The two women in their black draperies came up the wide staircase together in silence, but at the top the elder paused and put her hand on the other’s arm.
“Dear child, I think you are too tired to read to me this evening.”
Lucienne shook her head. “No, indeed not, Madame. I love to do it; please let me come at the usual time.”
And Madame de Château-Foix, after she had given her a kiss, watched her for a moment as she went along the landing, before she too entered her own room.
Only the firelight illumined it, for, though but five o’clock, it was quite dark outside. The Marquise lit the candles on her escritoire, unlocked a drawer and, taking out a little packet of papers tied with a black ribbon, laid them in front of her on the rosewood and sat back in her chair, her hands in her lap.
There are some letters which a woman knows by heart, and which she yet reads every day. Of such was the letter in the bundle before Madame de Château-Foix; she had read it daily for the last three and a half months. But this evening she was slow to spread it out as heretofore, and she knew whence proceeded this hesitation. That letter—Gilbert’s last, written months before his death, found on him and sent to her by M. des Graves—that letter bade her do a thing which she had not yet been able to bring herself to do. And this disobeyed request, this injunction ever speaking from the pages of the last memorial she had of her dead son, was a living reproach to the poor woman, and gave a sharper sting to her agonies of grief. Yet she had instinctively fought against the command. She had told herself that Gilbert was quixotic, like his father—and like M. des Graves. But she knew that she would yield in the end, and now, having made up her mind that what he asked should be done by Christmas Day, she had but a matter of thirty-six hours or so left. And surely she had conquered her repugnance at last.
She untied the bundle and spread out the first letter—not very long, worn and crumpled, strongly creased at the folds and marked in the middle with a long brown stain. The other two of the trinity, treasured but less sacred, she knew by heart also—M. des Graves’ long compassionate epistle, and Louis’ heart-broken scrawl. And she read the first once more, with the tears gathering in her eyes. “O Gilbert, Gilbert, I will do it! Oh, forgive me that I have been so long! But it was hard!” The tears trickled through her ringless fingers, and one fell quietly on the ink of the letter and blurred it.
But when Lucienne tapped at the door some twenty minutes later, it was a gentle and composed voice without trace of tears which bade her enter. The Marquise was not lying on the sofa as was her habit at this hour; she was sitting in a great chair by the fire.
“Come and sit by me here, petite,” she said. “We will not read just yet.”
And Lucienne, catching a cushion off the sofa, sat down on the floor by her, laying her head at once on the elder woman’s knee.
The Marquise’s hand began to pass lightly over her hair. “Has Sir William come back from Bury?” she asked.
“I do not know, Madame. I have been in my room. I hope so, for it is snowing fast.”
“I suppose we must expect snow now,” observed Madame de Château-Foix. “To-morrow is Christmas Eve.”
Lucienne moved a little. “Then it is a year ago to-day,” she said in a low voice, “since I angered you about Mr Trenchard’s flowers. How long ago it seems! . . . and how far away that self seems from this! I was a child then.”
The fingers still caressed her hair, and the eyes above her looked down at her very kindly.
“. . . But I have learnt much since then . . . and most of all from you, Madame.”
The hand stopped. “From me, child!” said the Marquise. “You had better go to another teacher.”
Lucienne raised herself. “Yes, indeed, Madame, from you,” she said, and her eyes were full of tears. “These last three months . . . how you have borne it . . . Oh, I cannot say what I would!” She clasped the Marquise’s knees passionately, and laid her head there again.
“My child—that I was to call daughter,” said Madame de Château-Foix sadly, “I have a confession to make to you; it will show you that, passionately as I loved him, I have done Gilbert a wrong—and you, too. Every day I have been putting off telling you, because it was difficult for me. . . . Gilbert wished you—if he were killed—to marry.”
Lucienne slowly drew away from her support and put her hands over her face. Was she horrified?
“It was his thought for you, Lucienne,” went on the poor mother, as if pleading an excuse. “He did not want your life to be spoiled. That is easy for me to understand. But he went further: he named the man he wished you to marry. Perhaps you could guess him?”
She was trying to spare the girl, not realising that she was but prolonging her pain.
“He wished you, if you wished it too, to marry Louis.”
It was done! Why did Lucienne not speak? And she was shaking all over. A wave of pity went over the Marquise, and she bent forward and put her arms about her shoulders.
“There . . . there . . . we will not speak of it again. I should not have told you yet, my dear. Of course it seems strange to you—poor, poor child!”
But the quivering body drew away from her embrace. “Don’t touch me, Madame!” cried Lucienne wildly, dropping her hands and almost pushing the Marquise away. “I am not fit for you to touch—I should never have been fit to be Gilbert’s wife. . . .”
But Madame de Château-Foix, seeing her profound agitation, did not take these self-accusations very seriously. “Tell me, child,” she said tenderly, “what is wrong. Tell me—Gilbert would have wished it.”
And Lucienne, too overwrought to soften the blow, gasped out: “I knew Gilbert’s wish. He gave me up last March.”
The Marquise fell back in her chair as though she had been shot through the heart. Her face changed till it was an old woman’s. Then there issued from her lips, in an inhuman voice, the single word: “Why?”
At the look on her face Lucienne’s rapidly mounting hysteria was stayed for a moment, and, not for her own sake, but for this stricken mother’s, she tried to put the thing less nakedly. But there was no way.
“Because he knew that Louis loved me, and that I loved Louis,” she said.
There was an awful silence, while the two women faced each other, with a chasm like a grave sprung open between them. Then the Marquise said, half choking: “That black dress . . . it is all part of a lie, then. . . .”
But mercifully Lucienne either did not hear or did not understand. Twisting her hands together she burst out: “Gilbert was all that was generous and noble. Louis and I . . . we saw each other so often . . . we could not help it . . . when he came to the Tuileries, but we never, never meant to speak of it. Then one day . . . it was not Louis’ fault . . . it all came out . . . but he left me, he left me. . . . You do believe me, Madame! M. des Graves believed me. . . . I did try never to think of him . . . you do believe it?” The last note in her voice was ominous of the breaking point.
