
Souday. No sooner were the hounds aware of the direction in which
their new leader was taking them than it was all he could do to hold
them back. They smelt their kennel, and dragged at the leash with all
their might; if harnessed to a light carriage they would have made the
distance in half an hour. The young man, forced to keep up with them
at a trot, would certainly do it in three-quarters.
After twenty minutes of this lively gait Michel reached the forest of
Machecoul, intending to make a short cut through it. It was necessary
to mount a rather steep slope before entering the wood, and when he
reached the top he halted to get his breath. Not so with the dogs, who
got their breath while running and wanted to keep on their way. The
baron opposed this desire by planting himself firmly on his feet and
leaning back while they dragged him forward. Two equal forces
neutralize each other,--that is one of the first principles of
mechanics. The young baron was the stronger, therefore he neutralized
the force of the two dogs.
This done, and quiet resulting, he took out his handkerchief to mop
his forehead. While he did so, enjoying the cool freshness of the
breeze as it breathed on his face from the invisible lips of evening,
he fancied he heard a cry wafted upon that breeze. The dogs heard it
too, and they answered it with that long, mournful cry of a lost
animal. Then they began to pull at their chain with fresh energy.
The baron was now rested and his forehead was mopped; he was therefore
quite as ready as Galon-d'Or and Allégro to continue the way; instead
of leaning back he leaned forward, and his little jog-trot was
resumed.
He had scarcely gone a few hundred steps before the same cry, or
rather call, was repeated, but very much nearer and therefore more
distinct than the first. The dogs answered by a long howl and a more
determined drag on their collars. The young man now felt certain that
the cry proceeded from some one in search of the dogs, and he bawled
to them (_hauler_). We beg pardon of our readers for using so
unacademic a word, but it is the one our peasants use to represent the
peculiar shout of a huntsman calling in his dogs. It has the advantage
of being expressive; and besides (for a last and better reason), I
know no other.
About six hundred paces farther on the same cry was repeated for the
third time by the seeking man and the missing hounds. This time
Galon-d'Or and Allégro tore along with such vigor that their conductor
was almost carried off his feet, and was forced to make his jog-trot a
quick trot and his quick trot a gallop.
He had scarcely kept along at that pace for three minutes before a man
appeared among the trees, jumped the ditch beside the road, and barred
the baron's way. The man was Jean Oullier.
"Ah, ha!" he cried; "so it's you, my pretty man, who not only turn my
dogs off the trail of the wolf I am hunting to that of a hare you're
after, but actually couple them, and lead 'em in a leash!"
"Monsieur," said the young man, all out of breath, "if I have coupled
them and led them it is to have the honor of returning them to
Monsieur le Marquis de Souday myself."
"Ho! yes, that's a likely story,--with no hat on your head! You
needn't trouble yourself any further, my good sir. Now you've met me
I'll take them back myself."
So saying, and before Monsieur Michel had time to oppose or even guess
his intention, Jean Oullier wrenched the chain from his hand and threw
it on the necks of the hounds, very much as we throw a bridle on the
neck of a horse. Finding themselves at liberty the dogs darted at full
speed in the direction of the castle, followed by Jean Oullier, whose
pace was equal to theirs as he cracked his whip and shouted:--
"Kennel! kennel, scamps!"
The whole scene was so rapid that dogs and man were nearly out of
sight before the young baron recovered himself. He stopped short
helplessly in the roadway, and must have been there ten minutes,
gazing, with his mouth open, in the direction Jean Oullier and the
dogs had taken, when the soft and caressing voice of a young girl said
close beside him:--
"Gracious goodness! Monsieur le baron, what are you doing here at this
hour, bareheaded?"
What he was doing, the young man would have been rather puzzled to
say; in point of fact he was following his hopes, which had flown away
in the direction of the castle, whither he dared not follow them. He
turned round to see who spoke to him, and recognized his
foster-sister, the daughter of the farmer Tinguy.
"Oh, it is you, Rosine, is it?" he said; "what are you doing here
yourself?"
"Monsieur le baron," said the girl, in a tearful voice, "I have just
come from the château de la Logerie, where Madame la baronne treated
me very unkindly."
"Why so, Rosine? You know my mother loves you and takes care of you."
"Yes, as a general thing; but not to-day."
"Why not to-day?"
"She has just had me turned out of the house."
"Why didn't you ask for me?"
"I did ask for you, Monsieur le baron, but they said yon were not at
home."
"I was at home; I have only just come out, my dear; for fast as you
may have come, I'll answer for it I came faster!"
"Maybe; it is likely enough, Monsieur le baron; for when Madame was so
cruel to me I thought I would come and ask the wolves to help me, but
couldn't decide at once to do so."
"What help can the _wolves_ give you?"
Michel forced himself to utter the word.
"The help I wanted Madame la baronne to give me, for my poor father
who is very ill."
"What is the matter with him?"
"A fever he caught in the marshes."
"A fever?" repeated Michel; "is it a malignant fever,--intermittent or
typhoid?"
"I don't know, Monsieur le baron."
"What does the doctor say?"
"Oh, goodness! the doctor lives at Palluau; he won't trouble himself
to come here under five francs, and we are not rich enough to pay five
francs for a doctor's visit."
"And didn't my mother give you any money?"
"Why, I told you she wouldn't even see me! 'A fever!' she said; 'and
Rosine dares to come to the château when her father has a fever? Send
her away.'"
"Oh, impossible!"
"I heard her, Monsieur le baron, she spoke so loud; besides, the proof
is that they turned me out of the house."
"Wait, wait!" cried the young man eagerly, "I'll give you the money."
He felt in his pockets. Then he remembered that he had given Courtin
all he had with him. "Confound it! I haven't a penny on me," he said.
"Come back with me to the château, Rosine, and I'll give you all you
want."
