CHAPTER XXXI
The Paying of the Score
(1)
Quiberon once more, place of intolerable memories, that Fortuné had thought never to see again, and the sea, blue and sparkling, breaking idly on the white sand that a few days had sufficed to wash clean of blood and tears.
It was thus that it had greeted La Vireville's eyes this afternoon, at the end of the long and dusty march back along that via dolorosa from Auray. For when he left Mme. de Chaulnes' presence he was included in a draft that was being taken back to Quiberon to be tried by a commission there. It was in vain that La Vireville had protested that he had already been judged and condemned—that he had, in fact, a right to be shot at Auray. It was useless, and he had to go.
He found himself this evening herded for the night, with these fresh comrades marked for death, in a stone-walled field, with a sentry at every ten paces outside. They were to appear before the commission next morning. Most of them had in their pockets a hunch of bread, but the long hot march had made them very thirsty, and water was hard to come by. La Vireville contrived to procure some, and shared it with a grey-haired émigré of Loyal-Emigrant from Poitou.
"To our last night on earth!" said the old man tranquilly as he took it, and thanked him.
"I have already had one 'last night,'" replied the Chouan, with rather a wry smile. "I did not expect another. But at least it is under the stars this time."
He settled himself under the lee of a wall to sleep. The stars indeed were very bright, save just near the moon. In the silence he could hear the surf breaking on the rocks of the western shore. He was tired, but he did not sleep as he had slept last night at Auray, after his condemnation. This place was too bitterly full of memories. One in particular, that of his lost friend, haunted him, and he recalled his promise to him here, where it was made—the promise he could not have kept, the promise he did not even want to keep, for he had no wish to live now. But for Mme. de Chaulnes he would be sleeping at this moment with the others, in the meadow at Auray. And yet his fury at her cruelty had died already into ashes, for she had given him this night under the stars, a night like many he had passed among the broom with his men . . . a whole lifetime ago. . . .
That he should have recognised this for a boon, and felt thankful for it, might have told Fortuné de la Vireville that the unquenchable instinct of life was not really dead in him, though he thought it was. But he was not given to self-analysis. This only he was aware of, as he lay there, that whereas at Auray he had been genuinely resigned to his fate, and would hardly have looked at the chance of escape if it had been offered to him (save perhaps for Anne's sake), now some obscure process of the mind, in stirring up a profound annoyance at the way in which he had been treated by Mme. de Chaulnes, had also stirred up the desire to live, and cheat her of her vengeance. Only now there appeared no means of putting that desire into practice.
And had Providence been as merciful as he had thought? Ah, if after all he had had a son—if he were not going down into the dust, leaving no trace and no memorial behind him! But that thought brought him face to face with the tragedy of his life. He flung his arm over his eyes, and so lay, motionless, a long time. . . . The stars moved on; the sea-wind swept, sighing, over the prone figures which would lie yet more still to-morrow, and at last La Vireville, rousing himself, came back to the present.
Should he try to save himself, this time, at his trial? There was just a chance of doing so if, as was probable, the tribunal had not the minutes of the court at Auray. Could he gull his judges with some story of his being just a Breton peasant, as his dress, or at least the chief part of it, proclaimed him? They were showing more mercy to the Chouans than to their leaders. He could take off his high boots and go barefoot, leave here in the field his sling which, though no longer white, had obviously once been a leader's scarf, untie his hair once more and wear it loose on his shoulders. Among so many, his guards would hardly notice the transformation, and his judges would not have seen him before. Was it worth trying?
Yes, for the sake of the promise to the dead, for Anne-Hilarion's sake, and because, at thirty-five, it is not easy to be twice resigned.
(2)
The military commission began its work at eight next morning. La Vireville, appearing before it at about half-past eleven, found it to consist of a captain of artillery, a sous-lieutenant and a corporal of sharp-shooters, and a sergeant, under the presidency of a chef de bataillon.
It was very soon evident that this commission, as he had hoped, had no record of the proceedings of its fellow at Auray. La Vireville's statement that he was a peasant of the Morbihan passed practically unchallenged, helped by the changes he had made in his appearance and by the Bas-Breton with which he interlarded his replies. How then had he come to be taken at Quiberon? Why, because when Hoche had driven in the Chouans from their positions on the mainland, quantities of the peaceable peasants there, as his interrogators knew, had fled to the peninsula with their families. Indeed, warming to his work as he went on, as once before on a less serious occasion at St. Valéry, here in the little bare room in Quiberon village, with his life at stake, Fortuné began in his own mind to invest his supposed family with many likely attributes, and went so far as to tell the commission that one of his brothers had been drowned in trying, most foolishly, to escape to the English fleet.
So he had not borne arms against the Republic? Ma Doué, certainly not! Nothing was further from his thoughts; he was a peaceable cultivator, and only wanted to be left alone to cultivate. He had never emigrated? Dame, no! Why should he leave his family, his parish, and his recteur?
The commission conferred together. The chef de bataillon seemed to be studying some paper in front of him, glancing off now and again to look at La Vireville very keenly from under his grey eyebrows.
"You have never been in North Brittany then?"
No; he had never in his life left the Morbihan.
"Then you do not know Erquy and Pléneuf?"
Not if those places were in North Brittany. For his part, he did not know where they were.
"Then," inquired the president suavely, "you have never met or even heard of the North Breton Chouan leader called Augustin?"
And in that moment, as La Vireville realised that he was lost, he realised also what Mme. de Chaulnes had meant when she said that the score was yet to pay. This was her real vengeance.
But he made a fight for it. "How could I possibly say that, mon commandant?" he asked, with an air of puzzled innocence. "I do not wish to tell a lie. I may have seen him here at Quiberon. Is that what you mean?"
The president laughed, not unappreciatively. "I suggest to the prisoner that he can indeed see Augustin at Quiberon this very moment, if he will be at the trouble of looking in a mirror."
La Vireville assumed the most bovine air of stupidity at his command, and shook his head. "I do not understand," he answered.
"I think you understand only too well, Monsieur Augustin, otherwise La Vireville," said the chef de bataillon sternly. "Courtois, oblige me by reading out the description of the Chouan Augustin."
The sous-lieutenant read it out slowly and clearly—a damning document enough, not the old incorrect Government 'signalement,' but the one, drawn from the life, which Mlle. Angèle had penned that evening at Canterbury.
"The scar on the left cheek—put back that long hair of his!"
The wheel had come full circle. What he had had to submit to, in order to save Anne-Hilarion, months ago, had proved fatal to him himself now, as he had always known it would some day. Well, Anne could live without him.
"I do not think," observed the president, folding up the paper in front of him, "that there is anything more to say. Take him away. The next, sergeant!"
So La Vireville lost the throw, for the dice were loaded against him. He had no doubt that Mme. de Chaulnes had sent the 'signalement' down with him to Quiberon, and that the president had been ordered to keep it back till the last moment, as he had done, so that he could delude himself that after all he was going to escape. She had a pretty taste in vengeance, that old woman!
