The captain’s hasty retreat had a motive. The despised, humiliated woman, who was even then, perhaps, being put to death, had so won upon him during the scene of her degradation that he said to himself, as he left the room, “If she is a prostitute, she is not an ordinary one, and I’ll marry her.” He felt so sure of being able to rescue her from the savages that his first thought, when his own life was given to him, was to save hers. Unhappily, when he reached the portico, he found the courtyard deserted. He looked about him, listened to the silence, and could hear nothing but the distant shouts and laughter of the Chouans, who were drinking in the gardens and dividing their booty. He turned the corner to the fatal wing before which his men had been shot, and from there he could distinguish, by the feeble light of a few stray lanterns, the different groups of the Chasseurs du Roi. Neither Pille-Miche, nor Marche-a-Terre, nor the girl were visible; but he felt himself gently pulled by the flap of his uniform, and, turning round, saw Francine on her knees.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“I don’t know; Pierre drove me back and told me not to stir from here.”
“Which way did they go?”
“That way,” she replied, pointing to the causeway.
The captain and Francine then noticed in that direction a line of strong shadows thrown by the moonlight on the lake, and among them that of a female figure.
“It is she!” cried Francine.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil seemed to be standing, as if resigned, in the midst of other figures, whose gestures denoted a debate.
“There are several,” said the captain. “Well, no matter, let us go to them.”
“You will get yourself killed uselessly,” said Francine.
“I have been killed once before to-day,” he said gaily.
They both walked towards the gloomy gateway which led to the causeway; there Francine suddenly stopped short.
“No,” she said, gently, “I’ll go no farther; Pierre told me not to meddle; I believe in him; if we go on we shall spoil all. Do as you please, officer, but leave me. If Pierre saw us together he would kill you.”
Just then Pille-Miche appeared in the gateway and called to the postilion who was left in the stable. At the same moment he saw the captain and covered him with his musket, shouting out, “By Saint Anne of Auray! the rector was right enough in telling us the Blues had signed a compact with the devil. I’ll bring you to life, I will!”
“Stop! my life is sacred,” cried Merle, seeing his danger. “There’s the glove of your Gars,” and he held it out.
“Ghosts’ lives are not sacred,” replied the Chouan, “and I sha’n’t give you yours. Ave Maria!”
He fired, and the ball passed through his victim’s head. The captain fell. When Francine reached him she heard him mutter the words, “I’d rather die with them than return without them.”
The Chouan sprang upon the body to strip it, saying, “There’s one good thing about ghosts, they come to life in their clothes.” Then, recognizing the Gars’ glove, that sacred safeguard, in the captain’s hand, he stopped short, terrified. “I wish I wasn’t in the skin of my mother’s son!” he exclaimed, as he turned and disappeared with the rapidity of a bird.
To understand this scene, so fatal to poor Merle, we must follow Mademoiselle de Verneuil after the marquis, in his fury and despair, had abandoned her to Pille-Miche. Francine had caught Marche-a-Terre by the arm and reminded him, with sobs, of the promise he had made her. Pille-Miche was already dragging away his victim like a heavy bundle. Marie, her head and hair hanging back, turned her eyes to the lake; but held as she was in a grasp of iron she was forced to follow the Chouan, who turned now and then to hasten her steps, and each time that he did so a jovial thought brought a hideous smile upon his face.
“Isn’t she a morsel!” he cried, with a coarse laugh.
Hearing the words, Francine recovered speech.
“Pierre?”
“Well, what?”
“He’ll kill her.”
“Not at once.”
“Then she’ll kill herself, she will never submit; and if she dies I shall die too.”
“Then you love her too much, and she shall die,” said Marche-a-Terre.
“Pierre! if we are rich and happy we owe it all to her; but, whether or no, you promised me to save her.”
“Well, I’ll try; but you must stay here, and don’t move.”
Francine at once let go his arm, and waited in horrible suspense in the courtyard where Merle found her. Meantime Marche-a-Terre joined his comrade at the moment when the latter, after dragging his victim to the barn, was compelling her to get into the coach. Pille-Miche called to him to help in pulling out the vehicle.
“What are you going to do with all that?” asked Marche-a-Terre.
“The Grande Garce gave me the woman, and all that belongs to her is mine.”
“The coach will put a sou or two in your pocket; but as for the woman, she’ll scratch your eyes out like a cat.”
Pille-Miche burst into a roar of laughter.
“Then I’ll tie her up and take her home,” he answered.
“Very good; suppose we harness the horses,” said Marche-a-Terre.
A few moments later Marche-a-Terre, who had left his comrade mounting guard over his prey, led the coach from the stable to the causeway, where Pille-Miche got into it beside Mademoiselle de Verneuil, not perceiving that she was on the point of making a spring into the lake.
“I say, Pille-Miche!” cried Marche-a-Terre.
“What!”
“I’ll buy all your booty.”
“Are you joking?” asked the other, catching his prisoner by the petticoat, as a butcher catches a calf that is trying to escape him.
“Let me see her, and I’ll set a price.”
The unfortunate creature was made to leave the coach and stand between the two Chouans, who each held a hand and looked at her as the Elders must have looked at Susannah.
“Will you take thirty francs in good coin?” said Marche-a-Terre, with a groan.
“Really?”
“Done?” said Marche-a-Terre, holding out his hand.
“Yes, done; I can get plenty of Breton girls for that, and choice morsels, too. But the coach; whose is that?” asked Pille-Miche, beginning to reflect upon his bargain.
“Mine!” cried Marche-a-Terre, in a terrible tone of voice, which showed the sort of superiority his ferocious character gave him over his companions.
“But suppose there’s money in the coach?”
“Didn’t you say, ‘Done’?”
“Yes, I said, ‘Done.'”
“Very good; then go and fetch the postilion who is gagged in the stable over there.”
“But if there’s money in the–“
“Is there any?” asked Marche-a-Terre, roughly, shaking Marie by the arm.
“Yes, about a hundred crowns.”
The two Chouans looked at each other.
“Well, well, friend,” said Pille-Miche, “we won’t quarrel for a female Blue; let’s pitch her into the lake with a stone around her neck, and divide the money.”
“I’ll give you that money as my share in d’Orgemont’s ransom,” said Marche-a-Terre, smothering a groan, caused by such sacrifice.
Pille-Miche uttered a sort of hoarse cry as he started to find the postilion, and his glee brought death to Merle, whom he met on his way.
Hearing the shot, Marche-a-Terre rushed in the direction where he had left Francine, and found her praying on her knees, with clasped hands, beside the poor captain, whose murder had deeply horrified her.
“Run to your mistress,” said the Chouan; “she is saved.”
He ran himself to fetch the postilion, returning with all speed, and, as he repassed Merle’s body, he noticed the Gars’ glove, which was still convulsively clasped in the dead hand.
“Oho!” he cried. “Pille-Miche has blundered horribly–he won’t live to spend his crowns.”
He snatched up the glove and said to Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who was already in the coach with Francine: “Here, take this glove. If any of our men attack you on the road, call out ‘Ho, the Gars!’ show the glove, and no harm can happen to you. Francine,” he said, turning towards her and seizing her violently, “you and I are quits with that woman; come with me and let the devil have her.”
“You can’t ask me to abandon her just at this moment!” cried Francine, in distress.
Marche-a-Terre scratched his ear and forehead, then he raised his head, and his mistress saw the ferocious expression of his eyes. “You are right,” he said; “I leave you with her one week; if at the end of that time you don’t come with me–” he did not finish the sentence, but he slapped the muzzle of his gun with the flat of his hand. After making the gesture of taking aim at her, he disappeared, without waiting for her reply.
No sooner was he gone than a voice, which seemed to issue from the lake, called, in a muffled tone: “Madame, madame!”
The postilion and the two women shuddered, for several corpses were floating near them. A Blue, hidden behind a tree, cautiously appeared.
“Let me get up behind the coach, or I’m a dead man. That damned cider which Clef-des-Coeurs would stop to drink cost more than a pint of blood. If he had done as I did, and made his round, our poor comrades there wouldn’t be floating dead in the pond.”
* * * * *
While these events were taking place outside the chateau, the leaders sent by the Vendeans and those of the Chouans were holding a council of war, with their glasses in their hands, under the presidency of the Marquis de Montauran. Frequent libations of Bordeaux animated the discussion, which, however, became more serious and important at the end of the meal. After the general plan of military operations had been decided on, the Royalists drank to the health of the Bourbons. It was at that moment that the shot which killed Merle was heard, like an echo of the disastrous war which these gay and noble conspirators were about to make against the Republic. Madame du Gua quivered with pleasure at the thought that she was freed from her rival; the guests looked at each other in silence; the marquis rose from the table and went out.
“He loved her!” said Madame du Gua, sarcastically. “Follow him, Monsieur de Fontaine, and keep him company; he will be as irritating as a fly if we let him sulk.”
She went to a window which looked on the courtyard to endeavor to see Marie’s body. There, by the last gleams of the sinking moon, she caught sight of the coach being rapidly driven down the avenue of apple-trees. Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s veil was fluttering in the wind. Madame du Gua, furious at the sight, left the room hurriedly. The marquis, standing on the portico absorbed in gloomy thought, was watching about a hundred and fifty Chouans, who, having divided their booty in the gardens, were now returning to finish the cider and the rye-bread provided for the Blues. These soldiers of a new species, on whom the monarchy was resting its hopes, dispersed into groups. Some drank the cider; others, on the bank before the portico, amused themselves by flinging into the lake the dead bodies of the Blues, to which they fastened stones. This sight, joined to the other aspects of the strange scene,–the fantastic dress, the savage expressions of the barbarous and uncouth /gars/,–was so new and so amazing to Monsieur de Fontaine, accustomed to the nobler and better-regulated appearance of the Vendean troops, that he seized the occasion to say to the Marquis de Montauran, “What do you expect to do with such brutes?”
“Not very much, my dear count,” replied the Gars.
“Will they ever be fit to manoeuvre before the enemy?”
“Never.”
“Can they understand or execute an order?”
“No.”
“Then what good will they be to you?”
“They will help me to plunge my sword into the entrails of the Republic,” replied the marquis in a thundering voice. “They will give me Fougeres in three days, and all Brittany in ten! Monsieur,” he added in a gentler voice, “start at once for La Vendee; if d’Auticamp, Suzannet, and the Abbe Bernier will act as rapidly as I do, if they’ll not negotiate with the First Consul, as I am afraid they will” (here he wrung the hand of the Vendean chief) “we shall be within reach of Paris in a fortnight.”
“But the Republic is sending sixty thousand men and General Brune against us.”