"No, no!" said the young girl; "I wouldn't go back for all the gold in
the world! No, my resolution is taken: I shall go to the wolves; they
are charitable; they won't turn away a poor girl who wants help for a
dying father."
"But--but," said the young man, hesitating, "I am told they are not
rich."
"Who are not rich?"
"The Demoiselles de Souday."
"Oh! it isn't money people ask of them,--it isn't alms they give; it
is something better than that, and God knows it."
"What is it, then?"
"They go themselves when people are sick; and if they can't cure them,
they comfort them in dying, and mourn with those who are left."
"Yes," said the young man, "that may be for ordinary illness, but when
it is a dangerous fever--"
"They wouldn't mind that,--not they! There's nothing dangerous to kind
hearts. I shall go to them, and you'll see they'll come. If you stay
here ten minutes more you'll see me coming back with one or other of
the sisters, who will help me nurse my father. Good-bye, Monsieur
Michel. I never would have thought Madame la baronne could be so
cruel! To drive away like a thief the daughter of the woman who nursed
you!"
The girl walked on and the young man made no answer; there was nothing
he could say. But Rosine had dropped a word which remained in his
mind: "If you stay here ten minutes you will see me coming back with
one or other of the sisters." He resolved to stay. The opportunity he
had lost in one direction came back to him from another. Oh! if only
Mary should be the one to come out with Rosine!
But how could he suppose that a young girl of eighteen, the daughter
of the Marquis de Souday, would leave her home at eight o'clock at
night and go five miles to nurse a poor peasant ill of a dangerous
fever? It was not only improbable, but it was actually impossible.
Rosine must have made the sisters better than they were, just as
others made them worse.
Besides, was it believable that his mother, noted for her piety and
claiming all the virtues, could have acted in this affair just the
reverse of two young girls of whom so much evil was said in the
neighborhood? But if things should happen as Rosine said, wouldn't
that prove that these young girls had souls after God's own heart? Of
course, however, it was quite certain that neither of them would come.
The young man was repeating this for the tenth time in as many minutes
when he saw, at the angle of the road round which Rosine had
disappeared, the shadows of two women. In spite of the coming darkness
he saw that one was Rosine; but as for the person with her, it was
impossible to recognize her identity, for she was wrapped in a large
mantle.
Baron Michel was so perplexed in mind, and his heart above all was so
agitated, that his legs failed him, and he stood stock-still till the
girls came up to him.
"Well, Monsieur le baron," said Rosine, with much pride, "what did I
tell you?"
"What did you tell him?" said the girl in the mantle.
Michel sighed. By the firm and decided tone of voice he knew she was
Bertha.
"I told him that I shouldn't be turned away from your house as I was
from the château de la Logerie," answered Rosine.
"But," said Michel, "perhaps you have not told Mademoiselle de Souday
what is the matter with your father."
"From the symptoms," said Bertha, "I suppose it is typhoid fever. That
is why we have not a minute to lose; it is an illness that requires to
be taken in time. Are you coming with us, Monsieur Michel?"
"But, mademoiselle," said the young man, "typhoid fever is
contagious."
"Some say it is, and others say it is not," replied Bertha,
carelessly.
"But," insisted Michel, "it is deadly."
"Yes, in many cases; though it is often cured."
The young man went close up to Bertha.
"Are you really going to expose yourself to such a danger?" he said.
"Of course I am."
"For an unknown man, a stranger to you?"
"Those who are strangers to us," said Bertha, with infinite
gentleness, "are fathers, brothers, husbands, to other human beings.
There is no such thing as a stranger in this world, Monsieur Michel;
even to you this man may be something."
"He was the husband of my nurse," stammered Michel.
"There! you see," said Bertha, "you can't regard him as a stranger."
"I did offer to go back to the château with Rosine and give her the
money to get a doctor."
"And she refused, preferring to come to us? Thank you, Rosine," said
Bertha.
The young man was dumfounded. He had heard of charity, but he had
never seen it; and here it was embodied in the form of Bertha. He
followed the young girls thoughtfully, with his head down.
"If you are coming with us, Monsieur Michel," said Bertha, "be so kind
as to carry this little box, which contains the medicines."
"No," said Rosine, "Monsieur le baron can't come with us, for he knows
what a dread madame has of contagious diseases."
"You are mistaken, Rosine," said the young man; "I am going with you."
And he took the box from Bertha's hands. An hour later they all three
reached the cottage of the sick man.
XI.
THE FOSTER-FATHER.
The cottage stood, not in the village but on the outskirts of it, a
gunshot distant or thereabouts. It was close to a little wood, into
which the back-door opened.
The goodman Tinguy--that was the term usually applied to Rosine's
father--was a Chouan of the old type. While still a lad, he fought
through the first war in La Vendée under Jolly, Couëtu, Charette, La
Rochejaquelein, and others. He was afterwards married and had two
children. The eldest, a boy, had been drafted, and was now in the
army; the youngest was Rosine.
At the birth of each child the mother, like other
poor peasant-women, had taken a nursling. The
foster-brother of the boy was the last scion of a noble family of
Maine, Henri de Bonneville, who will presently appear in this history.
The foster-brother of Rosine was, as we have already said, Michel de
la Logerie, one of the chief actors in our drama.
Henri de Bonneville was two years older than Michel; the two boys had
often played together on the threshold of the door that Michel was
about to cross, following Bertha and Rosine. Later on they met in
Paris; and Madame de la Logerie had encouraged the intimacy of her son
with a young man of large fortune and high rank in the Western
provinces.
These foster-children had greatly eased the circumstances of the
Tinguy family; but the Vendéan peasant is so constituted that he never
admits that he is comfortably off. Tinguy was now making himself out
poor at the expense of his life. Ill as he was, nothing would have
induced him to send to Palluau for a doctor, whose visit would have
cost him five francs. Besides, no peasant, and the Vendéan peasant
least of all, believes in a doctor or in medicine. This was why
Rosine, when they wanted help, applied first at the château de la
Logerie, as foster-sister of the young baron, and then, being driven
thence, to the Demoiselles de Souday.