(3)
At half-past nine that night seventy of them were marched out to die. It was a beautiful and serene evening, light enough to slay by. Over the quiet waves the just risen moon made a wide golden highway. They went four abreast along the sandy track till they came, among the barley-fields at the edge of the sea, to a stony, uncultivated meadow with a fringe of wind-sloped and stunted trees behind one of its encircling stone walls. There they were halted and their sentences read to them, and after that stationed, thirty at a time, a few paces apart, against this low barrier. To each was told off a firing-party of four. La Vireville had been speculating how it would be done; at Auray he had heard that they had arranged otherwise. He himself was placed among the first thirty, the last but one of the line.
He had shaken hands with his right-hand neighbour, the Poitevin from Loyal-Emigrant, and was turning to the one remaining victim on his left, when his own four soldiers closed upon him. One of them drew out a handkerchief to bandage his eyes. Fortuné did not think it worth protesting that he should prefer not to be blindfolded, and submitted without a word to the operation. Another man held his unbound wrists, but La Vireville had no intention of struggling, though all the time he was thinking, "If I had a chance, even now, I would take it—were it only to spite that she-devil!" The handkerchief smelt strongly of brandy.
"Citizen," suddenly said a husky voice in his ear, and he felt the rough hands still fumbling behind his head with the knot of the handkerchief, which he was sure was already tied—"Citizen, we are very sorry, but it is the law. So if you have any money about you, give it to me now!"
La Vireville gave a laugh. Could they not be at the trouble of searching him afterwards?
"I have several louis left, as it happens," he said, "but it would not be fair to give them all to you, my friend. If I am to pay for the privilege of being shot . . .! Shall I throw them to you all?"
"No!" said the first applicant, with emphasis. "No, divide them now!" cried two of the others; but this altercation on the brink of the grave was broken into by an angry order from the officer commanding the party: "You there at the end, get to your places instantly!" And the hands, unwillingly, left Fortuné alone in the darkness, on the bank of the same river whose fording he had tried to make easier for that unfortunate young man at Auray yesterday morning. For himself, he had always known and expected that he would end like this, with his back to a wall and a firing-party in front of him; the only feeling which remained, now that the moment had actually come, was a hope for accurate aim.
Down the line in front of him he heard the click of cocking hammers. The voice of the old Poitevin a little way off on his right began, firm and clear, to repeat a response from the Burial Mass: "Libera me, Domine, de morte eterna, in die illa. . . ." The man on his left was murmuring over and over again a woman's name. . . . All that Fortuné himself thought was, "They might as well have it, the rascals, if I can get it out in time!" He thrust his right hand into his breeches pocket.
"Apprêtez armes!" shouted the officer.
And La Vireville, drawing out his hand full of gold pieces, threw the money from him with a gesture half-tolerant, half-contemptuous.
But all that he had played for and lost, much that he remembered, much that he had forgotten, surged like a tumultuous mist before him, in those two or three seconds that he folded his arms on his breast and waited for the final order. . . .
"Feu!"
In Quiberon village the peasants crossed themselves at the sound of the volley.
CHAPTER XXXII
Dead Leaves
(1)
In the Square garden, behind the statue of Butcher Cumberland, the leaves fell early that year. Anne-Hilarion, Comte de Flavigny, playing under their fading splendour, daily collected those he most esteemed, and bore them indoors to hoard in a rosewood box, lined with tartan, that had once been his mother's. Alas, like many other of this world's treasures, these precious things proved very evanescent. Either they fell to pieces, so brittle was their beauty, or else Mrs. Saunders, declaring that she would not have a rubbish heap in her nursery, threw them implacably away.
Those were rather sorrowful days altogether in Cavendish Square. It had seemed at first, when August was beginning, that Anne's father had been snatched by a British naval officer's pertinacity from that shore of death in the Morbihan only to die in England. And the Chevalier de la Vireville, like so many others, had never come back at all. . . . Ere August was over M. de Flavigny, it is true, was out of danger; now, by mid-October, he was mending fast. But he was very sad; and of M. le Chevalier no one ever spoke to Anne-Hilarion, since a certain dreadful fit of crying, occasioned by his queries about his friend—or rather, by the answers which had to be given to those queries. And all the tragedy of Quiberon, its waste of life and loyalty and devotion, lay heavy over that London house, though no English existence or interests had suffered loss there.
All the more, therefore, did it seem good to the powers governing Anne-Hilarion's days that he should frequent the Square garden this autumn more than in previous years. And this morning he was doing so, unattended, too, since John Simms, the gardener, was there sweeping up the leaves, and the child was under engagement not to go outside the enclosure. Elspeth had therefore left him for a space to his own devices, and Anne was supremely happy, transporting fallen leaves from one side of the garden to the other, in a little painted cart indissolubly united to a horse of primitive breed. The lack of playmates did not trouble him, and indeed his experience of these had not been uniformly happy. There had been the episode of Lord Henry Gower's two little boys, who also, as dwellers in that house overlooking the garden where the Princess Amelia had used to hold her court, sometimes took their pastimes therein. To them, on one occasion, 'French and English' had seemed a highly suitable game, and since Anne-Hilarion bore a Gallic name, it was quite clear what part he was to sustain. He sustained five distinct bruises also, and relations with the Masters Gower languished a little in consequence.
"A'll lairn them play Scots and English!" had threatened Elspeth, on discovering these evidences of realism; but the culprits never gave her the chance.
To-day, however, there was no one in the garden but John Simms and Anne himself; and John Simms, though amenable and ready to reply when addressed, never bothered him with tiresome questions, as strangers were apt to do, nor exercised an undue control over the dispositions of his game, like Elspeth. He was a person of intermittent spasms of labour, alternating with intervals of reflection, during which he scratched his head, and silently watched whatever was going forward—in this case Anne-Hilarion busily conveying to and fro minute quantities of dead leaves, under the impression that he was helping him.
Accustomed to these periods of inaction, Anne, as he passed the clump of laurels on the other side of which John Simms was at the moment working—or meditating, as the case might be—would have paid no attention to the cessation of the sound of the broom, had he not just then heard the gardener thus deliver himself to some person or persons unknown:
"The Markis dee Flavinny, the French gentleman? Why, Mam, he lives over there, just by where Cap'n Nelson used to live. But the 'ouse ain't the Markis's, though, 'tis the old gentleman's, Mr. Elphinstone's. And as it 'appens, the Markis's little boy's here in the garden along o' me at this very minute—him with the gal's name, Master Anne."
Taking this as a summons, Anne-Hilarion at that came round the laurel bush, his horse and cart behind him, to find that John Simms' questioner was a lady in deep mourning, with a long veil.
"This 'ere's the Markis dee Flavinny's little boy, Mam."
Anne could not remove his hat, as he had been taught to do in the presence of ladies, since he was already bareheaded. "Did you wish to see my Papa, Madame?" he inquired rather diffidently. "Because he is ill. . . ."
The lady had never taken her eyes off him since he first appeared. Even through the veil, Anne thought she was very beautiful.
"I should like to talk to you a little first," she said, in a sweet voice, speaking French. "Shall we go and sit on that seat over there?"
They went over to it, and she sat down; but Anne, still a trifle doubtful, stood in front of her clutching the string of his horse.
"And what have you in your cart?" inquired the lady, putting back her veil.
"Leaves," replied the little boy. "I fetch them from there, and I empty them out there. It is to help John Simms, but it takes a long time."
A pause, and then the visitor observed, "Did you say that your father was ill, Anne?"
