CHAPTER XL
THE FIGHT AT THE BRIDGE
At half an hour after noon next day Louis-Henri-François de Marcé, with forty-eight years of service and two thousand five hundred men behind him, marched out of Chantonnay in the direction of Saint Fulgent, with the intention of completing his victory of the previous Sunday. At three o’clock he passed the river Lay on the pont du Gravereau, which had been cut by the peasants and subsequently repaired by his orders, after which he proceeded to repair a second bridge at the mill of La Rivière, a league further on.
While his troops were thus occupied there appeared over the high and wooded ground in front of him a large body of armed men. The Republican general would have taken them for insurgents, had not the commissary of the Convention who accompanied him distinctly heard borne towards him on the breeze the surge of the Marseillaise, that sound dear to every good patriot, as he remarked to the veteran. It stamped them, he asserted, as the National Guard from Nantes, and De Marcé went on with his bridge-mending. On all sides, except to his rear, the heights surrounded him: it was an ill position to defend, but at the moment he was not thinking of defence.
Yet it was not the true Marseillaise which was being sung on the heights; it was the Marseillaise Vendéenne, whose words, wedded indeed to the same famous air, expressed far other sentiments. With their rosaries round their necks the peasants were chanting lustily in their patois.
And after they had sung they turned and were swallowed up in the woods whence they had appeared. Masked by these woods, they were going to turn De Marcé’s position down below.
Yet it was seven o’clock of the March evening before this fact burst upon the Republicans. Then, with the first hidden and deadly fire from the lower woods, a whole column of National Guards posted on their left flank deserted their posts. De Marcé, taken by surprise, withdrew the bulk of his forces to the farther bridge at Gravereau, leaving, however, a strong detachment on the bridge nearer to the Royalists, and throwing out a column on his other flank.
About twenty minutes after the first fusillade Gilbert found himself with his little troop where the woods joined the water meadows, a little to the left of the nearer bridge, still lined with grenadiers and emitting a constant though ill-directed fire. He had discarded his horse, preferring to be as his men were, and fancying that they followed him better unmounted. But Louis, combining as he did the function of aide-de-camp with that of second in command, could not be deprived of his, and, a little way along the rank of kneeling men he stood, bridle in hand, directing their fire. The woods, black behind them in the fading light, prevented the Vendeans from being picked out by the Blues on the bridge, who were, moreover, firing much too high. Hardly a man had been hit. Yet it was slow and trying work, and the Royalists were very short of muskets. If only they could carry the bridge! But Gilbert could not attempt it on his own responsibility, and Royrand was on the other side of the river, two meadows’ width away. He would have to send some one across the danger zone, and Louis was the only person to send—Louis who had in him as it was far too much of the lust of danger, and whom he hesitated to send . . . for other reasons.
Yet, after all, he had no right to indulge private considerations. He summoned his cousin. “Ride as hard as you can,” he said, “to M. de Royrand, and ask him whether we shall not try to carry the bridge from here. Tell him that we are very short of ammunition and muskets but have plenty of scythes and pikes, and that our position is good for such an attempt. The Blues, as any one can see, are demoralised already.”
“Excellent!” commented Louis, and he sprang with alacrity to the saddle. “You may trust me to persuade him! And as I come back I will wave my handkerchief if he consents.”
“Don’t go right across the open like that!” shouted Gilbert after him, but it was too late, and with his teeth caught on his under lip the Marquis watched the slight, reckless figure dash untouched through the fusillade which immediately opened on him from the bridge, splash through the shallow stream and disappear.
It seemed a long time before he saw his cousin, bare-headed now, galloping wildly towards them over the meadow. The white signal flew from his hand, and Gilbert could hear his laugh as he pulled Saladin on to his haunches at a few yards distance and waited for them.
“Come on, men!” The excitement gained the ranks, and with the Marquis, sword in hand, at their head, they burst out of shelter and ran across the meadow.
