The Red Cockade Part 24

At last I thought the end had come. The body that pressed on me, and partly hid me, was abruptly dragged away; the light came to my eyes, and a voice cried, briskly: "Here is another! He is alive!"

I staggered to my feet, stupidly willing to die with some sort of dignity. The speaker was a stranger, but by his side was Buton, and beyond him stood De Geol; and there were others, all staring at me, face beyond face. Still, I could not believe that I was saved. "If you are going to do it, do it quickly," I muttered; and I opened my arms.

"G.o.d forbid!" Buton answered hurriedly. "Enough has been done already, and too much! M. le Vicomte, lean on me! Lean on me, and come this way. Mon Dieu, I was only just in time. If they had killed you----"

"That is the fifth," said De Geol.

Buton did not answer, but taking my arm, gently urged me along, and De Geol taking the other side, I walked between them, through a lane of people who stared at me with a sort of brutish wonder--a lane of people with faces that looked strangely white in the sunshine. I was bareheaded, and the sun dazzled and confused me, but obeying the pressure of Buton's hand I swerved and pa.s.sed through a door that seemed to open in the wall. As I did so I dropped a kerchief which some one had given me to bind up my shoulder. A man standing beside the door, the last man on the right-hand side of the lane of people, picked it up and gave it to me with a kindly alacrity. He had a pike, and his hands were covered with blood, and I do not doubt that he was one of the murderers!

Two men were carrying some one into the house before us, and at the sight of the helpless body and hanging head, sense and memory returned to me with a rush. I caught Buton by the breast of his coat and shook him--shook him savagely. "Mademoiselle de St. Alais!" I cried. "What have you done to her, wretch? If you have----"

"Hush, Monsieur, hush," he answered reproachfully. "And be yourself. She is safe, and here, I give you my word. She was carried in among the first. I don't think a hair of her head is injured."

"She was carried in here?" I said.

"Yes, M. le Vicomte."

"And safe?"

"Yes, yes."

I believe that at that I burst into tears not altogether unmanly; for they were tears of thankfulness and grat.i.tude. I had gone through very much, and, though the wound in my arm was a trifle, I had lost some blood; and the tears may be forgiven me. Nor indeed was I alone in weeping that day. I learned afterwards that one of the very murderers, a man who had been foremost in the work, cried bitterly when he came to himself and saw what he had done.

They killed in Nimes on that day and the two next, about three hundred men, princ.i.p.ally in the Capuchin convent--which Froment had used as a printing-office, and made the headquarters of his propaganda--in the Cabaret Rouge, and in Froment's own house, which held out until they brought cannon to bear on it. Not more than one-half of these fell in actual conflict or hot blood; the remainder were hunted down in lanes and houses and hiding-places, and killed where they were found, or, surrendering at discretion, were led to the nearest wall, and there shot.

Later, both in Paris and the provinces, this severity was commended, and held up to admiration as the truest mercy; on the ground that it stamped out the fire of revolt which was on the point of blazing up and prevented it spreading to the rest of France. But, looking back, I find in it another thing; I find in it not mercy, but the first, or nearly the first, instance of that strange contempt of human life which marked the Revolution in its later stages; of that extravagance of cruelty which three years afterwards paralysed society and astounded the world, and, by the horrible excesses into which it occasionally led men, proved to the philosophers of the Human Race that France in the last days of the eighteenth century could do in the daylight, at Arras and Nantes and Paris, deeds which the tyrants of old confined to the dark recesses of their torture-chambers: deeds--I blush to say it--that no other polite country has matched in this age.

But with these crimes--and be it understood I do not refer here to the work of the guillotine--I thank G.o.d that I have at this time nothing to do. They left their traces on later pages of my life--as on the life of what Frenchman have they not?--and some day I may revert to them. But my task here barely touches them. It is enough for me to say that of eighteen men who shared with me the horrors of the alley by the Capuchins, four only lived to tell the tale, and look back on the walls of Nimes; they and I owing our lives in part to the timely arrival of Buton and some foreign representatives, who did not share the Cevennols' fanaticism, and partly to the late relenting of the murderers themselves.

