Chapter XXII: “monsieur Milet”

“Ken ye wha supped Bessy’s haggies?
Ken ye wha dinner’d on our Bessy’s haggies?
Four good lords and three bonny ladies,
A’ to dinner on our Bessy’s haggies.
Ae gude chief wi’ his gear and his glaumrie;
Lords on the bed and dukes in the aumrie;
There was a king’s son kiver’d o’er wi’ raggies,
A’ for to dinner on our Bessy’s haggies.”
—_Bessy’s Haggies_.

Château-Foix, riding close beside his cousin, and uneasily watching his set mouth, suddenly put out a hand and gripped him by the arm as he lurched forward in the saddle. “We will stop at the first house we see,” he said briefly; and Louis, recovering himself, nodded without speaking.

It was the afternoon of the next day. All morning, under a hot sun, the travellers had ridden through the green, rolling, wooded Maine country at a pace regulated alike by the capabilities of their steeds and by Saint-Ermay’s ebbing strength. It was an hour or more now since that pace had dropped to a walk; several hours since Louis had ceased from converse, and had jogged on silently with eyes fixed ahead. Latterly he had been devoting his energies to the bare task of keeping in the saddle—and all this with amazing pluck and good temper. But he was beaten at last. Gilbert recognised it for a curious phenomenon that he could feel for the young man beside him, in the same flash of thought, so real an admiration, so sharp an anxiety, and so horrible a hatred. . . .

They moved forward another hundred yards, the Marquis steadying him as they went, and in a bend of the road came on a cottage. Château-Foix checked both horses at the door. “I am going to ask for shelter,” he said in his cousin’s ear. “Can you manage to stay where you are—no, I had better help you to dismount.”

Louis made a motion of the head to be taken for assent, and in another moment or two Gilbert had dragged his swaying form out of the saddle, and, with his arm round him, was knocking vigorously at the cottage door.

Hasty and feeble steps were heard to approach it, and after some fumbling with bolts and bars a wrinkled old woman looked out. “You cannot come in,” she said, before the Marquis had time to formulate his request.

“We only want to rest a little,” said Château-Foix. “I can pay——”

“No! no!” reiterated the old woman, and it seemed to Gilbert that there was an unaccountable anxiety in her tone. “I tell you that you cannot come in!” And she made to shut the door, which she had opened but a little way.

But the Marquis was not in a mood to be easily rebuffed, and he planted his foot on the threshold in such a manner as to make the closing of the door impossible, and threw a hasty look within. As the inner darkness cleared from under the low, black beams he made out the figure of a man sitting, with his back to the door, on a stool by the hearth. The sight of this back, in a brown redingote, gave him pause; he did not wish to encounter a possible municipal officer from Laval. As he hesitated, the old woman, trying to shut the door, gave vent to an impatient exclamation, and the man by the fire looked round.

“Do not be so inhospitable, Barbette,” he said, in pleasant and noticeably well-bred tones.

Gilbert would have drawn back, but, with Louis clinging blindly to his shoulder, the thing could not be done quickly enough, and the stranger was on his feet and coming towards them. He was a man about forty.

“Your friend is ill, sir? Barbette, open the door! Permit me to assist you,” said the easy, commanding voice.

The sound of it roused the Vicomte for a second. “I am merely tired,” he murmured, trying to stand clear of Gilbert’s encircling arm.

“He had a fall from his horse some days ago and injured his shoulder,” explained the Marquis carefully, seeing the stranger’s swift glance at Louis’ arm as he moved to the other side to help him. Between them they steered the young man’s stumbling steps to the settle by the hearth, into the corner of which Saint-Ermay subsided, his head against the high back.

The other bent quickly over him. “He has fainted, I think,” he observed. “And with some cause. The fall must have been a deuced awkward one!” And holding out his own hand, smeared with red where he had held Louis by the elbow, he looked Château-Foix full in the face.

