He recognised his difficulty, and turned as if to wade up stream and escape by the fields. His fourth step brought him into deep water, out of which he floundered snorting.
“Try under the bridge,” I said. “It is the right passage for rats.”
He cursed me volubly.
“Well, we are one to one,” said he in sudden decision, and came splashing out on the Coutras side.
The moment he climbed up the bank I closed with him. He was fairly handicapped by his liquid load, and out of breath and of conceit with his luck besides. He aimed a blow at me with his pistol-butt, but I easily avoided it and let him topple his length again—assisting him in fact—but this time in the dust. Then I sat on him, and threatened his head with a great stone.
“Pouf!” said he, panting. “I protest I am no adept at this business.”
“Is it your only one?” said I.
“At this date, yes.”
“So—you have been an honest man? And what more can a patriot boast of?”
I whistled and called to my companions. My prisoner looked amazed.
“You are not alone!” he exclaimed.
“By no means. My escort is round the curve of the road there.”
He seemed to collapse under me.
“Merci, monsieur!” he muttered, “merci!”
“What, in these days!”
He dared his chance of the stone, and began to struggle violently. I doubt if I could have held him long if Crépin and one of the postilions had not come running up to my shout. A few words were enough to explain the situation, and we conducted the fellow to the carriage and strapped him upon one of the horses in a way compromising to his dignity. And so he became of our party when we moved on once more.
* * * * * * *
Coutras clacks with mills and is musical with weirs. The spirit of the warlike king yet informs its old umber walls and toppling houses. I found it a place so fragrant with antique and with natural beauties, that my heart wept over the present human degeneracy that vulgarised it. It lies amongst the last distant swells, as it were, of the great billows of the Auvergne mountains, before those swells have rolled themselves to waste in the sombre flats of the Landes. It is the hill-slope garden on the fringe of the moor; the resting-place of the sea and the high-rock winds; the hostelry where these meet and embrace and people the vineyards with baby breezes. It has grown old listening under its great chestnuts to the sweet thunder of the Isle and the Dronne. Its peasants, pagan in their instinct for beauty, train their vines up the elm and walnut trees, that in autumn they may dance under a dropping rain of grapes. At the same time, I am bound to confess that their wine suffers for the sake of this picturesqueness.
Now, as we entered it by moonlight, it was a panic town, restless, scurrying, lurid. The new spirit ran vile and naked in its venerable streets; the air was poisonous with the breath of ça ira. For, since we left Paris, this had happened. The Girondists were fallen and hunted men, and Tallien and Ysabeau were at La Réole, preparing for a descent on Bordeaux. We learned it all at the gate, and also that the spies and agents of these scoundrels were everywhere abroad, nosing after the escaped deputies, bullying, torturing, and denouncing.
“It would appear we are forestalled,” said Crépin, drily. “M. Thibaut, have you a mind to rake over dead ashes? Well, I have heard of the white wine of Bergerac. At least I will taste that before I go to bed.”
We drove up to the Golden Lion, whither our scamps had preceded us. Patriots hooted our prisoner as we clattered through the streets, or whipped at him with their ramrods. The decent citizens fled before us, and white-faced girls peeped from behind the white curtains of their little bed-chambers, crushing the dimity against their swelling bosoms. Oh! we were great people, I can assure you.
At the hostelry—a high, mud-coloured building, with window-places fringed with stone, and its hill of a roof fretted thick as a dove-cote with dormer casements—they brought to our carriage a poor weeping maid.
“La demoiselle des pleurs,” said Bonnet-rouge, with a grin.
“Eh?” said Crépin.
“The aubergiste, citizen.”
Crépin looked at the poor creature with disfavour. Certainly she was very plain, though quite young, and her homely face was blowzed with tears.
“Why do you cry then, little fool?”
“Monsieur, they have taken my father to La Réole.”
“He will return, if innocent.”
“Alas! no, monsieur.”
“What! you would discredit the impartiality of the Republic?”
He stepped from the carriage, and took her by the shoulder.
“He will return, if innocent, I say; and would the law had enlarged him before we arrived! You are in charge here, citoyenne?”
“But yes, monsieur.”
“A thousand devils!—and disorganised, I’ll swear; no fire in the kitchen, no food in the larder.”
“Monsieur is in error. I go at once to serve the first monsieur of our best.”
“The first—sacré! is that also forestalled? But who is this first?”
“The same as monsieur.”
“And dost thou know who I am?”
“Alas, monsieur! You come and go, and you are all great and imperious. But I would not with a word offend monsieur.”
“Listen, girl.” (A crowd stood about. He spoke for the benefit of all.) “I am a high officer of the Republic, en mission to rout out the disaffected and to enforce the law. Go, and say to this citizen that, with his permission, I will join him.”
Our rogues were unstrapping the footpad from the horse as he spoke. As they tumbled him, half silly with his jolting and with the blows he had received, upon his feet, the aubergiste gave a faint cry. Crépin caught her as she retreated, and twisted her about once more.
“You know this Chevalier de la Coupe?”
“Monsieur, I—how can I say? So many drink wine with us.”
He looked at her sternly a moment, then pushed her from him.
“For supper, the best in the house!” he called after her, and turned to arrange for the disposition of his men and their prisoner.
By-and-by the aubergiste came to conduct us to table. As we went thither, Crépin stopped, took the girl by the chin, and looked into her wet inflamed eyes. If the prospect of good fare exhilarated him, I will say, also, for his credit, that I believe he had a kindly nature.
“For the future,” he said, “be discreet and make a study to command your nerves. In these days one must look on life through the little window of the lunette.”
We found our forestaller (who, by the way, had returned no answer to Crépin’s polite message) established in the eating-room when we entered it. He was a coarse, blotched ruffian, thick and overbearing, and he stared at us insolently as he lay sprawled over a couple of chairs.
“So, thou wouldst share my supper?” he cried, in a rumbling, vibrant voice. “Lie down under the table, citizen, and thou shalt have a big plate of scraps when once my belly is satisfied.”
Crépin paused near the threshold. I tingled with secret laughter to watch the bludgeoning of these two parvenus. But my respected chief had the advantage of an acquired courtesy.
“You honour me beyond my expectations,” he said. “But, if I were to break the dish over the citizen’s face, the scraps would fall the sooner.”
The other scrambled to his feet with a furious grimace.
“Canaille!” he shouted (it was curious that I never heard an upstart but would apply this term in a quarrel to those of his own kidney)—“Scum! pigwash! Do you know my name, my office, my reputation? God’s-blood! I’ve a mind to have you roasted in a fat hog’s skin and served for the first course!”
Crépin walked up to the bully very coolly. M. le Représentant had plenty of courage in the ordinary affairs of life.