“Dismount—you’ll be hit!” cried Gilbert, as he came abreast of the Vicomte; but Saladin, fresh from his gallop, and maddened by the racing feet behind him, was hard to hold, and Louis paid no heed. On they went, and the Blues on the bridge, seeing this advancing wave with its tip of steel, began to pull themselves together and to concentrate their aim. A peasant or two fell, and Gilbert could not but wonder whether, though his men were following well enough, there might not be a catastrophe when they came face to face with the levelled muskets. If so, then these were his last few minutes on earth. Not that that mattered.
But at last they began to breast the rise to the bridge, and showed no sign of slackening. The Marquis looked round, encouraging them as he ran; Louis, holding in his horse with bridle hand alone, pointed them on with his sword. Now they were nearly abreast of the idle mill wheel. Gilbert glanced round for the last time; the front rank was on his heels, shouting wildly. At that moment, too, he realised that Louis, glad of the excuse perhaps, had let his fretting horse carry him still further in advance. And then the catastrophe came—but not as Gilbert had pictured it. For suddenly, without warning, as Louis turned back in the saddle, Saladin went down beneath him like a stone, pitching him, finished horseman as he was, clean into the road.
Neither horse nor man rose again, and in a moment, when the smoke of the instantly succeeding volley had cleared, Château-Foix saw his cousin lying on his face, motionless, between the ranks of friends and foes. And the men behind were stopping.
A lightning pang tore at Gilbert’s heart. “Good God! come on!” he shouted desperately. “Will you let him be killed before your eyes?”
A roar answered him, and in that moment he knew that he was followed indeed. On they poured, over the dying horse, over his rider’s body—no time to see if he were alive or dead—and hurled themselves on the bayonets. . . . Five minutes of the hottest hand-to-hand fighting ensued—a whirling vision of fierce, convulsed faces, of straining bodies, of red steel, then of a sudden swaying movement as the soldiers gave before the terrible scythe-blades and the scarcely less terrible pitchforks, and fled along the road, mingled with their exultant pursuers. The bridge was won.
At the further end the Marquis paused a moment, sword in hand and panting, to look back. The light had not failed so utterly but that he could distinguish, among the human wreckage on the bridge, the bulk of the dead horse and a little group beside it. A second’s hesitation and he ran back. Louis was lying senseless in the arms of Laurent Robineau, while another man dashed on him the river water from his hat.
“Only stunned, Monsieur le Marquis, praise the saints,” said the latter, looking up; and Gilbert, drawing a long breath, waited for no more but ran on after his men.
But the fight was practically over, for with every moment it turned more and more to rout. Royrand and Sapinaud had driven in the right flank; at the second bridge the double mass of fugitives swept back the defenders with it. In vain De Marcé and Boulard tried to rally them; panic had gripped them, and all night long they streamed through the affrighted villages, till at daybreak even Saint Hermand, seven leagues away, woke to the clatter of the flying cavalry.
But the end of the fight had no concern for Louis, though the treatment to which he was subjected was not long in rousing him. Indeed, as he put up an instinctive hand to ward off the fresh avalanche which was impending, he muttered something about death by drowning. After a little he was able to get with assistance to his feet, and dizzily to survey the scene of slaughter at the farther end of the bridge. Then his eyes fell on his own dead horse, and the satisfaction died out of his face.
“My poor Saladin!” he said brokenly, and kneeling down kissed the star on his forehead.
Soon afterwards, not knowing in the least how he had got there, he found himself lying by the river, almost underneath the bridge, and here he went to sleep for another indeterminate period. After this he had a hazy sensation of being carried a long way, in the midst of a great many people, on something rather uncomfortable. Oddly enough, when he found himself laid upon the bed in his and Gilbert’s little room at L’Oie, his brain became instantaneously and miraculously clear, so that he immediately announced his intention of following Gilbert and the other chiefs to the Four Roads. He was only induced to abandon this idea by the threats of the surgeon whom the Marquis had sent to him, and by the fact that during the altercation his head began to ache consumedly.
He therefore yielded the point, submitted to having wet cloths wound about his head, and even to being consigned to solitude and darkness. But shortly after the surgeon had taken his departure he rose from his couch, struck a light, and throwing open the casement established himself on the window-seat in the cool night air.