The Marquis bit his lip and silently cursed his incriminating lie. No use to deny a knife-wound now. Without a word he turned away and began to unfasten the ancient garment by which Madame Geffroi had replaced his cousin’s coat, too stained and slashed to wear.

“Barbette,” said the stranger sharply, “bring a bowl of water! Would you not find it easier, Monsieur, if you got him at full length on the settle?” And thus he was helping Gilbert almost before the latter was aware of it. “How long since this broke out afresh, I wonder?” he said half to himself, and Gilbert could only reply with truth that he did not know. The fiction of a fall was not referred to again, and the stranger having called on Barbette for fresh linen, bound up the Vicomte’s shoulder with even more skilful fingers than Madame Geffroi’s.

“He must stay here, of course, for the present,” he said, drying his hands on his handkerchief. “When he comes to we will give him some brandy. And, parbleu, he is rather long about it.” He knelt down again by the still insensible Louis, and laid his ear to his heart.

All this while the old woman, with wringings of the hands and muttered protestations, had hovered round the group like a flustered hen. The stranger who so coolly placed her dwelling at the travellers’ disposal took no notice of her, but the Marquis was puzzled by her behaviour. At this juncture, suddenly remembering that he had a flask of brandy in his holsters, he looked towards the door—now shut—and made a movement as if to go to fetch it. The old woman, following the direction of his gaze, instantly cried out in accents of dismay: “Mon Dieu, Monsieur le Marquis, the horses!” She stopped as suddenly, with a sharp guilty intake of the breath.

Gilbert turned in astonishment, conceiving himself addressed, and startled by the use of his title. But the other man too lifted his head sharply from Louis’ breast and glanced up with a frown at the speaker. Then he flashed a look on Gilbert, saw his start of self-betrayal, raised his eyebrows—and the next moment burst out laughing.

“There’s but one title between the two of us!” he exclaimed, getting to his feet. “To which of us does it belong?—I fear, Monsieur, that you have not long relinquished yours!”

Gilbert looked steadily at the thin, vivid face, with its dark eyes and slender arching brows under chestnut hair, its cleft chin and delicate aquiline nose. Something of charm caught him, something of instinct cried out that this was no spy nor informer, nor even a republican of any kind. And moved by something that was rather chivalry than defiance he said simply: “I have the honour to claim it.”

The other instantly capped his avowal by one far more foolhardy. “And I too,” he said, “I am Armand de la Rouërie, at your service.”

The old woman gave a stifled scream, and Gilbert gasped, no less with astonishment than at the magnitude of the confidence.

“You have paid me the greatest compliment of my life,” he exclaimed, holding out his hand. “My own name is Château-Foix; I am returning from Paris to my home near Chantonnay, and my cousin here—to give you the real truth—was stabbed some days ago in an affray.”

The Marquis de la Rouërie wrung his hand warmly. “You are sent by Heaven,” he declared. “Be quiet, Barbette! Monsieur de Château-Foix, half an hour’s talk with you—that is, if you are willing . . . if your views——”

“My views,” said Gilbert rather sombrely, “have something changed of late.”

“God be praised for that!” broke in a faint voice, and both men, starting, looked down at the quiet and momentarily forgotten figure on the settle. Louis’ eyes were shut, but his own mischievous smile played for an instant about his white lips. La Rouërie bent over him.

“My cousin may be an apothecary,” continued the Vicomte, opening his eyes, “but you are a better surgeon, Monsieur . . . le Marquis. Permit me to thank you with all my heart.”

“You heard?” ejaculated Gilbert.

“Indistinctly,” replied his cousin. “I am prepared not to have heard if Monsieur wishes.”

“Not in the least,” said La Rouërie quickly. “Yes, you may sit up if you wish. Do not try to stand yet. Barbette, where is my flask of brandy?”

“I will get mine,” said Gilbert, hastening to the door.