“Sixty thousand men! indeed!” cried the marquis, with a scoffing laugh. “And how will Bonaparte carry on the Italian campaign? As for General Brune, he is not coming. The First Consul has sent him against the English in Holland, and General Hedouville, /the friend of our friend Barras/, takes his place here. Do you understand?”
As Monsieur de Fontaine heard these words he gave Montauran a look of keen intelligence which seemed to say that the marquis had not himself understood the real meaning of the words addressed to him. The two leaders then comprehended each other perfectly, and the Gars replied with an undefinable smile to the thoughts expressed in both their eyes: “Monsieur de Fontaine, do you know my arms? our motto is ‘Persevere unto death.'”
The Comte de Fontaine took Montauran’s hand and pressed it, saying: “I was left for dead at Quatre-Chemins, therefore you need never doubt me. But believe in my experience–times have changed.”
“Yes,” said La Billardiere, who now joined them. “You are young, marquis. Listen to me; your property has not yet been sold–“
“Ah!” cried Montauran, “can you conceive of devotion without sacrifice?”
“Do you really know the king?”
“I do.”
“Then I admire your loyalty.”
“The king,” replied the young chieftain, “is the priest; I am fighting not for the man, but for the faith.”
They parted,–the Vendean leader convinced of the necessity of yielding to circumstances and keeping his beliefs in the depths of his heart; La Billardiere to return to his negotiations in England; and Montauran to fight savagely and compel the Vendeans, by the victories he expected to win, to co-operate in his enterprise.
* * * * *
The events of the day had excited such violent emotions in Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s whole being that she lay back almost fainting in the carriage, after giving the order to drive to Fougeres. Francine was as silent as her mistress. The postilion, dreading some new disaster, made all the haste he could to reach the high-road, and was soon on the summit of La Pelerine. Through the thick white mists of morning Marie de Verneuil crossed the broad and beautiful valley of Couesnon (where this history began) scarcely able to distinguish the slaty rock on which the town of Fougeres stands from the slopes of La Pelerine. They were still eight miles from it. Shivering with cold herself, Mademoiselle de Verneuil recollected the poor soldier behind the carriage, and insisted, against his remonstrances, in taking him into the carriage beside Francine. The sight of Fougeres drew her for a time out of her reflections. The sentinels stationed at the Porte Saint-Leonard refused to allow ingress to the strangers, and she was therefore obliged to exhibit the ministerial order. This at once gave her safety in entering the town, but the postilion could find no other place for her to stop at than the Poste inn.
“Madame,” said the Blue whose life she had saved. “If you ever want a sabre to deal some special blow, my life is yours. I am good for that. My name is Jean Falcon, otherwise called Beau-Pied, sergeant of the first company of Hulot’s veterans, seventy-second half-brigade, nicknamed ‘Les Mayencais.’ Excuse my vanity; I can only offer you the soul of a sergeant, but that’s at your service.”
He turned on his heel and walked off whistling.
“The lower one goes in social life,” said Marie, bitterly, “the more we find generous feelings without display. A marquis returns death for life, and a poor sergeant–but enough of that.”
When the weary woman was at last in a warm bed, her faithful Francine waited in vain for the affectionate good-night to which she was accustomed; but her mistress, seeing her still standing and evidently uneasy, made her a sign of distress.
“This is called a day, Francine,” she said; “but I have aged ten years in it.”
The next morning, as soon as she had risen, Corentin came to see her and she admitted him.
“Francine,” she exclaimed, “my degradation is great indeed, for the thought of that man is not disagreeable to me.”
Still, when she saw him, she felt once more, for the hundredth time, the instinctive repulsion which two years’ intercourse had increased rather than lessened.
“Well,” he said, smiling, “I felt certain you were succeeding. Was I mistaken? did you get hold of the wrong man?”
“Corentin,” she replied, with a dull look of pain, “never mention that affair to me unless I speak of it myself.”
He walked up and down the room casting oblique glances at her, endeavoring to guess the secret thoughts of the singular woman whose mere glance had the power of discomfiting at times the cleverest men.
“I foresaw this check,” he replied, after a moment’s silence. “If you would be willing to establish your headquarters in this town, I have already found a suitable place for you. We are in the very centre of Chouannerie. Will you stay here?”
She answered with an affirmative sign, which enabled Corentin to make conjectures, partly correct, as to the events of the preceding evening.
“I can hire a house for you, a bit of national property still unsold. They are behind the age in these parts. No one has dared buy the old barrack because it belonged to an /emigre/ who was thought to be harsh. It is close to the church of Saint Leonard; and on my word of honor the view from it is delightful. Something can really be made of the old place; will you try it?”
“Yes, at once,” she cried.
“I want a few hours to have it cleaned and put in order for you, so that you may like it.”
“What matter?” she said. “I could live in a cloister or a prison without caring. However, see that everything is in order before night, so that I may sleep there in perfect solitude. Go, leave me; your presence is intolerable. I wish to be alone with Francine; she is better for me than my own company, perhaps. Adieu; go–go, I say.”
These words, said volubly with a mingling of coquetry, despotism, and passion, showed she had entirely recovered her self-possession. Sleep had no doubt classified the impressions of the preceding day, and reflection had determined her on vengeance. If a few reluctant signs appeared on her face they only proved the ease with which certain women can bury the better feelings of their souls, and the cruel dissimulation which enables them to smile sweetly while planning the destruction of a victim. She sat alone after Corentin had left her, thinking how she could get the marquis still living into her toils. For the first time in her life this woman had lived according to her inmost desires; but of that life nothing remained but one craving, –that of vengeance,–vengeance complete and infinite. It was her one thought, her sole desire. Francine’s words and attentions were unnoticed. Marie seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open; and the long day passed without an action or even a gesture that bore testimony to her thoughts. She lay on a couch which she had made of chairs and pillows. It was late in the evening when a few words escaped her, as if involuntarily.
“My child,” she said to Francine, “I understood yesterday what it was to live for love; to-day I know what it means to die for vengeance. Yes, I will give my life to seek him wherever he may be, to meet him, seduce him, make him mine! If I do not have that man, who dared to despise me, at my feet humble and submissive, if I do not make him my lackey and my slave, I shall indeed be base; I shall not be a woman; I shall not be myself.”
The house which Corentin now hired for Mademoiselle de Verneuil offered many gratifications to the innate love of luxury and elegance that was part of this girl. The capricious creature took possession of it with regal composure, as of a thing which already belonged to her; she appropriated the furniture and arranged it with intuitive sympathy, as though she had known it all her life. This is a vulgar detail, but one that is not unimportant in sketching the character of so exceptional a person. She seemed to have been already familiarized in a dream with the house in which she now lived on her hatred as she might have lived on her love.
“At least,” she said to herself, “I did not rouse insulting pity in him; I do not owe him my life. Oh, my first, my last, my only love! what an end to it!” She sprang upon Francine, who was terrified. “Do you love a man? Oh, yes, yes, I remember; you do. I am glad I have a woman here who can understand me. Ah, my poor Francette, man is a miserable being. Ha! he said he loved me, and his love could not bear the slightest test! But I,–if all men had accused him I would have defended him; if the universe rejected him my soul should have been his refuge. In the old days life was filled with human beings coming and going for whom I did not care; it was sad and dull, but not horrible; but now, now, what is life without him? He will live on, and I not near him! I shall not see him, speak to him, feel him, hold him, press him,–ha! I would rather strangle him myself in his sleep!”
Francine, horrified, looked at her in silence.
“Kill the man you love?” she said, in a soft voice.
“Yes, yes, if he ceases to love me.”
But after those ruthless words she hid her face in her hands, and sat down silently.
The next day a man presented himself without being announced. His face was stern. It was Hulot, followed by Corentin. Mademoiselle de Verneuil looked at the commandant and trembled.
“You have come,” she said, “to ask me to account for your friends. They are dead.”
“I know it,” he replied, “and not in the service of the Republic.”
“For me, and by me,” she said. “You preach the nation to me. Can the nation bring to life those who die for her? Can she even avenge them? But I–I will avenge them!” she cried. The awful images of the catastrophe filled her imagination suddenly, and the graceful creature who held modesty to be the first of women’s wiles forgot herself in a moment of madness, and marched towards the amazed commandant brusquely.
“In exchange for a few murdered soldiers,” she said, “I will bring to the block a head that is worth a million heads of other men. It is not a woman’s business to wage war; but you, old as you are, shall learn good stratagems from me. I’ll deliver a whole family to your bayonets –him, his ancestors, his past, his future. I will be as false and treacherous to him as I was good and true. Yes, commandant, I will bring that little noble to my arms, and he shall leave them to go to death. I have no other rival. The wretch himself pronounced his doom, –/a day without a morrow/. Your Republic and I shall be avenged. The Republic!” she cried in a voice the strange intonations of which horrified Hulot. “Is he to die for bearing arms against the nation? Shall I suffer France to rob me of my vengeance? Ah! what a little thing is life! death can expiate but one crime. He has but one head to fall, but I will make him know in one night that he loses more than life. Commandant, you who will kill him,” and she sighed, “see that nothing betrays my betrayal; he must die convinced of my fidelity. I ask that of you. Let him know only me–me, and my caresses!”
She stopped; but through the crimson of her cheeks Hulot and Corentin saw that rage and delirium had not entirely smothered all sense of shame. Marie shuddered violently as she said the words; she seemed to listen to them as though she doubted whether she herself had said them, and she made the involuntary movement of a woman whose veil is falling from her.
“But you had him in your power,” said Corentin.
“Very likely.”
“Why did you stop me when I had him?” asked Hulot.
“I did not know what he would prove to be,” she cried. Then, suddenly, the excited woman, who was walking up and down with hurried steps and casting savage glances at the spectators of the storm, calmed down. “I do not know myself,” she said, in a man’s tone. “Why talk? I must go and find him.”
“Go and find him?” said Hulot. “My dear woman, take care; we are not yet masters of this part of the country; if you venture outside of the town you will be taken or killed before you’ve gone a hundred yards.”
“There’s never any danger for those who seek vengeance,” she said, driving from her presence with a disdainful gesture the two men whom she was ashamed to face.
“What a woman!” cried Hulot as he walked away with Corentin. “A queer idea of those police fellows in Paris to send her here; but she’ll never deliver him up to us,” he added, shaking his head.
“Oh yes, she will,” replied Corentin.
“Don’t you see she loves him?” said Hulot.
“That’s just why she will. Besides,” looking at the amazed commandant, “I am here to see that she doesn’t commit any folly. In my opinion, comrade, there is no love in the world worth the three hundred thousand francs she’ll make out of this.”