The Marquise had risen, and, withdrawn a little, stood looking frozenly down at the girl crouched on the floor. “I do not know what to believe,” she said at last. “Every one seems to have known of this—this disgraceful affair but myself.”
“But Gilbert did that to spare you!” cried the girl, flinging out imploring hands. “It was only to spare you—he told me so himself. He found out about Louis and me, and he gave me up . . . Don’t you see that it was to spare you—to spare us all, because he understood. . . .”
But the Marquise gave no sign, and after a minute or two of deadly silence Lucienne’s nerves gave way, and sinking to the floor she broke into sobs full of fragmentary entreaties in which Gilbert’s name was mingled, and out of which detached itself at last, in tortured and direct appeal: “Gilbert, Gilbert, if you were here you would explain. . . .”
Madame de Château-Foix’ hands clenched themselves. “Silence, girl! What right have you now to call on that saint in Paradise? After deceiving him, deceiving me, posing to Sir William and all the household as his widowed betrothed, you have the audacity to talk about explaining and understanding! Explain, indeed! It is a pity that Louis is not here to explain! I always——”
The sobbing girl flared up with extraordinary ardour. “You shall not say anything about Louis! You have always misjudged and belittled him—and yet he did what one man in a million would not have done—and did it for Gilbert’s sake. If any one was to blame it was I—not he . . . no, a thousand thousand times not he! He was no less noble hearted than Gilbert, no less self-sacrificing. . . . And if you knew, you would not be so cruel to me, for it is all over now . . . since he is dead.”
Between the fire of her beginning and the profound, hopeless conviction of her tone at the end, the Marquise’s wrath was stayed for a moment.
“What do you mean?” she ejaculated.
“Why, Louis was killed this morning. Did you not know?” asked Lucienne simply.
Madame de Château-Foix stared at her. “The girl is out of her mind,” she said slowly to herself.
“I dreamed of it all last night,” went on Lucienne with a horrible calm, “and about midday I knew that it was true. I can see him now . . . I think it did not hurt him much . . . he was very tired . . . but he lies there quite cold now—and dead, dead. . . .” And exclaiming, in accents of breathless horror and longing, “Louis, Louis, my love, my love!” she knelt upright and gazed with clasped hands and dilated eyes at a spot on the floor not far from either of them.
And when the Marquise, having shudderingly turned her head in the same direction, was conscious of a distinct feeling of relief at not beholding the lifeless body of her nephew stretched on that tract of carpet, half in firelight, half in shadow, between the hearth and the sofa, she was thoroughly frightened, though she did not show it.
She went quickly to the girl and shook her.
“Lucienne, stop! I cannot have this! Wake up, child, and control yourself. There is nothing there.”
But Lucienne still gazed at the same place, till the passion of love and despair in her eyes was swamped by a rising tide of horror. “Yes, there is blood there,” she said, “a pool of blood . . . and no one to stop it. O Madame, what shall I do? He is dying there and I cannot help him!” She caught the Marquise’s dress in a fierce and frightened grip, and, cowering on the ground, hid her face against it. Madame de Château-Foix, nothing but alarm in her mind, contrived to sit down and to draw the girl with her, and Lucienne knelt there clutching her, and shaken with paroxysms of almost tearless sobs, till those, too, were exhausted, and she slipped down to her old position against the elder woman’s knees.
There was then presented to Madame de Château-Foix one of the great opportunities of life, which, when they come unannounced, go sometimes unrecognised as such. But the Marquise did realise that something great was being demanded of her, something so foreign to her outlook that it was almost beyond her powers, but that for the very sake of the dead son whose memory it seemed to outrage she must try to respond to the call. Moreover, she knew that she must respond at once—not to-morrow or the next day, when the bitterness and shock had a little passed, but now, at this very moment. Yet in that half-hour of tension and reflection, while she mechanically tried to soothe the girl, she saw that she was about to do one of those—to her—fantastic actions, one of those “things which we are not called upon to do,” as she would have phrased it, such as she had sometimes carped at in her husband, or Gilbert, or M. des Graves. She did not realise what the result would be; that she would gain Lucienne for ever; perhaps, indeed, she never realised that she had need to gain her. For Félicité de Chantemerle had not the gift of clear thinking; and so, happily, it did not occur to her to consider that Gilbert, with the best intentions, had been guilty of a measure of duplicity towards her. To her mind his course of action was right, because he had taken it, and there was an end of the matter. Her love for her son had made it hard to bear patiently the news that another man had been preferred before him, but the same love would carry her over this crisis—her love and her rather childlike belief that if she did not act as he would have acted she would never attain to his company in those blessed regions whither she never doubted he had gone—regions which, all unconsciously, she now desired less for their own sake than because he would be there.
The great effort which she made at last was scarcely perceptible in her voice. “Lucienne, look at me . . . I am Gilbert’s mother, and if he could forgive this I must learn to. I promised him once that I would be a mother to you, and I have tried to keep my promise. I am afraid that I have failed many times; I have failed most of all to-night. . . . But I am an old woman, Lucienne, and have always been jealous for my son—perhaps you cannot understand that, but you may some day. It has always seemed to me that . . . others . . . have taken everything, and that he was always ready to give, and never got the appreciation he deserved. But I knew; he was my boy, my very own. . . . Sometimes I was afraid that I loved him too much, and that God would take him from me. . . . And now He has taken him. . . . Some day—not yet—I shall learn to thank Him for the death He has sent him. . . .” She struggled for a moment, and went on: “Since I was allowed to be his mother, I must be worthy of it. And so, my dear child, we will put away . . . all this . . . and you shall be my daughter really . . . if you can care for a mother who has loved her son too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now, my child, you must be brave, and remember that because we have not heard from Louis since November it probably only means that his letters have miscarried. And he will soon be here—he will soon be here! You shall have him, I promise you!” She stroked the head on her breast. “My poor child, what you have suffered!”