“Do I know who you are?” he said. “Why, I take you for one of those curs that are whipt on to do the dirty work of the people’s ministers. And do you know who I am, citizen spy? I hold my commission direct from the Committee of Safety, with full authority of sequestration and requisition, and no tittle of responsibility to your masters at La Réole. If you interfere with the processes of my office, I shall have something additional to say in my report to the chiefs of my department, whom your highness may recognise by the names of Billaud-Varennes and Collot-d’Herbois. If you insult me personally, I shall thrash you with a dog-whip.”
The creature was but a huge wind-bag. I never saw one collapse so suddenly. Crépin, it is true, had some fearful names to conjure by.
“M. le Représentant,” said the former, in a fallen, flabby voice, “I have no desire to oppose or embarrass you. We need not clash if I am circumspect. For the rest, accept my apologies for the heat I was betrayed into through inadvertence. We have to be so careful with strangers.”
He bowed clumsily. His neck was choked with a great cravat; a huge sabre clanked on the floor beside him as he moved. He was a very ugly piece of goods, and he bore his humiliation with secret fury, I could perceive—the more so as the aubergiste brought in the first of the dishes during the height of the dispute.
Crépin permitted himself to be something mollified by the sight of supper. He complimented the girl on her promptitude. The poor creature may have been no heroine, but she was a seductive cook. We had potage, most excellent, an entrée of chestnut-meal ramequins, roasted kid stuffed with truffes de Périgord and served with sweet wine-sauce. Also a magnificent brand of Bergerac was in evidence.
Under the influence of these generous things our table-fellow’s insolence a little revived; but now he would rally me as the safer butt.
“The citizen is dainty with his food.” (The fellow himself had lapped and sucked like a pig.)
“I owe it to the cook,” said I, serenely.
“A debt of love. Thou shalt pay it her presently when the lights are out.”
“You are an ill-conditioned hog,” said I.
He sprang, toppling, to his feet.
“Mother of God!” he stuttered, hoarsely; “this goes too far, this——”
He caught Crépin’s eye and subsided again, muttering. We were all pretty warm with liquor; but my superior officer was grown benignant under its influence.
“For shame, citizens!” he said, blandly, “to put a coarse accent to this heavenly bouquet.”
He had bettered me in the philosophy of the palate. I confess it at once.
The other (his name, we came to know, was Lacombe—a name of infamous notoriety in the Bordeaux business) leaned over to me presently—when Crépin was gone from the room a moment to give a direction—with hell glinting out of his eyes.
“M. le Représentant’s fellow,” said he; “I bow to authority, but I kick authority’s dog in the ribs if the cur molests me.”
“I don’t doubt it. It is probably the measure of your courage.”
He nodded pregnantly.
“The resurrection of France shall be in discretion. That is the real courage to those whose overbearing impulse is to strike. We are discreet, and we watch, and we evolve by degrees the whole alphabet of espionage. Let us call A the language of the hands. These the frost of poverty will stunt, the rack of labour will warp and disjoint. There is your sign of a citizen of the people. Monsieur has very pretty fingers and pink nails.”
“By the same token a corded fist should prove one to be a hangman. Monsieur has a knot for every knuckle.”
He nodded again. His calmness was more deadly than his wrath.
“You spit your insults over the shoulder of your master. You think yourself secure in your office. But there is an order of repartee unknown to patriots, for it was hatched in the hotbeds of Versailles.”
He fell back in his chair—still eyeing me—with a grunt; then suddenly leaned forward again.
“The alphabet,” he said, “of which B shall be designated the penetration of disguises. Coach-drivers, colporteurs, pedlars—oh, one may happen upon the cloven hoof amongst them all.”
I laughed, with a fine affectation of contempt. This mummy at the feast——
There was a sound in the room. I turned my head. The little aubergiste stood at the door, weeping and wringing her hands.
“Monsieur!” she cried, “do not let it be done!”
I rose and went to the child.
“Tell me,” I said, “what is it?”
“Monsieur, the poor man that you captured! they are torturing him in the yard.”
I pointed with my hand to a window. Without, all during our meal, had been a confused clatter of voices and the lurid smoke of torches rising about the glass.
“Yes,” she sobbed, quite overcome. “It is not right, monsieur. It will bring a curse upon the place.”
I ran from the room, my blood on fire. Whatever his offence to me, I had sooner let the rascal go than that he should fall into the hands of drunken patriots.
The yard was a paved space scooped from the rear of the house. A well with a windlass pierced it about the middle, and round the low wall of this were seated a dozen red-bonnets, our own four prominent, shouting and quarrelling and voluble as parrots. Broken bottles strewed the ground, and here and there a torch was stuck into the chinks of the stones, informing all with a jumping glare of red.
I pushed past two or three frightened onlookers, and rushed out into the open.
“Where is he?” I cried in a heat. “What the devil! am I not to pass judgment on my own!”
A moment’s silence fell. The faces of all were turned up to me, scowling and furious. In the pause a pitiful voice came booming and wailing up from the very bowels of the well itself.
“Merci! messieurs, merci! and I will conduct you to the treasure!”
I wore a sword, and I drew it and sprang to the well-mouth.
“God in heaven!” I cried, “what are you doing with him down there?”
Several had risen by this, and were set at me, snarling like dogs.
“The man is forfeit to the law!” they yelped.
“That is for the law to decide.”
“The people are the law. We sit here to condemn him while he cools his heels.”
“Send monsieur to fetch his friend up!” cried Lacombe’s voice over their heads. “He will be dainty to wash his white fingers after a meal!”
There were cries of “Aristocrat!” Possibly they would have put the brute’s suggestion into effect—for a tipsy patriot has no bowels—had not Crépin at that moment run into the yard. I informed him of the situation in a word, as he joined me by the well-side.
“Haul up the man!” he said, coolly and peremptorily. His office procured him some respect and more fear. Our fellows had no stomach but to obey, and they came to the windlass, muttering, and wound their victim up to the surface. He was a pitiable sight when he reached it. They had trussed him to the rope with a savagery to which his swollen joints bore witness, and, with a refinement of cruelty, had cut the bucket from under his feet, that the full weight of his body should hang without support. In this condition they had then lowered him up to his neck in the black water.
He fell, when released, a sodden moaning heap on the stones.
“And what was to be the end?” asked Crépin.
“Citizen Représentant, we could not decide; yet a show of hands was in favour of singeing over a slow fire. Grace of God! but it would seem the accused has forestalled the jury.”
He had not, however.
“Give him brandy,” said Crépin; “and bring him to the shed yonder, when recovered, for the procès verbal.”
He took my arm, and we went off together to the place designated,—an outbuilding half full of fagots. On the way he beckoned the crying aubergiste, who had followed him into the yard, to attend us.