At the noise the young people made on entering the sick man rose on
his elbow, with difficulty, but immediately fell back on the bed with
a piteous moan. A candle was burning, which lighted the bed only; the
rest of the room was in darkness. The light showed, on a species of
cot or pallet, a man over fifty years of age, struggling in the grasp
of the demon of fever. He was pale to lividness; his eyes were glassy
and sunken, and from time to time his body shook from head to foot, as
if it had come in contact with a galvanic battery.
Michel shuddered at the sight. He understood at once why his mother,
fearing contagion, and knowing that Rosine must come from that bedside
impregnated with the miasmas of the disease, which were floating
almost visibly in the circle of light around that dying bed, was
unwilling to let Rosine enter the château. He wished for camphor, or
chloride of lime, or some disinfectant to isolate the sick man from
the well man, but having nothing of the kind he stood as near the door
as he could to breathe the fresh air.
As for Bertha, she seemed to pay no attention to all that; she went
straight to the patient and took his hand. Michel made a motion as if
to stop her, and opened his lips to utter a cry; but he was, in a
measure, petrified by the boldness of her charity, and he kept his
place silently, in admiring terror.
Bertha questioned the sick man. He replied that in the morning, when
he rose he had felt so weary that his legs gave way under him when he
attempted to walk. This was a warning given by Nature; but the
peasantry seldom pay heed to such advice. Instead of getting back into
bed and sending for a doctor, Tinguy dressed himself, went down into
the cellar for a pot of cider, and cut himself a slice of bread,--to
"strengthen him up," as he said. His pot of cider tasted good, but he
could not eat the bread. Then he went to his work in the fields.
As he went along, he had terrible pains in his head and a bleeding at
the nose; his weariness was excessive, and he was forced to sit down
once or twice. When he came to a brook he drank of it; but this did
not slake his thirst, which was so great that he even drank the water
out of a puddle. When at last he reached his field he had not the
strength to put a spade into the furrow he had begun the night before,
and he stood for some moments leaning on his tool. Then his head
turned, and he lay down, or rather fell down on the ground in a state
of utter prostration.
There he remained till seven in the evening, and might have stayed all
night if a peasant from the little town of Légé had not happened to
come along. Seeing a man lying in the field, he called to him. Tinguy
did not answer, but he made a movement. The peasant went nearer and
recognized him. With great difficulty he got the sick man home; Tinguy
was so feeble that it took him over an hour to go half a mile.
Rosine was watching for him anxiously. When she saw him she was
frightened, and wished to go to Palluau and fetch the doctor; but her
father positively forbade it, and went to bed, declaring it would be
nothing and the next day he should be well. But as his thirst, instead
of lessening, continued to increase, he told Rosine to put a pitcher
of water by his bedside for the night. He spent the night thus,
devoured by thirst, and drinking incessantly without allaying the
fever that burned within him. The next morning he tried to rise; but
he no sooner sat up in bed than his head, in which he complained of
violent shooting pains, became dizzy, and he was seized with a violent
pain in the right side.
Rosine insisted on going for M. Roger (that was the name of the doctor
at Palluau); but again her father forbade her. The girl then stayed
quietly by his bed, ready to obey his wishes and serve his needs. His
greatest need was for drink; every ten minutes he asked for water.
Matters went on thus till four in the afternoon. Then the sick man
shook his head and said, "I see I have got a bad fever; you must go
and get me some help from the good ladies at the castle." We know the
results of Rosine's expedition.
After feeling the sick man's pulse and listening to this account of
his illness, given with great difficulty, Bertha, who counted above a
hundred pulsations, was sure that Tinguy was in a dangerous state.
What the exact nature of the fever was she was too ignorant of the
science of medicine to decide. But as the sick man was constantly
crying for "Drink! drink!" she cut a lemon in slices, boiled it in a
potful of water, sweetened it slightly, and let the sick man drink it
in place of pure water.
It is to be remarked that when she wanted to sweeten the infusion
Rosine told her there was no sugar in the house; sugar, to a Vendéan
peasant, is the supreme of luxury. Fortunately, the provident Bertha
had put a few lumps into the little box which contained her medicines.
She cast her eyes about her in search of the box, and saw it under the
arm of the young man, who was still standing near the door.
She made him a sign to come to her; but before he could obey she made
him another sign to stay where he was. Then she went up to him
herself, laying a finger on her lips, and said in a low voice, so that
the patient might not hear her:--
"The man's condition is very serious. I dare not take much upon
myself. It is absolutely necessary to have a doctor, and even so, I
fear it will be too late. Will you go to Palluau, dear Monsieur
Michel, and fetch Doctor Roger? Meantime I will give Tinguy something
to quiet him."
"But you--you?" said the young baron, anxiously.
"I shall stay here; you will find me when you get back. I have some
important things to say to the patient."
"Important things?" said Michel, astonished.
"Yes."
"But--" insisted the young man.
"I assure you," interrupted the young girl, "that every minute's delay
is of consequence. Taken in time these fevers are often fatal;
neglected, as this has been, there is little hope. Go at once,--at
once, and bring back the doctor."
"But," persisted the young man, "suppose the fever is contagious?"
"What then?"
"Won't you run great risk of taking it?"
"My dear monsieur," said Bertha, "if we stopped to think about such
things half the sick peasants would die. Come, go; and trust to God to
take care of me."
She held out her hand to him; the young man took it. Carried away by
the admiration he felt at seeing in a woman a grand and simple courage
of which he, a man, was incapable, he pressed his lips with a sort of
passion upon it.
The movement was so rapid and unexpected that Bertha quivered, turned
very pale, and sighed as she said:--
"Go, friend; go!"