He had sat there some time, the incidents of the fight running madly through his throbbing head, when he heard a light and springing step that he did not know coming up the stairs. With a little knock the door opened, and into the light of the single candle came some one tall and slim and very young, at whom Louis stared for a moment in amazement.
“Good Heavens! what are you doing here?” he exclaimed, getting slowly to his feet.
It was the youth whom he had pointed out to his cousin in the Tuileries as Henri de la Rochejaquelein.
“Mon Dieu, that I had been earlier!” cried the newcomer, on fire, as he grasped the Vicomte’s hand. “Ah, my dear Saint-Ermay, how I envy you that!” He pointed to the wet bandage, and there was no doubt of his sincerity.
“Indeed you need not!” retorted Louis, laughing. “It covers the most confounded headache that you can imagine, gained by nothing more heroic than falling off a horse on to a very stony bridge.”
“Oh, I know all about you,” said La Rochejaquelein. “At least sit down again.”
“But tell me,” said Louis, obeying, “where you have come from, and what on earth you are doing here?”
“I have come from Clisson, my cousin De Lescure’s château near Bressuire, you know. There they all are not knowing what to do; but I—— My God! I couldn’t keep away when I heard of your victory on the 15th. So I came to ask M. de Sapinaud to take me as his aide-de-camp—or as anything he pleased.”
“A la bonne heure!” observed Saint-Ermay warmly. “You can have my place—my poor horse is dead.”
“Yes, but M. de Sapinaud won’t have me,” returned the young man with a smile. “He says—it is very absurd—that I am more fit to command than to be commanded. And I would rather a thousand times fight in the ranks—just for the pleasure of it.”
“Yes, it is hard lines to be a general malgré soi,” said Louis jestingly. “But old Sapinaud, I begin to think, knows what he is doing. And what, by the way, are they all about now at the Cross Roads?”
“M. de Sapinaud,” said La Rochejaquelein, leaning against the table, “has prevailed on the rest to elect, not himself, but M. de Royrand general-in-chief; he is general of division, while MM. de Vaugirard and Baudry d’Asson have been chosen as commandants, and your cousin as major-general—I forget the names of the others. And they have resolved, I understand, to make this position their headquarters, and to organise the surrounding district. But I am tiring you, Saint-Ermay, and I must get back. I only rode over from the Four Roads to see how you were. It is high time I started.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Saint-Aubin-de-Baubigné, to rouse my father’s tenantry at La Durbellière, if I can.” He was silent for a moment, his eyes kindling. “I shall say to them, I think, what one of my ancestors said to his retainers in the time of the wars of the League: ‘If I go forward, follow me; if I draw back, kill me; if I die, avenge me!’”
“If you look at them like that, Henri,” said Saint-Ermay, “there is not much doubt about their following you. Well, good luck! May we meet again!”
They clasped hands, and La Rochejaquelein was gone, taking out of the room with him an extraordinary impression of youth and ardour. But though he well remembered that evening afterwards, Louis could not guess at the time that the newly-formed army of the centre, self-effacing as it was always to be, had that night given back to the future grande armée its name of highest romance and its most brilliant sword.
The Vicomte returned to the window-seat. The hamlet, usually so early abed, was not much disturbed even to-night by victory. Snatches of song came out of the darkness and a little laughter. And as he sat there with his bandaged head leaning against the casement, Louis’ thoughts went over the seas. But four days of fighting seemed to have set between him and Lucienne a gulf far wider than the Channel. When he had ridden homeward from the Etoile de Vendée, and when his stupefaction had a little cleared, one thought had possessed his mind, that now he could go to Lucienne at once. . . . Almost before he had had time to taste the full rapture of this idea the stone at the window had chased the vision. And what of Lucienne’s kisses now? Again honour held them apart; how could he turn his back on Gilbert now, withdraw from the opening struggle? But honour no longer forbade him to think of her, to write to her. He could not at times believe in the reality of his happiness. At odd moments he contemplated Gilbert with profound amazement, not unmixed with wistfulness. If only he would drop a little of his frigid bearing! Even so he was aware that their relations were not what they had been a day or two ago. Perhaps in time. . . .
He had fallen into so deep a slumber that he never heard the door open, and woke only to the sound of his own name. In front of him stood the Marquis and M. des Graves, looking at him attentively.