“But Louis is dead,” repeated Lucienne. “Do not tell me that he will come, for that hurts more . . . and in time, perhaps, I shall get used to it . . . like all the other things. . . .”
“My child,” said the Marquise, fighting down her fears, “you are very greatly overwrought. All these fancies come from what you have gone through; when you are better you will forget them. Now kiss me, and go and bathe your eyes. . . . That’s right.” She studied the girl’s marred face for a moment. “An idea has just occurred to me, my dear; yes, I believe it would be an excellent plan. Only this afternoon Lady Milton was telling Amelia of the benefit which her daughter has derived from the waters of Bath. I shall most certainly take you to Bath after Christmas.”
Downstairs in the hall Sir William, with a very grave face, was reading to his son and daughter, out of the newspaper which he had brought over from Bury, the belated and scanty news of the irretrievable disaster which had overtaken the Vendean army at Le Mans twelve days before.
“Practically cut to pieces,” he summed up, finishing. “Good God, how shall we tell them!”
CHAPTER XLV
THERMOPYLÆ
It was not yet dawn. In the darkness of the Bois des Amourettes (the name held a horrible irony), huddled together for warmth, wet to the skin with the frozen rain, worn out with hunger and with the long retreat from Normandy, all that the terrible catastrophe at Le Mans had left of the Vendean host waited for the dawn and death. Eighty thousand souls, men, women, and children, they had crossed the Loire sixty-five days ago; a bare six thousand now remained to die in this corner of Brittany, hemmed in between two rivers and the sea.
To-morrow, which they should never see, was Christmas Eve. Yesterday morning, with the Republicans on their heels, they had marched into the little town of Savenay; last night they had taken up their stand on the rising ground above it, and all through the hours of darkness, like birds of prey, the legions of the Republic had gathered, twenty thousand strong, under great names, Marceau, Tilly, Westermann, Kléber, to exterminate the forlorn remnant of a once victorious foe. And they, too, waited for the dawn. . . .
In the extreme eastern corner of the wood, at the very end of the Vendean lines, near a miserable fire, which the rain had half extinguished, a young man was sitting against a tree with the head of another on his knees. The prostrate man was wrapped in what appeared to be part of the hangings of a bed, flowered brown and yellow; he who was sitting up wore what had once been the brilliant uniform of a garde-du-corps, tattered now and faded beyond all recognition. A blood-stained and very dirty rag was tied round his forehead, and his hair fell unkempt about his shoulders; he looked pinched with cold and fatigue, but his eyes were steady. It was Louis de Saint-Ermay. Round the two, clad, some of them, in the most fantastic garments, some merely in their rags, lay all that remained of the three hundred and fifty odd men who, nine months before, had called on the Marquis de Château-Foix to lead them to victory. There were just thirteen.
As he sat there waiting in the fine cold rain, warm only where the weight of the wounded man and a little of his covering lay across his knees, there swept before the Vicomte all the issues of the past four months. Since Gilbert had died in his arms, what a rosary of disasters had been theirs to tell! It had been a chaplet of desperate fighting, the ebb and flow of a bitter tide, a contest fought and refought over every foot of Vendean soil; but the beads, as they slipped in memory through the fingers, spoke only of the gradual quenching of the light of victory, of the appearance of disunion, of their double defeat at La Tremblay and at Cholet in mid-October, with Bonchamps and Lescure mortally wounded, and, as its consequence, the thrice fatal decision to leave their own province and to press on northwards of the Loire. Then that never-to-be-forgotten crossing of the wide river, with the smoke of their burning villages behind them, Bonchamps’ death on the further bank, and Lescure’s, horribly protracted, on the march through Maine. And the march itself, a slow serpent of a column miles in length, hampered with old and wounded, with children and women, the exodus of an entire people, with a young man of one-and-twenty for its leader. Then, when Normandy was reached at last, the abortive attack on the port of Granville, unsuccoured by the aid from England for which they had hoped; and after that, the agonising retreat, marked by combats at every halting-place, with forces dwindling day by day, till the final overthrow at Le Mans, with its whirlwind of slaughter. . . . And as if that were not enough, for those who survived it the scenes on the bank of the Loire, when the remnant attempted to recross the river to die in Vendée and found it impossible for want of boats, when, by a cruel mistake, Stofflet and La Rochejaquelein traversed it with a handful of followers, only to fall, probably, into the hands of the enemy on the other side. Then, their general separated from them for ever and their last hope of safety vanished, the influx of the courage of despair which bade most of them turn to bay and die here, sword in hand.
And from these red visions Louis’ thoughts went still further backwards. Centuries ago he had led a pleasant and irresponsible life in Paris, agreeably gilded by danger and intrigue, but not shot through, like this existence, in every hour, every minute, at every footstep with the need for endurance. Centuries ago he and Gilbert had stood with an Englishman at the parting of the ways at Candé; how well—though distantly—he had remembered it the other day, when they marched through the place. And the peasant whom centuries ago he had watched talking at midnight with Gilbert and La Rouërie he had seen since, riding into Laval to join them, his Chouans behind him. These memories, woven of threads which seemed to be torn from different existences, were confusing, phantasmagoric. How far away seemed even that amazing night when Gilbert had given up to him his claim, when he had welcomed with joy the call to arms, before he had learnt what that call was to mean.
But Gilbert’s weight in his hold, his head on his breast, his own kisses, the look on his face when he lay dead, those things were always near. It was partly for them, for all that made Gilbert’s memory dear and sacred to him, that he had followed to this bitter end the failing fortunes of the cause, instead of throwing down a sword grown blunted, and turning, as he might have done at Granville, to find safety—and something more—across the sea. He had never really contemplated that alternative, but he had thought to himself once or twice that, if there were such a thing as a meeting beyond the grave, Gilbert would approve him. And in that case the moment of approbation was very near now.