The child nodded. "He was wounded over there in France, at Qui—Quiberon, Madame. He has been very ill, but he is going to get better now."
"And is——" began the lady, and then seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. "I suppose he had friends who went to Quiberon too?" she suggested.
"Yes," replied Anne. "But M. de Soucy could not go," he volunteered, and contributed the reason. The lady, however, did not appear to be in the least interested in the Vicomte de Soucy, indeed she scarcely seemed to hear. She looked as if she were seeing something a long way off.
"My child," she said at last, bringing back her gaze to him, "you remember the gentleman who fetched you back from France in the spring?"
A quiver went through Anne-Hilarion. "Oh yes," he replied.
"I must ask," said the lady to herself; "I cannot wait." She looked hungrily at the little figure with the cart, her hands gripping each other, and as Anne had averted his head she did not see how the young roses had faded from his cheeks. "Anne," she said, finding her voice with difficulty, "has he come back—the Chevalier de la Vireville?"
Anne-Hilarion shook his head, and then, collapsing on to the grass, put his curls down on the unyielding neck of his toy horse and burst into tears.
The lady covered her own face for a moment with her hands, the next, she was kneeling beside him in her black draperies. "Mon petit, don't cry so—don't, don't, you break my heart!"
But Anne sobbed on as if his own heart were breaking, till the zebra-like stripes on the little horse were all sticky with the tokens of his grief.
"Dear little boy," said the lady beseechingly, putting her arms round him. "I should not have asked you—I ought not to have mentioned him." Her own voice was by no means steady.
"He said," gulped Anne, without raising his head, "that he would be my uncle . . . in England too. But he has never come back . . . and I want him. . . ."
"Oh, Anne, so do I!" said the lady. "But don't cry so, darling! Perhaps he will come back one day. Let me wipe your face . . . look!"
"I thought you were going to say . . . that he was not killed after all," sobbed Anne.
"But we do not know, mon chéri, that he is killed, do we?" said the lady, whose own face was now much the paler of the two. "You see, Anne, he has perhaps gone back to his Chouans—to Grain d'Orge. You remember him, my child? Do you know, Anne, that I once rode on a horse behind Grain d'Orge?"
She beguiled him at last into submitting to be detached from his steed, and having his smeared countenance wiped with her fine cambric handkerchief (much pleasanter than Elspeth's towels), and finally, on the grass of the Square garden, she got him into her arms and kissed and comforted him.
(2)
All this time the broom of John Simms had been silent, and if he had heretofore stood and scratched his head and watched Anne-Hilarion at play, with how much more abandonment did he not now give himself to this occupation! So absorbed was he in the spectacle before him that he fairly jumped when he heard a fierce voice at his elbow, and perceived Mrs. Saunders, come to fetch her charge to the house, and, equally with him, amazed at what she saw.
"Wha's yon wumman?" she repeated. "What for did ye let her in here, John Simms?"
"I dunno who she is," responded he weakly. "She's furrin, that's all I know, and asked queer-like wheer the Markis dee Flavinny lived. So I tells her, and I says, 'This here's his little boy!'"
"Ye doited auld loon!" ejaculated Elspeth. "'Tis anither French witch, as A'm a sinner, come after the wean. John Simms"—she shook him by the arm—"gang till yon gate, and dinna stir frae it—she'll hae him awa gin ye dinna! A'll sort her!"
But though she advanced towards the unconscious little group upon the grass with that intention, she changed it en route. Glenauchtie should deal with this intruder.
"A'm gaein' for the maister," she announced, as she passed John Simms, who was slowly and reluctantly gravitating from his post of vantage to the gate, as he had been bidden. "Hasten noo, ye gaberlunzie!"
So Mr. Elphinstone, having for once contrived a comfortable morning with his books, was disturbed by a tempestuous knock at the door, and the entrance of his highly discomposed countrywoman.
"Glenauchtie," said she breathlessly, "there's a wumman—a French body, in the garden, crackin' tae the bairn. She's gar'd him greet, and noo she's at rockin' him in her arrms. A'm thinkin' she'll be anither o' they deils frae Canterbury. Come awa quick, sir!"
"Dear, dear!" exclaimed her master, catching her alarm. "Fetch me my hat,—tis in the hall,—and let us go at once!"
"There's Grandpapa," said Anne, detaching himself from the warm and consolatory embrace. The lady rose from her knees as Mr. Elphinstone, closely followed by Elspeth, came hurrying towards them over the grass. But when he saw her Mr. Elphinstone mitigated his haste. She was not, somehow, what Mrs. Saunders had led him to expect.
"Madame?" he began, removing his hat.
"You are Mr. Elphinstone, Monsieur?" asked the lady, stumbling a little over the difficult, only once-heard name. "Forgive me that I have made acquaintance with your grandson before waiting upon you, Monsieur. I came in here to ask the gardener the number of your house. Forgive me, too, that I have made the little boy to cry."
Despite the consciousness of Elspeth, breathing out slaughter behind him, Mr. Elphinstone felt calm. This was some émigré's widow, perhaps (unaccustomed to the depth of French mourning, he would never have imagined it assumed for a brother) but she had certainly not come to beg financial assistance. Her air, even more than her dress, assured him of that. As to spiriting away the child——
"In what can I be of service to you, Madame?" he inquired.
"I came to ask news of someone," replied the stranger. "But"—she looked a moment at Anne—"I have had my answer."
"Come awa', Maister Anne!" whispered Elspeth, gesticulating from behind.
Mr. Elphinstone began to understand. "Yes, go with Elspeth, my bairn," he said. And Anne-Hilarion went, first saluting the hand of the lady, who thereafter bent and kissed him, and watched him as he departed.
"Madame, will you not come into the house?" suggested Anne's grandfather.
She shook her head with a little sigh. "Thank you, no, Monsieur. I will not detain you a moment. You can tell me what I want to know only too quickly, I fear."
"It is about the Chevalier de la Vireville?" queried Mr. Elphinstone.
She bowed her head without answering.
A look of pain came over Glenauchtie's ruddy features. "Madame," he said, "it is best to be frank with you. We have no news of him since that fatal day of the surrender—no certain news, that is. We have made every inquiry in our power. My son-in-law was his friend, as you may have heard, and he was severely wounded at Quiberon. As it happens, almost the last thing he remembers is bidding a hasty farewell to M. de la Vireville, who was then with the retreating troops. He himself knew nothing more till he found himself that night on board the English frigate, one of whose boats had rescued him. We fear the worst now on M. de la Vireville's count, and it is a great grief to us. We owed him much, my son-in-law and I. In fact," finished Mr. Elphinstone not very steadily, "we owe him that!" He indicated the departing figure of Anne, now just disappearing with Elspeth through the garden gate.
"I know," said the lady. "And I owe him much too—though we only met once. But what did you mean, Monsieur, by saying you had no 'certain' news? Have you any then that is uncertain?"
"It is so untrustworthy," said Mr. Elphinstone, hesitating, "that I would rather not tell you."
"I would rather hear it, Monsieur!"
The old man still showed reluctance. "It is only this, Madame," he said at last, "that a friend of ours, a naval officer—he, in fact, who saved my son-in-law—met an émigré who said that he had seen M. de la Vireville's name in a list of those who were shot at Auray or Quiberon on a certain date in August. But indeed, Madame, that is not evidence—still less so because this officer's informant affirmed that he had seen the name in both lists—which is surely impossible."
