PEACE AT THE LAST
“It strikes me very forcibly,” observed Louis in a low voice, “that we
shall be occupied, all the time you are away taking Luçon, in tidying
up the horrible litter you have made here. Did you ever see such a
room?”
It was on the library at Chantemerle that the Vicomte passed these not
undeserved strictures. The table was strewed with maps; in the middle
stood two half-empty bottles of wine and some glasses, while at one
end a tray bore the remains of a hasty meal. An ink-pot had been
upset; the chairs were all awry, and one had fallen over.
Henri de la Rochejaquelein, who, booted, spurred, and fully armed,
stood with the Vicomte in front of the hearth, smiled as he drew on
his gloves. “My dear Saint-Ermay,” he replied, “if you and M. de
Château-Foix have no more to occupy you than to put his dwelling to
rights again you will be fortunate.” His tones, too, were low, for
there were others in the room.
“Unfortunate, you mean,” retorted Louis with vivacity. “You know
devilish well, M. l’Intrépide, that you would not be in my shoes for
all the gold of—Necker. . . . I mustn’t swear, or our respective and
respectable cousins will hear us.”
This was quite possible, for at the lower end of the long littered
table, sitting sideways as men who have but temporarily dropped into a
place there, were Gilbert and M. de Royrand. Three other leaders were
there also. He who sat with his hands outspread upon a map to keep it
in position was the “saint of Poitou,” the Marquis de Lescure,
whom, with his young kinsman, Louis had saluted that day in the
Tuileries. Over him bent the only roturier of the party, Stofflet, the
gamekeeper, who had raised the parishes round Maulevrier. Behind,
leaning upon his sword, and pulling impatiently with his teeth at a
glove, stood the Chevalier de Charette, hawk-faced and implacable,
newly come from the Marais to join the _grande armée_.
“Was ever a house so full of generals!” whispered Louis half
mockingly. “. . . Your pardon, Henri: I forgot you were all but one
yourself!”
And the château had been even fuller of these unusual guests. Last
night, the night of the council of war which had caused so much
disorder in the library, it had harboured not only those now present,
but the general-in-chief himself, the Marquis d’Elbée, and the Marquis
de Donnissan, both of whom were now gone forth to their men. Many
other chiefs had clattered in and out: Bernard de Marigny, the
hot-tempered, who commanded the artillery; Forestier, who led the
somewhat scanty cavalry; D’Autichamp and the Prince de Talmont, bearer
of a famous name, lieutenants of the wounded Marquis de Bonchamps,
the only leader of note who was absent; De Couëtus, Joly, Savin,
Charette’s subordinates. For on this 13th day of August (harvest being
over), seasoned by an almost unbroken career of victory that was
blotted only by their costly defeat at Nantes, masters at present of
all their territory, but threatened, from their very success, by the
Convention’s extremest measures of hostility, the Vendean hosts had
gathered to strike a united blow; and the little cathedral town of
Luçon, some fifteen miles to the southward, had been selected as the
object of attack.
Yet Louis, though he bore his uniform of the bodyguard, which the
fancy occasionally seized him to put on, wore no sword, and Gilbert’s
sheathed blade was keeping down a refractory map upon the table. For
they were neither of them going with their comrades to take Luçon.
D’Elbée had been anxious to leave some post occupied in his rear, for
disaster had already overtaken him on the plains of Luçon, and Gilbert
had offered to stay behind and hold Chantemerle. The house was not
fortified, and could by no means stand a siege, but it could very
well prove a check to any detached body of troops with which the
Republicans in the neighbouring department of Deux-Sèvres might
have a fancy to harass D’Elbée’s rear-guard. That this idea would
occur to them was extremely unlikely, for all their available
troops were already in Luçon. As, therefore, there was no prospect
of the occupation being anything but a sinecure, Louis had been
proportionately disgusted when the decision was first communicated to
him, but he had refused to desert his cousin.
