Chapter XLII: Peace at the Last

“It strikes me very forcibly,” observed Louis in a low voice, “that we shall be occupied, all the time you are away taking Luçon, in tidying up the horrible litter you have made here. Did you ever see such a room?”

It was on the library at Chantemerle that the Vicomte passed these not undeserved strictures. The table was strewed with maps; in the middle stood two half-empty bottles of wine and some glasses, while at one end a tray bore the remains of a hasty meal. An ink-pot had been upset; the chairs were all awry, and one had fallen over.

Henri de la Rochejaquelein, who, booted, spurred, and fully armed, stood with the Vicomte in front of the hearth, smiled as he drew on his gloves. “My dear Saint-Ermay,” he replied, “if you and M. de Château-Foix have no more to occupy you than to put his dwelling to rights again you will be fortunate.” His tones, too, were low, for there were others in the room.

“Unfortunate, you mean,” retorted Louis with vivacity. “You know devilish well, M. l’Intrépide, that you would not be in my shoes for all the gold of—Necker. . . . I mustn’t swear, or our respective and respectable cousins will hear us.”

This was quite possible, for at the lower end of the long littered table, sitting sideways as men who have but temporarily dropped into a place there, were Gilbert and M. de Royrand. Three other leaders were there also. He who sat with his hands outspread upon a map to keep it in position was the “saint of Poitou,” the Marquis de Lescure, whom, with his young kinsman, Louis had saluted that day in the Tuileries. Over him bent the only roturier of the party, Stofflet, the gamekeeper, who had raised the parishes round Maulevrier. Behind, leaning upon his sword, and pulling impatiently with his teeth at a glove, stood the Chevalier de Charette, hawk-faced and implacable, newly come from the Marais to join the _grande armée_.

“Was ever a house so full of generals!” whispered Louis half mockingly. “. . . Your pardon, Henri: I forgot you were all but one yourself!”

And the château had been even fuller of these unusual guests. Last night, the night of the council of war which had caused so much disorder in the library, it had harboured not only those now present, but the general-in-chief himself, the Marquis d’Elbée, and the Marquis de Donnissan, both of whom were now gone forth to their men. Many other chiefs had clattered in and out: Bernard de Marigny, the hot-tempered, who commanded the artillery; Forestier, who led the somewhat scanty cavalry; D’Autichamp and the Prince de Talmont, bearer of a famous name, lieutenants of the wounded Marquis de Bonchamps, the only leader of note who was absent; De Couëtus, Joly, Savin, Charette’s subordinates. For on this 13th day of August (harvest being over), seasoned by an almost unbroken career of victory that was blotted only by their costly defeat at Nantes, masters at present of all their territory, but threatened, from their very success, by the Convention’s extremest measures of hostility, the Vendean hosts had gathered to strike a united blow; and the little cathedral town of Luçon, some fifteen miles to the southward, had been selected as the object of attack.

Yet Louis, though he bore his uniform of the bodyguard, which the fancy occasionally seized him to put on, wore no sword, and Gilbert’s sheathed blade was keeping down a refractory map upon the table. For they were neither of them going with their comrades to take Luçon. D’Elbée had been anxious to leave some post occupied in his rear, for disaster had already overtaken him on the plains of Luçon, and Gilbert had offered to stay behind and hold Chantemerle. The house was not fortified, and could by no means stand a siege, but it could very well prove a check to any detached body of troops with which the Republicans in the neighbouring department of Deux-Sèvres might have a fancy to harass D’Elbée’s rear-guard. That this idea would occur to them was extremely unlikely, for all their available troops were already in Luçon. As, therefore, there was no prospect of the occupation being anything but a sinecure, Louis had been proportionately disgusted when the decision was first communicated to him, but he had refused to desert his cousin.

Even as he made his rather irreverent remark there was a stir in the little group at the end of the table. Lescure stood up, saying: “Well, gentlemen, I suppose we must get to horse;” and as he removed his hands the map of Luçon rolled itself resolutely together. Stofflet noticed it. “Is that a good or a bad omen?” he asked. He was of Lorraine, and his accent showed it.

“The third time is always lucky,” answered Charette in his curiously clear and biting voice.

“Are you ready, Henri?” asked Lescure of his cousin and adjutant. “Good-bye, M. de Château-Foix: it is in vain to try to thank you for your hospitality, or for your self-sacrifice in remaining behind.”

“You should thank me instead for my self-sacrifice in depriving myself of him,” said old Royrand, as he shook hands with his best lieutenant.

And Charette said: “To-day to me, to-morrow to you. But before you are hard pressed, Monsieur le Marquis, you shall see my Maraîchins cutting their way through to you.”

“You are very kind, gentlemen,” answered Gilbert, smiling, as he escorted them through the hall. “But I do not anticipate any necessity of the sort.”

“Worse luck!” finished Louis behind him.

Outside, in the August sun, switching their tails to keep off the flies, were the horses. The four younger chiefs trotted off together down the avenue, but Gilbert walked by Royrand’s side for a little while, and when they parted the old soldier bent from his saddle and kissed him. Was it that salute, as of a comrade about to die, which struck a sudden question into Gilbert’s mind, as he stood a moment shading his eyes, even under the trees, to see the last of them? For Sapinaud was gone, killed in July a few miles away, and the whole army still mourned the irreparable loss of their first and greatest general-in-chief, the peasant Cathelineau. . . . Could he have known, La Rochejaquelein should build himself an imperishable name and never see his twenty-second birthday; Lescure had but three months to live, the old man who had embraced him but little longer. How long had he and Louis, who had played together so often under these trees? The question troubled him not at all, but it suddenly shed on the whole château, as he turned, and it lay before him, a kind of vaporous unreality. Even Louis, as he sat upon the steps of the perron waiting for him, was not exempt from it.