"I thank you, Monsieur," said the lady, putting down her long veil. "I had not really any hope. You will pardon me for having troubled you? Your son-in-law will, I trust, soon be restored to health. I am glad I have seen the little boy."
She was extraordinarily calm, the old man thought. He went with her to the gate. For one moment, forgetting that she had confessed to having only once seen him, he wondered whether she had been La Vireville's wife.
"May I know your name, Madame?" he asked, as he bowed over her hand.
"The Comtesse de Guéfontaine," said she, and was gone.
René de Flavigny, lying wearily in his mahogany fourposter, was a little reproachful when he heard of this visit, showing, in fact, some of the petulance of the convalescent. He asked why his father-in-law had not brought Mme. de Guéfontaine in to see him.
"I am sorry, my boy," said Mr. Elphinstone. "I thought it would be too much for you. Still, it might have been a consolation to her to talk with you."
"Not that I could have told her anything consoling," said the Marquis dismally. "Fortuné is engulfed with the rest—we shall never see him again. Did you tell her what Tollemache said?"
"Yes," said the old man, with a sigh. "She took it, I think, as conclusive. She had great self-command."
His son-in-law sighed too, a sigh of utter weariness and depression. "I wonder what she was to M. de la Vireville," said Mr. Elphinstone, pursuing his train of thought, as he stooped to mend the fire.
René started. He was back suddenly at Quiberon, on the rocks in the sunshine, in his friend's quarters by candlelight. "Bon Dieu!" he murmured to himself. "I have only once—no, twice—heard him speak of a woman," he added aloud. "Surely it cannot have been she!"
CHAPTER XXXIII
The Man she would have Married
(1)
So he was dead—was lying with his comrades in a hasty trench at Auray, or under the bloodstained sand of Quiberon itself. Sometimes—for she had heard that many had been drowned—Raymonde de Guéfontaine had fancied that the sea, out of which he had come to her, had claimed him again, and that his body lay forgotten on some lonely Breton beach, or swayed gently, far down, with the drift of the full Atlantic. It was not so; French soil held him, as she hoped it would hold her some day. Yet, no more than the little boy, should she look on him again.
The October sunshine seemed to hurt her eyes as she went along Oxford Street. These English people too, prosperous and indifferent, who walked the streets of their dull city without a care, with such satisfied faces, such garish-coloured clothes—she hated them! Why had not England done more, lent the full weight of her arm to that doomed enterprise? England had not shed a drop of her blood for it. There were even those who said that she was not sorry to know that so much French blood had flowed, and was glad to have rid herself so cheaply of some of her pensioners. Raymonde de Guéfontaine had too generous a nature herself to lend a ready credence to that rumour, and yet she felt that the country which sheltered her had wounded her too. For someone had told her that, to England, the main significance of the expedition which had meant so much to her and hers was that it had served as a diversion in favour of England's ally, Austria; and seeing how, at the end, it had been hurried forward, she did not wholly disbelieve this.
Mme. de Guéfontaine had come over to London from Guernsey, where her brother Henri was stationed, to visit an old aunt who, unlike most of her compatriots, had succeeded in saving no inconsiderable sum from the wreck of her fortunes, and was now enjoying life and society in an atmosphere perhaps greyer, but certainly less inflammable, than that of Paris. Mme. de Nantillac was fond of her niece, and, being one of those to whom bodily comfort is paramount, was set upon driving Raymonde into giving up the lodging she shared with her brother at St. Peter Port and living with her in comparative affluence in Sloane Street. She had even selected a parti for her, the most eligible of her circle. And for these reasons Mme. de Guéfontaine felt a strong repugnance towards returning immediately to her society. Instead of summoning a hackney coach she would go into this great park, and sit there a little under the trees, alone with the strange guest that had lodged all at once like a bird in her heart—grief.
She should never see him again. Now she realised that all the early summer, when she had been in Guernsey, she had felt that only a few miles of sea sundered them, were he in Brittany or in Jersey, and that perhaps some day he would fulfil his promise, and come to St. Peter Port. And then, on that day, she could try again to convince him that, once that wild moment of fury and pain and vengeance past, she had not even in will betrayed him. For it haunted her sometimes that she had not really persuaded him, though she could point to no look or word of his to prove it.
Then had come Quiberon—yet she had hoped, and hoped . . .
But now she could never plead her cause—now she could never convince him. She could never have again that moonlit vigil at L'Estournel, nor their twilight parting above the little bay. . . . But it was only now that she really knew—only now, in this stinging, choking mist of pain and regret, that two things, the most simple and ordinary and terrible in the world, were made plain to her: that she loved him, and that he was dead.
And Raymonde de Guéfontaine, a Catholic, was transported in mind from the bench in Hyde Park to the little church of her faith in Guernsey, where every day she went to pray for André's soul. It was unfamiliar to her, and she always found it stiff and new-looking, with its pews and whitewash and self-complacent plaster saints. The feet of her spirit faltered now upon its threshold. No, better far to be in that little old pinnacled chapel in Finistère where she and André had knelt as children, a marvel of delicate and lovely tracery, set away from mortal haunts in a world of shining chestnut trees—the little chapel where woodland beasts and grotesques chased each other about the intricate carving of the ancient painted screen; where St. Christopher, uncouth and truly gigantic, looked across at St. Roch, whose dog no longer possessed tail or ears; where the floor was worn by generations of use, and the pillars green with damp. There, before the rude wooden Pietà, wrought centuries ago with much love if with little skill, she could have prayed indeed to the Mother who knew, if ever woman did, what loss meant. . . . And there, in spirit, she did so pray, while her bodily eyes, long exiled from that shrine, watched the fans of the alien horse-chestnuts flutter to the ground about her.
(2)
The Vicomtesse de Nantillac was stout, she wheezed when she spoke, and was sometimes besprinkled with snuff; but she had been a beauty at the court of Louis XV., and did not forget it.
"You know, child," she said that evening, as they awaited a guest in her comfortable drawing-room, which faced the fields towards Westminster, "it really is time that you were rangée. You have been in that barbarous island since the spring, and Henri might well part with you now. What further do you propose to do there—or he with you?"
"I may find means of making myself useful," said her niece placidly. Having not the slightest intention of yielding to these attacks, she was not disturbed by their recurrence.
"You know," went on the old lady, shaking her elaborate grey curls, "M. de Pontferrand thinks——"
"But it is nothing to me what M. de Pontferrand thinks!" interrupted Mme. de Guéfontaine with vigour.
Mme. de Nantillac turned up her eyes to heaven, then addressed a much more mundane deity, her lapdog. "Cupidon, you hear!" she wheezed. "And as for that time in Brittany with poor André . . . Tell me, Raymonde, what did you wear there? Did you really go about with pistols and a cartridge belt? I said something about it to M. le Duc, and though of course he thought it was most unfitting, he vowed you must have looked like Minerva or la Grande Mademoiselle."
Mme. de Guéfontaine gave a laugh. Out of deference to her aunt's wishes, she was not wearing deep mourning this evening, and the full grey silk and abundant fichu from which her neck rose like an ivory column had about them nothing of the Amazon.
