Chapter XXXV: Out of Night Into the Night

“Willst du, dass trotz Sturm und Graus
In die Nacht ich muss hinaus—
Willst du, dass ich geh’?” —LEMCKE

And while M. des Graves was saying to Louis de Chantemerle, on that Saturday morning, the 2nd of March, what he had it in his mind to say, there was travelling rapidly to Fontenay a special courier from Paris with a thunderbolt in his pocket. That explosive he should the same evening deliver to the Directory, and these seven individuals should then and there proceed to give effect to the measure that was to be the match to fire the waiting tinder. And before they slept the printing presses of the town should be busy on it, and on Isnard’s “Address to the French People,” setting up with approbation, for all their haste, those rolling phrases: “France is about to fight alone against an enslaved Europe. . . . Let the country districts retain none of their sons but such as are indispensable. . . . Before our fields can be improved they must be set free. . . .” In such language did the Convention commend its decree for the levying of three hundred thousand conscripts.

There are, perhaps, no such things as political bolts from the blue. Such projectiles fall usually from a clouded sky, upon the heads of persons who have already discerned threatening atmospheric symptoms. But whether the peasants of Vendée had or had not been looking skywards, the decree struck them with fearful force. . . . Should they, to whom the very name of Blue was execrable—whether applied to National Guard or to soldier of the line—should they be forced to enroll themselves in the ranks of the men to whom they owed the carrying out of more than two years of persecution and vexation? Were they, the most stay-at-home, possibly, of all the peasantry of France, to be forced to leave their homesteads to fight on the frontiers? The hated words of conscription and _tirage au sort_ were not indeed mentioned in the decree, but they had already been spoken in the Assembly, and since the drawing of lots was the simplest method of forced recruiting, to that method it would come in the end. From the moment when the news struck the inhabitants of the town of Cholet, busy on that Saturday in their weekly market, the cry rang hot through all the countryside: “Down with the tirage!” “We will not give our names!” The tinder was alight.

But the inner mental atmosphere of a house is sometimes so charged with emotion as to resist the pressure of outer conditions, and to one inmate at least of the château the breath of nearing revolt brought with it, after all, nothing of exultation. So, on the Wednesday evening, Louis was sitting on the edge of his bed hardly heeding the disjointed tale of some affray which Jasmin poured out as he pulled off his master’s boots. At any other time it would have been exceedingly welcome to the young man, but now——

“That will do, Jasmin,” he said. He got up and threw off his coat and waistcoat. “No, I don’t want you any more now. Give me my dressing-gown and my slippers, and don’t come back till I ring.”

“Monsieur le Vicomte is not ill?” queried Jasmin anxiously, as he held out the flowered silk.

“Good God, no! What put such a foolish idea into your head?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” responded his domestic rather hastily. “Only I thought, Monsieur Louis, that you did not seem quite yourself.”

Louis looked after him as he went out with a frown. “Curse it!” he said between his teeth. “Even the servants are noticing. . . .”

He caught sight of his own face in the glass, and laughed. “Small wonder!” he exclaimed, and threw himself down moodily in his big chair in front of the fire.

An hour and a half to supper-time. Then the meal to be got through as best he could, with that cold, impassive face at the head of the board, and opposite him, rather silent and sad, the old man who had tried to help him. For it was four days since M. des Graves had dragged his secret out of him, and it seemed to Louis, strung to the last pitch of tension, that, but for his merciful inquisition and his own frantic outburst, he must have been mad by now. God! had he not paid, since that day at the ford, for every one of those few and never-repeated kisses!

Yet with all his new-born hatred of Gilbert was mingled an unwilling admiration. He himself, who loathed above all things the display of what he really and profoundly felt, had had torn from him that easy, baffling self-control which had always served him so well. But only for a flash, down there by the river, had Gilbert let slip his self-command. He remained now glacially clothed in it—hateful, yet provoking to admiration. . . . But he would think as little as possible of Gilbert.

M. des Graves, then. He fell to remembering what the priest had said to him. He had not told him that he had behaved like . . . he could not repeat the word, even to himself. Judge and friend, he had not spared him; he had blamed him severely for ever having revealed his passion to Lucienne; he had pointed out that she could never be the same again, and that therein lay the irreparable injury dealt to Gilbert. But he had told him that, in his efforts to repair that wrong, he had acted like a gentleman; he had begged his pardon for ever having doubted it. When Louis had said bitterly that it seemed of little use, M. des Graves had replied with great earnestness—he could hear him now: “Oh, my dear boy, that is just where you are wrong. Believe an old man when he tells you that sacrifice is only exchange.”

Louis did not believe him—he did not even understand him, but he was a little comforted. Comforting too, somehow—though he was not allowed to see the letter—was the knowledge that Lucienne had made a confidant of M. des Graves. Poor darling, was it wonderful! For himself, he had hardly been able to think of her in these black days; it seemed to be dragging her visibly into the presence of their enmity. Yet this evening he began to glide insensibly into imaginations about her; where she had written the letter—if she was happier when it was done—whether the Marquise was kind to her. . . .

In the very midst of them came a knock at the door. “Come in,” he called out nonchalantly, and in walked—Gilbert.

The Vicomte sprang to his feet. How dared he come here—to the one place that was free from his presence! But Château-Foix closed the door carefully, and came forward, unheeding the furious unspoken greeting. He had a letter in his hand.