When the police diplomatist left the soldier the latter stood looking after him, and as the sound of the man’s steps died away he gave a sigh, muttering to himself, “It may be a good thing after all to be such a dullard as I am. God’s thunder! if I meet the Gars I’ll fight him hand to hand, or my name’s not Hulot; for if that fox brings him before me in any of their new-fangled councils of war, my honor will be as soiled as the shirt of a young trooper who is under fire for the first time.”
The massacre at La Vivetiere, and the desire to avenge his friends had led Hulot to accept a reinstatement in his late command; in fact, the new minister, Berthier, had refused to accept his resignation under existing circumstances. To the official despatch was added a private letter, in which, without explaining the mission of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, the minister informed him that the affair was entirely outside of the war, and not to interfere with any military operations. The duty of the commanders, he said, was limited to giving assistance to that honorable /citoyenne/, if occasion arose. Learning from his scouts that the movements of the Chouans all tended towards a concentration of their forces in the neighborhood of Fougeres, Hulot secretly and with forced marches brought two battalions of his brigade into the town. The nation’s danger, his hatred of aristocracy, whose partisans threatened to convulse so large a section of country, his desire to avenge his murdered friends, revived in the old veteran the fire of his youth.
* * * * *
“So this is the life I craved,” exclaimed Mademoiselle de Verneuil, when she was left alone with Francine. “No matter how fast the hours go, they are to me like centuries of thought.”
Suddenly she took Francine’s hand, and her voice, soft as that of the first red-throat singing after a storm, slowly gave sound to the following words:–
“Try as I will to forget them, I see those two delicious lips, that chin just raised, those eyes of fire; I hear the ‘Hue!’ of the postilion; I dream, I dream,–why then such hatred on awakening!”
She drew a long sigh, rose, and then for the first time looked out upon the country delivered over to civil war by the cruel leader whom she was plotting to destroy. Attracted by the scene she wandered out to breathe at her ease beneath the sky; and though her steps conducted her at a venture, she was surely led to the Promenade of the town by one of those occult impulses of the soul which lead us to follow hope irrationally. Thoughts conceived under the dominion of that spell are often realized; but we then attribute their pre-vision to a power we call presentiment,–an inexplicable power, but a real one,–which our passions find accommodating, like a flatterer who, among his many lies, does sometimes tell the truth.
III
A DAY WITHOUT A MORROW
The preceding events of this history having been greatly influenced by the formation of the regions in which they happened, it is desirable to give a minute description of them, without which the closing scenes might be difficult of comprehension.
The town of Fougeres is partly built upon a slate rock, which seems to have slipped from the mountains that hem in the broad valley of Couesnon to the west and take various names according to their localities. The town is separated from the mountains by a gorge, through which flows a small river called the Nancon. To the east, the view is the same as from the summit of La Pelerine; to the west, the town looks down into the tortuous valley of the Nancon; but there is a spot from which a section of the great valley and the picturesque windings of the gorge can be seen at the same time. This place, chosen by the inhabitants of the town for their Promenade, and to which the steps of Mademoiselle de Verneuil were now turned, was destined to be the theatre on which the drama begun at La Vivetiere was to end. Therefore, however picturesque the other parts of Fougeres may be, attention must be particularly given to the scenery which meets the eye from this terrace.
To give an idea of the rock on which Fougeres stands, as seen on this side, we may compare it to one of those immense towers circled by Saracen architects with balconies on each story, which were reached by spiral stairways. To add to this effect, the rock is capped by a Gothic church, the small spires, clock-tower, and buttresses of which make its shape almost precisely that of a sugar-loaf. Before the portal of this church, which is dedicated to Saint-Leonard, is a small, irregular square, where the soil is held up by a buttressed wall, which forms a balustrade and communicates by a flight of steps with the Promenade. This public walk, like a second cornice, extends round the rock a few rods below the square of Saint-Leonard; it is a broad piece of ground planted with trees, and it joins the fortifications of the town. About ten rods below the walls and rocks which support this Promenade (due to a happy combination of indestructible slate and patient industry) another circular road exists, called the “Queen’s Staircase”; this is cut in the rock itself and leads to a bridge built across the Nancon by Anne of Brittany. Below this road, which forms a third cornice, gardens descend, terrace after terrace, to the river, like shelves covered with flowers.
Parallel with the Promenade, on the other side of the Nancon and across its narrow valley, high rock-formations, called the heights of Saint-Sulpice, follow the stream and descend in gentle slopes to the great valley, where they turn abruptly to the north. Towards the south, where the town itself really ends and the faubourg Saint- Leonard begins, the Fougeres rock makes a bend, becomes less steep, and turns into the great valley, following the course of the river, which it hems in between itself and the heights of Saint-Sulpice, forming a sort of pass through which the water escapes in two streamlets to the Couesnon, into which they fall. This pretty group of rocky hills is called the “Nid-aux-Crocs”; the little vale they surround is the “Val de Gibarry,” the rich pastures of which supply the butter known to epicures as that of the “Pree-Valaye.”
At the point where the Promenade joins the fortifications is a tower called the “Tour de Papegaut.” Close to this square erection, against the side of which the house now occupied by Mademoiselle de Verneuil rested, is a wall, partly built by hands and partly formed of the native rock where it offered a smooth surface. Here stands a gateway leading to the faubourg of Saint-Sulpice and bearing the same name. Above, on a breastwork of granite which commands the three valleys, rise the battlements and feudal towers of the ancient castle of Fougeres,–one of those enormous erections built by the Dukes of Brittany, with lofty walls fifteen feet thick, protected on the east by a pond from which flows the Nancon, the waters of which fill its moats, and on the west by the inaccessible granite rock on which it stands.
Seen from the Promenade, this magnificent relic of the Middle Ages, wrapped in its ivy mantle, adorned with its square or rounded towers, in either of which a whole regiment could be quartered,–the castle, the town, and the rock, protected by walls with sheer surfaces, or by the glacis of the fortifications, form a huge horseshoe, lined with precipices, on which the Bretons have, in course of ages, cut various narrow footways. Here and there the rocks push out like architectural adornments. Streamlets issue from the fissures, where the roots of stunted trees are nourished. Farther on, a few rocky slopes, less perpendicular than the rest, afford a scanty pasture for the goats. On all sides heather, growing from every crevice, flings its rosy garlands over the dark, uneven surface of the ground. At the bottom of this vast funnel the little river winds through meadows that are always cool and green, lying softly like a carpet.
Beneath the castle and among the granite boulders is a church dedicated to Saint-Sulpice, whose name is given to the suburb which lies across the Nancon. This suburb, flung as it were to the bottom of a precipice, and its church, the spire of which does not rise to the height of the rocks which threaten to crush it, are picturesquely watered by several affluents of the Nancon, shaded by trees and brightened by gardens. The whole region of Fougeres, its suburbs, its churches, and the hills of Saint-Sulpice are surrounded by the heights of Rille, which form part of a general range of mountains enclosing the broad valley of Couesnon.
Such are the chief features of this landscape, the principal characteristic of which is a rugged wildness softened by smiling accidents, by a happy blending of the finest works of men’s hands with the capricious lay of a land full of unexpected contrasts, by a something, hardly to be explained, which surprises, astonishes, and puzzles. In no other part of France can the traveller meet with such grandiose contrasts as those offered by the great basin of the Couesnon, and the valleys hidden among the rocks of Fougeres and the heights of Rille. Their beauty is of that unspeakable kind in which chance triumphs and all the harmonies of Nature do their part. The clear, limpid, flowing waters, the mountains clothed with the vigorous vegetation of those regions, the sombre rocks, the graceful buildings, the fortifications raised by nature, and the granite towers built by man; combined with all the artifices of light and shade, with the contrasts of the varieties of foliage, with the groups of houses where an active population swarms, with the lonely barren places where the granite will not suffer even the lichen to fasten on its surface, in short, with all the ideas we ask a landscape to possess: grace and awfulness, poesy with its renascent magic, sublime pictures, delightful ruralities,–all these are here; it is Brittany in bloom.
The tower called the Papegaut, against which the house now occupied by Mademoiselle de Verneuil rested, has its base at the very bottom of the precipice, and rises to the esplanade which forms the cornice or terrace before the church of Saint-Leonard. From Marie’s house, which was open on three sides, could be seen the horseshoe (which begins at the tower itself), the winding valley of the Nancon, and the square of Saint-Leonard. It is one of a group of wooden buildings standing parallel with the western side of the church, with which they form an alley-way, the farther end of which opens on a steep street skirting the church and leading to the gate of Saint-Leonard, along which Mademoiselle de Verneuil now made her way.
Marie naturally avoided entering the square of the church which was then above her, and turned towards the Promenade. The magnificence of the scene which met her eyes silenced for a moment the tumult of her passions. She admired the vast trend of the valley, which her eyes took in, from the summit of La Pelerine to the plateau where the main road to Vitry passes; then her eyes rested on the Nid-aux-Crocs and the winding gorges of the Val de Gibarry, the crests of which were bathed in the misty glow of the setting sun. She was almost frightened by the depth of the valley of the Nancon, the tallest poplars of which scarcely reached to the level of the gardens below the Queen’s Staircase. At this time of day the smoke from the houses in the suburbs and in the valleys made a vapor in the air, through which the various objects had a bluish tinge; the brilliant colors of the day were beginning to fade; the firmament took a pearly tone; the moon was casting its veil of light into the ravine; all things tended to plunge the soul into reverie and bring back the memory of those beloved.
In a moment the scene before her was powerless to hold Marie’s thoughts. In vain did the setting sun cast its gold-dust and its crimson sheets to the depths of the river and along the meadows and over the graceful buildings strewn among the rocks; she stood immovable, gazing at the heights of the Mont Saint-Sulpice. The frantic hope which had led her to the Promenade was miraculously realized. Among the gorse and bracken which grew upon those heights she was certain that she recognized, in spite of the goatskins which they wore, a number of the guests at La Vivetiere, and among them the Gars, whose every moment became vivid to her eyes in the softened light of the sinking sun. A few steps back of the ground of men she distinguished her enemy, Madame du Gua. For a moment Marie fancied that she dreamed, but her rival’s hatred soon proved to her that the dream was a living one. The attention she was giving to the least little gesture of the marquis prevented her from observing the care with which Madame du Gua aimed a musket at her. But a shot which woke the echoes of the mountains, and a ball that whistled past her warned Mademoiselle de Verneuil of her rival’s determination. “She sends me her card,” thought Marie, smiling. Instantly a “Qui vive?” echoing from sentry to sentry, from the castle to the Porte Saint-Leonard, proved to the Chouans the alertness of the Blues, inasmuch as the least accessible of their ramparts was so well guarded.