Of the four, Father Benoit and Louis St. Alais were two, and strange was the meeting, when we three, so wonderfully preserved, with clothes still torn and disordered, and faces splashed with blood, came together in the upstairs salon at Madame Catinot's. The shutters of the room, with the exception of one high corner shutter, were still closed; dead ashes lay white and cold in the empty fire-place, that had blazed so cheerfully in my honour the night I supped with Madame Catinot. The whole room was gloomy and chill, the furniture cast long shadows, and up the stairs came the clamour of the mob, that having seen us into the house eddied curiously round the scene of the murder, and could not have enough of it.

A strange meeting, for we three had all loved one another, and by stress of the times had been separated. Now we met as from the grave, ghostly figures, livid, trembling, with shaking hands and eyes burning with the light of fever; but with all differences purged away. "My Brother!" "Your Brother!" and Louis' hands met mine, as if the dead man who had died with the courage of his race joined them; while Father Benoit wrung his hands in uncontrollable grief or walked the room, crying: "My poor children! Oh, my poor children! G.o.d have mercy on this land!"

A low sound of women's voices, and weeping, with the hurrying of feet going softly to and fro, came from the next room: and that it was, I think, that presently calmed us, so that except for an occasional burst of grief on Louis' part we could talk quietly. I learned that Madame St. Alais lay there, sadly injured in the melee, either by her fall or a blow from a foot; and that Denise and Madame Catinot and a surgeon were with her. The very room in its gloom was funereal, and we talked in whispers--and then sank into silence; or again one or other would rise with a shudder of remembrance, and walk the room with heaving breast. Presently, the sound of guns coming to our ears, we forgot ourselves for a while and talked of Froment, and what chance of escape he had, and listened and heard the mob raving and howling as it surged by; and then talked again. But always as men who were no longer concerned; as men whom death had released from the common obligations.

Presently they came and called Louis, who went to his mother; and then after another interval Father Benoit was summoned, and I walked the room alone. Silence after so great commotion, solitude, when an hour before I had dealt death and faced it in that inferno, safety after danger so imminent, all stirred the depths of my heart. When, in addition, I thought of St. Alais' death, and recalled the brilliant promise, the daring, the brightness of that haughty spirit now for ever quenched, I felt the tears rise again. I paced the room in uncontrollable emotion, and was thankful for the gloom that allowed me to give it vent. Old times, old scenes, old affections rose up, and my boyhood; I remembered that we had played together, I forgot that we had gone different ways.

After a long time, a long, long time, when evening had nearly come, Louis came in to me. "Will you come?" he said abruptly.

"To Madame St. Alais?"

"Yes, she wants to see you," he replied, holding the door open, and speaking in the dull even tone of one who knows all.

After such a scene as we had pa.s.sed through comes reaction; I was worn out and I went with him mechanically, thinking rather of the past than the present. But no sooner was I over the threshold of the next room, which, unlike that I had left, was brilliantly lit by candles set in sconces, the shutters being closed, than I came to myself with a shock. Propped up with pillows on a bed opposite the door, so that I met her eyes and had a full view of her face as I entered, lay Madame St. Alais; and I stood. Her face was white with a red spot burning in each cheek; her eyes matched the colour in brilliance; but it was neither of these things that brought me up suddenly, nor--though I noticed it with foreboding--the way in which she plucked at the coverlet when she spoke. It was something in her expression; something so unfitting the occasion, so bizarre and light that I stood appalled.

She saw my hesitation, and in a gay and slightly affected tone, that in a moment told the story, a tone more dreadful under the circ.u.mstances than the most pathetic outbursts, she reproached me with it. "Welcome, M. le Vicomte," she said. "And yet I am glad to see that you have some modesty. We will not be hard on you, however. A late repentance is better than none, and--where is my fan, Denise? Child, my fan!"

Denise rose with a choking sound from her seat by the bed, and must, I think, have broken down; we had all nerves worn to the last thread. But Madame Catinot saved the situation. Hastily reaching a fan from a side table she laid a firm hand on the younger woman's shoulder as she pa.s.sed, and gently pressed her back into her seat.