“For the present the man is saved,” he said to her when we were alone. “Now, what is your interest in the rascal?”
“Monsieur, he was an honest man once.”
“Of the neighbourhood?”
She looked up at him with her little imploring red eyes.
“Come,” he said; “I owe you the debt of a grateful digestion.”
“Of the château,” she said faintly.
“What château?”
“Des Pierrettes, monsieur.”
Crépin, as I, I could see, was beating his brains for some memory connected with the name.
“In Février’s café!” I said suddenly. Should it prove the same, for the third time destiny seemed bringing me into touch with a lady of this history.
“Ah!” he said. “But it is not on my list. In what direction does it lie, girl?”
“Monsieur, two leagues away, off the Libourne road by the lane of the Marron Cornu.”
“And who inhabits it?”
The poor girl looked infinitely distressed.
“It is M. de Lâge and his niece. You will not make me the instrument to harm them, monsieur. They are patriots, I will swear. Monsieur, monsieur!”
“Silence, girl! What are you to question the methods of the Republic? It is a good recommendation at least that they commission a footpad to patrol the neighbourhood.”
“It is none of their doing. Oh, monsieur, will you not believe me? He was an honest servant of theirs till this religion of Reason drove him to the crooked path. And he has been dismissed this twelvemonth.”
“Harkee, wench! If I read you right, you are well quit of a scoundrel.”
She fell to sobbing and clucking over that again; and in the midst of her outburst the half-revived felon was hustled into the shed.
The poor broken and collapsed creature fell at Crépin’s feet and moaned for mercy.
“Give me a day of life,” he snuffled abjectly, “and I will lead you to the treasure.”
One of the guard pecked at his ribs with his boot.
“Pomme de chou!” he grunted, “have you no other song to sing but that?”
But Crépin was looking extremely grave and virtuous.
“The prisoner is in no state to be examined,” he said. “Place him under lock and key, with food and drink; and I will put him to the question later.”
“Nous y voici!”
The carriage pulled back with a jerk, so that the prisoner Michel, who sat opposite us, was almost thrown into our laps. One of our grimy escort appeared at the window.
“Dog of a thief!” he growled. “Is this the turning?”
The other sacréd below his breath and nodded sullenly. A vast chestnut (the thick of its butt must have been thirty feet in circumference) stood at the entrance to a narrow lane. Turning, with a worrying of wheels, down the latter, we continued our journey.
Southwards from Coutras we had broken into a plat of country very wild and sterile; but now we were amongst trees again—oak, chestnut, and walnut—that thronged the damp hollows and flung themselves over the low hills in irresistible battalions.
Suddenly Michel bent forward and touched my companion’s knee menacingly. The rascal was near restored to himself, and his lowering eyes were full of gloom.
“The treasure, monsieur,” he said; “is that the condition of my liberty?”
“I have said—discover it to me and thou shalt go free.”
“But I, monsieur, I also must make a condition.”
Crépin stared. The man bent still more earnestly forward.
“Mademoiselle Carinne——”
“The niece of De Lâge——?”
“She must be considered—respected. I will not have her insulted with a look.”
“What now, Michel?”
“Oh, monsieur! you may do as you will with the old, hard man; but her—her——”
“And is it for the lady’s sake thou hast forborne hitherto to appropriate this treasure, the hiding-place of which thou wilt buy thy life by revealing?”
“It is so. I have driven a desperate trade, starving often with this knowledge in my breast.”
“But why?”
“How can I tell? I have known her from a child. Once she struck me that I killed a cheeping wolf-cub she had brought from the snow; and then she was sorry and kissed the little stupid bruise; and I swore my arm should rot before it lost the will to protect her.”
“I will do my best.”
“But that is not enough. My God! if I were to sacrifice mademoiselle’s dot without purpose.”
“The purpose is thy life.”
“That were nothing were she dishonoured.”
I put in a serene word—
“Yet it seems you would condemn her to poverty to save your skin?”
“That is different. I should have life; and life means many things—the power, possibly, to influence her fortunes; at least the wash of wine again in one’s dusty throat.”
“Michel,” I said, “I must applaud you for a capital rogue.”
He stared at me sombrely, muttered, “Je suis ce que je suis,” and sank back in his corner.
We were running between dark hedges at the time. Suddenly we came among farm-buildings, a thronging dilapidated group. The byres mouldered on their props; the flat stones of the roofs had flaked generations of rubbish upon the weedy ground beneath.
Crépin rubbed his hands.
“It is well,” he said. “This without doubt is a skinflint.”
We turned a corner and passed the entrance to a ruined drive. Here the tall iron gates, swinging upon massive posts of rubble-stone, had been recently, it seemed, torn from their moorings of grass and knotted bindweed, for the ground was scarred and the lower bars of metal hung with rags of drooping green. Crépin’s features underwent another change at the sight.
“But what is this?” he muttered. “Something unaccustomed—some scare—some panic?”
He looked with sudden fury at the prisoner.
“If he has got wind of our coming—has escaped with——”
He broke off, showing his teeth and grinding his hands together. At the moment we came in view of the château.
It was an old grey house—built of the same material as the gate-pillars—with a high-pitched roof and little corner tourelles. Once, presumably, a possession of importance, decay and neglect had now beggared it beyond description. Yet within and without were evidences of that vulgar miserly spirit that seeks by inadequate tinkering to deceive with half-measures. The tangled grass of the lawn was cut only where its untidiness would have been most in evidence, and its litter left where it fell. Triton blew his conch from a fine fountain basin near the middle of the plot; but the shell, threatening to break away, had been fastened to the sea-god’s lips with a ligament of twine that was knotted round the head. A crippled bench was propped with a stone; a shattered ball-capital at the entrance-door held together with a loop of wire. What restoration that was visible was all in this vein of ludicrous economy.
But not a sign of life was about—no footstep in the grounds, no face at any window. To all appearance the place was desolate.
We drew up at the broken stone porch. The door was already flung wide, and we entered, with all the usual insolent clatter of “fraternity,” an echoing hall. Here, as elsewhere, were dust and decay—inconsequent patching and the same tawdry affectation of repair.
A shallow flight of stairs, broad and oaken, led straight up to a little low gallery that bisected the hall like a transom. Up these steps we scuttled, the escort driving the prisoner amongst them, and came to a corridor from which a number of closed doors shut off the living rooms of the house.
Suddenly Crépin put up his hand and motioned us to silence. From one of the invisible chambers, some distance down the corridor, rose and fell, like wind in a key-hole, a little blasphemous complaining voice.
“In the sober moonlight of my days!” we made it out to cry—“after scaling the rough peaks of self-denial, thus to be tilted over into the depths again by a lying Providence!”