“It is she–and he,” muttered Marie to herself.
To seek the marquis, follow his steps and overtake him, was a thought that flashed like lightning through her mind. “I have no weapon!” she cried. She remembered that on leaving Paris she had flung into a trunk an elegant dagger formerly belonging to a sultana, which she had jestingly brought with her to the theatre of war, as some persons take note-books in which to jot down their travelling ideas; she was less attracted by the prospect of shedding blood than by the pleasure of wearing a pretty weapon studded with precious stones, and playing with a blade that was stainless. Three days earlier she had deeply regretted having put this dagger in a trunk, when to escape her enemies at La Vivetiere she had thought for a moment of killing herself. She now returned to the house, found the weapon, put it in her belt, wrapped a large shawl round her shoulders and a black lace scarf about her hair, and covered her head with one of those broad-brimmed hats distinctive of Chouans which belonged to a servant of the house. Then, with the presence of mind which excited passions often give, she took the glove which Marche-a-Terre had given her as a safeguard, and saying, in reply to Francine’s terrible looks, “I would seek him in hell,” she returned to the Promenade.
The Gars was still at the same place, but alone. By the direction of his telescope he seemed to be examining with the careful attention of a commander the various paths across the Nancon, the Queen’s Staircase, and the road leading through the Porte Saint-Sulpice and round the church of that name, where it meets the high-road under range of the guns at the castle. Mademoiselle de Verneuil took one of the little paths made by goats and their keepers leading down from the Promenade, reached the Staircase, then the bottom of the ravine, crossed the Nancon and the suburb, and divining like a bird in the desert her right course among the dangerous precipices of the Mont Saint-Sulpice, she followed a slippery track defined upon the granite, and in spite of the prickly gorse and reeds and loose stones which hindered her, she climbed the steep ascent with an energy greater perhaps than that of a man,–the energy momentarily possessed by a woman under the influence of passion.
Night overtook her as she endeavored by the failing moonlight to make out the path the marquis must have taken; an obstinate quest without reward, for the dead silence about her was sufficient proof of the withdrawal of the Chouans and their leader. This effort of passion collapsed with the hope that inspired it. Finding herself alone, after nightfall, in a hostile country, she began to reflect; and Hulot’s advice, together with the recollection of Madame du Gua’s attempt, made her tremble with fear. The stillness of the night, so deep in mountain regions, enabled her to hear the fall of every leaf even at a distance, and these slight sounds vibrated on the air as though to give a measure of the silence or the solitude. The wind was blowing across the heights and sweeping away the clouds with violence, producing an alternation of shadows and light, the effect of which increased her fears, and gave fantastic and terrifying semblances to the most harmless objects. She turned her eyes to the houses of Fougeres, where the domestic lights were burning like so many earthly stars, and she presently saw distinctly the tower of Papegaut. She was but a very short distance from her own house, but within that space was the ravine. She remembered the declivities by which she had come, and wondered if there were not more risk in attempting to return to Fougeres than in following out the purpose which had brought her. She reflected that the marquis’s glove would surely protect her from the Chouans, and that Madame du Gua was the only enemy to be really feared. With this idea in her mind, Marie clasped her dagger, and tried to find the way to a country house the roofs of which she had noticed as she climbed Saint-Sulpice; but she walked slowly, for she suddenly became aware of the majestic solemnity which oppresses a solitary being in the night time in the midst of wild scenery, where lofty mountains nod their heads like assembled giants. The rustle of her gown, caught by the brambles, made her tremble more than once, and more than once she hastened her steps only to slacken them again as she thought her last hour had come. Before long matters assumed an aspect which the boldest men could not have faced without alarm, and which threw Mademoiselle de Verneuil into the sort of terror that so affects the very springs of life that all things become excessive, weakness as well as strength. The feeblest beings will then do deeds of amazing power; the strongest go mad with fear.
Marie heard at a short distance a number of strange sounds, distinct yet vague, indicative of confusion and tumult, fatiguing to the ear which tried to distinguish them. They came from the ground, which seemed to tremble beneath the feet of a multitude of marching men. A momentary clearness in the sky enabled her to perceive at a little distance long files of hideous figures waving like ears of corn and gliding like phantoms; but she scarcely saw them, for darkness fell again, like a black curtain, and hid the fearful scene which seemed to her full of yellow, dazzling eyes. She turned hastily and ran to the top of a bank to escape meeting three of these horrible figures who were coming towards her.
“Did you see it?” said one.
“I felt a cold wind as it rushed past me,” replied a hoarse voice.
“I smelt a damp and graveyard smell,” said the third.
“Was it white?” asked the first.
“Why should only /he/ come back out of all those we left dead at La Pelerine?” said the second.
“Why indeed?” replied the third. “Why do the Sacre-Coeur men have the preference? Well, at any rate, I’d rather die without confession than wander about as he does, without eating or drinking, and no blood in his body or flesh on his bones.”
“Ah!”
This exclamation, or rather this fearful cry, issued from the group as the three Chouans pointed to the slender form and pallid face of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who fled away with terrified rapidity without a sound.
“Here he is!” “There he is!” “Where?” “There!” “He’s gone!” “No!” “Yes!” “Can you see him?” These cries reverberated like the monotonous murmur of waves upon a shore.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil walked bravely in the direction of the house she had seen, and soon came in sight of a number of persons, who all fled away at her approach with every sign of panic fear. She felt impelled to advance by a mysterious power which coerced her; the lightness of her body, which seemed to herself inexplicable, was another source of terror. These forms which rose in masses at her approach, as if from the ground on which she trod, uttered moans which were scarcely human. At last she reached, not without difficulty, a trampled garden, the hedges and fences of which were broken down. Stopped by a sentry, she showed the glove. The moon lighted her face, and the muzzle of the gun already pointed at her was dropped by the Chouan, who uttered a hoarse cry, which echoed through the place. She now saw large buildings, where a few lighted windows showed the rooms that were occupied, and presently reached the walls without further hindrance. Through the window into which she looked, she saw Madame du Gua and the leaders who were convoked at La Vivetiere. Bewildered at the sight, also by the conviction of her danger, she turned hastily to a little opening protected by iron bars, and saw in a long vaulted hall the marquis, alone and gloomy, within six feet of her. The reflection of the fire, before which he was sitting in a clumsy chair, lighted his face with a vacillating ruddy glow that gave the character of a vision to the scene. Motionless and trembling, the girl stood clinging to the bars, to catch his words if he spoke. Seeing him so depressed, disheartened, and pale, she believed herself to be the cause of his sadness. Her anger changed to pity, her pity to tenderness, and she suddenly knew that it was not revenge alone which had brought her there.
The marquis rose, turned his head, and stood amazed when he saw, as if in a cloud, Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s face; then he shook his head with a gesture of impatience and contempt, exclaiming: “Must I forever see the face of that devil, even when awake?”
This utter contempt for her forced a half-maddened laugh from the unhappy girl which made the young leader quiver. He sprang to the window, but Mademoiselle de Verneuil was gone. She heard the steps of a man behind her, which she supposed to be those of the marquis, and, to escape him, she knew no obstacles; she would have scaled walls and flown through air; she would have found and followed a path to hell sooner than have seen again, in flaming letters on the forehead of that man, “I despise you,”–words which an inward voice sounded in her soul with the noise of a trumpet.
After walking a short distance without knowing where she went, she stopped, conscious of a damp exhalation. Alarmed by the sound of voices, she went down some steps which led into a cellar. As she reached the last of them, she stopped to listen and discover the direction her pursuers might take. Above the sounds from the outside, which were somewhat loud, she could hear within the lugubrious moans of a human being, which added to her terror. Rays of light coming down the steps made her fear that this retreat was only too well known to her enemies, and, to escape them, she summoned fresh energy. Some moments later, after recovering her composure of mind, it was difficult for her to conceive by what means she had been able to climb a little wall, in a recess of which she was now hidden. She took no notice at first of the cramped position in which she was, but before long the pain of it became intolerable, for she was bending double under the arched opening of a vault, like the crouching Venus which ignorant persons attempt to squeeze into too narrow a niche. The wall, which was rather thick and built of granite, formed a low partition between the stairway and the cellar whence the groans were issuing. Presently she saw an individual, clothed in a goatskin, enter the cave beneath her, and move about, without making any sign of eager search. Impatient to discover if she had any chance of safety, Mademoiselle de Verneuil waited with anxiety till the light brought by the new-comer lighted the whole cave, where she could partly distinguish a formless but living mass which was trying to reach a part of the wall, with violent and repeated jerks, something like those of a carp lying out of water on a shore.
A small pine torch threw its blue and hazy light into the cave. In spite of the gloomy poetic effects which Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s imagination cast about this vaulted chamber, which was echoing to the sounds of a pitiful prayer, she was obliged to admit that the place was nothing more than an underground kitchen, evidently long abandoned. When the formless mass was distinguishable it proved to be a short and very fat man, whose limbs were carefully bound before he had been left lying on the damp stone floor of the kitchen by those who had seized him. When he saw the new-comer approach him with a torch in one hand and a fagot of sticks in the other, the captive gave a dreadful groan, which so wrought upon the sensibilities of Mademoiselle de Verneuil that she forgot her own terror and despair and the cramped position of her limbs, which were growing numb. But she made a great effort and remained still. The Chouan flung the sticks into the fireplace, after trying the strength of an old crane which was fastened to a long iron bar; then he set fire to the wood with his torch. Marie saw with terror that the man was the same Pille-Miche to whom her rival had delivered her, and whose figure, illuminated by the flame, was like that of the little boxwood men so grotesquely carved in Germany. The moans of his prisoner produced a broad grin upon features that were ribbed with wrinkles and tanned by the sun.
“You see,” he said to his victim, “that we Christians keep our promises, which you don’t. That fire is going to thaw out your legs and tongue and hands. Hey! hey! I don’t see a dripping-pan to put under your feet; they are so fat the grease may put out the fire. Your house must be badly furnished if it can’t give its master all he wants to warm him.”
The victim uttered a sharp cry, as if he hoped someone would hear him through the ceiling and come to his assistance.
“Ho! sing away, Monsieur d’Orgemont; they are all asleep upstairs, and Marche-a-Terre is just behind me; he’ll shut the cellar door.”