Louis was not disturbed at the prospect; he had faced it too often. And amid the wreck of everything that makes a man’s life, of family ties, of high and warlike hopes, of love itself, he had retained a kind of serenity—a gift not always to be found in conjunction with a brilliant and reckless courage such as his, and proportionately the more valuable in the hour of disaster. Yet Gilbert was dead; M. des Graves was gone—killed or taken at Le Mans, he knew not which—he should never see Lucienne now. She would be making holly wreaths in England to-day. . . .
He shivered suddenly, and gently removing the head of his wounded follower from his knee, replaced the coverlet over him, and, getting to his feet, began to pace up and down to keep warm. The doglike eyes of Toussaint Lelièvre followed him from the ground as he went. Here and there a head was raised to look at him. But not all were sleeping or pretending to sleep. Many were on their knees; and under a tree two young men, finishing a long conversation, gave each other the kiss of farewell.
It grew a little lighter. Louis beat his arms about him and tried to whistle an air, but his lips were too stiff. Like everybody else, he was wet to the bone, for his uniform was more than threadbare, and he had no cloak. But only two things mattered now: this nerve-trying waiting for a death to which one was resigned—and Lucienne. . . . He thrust a hand beneath his coat and felt her miniature on his breast. Into whose possession would it fall . . . afterwards? “But I shan’t be worth stripping,” he thought to himself, looking down at his rags. At the last he would kiss it; that was the only farewell he could make.
Presently out of the cold gloom came riding a dim form. “Is that you, M. de Saint-Ermay?”
Louis drew himself up and saluted. Bernard de Marigny leant his tall figure from the saddle. “How many men have you left, Monsieur?”
“Fourteen,” replied the Vicomte; “and one wounded.”
Marigny made a gesture. “Not enough! We are going to attack directly it is light. Since they are three to one it is better than waiting for them. If you had had fifty men I would have given you the forlorn hope. As it is you must stay here. I shall place a couple of guns in this corner of the wood, with your men and those of M. des Nouhes. You will not be able to hold it long, but remain as long as possible, and then—save the guns if you can.”
“Very good, mon général,” replied Louis tranquilly, though he was conscious of a surprisingly keen pang of disappointment. “Who will lead the forlorn hope then?”
“La Roche-Saint-André, probably.”
“Lucky devil!” observed Louis. “He will have a chance to get warm.”
Marigny turned his horse. “We shall all be equally cold to-night,” he said significantly. “Good-bye, Saint-Ermay.” He wrung Louis’ hand and rode back.
And as the light filtered a little more rapidly through the leafless tree, drawing on to the fatal dawn, the wood began to stir. Some even made shift to relight the dead fires and to cook their last meal. Louis’ outward preparation for death consisted in tearing a strip of shabby silver lace from his sleeve and tying back his hair with it. Marigny’s two cannons came up, and with them a score of Des Nouhes’ men from Les Aubiers, La Rochejaquelein’s country. Louis shook hands with their commander, who wore a woman’s petticoat pinned about his breast, and sabots. Then he went towards his own little contingent.
“My children,” he said, “we have come to our last fight. Let us show the Angevins here that we are as much men as they, and die as Monsieur le Marquis would have had us. For myself, I give you my word of honour that I will stay by the guns as long as there is ammunition left.”
He went round to shake hands with the little group, but they all demanded permission to embrace him, and Toussaint Lelièvre clung to him passionately, whispering hoarse and broken words: “If only I could die for you, M. Louis! . . .”
“Eh, mon ami,” said Saint-Ermay, disengaging himself, “we have all got to die some time, and this, apparently, is the hour. The only thing that matters is the manner of our dying.”
The young Vendean looked at him with his eyes full of tears. “If you fall,” he said almost fiercely, “I will save you. . . .”
And from the hillside came through the dawn the first sudden rattle of musketry.
Louis wiped the sweat from his forehead with his frayed scarlet cuff, and leant a moment breathless against the gun which he had been helping to drag nearer to the edge of the copse. He had no cause to complain of cold now. “How many more rounds?” he asked.
Panting, begrimed, blood-stained, the four men at the gun looked at him. “Three,” said the eldest solemnly, and the voice of Toussaint Lelièvre added sharply: “Monsieur le Vicomte, you are wounded!”
Louis shrugged his shoulders, and glanced down carelessly at the gash above his knee, whence the blood was coursing unheeded into his high boot. “Three? Carefully then, mes enfants. . . .”
In front, between them and Savenay, could be seen a blue and white mass, advancing slowly but steadily, and firing as it came. A little behind it, to the left, almost motionless, was visible a body of horsemen—the hussars of Westermann, the man who knew no pity. The gun roared. Louis looked a moment longer through the twigs, and then, catching up a musket, knelt down again on the dead leaves and went on firing.
The leaden sky, the cold rain, the position of the gun on the edge of a wood, all seemed a replica of three hours ago. Yet all was changed. The day was lost, and the wood was not the same. When first the Vendeans attacked with the fury of despair, they had driven in the outposts of the château of Touchelais, but afterwards they had been slowly forced back on to the Bois des Amourettes, where Marigny’s battery had checked for a time Marceau’s onset. In their corner of the wood Louis’ men and Des Nouhes’ Angevins, ravaged by the grape-shot, fell, re-formed, fell faster. At last it was impossible to hold the wood any longer. Even then they saved the guns.
And then they were down in Savenay, and Savenay was a nightmare—a repetition of the unspeakable carnage of Le Mans. By every inlet flooded through the united columns of Marceau and Kléber, Tilly and Canuel. And first Louis was in the square by the church, always with the guns, holding a street full of hussars in check. Then, in some inexplicable fashion, a torrent of fugitives tore both him and Des Nouhes away from their men, and they were flung to the other side of the square, right under the hoofs of a squadron of dragoons who came like a whirlwind out of another street. Des Nouhes was sabred at Saint-Ermay’s side, and in a doorway Louis saw a boy of fourteen, Armand de Beaurepaire, cut to pieces with the Comte, his grandfather, because he would not surrender. But death would none of him—only a dragoon slashed at him as he struggled to rise. After that he had tried to work his way back across the tossing square to the guns, inwardly thanking God that, at least, the women and children were gone—he could not bear to see that again. . . . He caught sight of a fresh stream of fugitives. Half of them were women. From the sleeve of one of them, quite young, and by her face of gentle birth, protruded a dripping stump. . . . And a red fury banished his frozen calm. At the tail of the press was Marigny, on horseback, in his hand the white standard Madame de Lescure had once embroidered for him. Louis had wrestled through to him, had caught at his bridle and cried in a breaking voice that there were still women in the town, and Marigny, death in his face, had replied that he was trying to get them out by the Guérande road. . . . And not long after that, profiting by the diversion caused by Fleuriot and Donnissan, who, disdaining to fly, had opened a passage back into Savenay with the bayonet, they had succeeded in getting the two guns out of the shambles, along the road. More nightmare scenes. . . .