There followed some shrill storming of nouns and epithets; then a pause, out of which the voice snapped once more—
“I hear you, you scum of ditches—you stinking offal of the Faubourgs—you publicans ennobled of a short-sighted Saviour!—Come back and finish your work, and I will spit poison on you that you shall follow me to the hell—to the hell, I say——”
The furious dragging of a chair mangled the sentence; then came a jarring thump and a further shrieking of oaths. With one impulse we made for the door, threw it open, and burst into the room. In the midst of a lofty chamber lay a little man struggling on the floor, a pretty heavy prie-dieu, to which he had been bound with his arms behind his back, jerking and bobbing above him with his every kick.
“Mais c’est une tortue!” cried one of the crew, with a howl of laughter.
The tortoise twisted up its face, disfigured with passion. It was the face, without doubt, of the little fesse-Mathieu of Février’s restaurant.
The room in which he lay was of good proportions, but furnished meagrely, and informed with the same spirit of graceless economy as was apparent without. For the dark ancient panels of its walls had been smeared with some light-grey wash, and an attempt made to decorate them with plaster wreaths and festoons in the Louis Quinze style. The work, however, had been left unfinished, and, so far as it went, was crude and amateurish to a degree. Obviously, here was an example of that species of niggard that will try to cheat a dozen trades by wringing the gist of all out of one poor factotum.
But Crépin stood with corrugated forehead; for there were other signs in the room than those of parsimony—signs in plenty, in fact, that he had been forestalled in his quest. Chairs and tables were overturned, a bureau was smashed almost to pieces, great rents appeared in the panelling of the walls, where search had been instituted, one would judge, for secret depositories.
A savage oath exploded from M. le Représentant’s lips.
“That spy—that swaggerer—that Lacombe!” he muttered, looking at me. “He was vanished this morning—he and his ragged tail—when we rose. He got scent, without doubt, and has played outrider to my mission of search. If it is so; if he has found and removed—my God! but for all his Tallien and the Committee of Bordeaux he shall dance—he shall dance!”
He turned furiously to his men.
“Put the rascal upright,” he bellowed.
A couple of them lifted and spun the chair to its legs, so that the old man’s skull jerked against the head-rail with a clack like that of a mill-hopper. He did not seem to notice the blow. His eyes, ever since they had alighted on this new influx of brigands, had been set like a fish’s—wondering and unwinking. Now they slowly travelled, taking in Crépin, Citizen Thibaut, the escort, until they stopped—actually, it appeared, with a click—at Michel. His mouth puckered, and, like a ring blown by a smoker, a wavering “O!” issued from it.
“Your ci-devant servant?” said Crépin, grimly.
The old man nodded his head.
“Michel. But, yes—it is Michel.”
“Thou owest him compensation for that long tyranny of service.”
“I owe him nothing.”
“And me, citizen? Dost thou remember the Abbaye St Germain and the killings of September?”
I struck in with the question. I was willing, I think, for the girl’s sake, to identify myself with a past incident.
He looked at me bitterly, but with no recognition in his eyes.
“I deplore the cursed fortune,” he cried in grief, “that preserved me but for this!”
“How now, old fool!” said Crépin, with impatience. “Thou shalt go free when Michel has revealed to me thy secret place of hoarding.”
M. de Lâge gave the crying snarl of a wolf.
“Let him go—the ingrate and the traitor! What, Michel! dost thou mangle the hand that gave thee soft litter for thy couch and honest bread for thy belly? Look, Michel!—the white garlands on the walls there! Dost thou remember how thou wrought’st them to pleasure thy mistress—to win her from the depression she suffered in the sombre oak and its long history of gloom? There they cling unfinished,—thy solemn rebuke, Michel. Thy attachment to her was the one reality, thou wouldst say, in a world of shadows, and yet the blatant fanfare of those shadows was all that was needed to win thee from the reality. And what is the price of thy kiss, Judas?”
The man hung his head.
“Not your life, monsieur,” he muttered.
“Nay; but only that which makes my life endurable. And the forfeit—what is that?”
“My life, monsieur.”
De Lâge drew in his breath with a cruel sound.
“Hélas!” he cried. “You will have to pay the penalty! the faithful servant will have to pay the penalty!”
Crépin uttered an exclamation and strode forward.
“You have been stripped?” said he.
“Of all, monsieur, of all. There have been others here before you this morning—fine sans-culotte preachers of equality and the gospel of distribution, whose practice, nevertheless, is to enrich the poor at the expense of the wealthy. They were brave fellows by their own showing; yet they must truss me here before they dared brandish the fruits of their robbery before my eyes!”
Suddenly he was straining and screaming in his bonds, his face like a map of some inhuman territory of the passions, branched with veins for rivers of blood.
“Free me that I may kill some one!” he shrieked. “I am mad to groove my fingers in flesh! The time for concessions is past. I was as wax in their hands till they unearthed my plate, my coins, my riches. Now, now——”
He was indeed beyond himself, a better man—or devil—in his despair than the money-conscious craven who had palpitated over that little “Vive le roi!” once upon a time.
Crépin regarded the struggling creature with harsh contempt. This plebeian soul also was translated, but not to his moral promotion. It was evident he had enlarged the scope of his anticipations greatly in view of his prisoner’s promise; and his disappointment brought the spotted side of him uppermost.
“Take the dog,” he cried in a hoarse voice (signifying Michel by a gesture), “and whip him to the lair! At least we will look to see if the wolves have left a bone or two for our picking.”
“M. le Représentant,” I ventured to say, “be just to consider that the prisoner is by all rights my prisoner. Anyhow he has stuck to his side of the bargain. Let me hold you in fairness responsible for his safe-conduct.”
He turned upon me like a teased bullock.
“In fairness!” he cried—“in fairness! But you presume, citizen, on your position.”
He looked as if he could have struck me; all the beast in the man was prominent. Then he gave the order to march, and I found myself left alone with the little grotesque in the chair.
I was hot and indignant; but the passion of the other seemed to have exploded itself into a rain of emotion. His dry cheeks quivered; the tears ran down them like moisture on an old wall.
“Monsieur,” I said, softly, “I know not whether to applaud or upbraid you. And where is Mademoiselle Carinne?”
He seemed quite broken in a moment—neither to resent nor to be surprised at my mention of the girl’s name.
“She is fled,” he whimpered—“the little graceless cabbage is fled.”
“To safety, I hope?”
“To the devil, for all I care.”
“Monsieur, I hold your wretchedness an excuse, even if you have been careless of——”
He caught me up, staring at me woefully.
“Careless? but, my God! I have pampered and maintained her ever since her brown head was a crutch to my fingers; and this is how she repays me.”
“What has she done?”