Even as he made his rather irreverent remark there was a stir in the
little group at the end of the table. Lescure stood up, saying: “Well,
gentlemen, I suppose we must get to horse;” and as he removed his
hands the map of Luçon rolled itself resolutely together. Stofflet
noticed it. “Is that a good or a bad omen?” he asked. He was of
Lorraine, and his accent showed it.
“The third time is always lucky,” answered Charette in his curiously
clear and biting voice.
“Are you ready, Henri?” asked Lescure of his cousin and adjutant.
“Good-bye, M. de Château-Foix: it is in vain to try to thank you for
your hospitality, or for your self-sacrifice in remaining behind.”
“You should thank me instead for my self-sacrifice in depriving myself
of him,” said old Royrand, as he shook hands with his best lieutenant.
And Charette said: “To-day to me, to-morrow to you. But before you are
hard pressed, Monsieur le Marquis, you shall see my Maraîchins cutting
their way through to you.”
“You are very kind, gentlemen,” answered Gilbert, smiling, as he
escorted them through the hall. “But I do not anticipate any necessity
of the sort.”
“Worse luck!” finished Louis behind him.
Outside, in the August sun, switching their tails to keep off the
flies, were the horses. The four younger chiefs trotted off together
down the avenue, but Gilbert walked by Royrand’s side for a little
while, and when they parted the old soldier bent from his saddle and
kissed him. Was it that salute, as of a comrade about to die, which
struck a sudden question into Gilbert’s mind, as he stood a moment
shading his eyes, even under the trees, to see the last of them? For
Sapinaud was gone, killed in July a few miles away, and the whole army
still mourned the irreparable loss of their first and greatest
general-in-chief, the peasant Cathelineau. . . . Could he have known,
La Rochejaquelein should build himself an imperishable name and never
see his twenty-second birthday; Lescure had but three months to live,
the old man who had embraced him but little longer. How long had he
and Louis, who had played together so often under these trees? The
question troubled him not at all, but it suddenly shed on the whole
château, as he turned, and it lay before him, a kind of vaporous
unreality. Even Louis, as he sat upon the steps of the perron waiting
for him, was not exempt from it.
“Poor Louis,” he said, looking down at him with amusement and
affection. “Have you forgiven me for staying here?”
“Parbleu!” returned his kinsman lazily, “the way to Luçon is long, and
that confounded plain will be as hot as hell. One is better off here,
after all. When we have barricaded a few windows—which I suppose we
must do for the look of the thing—let’s go and see if we cannot catch
a trout or two.”
They entered arm-in-arm, laughing, and turned, directly they were
inside, with alacrity to business. All day long the château rang with
the noise of hammers, and men tramped to and fro, dragging mattresses
from the beds with dirty and unhallowed hands. The dining-room became
a sort of guard-room, the Marquise’s boudoir was full of planks and
ammunition. Gilbert, Louis, and the priest supped in the library, the
only room left to them by the evening.
“It is hard to imagine that we are—supposedly—in a state of siege,
isn’t it, Father?” asked Louis, pulling his spaniel’s ears, as they
sat there afterwards.
The priest nodded, smiling.
“It is hard to realise that we are not back in the old days years
ago—before the troubles,” remarked Gilbert, who was lying back in an
arm-chair. His voice sounded unusually dreamy. “It might be in the
time when we were boys, and did our lessons here.”
“Except that we were never allowed to make the room so untidy,” added
Louis. “Why your generals could not hold a council without throwing
all the maps on the floor, Gilbert, I can’t conceive. It almost leads
one to suspect that they used them as missiles to enforce their
different views. If Marigny had been present I can well imagine him
hurling an atlas at some one.”
“Louis, will you never learn respect for your elders and betters?”
asked M. des Graves, laughing. “But seriously, Gilbert, without
adopting Louis’ interpretation, there was a difference of opinion, was
there not, about the method of attack?”