“I have just had very bad news,” he said, and Louis noticed then that he looked really as if he had had a shock. And he knew, somehow, in an instant that the news had no direct personal bearing. For the moment the remembrance of their relations left him.

“It is not . . . the Queen?”

“Not yet,” said his cousin grimly. He came to the fire. “It is La Rouërie—he is dead—has been dead a month.” And in spite of his iron self-command his voice shook a little.

“Dead!” repeated Louis, stupefied. “La Rouërie! How? Killed?”

“Yes,” answered the Marquis, “by the news of the King’s death. It seems that in the second week in January he came by night, in disguise, to the château of La Guyomarais, near Lamballe. There he fell ill; he got worse. Then came the fatal news, which M. de la Guyomarais and his family succeeded in keeping from him for some days, but which in the end he discovered. It threw him into a raging fever, of which he died, on the 30th of January, without recovering consciousness. They buried him secretly in the plantation.”

Louis stared at him and said nothing.

“There is almost worse to follow,” continued Gilbert, glancing at the letter in his hand. “The man whom he most trusted had been betraying him for months to Danton—knew all about his plans. He set the authorities on the alert after La Rouërie’s disappearance; a few days ago they surrounded the château and questioned the La Guyomarais and their dependents. As old Madame de la Guyomarais was denying any knowledge of the fugitive, La Rouërie’s head, five-and-twenty days buried, came rolling through the window to her feet. . . . They have nearly all been taken off to the prisons of Rennes. And in that holocaust ends the Marquis de la Rouërie and his plans.”

He sank down uninvited into a chair—Louis was still standing—and began mechanically pleating the letter into smaller and smaller folds. They were both of them thinking of their first meeting with a personality so vivid that it seemed impossible it should have been extinguished, unknown to them, a month ago.

“No, not of his plans, surely,” said Louis at last.

“Perhaps not, perhaps not,” said his cousin. “That depends on how much Cheftel knew and betrayed. And in any case they have no bearing on this side the Loire.” He tapped his fingers thoughtfully on his knee. “I want you, Louis, if you will, to go to Nantes for me at once.”

“I?” exclaimed Saint-Ermay. “Why? Do you really mean it?” A little flush rose to his face, and he could not wholly keep out of his voice an accent of pleasure and elation.

“Certainly I mean it,” said Gilbert evenly. “I must have some information upon those two points; all the more if, as I believe, we are on the edge of a great crisis. But I cannot go myself. There may be a riot here any day; you know that in the affair at Cholet on Sunday and Monday the tricolour was trodden underfoot and two officers wounded. At Nantes, by the indications I will give you, you will easily find out what I want to know. But there is danger in going there.”

“Of course,” said Louis, and in his voice was a faint indication that the fact was not unwelcome.

“You will not be able to get a passport; the Directory have stopped issuing them until the recruiting is over.”

“I will do without,” replied the Vicomte, undisturbed, and he sat down, gathering the folds of silk about him.

Château-Foix still looked hard at him. “The troubles at Beaupréau have spread to Challans,” he said drily.

“But I am not going to Challans.”

“No; and do not go to Nantes by the main-road. But, if it is convenient to you, I will give you my instructions here and now.”

The Marquis stretched out an arm, pulled another chair towards him, and placing it between them spread out a map of Loire-Inférieure. Then he plunged without hesitation or embarrassment into a lucid exposition of his requirements at Nantes and of the safest routes thither. No just idea of their owners’ feelings could have been gathered by a spectator seeing the two heads bent so amicably together.

“There is a last thing,” said Gilbert at length, folding up the map and giving it to his cousin. “When you return, do not come straight here, but go to that little inn near La Peyratte, the ‘Etoile de Vendée.’ I will meet you there. I might have to send you off again, and it is just as well that you should not return to the château in the interval. And now I will have some food sent up to you here, and order a horse to be ready. Will you ride yours or one of mine?”

“Saladin, please,” returned Louis, ringing the bell. “I will be ready in half an hour.”

And directly Gilbert had left the room he tore off his dressing-gown, rolled it into a ball, pitched it violently on to the bed, and, standing in the middle of the room, slim and tense, stretched out his arms and said aloud, with heart-felt meaning: “Thank God—oh, thank God!”

* * * * * *

It was a dark and clear night when Saladin was led round to the door. Gilbert came to see off his messenger.

“You have everything?”

“Everything,” answered Louis. And then he bent from the saddle and whispered into Gilbert’s ear: “Take heart! I may never come back again. . . .”

His taunt had even more success than he had anticipated. The Marquis, stung, seized his bridle violently. “My God! you don’t think that is why I am sending you?”

And Louis, who thought no such thing, looked down on him with a mocking smile. “No? . . . Au revoir, then: in eight days, at the place you named.”

The hand fell from his bridle, and he moved out of the shaft of light into the darkness, with exultation of a kind in his heart. He was free—going away from intolerable strain into mere danger. And he had just dealt Gilbert a thrust which had told. “He will think of that presently when he hears that I have been arrested, as I most probably shall be.”

And then, quite suddenly, half way down the avenue, between the shadowy tree trunks, he dropped the reins and covered his face with his hands. . . . A moment, perhaps, he sat thus motionless—for Saladin, perplexed, had stopped of his own accord—then, throwing back his head defiantly, he went forward under the naked black boughs, between which there still dangled, low down, the sword of Orion.