“She has condemned me to beggary for a prudish sentiment—me, in my old forlorn age. From the first I saw that the test might come—that she might be called upon to employ the privileges of her sex on my behalf. Free-thought, free-love! Bah! What are they but a self-adaptation to the ever-changing conditions of life. The spirit need not subscribe to such mere necessities of being; and a little gratitude at least was due to me. She has none, and for that may God strike her dead!”
“What has she done?”
“Done!” (His voice rose to a shriek again.) “But, what has she not?—That scoundrel Lacombe would have exchanged me my riches—my pitiful show of tankards that he had unearthed—for her favour. She would not; she refused to go with him; she reviled and cursed me—me that had been her bulwark against poverty.”
“You would have sold her honour for your brazen pots?”
“Gold and silver, monsieur; and it was only a question of temporary accommodation. In a few months she might have returned, and all would have been well again. But honour—bah! it will survive a chin-chuck better than loss of wealth. But she would not. She escaped from us by a lying ruse, and they sought her far and near without avail. At the last they robbed and maltreated me, and for that may hell seize them and fester in their bones!”
“And in thine, thou pestilence!”
My fury and my contempt joined with a clap, like detonating acids.
“Lie there and rot!” I shouted, and so flung out of the room.
My heart blazed. That white girl—that Carinne. I could recall her face, could picture her in her loneliness arraigned before Lacombe and his sans-culottes and his reptile prisoner—defying them all. With some vague instinct of search directing my fury, I hurried through room after room of the empty house. Each was like its neighbour, vulgarised, scantily furnished, disfigured by the search that had been conducted therein. Once I broke into the girl’s own bed-chamber (it was hers, I will swear, by token of little feminine fancies consistent with the character I had gifted her withal), and cursed the beasts who had evidently made it the rallying-point of their brutal jesting. But this, obviously, must be the last place in which to seek her, and I quickly left it.
Not a soul did I happen upon. Of whomsoever the household had consisted, no single individual but the old villain in the chair was remained to brazen out the situation.
At last I made my way into the grounds once more, issuing from the rear of the building into a patch of dense woodland that flowed up to within fifty yards of the walls. I heard voices, and, plunging down a moist track amongst the trees, came immediately in view of my party returning to the house. Then I saw there were two women conducted in its midst, and my throat jumped, and I ran forward.
At least my sudden apprehension was comforted. These crying wenches were of the working class—comely domestics by their appearance.
Crépin stayed them all when he came up to me. The ugly look had not left his face—was intensified on it, in fact. He stared at me, haughty and lowering at once, and was altogether a very offensive creature.
“Has Citizen Thibaut any further exception to take to my methods of procedure?” he said, ironically.
I looked at him, but did not reply.
“Because,” he went on, “perhaps his permission should be asked that these pretty citizenesses accompany me in my carriage?”
“Mais non, monsieur—par pitié, mais non!” cried one of the wenches in a sobbing voice.
He bent down to her—a sicklily self-revealed animal.
“Hush, ma petite!” he said. “We of the Republic do not ask—we take. Thou shalt have a brighter gown than ever De Lâge furnished for thy shapely limbs.”
She stopped crying, and seemed to listen at that. He came erect again, with a smile on his face and his lips licking together, and regarded me defiantly.
“The Citizen Representative can please himself,” I said, coldly, and pushed past them all and walked on. Crépin turned to look after me, gave a peculiar cynical laugh, and cried “En avant!” to his party.
I was to read the significance of his attitude in a moment—to read it in the dead form of Michel hanging from a tree.
I rushed back along the path, and caught the others as they issued from the wood. Crépin heard me coming, bade his men on to the house, and returned a pace or two to meet me. His mood asserted, he was something inclined, I suppose, to a resumption of the better terms between us. At any rate, his expression now was a mixture of embarrassment and a little apprehension. But I spoke to him very staidly and quietly—
“M. Crépin, it dawns upon me that I am slow to learn the methods of the new morality, and that I shall never justify your choice of a secretary.”
“You are going to leave me.”
“There will be the more room in the coach for monsieur’s harem.”
I made him a low bow and went off amongst the trees. He called after me—there was some real regret in his voice—“But you will come to harm! be wise!—monsieur!”
I paid no heed; and the thickets received and buried me.
My rupture with Crépin was the preface to a period of my life, the details of which I could never but doubtfully piece together in my mind. During this period I lived, but how I supported existence is a problem that it is beyond my power to solve. I have an indistinct memory of wandering amongst trees—always amongst trees; in light and darkness; in drought and in dew; of scaring and being scared by snakes, that rustled from me over patches of dead leaves; of swallowing, in desperate phases of hunger, berries and forest fruits, of whose properties I was as ignorant as of their names.
And, throughout, the strange thought dwelt with me, warm and insistent, that I was the champion elect of that white Carinne with whom I had never so much as exchanged a word. To me she was the Una of these fathomless green depths—the virgin who had carried her maidenhood and her pride to the Republic of the woods, where security and an equal condition were the right of all.
This fanciful image possessed a singular fascination for me. It glimmered behind trees; it peered through the thick interlace of branches; I heard the paddle of its feet in mossy rills, or the low song of its voice rising from some shadow prostrate in beds of fern. No doubt fatigue and hunger and that sense of a long responsibility repudiated came to work a melodious madness in my brain. For days, loitering aimlessly under its spell, I was happy—happier, I believe, than I had ever been hitherto. I had become a thing apart from mankind—a faun—a reversion to the near soulless type, but with the germ of spirit budding in me.
It was a desire to avoid a certain horror dangling over a track that had at first driven me into the thickets, and so lost me my way. The memory of a blot of shadow, on the sunny grass underneath that same horror, that swayed sluggishly, like the disc of a pendulum, as the body swayed above, got into my waking thoughts and haunted them. I wished to put a world-wide interval between myself and the blot—though I had seen monstrosities enough of late, God knows. But, in the silent woods, under that enchanted fancy of my relapse to primitive conditions, a loathing of the dead man, such as Cain might have felt, sickened all my veins. I was done with violence—astonished that its employment could ever have entered into the systems of such a defenceless race as man.
But also I knew that to me, moving no longer under the ægis of authority, the towns and the resorts of men were become quagmires for my uncertain feet. I was three hundred miles from Paris; all my neighbourhood was dominated by Revolutionary Committees; my chance of escape, did once that black cuttle-fish of the “Terror” touch me with a tentacle, a finger-snap would express. My hitherto immunity was due, indeed, to the offices of certain friends, and a little, perhaps, to my constitutional tendency to allow circumstances to shape my personality as they listed. Resigned to the remotest possibilities, my absence of affectation was in a sense my safeguard.