“Ah, you are back, Gilbert,” he observed sleepily. “Father! you here!”
“I might say the same to you,” retorted the priest with mock sternness. “Why are you not in your bed?”
Louis got up and took hold of his arm. Gilbert had turned away and was lighting another candle. No one would have guessed that he had been chafing the whole evening to return and see how his cousin fared.
“I will not be scolded,” said the Vicomte. “What are you doing here, mon père?”
“He is going to be with us henceforward as our chaplain,” said Gilbert. “Get into bed, Louis, at once.”
“I am going,” said M. des Graves, smiling at the pleasure in Louis’ eyes. “I have no influence with this disobedient boy.”
The individual in question went arm-in-arm with him to the door, and out to the top of the stairs. Once outside the room the priest took his hand. “Louis, I hope you have not forgotten to thank God for your preservation. Good-night, my child.”
“I have not yet thanked Gilbert,” said Louis to himself. “I do not care—I shall do it. I suppose he does not exactly regret his action.”
The Marquis, when he re-entered the room, was unfastening his sword. “You must take the bed to-night, of course, Louis,” he said, without looking up. “And for God’s sake be quick about it.”
Saint-Ermay looked at him as with bent head he fumbled at his side. The fingers of his left hand were still swathed in bandages.
“Let me unfasten that for you,” he said. “You will do your hand an injury.” And before his cousin could object he was kneeling beside him. He had the sword detached in an instant, and, handing it up to him, said softly: “I owe you my life.”
“On the contrary,” said the Marquis coolly, “I think that we owe you the bridge, for if the men had not had to save you I doubt whether they would have followed me over it.” He turned away and laid his sword on the table.
“Well, of all the extraordinary and perverted logic——” began Louis, laughing.
Château-Foix sat down and began to pull off his boots. “It is a fact,” he said. “And then what of the man at Pézé?”
The Vicomte flushed scarlet. “Oh, were you only paying off a debt?” he asked in a suddenly hardened voice.
Gilbert finished the struggle with his boots before he answered. “No,” he said, “that debt is not yet paid. I did not save you, Louis; it was the men. We must have tried to carry the bridge anyhow. . . . But you acknowledge then, at last, that I did incur a debt at Pézé?”
“I would rather not talk about what happened at Pézé,” returned Louis. He was now very pale. “Good-night.”
How, after the poignant emotion of the bridge, could he torture Louis now that he was given back to him? Gilbert suddenly held out his hand. “You gave me a most horrible fright this evening. . . . Now get to bed. I do not want another.”
CHAPTER XLI
SURRENDER
Inside the little church it was beginning to grow dusk, and the May twilight, as if in pity, shrouded the devastation which had recently been wrought there. Chalbos’ soldiers had passed not long ago through the village, and the traces of their passing were scored on the hacked woodwork of the choir, in the rents and fresh splintered wounds of the painted oak. The statue of Our Lady was headless; of the Child in her arms she held only half the body, and the image of Saint Roch lay its length on the pavement. Under one or two of the windows rested a splash of shattered glass. The door of the tabernacle had been wrenched off, and on the front of the bare stripped altar, whose stone had resisted all efforts at destruction, a wanton hand had begun, with a brushful of tar, to paint the words, “Liberté, Ega . . .” and had got no further. To all these spoliations was added Nature’s too, for half way up the pillars of the church ran the significant green stain of persistent damp, beautiful in itself, and doubly so in contrast with the faded blue of the roof, where there still glimmered a score or so of tarnished stars.
In front of the violated altar, just inside the rails, sat a priest, and before the rails knelt a Vendean. His musket lay on the steps beside him. Further down the church knelt two or three others, with their weapons and their rosaries. The priest was Sébastien des Graves, and he was hearing confessions at the altar because the confessionals had all been hacked to pieces.