While speaking Pille-Miche was sounding with the butt-end of his musket the mantel-piece of the chimney, the tiles of the floor, the walls and the ovens, to discover, if possible, where the miser hid his gold. This search was made with such adroitness that d’Orgemont kept silence, as if he feared to have been betrayed by some frightened servant; for, though he trusted his secrets to no one, his habits gave plenty of ground for logical deductions. Pille-Miche turned several times sharply to look at his victim, as children do when they try to guess, by the conscious expression of the comrade who has hidden an article, whether they are nearer to or farther away from it. D’Orgemont pretended to be alarmed when the Chouan tapped the ovens, which sounded hollow, and seemed to wish to play upon his eager credulity. Just then three other Chouans rushed down the steps and entered the kitchen. Seeing Marche-a-Terre among them Pille-Miche discontinued his search, after casting upon d’Orgemont a look that conveyed the wrath of his balked covetousness.
“Marie Lambrequin has come to life!” cried Marche-a-Terre, proclaiming by his manner that all other interests were of no account beside this great piece of news.
“I’m not surprised,” said Pille-Miche, “he took the sacrament so often; the good God belonged to him.”
“Ha! ha!” observed Mene-a-Bien, “that didn’t stand him in anything at his death. He hadn’t received absolution before the affair at La Pelerine. He had cheapened Goguelu’s daughter, and was living in mortal sin. The Abbe Gudin said he’d have to roam round two months as a ghost before he could come to life. We saw him pass us,–he was pale, he was cold, he was thin, he smelt of the cemetery.”
“And his Reverence says that if a ghost gets hold of a living man he can force him to be his companion,” said the fourth Chouan.
The grotesque appearance of this last speaker drew Marche-a-Terre from the pious reflections he had been making on the accomplishment of this miracle of coming to life which, according to the Abbe Gudin would happen to every true defender of religion and the king.
“You see, Galope-Chopine,” he said to the fourth man gravely, “what comes of omitting even the smallest duty commanded by our holy religion. It is a warning to us, given by Saint Anne of Auray, to be rigorous with ourselves for the slightest sin. Your cousin Pille-Miche has asked the Gars to give you the surveillance of Fougeres, and the Gars consents, and you’ll be well paid–but you know with what flour we bake a traitor’s bread.”
“Yes, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre.”
“And you know why I tell you that. Some say you like cider and gambling, but you can’t play heads or tails now, remember; you must belong to us only, or–“
“By your leave, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, cider and stakes are two good things which don’t hinder a man’s salvation.”
“If my cousin commits any folly,” said Pille-Miche, “it will be out of ignorance.”
“In any way he commits it, if harm comes,” said Marche-a-Terre, in a voice which made the arched roof tremble, “my gun won’t miss him. You will answer for him to me,” he added, turning to Pille-Miche; “for if he does wrong I shall take it out on the thing that fills your goatskin.”
“But, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, with all due respect,” said Galope-Chopine, “haven’t you sometimes taken a counterfeit Chouan for a real one.”
“My friend,” said Marche-a-Terre in a curt tone, “don’t let that happen in your case, or I’ll cut you in two like a turnip. As to the emissaries of the Gars, they all carry his glove, but since that affair at La Vivetiere the Grande Garce has added a green ribbon to it.”
Pille Miche nudged his comrade by the elbow and showed him d’Orgemont, who was pretending to be asleep; but Pille-Miche and Marche-a-Terre both knew by experience that no one ever slept by the corner of their fire, and though the last words said to Galope-Chopine were almost whispered, they must have been heard by the victim, and the four Chouans looked at him fixedly, thinking perhaps that fear had deprived him of his senses.
Suddenly, at a slight sign from Marche-a-Terre, Pille-Miche pulled off d’Orgemont’s shoes and stockings, Mene-a-Bien and Galope-Chopine seized him round the body and carried him to the fire. Then Marche-a-Terre took one of the thongs that tied the fagots and fastened the miser’s feet to the crane. These actions and the horrible celerity with which they were done brought cries from the victim, which became heart-rending when Pille-Miche gathered the burning sticks under his legs.
“My friends, my good friends,” screamed d’Orgemont, “you hurt me, you kill me! I’m a Christian like you.”
“You lie in your throat!” replied Marche-a-Terre. “Your brother denied God; and as for you, you bought the abbey of Juvigny. The Abbe Gudin says we can roast apostates when we find them.”
“But, my brothers in God, I don’t refuse to pay.”
“We gave you two weeks, and it is now two months, and Galope-Chopine here hasn’t received the money.”
“Haven’t you received any of it, Galope-Chopine?” asked the miser, in despair.
“None of it, Monsieur d’Orgemont,” replied Galope-Chopine, frightened.
The cries, which had sunk into groans, continuous as the rattle in a dying throat, now began again with dreadful violence. Accustomed to such scenes, the four Chouans looked at d’Orgemont, who was twisting and howling, so coolly that they seemed like travellers watching before an inn fire till the roast meat was done enough to eat.
“I’m dying, I’m dying!” cried the victim, “and you won’t get my money.”
In spite of these agonizing cries, Pille-Miche saw that the fire did not yet scorch the skin; he drew the sticks cleverly together so as to make a slight flame. On this d’Orgemont called out in a quavering voice: “My friends, unbind me! How much do you want? A hundred crowns –a thousand crowns–ten thousand crowns–a hundred thousand crowns–I offer you two hundred thousand crowns!”
The voice became so lamentable that Mademoiselle de Verneuil forgot her own danger and uttered an exclamation.
“Who spoke?” asked Marche-a-Terre.
The Chouans looked about them with terrified eyes. These men, so brave in fight, were unable to face a ghost. Pille-Miche alone continued to listen to the promises which the flames were now extracting from his victim.
“Five hundred thousand crowns–yes, I’ll give them,” cried the victim.
“Well, where are they?” answered Pille-Miche, tranquilly.
“Under the first apple-tree–Holy Virgin! at the bottom of the garden to the left–you are brigands–thieves! Ah! I’m dying–there’s ten thousand francs–“
“Francs! we don’t want francs,” said Marche-a-Terre; “those Republican coins have pagan figures which oughtn’t to pass.”
“They are not francs, they are good louis d’or. But oh! undo me, unbind me! I’ve told you where my life is–my money.”
The four Chouans looked at each other as if thinking which of their number they could trust sufficiently to disinter the money.
The cannibal cruelty of the scene so horrified Mademoiselle de Verneuil that she could bear it no longer. Though doubtful whether the role of ghost, which her pale face and the Chouan superstitions evidently assigned to her, would carry her safely through the danger, she called out, courageously, “Do you not fear God’s anger? Unbind him, brutes!”
The Chouans raised their heads and saw in the air above them two eyes which shone like stars, and they fled, terrified. Mademoiselle de Verneuil sprang into the kitchen, ran to d’Orgemont, and pulled him so violently from the crane that the thong broke. Then with the blade of her dagger she cut the cords which bound him. When the miser was free and on his feet, the first expression of his face was a painful but sardonic grin.
“Apple-tree! yes, go to the apple-tree, you brigands,” he said. “Ho, ho! this is the second time I’ve fooled them. They won’t get a third chance at me.”
So saying, he caught Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s hand, drew her under the mantel-shelf to the back of the hearth in a way to avoid disturbing the fire, which covered only a small part of it; then he touched a spring; the iron back was lifted, and when their enemies returned to the kitchen the heavy door of the hiding-place had already fallen noiselessly. Mademoiselle de Verneuil then understood the carp-like movements she had seen the miser making.
“The ghost has taken the Blue with him,” cried the voice of Marche-a-Terre.
The fright of the Chouans must have been great, for the words were followed by a stillness so profound that d’Orgemont and his companion could hear them muttering to themselves: “Ave, sancta Anna Auriaca gratia plena, Dominus tecum,” etc.
“They are praying, the fools!” cried d’Orgemont.
“Hush! are you not afraid they will discover us?” said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, checking her companion.
The old man’s laugh dissipated her fears.
“That iron back is set in a wall of granite two feet thick,” he said. “We can hear them, but they can’t hear us.”
Then he took the hand of his preserver and placed it near a crevice through which a current of fresh air was blowing. She then perceived that the opening was made in the shaft of the chimney.
“Ai! ai!” cried d’Orgemont. “The devil! how my legs smart!”
The Chouans, having finished their prayer, departed, and the old miser again caught the hand of his companion and helped her to climb some narrow winding steps cut in the granite wall. When they had mounted some twenty of these steps the gleam of a lamp dimly lighted their heads. The miser stopped, turned to his companion, examined her face as if it were a bank note he was doubtful about cashing, and heaved a heavy sigh.
“By bringing you here,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “I have paid you in full for the service you did me; I don’t see why I should give you–“
“Monsieur, I ask nothing of you,” she said.
These words, and also, perhaps, the disdainful expression on the beautiful face, reassured the old man, for he answered, not without a sigh, “Ah! if you take it that way, I have gone too far not to continue on.”
He politely assisted Marie to climb a few more steps rather strangely constructed, and half willingly, half reluctantly, ushered her into a small closet about four feet square, lighted by a lamp hanging from the ceiling. It was easy to see that the miser had made preparations to spend more than one day in this retreat if the events of the civil war compelled him to hide himself.
“Don’t brush against that wall, you might whiten yourself,” said d’Orgemont suddenly, as he hurriedly put his hand between the girl’s shawl and the stones which seemed to have been lately whitewashed. The old man’s action produced quite another effect from that he intended. Marie looked about her and saw in one corner a sort of projection, the shape of which forced from her a cry of terror, for she fancied it was that of a human being standing erect and mortared into the wall. D’Orgemont made a violent sign to her to hold her tongue, and his little eyes of a porcelain blue showed as much fear as those of his companion.
“Fool! do you think I murdered him? It is the body of my brother,” and the old man gave a lugubrious sigh. “He was the first sworn-in priest; and this was the only asylum where he was safe against the fury of the Chouans and the other priests. He was my elder brother, and he alone had the patience to each me the decimal calculus. Oh! he was a good priest! He was economical and laid by money. It is four years since he died; I don’t know what was the matter with him; perhaps it was that priests are so in the habit of kneeling down to pray that he couldn’t get accustomed to standing upright here as I do. I walled him up there; /they’d/ have dug him up elsewhere. Some day perhaps I can put him in holy ground, as he used to call it,–poor man, he only took the oath out of fear.”
A tear rolled from the hard eyes of the little old man, whose rusty wig suddenly seemed less hideous to the girl, and she turned her eyes respectfully away from his distress. But, in spite of these tender reminiscences, d’Orgemont kept on saying, “Don’t go near the wall, you might–“
His eyes never ceased to watch hers, hoping thus to prevent her from examining too closely the walls of the closet, where the close air was scarcely enough to inflate the lungs. Marie succeeded, however, in getting a sufficiently good look in spite of her Argus, and she came to the conclusion that the strange protuberances in the walls were neither more nor less than sacks of coin which the miser had placed there and plastered up.