She did not need, this time, to reiterate her order. Michel sprang
from the cottage. A mysterious fire seemed to run through his veins
and doubled his vital power; he felt a strange, new force within him.
He fancied he was capable of accomplishing miracles; it seemed to him
that like the antique Mercury, wings had grown upon his head and
heels. If a wall had barred the way he would have scaled it; if a
river were flowing across his path, without bridge or ford, he would
have swum it, not stopping to fling off his clothes. He only regretted
that Bertha had asked him to do so easy a thing; he would fain have
had obstacles, some difficult--nay, impossible--quest! How could
Bertha be grateful to him for only going a few miles to fetch a
doctor? A few miles! when he longed to go to the end of the world for
her! Why couldn't he give some proof of heroism which might match his
courage with Bertha's own?
Of course, in such a state of exaltation the young baron never dreamed
of fatigue. The three and a half miles to Palluau were done in less
than half an hour. Doctor Roger was a familiar visitor at the château
of La Logerie, which is hardly an hour's distance from Palluau. Michel
had only to send up his name before the doctor, who had gone to bed
called out that he would be ready in five minutes.
At the end of that time he appeared in the salon, and asked the young
man what could possibly bring him there at that unusual time of night.
In two words Michel told the doctor the state of the case; and as M.
Roger seemed a good deal surprised at his taking so lively an interest
in a peasant as to come on foot, at night, with an agitated manner and
bathed in perspiration, the young baron hastened to explain his
interest by the ties of affection which naturally bound him to his
foster-father.
Questioned by the doctor as to the symptoms of the illness, Michel
repeated faithfully all he had heard, and begged M. Roger to take with
him the necessary remedies,--the village of Légé not yet having
attained to the civilization of possessing an apothecary. Noticing
that the young baron was reeking with perspiration, and finding that
he had come on foot, the doctor, who had already ordered his horse to
be saddled, changed the order and had him harnessed to his carriole.
Michel was most anxious to prevent this arrangement; he declared that
he could go on foot much faster than the doctor could go on horseback.
He was, in fact, so powerful, with that valiant vigor of youth and
heart, that he probably could have done so as fast, or even faster,
than the doctor on his horse. The doctor insisted, Michel refused; and
the discussion ended by his darting out of the house and calling back
to Monsieur Roger:--
"Come as fast as you can. I'll announce your coming!"
The doctor began to think that Madame de la Logerie's son was mad. He
said to himself that he should soon overtake him, and did not change
the order for the carriole.
It was the thought of appearing before the eyes of the young girl in a
carriole which so exasperated the lover. He fancied Bertha would feel
more grateful to him if she saw him arrive all out of breath and open
the cottage door, crying out, "Here I am! the doctor is following me!"
than if she saw him driving up in a carriole, accompanying the doctor.
On horseback, on a fine courser, mane and tail flying in the wind, his
arrival announced by snorts and neighs, it would have been another
thing; but in a carriole!--ten thousand times better go on foot! A
first love teems with poesy, and it feels a bitter hatred to the
prosaic. What would Mary think when her sister told her she had sent
the young baron to Palluau for Doctor Roger, and that the young baron
had returned in the doctor's carriole!
No, no; better a thousand times, as we have said, arrive on foot. The
young fellow understood very well that this first appearance on the
stage of love with heaving breast and ardent eyes, dust on his
clothes, hair streaming in the wind, was good, good, and well done. As
for the patient, heavens! he was well-nigh forgotten, we must admit,
in the midst of this excitement; at any rate, it was not of him that
Michel thought, but of the two sisters. His poor foster-father would
not have driven him across the country at the rate of seven miles an
hour; it was Bertha, it was Mary. The exciting cause in this grand
physiological cataclysm now taking place in our hero had become a mere
accessory. Michel, under the name of Hippomenes, struggling for the
prize with Atalanta, had no need to drop the golden apples on his way.
He laughed to scorn the idea that the doctor and his horse could
overtake him; and he felt a sensation of physical delight as the cold
night-wind chilled the moisture on his brow. Overtaken by the doctor!
Sooner death than that!
It had taken him half an hour to go; it took him twenty-five minutes
to return.
As though Bertha had expected or divined this impossible celerity, she
had gone to the threshold of the door to await her messenger. She knew
that in all probability he could not be back till half an hour later,
and yet she went out to listen for him. She thought she heard steps in
the far distance. Impossible! it could not be he already; and yet she
never doubted that it was he.
In fact, a moment later she saw him looming, appearing, then clearly
defined upon the darkness, while at the same time he, with his eyes
fixed on the door, all the while doubting them, saw her standing there
motionless, her hand on her heart, which, for the first time in her
life, was beating violently.
When he reached her the youth, like the Greek of Marathon, was
voiceless, breathless, and came near dropping, if not as dead as the
Greek, at least in a faint. He had only strength to say:--
"The doctor is following me."
Then, in order not to fall, he leaned with his hand against the wall.
If he could have said more he might have cried:--
"You will tell Mademoiselle Mary, won't you? that it was for love of
her and of you that I have done seven miles in fifty minutes."
But he could not speak; so that Bertha believed, and had ground for
believing, that it was for love of her, and her alone, that the young
messenger had performed his feat. She smiled with pleasure. Drawing
her handkerchief from her pocket, she said, softly wiping the young
man's forehead, and taking great care not to touch his wound:--
"Good heavens! how sorry I am that you took my request to hasten so
much to heart! What a state you are in!" Then scolding him like a
mother, she added in a tender tone, "What a child you are!"
That word "child" was said in a tone of such indescribable tenderness
that it made Michel quiver. He seized Bertha's hand; it was moist and
trembling. Just then the sound of wheels was heard on the
high-road.
"Ah! here is the doctor," she cried, pushing away the young man's
hand.
Michel looked at her in amazement. Why did she push away his hand? He
was, of course, unable to give a clear account to himself of what was
passing in a girl's mind; but he felt, instinctively, that although
she repulsed him it was not from dislike or anger.