Then, with but one gun, he was here in the wood of Blanche-Couronne, with Marigny, four times that day repulsed by the death he sought, and old Donnissan, and Fleuriot, and a few score more, holding it in a last desperate effort to protect the rout, to postpone, if only for half an hour, the ultimate slaughter. But five minutes more would see the end. . . .
Less, perhaps. There was a stir along the border of the wood to his right, wild voices, men scrambling to the saddle, running. And Louis’ musket snapped uselessly—the cartridges were too wet. He threw it down and drew his sword.
Marigny galloped past. “Save yourself, Saint-Ermay!” he cried. “Make for the marshes!”
Louis shook his head. He would not leave his men, and the gun. Besides, what was the use? He had no fancy for being slaughtered in a ditch; he preferred to die standing, and in the open.
The gun by him spoke for the last time, and almost immediately Toussaint Lelièvre pitched forward on his face.
And suddenly Louis, who, all through the war, in his maddest exploits had never been touched by a bullet, knew that he should not die by a bullet now, and was glad. The grenadiers had ceased to advance. In front of them, racing madly towards the slope, came on the cavalry they had screened. Westermann’s hussars were coming to clear out the wood; the pounding of their nearing hoofs on the wet grass was like the beat of the last pulses of life. The three men at the guns were on their knees, reciting their acts of contrition, calm, as if they had been in church. Only a little sob broke from one, the youngest. Louis turned towards them, brought his sword to the salute, and, walking very coolly to a tree a few yards away, set his back against it and waited.
There was just here a little hedge for a boundary to the copse. Would their horses take it well . . . as Saladin would have done? . . . Yes; in a moment they were over it gallantly, their red, fur-edged pelisses flying. They seemed in an enormous hurry. A couple of them, striking right and left, despatched in an instant the three men by the gun. Then the line swept on. And Louis straightened himself as he saw death riding at him—a big man on a roan horse, something restive. Under his high red and black headgear his fair, stupid face glistened with exertion; his doubled tresses of plaited hair hung to his shoulders. As he passed Louis he cut savagely at him. Louis sprang a little to one side, the roan swerved, and Saint-Ermay parried the stroke, though not entirely, for the point of the sabre bit into his collarbone. The force of the blow sent him back for a second against the tree-trunk, and another hussar was on him, young, dark, smiling sardonically. Leaning from the saddle, this man made as though to cut, then, suddenly stooping, thrust instead.
“Take that, brigand!” he cried, his smile widening.
The long, heavy blade, with the momentum of the horse behind it, went leaping treacherously under the Vicomte’s raised guard, and drove through the tarnished silver facings full into his breast.
Louis was conscious of a spasm of rending pain, of a conviction that he was pinned to the tree behind him (which was momentarily true), of the horseman’s laugh as he wrenched out his sword and rode on . . . then of a noisy, rushing red mist and a sensation of falling.
For all that he stood swaying for an instant by the tree, with his mouth full of blood, and but one unreasoning thought in his mind—to get back to the gun to die. And observing him to be still on his feet, though visibly not long to remain there, another hussar, looking over his shoulder, wheeled his horse with the intention of giving him the coup de grâce. Louis did not see him. He could indeed see nothing now, but with his head thrown back in agony, and both hands pressed to his breast, whence the blood poured hot through his fingers, he took a couple of blind paces forward in the direction where he imagined the gun to be. Then he staggered, flung out his hands, and fell.
The hussar, whose arm was already raised to strike, glanced carelessly down at him and did not trouble to dismount. “He has his affair already, parbleu,” he muttered, and, swinging his sabre till it whistled through the air, rode after his comrades.
Louis made one or two convulsive movements, and then, with a long shuddering sigh, lay still, his arms spread wide and the rain falling on his upturned face.
A peasant began to crawl very slowly forward from the little heap by the gun. A red foam hung on his lips, and as he dragged himself along he left a dark track on the damp leaves. Twice in his difficult progression he sank down, gasping, but in the end he reached the body which he sought, and peered into its ashen face. As he bent over it his own blood mingled with the stream which still soaked through Louis’ ragged blue and scarlet, and which, joining with the trickle creeping slowly from beneath him, was forming a little pool at his side. With shaking hands the wounded man tried to unfasten the Vicomte’s uniform; he got it open a little way at the throat, and then the uselessness of his action seemed to overcome him, and, groaning, he looked wildly round for something to staunch the steady red rivulet within. His eyes fell on the white scarf which encircled his young leader’s body; but it was worn under the sword-belt, and Toussaint Lelièvre, with but a few seconds to live himself, knew that he could not unfasten the clasp and unwind the scarf in time. . . . He carried his hands to the sash round his own waist, and, coughing, crouched on his heels, fumbled with the end. He got it unfastened . . . but it was a long woollen strip wound round many times. . . . In a supreme gesture of despair and farewell he tore his rosary from his buttonhole, and, with heaven knows what vague idea of its efficacy, tried to put it into Saint-Ermay’s slack, out-flung hand—the last and only office in his power. Even that he could scarcely do. The chaplet dropped waveringly into Louis’ palm, and Toussaint Lelièvre fell dead across him.
CHAPTER XLVI
WRECKAGE
The door opened a little way, heavy sabots clattered over the high stone sill on to the floor of beaten earth within, and the door closed again.