"Thank you, my dear," Madame St. Alais said, playing an instant with the fan, and smiling from side to side, as I had seen her smile a hundred times in her salon. "And now, M. le Vicomte," she continued with ghastly archness, "I think that you will have the grace to say that I was a true prophet?"

I muttered something, heaven knows what; the scene, with Madame's smiling face, and the others' bowed shoulders and averted eyes, was dreadful.

"I never doubted that you would have to join us," she went on, with complacency. "And if I were cruel, I should have much to say. But as you have returned to your allegiance before it was too late, we will let bygones be bygones. His Majesty is so good that--but where are the others? We cannot proceed without them."

She looked round with a touch of her native peremptoriness. "Where is M. de Gontaut?" she said. "Louis, has not M. de Gontaut arrived? He promised to be here to witness the contract."

Louis, from his place by one of the closed windows, where he stood with Father Benoit and the surgeon, answered in a strained voice that he had not yet arrived.

Madame seemed to find something unnatural in his tone and our att.i.tude, she looked uneasily from one to the other of us. "There is nothing the matter, is there?" she said, flirting her fan more vigorously. "Nothing has happened?"

"No, no, Madame," Louis answered, striving to soothe her. "Doubtless he will be here by-and-by."

But a shadow of anxiety still clouded Madame's face. "And Victor?" she said. "He has not come either? Louis, are you sure that there is nothing the matter?"

"Madame, Madame, you will see him presently," he answered with a half-stifled sob; and he turned away with a gesture of horror, which, but for one of the curtains of the alcove, she must have seen.

She did not, though there was enough in this to arouse a sane person's suspicions. As he spoke, however, Madame's eyes fell on me, and the piteous anxiety which had for the moment darkened her face, pa.s.sed away as quickly as the shadow of a cloud pa.s.ses on an April morning. She took up her fan again, and looked at me gaily. "Do you know," she said, "I had the strangest dream last night, M. le Vicomte--or was it when I was ill, Denise? Never mind. But I dreamed all sorts of horrors; that our house here was burned, and the house at Cahors, and that we had to fly and take refuge at Montauban, and then--I think it was at Nimes. And that M. de Gontaut was murdered, and all the canaille were up in arms! As if--as if," she continued, with a little laugh, cut short by a gasp of pain, "the King would permit such things, or they were possible. And there was something--something still more absurd about the Church." She paused, knitting her brows; and then with a touch of her fan dismissing the subject: "But I forget--I forget. And just when it was most horrible I awoke. It was all absurd. So extravagant you would all be ill with laughing if I could remember it. I fancied that a pair of red-heeled shoes were as good as a death warrant, and powder and patches condemned you at once."

She paused. The fan dropped from her hand, and she looked round uneasily. "I think--I think I am not quite well yet," she said in a different tone, and a spasm crossed her face--it was plain that she was in pain. "Louis!" she continued petulantly, "where is the notary? He might read the contract. Doubtless Victor and M. de Gontaut will be here before long. Where is he?" she continued sharply.

It is easy to say that we might have played our parts; but the pity and the horror of it, falling on hearts already tortured by the scenes of the day, fairly unmanned us. Denise hid her face, and trembled so that the chair on which she sat shook; and Louis turned away shuddering, while I stood near the foot of the bed, frozen into silence. This time it was the surgeon, a thin young man of dark complexion, who put himself forward.

"The papers are in the next room, Madame," he said gravely.

"But you are not M. Pettifer?" she answered querulously.

"No, Madame, he was so unwell as to be unable to leave the house."

"He has no right to be unwell," Madame retorted severely. "Pettifer unwell, and Mademoiselle St. Alais' contract to be signed! But you have the papers?"

"In the next room, Madame."

"Fetch them! Fetch them!" she answered, her eyes wandering uneasily from one to another. And she moved in the bed and sighed as one in pain. Then, "Where is Victor? Why does he not come?" she asked impatiently.

"I think I hear him," Louis said suddenly. It was the first time he had spoken of his own free will, and I caught a new sound in his voice. "I will see," he went on, and moving to the door he gave me a sign, as he pa.s.sed, to follow him.