Bertha went back into the cottage, no doubt to prepare for the
doctor's arrival. Michel stayed at the door to receive him. When he
saw him coming along in his wicker vehicle, which shook him
grotesquely, the young fellow congratulated himself more than ever for
having come on foot. It was true that if Bertha had gone in, as she
had just done, when she heard the wheels she would not have seen him
in that vulgar trap. But if he had not already returned would she, or
would she not, have waited till he came?
Michel told himself that it was more than probable she would have
waited, and he felt in his heart, if not the warm satisfactions of
love, at any rate the soft ticklings of vanity.
XII.
NOBLESSE OBLIGE.
When the doctor entered the room Bertha was beside the patient. The
first thing that met M. Roger's eyes was her graceful form, like those
of the angels in German legends bending forward to receive the souls
of the dying. He knew her at once, for he was rarely called to the
cottages of the poor that he did not find either her or her sister
between death and the dying.
"Oh, doctor," she said, "come quick! poor Tinguy is delirious."
The patient was under much excitement. The doctor went to him.
"Come, friend," said he, "be calm."
"Let me alone! let me alone!" cried Tinguy. "I must get up; they want
me at Montaigu."
"No, dear Tinguy," said Bertha, "no; they are not expecting you just
yet."
"Yes, mademoiselle; yes, they are! It was for
to-night. Who will go from house to house and carry the news if I'm
not there?"
"Hush, Tinguy, hush!" said Bertha; "remember you are ill, and Doctor
Roger is here."
"Doctor Roger, is one of us, mademoiselle; we can talk before him. He
knows they are waiting for me; he knows I must get up at once. I must
go to Montaigu."
Doctor Roger and the young girl looked at each other.
"_Massa_," said the doctor.
"_Marseille_," replied Bertha.
And then, with a spontaneous movement, they shook hands.
Bertha returned to the patient.
"Yes," she said, bending to his ear, "you are right. The doctor is one
of us; but there is some one else here who is not." She lowered her
voice so that only Tinguy could hear. "And that," she added, "is the
young Baron Michel."
"Ah, true," said the goodman. "Don't let him hear anything. Courtin is
a traitor. But if I don't go to Montaigu, who will?"
"Jean Oullier. Don't worry, Tinguy."
"Oh! if Jean Oullier will go," said the sick man,--"if Jean Oullier
will go I need not. His foot's good, and his eye true; he can fire
straight, he can!"
And he burst out laughing; but in that laugh he seemed to expend his
last vital strength and fell backward on the bed.
The young baron had listened to this dialogue (of which he could only
hear portions) without in the least understanding it. All he
distinctly made out was, "Courtin is a traitor," and from the
direction of the young girl's eye as she spoke with the peasant he was
certain that they were talking of him. His heart contracted; they had
some secret in which they would not let him share. He went up to
Bertha.
"Mademoiselle," he said, "if I am in your way, or if you have no
further need of me, say the word and I retire."
He spoke in a tone of so much pain that Bertha was touched.
"No," she said, "stay. We need you still; you must help Rosine to
prepare M. Roger's prescriptions while I talk with him about the
case." Then to the doctor she said, in a low voice, "Keep them busy,
and you can tell me what you know, and I will tell you what I know."
Turning again to Michel she added, in her sweetest voice, "I know, my
dear friend, that you will be willing to help Rosine."
"As long as you wish, mademoiselle; give your orders and I will obey
them," said the young man.
"You see, doctor," said Bertha, smiling, "you have two willing
helpers."
The doctor went out to his vehicle and returned with a bottle of
Sedlitz water and a package of mustard.
"Here," he said to Michel, giving him the bottle, "uncork that and
make him drink half a glassful every ten minutes. And you, Rosine,"
giving her the mustard, "mix that into a paste with hot water; it is
to be put on the soles of your father's feet."
The sick man had dropped back into the state of apathetic indifference
which preceded the excitement Bertha had calmed by assuring him that
Jean Oullier would take his place. The doctor cast a look at him, and
seeing that in his present state of quiescence he could safely be left
to the care of the young baron, he went eagerly up to Bertha.
"Mademoiselle de Souday," he said, "since it seems that we hold the
same opinions, what news have you?"
"Madame left Massa on the 21st of last April, and she ought to have
landed at Marseille on the 29th or 30th. This is now the 6th of May.
Madame must have disembarked, and the whole South ought by this time
to have risen."
"Is that all you know?" asked the doctor.
"Yes, all," replied Bertha.
"You have not read the evening papers of the 3d?"
"We do not get any papers at the château de Souday," she said.
"Well," said the doctor, "the whole thing failed."
"Is it possible! Failed?"
"Yes, Madame was utterly misled."
"Good God! what are you telling me?"
"The exact truth. Madame, after a prosperous voyage in the 'Carlo
Alberto,' landed on the coast at some little distance from Marseille.
A guide awaited her and took her to a lonely house in the woods.
Madame had only six persons with her--"
"Oh! go on; go on!"
"She sent one of those persons to Marseille to inform the leader of
the movement that she had landed and was awaiting the result of the
promises which had brought her to France--"
"Well?"
"That evening the messenger came back with a note, congratulating the
princess on her safe arrival, and saying that Marseille would rise on
the following day--"
"Yes; what then?"
"The next day an attempt was made, but Marseille would not rise at
all. The people would take no part in the affair, which failed
utterly."
"And Madame?"
"It is not known where she is; but they hope she
re-embarked on the 'Carlo Alberto.'"
"Cowards!" muttered Bertha. "I am nothing but a woman; but oh! I swear
to God that if Madame comes into La Vendée I will set an example to
some men. Good-bye, doctor, and thank you."
"Must you go?"