“Perrine,” said the old man who had entered, speaking Breton, “it is arranged. I have left Marie-Pierre behind at Coatsaliou’s house to fetch him.”
The woman who sat dozing in the ingle-nook gave a start. “Eh, ma Doué, is it you, Mathurin? What did you say? I was half asleep.”
The aged Breton, thin, bent, his meagre white hair falling over his bowed shoulders, began to shuffle towards her, then, as if remembering something, stopped, and slipping his bare feet out of straw-stuffed sabots, pattered on noiselessly without the latter. “Listen,” he said, sitting down beside his wife. “When Coatsaliou brings the good priest safe from Besné to his house he will find Marie-Pierre there—I left him behind on purpose—and when the Révérend has refreshed himself, Marie-Pierre will tell him how we have here a wounded Vendean, and how we fear he is dying, and that he cannot have the sacraments because Monsieur le Recteur is driven away. Then Marie-Pierre will bring the abbé here, and he can confess the young man and give him the last sacraments and go on his way.”
Madame Gloannec, many years younger than her husband—she was his second wife—lifted her coiffed head and looked doubtful. “You say it is arranged, Mathurin, but supposing the priest cannot come? After all, he is himself escaping, is he not, from Nantes? Perhaps he will think the risk too great.”
“Is it likely, Perrine, that he will not come when he hears that the young man is dying without the sacraments, and he a priest of the Vendeans!”
“You do not know who he is, the abbé?”
“No more than Noel Coatsaliou himself. But Noel says that he must be somebody very important, because of the money that must have been spent to get him out of Nantes, and the difficulty of making all these arrangements for guiding him to the coast. Probably he is very holy; it will be blessed for us to have him in this house.” He took snuff vigorously, and with an air appreciative of future spiritual benefits.
“And for the young man,” added his wife. “Thank God that we have been able to get him a priest at the last. . . . But to think,” she added sadly, “that there was a time when we thought we should save the poor boy.”
“Dame! I never thought so, with a wound like that!”
“Then why did you and Marie-Pierre bring him in, at such a risk?—No, Mathurin, you know you thought so, too. . . . It is six weeks yesterday since you found him.”
“Christmas Eve it was,” assented old Gloannec, putting away his snuff-box and brushing himself. “Well, I for one am not sorry that the good God has decided to take him to Himself, and, without disrespect, I think He might have made up His mind earlier.”
“Because the poor young man has suffered so much, you mean?” said his wife. “Yes, you are right there. But last night, when I was up with him, he had not nearly so much pain as usual. Yet it is a bad sign that he is so much weaker. He is worn out, I think.”
“If only we could have had a surgeon,” said Mathurin. “Well, well. . . . Yet, thank the saints, if we have not been able to do much for his body, we shall have done the best we could for his soul, and may God have mercy on it.”
He had scarcely completed the sign of the cross with which he accompanied this pious adjuration before the latch of the door clicked. They had neither of them heard the approaching footsteps.
As M. des Graves, following his tall young guide, and clad like him in Breton dress, stepped out of the whipping February blast into the warm kitchen, the place appeared to him to be much darker than it really was. Then, as the apparent gloom lightened, he saw, in the greenish light of the peat fire, the three Breton faces looking at him with a reverent and wistful attention.
“First of all give us your blessing, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Mathurin, hobbling forward. “It is long since we had a priest in this house.” And with his wife and his son he fell on his knees to receive it.
As they rose M. des Graves glanced instinctively towards the lit clos, which, with its carved panels, its chest, and its little holy-water stoup, stood as usual in the corner by the hearth. Madame Gloannec saw the look.
“No, Monsieur l’Abbé: he is above, in the granary. It is a poor place for a sick man, but it was safer in case the Blues searched for fugitives. Indeed, they did so once, and we had to cover the bed with hay. Will your Reverence come to him now?”
“He is conscious, I suppose?” asked the priest. “How long has he been in danger?”
“Ma foi, I scarcely know,” replied Madame Gloannec. “We are but ignorant people, mon père, and could not have a surgeon. And he was desperately hurt. At first, when Mathurin and Marie-Pierre brought him in, six weeks ago, with a horrible wound right through his body, we thought he was dying. We did what we could; then he got a little better, then worse, then better again, and so it has gone on until the last few days, when he has been much worse. Yesterday we were sure that he was sinking. So, knowing that your Reverence was about to pass through on the way to Ste. Reine, I asked him if he would like to see a priest, and he said yes. He was quite conscious half an hour ago, and I think he has little pain now, but he has suffered very much.” The tears were in her eyes as she added that if the priest wished to give him extreme unction the sacred oils were still in the little church near by, and could be speedily fetched. The tabernacle was empty. But, since the army had crossed the Loire, M. des Graves had always carried the Blessed Sacrament with him, and he had but to despatch Marie-Pierre to the church, which was done.
Mounting the narrow, ladder-like stairs after Madame Gloannec, the priest found himself in the space under the roof, used, as always in Brittany, for a loft and store-room. In one corner was a large pile of fodder, into which, at their approach, a mouse ran squeaking. Strings of onions hung from the sloping rafters; a brazier, now nearly extinct, had been lit to dispel the cold, and it was evident that its smoke escaped but ill by the hole which had been knocked in the roof for that purpose. One small window let in a muffled daylight, and near it, on a miserable pallet bed, under a dirty and faded coverlet, was the outline of a human form, lying, slightly huddled up, on its right side, with its face turned away from the door, and consequently invisible.
Madame Gloannec placed a crazy chair at the head of the bed for the priest, and going round to the other side of the pallet bent down.
“Mon enfant,” she said in a tone of extraordinary gentleness, and as if she were indeed speaking to a child—even to her own child—“mon enfant, here is the good priest come to you. You wish him to confess you, do you not?”
Evidently she received an answer in the affirmative, though none was audible to M. des Graves; and after a moment’s hesitation she slipped her arms under the dying man, gently lifting him a little so that he should lie on his back. And as his head sank back in profile on the low pillow M. des Graves recognised him.