“Poor Louis,” he said, looking down at him with amusement and affection. “Have you forgiven me for staying here?”

“Parbleu!” returned his kinsman lazily, “the way to Luçon is long, and that confounded plain will be as hot as hell. One is better off here, after all. When we have barricaded a few windows—which I suppose we must do for the look of the thing—let’s go and see if we cannot catch a trout or two.”

They entered arm-in-arm, laughing, and turned, directly they were inside, with alacrity to business. All day long the château rang with the noise of hammers, and men tramped to and fro, dragging mattresses from the beds with dirty and unhallowed hands. The dining-room became a sort of guard-room, the Marquise’s boudoir was full of planks and ammunition. Gilbert, Louis, and the priest supped in the library, the only room left to them by the evening.

“It is hard to imagine that we are—supposedly—in a state of siege, isn’t it, Father?” asked Louis, pulling his spaniel’s ears, as they sat there afterwards.

The priest nodded, smiling.

“It is hard to realise that we are not back in the old days years ago—before the troubles,” remarked Gilbert, who was lying back in an arm-chair. His voice sounded unusually dreamy. “It might be in the time when we were boys, and did our lessons here.”

“Except that we were never allowed to make the room so untidy,” added Louis. “Why your generals could not hold a council without throwing all the maps on the floor, Gilbert, I can’t conceive. It almost leads one to suspect that they used them as missiles to enforce their different views. If Marigny had been present I can well imagine him hurling an atlas at some one.”

“Louis, will you never learn respect for your elders and betters?” asked M. des Graves, laughing. “But seriously, Gilbert, without adopting Louis’ interpretation, there was a difference of opinion, was there not, about the method of attack?”

The Marquis nodded. “Lescure wanted an attack _en échelon_. The others objected, because our men are not sufficiently trained. But undoubtedly, having regard to the position of Luçon, his theory is sound, and he got his way in the end.”

“Well, we shall know the result to-morrow,” said M. des Graves. And there was a silence, broken only by Louis’ whispered endearments to his dog.

The priest’s heart was very full. Most overwhelming of all at that hour was the sensation of the falteringness of his own faith. There had been little room for hope in his mind on that memorable night when, driven by a force outside himself, and knowing more real fear than ever in his life, he had broken his long silence, and had called up, to encounter Gilbert, all the awful sanctions that sustain the priestly office. And the tenuity of his hope was made yet more plain to him when God had so amazingly and so speedily answered his faithless prayers, when, himself humbled to the dust, he had fallen in adoration before the spectacle of that most stupendous of conquests, the victory of the Divine over the human will.

Then indeed he had been filled with hope—with violent hope—that the rest would follow, not because Gilbert had done right in giving up Lucienne, but because he had renounced with her something immeasurably more significant. But the immediate effect of his renunciation seemed to have been to make Gilbert harder than before. Then had come a period so full of the whirling activities of war that his glimpses of the Marquis had been necessarily fragmentary. Yet there was one sign which, after he joined the army at the Four Roads, gradually impressed itself upon M. des Graves. Gilbert’s men—most of them, too, his own peasantry among whom he had always lived—were beginning to manifest for him feelings of a much warmer sort than mere respect. The growth of these indications M. des Graves observed; it was all that he could do, for to him Gilbert vouchsafed not a word, not a clue. And so that evening in the church, the hour of the supremest happiness that he had ever known, had swept upon him unprepared. Yet, sudden as Gilbert’s surrender seemed, it had brought with it its own justification, for the priest had learnt then that the growth of his soul had been as natural as that which precedes the birth of all living things. Only the time had been short—as men count time. But the accompaniments of life had been beyond the ordinary, and the stress of war, the daily perils, the spectacle of the faith which inspired the humble to fight and taught them how to die had ripened to an early unfolding the seed which had never room to grow until, in that bitter conflict, Gilbert had torn up for ever the upas-tree of his own overshadowing will. And they had also made of him a leader. He had the devotion of his men, the profound esteem of his chiefs; he had found his vocation. Ah, when God gave He gave with both hands!

And the priest looked at Gilbert as the latter lay back in his chair smiling at the violent love which Louis and his spaniel were making to each other, and knew that he and his spiritual son were at last in that relationship of perfect understanding which had always been his ideal and which he had never thought would come to be. The ascetic in M. des Graves let itself be swept outwards on that warm tide of affection. He began to experience a very natural and human longing to break down a little the inflexible barriers which he had built about his own inner life. He felt that he would like to let Gilbert in; and had not the day come at last when he could do so and receive not wonder, but sympathy? Moreover, he had been reflecting of late whether the time was not ripe for him to obey Cantagalli’s summons. In that case he would be obliged to tell Gilbert the whole story. So he thought to himself, and in the bottom of his heart knew this consideration to be more of an excuse than a reason. . . .

“What is the time?” asked Louis suddenly. “Nearly ten? They will be getting to Ste. Hermine. . . . Victor, get down, you lazy and very heavy brute! You’d like me to set sentinels for the night, Gilbert?”

“The same as last night,” said his cousin. “The same relief. I will go round myself at two.”

Louis pulled himself out of his chair. “I shall have to put Toussaint Lelièvre on duty to-night,” he remarked, “merely to prevent him from sleeping like a mediæval squire outside my door. He is making me ridiculous, and I am beginning to repent me of my heroism at Chantonnay. Au revoir.”

* * * * * *

But when the Vicomte looked in again a little later Gilbert and the priest were so engrossed in converse that they never heard him, and he shut the door softly and went away.