"Ma tante, the Duc would never have looked twice at me in Brittany. I wore a coarse stuff skirt, pleated into a thousand folds all round, and a peasant's embroidered bodice, and a peasant's coif. But as to settling down—no! I must fight in some way. I cannot live at ease."
The Vicomtesse bent her large pug face forwards. "You know, my dear child," she whispered, "M. le Duc has . . . has recovered a good deal of his money, and if you wanted to assist the cause in that way, as I am sure we all do" (she never gave a penny herself), "you would find him by no means parsimonious."
"Possibly," said Mme. de Guéfontaine, shrugging her shoulders. "But I do not want M. le Duc either as a banker or in any other capacity."
"All I can say is that you do very wrong, Raymonde," urged her aunt. "You should always think of the future. Who is going to look after you in the years to come, when Henri is married and I am gone, and perhaps the English are not as generously disposed as they are at present?"
"I do not want the charity of the English!" said Raymonde, flushing. "And as for someone to take care of me—I am not a young girl. You forget; like you, ma tante, I am a widow."
"I do not know what that has to do with it, child," retorted her fellow-bereaved. "Even I sometimes, not so young as I was, feel . . ." She left her sensations of unprotectedness to the imagination. "Let me implore you to think about it seriously. If you are determined not to have the Duc (I am certain he is going to ask you, and probably this evening), you might even marry an Englishman. You are so odd, who knows?—it might be a success! There are English officers of family in Guernsey, I suppose?"
"I suppose so," returned Raymonde indifferently.
"My dear child, if they were there you must have seen them, in six months. I have met English officers, quite proper men. You have not taken a vow against marrying again, I imagine?"
"Not that I remember."
"Of course I know—your first marriage, your husband was somewhat old for you. And on that score, perhaps, M. le Duc . . ."
"The man I would marry," began Mme. de Guéfontaine suddenly, looking down and pleating the silken folds of her gown, "would not be like M. le Duc in any way. He would be lean and sinewy and agile. He would not be rich, but he would have a mouth that held always a shade of mockery, and he would do the most unexpected things with an air of being amused by them, from befooling a Republican official to saving the life of a woman who had tried to kill him."
"You are describing some man you know," said Mme. de Nantillac, with a certain measure of excitement. "Cela se voit. Who is it? And who was the woman?"
Raymonde de Guéfontaine checked herself. The light which had been in her downcast eyes was extinguished. "Oh no, ma tante. My portrait has no original . . . now," she added inaudibly, and, turning away, she began to rearrange the flowers at her breast, just one minute before M. le Duc de Pontferrand, with his smile and his smooth, portly, debonair presence, was announced.
That night she revisited Porhoët in her dreams. The tide was up, the moon was full, and from her little cottage, as she stood on the sand and looked up at it, shone a light. She went up the path, lifted the latch, and entered; and sitting at the table, breaking bread together, were the two who had never met in life—André, pale and smiling, with the fatal bullet wound in his forehead, and . . . the Chevalier de la Vireville. They both rose as she came in, and held out their glasses towards her, and as La Vireville moved she saw the blood run through the fingers of the hand which he held pressed against his side.
She stretched out her arms towards the two phantoms with a great cry—"Mes morts!" and with that woke, and lay sobbing.
A week later she was on her way back to Guernsey—Guernsey, whence she could sometimes see the coast of that France for which they both had died.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Monseigneur's Guest
(1)
Up and down the Hard at Portsmouth, among rough sailors and rough language, but apparently unconscious of either, there walked in the last days of November 1795 a little old man in the dress of a French ecclesiastic, absorbed in a book. Such sights were not very infrequent now in the southern ports, and if they aroused occasional comment, it was not of a hostile nature. This old priest was small, frail, and a little shabby, but of a very unaffected dignity, and on one finger shone an amethyst ring.
"Monseigneur does choose such extraordinary places to say his office in!" thought a younger and taller priest, making his way through the throng to the old man. "One knows, of course, that it is all the same to him wherever he is."
He approached his compatriot and addressed him with deference. For the shabby little ecclesiastic was the exiled bishop of one of the most important dioceses in France.
"It is as Your Grandeur thought. The corvette is from Houat, and she has on board a dozen or so of our unfortunate fellow-countrymen from Quiberon. They are sending them ashore now."
The Bishop slipped the book he was reading into a bulged pocket. "Then we will go and meet them. Ah, pardon, my friend, I hope I have not hurt you?" he exclaimed, as, in turning, he collided with a gigantic man-o'-war's man in a shiny tarpaulin hat.
The sailor pulled his forelock. "Not very likely, sir, saving your presence," he returned, with a grin. "'Twould take a vessel of more tonnage than you has to sink Tom Richards!"
"I love these good mariners!" observed the Bishop, as the two priests made their way to the edge of the quay and looked down. The corvette's boat was already there, landing her cargo of battered and broken men. So the Bishop stationed himself at the top of the steps, and as they came up he spoke to each, asking his name, where he was going, if he had need of anything.
Last of all came a tall, gaunt man in English uniform who seemed rather dazed, and was helped by two sailors up the steps. When his supporters abandoned him he sat down on a bollard and put his right hand over his eyes. His left sleeve hung empty.
Perceiving his condition the Bishop did not address him directly, but applied for information about him to the lieutenant of the régiment de Rohan with whom he had last been conversing.
"No one at Houat knew exactly who he was, Monseigneur," replied the French officer, glancing over his shoulder. "He was found half-dead on the rocks there as long ago as August, and he was ill for months afterwards from wounds and exposure. Neither then nor since has he been able to give much account of himself—he seems to have lost his memory—though from the few rags remaining on him when he was discovered it was supposed that he had been one of the Chouan leaders."
"Thank you, Monsieur," said the Bishop. He went over, with compassion in his face, to the seated man, and touched him on the shoulder.
"My son," he said, "is there anything that I can do for you?"
"This is St. Helier, is it not?" answered the other in a dulled voice, without looking up. "If you could kindly take me to where my mother lives. I . . . I have been ill . . . and I do not think I could find the way."
The Bishop paused a moment, then he said, very gently, "This is not Jersey, my child; it is Portsmouth."
"Portsmouth," repeated the émigré, in the same uninterested tone. "Not Jersey—Portsmouth. But she is not at Portsmouth——" Then he looked up, and his eyes, full of fever though they were, knew the man who was speaking to him for a bishop of his own Church.
"But they shot you at Vannes, Monseigneur, with Sombreuil!"
The old man guessed to whom he was referring. "God rest his soul!" he said, signing himself. "But you mistake, my son; I am not the Bishop of Dol, and this is England. What are you going to do?"
The Frenchman got to his feet. "I?" he said, and laughed a little. "Why, I should have been shot at Auray, Monseigneur . . . or at Quiberon. . . . It would have been better. . . . But I am here. . . . God knows why." He sat down again on the bollard.
Monseigneur beckoned to his Grand Vicar. Then he turned again to the émigré. "My son," he said, "you will come home with me. It is not far. Come, take my arm!"
And the émigré obediently took that ridiculous support (the Grand Vicar, however, walking in readiness on the other side) and so came, with difficulty and without speech, to the little hired house where the Bishop lived.
In the parlour Monseigneur said to him, "And now perhaps you had better tell us your name?"