"Yes; it is important that my father should know this news. He is at a
meeting to-night at the château de Montaigu. I must get back to
Souday. I commit my poor patient to you. Leave exact directions, and I
or my sister, unless something unforeseen prevents, will be here
to-morrow and watch at night."
"Will you take my carriage? I can get back on foot, and you can return
it by Jean Oullier, or any one, to-morrow."
"Thank you, no; I don't know where Jean Oullier may be to-morrow.
Besides, I prefer walking; the air will do me good."
Bertha held out her hand to the doctor, pressed his with almost
masculine strength, threw her mantle over her shoulders, and left the
cottage. At the door she found Michel, who, although he could not hear
the conversation, had kept his eye on the young girl, and, seeing that
she was about to depart, got to the door before her.
"Ah! mademoiselle," he exclaimed, "what has happened? What have you
just heard?"
"Nothing," said Bertha.
"Nothing! If you had heard nothing you would not be starting off in
such a hurry, without a word to me,--without so much as signing to
me, or saying good-bye."
"Why should I say good-bye, inasmuch as you are going with me? When we
reach the gate of Souday will be time enough to bid you good-bye."
"What! will you allow me?"
"To accompany me? Certainly. After all you have done for me this
evening, it is your right, my dear Monsieur Michel,--that is, unless
you are too fatigued."
"I, mademoiselle, too fatigued, when it is a matter of accompanying
you! With you, or with Mademoiselle Mary, I would go to the end of the
world. Fatigued? Heavens, no!"
Bertha smiled, murmuring to herself, "What a pity he is not one of
us!" Then she added under her breath, "One could do as one pleased
with a nature like his."
"Are you speaking?" said Michel. "I did not quite catch what you say."
"I spoke very low."
"Why do you speak low?"
"Because what I was saying cannot be said out
loud,--not yet, at least."
"But later?"
"Ah! later, perhaps--"
The young man in turn moved his lips, and made no sound.
"What does that pantomime mean?" asked Bertha.
"It means that I can speak below my breath as you do, with this
difference, that what I say low I am ready to say out loud and
instantly,--at this very moment if I dared--"
"I am not a woman like other women," said Bertha, with an almost
disdainful smile; "and what is said to me in a low voice may equally
well be said aloud."
"Well then, what I was saying below my breath was this; I grieve to
see you flinging yourself into danger,--danger as certain as it is
useless."
"What danger are you talking about, my dear neighbor?" said the girl,
in a slightly mocking tone.
"That about which you were speaking to Doctor Roger just now. An
uprising is to take place in La Vendée."
"Really?"
"You will not deny that, I think."
"I?--why should I deny it?"
"Your father and you are taking part in it."
"You forget my sister," said Bertha, laughing.
"No, I forget no one," said Michel, with a sigh.
"Go on."
"Let me tell you--as a tender friend, a devoted friend--that you are
wrong."
"And why am I wrong, my tender, my devoted friend," asked Bertha, with
the tinge of satire she could never quite eliminate from her nature.
"Because La Vendée is not in 1832 what she was in 1793; or rather,
because there is no longer a Vendée."
"So much the worse for La Vendée! But, happily, there is always the
Noblesse,--you don't yet know, Monsieur Michel, but your children's
children in the sixth generation will know the meaning of the words
NOBLESSE OBLIGE."
The young man made a hasty movement.
"Now," said Bertha, "let's talk of something else; for on this topic I
will not say another word, inasmuch as you are not--as poor Tinguy
says--one of us."
"But," said the young man, hurt by Bertha's tone toward him, "what
shall we talk about?"
"Why, anything,--everything. The night is magnificent, talk to me of
the night; the moon is brilliant, talk of the moon; the stars are
dazzling, tell me about the stars; the heavens are pure, let us talk
of the heavens."
She raised her head and let her eyes rest on the clear and starry
firmament. Michel sighed; he said nothing, and walked on beside her.
What could he say--that man of books and city walls--about the nature
that seemed her fitting kingdom? Had he, like Bertha, been in contact
from his infancy with the wonders of creation? Had he watched, like
her, the gradations through which the dawn ascends and the sun sinks
down? Did his ear know, like hers, the mysterious sounds of night?
When the lark rang out its reveille did he know what the lark was
saying? When the gurgle of the nightingale filled the darkness with
harmony could he tell what that throat was uttering? No, no. He knew
the things of science, which Bertha did not know; but Bertha knew the
things of nature, and of all such things he was ignorant. Oh! if the
young girl had only spoken then, how religiously his heart would have
listened to her.
But, unfortunately, she was silent. Her heart was full of thoughts
which escaped in looks and sighs, and not in sounds and words.
He, too, was dreaming. He walked beside the gentle Mary, not the
harsh, firm Bertha; instead of the self-reliant Bertha, he felt the
weaker Mary leaning on his arm. Ah! if she were only there words would
come; all the thousand things of the night--the moon, the stars, the
sky--would have rushed to his lips. With Mary he would have been the
teacher and the master; with Bertha he was the scholar and the slave.
The two young people walked silently side by side for more than a
quarter of an hour, when suddenly Bertha stopped and made a sign to
Michel to stop also. The young man obeyed; with Bertha his place was
to obey.
"Do you hear?" said Bertha.
"No," said Michel, shaking his head.
"Well, I hear," she said, her eyes gleaming and her ears alert, as she
strained them eagerly.
"What do you hear?"
"My horse's step and that of my sister Mary's horse. They are coming
for me. Something must have happened." She listened again. "Mary has
come herself."
"How can you tell that?" asked the young man.
"By the way the horses gallop. Let us walk faster, please."
The sounds came nearer, and in less than five minutes a dark group
showed in the distance. Soon it was seen to be two horses,--a woman
riding one and leading the other.
"I told you it was my sister," said Bertha.
The young man had already recognized her, less by her person, scarcely
distinguishable in the darkness, than by the beating of his heart.