He was terribly altered; his face, with its shadows, its pinched nostrils and hollow temples, waxlike in pallor and transparency. Round the mouth and on the brow was scored the track of past pain, but what every lineament bore most plainly was the stamp of an exhaustion so profound that it seemed as if physical suffering must be over now for ever—could have no more power over the body on which it had so fully worked its will. Indeed, after the first lightning shock of recognition the priest asked himself if they could really be Louis’ features, so completely had all trace of the lazy vitality which was once their characteristic and their charm ebbed away from their sharpened contours.
Madame Gloannec, occupied in arranging the pillow and the coverings, did not hear the stifled exclamation which rose to M. des Graves’ lips. A momentary fierce conflict shook him between his instinctive craving to bend at once over Louis, to call him by his name, to assure himself if indeed he were dying, as they said, to tell him that he was near him, to comfort him . . . and the conviction that nothing personal must be suffered to distract the young man at this supreme moment, and that the poor remnants of his strength had to be used for something else than a greeting which would shake and try them. And the priest was victorious over the friend. M. des Graves deliberately set his chair where Louis could not see him without completely turning his head, an action which was probably quite beyond his powers, and pulling out a shabby stole, sat down. Madame Gloannec crept from the room.
The roughly-shorn brown head—they had cut off his long hair—moved very slightly on the pillow, and the half-shut, dark-lidded eyes opened.
“I am here, my son,” said M. des Graves instantly, praying that Louis might not know his voice. “I will say your Confiteor for you, since you are very ill, and afterwards, my child, accuse yourself of such sins as you can remember.”
Louis did not know the familiar voice. He sighed, moved his hands a little on the coverlet, and began. His own voice was as changed as the rest of him. For a few minutes it went on, weak and trailing, halting for breath, stumbling over words, and then began to show a significant tendency to repeat the same phrases over and over again.
M. des Graves interposed at once. “That is enough, my son. You have made a sufficient confession. ‘For these and all my other sins’——”
But Louis scarcely heeded him. His brain, spurred by its recent costly effort at concentration, was beginning to hurry him towards the regions of delirium, yet not so fast but that he seemed to know it, and to make painful attempts to regain control of his thoughts. “For these and all my other sins,” he repeated mechanically. “Gilbert, you must believe me. My God! you don’t think that! . . . which I cannot now remember . . . which I cannot . . . I cannot remember about Gilbert . . . but he is dead, and it is my fault . . . because I hated him . . . and now he is dead. . . . Marigny, Marigny, there are women in the town . . . we have only three rounds left . . . no, I shall stay by the gun. . . . O God! will the pain never cease! . . . I did not think it was so difficult to die. . . . Gilbert was lucky; he died quickly. . . . O Gilbert, if you would only listen! . . . mon père, he keeps turning away his head . . . but I never betrayed him . . . God knows I never betrayed him. . . .”
“Louis, Louis!” exclaimed M. des Graves, in great distress, careless that he used the name, and horrified at witnessing the sands of life slipping away in a fashion so useless and so heart-rending. His remonstrance had no result except to wake in the wandering mind some faint echo of the past.
“It is no use, Father . . . let me go! He says I have no honour . . . he will not listen because he is dead . . . dead . . .” The broken voice paused for an instant, and, losing something of its fever, began to grow weaker. “How wide the river is . . . they will never all get across . . . there are so many dead . . . Lescure was a long time dying . . . and Royrand. . . . I cannot remember any more. . . . For all my sins, which I cannot now remember. . . . If only M. des Graves . . . were here . . . but he is . . . dead, too. . . .” And suddenly he exclaimed, on a note of horror: “Gilbert, who gave you that wound?”
But at the appeal to himself the priest could bear it no longer. Better the risk of shock than this fatal expenditure of strength. He got up from his place, and, kneeling down by the side of the bed where the young man could see him, took one of the thin hands into his own. “Louis, my dear child, I am here. You must not imagine these things; they are not true. All was well between you and Gilbert; do you not remember? You have made a good confession. Try now to recollect yourself while I give you absolution.”
His revelation had all the effect he could have desired, and none of those he feared. The faint voice died down into silence. But Louis was too near death for anything to surprise him. He looked up at M. des Graves quietly, accepting his presence naturally and without wonder. His hand moved in the priest’s, the transient shadow of a smile flickered for an instant round his drawn mouth, he gave a long sigh, perhaps of contentment, perhaps of fatigue, and his eyelids fell.
M. des Graves stood up and gave him absolution. Then he knelt down again, and after a long look at the young, worn face stooped and kissed it.
The Vicomte reopened his lustreless eyes. The question in them was unmistakable.
“I think so, my dear child,” said the priest solemnly.
And Louis received the fiat with the same dreamy composure as that with which he had accepted M. des Graves’ presence. The priest had the impression that, once his mind was quieted, the mere sensation of respite from prolonged physical pain flooded it to the exclusion of any other emotion. But even as he thought this Saint-Ermay slowly and with difficulty raised his right hand and began to grope underneath his coarse shirt. Finding nothing there but his bandages he turned away his head, and M. des Graves, following his gaze, beheld, hanging by a rusty nail to the rafters, its ribbon worn and very faded, the miniature of Lucienne. Louis made a gesture towards it that was half a gesture of farewell, and his hand fell on the coverlet.
The priest went round and took down the portrait. The brilliants of its setting were clogged with something dried and brown. He put it into Louis’ hand, and the fingers closed round it, but the hand itself, inexpressibly wasted, seemed to be incapable of further effort, and remained lying there inert. Louis sighed, and murmured something inaudible; then, with a visible effort, he said slowly and distinctly, “Thank you, Father. That is all. . . .” And, adding much more faintly, “I am very tired,” he closed his eyes again.
“My child,” said M. des Graves, bending close above him, “it may yet be God’s purpose that you should live. We do not know, and in our ignorance we can do nothing. But you submit yourself to His Will, do you not, Louis? . . . And now, my dear child, shall I give you the last sacraments?”