That outrage, and the rest, would presently be avenged—so, at least, hoped every man in the great host now gathering to march on Fontenay—a host of which Gilbert de Château-Foix’ contingent, quartered in this village, formed but a small part. For since the end of April the whole country had been in arms; Cathelineau, Stofflet, Bonchamps, joined latterly by Lescure and La Rochejaquelein, had swept along on a tide of victory which had met its first check at Fontenay a week ago. To wipe out that defeat some thirty-five thousand Vendeans were on foot, and to these the little army of the centre had contributed four thousand men under its ablest lieutenant. To-night they rested here after their long march from the Four Roads; to-morrow they should effect their junction with the other chiefs.
When the footsteps of his last penitent had died away down the church, M. des Graves sat still, thinking of the morrow. He was going to say Mass in the open very early. After waiting for a few minutes, he took off his stole. As he did so, he heard the moan of the leathern door at the end of the church, and he slipped it on again with a little sigh for he was very tired. So dusk was it growing that he considered whether he should light the altar candles; and as he looked towards them his heart began suddenly to quicken. There was something familiar in the footsteps coming up the church. . . . Unable to resist the impulse, slowly, afraid, he turned his head to look.
Yes, it was Gilbert—Gilbert, tall, erect, booted and spurred, girt under his sword-belt with the white scarf of leadership, the red patch of the Sacred Heart on his breast. He walked straight up to the altar steps and knelt down, and the clank of his sword on the stone told the priest that it was no vision.
And into Gilbert’s confession, before he had ended, was suddenly woven a snatch of the Vexilla regis, that hymn which they would all chant on the morrow as they marched, which some one passing the church was singing in a low voice of singular sweetness. The words drifted in through the shattered windows:—
and died away as the singer passed on. But as M. des Graves raised in absolution a hand that shook a little, he heard Gilbert murmur to himself the last line, and then say, in a steady voice: “I should like you to lay my sword on the altar, Father. It has never been offered.”
The priest stood up. He was obliged to support himself by the rails. Gilbert unbuckled his sword, scabbard and all, and M. des Graves took it from his hands, and, going to the dark and outraged shrine, laid it thereon. Then he sank on his knees, his arms outstretched on the stone, and his head bowed upon it.
At the door of Gilbert’s quarters, when he got there, stood a sentry, probably self-stationed, since for no duty had the Vendean peasant a stronger distaste. It was Toussaint Lelièvre, the young man who, since Louis had saved his life at Chantonnay, followed him about like a dog. There was, therefore, no need to ask if the Vicomte were within.
Louis was ensconced in the deep window-seat, with his sword upon his knees, polishing the weapon with energy. The golden afterglow behind him, falling upon his bent head and pure profile, gave him something the air of a Sir Galahad engaged in a similar task on the eve of conflict. He looked up as the door opened. “I was just snatching a moment for this job before going out to the pickets,” he said cheerfully. “However, I think this is quite clean enough to do justice to a Blue.” He got up, threw the rag in his hand on to the seat, and held out his shining blade upright at arm’s length, looking more like a Galahad than ever. Only the stainless knight never had so mischievous a sparkle in his eyes, nor such a tone of relish in his voice. “Yes, that will do,” he continued, running an appraising glance up and down the steel. “They like to see it bright; it encourages them to come on if they can see it about a mile in front of them.” In this Louis was referring not to the enemy but to their own men. It was by now well known that the Vendeans would not follow unless their leaders were ready to expose themselves in the rashest of manners—a fact which the Vicomte himself had found very useful to him when brought to book for exploits of surpassing imprudence. “Shall I give yours a rub? . . . Why, what have you done with it?”
“It is lying on the altar in the church,” said the Marquis quietly. He had crossed the room, and stood a little in shadow, between the table and the hearth. “Louis, I want to say something to you.”
It was the new expression on his face, as much as the extraordinary change in his tone, which made the Vicomte stand instantly motionless, while the sword in his hand gradually sank until its point touched the floor.
“It can be said in a very few words,” pursued Gilbert, “and I dare say that you can guess what it is. I want with all my heart to ask your forgiveness for the past—for my lack of generosity to you, for——”
“Oh, stop!” cried Louis, in distress. The sword went clattering from his hand. “Gilbert . . . You! ungenerous. . . .”
