MANY WAYS—AND ALL STEEP
“_Clamavi in toto corde meo, exaudi me, Domine_,” read M. des Graves,
“_justificationes tuas requiram. Clamavi ad te, salvum me fac; ut
custodiam mandata tua_. . . .”
The stream of the Latin, widening and sonorous, bathed all the dusty,
comfortless loft with a suggestion of better and unchanging places, of
choir or cloister, and washed in waves of security and repose over the
mean bed and its occupant. A ray of March sunshine, too, had crept
through the tiny window, and fell across the little hillock made by
Louis’ feet under the coverlet; earlier in the afternoon, when it had
barred his body, M. des Graves had found him looking at it with a sort
of incredulity. Now, with shut eyes and head turned a little on the
pillow, he lay and listened to the psalms for None.
On his face, colourless as a cameo, and as sharply cut, a rather tired
patience had replaced the deadly look of drained vitality. The young
man was passing, in his prolonged and difficult convalescence, through
the stage of restless fatigue, really more trying to endurance than
earlier conditions. How weary he was of the uncomfortable mattress of
oat husks on which he had lain for so many weeks, how ardently he
longed for a change of position and surroundings, he could not but
indirectly betray, though he rarely gave vent to any verbal expression
of his desires. But usually, if he asked M. des Graves to read to him,
it meant that he was finding his state difficult to bear patiently;
and there had been a day when the priest, to keep him quiet, had read
to him every office from Prime to Compline. Since his breviary was the
only book available there was no choice of literature; and indeed
Louis seemed to find the sound of the Latin soothing. M. des Graves
never knew how much he attended to the actual words.
“_Quia in verba tua. . . . Vocem meam audi_. . . .” The reader
finished the psalm, glanced at the pallet, and went on to the next.
“_Principes persecuti sunt. . . . Laetabor ego super eloquia tua
sicut_——” The river suddenly ceased to flow.
“That is only the cattle hitting their horns against the manger down
there,” said Louis, without opening his eyes; “I used always to be
thinking it was the Blues. Please go on, Father.”
But M. des Graves did not comply with his request. Instead, he quietly
laid down his book, as three thundering blows resounded up from the
cottage door.
Peace was vanished in a heart-beat. The invalid, his eyes wide enough
now, strained his head from the pillow, but neither he nor the priest
uttered a word during the short, supreme tension which sickeningly
terminated with loud voices from below, an oath or two, the tramp of
feet, and the unmistakable clank of accoutrements.
“O my God, my God!” whispered Louis. “They have come for you! Father,
Father, why did I let you stay! . . .” Weak as he was, he contrived,
panting, to drag himself a little higher in the bed.
The priest stood a second listening, on his face an expression removed
from any earthly emotion. Then he threw himself on his knees by the
pallet and clasped the young man in his arms. “Hush, my child, hush!
If it has come, for either or for both of us, let us meet it without
shrinking. I shall go willingly. And you, Louis, since when have you
known fear?”
“You know it is not that,” choked Louis, clinging to him in all the
desperation of a last farewell. The priest stooped his head, and they
kissed each other. A moment after Louis loosed his passionate embrace
and fell back on the pillow, and M. des Graves, risen from his knees,
made the sign of the cross over him as once before, and went quietly
back to his chair.
Footsteps were coming up the stairs. They were accompanied by the
voice of Madame Gloannec, very loud.
“Very well, you can search, of course, for your fugitive, but all
you’ll find, as I told you, is my husband’s nephew, Yves Goulven, who
has been gored by one of our cattle, and a neighbour who is looking
after him. And no use to ask Yves anything, for he only speaks
Breton. . . . Mind the top step, Monsieur le sergent.”
And in another moment the soldier stood in the doorway, grizzled,
stiff, authoritative, in his blue, cut-away coat with its red
epaulettes and cuffs and white facings, his white breeches, gaiters,
and bandoliers. “Be quiet, old cackler!” he shouted over his shoulder.
“I have eyes and a tongue of my own, thank heaven. Come up, you two;
they are here right enough. Now, my men, let’s have some account of
you. . . .”
Neither Louis nor M. des Graves responded. Two more grenadiers
posted themselves in the doorway, and as their muskets grounded
simultaneously on the floor the invader came over to the bed.
“Come, young man. . . .”