Here, however, far from the centre of operations, that which, under certain conditions, had proved my protection, would avail me nothing. A sober nonchalance, an easy manner, would be the very thyrsus to whip these coarse provincial hinds to madness. And, finding in my new emancipation—or intellectual decadence—an ecstasy I had not known before, I was very tender of my life, and had no longer that old power of indifference in me to the processes of fatality.
How long this state of exaltation lasted I do not know; but I know it came to me all in a moment that I must eat or die. It was the reflection of my own face, I think, in a little pool of water, that wrought in me this first dull recrudescence of reason. The wild countenance of a maniac stared up at me. Its hollow jaws bristled like the withered husks of a chestnut; its lips were black with the juice of berries; an animal abandon slept in the pupils of its eyes. Ah! it was better that reason should triumph over circumstance than that the soul should subscribe tamely to its own disinheritance.
All in an instant I had set off running through the wood. That privilege of man, to dare and to fail, I would not abrogate for all the green retreats of nature.
For hours, it seemed to me, I hurried onwards. My heart sobbed in my chest; my breath was like a knotted cord under my shirt. At last, quite suddenly, blue sky came at me through the trunks, and I broke from the dense covert into a field of maize, and found myself looking down a half mile of sloping arable land upon a large town of ancient houses, whereof at the gate opposite me the tricolour mounted guard on the height of a sombre tower.
Now, in view of this, my purpose somewhat wavering, I sat me down in the thick of the corn and set to wondering how I could act for the best. I had assignats in my pocket, and a little money, yet there could be no dealings for me in the open market. Thinking of my appearance, I knew that by my own act I had yielded myself to the condition of a hunted creature.
All the afternoon I crouched in patches of the higher stalks, peeping down upon the town that, spreading up a gentle slope in the nearer distance, lay mapped before my eyes. Sometimes desperate in my hunger, I would snatch a head of the standing grain; but to chew and swallow more than would just blunt the edge of my suffering would be, I knew, to invite a worser torture. The sun beat on my head; my throat was caked with drought. At last I could endure it no longer, but retreated once more into the wood and waited for the shadows to lengthen.
It was early evening when I ventured into the field again and looked down. The falling sunlight smote the town with fire from the west, so that its walls and turrets seemed to melt in the glare and run into long pools of shadow. But here and there wan ribbons of streets, or patches of open places, broke up the sombreness—in vivid contrast with it—and seemed to swarm, alone of all the dappled area, with crawling shapes.
Of these blotches of whiteness, one flashed and scintillated at a certain point, from some cause I could not at first fathom. Now white, now red, it stretched across the fields a rayed beam that dazzled my wood-haunted eyes with the witchery of its brightness.
But presently I saw the open patch whence it issued grow dark with a press of figures. It was as if a cloth had been pulled over a dead face; and all in a moment the strange flash fell and rose again—like a hawk that has caught a life in its talons,—and a second time swooped and mounted, clustered with red rays,—and a third time and a fourth; but by then I had interpreted the writing on the wall, and it was the “Mene, mene,” written on the bright blade of the guillotine by the finger of the setting sun.
A very strange and quiet pity flowed in my veins as I looked. Here was I resting amidst the tranquillity of a golden harvest, watching that other harvest being gathered in. Could it be possible that any point of my picture expressed other than the glowing serenity that was necessary to the composition? I felt as if, in the intervals of the flashing, each next victim must be stepping forward with a happy consciousness of the part he was to play in the design. Then suddenly I threw myself on my face, and crushed my palms against my mouth that I might not shriek curses on the inexorable beauty of the heavens above me.
I did not look again, or rise from my covert till dark was drooping over the hillside. But, with the first full radiance of moonrise, I got to my feet, feeling dazed and light-headed, and went straight off in an easterly direction. My plan was to circumambulate, at a safe distance, the walls (that could enclose no possibility of help to me in my distress), and seek relief of my hunger in some hamlet (less emancipated) on their farther side. If the town was Libourne, as I believed it to be, then I knew the village of St Émilion to lie but a single league to the south-east of it.
Walking as in a dream, I came out suddenly into the highroad, and saw the moon-drenched whiteness of it flow down to the very closed gates far below me. Its track was a desolate tide on which no life was moving; for nowadays the rural population was mostly drifted or driven into the seething market-places of the Revolution. Now my imagination pictured this cold and silent highway a softly tumultuous stream—a welded torrent of phantoms, mingling and pushing and hurrying, in the midst of noiseless laughter, to beat on the town gates and cry out murmuringly that a “suspect” was fording a channel of its upper reaches.
This fright, this fancy (one would hardly credit it) brought the sweat out under my clothes. But it was to be succeeded by a worse. For, as I looked, the boiling wash of moonlight was a road again, and there came up it footsteps rhythmically clanking and unearthly—and others and yet others, till the whole night was quick with their approach. And, as the footfalls neared me, they ceased abruptly, and there followed the sound of an axe ringing down in wooden grooves; and then I knew that the victims of the evening, ghastly and impalpable, were come to gaze upon the man who had indulged his soul, even for a moment, with the enchantment of a prospect whose accent was their agony.
Now, assuredly, my reason was in a parlous state—when, with a whoop that broke the spell, an owl swept above me and fled eastwards down the sky; and I answered to its call, and crossed the road and plunged into fields again, and ran and stumbled and went blindly on once more until I had to pause for breath.
At last I heard the rumbling wash of water, and paused a stone’s-throw from a river-bank; and here a weight of terror seemed to fall from me to mark how wan and sad the real stream looked, and how human in comparison with that other demon current of my imagining. From its bosom a cluster of yards and masts stood up against the sky; and by that I knew that I was come upon the Dordogne where it opened out into a port for the once busy town of Libourne, and that if ever caution was necessary to me it was necessary now.
I looked to my right. A furlong off the rampart of the walls swept black and menacing; and over them, close at hand now, the silent yoke of the guillotine rose into the moonlight. It must have been perched upon some high ground within; and there it stood motionless, its jaws locked in slumber. Could it be the same monster I had watched flashing, scarlet and furious, from the hillside? Now, the ravening of its gluttony was satisfied; Jacques Bourreau had wiped its slobbered lips clean with a napkin. Sullenly satiate, propped against the sky, straddling its gaunt legs over the empty trough at its feet, it slept with lidless eyes that seemed to gloat upon me in a hideous trance.
Bah! Now all this is not Jean-Louis Sebastien de Crancé, nor even Citizen Thibaut. It is, in truth, the half-conscious delirium of a brain swimming a little with hunger and thirst and fatigue; and I must cut myself adrift from the hysterical retrospection.