“Yes, I,” said the Marquis, coming a little nearer. And he went on with the same gentle gravity: “Even when I made—when I resigned my right to you . . . well, you must have known what hell was in my heart. Let me make that surrender anew to you, Louis, fully and freely, and let us be as we might always have been. . . . Do you forgive me?” He held out his hand.
And it was thus that Gilbert, the proud and taciturn, had found speech! What had happened? Louis had lost it. And the manner of Gilbert’s avowal, easy, effortless, yet so transparently sincere, seemed to inspire him with a kind of awe.
“I have not anything to forgive,” he stammered, drawing back from the outstretched hand. “How could I, after——”
At that the Marquis came nearer and put both hands on his shoulders. “Louis,” he said with still greater gentleness, “be as sincere as you are generous. You know that you have a very great deal to forgive—and most of all perhaps this, that—putting aside, if you will, all that happened at Chantemerle—while we might have been fighting side by side like brothers, while you were wanting to thank me, to hold out a hand to me, I would not have it so, I shut you out. . . . Isn’t that true, Louis?”
The younger man’s eyes fell. “Yes,” he said, very low, as if he were confessing to a fault of his own.
“Well, then. . . . ?”
The Vicomte lifted his head, and met the strange serene light in Gilbert’s eyes. His own keen gaze was misty. Without a word he flung himself into his cousin’s arms. . . .
And when they knelt side by side at daybreak next morning there was, in all the host who saw them, or who knelt with them at the rude altar under the shadow of the forest of Mervent, but one man who knew to what perfect reconciliation the Sacrament which he gave them was the seal. But he was also the one man to whom the knowledge very greatly mattered.
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.
CHAPTER XLIII
ULTIMA FORSAN
It was not till after noon next day that the sound of distant firing broke on the expectant ears of the occupants of the château. It was no guide to events. The afternoon wore on, and still there was nothing to tell them how Fate was balancing her scales. The peasants prayed at their idle posts, and sang the litanies of the Virgin—for it was the vigil of the Assumption—the Marquis and Louis craned their necks out of such portions of the south windows as were not barricaded, but they could see nothing in the leafy country.
“News of some kind must have got to Chantonnay by now,” said Gilbert about four o’clock. “I will send out a couple of men.”
Louis caught at his arm. “Listen . . . in the avenue! Don’t you hear?”
They ran down the stairs and emerged by a little door—the great door was barricaded—into the avenue front. The sentinels there, as eager as themselves, were staring at the two horsemen who were tearing towards them under the trees. One of the riders was swaying in the saddle, and when he got near enough they saw that blood was trickling from his open and gasping mouth. His reins were in the grasp of his companion, in whom, as he pulled up, the cousins recognised one of Forestier’s officers.
“Routed!” he cried in a high voice, and the wounded man pitched forward on to his horse’s neck.
“What!” cried Gilbert. “My God! it can’t be!”
“Utterly!” gasped the rider. “It was that accursed open plain . . . the centre gave first, then the right. All the guns are captured but two . . . we have lost thousands . . . thousands. . . .” He could say no more, but getting off his horse and staggering to the perron, sank down on it and sobbed aloud.
Beside him the sentries were laying his companion. Louis stooped over him. “Dead,” he said briefly. “Well, Gilbert?”
The Marquis raised his head. “We must hold it now,” he said very quietly, and their hands met for an instant.
But so thorough had been Gilbert’s dispositions from the first that there was nothing more to do except to be on the alert. At sunset came in another fugitive who reported that Charette, having covered La Rochejaquelein’s retreat, was said to be falling back on Chantonnay. Dusk was falling before a sudden little burst of musketry in the direction of the village warned the defenders. A little later the Marquis, guessing at the presence of sharpshooters on the avenue side—the light was too bad to be sure—gave the order to fire from the Marquise’s bedroom, in which, as the largest room on the first floor, he had ensconced himself. A minute or two afterwards an answering crash of glass along the front of the house showed his surmise to be correct.
“What a glazier’s bill!” ejaculated Louis, laughing. “My poor aunt—if she only knew!” He bit at a fresh cartridge, for, happening to be in the room, he was firing with the rest.