"Augustin," replied the guest, and, turning suddenly faint or giddy with the word, collapsed like a log against the Grand Vicar, who, being fortunately nearly as tall as he, and robust to boot, was not felled to the floor as the Bishop would undoubtedly have been.
(2)
The good Bishop sat all that night by the bedside of his guest, and all night long La Vireville tossed and talked, so that, being undeterred by his occasional lapses into language of a vigour which would have shocked the Grand Vicar, the Bishop learnt many things. The empty left sleeve indicated, as he had of course supposed, that the émigré had lost his arm—or most of it, for it had been amputated some way above the elbow. That wound was healed, but his whole body still bore the marks of what the sea and the rocks between them had done to it, and it was to one of these injuries, to the head, that the surgeon summoned next morning was inclined to attribute his sudden lapse into insensibility and his present state of semi-stupor.
"He was not really fit to have made the voyage from Houat," he said in conclusion; "but from what one hears of conditions in the Ile d'Yeu he is certainly better in England." He was thinking of the privations which, since the end of September, General Doyle's little force had been undergoing in the latter island.
When the surgeon had gone the old Bishop said to his Grand Vicar, with his customary gentle resolution, "We must try to find our guest's mother in Jersey, of whom he spoke on the quay yesterday."
"But we do not know his surname, Monseigneur," objected the younger priest, "unless by any chance 'Augustin' is his family and not his Christian name. And there are so many French exiles in Jersey."
"His mother evidently lives at St. Helier," replied the Bishop, "and that gives us something to start from. I shall write to the Prince de Bouillon and ask him to make inquiries. . . . Also I shall have M. Augustin moved into my bedroom. He will be more comfortable there, and if, as I suspect, he is going to be ill for some time, it is a sunny room, which is important."
As the Grand Vicar and the housekeeper alike knew that it was of no use arguing with Monseigneur, especially when his own discomfort was in question, they did not waste their energies in conflict, and La Vireville, still only half-conscious, was transferred to the modest episcopal apartment.
(3)
The volleys that rang out that August evening over the Bay of Quiberon had left one man out of the doomed thirty untouched by any bullet—preserved as by a miracle. The miracle was wrought by greed, and the man—as may be guessed—was Fortuné de la Vireville.
Fortuné had realised the incredible thing quickly enough. Dazed though he was by the ear-splitting general discharge at such close quarters, he had no sooner perceived that he was still on his feet, unharmed, than he had torn off the bandage round his eyes, taken one glance at the scene through the drifting smoke, and with a single bound had cleared the low stone wall behind him. Even as he jumped, however, came a report, and his left, his already injured, arm fell powerless to his side. He staggered a moment with the shock, recovered himself, plunged through the little thicket of dwarfed trees, and in another minute was running like a deer across the pale barley-field beyond. He was saved—for the time at least—by a chance the possibility of which had never entered his head. At the moment of the command to fire, his executioners had been stooping after the gold which he had just thrown to them. . . . One man only, he who had just winged him, was bringing his musket to the level as the émigré had snatched the handkerchief from his eyes and turned. Now, as he ran, the barley catching at his bare feet, the rest of the belated volley and some other shots came after him. But they went wide; the light, at that distance, was too uncertain. La Vireville tore on.
Yet that one marksman had scored heavily enough, as was soon only too obvious to the fugitive. His left elbow was shattered, and—what for the moment was worse—the injury was bleeding very copiously. La Vireville supported it with his other hand and arm as he raced through the barley, but he knew that between the severity of the pain, which the rapid motion was momentarily intensifying to agony, and the haemorrhage, he would not be able to run much farther. And indeed there was not much farther for him to run, since beyond the field was nothing but the shore. That solved the question, anyhow. With forty others to despatch, too, there was just a chance that they would not pursue him immediately.
So, where the edge of the barley-field curved gently over to the beach, he scrambled down, panting and dizzy, and fell to his knees on the soft sand. One thing he knew to be imperative—to stop the blood pouring from his arm, and in a kind of frenzy he tore off the bandage from his former, half-healed wound and tied it tightly above and around the new. This proceeding, necessary though it was, put the coping-stone on his endurance, and it was barely finished before he toppled forward on to his face and lay there motionless. Dimly, as consciousness left him, he heard the sound of the second series of volleys.
He came to—how much later he had small idea—with sand in his mouth and an almost intolerable aching in his fractured elbow. Whether the soldiers had searched for him or no he could not tell. He hardly realised that, except from the beach itself, he was invisible where he lay. But he did not conceive that there was any permanent shelter for him on Quiberon. Looking stupidly at his arm, he saw that the bleeding had stopped, but the arm was much worse than useless, for it was anguish to move it in any direction. . . . Really the simplest plan was to stay where he was. The soldiers would find him in time, and could finish their work; on the whole, it was foolishness not to have stayed up there by the wall to let them do it. . . . And Fortuné lay down again, with relief, on the fine and kindly sand that had already drunk his blood and now offered him oblivion.
For though he had said to himself a little while ago that if he had a chance he would take it, and though he had leapt the wall instinctively, and had run as never before in his life, yet now, after all, his will faltered. For one thing, he was sick with pain; for another, he was badly crippled. And what inducements had he, he asked himself, to wrestle further with destiny?—for a fight it would be, and most probably a losing one. Anne-Hilarion, to whom he now owed a duty; his mother, whom he loved; the cause he followed? Yes; but to none of these was he indispensable. That dark star of his, which for ten years had represented love to him, certainly offered him no light to live by; nor did revenge, since St. Four was dead. All he asked for was to yield, to contend no more.
But in a few moments he had struggled up again on to his elbow. The naturally unsubmissive bent of his mind worked automatically against such a surrender, and the remembrance of his promise to René came back even stronger than it had done last night. He had pledged himself to do his best to escape; René's last words to him—possibly the last he had ever spoken—had been on that matter. But how was he to fulfil that promise?
Leaning thus on his right elbow, La Vireville studied the sand, that strangely white sand of Quiberon. How could he save himself—it was practically impossible now! Under his gaze, covered with half-dried blood from the shattered arm which it had supported in his flight, lay his right hand, and that was all he had to depend on. Slowly and awkwardly enough (and even then at the cost of what made him set his teeth) he raised himself a little higher. And as he propped himself on this sound but bloodstained hand, he was suddenly aware of a minor pang in that. Glancing down again he saw that in changing his position he had brushed it against a plant of sea-holly, of which there were many on the shore and the dunes of Quiberon.
And La Vireville stared at that sturdy thistle, with its sharp, glaucous leaves and its beautiful dream-blue flower, both misty now in the dim light, almost as if he saw it in a dream, for its harsh touch had carried him back in a flash to the little bay in the Côtes-du-Nord where all this, surely, had happened before—where, when he was crippled, that same hand had known the scratch of the sea-holly, even to blood, and Mme. de Guéfontaine's kiss.
"She would not like to kiss that hand now!" he reflected, rather grimly. Yet suddenly he had the impression, as vivid as if she were there now, kneeling by him, near the sea-holly, as she had knelt that evening in the northern bay, that she, with her high courage and her ideals of devotion, would never counsel him to lie here like a coward till he was found and shot. She would have counselled him—did indeed seem to be counselling him now—to bestir himself, for the child's sake, for his own self-respect. But how was he to obey her?