Old d’Orgemont was now in a state of almost grotesque bewilderment. The pain in his legs, the terror he felt at seeing a human being in the midst of his hoards, could be read in every wrinkle of his face, and yet at the same time his eyes expressed, with unaccustomed fire, a lively emotion excited in him by the presence of his liberator, whose white and rosy cheek invited kisses, and whose velvety black eye sent waves of blood to his heart, so hot that he was much in doubt whether they were signs of life or of death.
“Are you married?” he asked, in a trembling voice.
“No,” she said, smiling.
“I have a little something,” he continued, heaving a sigh, “though I am not so rich as people think for. A young girl like you must love diamonds, trinkets, carriages, money. I’ve got all that to give–after my death. Hey! if you will–“
The old man’s eyes were so shrewd and betrayed such calculation in this ephemeral love that Mademoiselle de Verneuil, as she shook her head in sign of refusal, felt that his desire to marry her was solely to bury his secret in another himself.
“Money!” she said, with a look of scorn which made him satisfied and angry both; “money is nothing to me. You would be three times as rich as you are, if you had all the gold that I have refused–” she stopped suddenly.
“Don’t go near that wall, or–“
“But I hear a voice,” she said; “it echoes through that wall,–a voice that is more to me than all your riches.”
Before the miser could stop her Marie had laid her hand on a small colored engraving of Louis XV. on horseback; to her amazement it turned, and she saw, in a room beneath her, the Marquis de Montauran, who was loading a musket. The opening, hidden by a little panel on which the picture was gummed, seemed to form some opening in the ceiling of the adjoining chamber, which, no doubt, was the bedroom of the royalist general. D’Orgemont closed the opening with much precaution, and looked at the girl sternly.
“Don’t say a word if you love your life. You haven’t thrown your grappling-iron on a worthless building. Do you know that the Marquis de Montauran is worth more than one hundred thousand francs a year from lands which have not yet been confiscated? And I read in the Primidi de l’Ille-et-Vilaine a decree of the Consuls putting an end to confiscation. Ha! ha! you’ll think the Gars a prettier fellow than ever, won’t you? Your eyes are shining like two new louis d’or.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s face was, indeed, keenly excited when she heard that well-known voice so near her. Since she had been standing there, erect, in the midst as it were of a silver mine, the spring of her mind, held down by these strange events, recovered itself. She seemed to have formed some sinister resolution and to perceive a means of carrying it out.
“There is no return from such contempt,” she was saying to herself; “and if he cannot love me, I will kill him–no other woman shall have him.”
“No, abbe, no!” cried the young chief, in a loud voice which was heard through the panel, “it must be so.”
“Monsieur le marquis,” replied the Abbe Gudin, haughtily; “you will scandalize all Brittany if you give that ball at Saint James. It is preaching, not dancing, which will rouse our villagers. Take guns, not fiddles.”
“Abbe, you have sense enough to know that it is not in a general assembly of our partisans that I can learn to know these people, or judge of what I may be able to undertake with them. A supper is better for examining faces than all the spying in the world, of which, by the bye, I have a horror; they can be made to talk with glasses in their hand.”
Marie quivered, as she listened, and conceived the idea of going to the ball and there avenging herself.
“Do you take me for an idiot with your sermon against dancing?” continued Montauran. “Wouldn’t you yourself dance a reed if it would restore your order under its new name of Fathers of the Faith? Don’t you know that Bretons come away from the mass and go to dancing? Are you aware that Messieurs Hyde de Neuville and d’Andigne had a conference, five days ago, with the First Consul, on the question of restoring his Majesty Louis XVIII.? Ah, monsieur, the princes are deceived as to the true state of France. The devotions which uphold them are solely those of rank. Abbe, if I have set my feet in blood, at least I will not go into it to my middle without full knowledge of what I do. I am devoted to the king, but not to four hot-heads, not to a man crippled with debt like Rifoel, not to ‘chauffeurs,’ not to–“
“Say frankly, monsieur, not to abbes who force contributions on the highway to carry on the war,” retorted the Abbe Gudin.
“Why should I not say it?” replied the marquis, sharply; “and I’ll say, further, that the great and heroic days of La Vendee are over.”
“Monsieur le marquis, we can perform miracles without you.”
“Yes, like that of Marie Lambrequin, whom I hear you have brought to life,” said the marquis, smiling. “Come, come, let us have no rancor, abbe. I know that you run all risks and would shoot a Blue as readily as you say an /oremus/. God willing, I hope to make you assist with a mitre on your head at the king’s coronation.”
This last remark must have had some magic power, for the click of a musket was heard as the abbe exclaimed, “I have fifty cartridges in my pocket, monsieur le marquis, and my life is the king’s.”
“He’s a debtor of mine,” whispered the usurer to Marie. “I don’t mean the five or six hundred crowns he has borrowed, but a debt of blood which I hope to make him pay. He can never suffer as much evil as I wish him, the damned Jesuit! He swore the death of my brother, and raised the country against him. Why? Because the poor man was afraid of the new laws.” Then, after applying his ear to another part of his hiding-place, he added, “They are all decamping, those brigands. I suppose they are going to do some other miracle elsewhere. I only hope they won’t bid me good-bye as they did the last time, by setting fire to my house.”
After the lapse of about half an hour, during which time the usurer and Mademoiselle de Verneuil looked at each other as if they were studying a picture, the coarse, gruff voice of Galope-Chopine was heard saying, in a muffled tone: “There’s no longer any danger, Monsieur d’Orgemont. But this time, you must allow that I have earned my thirty crowns.”
“My dear,” said the miser to Marie, “swear to shut your eyes.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil placed one hand over her eyelids; but for greater security d’Orgemont blew out the lamp, took his liberator by the hand, and helped her to make seven or eight steps along a difficult passage. At the end of some minutes he gently removed her hand, and she found herself in the very room the Marquis de Montauran had just quitted, and which was, in fact, the miser’s own bedroom.
“My dear girl,” said the old man, “you can safely go now. Don’t look about you that way. I dare say you have no money with you. Here are ten crowns; they are a little shaved, but they’ll pass. When you leave the garden you will see a path that leads straight to the town, or, as they say now, the district. But the Chouans will be at Fougeres, and it is to be presumed that you can’t get back there at once. You may want some safe place to hide in. Remember what I say to you, but don’t make use of it unless in some great emergency. You will see on the road which leads to Nid-aux-Crocs through the Val de Gibarry, a farmhouse belonging to Cibot–otherwise called Galope-Chopine. Go in, and say to his wife: ‘Good-day, Becaniere,’ and Barbette will hide you. If Galope-Chopine discovers you he will either take you for the ghost, if it is dark, or ten crowns will master him if it is light. Adieu, our account is squared. But if you choose,” he added, waving his hand about him, “all this is yours.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil gave the strange old man a look of thanks, and succeeded in extracting a sigh from him, expressing a variety of emotions.
“You will of course return me my ten crowns; and please remark that I ask no interest. You can pay them to my credit with Maitre Patrat, the notary at Fougeres, who would draw our marriage contract if you consented to be mine. Adieu.”
“Adieu,” she said, smiling and waving her hand.
“If you ever want money,” he called after her, “I’ll lend it to you at five per cent; yes, only five–did I say five?–why, she’s gone! That girl looks to me like a good one; nevertheless, I’ll change the secret opening of my chimney.”
Then he took a twelve-pound loaf and a ham, and returned to his hiding-place.
* * * * *
As Mademoiselle de Verneuil walked through the country she seemed to breathe a new life. The freshness of the night revived her after the fiery experience of the last few hours. She tried to follow the path explained to her by d’Orgemont, but the darkness became so dense after the moon had gone down that she was forced to walk hap-hazard, blindly. Presently the fear of falling down some precipice seized her and saved her life, for she stopped suddenly, fancying the ground would disappear before her if she made another step. A cool breeze lifting her hair, the murmur of the river, and her instinct all combined to warn her that she was probably on the verge of the Saint-Sulpice rocks. She slipped her arm around a tree and waited for dawn with keen anxiety, for she heard a noise of arms and horses and human voices; she was grateful to the darkness which saved her from the Chouans, who were evidently, as the miser had said, surrounding Fougeres.
Like fires lit at night as signals of liberty, a few gleams, faintly crimsoned, began to show upon the summits, while the bases of the mountains still retained the bluish tints which contrasted with the rosy clouds that were floating in the valley. Soon a ruby disk rose slowly on the horizon and the skies greeted it; the varied landscape, the bell-tower of Saint-Leonard, the rocks, the meadows buried in shadow, all insensibly reappeared, and the trees on the summits were defined against the skies in the rising glow. The sun freed itself with a graceful spring from the ribbons of flame and ochre and sapphire. Its vivid light took level lines from hill to hill and flowed into the vales. The dusk dispersed, day mastered Nature. A sharp breeze crisped the air, the birds sang, life wakened everywhere. But the girl had hardly time to cast her eyes over the whole of this wondrous landscape before, by a phenomenon not infrequent in these cool regions, the mists spread themselves in sheets, filled the valleys, and rose to the tops of the mountains, burying the great valley beneath a mantle of snow. Mademoiselle de Verneuil fancied for a moment she saw a /mer de glace/, like those of the Alps. Then the vaporous atmosphere rolled like the waves of ocean, lifted impenetrable billows which softly swayed, undulated, and were violently whirled, catching from the sun’s rays a vivid rosy tint, and showing here and there in their depths the transparencies of a lake of molten silver. Suddenly the north wind swept this phantasmagoric scene and scattered the mists which laid a dew full of oxygen on the meadows.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil was now able to distinguish a dark mass of men on the rocks of Fougeres. Seven or eight hundred Chouans were running like ants through the suburb of Saint-Sulpice. The sleeping town would certainly have been overpowered in spite of its fortifications and its old gray towers, if Hulot had not been alert. A battery, concealed on a height at the farther end of the basin formed by the ramparts, replied to the first fire of the Chouans by taking them diagonally on the road to the castle. The balls swept the road. Then a company of Blues made a sortie from the Saint-Sulpice gate, profited by the surprise of the royalists to form in line upon the high-road, and poured a murderous fire upon them. The Chouans made no attempt to resist, seeing that the ramparts of the castle were covered with soldiers, and that the guns of the fortress sufficiently protected the Republican advance.