Mary, too, had recognized him, and this was plain from the gesture of
amazement which escaped her. It was evident that she expected to find
her sister alone or with Rosine,--certainly not with the young baron.
Michel saw the impression his presence had produced, and he advanced.
"Mademoiselle," he said to Mary, "I met your sister on her way to
carry assistance to poor Tinguy, and in order that she might not be
alone I have accompanied her."
"You did perfectly right, monsieur," replied Mary.
"You don't understand," said Bertha, laughing. "He thinks he must
excuse me or excuse himself. Do forgive him for something; his mamma
is going to scold him." Then leaning on Mary's saddle, and speaking
close to her ear, "What is it, darling?" she asked.
"The attempt at Marseille has failed."
"I know that; and Madame has re-embarked."
"That's a mistake."
"A mistake?"
"Yes. Madame declares that as she is in France she will stay."
"Can it be true?"
"Yes; and she is now on her way to La Vendée,--in fact, she may
actually be here now."
"How did you hear all this?"
"Through a message received from her to-night at the château de
Montaigu, just as the meeting was about to break up disheartened."
"Gallant soul!" cried Bertha, enthusiastically.
"Papa returned home at full gallop, and finding where you were, he
told me to take the horses and fetch you."
"Well, here I am!" said Bertha, putting her foot into the stirrup.
"Are not you going to bid good-bye to your poor knight?"
"Oh, yes," said Bertha, holding out her hand to the young man, who
advanced to take it slowly and sadly.
"Ah! Mademoiselle Bertha," he murmured, taking her hand, "I am very
unhappy."
"Why?" she asked.
"Not to be, as you said just now, one of you."
"What prevents it?" said Mary, holding out her hand to him.
The young man darted on that hand and kissed it in a passion of love
and gratitude.
"Oh! yes, yes, yes," he murmured, so low that Mary alone could hear
him; "for you, mademoiselle, and with you."
Mary's hand was roughly torn from his grasp by a sudden movement of
her horse. Bertha, in touching hers, had struck that of her sister on
the flank. Horses and riders, starting at a gallop, were soon lost
like shadows in the darkness.
The young man stood motionless in the roadway.
"Adieu!" cried Bertha.
"Au revoir!" cried Mary.
"Yes, yes, yes," he said, stretching his arms toward their vanishing
figures; "yes, au revoir! au revoir!"
The two girls continued their way without uttering a word, until they
reached the castle gate, and there Bertha said, abruptly:--
"Mary, I know you will laugh at me!"
"Why?" asked Mary, trembling.
"I love him!" replied Bertha.
A cry of pain had almost escaped from Mary's lips, but she smothered
it.
"And I called to him 'au revoir!'" she whispered to herself. "God
grant I may never, never see him again."
XIII.
A DISTANT COUSIN.
The day after the events we have just related,--that is to say, on the
7th of May, 1832,--a great dinner-party was given at the château de
Vouillé, to celebrate the birthday of Madame la Comtesse de Vouillé,
who had on that day completed her twenty-fourth year.
The company had just sat down to table, and at this table, among
twenty-five other guests, was the prefect of Vienne and the mayor of
Châtellerault, relations more or less distant of Madame de Vouillé.
The soup was just removed when a servant entered the dining-room, and
said a few words in Monsieur de Vouillé's ear. Monsieur de Vouillé
made the man repeat them twice. Then addressing his guests, he said:--
"I beg you to excuse me for a few moments. A lady has arrived at the
gate in a post-chaise, and she insists on speaking to me personally.
Will you allow me to see what this lady wants?"
Permission was, of course, unanimously granted, though Madame de
Vouillé's eyes followed her husband to the door with some uneasiness.
Monsieur de Vouillé hastened to the gate. There, sure enough, was a
post-chaise, containing two persons, a man and a woman. A servant in
sky-blue livery with silver lace, was on the box. When he saw Monsieur
de Vouillé, whom he seemed to be expecting impatiently, he jumped
lightly down.
"Come, come, slow coach!" he said, as soon as the count was near
enough to hear him.
Monsieur de Vouillé stopped short, amazed,--more than amazed,
stupefied. What manner of servant was this, who dared to apostrophize
him in that style? He went nearer to let the fellow know his mind.
Then he stopped, and burst out laughing.
"What! is it you, de Lussac?" he said.
"Yes; undoubtedly, it is I."
"What is all this masquerading about?"
The counterfeit servant opened the carriage door and offered his arm
to enable the lady to get out of the chaise. Then he said:--
"My dear count, I have the honor to present you to Madame la Duchesse
de Berry." Bowing to the duchess, he continued, "Madame la duchesse,
Monsieur le Comte de Vouillé is one of my best friends and one of your
most devoted servants."
The count retreated a few steps.
"Madame la Duchesse de Berry!" he exclaimed, stupefied.
"In person, monsieur," said the duchess.
"Are you not proud and happy to receive her Royal Highness?" said de
Lussac.
"As proud and happy as an ardent royalist can be;
but--"
"What! is there a but?" asked the duchess.
"This is my wife's birthday, and we have twenty-five guests now dining
with us."
"Well, monsieur, there is a French proverb which says, 'Enough for two
is enough for three.' I am sure you will extend the maxim to mean
'Enough for twenty-five is enough for twenty-eight;' for I warn you
that Monsieur de Lussac, servant as he is, must dine at table, and he
is dying of hunger."
"Yes; but don't be uneasy," said the Baron de Lussac. "I'll take off
my livery."
Monsieur de Vouillé seized his head with both hands, as if he meant to
tear out his hair.
"What shall I do? what can I do?" he cried.
"Come," said the duchess, "let us talk sense."
"Talk sense!" said the count; "how can I? I am half crazy."
"Evidently not with joy," said the duchess.
"No, with terror, madame."
"Oh! you exaggerate the situation."
"But, madame, you are entering the lion's den. I have the prefect of
Vienne and the mayor of Châtellerault at my table."