But Gilbert laid a hand on his arm. “Go up and take command of the second floor windows, as we arranged,” he said. “And don’t expose yourself: there’s no need. We shall have to make fresh dispositions if they start firing at the garden front, but I do not, somehow, think they will. I will send for you if it is necessary.”
And the duel with an unseen enemy continued.
When Louis reappeared, about an hour later, in the Marquise’s bedroom, two of the shutters hung riddled from their hinges, half a dozen of the defenders lay dead or dying on the floor, and the air was full of smoke and the biting smell of gunpowder. Across the dismantled bed, his fingers tearing convulsively at the blue silken coverlet which still adorned it, lay, coughing, a peasant shot through the lungs. M. des Graves was ministering to another on the floor.
“What is it?” asked the Marquis quickly, as he caught sight of the begrimed figure in the doorway. “Nothing wrong?”
“Nothing,” returned Louis placidly, coming in. “Except that M. des Graves might come up to a couple of my fellows. But I wanted to ask whether you will spare me men for a sortie. I thought I would go out by the garden front, through the pavilion, and take the foe in flank. It would be very neat.”
The Marquis shook his head through the noise of the volley which interrupted the speaker.
“But, Gilbert,“ urged the Vicomte, coming closer and dropping his voice, “have you not thought that if they are not soon dislodged they may bring up artillery? Once or twice I have heard the unmistakable report of a gun from the direction of Chantonnay. Of course it may be Charette, one can’t tell; but if the guns were all lost but two—— Anyhow, as things go now the château is useless for fugitives, and,”—he dropped his voice still further, “the Blues are thinning us down, while we don’t seem to be making much impression on them.”
As if to point his words there was a crash behind him, and a Venetian mirror fell in fragments to the floor. A second later a marksman by one of the windows threw out his arms, and twisting rapidly round, staggered half across the room and fell at their feet.
While Gilbert and M. des Graves bent over him Louis very coolly went to one of the unshuttered windows and peered out into the dusk.
“Come back, you madman!” shouted Gilbert; “I have lost two men at that window already!”
“I was only reconnoitring,” urged Louis, as he was dragged away. “But it is too dark to see anything. So much the better. . . . Now will you give me twenty men?”
“No.”
“You think I should get knocked on the head?” queried the Vicomte, laughing. “You should know my luck better than that, mon ami; I have a charmed life, you know. Besides, better a few out there than all in here. Am I not right, Father?”
“You may be right,” began the Marquis, “but——” He never finished the sentence. Across it came a sound which made an end of it and of his opposition for ever, a sound which caused every window in the house to rattle—the deep, sullen boom of a heavy gun. It might have been a couple of miles away.
“There!” exclaimed Louis almost exultantly.
Gilbert’s and the priest’s eyes met.
“Very well, I will let you go,” said the Marquis quietly. “Will you pick your men yourself? I know they will follow you. I will spare you twenty-five; take most—say eighteen—from the second floor.”
Louis saluted, smiling.
“And remember,” went on Château-Foix in an altered voice, “that there are occasions on which it is a man’s duty to get himself killed. . . . I do—I do not think that this is one of them.” He stopped suddenly with a catch of the breath and made a gesture to M. des Graves. “Give him your blessing,” he said.
Louis dropped to his knee, while the priest commended him to the care of his Maker. When he rose he caught at the hand just uplifted in benediction and kissed it. As he raised his eyes he saw Gilbert’s face. The next instant he had his hands on his cousin’s shoulders.
“I promise you—I promise I won’t get killed,” he said between jest and earnest, and Château-Foix took his head between his hands and kissed him on the forehead.
Ten minutes later Louis with his score of men had dashed into the dusk and the wind and the singing bullets.
The minute hand had made more than half the circuit of the Sèvres clock in the Marquise’s boudoir, the dusk had deepened to dark, the sound of firing had drifted away, before the tramp of feet sounded again outside the little pavilion door. Some one knocked vigorously with the hilt of a sword, and the old man waiting anxiously in the passage hastened to undo the bolts. His round of lantern light fell on a white scarf and a smiling mouth.
“God be thanked! You are safe, Monsieur le Vicomte!” he exclaimed in a grave voice, raising the lantern higher.