I hurried towards the river, running obliquely to the south-east. If I could once win to clean water, I was prepared, in my desperation, to attempt to swim to the opposite bank. Stumbling, and sometimes wallowing, I made my way up a sludgy shore and suddenly came to a little creek or cove where a boat lay moored to a post. Close by, a wooden shanty, set in a small common garden with benches, like the Guinguettes of Paris, rattled to its very walls with boisterous disputation, while the shadows of men tossing wine-cups danced on its one window-blind. I unhitched the painter of the boat, pushed the prow from the bank, and, as the little craft swung out into the channel, scrambled softly on board and felt for the sculls in a panic. When I had once grasped and tilted these into the rowlocks, I breathed a great sigh of relief and pulled hurriedly round the stern of a swinging vessel into the cool-running waters of the Dordogne.
It was not until I had made more than half the passage to the farther side that I would venture to pause a moment to assuage my cruel thirst. Then, resting on my oars, I dipped in my hat and drank again and again, until my whole system seemed to flow with moisture like a rush. At last, clapping my sopped hat on my head, I was preparing to resume my work, when I uttered a low exclamation of astonishment, and sat transfixed. For something moved in the stern-sheets of the boat; and immediately, putting aside a cloak under which it appeared he had lain asleep, a child sat up on the bottom boards.
Now, my heart seemed to tilt like a top-heavy thing. Must this hateful necessity be mine, then—to silence, for my own safety, this baby of six or seven, this little comical poupon with the round cropt head and ridiculous small shirt?
He stared at me, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and suddenly began to whimper.
“Heu! heu!” he cried in the cheeping voice of a duckling, “la Grand’ Bête!”
He took me for the mythical monster of the peasants, whose power of assumption of any form is in ratio with the corrective ingenuity of nurses and mothers.
“Yes,” I said, my brain leaping to an idea; “I am la Grand’ Bête, and if you make a noise I shall devour you.”
His eyes were like full brown agates; his chin puckered to his lower lip; but he crushed his little fists against his chest to stay the coming outcry. My face relaxed as I looked at him.
“La Grand’ Bête is kind to the little ones that obey him. Can you use these sculls?”
“Mais, oui,” he whispered, with a soft sob; “I am the pretty little waterman.”
“Very well. Now, little waterman, I shall land at the bank over there, and then you can take the sculls and pull the boat across to the cove again. But you must be very silent and secret about having gone with la Grand’ Bête over the river, or he will come to your bedside in the night and devour you.”
I had been rowing gently as I talked, and now the nose of the skiff grounded easily under a low bank. I shipped the sculls, reached forward and took the rogue in my arms.
“Oh! but la Grand’ Bête loves the good children. Be a discreet little waterman, and thou shalt find a gold louis under thy pillow this very day month.”
I kissed him, and, turning, caught at the knots of grass and hauled myself up the bank. It was a clumsy disembarkation for a god, perhaps, but my late comrade did not appear to be shaken in his faith. I stopped and looked back at him when I had run a few yards from the river. He was paddling vigorously away, with a professional air, and the moonlight was shattered on his scull-blades into a rain of diamonds. Suddenly a patrol-boat was pulled up the river across his bows, and I half turned to fly, my heart in my mouth.
“Hullo, hullo, Jacksprat!” cried a rough voice. “What dost thou here at this hour?”
“They were noisy in the auberge,” answered the childish treble, “and I could not sleep.”
I went on my way with a smile. To have used the boat and cast it adrift would not have prospered me so well as did this accident. Yet I felt a shame of meanness to hear the little thing, taking its lying cue from me, lie to the men, and I wished I had not clinched my purchase of his silence with that promise of a louis-d’or.
Pushing boldly across a wide moon-dappled margin of grass, so thronged with trees as to afford one good cover, I came out suddenly into a field-track running southwards, and along this I sped at a fast pace. But presently, seeing figures mounting towards me from the dip of a flying slope, I dived into a belt of corn that ran on my left between the track and the skirt of a dense wood, and lay close among the stalks waiting for the travellers to pass. This, however, to my chagrin, they did not; but, when they were come right over against me, they stopped, very disputative and voluble in a breathless manner, and lashed one another with knotty thongs of patriotism.
“But who wants virtue or moderation in a Commonwealth?”
“Dost not thou?”
“I?—I want heads—a head for every cobblestone in the Rue St Jacques. I would walk on the brains of self-seekers. This Roland——”
“He wore strings in his shoes to rebuke the vanity of the Veto——”
“And to indulge his own. Head of a cabbage! thou wouldst weep over the orator though he condemned thy belly to starvation. What! shall I satisfy my hunger with a thesis on the beauty of self-denial, because, like a drum, it has a full sound!”
“Be sure I do not defend him; but has he not practised what he taught?”
“Of a certainty, and is double-damned thereby. For know that these austere moralists have found their opportunity to indulge a hobby—not to avenge a people. What do we want with abstinence who have practised it all our lives? What do we want with interminable phrases on the sublimity of duty?”
“But, thou wilt not understand that political economy——”
“Bah! I know it for the economy of words—that delicious terminer les débats of the jury that rolls another lying mouth into the basket and makes a body the less to feed. But I tell thee, with every fall of the axe I feel myself shifting a place nearer the rich joints at the top of the feast.”
“Liberty——”
“That I desire is the free indulgence of my appetites. Now would not Roland and Vergniaud and their crew shave me nicely for that sentiment? Therefore I love to hunt them down.”
A vieux chat jeune souris. How indeed could these old grimalkins, grown toothless under tyranny, digest this tough problem of virtue for its own sake? Their food must be minced for them.
I never saw their faces; but I guessed them, by a certain croaking in their speech, to be worn with years and suffering. Presently, to my disgust, they had out their pipes and a flask of cognac and sat themselves down against the edge of the corn for a mild carouse. I waited on and on, listening to their snuffling talk, till I grew sick with the monotony of it and the cramp of my position. They were, I gathered, informers employed by Tallien in his search for those escaped Deputies who were believed to be in hiding in the neighbourhood.
At last I could stand it no longer. Move I must, for all the risk it entailed. I set to work, very cautiously, a foot at a time, wriggling on my belly through the corn. They took no notice, each being voluble to assert his opinions against the other. Presently, making towards the wood, I found the field to dip downwards to its skirt, so that I was enabled to raise myself to a crouching position and increase my pace. The relief was immense; I was running as the tree-trunks came near and opened out to me.