La Rouërie quitted Louis and came after him. “Barbette shall show you where to put the horses,” he said in a low voice. “You cannot possibly go on to-night.”

“But we cannot stay here,” protested Gilbert.

“On the contrary, you can perfectly well do so. You will probably kill that young man if you take him on to-night. Besides, I want a talk with you.”

“But you—your own danger——” stammered Gilbert.

The prescript shrugged his shoulders. “I am only ‘Monsieur Milet’, a merchant of Bordeaux, staying at the château of Launay-Villiers. The person I am here to meet may not come to-night; if he does, so much the better. Barbette would let herself be cut in pieces for me.”

“But not for us,” thought Château-Foix, and hesitated.

“That is settled, then,” said the Breton easily. “Barbette, show Monsieur where to put the horses, and make us a bed ready at once.” He took the flask from Gilbert’s half unwilling hand and went back to his patient.

When Gilbert returned he found Louis propped in the corner of the settle, talking with rather feverish animation to their new acquaintance. And suddenly Gilbert realised how nothing, apparently, could more than a little dim his cousin’s charm—neither illness, nor fatigue, nor an ill-fitting coat, nor an uneasy conscience. But had he a conscience at all?

Undoubtedly the Marquis de la Rouërie had a way with him. It seemed but a short time after Gilbert’s re-entry that the owner of the house had been reduced to mute if not to acquiescent submission; that Louis, in spite of his expostulations, had been ensconced in the bed by which, after local custom, the corner of the living-room was adorned; and that Gilbert was sitting on the settle by the side of “Monsieur Milet,” talking as if he had known him all his life.

Armand de la Rouërie’s turbulent past was indeed common property, and Vendée no less than his native Brittany had heard of his light loves, his follies and his duels, as well as of his sojourn in the Bastille on a point of provincial independence and his service in America under Lafayette. Gilbert knew also, vaguely, that this firebrand had made himself the head of a secret Royalist organisation in Brittany, that his château near Antrain was its focus, and that since the end of the previous May he had disappeared, no research having revealed the retreat whence he still continued the direction of his schemes. But what he had heard of the Marquis had not particularly disposed him in his favour, and of his plans he knew no more than rumour whispered. And here, in a little Maine cottage, the man himself, impetuous and magnetic, and infinitely more capable than Gilbert had ever dreamt, was laying before him the details of an organisation astoundingly complete, ramified throughout Brittany and awaiting only the signal from Coblentz to put itself in motion. When the army of the Princes, said La Rouërie, entering France by Thionville and Verdun, had got as far as Chalons, he should give the word, and march on Paris with his nucleus of ten thousand men.

The man himself, of a character so diametrically opposed to his own, attracted Gilbert strangely; the organisation which his fiery brain had conceived and carried out in less than a year amazed him by its efficiency, but with its immediate object he could not sympathise, and he remained silent when La Rouërie had finished.

“You don’t approve?” said the Breton, flashing a quick glance at him.

“Not of invasion,” answered Gilbert.

“Not of the return of voluntary exiles, with our banished Princes at their head?”

“Perhaps,” said Château-Foix, “if they came back unsupported by Prussian or Austrian levies. But they will not.”

The Marquis de la Rouërie shrugged his shoulders. “Then, were you in my place, Monsieur, you would not, if you could, march on Paris to deliver the King?”

“I would do it to-morrow if I were sure that I should not meet Ferdinand of Brunswick under the walls!”

La Rouërie sprang to his feet. “M. de Château-Foix, men have called me reckless and unpractical, but you! . . . I will strike a bargain with you. Organise Vendée as I have organised Brittany, and in six months we will march together on Paris with never a Prussian to help us!”

So electric was his enthusiasm, as he stood there with sparkling eyes and outstretched hand, that the soldier’s dreams which Château-Foix had long relinquished glowed hot for a moment before him, and he stared up at La Rouërie fascinated, gripping the edge of the settle with his hands. The Breton laid hold of the heavy oaken table and dragged it nearer.