“As you see, Antoine. We flatter ourselves that we have had a great success, and at but small cost. They have drawn off.”
Saint-Ermay mounted the step as he spoke, bare-headed and flushed, with sparkling eyes. But for his disordered hair and his naked sword he might have been dancing. “They have drawn off,” he repeated. “Come in, men!”
But Antoine with the lantern moved between the young man and his followers, blocking the narrow doorway. “Yes, they have drawn off, M. Louis . . . too late. Monsieur le Marquis——”
“Hit?”
“Half an hour ago. It is good that you are come at last, because—because——”
“God!” said Louis. And he threw down his sword.
They had laid a mattress on the polished floor of the hall, just underneath the turn of the great staircase, and on this Gilbert was lying at full length with a cloak flung across him. On the other side, facing Louis as he put aside the curtain that hung over the doorway, knelt M. des Graves, with a stole over his soutane, and after a moment Louis knew why everybody else in the hall was standing apart from the kneeling and the prostrate figure. Gilbert was making his last confession—had made it, for almost as the realisation of the scene came to him, Saint-Ermay saw the priest lift his hand in absolution. He looked on at what followed as at something happening miles away, with the sense of not being there at all himself; and while peasant and servant knelt, and M. des Graves administered Viaticum, Louis alone stood on his feet where he was, motionless and frozen.
After a while he became aware that M. des Graves was making a sign to him, and he went forward. Of the disarray of Gilbert’s clothing, of bandages, or of blood, he was at the moment hardly conscious; he saw only his face, of an unearthly pallor, accentuated to a startling degree by his scattered black hair and by the dark cushion which supported his head. As Louis knelt down by his side the Marquis looked up quite collectedly, and smiled at him.
“You have come back, Louis . . . as you promised.”
“I wish to God that I had never gone!” exclaimed the Vicomte passionately.
Gilbert slipped his right hand into his. “My dear boy, don’t you know . . . that you saved us? Now you can hold the place . . . till Charette comes up. . . .” His voice failed suddenly, and he shut his eyes with a little sigh as though he were tired, and the last word said.
But Louis was clutching the cold hand to his breast as he bent over him. “O Gilbert—don’t go! For God’s sake, don’t go! . . . I want you . . . I can’t let you go now. . . .”
A gust of wind swept into the hall, and the candle flames bent before it. The priest, kneeling motionless on the other side, with a hand on Château-Foix’ left wrist, began to take his crucifix from his sash.
Louis saw it, and stretched out a barring arm. “No—you shall not put it there!” he said fiercely. “He is not dead—he is not going to die!” His look at M. des Graves was defiance.
For all answer the priest put the little crucifix, not on Gilbert’s breast, but into Louis’ own hand. “Lay it there yourself, my dear child, when it is time,” he said, and in the inexorable tenderness of his gaze the young man saw that the end was indeed come.
Suddenly Gilbert reopened his eyes, and looked slowly from one to the other. Louis felt the hand between his own contract a little, and heard a whisper of his name. He stooped and kissed the Marquis on the mouth. The tears were running down his face like rain. “Good-bye, Gilbert, good-bye!” he whispered brokenly. “Good-bye . . . good-bye. . . .”
“Lift him up a little,” came the priest’s voice, quiet and unshaken, and Louis raised his dying cousin in his arms till his head rested on his own shoulder. Everybody in the hall was kneeling round, and many were sobbing unrestrainedly. M. des Graves began the commendatory prayer; and in the middle of it Gilbert moved his head a little on Louis’ breast, looked at the priest, smiled very faintly, and died without a struggle.
In the low murmur of prayers rising round them Louis knelt on, holding Gilbert’s body in his arms. At last, kissing him again, he laid him gently down. Still looking at him as he lay there, he groped with one hand for the little crucifix which he had put on the floor beside him, and, finding it, laid it on his cousin’s wounded breast and folded his hands over it. Then he got rather suddenly to his feet, saying aloud (though he did not know it): “Is that all?”
And then he saw, standing by the curtained doorway, grim and blood-stained, his drawn sword in his hand, the Chevalier de Charette, and behind him other faces.
“You have come too late,” he said.