Meantime, however, other Chouans, masters of the little valley of the Nancon, had swarmed up the rocks and reached the Promenade, which was soon covered with goatskins, giving it to Marie’s eyes the appearance of a thatched roof, brown with age. At the same moment loud reports were heard from the part of the town which overlooks the valley of Couesnon. Evidently, Fougeres was attacked on all sides and completely surrounded. Flames rising on the western side of the rock showed that the Chouans were setting fire to the suburbs; but these soon ceased, and a column of black smoke which succeeded them showed that the fire was extinguished. Brown and white clouds again hid the scene from Mademoiselle de Verneuil, but they were clouds of smoke from the fire and powder, which the wind dispersed. The Republican commander, as soon as he saw his first orders admirably executed, changed the direction of his battery so as to sweep, successively, the valley of the Nancon, the Queen’s Staircase, and the base of the rock of Fougeres. Two guns posted at the gate of Saint-Leonard scattered the ant-hill of Chouans who had seized that position, and the national guard of the town, rushing in haste to the square before the Church, succeeded in dislodging the enemy. The fight lasted only half an hour, and cost the Blues a hundred men. The Chouans, beaten on all sides, retreated under orders from the Gars, whose bold attempt failed (although he did not know this) in consequence of the massacre at La Vivetiere, which had brought Hulot secretly and in all haste to Fougeres. The artillery had arrived only that evening, and the news had not reached Montauran; otherwise, he would certainly have abandoned an enterprise which, if it failed, could only have bad results. As soon as he heard the guns the marquis knew it would be madness to continue, out of mere pride, a surprise which had missed fire. Therefore, not to lose men uselessly, he sent at once to all points of the attack, ordering an immediate retreat. The commandant, seeing his adversary on the rocks of Saint-Sulpice surrounded by a council of men, endeavored to pour a volley upon him; but the spot was cleverly selected, and the young leader was out of danger in a moment. Hulot now changed parts with his opponent and became the aggressor. At the first sign of the Gars’ intention, the company stationed under the walls of the castle were ordered to cut off the Chouans’ retreat by seizing the upper outlet of the valley of the Nancon.
Notwithstanding her desire for revenge, Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s sympathies were with the men commanded by her lover, and she turned hastily to see if the other end of the valley were clear for them; but the Blues, conquerors no doubt on the opposite side of Fougeres, were returning from the valley of Couesnon and taking possession of the Nid-aux-Crocs and that portion of the Saint-Sulpice rocks which overhang the lower end of the valley of the Nancon. The Chouans, thus hemmed in to the narrow fields of the gorge, seemed in danger of perishing to the last man, so cleverly and sagaciously were the commandant’s measures taken. But Hulot’s cannon were powerless at these two points; and here, the town of Fougeres being quite safe, began one of those desperate struggles which denoted the character of Chouan warfare.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil now comprehended the presence of the masses of men she had seen as she left the town, the meeting of the leaders at d’Orgemont’s house, and all the other events of the night, wondering how she herself had escaped so many dangers. The attack, prompted by desperation, interested her so keenly that she stood motionless, watching the living pictures as they presented themselves to her sight. Presently the struggle at the foot of the mountain had a deeper interest for her. Seeing the Blues almost masters of the Chouans, the marquis and his friends rushed into the valley of the Nancon to support their men. The rocks were now covered with straggling groups of furious combatants deciding the question of life or death on a ground and with weapons that were more favorable to the Goatskins. Slowly this moving arena widened. The Chouans, recovering themselves, gained the rocks, thanks to the shrubs and bushes which grew here and there among them. For a moment Mademoiselle de Verneuil felt alarmed as she saw, rather late, her enemies swarming over the summit and defending the dangerous paths by which alone she could descend. Every issue on the mountain was occupied by one or other of the two parties; afraid of encountering them she left the tree behind which she had been sheltering, and began to run in the direction of the farm which d’Orgemont had mentioned to her. After running some time on the slope of Saint-Sulpice which overlooks the valley of Couesnon she saw a cow-shed in the distance, and thought it must belong to the house of Galope-Chopine, who had doubtless left his wife at home and alone during the fight. Mademoiselle de Verneuil hoped to be able to pass a few hours in this retreat until it was possible for her to return to Fougeres without danger. According to all appearance Hulot was to triumph. The Chouans were retreating so rapidly that she heard firing all about her, and the fear of being shot made her hasten to the cottage, the chimney of which was her landmark. The path she was following ended at a sort of shed covered with a furze-roof, supported by four stout trees with the bark still on them. A mud wall formed the back of this shed, under which were a cider-mill, a flail to thresh buckwheat, and several agricultural implements. She stopped before one of the posts, unwilling to cross the dirty bog which formed a sort of courtyard to the house which, in her Parisian ignorance, she had taken for a stable.
The cabin, protected from the north wind by an eminence towering above the roof, which rested against it, was not without a poetry of its own; for the tender shoots of elms, heather, and various rock-flowers wreathed it with garlands. A rustic staircase, constructed between the shed and the house, enabled the inhabitants to go to the top of the rock and breathe a purer air. On the left, the eminence sloped abruptly down, giving to view a series of fields, the first of which belonged no doubt to this farm. These fields were like bowers, separated by banks which were planted with trees. The road which led to them was barred by the trunk of an old, half-rotten tree,–a Breton method of enclosure the name of which may furnish, further on, a digression which will complete the characterization of this region. Between the stairway cut in the schist rock and the path closed by this old tree, in front of the marsh and beneath the overhanging rock, several granite blocks roughly hewn, and piled one upon the other, formed the four corners of the cottage and held up the planks, cobblestones, and pitch amalgam of which the walls were made. The fact that one half of the roof was covered with furze instead of thatch, and the other with shingles or bits of board cut into the form of slates, showed that the building was in two parts; one half, with a broken hurdle for a door, served as a stable, the other half was the dwelling of the owner. Though this hut owed to the neighborhood of the town a few improvements which were wholly absent from such buildings that were five or six miles further off, it showed plainly enough the instability of domestic life and habits to which the wars and customs of feudality had reduced the serf; even to this day many of the peasants of those parts call a seignorial chateau, “The Dwelling.”
While examining the place, with an astonishment we can readily conceive, Mademoiselle de Verneuil noticed here and there in the filth of the courtyard a few bits of granite so placed as to form stepping-stones to the house. Hearing the sound of musketry that was evidently coming nearer, she jumped from stone to stone, as if crossing a rivulet, to ask shelter. The house was closed by a door opening in two parts; the lower one of wood, heavy and massive, the upper one a shutter which served as a window. In many of the smaller towns of France the shops have the same type of door though far more decorated, the lower half possessing a call-bell. The door in question opened with a wooden latch worthy of the golden age, and the upper part was never closed except at night, for it was the only opening through which daylight could enter the room. There was, to be sure, a clumsy window, but the glass was thick like the bottom of a bottle, and the lead which held the panes in place took so much room that the opening seemed intended to intercept the light rather than admit it. As soon as Mademoiselle de Verneuil had turned the creaking hinges of the lower door she smelt an intolerable ammoniacal odor, and saw that the beasts in the stable had kicked through the inner partition which separated the stable from the dwelling. The interior of the farmhouse, for such it was, did not belie its exterior.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil was asking herself how it was possible for human beings to live in such habitual filth, when a ragged boy about eight or nine years old suddenly presented his fresh and rosy face, with a pair of fat cheeks, lively eyes, ivory teeth, and a mass of fair hair, which fell in curls upon his half-naked shoulders. His limbs were vigorous, and his attitude had the charm of that amazement and naive curiosity which widens a child’s eyes. The little fellow was a picture of beauty.
“Where is your mother?” said Marie, in a gentle voice, stooping to kiss him between the eyes.
After receiving her kiss the child slipped away like an eel, and disappeared behind a muck-heap which was piled at the top of a mound between the path and the house; for, like many Breton farmers who have a system of agriculture that is all their own, Galope-Chopine put his manure in an elevated spot, so that by the time it was wanted for use the rains had deprived it of all its virtue. Alone for a few minutes, Marie had time to make an inventory. The room in which she waited for Barbette was the whole house. The most obvious and sumptuous object was a vast fireplace with a /mantle/-shelf of blue granite. The etymology of that word was shown by a strip of green serge, edged with a pale-green ribbon, cut in scallops, which covered and overhung the whole shelf, on which stood a colored plaster cast of the Holy Virgin. On the pedestal of the statuette were two lines of a religious poem very popular in Brittany:–
“I am the mother of God,
Protectress of the sod.”
Behind the Virgin a hideous image, daubed with red and blue under pretence of painting, represented Saint-Labre. A green serge bed of the shape called “tomb,” a clumsy cradle, a spinning-wheel, common chairs, and a carved chest on which lay utensils, were about the whole of Galope-Chopine’s domestic possessions. In front of the window stood a chestnut table flanked by two benches of the same wood, to which the sombre light coming through the thick panes gave the tone of mahogany. An immense cask of cider, under the bung of which Mademoiselle de Verneuil noticed a pool of yellow mud, which had decomposed the flooring, although it was made of scraps of granite conglomerated in clay, proved that the master of the house had a right to his Chouan name, and that the pints galloped down either his own throat or that of his friends. Two enormous jugs full of cider stood on the table. Marie’s attention, caught at first by the innumerable spider’s-webs which hung from the roof, was fixing itself on these pitchers when the noise of fighting, growing more and more distinct, impelled her to find a hiding-place, without waiting for the woman of the house, who, however, appeared at that moment.
“Good-morning, Becaniere,” said Marie, restraining a smile at the appearance of a person who bore some resemblance to the heads which architects attach to window-casings.
“Ha! you come from d’Orgemont?” answered Barbette, in a tone that was far from cordial.
“Yes, where can you hide me? for the Chouans are close by–“
“There,” replied Barbette, as much amazed at the beauty as by the strange apparel of a being she could hardly believe to be of her own sex,–“there, in the priest’s hiding-place.”
She took her to the head of the bed, and was putting her behind it, when they were both startled by the noise of a man springing into the courtyard. Barbette had scarcely time to drop the curtain of the bed and fold it about the girl before she was face to face with a fugitive Chouan.
“Where can I hide, old woman? I am the Comte de Bauvan,” said the new-comer.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil quivered as she recognized the voice of the belated guest, whose words, still a secret to her, brought about the catastrophe of La Vivetiere.
“Alas! monseigneur, don’t you see, I have no place? What I’d better do is to keep outside and watch that no one gets in. If the Blues come, I’ll let you know. If I stay here, and they find me with you, they’ll burn my house down.”
Barbette left the hut, feeling herself incapable of settling the interests of two enemies who, in virtue of the double role her husband was playing, had an equal right to her hiding-place.
“I’ve only two shots left,” said the count, in despair. “It will be very unlucky if those fellows turn back now and take a fancy to look under this bed.”