Why had Madame Gloannec said that he could only speak Breton, when he
knew not a word of it? Sick at heart, Louis summoned his straying
wits, and there came haltingly to his tongue something which he had
often heard Madame Gloannec repeat in that language. He had not an
idea what it was, and hoped that the soldier was equally ignorant.
Afterwards he remembered how as the sergeant stood over him he had
fixed his eyes on the little transverse strips of gold braid above his
cuff, lest he should look at M. des Graves.
The grenadier shrugged his shoulders. “No use your telling me any of
that gibberish! However, there seems no humbug about your condition,
my friend; and I own I do not see how you could have escaped from
Nantes the day before yesterday. Besides, he was older,” he added,
looking at a paper in his hand.
On M. des Graves he scarcely bestowed a glance. Evidently his prey was
not of his type. He only muttered to himself as he turned on his heel:
“Sacré nom, how these old Bretons resemble priests!” Two minutes later
he and his men had left the house.
“O my child, my child, how the Blessed Virgin protected you!” said
Madame Gloannec a little later, clasping her hands over Louis. “Do you
know what you were saying . . . the Hail Mary!”
“I did not know it,” murmured the Vicomte, looking a good deal whiter
than his coarse sheets.
“No, but _she_ did. And . . . mon Dieu, was that there all the time,
Monsieur l’Abbé? She must also have hidden that from the eyes of the
Blues.” For the breviary was lying open at the foot of the bed.
* * * * * *
The shock of this narrow escape did not exercise a particularly
beneficial effect upon the convalescent, though a few days later he
tried, after his old fashion, to laugh at the episode. It seemed also
to have revived in his mind the memory of the past, to which he had as
yet made little reference. One morning, after the wound-dressing,
which was still an exhausting and sometimes a painful process, M. des
Graves, having drawn the coverlet up to his chin, and otherwise, as he
thought, disposed him to slumber, sat down to his office. The Vicomte
lay and looked at him, as he often did, without saying anything. When
M. des Graves had finished he was still so engaged, and suddenly said
in a meditative voice:
“Father, did I make my confession when I was ill?”
The priest closed his book. “Yes, my child; and I gave you extreme
unction.”
“It is odd,” commented Louis in a puzzled tone. “I don’t remember
anything about it.”
“You were too ill,” said the priest gently.
“You thought I was dying, then?” pursued the Vicomte.
M. des Graves nodded.
A little of Louis’ former self appeared for a moment in his expression.
“I am sorry to have been such a malingerer,” he observed. “The fact
is, that it is not as easy to die as one thinks. Just before that
brute of a hussar ran me through I thought, ‘Two or three minutes, and
it will be over.’ Ma foi, I was sure that it was, at the time! Imagine
my surprise, then, when I came to for a moment, hours afterwards, in
the dark and the rain, with a dead man across me. It must have been
night; there was a moon, I think. . . . And in my hand, mon père, so
they tell me, was a rosary; heaven knows how it got there. It was
not mine, and seems unlikely to have been the property of any of
Westermann’s parishioners. Well, then, I thought, this is certainly
the end, unless it is purgatory already, for it was horribly cold, and
I was not—not feeling my best. . . . Not a bit of it! I wake up again,
jolting most disagreeably in a cart—and then again in this place . . .
many times.” He broke off for a moment, and added: “I should have
caused vastly less discomfort, both to myself and to other people, if
I had finished, as my hussar intended, quietly under that tree.”
The priest looked at him intently for a moment. “Madame Gloannec tells
me,” he said at last, “that before I came you suffered so much pain
that she could not always bear to stay and see it. And I could have
guessed it for myself. . . . Were you conscious then?”
“Yes,” responded the Vicomte grimly, “I was very much conscious. It
was at those times that I regretted Marie-Pierre’s pious intervention.”
“I thought that you must have been conscious,” said the elder man
quietly. “Madame Gloannec believed that you were not, always.” He
paused, and his voice changed. “Have you ever thought, Louis, what the
martyr’s crown must have seemed to the onlookers—objectless, useless
suffering? But you know in what terms the Church speaks of it, when
she commemorates a martyr at her altars? ‘A crown of precious stones,’
that is what their blood and torments are to her—and were to them.”
“What do you mean?” exclaimed the young man, startled.
“Only that something of their high honour has been yours, my child.”
* * * * * *
“Shall we have a bet,” suggested the invalid one day, “that I get off
this bed of roses in—in how many days, mon père?”