The Marquis nodded. “Lescure wanted an attack _en échelon_. The
others objected, because our men are not sufficiently trained. But
undoubtedly, having regard to the position of Luçon, his theory is
sound, and he got his way in the end.”
“Well, we shall know the result to-morrow,” said M. des Graves. And
there was a silence, broken only by Louis’ whispered endearments to
his dog.
The priest’s heart was very full. Most overwhelming of all at that
hour was the sensation of the falteringness of his own faith. There
had been little room for hope in his mind on that memorable night
when, driven by a force outside himself, and knowing more real fear
than ever in his life, he had broken his long silence, and had called
up, to encounter Gilbert, all the awful sanctions that sustain the
priestly office. And the tenuity of his hope was made yet more plain
to him when God had so amazingly and so speedily answered his
faithless prayers, when, himself humbled to the dust, he had fallen in
adoration before the spectacle of that most stupendous of conquests,
the victory of the Divine over the human will.
Then indeed he had been filled with hope—with violent hope—that the
rest would follow, not because Gilbert had done right in giving up
Lucienne, but because he had renounced with her something immeasurably
more significant. But the immediate effect of his renunciation seemed
to have been to make Gilbert harder than before. Then had come a
period so full of the whirling activities of war that his glimpses of
the Marquis had been necessarily fragmentary. Yet there was one sign
which, after he joined the army at the Four Roads, gradually impressed
itself upon M. des Graves. Gilbert’s men—most of them, too, his own
peasantry among whom he had always lived—were beginning to manifest
for him feelings of a much warmer sort than mere respect. The growth
of these indications M. des Graves observed; it was all that he could
do, for to him Gilbert vouchsafed not a word, not a clue. And so that
evening in the church, the hour of the supremest happiness that he had
ever known, had swept upon him unprepared. Yet, sudden as Gilbert’s
surrender seemed, it had brought with it its own justification, for
the priest had learnt then that the growth of his soul had been as
natural as that which precedes the birth of all living things. Only
the time had been short—as men count time. But the accompaniments of
life had been beyond the ordinary, and the stress of war, the daily
perils, the spectacle of the faith which inspired the humble to fight
and taught them how to die had ripened to an early unfolding the seed
which had never room to grow until, in that bitter conflict, Gilbert
had torn up for ever the upas-tree of his own overshadowing will. And
they had also made of him a leader. He had the devotion of his men,
the profound esteem of his chiefs; he had found his vocation. Ah, when
God gave He gave with both hands!
And the priest looked at Gilbert as the latter lay back in his chair
smiling at the violent love which Louis and his spaniel were making to
each other, and knew that he and his spiritual son were at last in
that relationship of perfect understanding which had always been his
ideal and which he had never thought would come to be. The ascetic in
M. des Graves let itself be swept outwards on that warm tide of
affection. He began to experience a very natural and human longing to
break down a little the inflexible barriers which he had built about
his own inner life. He felt that he would like to let Gilbert in; and
had not the day come at last when he could do so and receive not
wonder, but sympathy? Moreover, he had been reflecting of late whether
the time was not ripe for him to obey Cantagalli’s summons. In
that case he would be obliged to tell Gilbert the whole story. So
he thought to himself, and in the bottom of his heart knew this
consideration to be more of an excuse than a reason. . . .
“What is the time?” asked Louis suddenly. “Nearly ten? They will be
getting to Ste. Hermine. . . . Victor, get down, you lazy and very
heavy brute! You’d like me to set sentinels for the night, Gilbert?”
“The same as last night,” said his cousin. “The same relief. I will go
round myself at two.”
Louis pulled himself out of his chair. “I shall have to put Toussaint
Lelièvre on duty to-night,” he remarked, “merely to prevent him
from sleeping like a mediæval squire outside my door. He is making
me ridiculous, and I am beginning to repent me of my heroism at
Chantonnay. Au revoir.”
* * * * * *
But when the Vicomte looked in again a little later Gilbert and the
priest were so engrossed in converse that they never heard him, and he
shut the door softly and went away.