There was only one way—the way she had gone that evening. The waves to-night broke not much less gently on this shore of tragedy than they had done on that placid strand. Yes, there lay, as always of late in Fortuné's life, the call. But it had never been so hard to follow. Nevertheless he believed the English squadron to be cruising somewhere off the little isles of Houat and Hoedic, and the former of these could not be more than ten miles away. If Providence would but complete the miracle and put him in the way of coming by a boat—a possible but an unlikely occurrence—he would take it for an omen, and make an attempt to reach the fleet.
And so, supporting his mangled arm again with the other, he began to get with difficulty to his feet, reflecting as he did so that even if there were a boat on the shore he could not launch it, injured as he was, and that in any case, if he showed himself near it, he would probably be fired on by some unseen sentry. Luckily the moon was near her setting. He must therefore look for this problematical boat before she set, but not attempt to embark till afterwards, when it would be much darker.
Directly he was on his feet, La Vireville became aware of a black blotch on the waters of the bay, a little to his left, and a few yards from shore. He stood there staring at it, utterly unbelieving. Was this the answer of Providence? Two fantastic thoughts immediately visited him: the first, that she, with whom he had almost seemed, a moment ago, to hold converse, had known that the boat was there; the second, that Anne-Hilarion must really need him. It was quite a small boat, yet, as far as he could see by straining his eyes in the moonlight, it had a mast ready stepped—a vital point, since he must have a sail. Then he tried to calculate the distance of the boat from the edge of the water, because he thought it very unlikely that in his present condition he could swim out to her. If the tide were ebbing, however, he might possibly reach her by wading.
"I shall be taking the deuce of a deal of trouble for you, Anne," he said out loud, "and I expect it will come to the same thing in the end—a volley at ten paces." But he sat down again to wait for the moon's setting, his back against the bank of sand that was the edge of the barley-field, trying to keep his hot thoughts off the great pain that he was suffering, wishing that he had not made away with his sling, and facing the more than probability that the fresh injury would in the end be his undoing.
Twelve hours later, shivering with fever under a hot noon sun, he was lying becalmed somewhere to the east of Houat. He had almost lost his sense of direction, and in any case there was no wind. The oars he naturally could not use. He had eaten nothing since the day before, he was very thirsty, he had been soaked to the skin in getting to the boat, and his wounded arm was causing him such a martyrdom that if he could have cut it off and thrown it overboard he would willingly have done so. Half the time Anne-Hilarion seemed to be sitting beside him, asking why they did not sail faster, and once, at least, he answered him very seriously, "Because, mon petit, your uncle has such extraordinary bad luck,"—to which Anne had contended that it was good luck, not bad, or that it might at least be regarded as mixed. And then the fugitive found himself saying something about the devil's own luck, and a voice replied, "André had that kind of luck too, but it failed him in the end." Who was André? Was he in the boat too? If he were, then perhaps his sister was with him, and perhaps she could do something for this terrible pain which was driving him crazy—as once she had with her cool fingers eased his foot. . . .
And Fortuné raised his throbbing head from the gunwale to look for her—but he was quite alone in the boat, and the boat was alone, motionless, in the midst of a shining sea. How the sun stared at him—and yet he was so cold! His head fell back again inert, and he returned once more to the vision of that tragic line of fallen, writhing figures, an ineffaceable glimpse of which his senses had caught and recorded as he leapt the wall.
Later still, as daylight faded, the little boat, lifting sideways with every long shoreward wave, her sails racketing madly about, drifted nearer and nearer to the iron rocks of Houat, where the surf was always pounding. The wished-for wind had sprung up just at sunset, but the helmsman, lying face upwards in the sternsheets, much as François the fisherman had once lain, was in no condition to utilise it, or even to avert the disaster to which it was hurrying him.
Author's Note.—It is a matter of historical fact that one émigré did escape shooting at Quiberon by throwing his gold to the firing-party, exactly as described.
CHAPTER XXXV
Mr. Tollemache as a Linguist
(1)
The full-rigged ship, in oils, embedded in a solid sea of the same medium resembling a newly ploughed ultramarine field, which hung over the chest of drawers in the Bishop's bedroom (he having taken the little house furnished, and feeling, with his fine courtesy, that he had no right to change the place of anything therein), perplexed La Vireville not at all. Almost his last memory had been of the sea. There was, too, a stuffed trout in a glass case which might also, with a little difference, have been a denizen of the deep. . . . But his mind, still, after ten days' care, somewhat confused, was not at all cleared by lying and gazing, as he often did, at the little triptych of the Assumption which the Bishop had succeeded in bringing away from his private chapel in France, and which hung not far from the other painting. La Vireville could not have told why, but the triptych seemed to him, as it did to the Grand Vicar, incongruous with the stuffed trout. He used to speculate how it got there.
At first he had remembered very little about Quiberon, either about the surrender or his own abortive execution, but he had a vivid, detached memory of what came after the latter event. He could recall how, just as the little boat plunged into the breakers of Houat, he had suddenly regained his senses, brought back, no doubt, from the borders of unconsciousness by the never-dying instinct of the seaman. Too late though it was to save himself then, that instinct kept his nerveless hand on the tiller in an attempt to guide what he could no longer control. . . . He remembered the crash, the swirling, foaming water that sucked him down twice, struggling desperately, from the rock which, crippled as he was, he could neither gain nor cling to, the water that beat him against it like a cork, and that then, in a great wave, finally engulfed him, to bear him back and fling him senseless on the pebbles. He remembered, too, waking once more to a brief, semi-animate existence, to find himself lying face downwards on the wet shingle, his hair in a salt pool that seemed half blood—or was it merely tinged with the light of the red sunset that towered over Houat? Close by the surge still thundered, drenching his cold, half-naked body with spray. He was bleeding and battered from head to foot, yet, though he knew he saw death face to face at last, he contrived to drag himself up the shingle a few inches farther from the furious breakers. . . . After that, darker oblivion than before. . . .
Of his finding next morning by two of his compatriots, refugees like himself from Quiberon, in time to save his life but not his arm, he knew nothing, and most of the memories of his slow and painful struggle back to existence in that bleak, scarcely habitable islet, among the human débris of the great disaster, were confused, and—except one—in no way desirable as reminiscences.
Yet now, whether as the result of better care and conditions, or because the strain of the voyage to England had worn itself off, brain and body alike were recovering fast, and Monseigneur, very much pleased, intimated that he should shortly set up in practice as a physician. His best medicine, however, was still to come—from Jersey.
(2)
Fortuné was sound asleep when his mother at last bent over him, one frosty December afternoon, her heart brimming with mingled thankfulness and tears. For indeed the face on the pillow, always lean, had passed far beyond mere leanness now. . . . Yet here he was, her son, whom she had mourned as slain, sleeping just as he used to sleep twenty years ago, a boy at Kerdronan, with one hand under his head—no, not just as he had used to sleep, for this was not of those days, this evidence, very marked in repose, of the pitiable victory that weakness had won over vigour. He was alive, would live, but he looked broken. And achingly it went to her heart, how thin his wrist was—all she could see, at the moment, of that once strong, sunburnt hand of his. Involuntarily she looked about for the other hand. . . . And it was then, and then only, that the full realisation of what the Bishop had told her came down upon her. Under that avalanche her fortitude gave way, and sinking down on the chair by the bedside she hid her face in her hands.