He placed his gun gently against the headboard behind which Marie was standing among the folds of the green serge, and stooped to see if there was room for him under the bed. He would infallibly have seen her feet, but she, rendered desperate by her danger, seized his gun, jumped quickly into the room, and threatened him. The count broke into a peal of laughter when he caught sight of her, for, in order to hide herself, Marie had taken off her broad-brimmed Chouan hat, and her hair was escaping, in heavy curls, from the lace scarf which she had worn on leaving home.
“Don’t laugh, monsieur le comte; you are my prisoner. If you make the least movement, you shall know what an offended woman is capable of doing.”
As the count and Marie stood looking at each other with differing emotions, confused voices were heard without among the rocks, calling out, “Save the Gars! spread out, spread out, save the Gars!”
Barbette’s voice, calling to her boy, was heard above the tumult with very different sensations by the two enemies, to whom Barbette was really speaking instead of to her son.
“Don’t you see the Blues?” she cried sharply. “Come here, you little scamp, or I shall be after you. Do you want to be shot? Come, hide, quick!”
While these things took place rapidly a Blue jumped into the marshy courtyard.
“Beau-Pied!” exclaimed Mademoiselle de Verneuil.
Beau-Pied, hearing her voice, rushed into the cottage, and aimed at the count.
“Aristocrat!” he cried, “don’t stir, or I’ll demolish you in a wink, like the Bastille.”
“Monsieur Beau-Pied,” said Mademoiselle de Verneuil, in a persuasive voice, “you will be answerable to me for this prisoner. Do as you like with him now, but you must return him to me safe and sound at Fougeres.”
“Enough, madame!”
“Is the road to Fougeres clear?”
“Yes, it’s safe enough–unless the Chouans come to life.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil picked up the count’s gun gaily, and smiled satirically as she said to her prisoner, “Adieu, monsieur le comte, au revoir!”
Then she darted down the path, having replaced the broad hat upon her head.
“I have learned too late,” said the count, “not to joke about the virtue of a woman who has none.”
“Aristocrat!” cried Beau-Pied, sternly, “if you don’t want me to send you to your /ci-devant/ paradise, you will not say a word against that beautiful lady.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil returned to Fougeres by the paths which connect the rocks of Saint-Sulpice with the Nid-aux-Crocs. When she reached the latter height and had threaded the winding way cut in its rough granite, she stopped to admire the pretty valley of the Nancon, lately so turbulent and now so tranquil. Seen from that point, the vale was like a street of verdure. Mademoiselle de Verneuil re-entered the town by the Porte Saint-Leonard. The inhabitants, still uneasy about the fighting, which, judging by the distant firing, was still going on, were waiting the return of the National Guard, to judge of their losses. Seeing the girl in her strange costume, her hair dishevelled, a gun in her hand, her shawl and gown whitened against the walls, soiled with mud and wet with dew, the curiosity of the people was keenly excited,–all the more because the power, beauty, and singularity of this young Parisian had been the subject of much discussion.
Francine, full of dreadful fears, had waited for her mistress throughout the night, and when she saw her she began to speak; but Marie, with a kindly gesture, silenced her.
“I am not dead, my child,” she said. “Ah!” she added, after a pause, “I wanted emotions when I left Paris, and I have had them!”
Francine asked if she should get her some food, observing that she must be in great need of it.
“No, no; a bath, a bath!” cried Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “I must dress at once.”
Francine was not a little surprised when her mistress required her to unpack the most elegant of the dresses she had brought with her. Having bathed and breakfasted, Marie made her toilet with all the minute care which a woman gives to that important act when she expects to meet the eyes of her lover in a ball-room. Francine could not explain to herself the mocking gaiety of her mistress. It was not the joy of love,–a woman never mistakes that; it was rather an expression of concentrated maliciousness, which to Francine’s mind boded evil. Marie herself drew the curtains of the window from which the glorious panorama could be seen, then she moved the sofa to the chimney corner, turning it so that the light would fall becomingly on her face; then she told Francine to fetch flowers, that the room might have a festive air; and when they came she herself directed their arrangement in a picturesque manner. Giving a last glance of satisfaction at these various preparations she sent Francine to the commandant with a request that he would bring her prisoner to her; then she lay down luxuriously on a sofa, partly to rest, and partly to throw herself into an attitude of graceful weakness, the power of which is irresistible in certain women. A soft languor, the seductive pose of her feet just seen below the drapery of her gown, the plastic ease of her body, the curving of the throat,–all, even the droop of her slender fingers as they hung from the pillow like the buds of a bunch of jasmine, combined with her eyes to produce seduction. She burned certain perfumes to fill the air with those subtle emanations which affect men’s fibres powerfully, and often prepare the way for conquests which women seek to make without seeming to desire them. Presently the heavy step of the old soldier resounded in the adjoining room.
“Well, commandant, where is my captive?” she said.
“I have just ordered a picket of twelve men to shoot him, being taken with arms in his hand.”
“Why have you disposed of my prisoner?” she asked. “Listen to me, commandant; surely, if I can trust your face, the death of a man /after/ a fight is no particular satisfaction to you. Well, then, give my Chouan a reprieve, for which I will be responsible, and let me see him. I assure you that aristocrat has become essential to me, and he can be made to further the success of our plans. Besides, to shoot a mere amateur in Chouannerie would be as absurd as to fire on a balloon when a pinprick would disinflate it. For heaven’s sake leave cruelty to the aristocracy. Republicans ought to be generous. Wouldn’t you and yours have forgiven the victims of Quiberon? Come, send your twelve men to patrol the town, and dine with me and bring the prisoner. There is only an hour of daylight left, and don’t you see,” she added smiling, “that if you are too late, my toilet will have lost its effect?”
“But, mademoiselle,” said the commandant, amazed.
“Well, what? But I know what you mean. Don’t be anxious; the count shall not escape. Sooner or later that big butterfly will burn himself in your fire.”
The commandant shrugged his shoulders slightly, with the air of a man who is forced to obey, whether he will or no, the commands of a pretty woman; and he returned in about half an hour, followed by the Comte de Bauvan.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil feigned surprise and seemed confused that the count should see her in such a negligent attitude; then, after reading in his eyes that her first effect was produced, she rose and busied herself about her guests with well-bred courtesy. There was nothing studied or forced in her motions, smiles, behavior, or voice, nothing that betrayed premeditation or purpose. All was harmonious; no part was over-acted; an observer could not have supposed that she affected the manners of a society in which she had not lived. When the Royalist and the Republic were seated she looked sternly at the count. He, on his part, knew women sufficiently well to feel certain that the offence he had committed against this woman was equivalent to a sentence of death. But in spite of this conviction, and without seeming either gay or gloomy, he had the air of a man who did not take such serious results into consideration; in fact, he really thought it ridiculous to fear death in presence of a pretty woman. Marie’s stern manner roused ideas in his mind.
“Who knows,” thought he, “whether a count’s coronet wouldn’t please her as well as that of her lost marquis? Montauran is as lean as a nail, while I–” and he looked himself over with an air of satisfaction. “At any rate I should save my head.”
These diplomatic revelations were wasted. The passion the count proposed to feign for Mademoiselle de Verneuil became a violent caprice, which the dangerous creature did her best to heighten.
“Monsieur le comte,” she said, “you are my prisoner, and I have the right to dispose of you. Your execution cannot take place without my consent, and I have too much curiosity to let them shoot you at present.”
“And suppose I am obstinate enough to keep silence?” he replied gaily.
“With an honest woman, perhaps, but with a woman of the town, no, no, monsieur le comte, impossible!” These words, full of bitter sarcasm, were hissed, as Sully says, in speaking of the Duchesse de Beaufort, from so sharp a beak that the count, amazed, merely looked at his antagonist. “But,” she continued, with a scornful glance, “not to contradict you, if I am a creature of that kind I will act like one. Here is your gun,” and she offered him his weapon with a mocking air.
“On the honor of a gentleman, mademoiselle–“
“Ah!” she said, interrupting him, “I have had enough of the honor of gentlemen. It was on the faith of that that I went to La Vivetiere. Your leader had sworn to me that I and my escort should be safe there.”
“What an infamy!” cried Hulot, contracting his brows.
“The fault lies with monsieur le comte,” said Marie, addressing Hulot. “I have no doubt the Gars meant to keep his word, but this gentleman told some calumny about me which confirmed those that Charette’s mistress had already invented–“
“Mademoiselle,” said the count, much troubled, “with my head under the axe I would swear that I said nothing but the truth.”
“In saying what?”
“That you were the–“
“Say the word, mistress of–“
“The Marquis de Lenoncourt, the present duke, a friend of mine,” replied the count.
“Now I can let you go to execution,” she said, without seeming at all agitated by the outspoken reply of the count, who was amazed at the real or pretended indifference with which she heard his statement. “However,” she added, laughing, “you have not wronged me more than that friend of whom you suppose me to have been the–Fie! monsieur le comte; surely you used to visit my father, the Duc de Verneuil? Yes? well then–“
Evidently considering Hulot one too many for the confidence she was about to make, Mademoiselle de Verneuil motioned the count to her side, and said a few words in her ear. Monsieur de Bauvan gave a low ejaculation of surprise and looked with bewilderment at Marie, who completed the effect of her words by leaning against the chimney in the artless and innocent attitude of a child.
“Mademoiselle,” cried the count, “I entreat your forgiveness, unworthy as I am of it.”
“I have nothing to forgive,” she replied. “You have no more ground for repentance than you had for the insolent supposition you proclaimed at La Vivetiere. But this is a matter beyond your comprehension. Only, remember this, monsieur le comte, the daughter of the Duc de Verneuil has too generous a spirit not to take a lively interest in your fate.”
“Even after I have insulted you?” said the count, with a sort of regret.
“Some are placed so high that insult cannot touch them. Monsieur le comte,–I am one of them.”
As she said the words, the girl assumed an air of pride and nobility which impressed the prisoner and made the whole of this strange intrigue much less clear to Hulot than the old soldier had thought it. He twirled his moustache and looked uneasily at Mademoiselle de Verneuil, who made him a sign, as if to say she was still carrying out her plan.
“Now,” continued Marie, after a pause, “let us discuss these matters. Francine, my dear, bring lights.”
She adroitly led the conversation to the times which had now, within a few short years, become the “ancien regime.” She brought back that period to the count’s mind by the liveliness of her remarks and sketches, and gave him so many opportunities to display his wit, by cleverly throwing repartees in his way, that he ended by thinking he had never been so charming; and that idea having rejuvenated him, he endeavored to inspire this seductive young woman with his own good opinion of himself. The malicious creature practised, in return, every art of her coquetry upon him, all the more adroitly because it was mere play to her. Sometimes she let him think he was making rapid