I muttered something, and did so. In the room in which I had waited, the half-shuttered room of gloom and shadows, from which Louis had fetched me, we found the surgeon groping hastily about. "Some paper, Monsieur," he said, looking up impatiently as we entered. "Some paper! Almost anything should do."

"Stay!" Louis said, his voice harsh with pain. "We have had too much of this--this mockery. I will have no more."

"Monsieur?"

"I say I will have no more!" Louis answered fiercely, a sob in his throat. "Tell her the truth."

"She would not believe it."

"At any rate, anything is better than this."

"Do you mean it, Monsieur?" the surgeon asked slowly, and he looked at him.

"I do."

"Then I will have no part in it," the man answered with gravity. "I acquit myself of all responsibility. Nor shall you do it, Monsieur, until you have heard what the inevitable result will be."

"My mother cannot recover," Louis said stubbornly.

"No, Monsieur, nor will she live, in my opinion, more than a few hours. When the fever that now supports her begins to wane she will collapse, and die. It depends on you whether she closes her eyes, knowing none of the evil that has happened, or her son's death; or dies----"

"It is horrible!"

"It is for you to choose," the surgeon answered inexorably.

Louis looked round. "There is paper there," he said suddenly.

I suppose that we had been absent from the room no more than a couple of minutes, but when we returned we found Madame St. Alais calling impatiently for us and for Victor. "Where is he? Where is he?" she repeated feverishly. "Why is he late to-day of all days? There is no--no quarrel between you?" And she looked jealously at me.

"None, Madame," I said, with tears in my voice. "That I swear!"

"Then why is he not here? And M. de Gontaut?" Her eyes were still bright; the red spot burned still in her cheeks; but her features had taken a pinched look, she was changed, and her fingers were never still. Her voice had grown harsh and unnatural, and from time to time she looked round with a piteous expression as if something puzzled her. "I am not well to-day," she muttered presently, with a painful effort to be herself. "And I forget to be as gay as I should be. Mademoiselle, go to M. le Vicomte, and say something pretty to amuse us while we wait. And you, M. le Vicomte! In my young days it was usual for the fiance to salute his mistress on these occasions. Fie on you! For shame, Monsieur! I am afraid that you are a laggard in love."

Denise rose, and came slowly to me before them all, but no word pa.s.sed her pale lips, and she did not raise her eyes to mine. She remained pa.s.sive when in accordance with Madame's permission I stooped and kissed her cold cheek; it grew no warmer, her eyes did not kindle. Yet I was satisfied, more than satisfied; for as I leant over her I felt her little hands--little hands I longed to take in mine and shelter and protect--I felt them clutch and hold the front of my coat, as the child clings to its mother's neck. I pa.s.sed my arm round her before them all, and so we stood at the foot of Madame's bed, and she looked at us.

She laughed gaily. "Poor little mouse!" she said. "She is shy yet. Be good to her, mon cher, she is a tender morsel, and--I don't feel well! I don't feel well," Madame repeated, abruptly breaking off, and lifting herself in bed, while one hand went with difficulty to her head. "I don't--what is it?" she continued, the colour visibly fading from her face and leaving it white and drawn, while fear leapt into her staring eyes. "What is it? Fetch--fetch some one, will you? The--the doctor! And Victor."

Denise slipped from my arm, and flew to her side. I stood a moment, then the surgeon touched my arm. "Go!" he muttered. "Go. Leave her to the women. It will be quickly over."

And so Madame St. Alais gave Mademoiselle to me at last; and the compact for our marriage, into which she had entered so many years before with my dead father, was fulfilled.

Madame died next morning, being taken not only from the evil to come, but from that which was then present, and roared and eddied through the streets of Nimes round the unburied body of her son; for she died without awaking from the delirium which followed her hurt. I went in to see her lying dead and little changed; and in the quiet decorum of the lighted chamber I thought reverently of the change which one year--one brief year had made, coming at the end of fifty years of prosperity. It seemed pitiful to me then, as I stooped and kissed the waxen hand--very pitiful; now, knowing what the future had in store, remembering the twenty years of exile and poverty and tedium and hope deferred, that were to be the lot of so many of her friends, of so many of those who had graced her salons at St. Alais and Cahors, I think her happy. Possessed of energy as well as pride, a rare combination in our order, she and hers dared greatly and greatly lost; staked all and lost all. Yet better that, than the prison or the guillotine; or growing old and decrepit in a strange land, to return to a patrie that had long forgotten them; that stood in the roads and jeered at the old berlins and petticoats and headgear that were the fashion in the days of the Polignacs.