"Very good; then you will present them to me."
"Good God! and under what title?"
"That of a cousin. You surely have some distant cousin, whose name
will answer the purpose."
"What an idea, madame!"
"Come, put it to use."
"I certainly have a cousin in Toulouse,--Madame de la Myre."
"The very thing! I am Madame de la Myre."
Then turning round in the carriage she offered her hand to an old man
about sixty-five years of age, who seemed waiting till the discussion
ended before he showed himself.
"Come, Monsieur de la Myre," said the duchess, "this is a surprise we
are giving our cousin, and we arrive just in time to keep his wife's
birthday. Come, cousin!"
So saying she jumped lightly out of the carriage and gayly slipped her
arm into that of the Comte de Vouillé.
"Yes, come!" said Monsieur de Vouillé, his mind made up to risk the
adventure into which the duchess was so joyously rushing. "Come!"
"Wait for me," cried the Baron de Lussac, jumping into the carriage,
which he transformed into a dressing-room, and changing his sky-blue
livery for a black surtout coat; "don't leave me behind."
"But who the devil are you to be?" asked M. de Vouillé.
"Oh! I'll be the Baron de Lussac, and--if Madame will permit me--the
cousin of your cousin."
"Stop! stop! monsieur le baron," said the old gentleman, who had not
yet spoken; "it seems to me that you are taking a great liberty."
"Pooh! we are on a campaign," said the duchess; "I permit it."
Monsieur de Vouillé now bravely led the way into the dining-room. The
curiosity of the guests and the uneasiness of the mistress of the
house were all the more excited by this prolonged absence. So, when
the door of the dining-room opened all eyes turned to the new
arrivals.
Whatever difficulties there may have been in playing the parts they
had thus unexpectedly assumed, none of the actors were at all
disconcerted.
"Dear," said the count to his wife, "I have often spoken to you of my
cousin in Toulouse--"
"Madame de la Myre?" interrupted the countess, eagerly.
"Yes,--Madame de la Myre. She is on her way to Nantes, and would not
pass the château without making your acquaintance. How fortunate that
she comes on your birthday! I hope it will bring luck to both."
"Dear cousin!" said the duchess, opening her arms to Madame de
Vouillé.
The two women kissed each other. As for the two men M. de Vouillé
contented himself with saying aloud, "Monsieur de la Myre," "Monsieur
de Lussac."
The company bowed.
"Now," said M. de Vouillé, "we must find seats for these new-comers,
who warn me that they are dying of hunger."
Every one moved a little. The table was large, and all the guests had
plenty of elbow-room; it was not difficult therefore to place three
additional persons.
"Did you not tell me, my dear cousin," said the duchess, "that the
prefect of Vienne was dining with you?"
"Yes, madame; and that is he whom you see on the countess's right,
with spectacles, a white cravat, and the rosette of an officer of the
Legion of honor in his buttonhole."
"Oh! pray present us."
Monsieur de Vouillé boldly carried on the comedy. He felt there was
nothing to be done but to play it out. Accordingly, he approached the
prefect, who was majestically leaning back in his chair.
"Monsieur le préfet," he said, "this is my cousin, who, with her
traditional respect for authority, thinks that a general presentation
is not enough, and therefore wishes to be presented to you
particularly."
"Generally, particularly, and officially," replied the gallant
functionary, "madame is and ever will be welcome."
"I accept the pledge, monsieur," said the duchess.
"Madame is going to Nantes?" asked the prefect, by way of making a
remark.
"Yes, monsieur; and thence to Paris,--at least, I hope so."
"It is not, I presume, the first time that Madame visits the capital?"
"No, monsieur; I lived there twelve years."
"And Madame left it--"
"Oh! very unwillingly, I assure you."
"Recently?"
"Two years ago last July."
"I can well understand that having once lived in Paris--"
"I should wish to return there. I am glad you understand that."
"Oh, Paris! Paris!" said the functionary.
"The paradise of the world!" said the duchess.
"Come, take your seats," said Monsieur de Vouillé.
"Oh, my dear cousin," said the duchess, with a glance at the place he
intended for her, "leave me beside Monsieur le préfet, I entreat you.
He has just expressed himself with so much feeling about the thing I
have most at heart that I place him, at once, on my list of friends."
The prefect, delighted with the compliment, drew aside his chair, and
Madame was installed in the seat to his left, to the detriment of the
person to whom that place of honor had been assigned. The two men
accepted without objection the seats given to them, and were soon
busy--M. de Lussac especially--in doing justice to the repast. The
other guests followed their example, and for a time nothing broke the
solemn silence which attends the beginning of a long-delayed and
impatiently awaited dinner.
Madame was the first to break that silence. Her adventurous spirit,
like the petrel, was more at ease in a gale.
"Well," she remarked, "I think our arrival must have interrupted the
conversation. Nothing is so depressing as a silent dinner. I detest
such dinners, my dear count; they are like those state functions at
the Tuileries, where, they tell me, no one was allowed to speak
unless the king had spoken. What were you all talking about before we
came in?"
"Dear cousin," said M. de Vouillé, "the prefect was kindly giving us
the official details of that blundering affair at Marseille."
"Blundering affair?" said the duchess.
"That's what he called it."
"And the words exactly describe the thing," said the functionary. "Can
you conceive of an expedition of that character for which the
arrangements were so carelessly made that it only required a
sub-lieutenant of the 13th regiment to arrest one of the leaders of
the outbreak and knock the whole affair in the head at once?"
"But don't you know, Monsieur le préfet," said the duchess, in a
melancholy tone, "in all great events there is a moment, a supreme
moment, when the destinies of princes and empires are shaken like
leaves in the wind? For example, when Napoleon at La Mure advanced to
meet the soldiers who were sent against him, if a sub-lieutenant of
any kind had taken him by the collar the return from Elba would hav
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