The slight movement had wakened the sleeper, and he opened his eyes, and lay a few seconds looking at her, without stirring. He had known that she was coming.
"What are you crying for, petite mère?" he said at last, in his changed voice. "Are you so sorry, then, to see me again?"
"Oh, my son, my son!" she cried.
"You know about this?" he asked abruptly, after a little, indicating his left arm.
Mme. de la Vireville nodded, unable, for all her courage, to trust herself to speak for a moment.
"I shall have a hook," went on Fortuné, with a faint smile. "Like old Yves, the ferryman at Coatquen, when I was a boy. . . . Do you remember? He always said that he could do more with it than with a hand. . . . I used to envy him that hook. And I should never have had an elbow again, you know."
Mme. de la Vireville swallowed something in her throat. "Since Monseigneur told me," she said, sufficiently firmly, "I have not ceased to thank God that it is your left arm."
"I also," replied her son, with an effort. "And for Monseigneur's charity, and now, for your coming, my heart. . . . Sit close to the bed, and I shall sleep again."
(3)
Several times during the next two or three weeks did the Grand Vicar congratulate the Bishop on having sent for Mme. de la Vireville. There was no room for her in the little house, but she lodged near, and spent all her days at her son's bedside. That son no longer looked quite so much like the wreck of his former hardy self, and, but for the fact that his memory still played him obstinate tricks over names, he had regained his normal mental condition. But he seemed to his mother to have something on his mind. One day, half in jest, she taxed him with it.
He looked at her from his pillows with a smile.
"If I had a mind, little mother, there might be something on it. Even my head is not as hard as I have been accustomed to boast, for either that confounded bullet last spring, or the rocks of Houat, have played the deuce with the inside of it."
"But, my son, you are daily recovering your memory," said Mme. de la Vireville encouragingly.
"Yes," agreed Fortuné, "and one thing I remember is this—that I promised poor René de Flavigny to look after Anne if he were killed. And I am convinced that he was killed."
His mother looked at his gaunt visage and hollow eyes.
"Fortuné, you are scarcely in a fit state to look after anyone at present, you must admit that. And as to the fate of M. de Flavigny, surely that could be ascertained by inquiry?"
"Doubtless, if I had not entirely forgotten his address in London, and even the name of his father-in-law with whom he lived. I have tried times without number to remember it," said La Vireville, frowning. "It was a square, and there was a statue of a general on horseback in it. . . . Perhaps Monseigneur would know?"
As the Bishop, however, had not once set foot in London he was not of much topographical assistance.
But now, having elicited what her son had on his mind, Mme. de la Vireville soon perceived what edifices he was ready to build on the subject of Anne-Hilarion's bereavement. Anne should come and stay with them in Jersey when his grandfather could spare him; Anne should do this, that, and the other. . . . She could not doubt the stimulus it was to Fortuné to feel that Anne would have a real claim on him, and he on the boy. He had long ago made up his mind that the Marquis could not have survived, and though his death caused him real sorrow, so many friends and acquaintances had come to violent ends since '89 that there was little sensation of shock about the loss.
Fortuné did not tell his mother, for fear of wounding her, that, but for Anne and his own promise to René he might possibly never have tried to escape that night, but she was not far from guessing it. It would have needed a miracle to enable her to guess that the thought of another person had also counted for something in that episode—and this fact he was still further from revealing to her.
(4)
The required information about M. de Flavigny was supplied, in the end, from a quite unexpected source. For, walking down High Street one morning, Mme. de la Vireville saw two British naval officers in front of her. One of the backs seemed familiar. So, rather shamefacedly, she hurried after it, and breathed behind it an apologetic, "De grâce, Monsieur!"
Mr. Francis Tollemache checked, looked over his shoulder, stopped altogether, turned round, and saluted. His companion did the same.
"At your service, Madame," he responded. "Madame de la Vireville, I believe?"
"Oui, M. le Lieutenant," said she, a little breathlessly. "Et si Monsieur voudrait, il pourrait me rendre un grand, un très grand service!"
The ready colour suffused M. le Lieutenant's ingenuous countenance. He turned to his comrade. "Could you take her on, Carleton?" he asked.
Mr. Carleton shook his head. "Don't know a word of the lingo," he replied unhelpfully.
Mme. de la Vireville saw what was wrong. She pulled herself together for an effort. "You do not speak French, Messieurs, is it not? Eh bien, it is that my son is very ill, and he want to know if the little boy Anne de Flavigny—no, if ze fazzer of the little boy is . . . vivant . . . or kill'. Il le croit mort . . . and he have forgot"—she touched her forehead—"where he live in Londres. Cela le tracasse tant! You per'aps know it, Messieurs?"
"Le petit garçon—oh, hang it! Madame, vous comprendre un peu anglais, don't you? The little boy lives with his grandfather, Mr. Elphinstone, in Cavendish Square, but his father—père, isn't it—ain't killed." Thus Mr. Tollemache, in the same bilingual style.
"Mais . . . my son, he was sure . . ."
"I've the best of reasons for knowing that de Flavigny is alive," said Mr. Tollemache stoutly, casting the French tongue momentarily to the winds. "I went to see them all last week, and he's getting on famously—can walk now. Porter bien . . . marcher . . . vous comprendre, Madame?"
"Tollemache here saved his life," put in Mr. Carleton. "Pulled him out of that affair under the very noses of the sans-culottes. A deuced fine piece of work." But this information was couched in language too idiomatic for Mme. de la Vireville's comprehension.
"M. de Flavigny n'est pas mort, alors?" said she, the conversation being evidently about to end in each party speaking his own tongue.
"Non, pas mort," responded Mr. Tollemache. "Jolly as a sandboy—at least he will be. So's the little 'un. And the address is Cavendish Square. Shall I write it down . . . er . . . écrivez pour vous, Madame?"
"Ah, M. le Lieutenant, if you could come to see my son a little five minute, to tell him about M. de Flavigny! Cela lui ferait tant de bien!" said Mme. de la Vireville, turning the wistful battery of her eyes on the young officer. And he capitulated unconditionally.
(5)
La Vireville was sitting that day, wrapped in a flowered dressing-gown, in the little bow window of the bedroom. It was promotion for him, yet Mr. Tollemache gave an exclamation when he entered.
"By gad, you look as if you had been through a good deal!" he said, and then saw the empty sleeve, and was dumb.
La Vireville stretched out his hand to him. "You behold in me, M. le Lieutenant," he observed, with rather a grim smile, "a twice condemned criminal. I have no right to be anywhere but underground. But what is the news you have to tell me, Monsieur?"
Mr. Tollemache sat down beside him and told him. The wounded man heard him through to the end without comment, his face shielded by the thin hand on which he leant it. At the end he said under his breath, "Thank God!" and held out that hand again to the narrator. "You are a brave man, Mr. Tollemache."
But the sailor, not a very keen observer, was struck by the added pallor which had come over the already haggard face during his brief recital, and which he assigned to the well-known emotional nature of the French, manifested as readily, apparently, at the hearing of good news as of bad. Besides, the poor devil looked very weak. Mr. Tollemache was sorry about that arm.