“See,” he said, taking out a knife and scoring the wood, “here is the Loire; here is your coast-line. I began by creating a council in the _chef-lieu_ of every department. Now here are yours—Fontenay for your own department of Vendée proper,” he stabbed the point into the table, “Niort for Deux-Sèvres, Angers——”

Gilbert got up and interrupted the draughtsman. “Tell me as much as you will of your own plans, M. de la Rouërie,” he said gravely, “and be assured of my sympathy and admiration, but do not hope to see the like succeed on the left bank of the Loire. If our people ever rise——”

“You will wish that you had organised them beforehand,” said La Rouërie like a flash. He had left the knife still stabbed into the table. “You do concede, then, that there is a chance of their rising?”

“I do not know what to think,” replied Gilbert. “But if ever they do, I am assured of this, that they will never be organised from above, nor will political considerations have much power to sway them. If ever it comes, the uprising will be a purely spontaneous movement from below, due to the religious persecution which has pressed so heavily on Vendée for the past two years and more.”

“And who will lead them?” cried the Breton. “Their priests? M. de Château-Foix, pardon me for saying so, but you are a true Liberal—you are refusing to look facts in the face. I will grant you, since you are so convinced of it, that your tenantry, if ever they take up arms, will do so of their own volition; but to whom will they come when they have got together the obsolete fowling-pieces and the pitchforks which will be their arms—in place of the muskets with which you might have furnished them? Why, to you, to their natural leader! And what will you do then? Let them go alone to be mown down by the regulars because the Prussians——” He checked himself. “I sincerely beg your pardon, Monsieur le Marquis, for I believe that I was on the verge of insulting you, which was not my intention, since I know that you would not let them go alone.”

Gilbert put his elbows on the table and his head between his hands. “You speak nothing but the truth,” he said dejectedly. “God knows what will happen; I don’t.”

La Rouërie studied him for a moment as he sat there, and then, casting a sudden glance towards the bed in the corner, crossed the room towards it. “Can’t you get to sleep?” he asked. “I am afraid we are doing a devilish amount of talking.”

“Oh, I find it rather soothing than otherwise,” was the Vicomte’s reply, and La Rouërie, coming back, observed in a low tone to Gilbert: “I like that cousin of yours, M. de Château-Foix. He has the pluck of twenty.” To which Gilbert replied rather stiffly that the Marquis was very good. . . .

It was in truth their conversation which had kept Louis awake, for he was deadly weary, and had already dozed off only to reawaken, after a more or less troubled period of slumber, to hear the sound of voices, and to see, through the faded green serge curtains of the bed, a close-framed, ill-lit picture of his cousin, seated by the table, his chin propped on his hands, listening, while La Rouërie, all animation, passed in and out of the canvas. And once—or was he dreaming?—they were both standing up, and with them was a man in the dress of a peasant, talking as eagerly as they.

These snatches of oblivion deprived him of all sense of time, and when he closed his eyes on the last occasion it might have been midnight, or ten o’clock, or the small hours. It was consequently a surprise to him when he was awakened by a hand on his shoulder, and, looking up, found Gilbert standing over him and the room full of daylight.

“Is it morning?” he exclaimed. “Where is M. de la Rouërie?”

“Gone,” said Gilbert briefly. “It is half-past six. Are you well enough to go on, do you think? We ought to get to Entrammes or beyond to-day.”

* * * * * *

“I am sorry not to have said farewell to ‘Monsieur Milet,’ that excellent surgeon,” remarked Louis later, as they moved off, with their unwilling hostess scowling at them from the doorstep. “And, by the way, hadn’t you a third person participating in your interminable conversation last night, or was I dreaming?”

“No, you were not dreaming,” returned his cousin. “It was the man whom M. de la Rouërie came here to meet—a salt-smuggler named Jean Cottereau or Chouan.”