Now, I was so weary that I thought I must sleep awhile before I proceeded. I was pushing through the last few yards of the stalks when a guttural snarl arrested me. Immediately, right in my path, a head was protruded from the corn, and a bristled snout, slavering in the moonlight, was lifted at me. I stood a moment transfixed—a long moment, it appeared to me. The ridiculous fancy occurred to me that the yellow eyes glaring into mine would go on dilating till presently I should find myself embedded in their midst, like a prawn in aspic. Then, with a feeling of indescribable politeness in my heart, I turned aside to make a détour into the wood, stepping on tiptoe as if I were leaving a sick-room. Once amongst the trees, I penetrated the darkness rapidly to the depth of a hundred yards, not venturing to look behind me, and, indeed, only before in search of some reasonable branch or fork where I might rest in safety. Wolves! I had not taken these into my calculations in the glowing solstice of summer, and it gave me something a shock to think what I had possibly escaped during my unguarded nights in the forest.
At length I found the place I sought—a little natural chair of branches high enough to be out of the reach of wild beasts, yet the ascent thereto easy. I climbed to it, notched myself in securely, and, my hunger somewhat comforted by the water I had drunk, fell almost immediately into a delicious stupor.
I awoke quite suddenly, yet with a smooth swift leap to consciousness. The angle of moonlight was now shifted to an oblique one, so that no rays entered direct; and the space beneath me was sunk into profound darkness. For some moments I lay in a happy trance, dully appreciative of the indistinct shapes that encompassed me, of the smell of living green bark near my face, of the stars embroidered into a woof of twigs overhead. But presently, gazing down, a queer little phenomenon of light fixed my attention, indifferently at first, then with an increase of wonder. This spot of pink radiance waxed and waned and waxed and waned, with a steady recurrence, on the butt of a great tree, twenty yards away. At first it was of a strong rosy tint, but little by little it faded till it was a mere phosphorescent blot; and then, while I was flogging my brains to think what it could be, of a sudden it seemed to fly down to the noise of a little grunting explosion, and break into a shower of scarlet sparks.
At that I was betrayed into a squiggle of laughter; for my phenomenon had in the flash resolved itself into nothing more mysterious than the glow from the pipe of a man seated silently smoking, with his head thrown back against the tree-foot.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed in a surprised voice, but with nothing of fear in it; and I congratulated myself at least that the voice struck a different note to that of either of M. Tallien’s informers. Nevertheless, I had been a fool, and I judged it the wise policy to slide from my perch and join my unseen companion. He made me out, I am sure, long before I did him; yet he never moved or showed sign of apprehension.
“Good evening, Jacques,” said I.
“Good morrow, rather, Jacques squirrel,” he answered.
“Is it so?”
“It is so.”
“You prefer the burrow, it seems, and I the branch.”
“No doubt we are not birds of a feather.”
“Why, truly, I seek Deputies,” I said, in a sudden inspiration.
“And I my fortune,” he answered, serenely.
“We travel by the same road, then. Have you a fragment of bread on you, comrade?”
“If I had a loaf thou shouldst go wanting a crumb of it.”
“And why, citizen?”
“I do not love spies.”
I fetched a grimace over my miscarried ruse.
“Then wilt thou never make thy fortune in France,” I said.
He gave a harsh laugh.
“You will prevent me for that word, citizen.”
I curled myself up under the tree.
“I will wait for the dawn and read thee thy fortune,” I said, “and charge thee nothing for it but a kick to help thee on thy way.”
He laughed again at that.
“Thou provest thyself an ass,” said he, and refilled and lit his pipe and smoked on silently.
I lay awake near him, because, churl as he appeared, I felt the advantage of any human companionship in these beast-haunted thickets.
At last the light of dawn penetrated a little to where we rested, and when it was broad enough to distinguish objects by, I rolled upon my elbow and scrutinised my companion closely.
“Good morrow, then, burner of charcoal.”
He turned to me, a leering smile suspended on his lips.
“Comment?” said he.
“But I am a palmist, my friend, as you observe.”
He looked at his stunted and blackened fists.
“Ah! si fait vraiment. That is to tell my past condition of poverty, not my fortune.”
“The rest shall come. Observe my fitness for my post. You are from the forests of Nontron.”
He started and stared.
“Truly I have no love for spies,” he muttered, dismayed.
It was my turn to laugh. I had hazarded a bold guess. That he was from the woods rather than from the Landes his gift of seeing through the darkness convinced me. Then, if from the woods, why not from that part of the province where they stretched thickest and most meet for his trade?
“Now,” said I, “for what follows. It comes to your ears that Guienne is hatching a fine breed of maggots from the carcasses of dead aristocrats; that there is a feast of rich fragments toward. You will have your share; you will eat of these aristocrats that have so long fed on you. That is a very natural resolve. But in a Republic of maggots, as in all other communities, there is always a proportion of the brood that will fatten unduly at the expense of its fellows. These despots by constitution appropriate the most succulent parts; they wax thick and strong, and, finally, they alone of the swarm hatch out into flies, while the rest perish undeveloped.”
“It is a cursed parable,” he said, sullenly. “I do not comprehend you.”
“I speak of the people, my friend—of whom you are not one that will fatten.”
“And why, and why?”
“You have scruples. You decry at the outset the methods of this select clique of the Republic that has the instinct to prosper. If I congratulate you on the possession of a conscience, I must deplore in anticipation the sacrifice of yet another martyr to that truism which history repeats as often as men forget it.”
“What truism, sayst thou?”
“That swinish Fortune will love the lusty bully that drains her, though the bulk of the litter starve.”
He spat savagely on the ground.
“I do not comprehend,” he muttered again.
“Well,” I said, “at least let us hope there is an especial Paradise reserved for the undeveloped maggots.”
He rose and stood brooding a moment; then looked away from me and cried morosely, “Get up!”
To my astonishment, from a sort of cradle of roots to the farther side of the tree a young girl scrambled to her feet at his call, and stood yawning and eyeing me loweringly.
“Your daughter?” said I.
“Yes,” he answered, “she is my daughter. What then?”
I jumped up in some suppressed excitement.
“I recall my words,” I said. “You have a chance, after all, down there in Bordeaux. And now I see that it is a thief that fears a spy.”
I pointed at the wench. She was dressed, ridiculously, inappropriately, in a silk gown of a past fashion, but rich in quality, and decorated with a collar of point-lace. Out of this her dirty countenance, thatched with a villainous mop of hair, stuck grotesquely; and the skirt of the dress had been roughly caught up to disencumber her bare feet.
The man stamped on the ground.
“I do not fear you!” he cried furiously, “and I am no thief!”
I laughed derisively.
“But it is true!” he shouted. “A young lady we met in the woods of Coutras would exchange it for Nannette’s jupon; and why the devil should we deny her?”
My heart gave a sudden swerve.
“What was she like, this lady?” I said.
The fellow glanced sulkily askance at me.
“Does not the spy know?” he said.
“Perhaps he does. Say this demoiselle was slender and of a reasonable height; that she had brown hair, and grey eyes under dark brows; that her face was of a cold, transparent whiteness; that she spoke with a certain soft huskiness in her voice.”