I have said that the riots in Nimes lasted three days. On the last Buton came to me and told us we must go; that to avoid worse things we must leave the city without delay, or he and the more moderate party who had saved us would no longer be responsible. On this, Louis was for retiring to Montpellier, and thence to the emigres at Turin; and for a few hours I was of the same mind, desiring most of all to place the women in safety.

I owe it to Buton that I did not take a step hard to recall, and of which I am sure that I should have repented later. He asked me bluntly whither I was going, and when I told him, set his back against the door. "G.o.d forbid!" he said. "Who go, go. Few will return."

I answered him with heat. "Nonsense!" I cried. "I tell you, within a year you will be on your knees to us to come back."

"Why?" he said.

"You cannot keep order without us!"

"With ease," he answered coolly.

"Look at the state of things here!"

"It will pa.s.s."

"But who will govern?"

"The fittest," he replied doggedly. "For do you still think, M. le Vicomte--after all that has happened--that a man to make laws must have a t.i.tle--saving your presence? Do you still think that the wheat will not grow, nor the hens lay eggs, unless the Seigneur's shadow falls on them? Do you think that to fight, a man must have powder on his head as well as in his musket?"

"I think," I retorted, "that when a man who does not know the sea turns pilot it is time to leave the vessel!"

"The pilot will learn," he answered. "And for quitting the vessel, let those go who have no business on board. Be guided, Monseigneur," he continued in a different tone. "Be guided. They have killed in Nimes three hundred in three days."

"And you say, stay?"

"Ay, for there is blood between us," he answered grimly. "That has been done now which will not easily be forgiven; that has been done which will abide. Go abroad after this--and stay abroad! Or rather do not--do not, but be guided," he continued, with rough emotion in his voice. "Go home to the Chateau, and be quiet, Monsieur, and no one will harm you."

There was much in what he said. At any rate, I thought the advice so good that, after some hesitation, I not only determined to follow it, but I gave it to the others. But Louis would not change his mind. A horror of the country had seized him since his escape; and he would go. He raised no opposition, however, when I asked him to give me Denise; and within twenty-four hours of her mother's death she became my wife, in that dark-shuttered house by the Capuchins' alley, Father Benoit performing the service. Louis was at the same time married to Madame Catinot, who was to share his exile. Needless to say there were no rejoicings at these weddings; no fete and no joy-bells, and no bride-clothes, but sobs and wailings, and cold lips and pa.s.sive hands.

But a bright day has sometimes a weeping dawn, and though for three years or more our life knew perils enough and some sorrows--the story of which I may one day tell--and we shared the lot of all Frenchmen in those times of shame and stress, I had never, no, not for a day or an hour, cause to repent the deed done so hurriedly at Nimes. Clinging hands and warm lips, eyes that shone as brightly in a prison as a palace, cheered me, when things were worst; and when better days came, and with them grey hairs and a new France, my wife found means still to grace, and ever more and more to share my life.

One word of the man to whom under G.o.d I owe it that I won her. He survived, but I never saw Froment of Nimes again. On the third day of the riots cannon were brought to bear on his tower, it was stormed, and the garrison were put to the sword, one man only, I believe, escaping with his life. That man was Froment, the indomitable, the most capable leader that the Royalists of France ever boasted. He got safely to the frontier and thence to Turin, where he was received with honour by those whose aid might a little earlier have saved all. Who fails must expect buffets, however; the cold shoulder was presently turned to him; he was slighted, and as the years went on his complaints grew louder. Once I sought to find and a.s.sist him, but he was then engaged in some enterprise on the African coast, and my circ.u.mstances were such that I could have done little had I found him. Soon afterwards, I believe, he died, though certain information never reached me. But dead or alive I owe him grat.i.tude, respect, and other things, among which I count the greatest happiness of my life.

THE END.