“Certainly not!” replied M. des Graves. “Louis, if you are going to
talk nonsense——”
“_Mea culpa!_ Then if I am to stop here for ever, would you be so good
as to move that string of onions, and give me something else to count
instead. I am no agriculturist like——” He stopped suddenly, and said,
between laughing and something else: “I believe that if Gilbert had
been in my place they would have been a comfort to him.” And he turned
his head away on the pillow.
Yet they often spoke of Gilbert, and of the others gone down like him
to the place of heroes.
“I wonder what has become of Henri,” said Louis, one afternoon towards
the end of March. “I suppose that he, too, is dead by now.”
“I sometimes think,” replied M. des Graves, “that in permitting him—I
had almost said in forcing him—to cross the Loire again in the way you
have described, Heaven had some great design for him, and that we
shall hear of him again.”
But La Rochejaquelein had been lying these two months under a hedge
with a bullet in his brain.
“Then there is Marigny,” went on Louis. “I would give a great deal for
news. I wonder, for instance, if the Princess Elisabeth is still
alive. Since she was not murdered with the Queen last October, perhaps
they meant to spare her.”
“Whenever she enters Paradise, there will be one saint there the
more,” remarked the priest.
“That,” said Louis, “is almost exactly what I overheard M. de Lescure
saying to Gilbert just before Luçon, when that false report of the
Queen’s death was circulated. I remember that I was struck at the
time with Gilbert’s lack of enthusiasm on the point. He flushed,
looked down, and said nothing, and seeing that he knew the Princess
personally, I wondered why he was so unresponsive.”
“He had strong likes and dislikes, as you know,” returned M. des
Graves, who knew to what very human resentment must be assigned this
coldness of which he now heard for the first time. But there was no
need that Louis should know it.
“Accursed window!” exclaimed the young man, coming suddenly out of the
brief reverie into which he had fallen. “It _was_ through the window
from which he pulled me back that the bullet came, was it not?”
The priest nodded.
“All my life I shall regret that I was not there!”
“Why?” asked M. des Graves gently. “You have nothing, my son, with
which to reproach yourself; you were doing your duty elsewhere.
Humanly speaking, you yourself were running a much greater risk than
Gilbert.”
“Yes, I know,” assented Louis, sighing. “That is why it is so hard. I
suppose one must always feel like that—as if one could have prevented
a disaster had one been there.”
“You must remember, Louis, that it was God’s will.”
The young man suddenly stirred—he was a good deal stronger now—and
flashed on the priest, out of eyes full of tears, a look of piercing
enquiry. “Is that enough for you, Father?”
And in the priest’s eyes, as he bowed his head without speaking, was
an echo of that look with which he had faced Louis over his dying
cousin.
“Well, it isn’t enough for me!” said the Vicomte, catching a sob
between his teeth. He began again after a moment. “Did he have much
pain—before I saw him?”
“No, very little, I think.”
“He . . . had it before, in another way?”
“Yes,” said M. des Graves, looking at him very tenderly. “Louis, my
dear child, I know what you are thinking of. There is no need to
distress yourself. What Gilbert gave up, for you or for right’s sake,
put it as you will, was only a symbol. It was only a part, perhaps a
small part, of the work that had to be done in him. And he was a
thousand-fold repaid even here. Perhaps you have forgotten what I once
said to you about your own renunciation, that sacrifice is only
exchange.”
“No, I have not forgotten.”
“It is true—and Gilbert learnt it before he died. That is enough for
us to know.”
Louis gazed at him long and wistfully. “Yes, he looked happy,” he said
to himself.
“To the selfless something of the Beatific Vision is perhaps given in
this world,” said the priest. “I think Gilbert had a measure of it
before he died.”
They were both silent.
“God knows,” said Louis suddenly, “what I shall say in England, if
ever I get there. . . . But you will be there to help me, Father.”
“Are you tired, Louis?” asked the priest suddenly.
“Not at all,” answered Louis, surprised at his tone. “Why?”
For a second M. des Graves hesitated. “I may as well tell you
now . . . I shall take you to England, Louis, when we get away, which,
if God wills, we shall do as soon as you are fit to travel to the
coast—it is all arranged. But I shall not be able to accompany you
to Suffolk.”
“Not come with me to Suffolk!” repeated the Vicomte, highly amazed.