The young man, without opening his eyes, made a little motion of the head, and M. des Graves, going to the door, called for Marie-Pierre and the sacred oils.
The beautiful and significant rite went forward, the young Breton assisting. At its beginning Louis was still conscious, but when M. des Graves came to anoint his palms, and tried very gently to disengage the miniature from his right hand, he evidently did not know what was happening, and seemed to wish to retain it. By the end he had sunk quietly into insensibility.
“You cannot give him le bon Dieu, mon père,” said Marie-Pierre in a whisper. “He is going.” Crossing himself, he dropped to his knees.
But M. des Graves, with his hand on the Vicomte’s wrist, said nothing for a moment. The tiny thread of life, flickering under his fingers, woke in him a hope disproportionate to its frail pulsations. He listened to his heart, lifted an eyelid.
“I think he may at least last the night,” he said quietly, “and I should like to stay with him. I have known him since he was a boy.”
Fantastic shadows were cast about the loft by the wavering rush-light, as, powerless to aid, M. des Graves watched there over the existence which seemed likely to go out even before the short-lived candle. But, listening to the shallow, fluttering breathing from the bed, the priest thanked God that whether Louis was to live or die, he had been able to come to him in his need. If the name of another Chantemerle—the last—was to be added to the roll-call of the noble army of martyrs, for that too he would thank Him; and, most of all, that the breath of the furnace, passing over the nature that was too hard and the nature that was too volatile, had proved them both of the same metal. So, diverse as they were in all else, the same august altar had claimed them at last, Gilbert in his hasty grave at Chantemerle, and Louis, the gay and irresponsible, lying here wrecked and dying from the very circumstances which had brought his undiscovered fine qualities to the birth. For in the hardships and disasters of the campaign beyond the Loire, Louis had displayed, to M. des Graves’ eyes, a more brilliant courage than when, at La Rochejaquelein’s side, he had dashed without a single follower on to the bridge at Château-Gontier, and a heroism of endurance the more wonderful because nothing in his character or breeding had seemed to promise it.
Well, it was over now, that and the long weeks of illness, of pain and of insufficient care. God was good; He knew best. Often He vouchsafed the crown of martyrdom to the young and withheld it from the old. His own had waited for him long at Nantes in the cold waters of the Loire, in the fusillades at the quarries. But when he had thought to grasp it, it was withdrawn from him.
Towards midnight Madame Gloannec stole up to the granary. M. des Graves rose from the pallet, by which he was praying, and they stood together looking down in silence at its burden. Louis had not stirred since he had become unconscious; his hands were still lightly crossed on his breast as the priest had laid them after extreme unction, and in this posture, with his head thrown back on the low pillow, he had the aspect of an effigy in pale ivory, touched with a kind of morbid beauty and rendering with fidelity not only the calm, but the deadly fatigue preceding dissolution. The woman after a little while of gazing threw her apron over her head, and, turning away, was shaken with silent sobs; then, without a word, she left the priest again to his vigil.
And there came to the watcher very clearly the remembrance of standing with Louis by Gilbert’s bier before the altar, in the sacramental radiance of the tall candles, and looking at the great peace of his face. . . . Louis’ own face, now, was not so different. . . .
CHAPTER XLVII
HOW A VOW WAS KEPT
When the dawn broke Louis was still alive. It was all that could be said; yet when the cold daylight was fully come, and the priest could get a clearer view of his face, drowned as it was in the waves of an unfathomable sleep, he thought that it looked a little less deathlike. And surely his breathing was more natural.
He stayed by him all that day, and when night came a mattress was placed for him on the floor of the loft. The good Bretons were impressed to tears by his determination to remain with the wounded man instead of continuing his journey towards safety, and, set against the privilege of having a priest in their dwelling, the danger of his presence appeared negligible.
And next morning, early, ere the rush-light was extinguished, Louis stirred a little and opened eyes that were indeed unseeing, but which at least had the light of life in them. He did not know M. des Graves, but, too weak even to turn his head on the pillow, accepted his good offices like a child. Sometimes he seemed on the point of recognising his nurse, at others he was perfectly indifferent to his presence. Later in the day, with the assistance of Madame Gloannec, M. des Graves set about examining and dressing his injuries. Even his lesser hurts were not fully healed, and as for the sabre thrust which had transfixed him, the priest was little short of horrified at the methods which the peasants in their well-meaning ignorance and their want of appliances had followed. But for Louis’ youth and constitution, he must have succumbed already to such bungling treatment; perhaps it was even now too late to save him.
The operation was over at last.
“One sees that you have studied, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Madame Gloannec, collecting the scattered dressings and strips of linen.
“A little, in my youth,” answered the priest absently, looking down at his semi-conscious patient, who lay between them moaning faintly. “I am afraid that we have hurt him. My poor child. . . .” He laid his hand on the Vicomte’s forehead, gently smoothing off it the tendrils of brown hair, caught there by the sweat of fever and weakness.
“You love him, mon père,” said the Breton woman softly. “Ah well, so do I—as if he were my own son. He was like a son to me—when he could speak.”
“Was he ever able to tell you his name?” asked M. des Graves. “I suppose not.”
“Mais si, Monsieur l’Abbé. Saint-Ermay. But you did not ask it when you came, and we never thought——”
“Nor I. I never hoped or guessed. Yet I was led here. . . . Yes, I have known and loved him always.” He was still passing his hand over the hot, damp brow, and Louis had ceased to moan and was lying quiet.
“He loves you too, that is plain,” said Madame Gloannec, coming round to the priest’s side. “See, although he does not know you, that eases the pain—your hand there! And he has suffered enough already, God knows. But I will stay with him now, mon père, if you will go down and eat some soup with Mathurin and Marie-Pierre. . . . Let us see, my child, if I cannot get you to sleep.”
She sat down by the bed, and as M. des Graves went down the rickety stairs he heard her crooning gently the old Breton song of the miller girl of Pontaro, with its strange monotonous refrain on two notes, that was like the turning of the mill-wheel—