“No,” answered M. des Graves quietly. “I must find at Portsmouth, or
London, a ship to take me to Hamburg, or some other German port, if
indeed I cannot find a vessel sailing direct to Italy. I am going to
Rome, Louis, and with as little delay as possible.”
“To Rome, Father! A pilgrimage?”
“No, not a pilgrimage. I may be there for the rest of my life. . . .
Louis, do you remember Monsignor Cantagalli?”
“Yes. He annoyed me very much.”
“I am sure you must have wondered why he came to Chantemerle. It was
to bring me a command from the Holy Father . . . an unexpected
command, touching a matter of which I never thought to hear an echo
again——”
But the Vicomte, raising himself in bed, broke in upon him in a sudden
violent excitement. “He called you Eminence! I did not believe my
ears. . . . Father, it can’t be!”
“No, indeed, my child, I do not wonder at your astonishment,” said the
priest, with a touching humility. “There could not be any one so
unworthy; I knew that long ago. Nevertheless——”
“Long ago!” exclaimed Louis, with a hand to his head as if he were
dizzy. “Good God! how long, then, have you——”
M. des Graves got up and came over to him. “If you will only lie down,
Louis, I will tell you the whole story. Let me move that pillow for
you first. . . . That’s better. . . . Well, then, there was once a
young man, well born and tolerably rich, who at an early age took
orders, because his family had influence in ecclesiastical quarters,
and because it was the tradition for the third son of his house. He
was gifted, and very ambitious. From the first he turned his attention
to diplomacy, and here, in an extraordinary way, everything prospered
to which he set his hand. Very soon he was swimming on a full tide of
success; he was known to be favoured by the Pope; wherever he went he
was courted and flattered. And thus circumstances fostered his
naturally great ambition till it became an overmastering passion, the
very mainspring of his life. Then there came to him a supreme chance
of distinguishing himself—a chance such as has seldom fallen to the
lot of so young a man. The Pope—it was Clement XIII.—entrusted him
with a very difficult and delicate mission to the late King—I mean
Louis XV.—and the priest’s conduct of this negotiation brought
him to a pinnacle of esteem whence nothing seemed too much for him
to grasp. Besides the Pope’s favour he now had the King’s, who
told him in no veiled terms that he regretted the days of the great
cardinal-ministers, of Fleury, of Richelieu. Yet the hour when the
King said that to him, in the park of Fontainebleau, was followed by
a stronger renewal of that sense of vague discomfort which, all the
while that he walked on this golden path, had followed him like a
shadow, trying to whisper to him something which he would not hear.”
“But why?” asked the young man rather impatiently. “What is there
wrong in success?”
“Nothing, my son, if it is in God’s purpose for us and if we use it
to His glory, being ourselves indifferent to it. But that was just
what the priest had never done. He wanted the success for its own
sake—though he told himself, indeed, that all he did was to be for
the advancement of the Church.”
“Well?” said Saint-Ermay.
“So he went on, shutting out the voices of warning. But God is
merciful. He has many weapons. And He struck at him twice . . . Louis,
I cannot tell you how . . . it was through a very dear friend, the one
man whom he esteemed and admired above all others. The first time
the priest would not heed; but the second time . . . he was not
disobedient. Then the bandage fell from his eyes; he saw what he had
been pursuing, and that all which had been the very breath of life to
him was thinner and more vanishing than smoke. And in the enthusiasm
of his conversion it became the dearest wish of his heart to give up
everything for the glory of God and to enter the religious life.
“He was already in the Benedictine monastery of Valfleury when the
news came that the Pope was about to make him a cardinal. That news
was nothing to him now; he had something very different to trouble
him, for, during the six months in which he tried his vocation, with
all the earnestness of which he was capable, he found no peace. And at
the end of that time the Abbot, an old man of the greatest sanctity
and experience, sent for him and told him the hardest thing of all,
that he was not called to be a son of Saint Benedict. He implored the
Abbot not to send him away, back to the success which would dog him,
which he was not strong enough to bear. But the Abbot was convinced
that God’s will for the priest was that he should go back to the
world, but only to serve Him from the lowest rank. The religious life
was not for him, the diplomatic too great a temptation; his place, the
safest, but not the easiest, lay between. He said one thing that
I have never forgotten: ‘With some a great sacrifice is made once;
with others it is made many times.’”
To the young man gazing in speechless attention from his pillow, it
was plain from the little pause that his companion had forgotten him,
and was withdrawn into some region of the memory. But it was only for
a moment.
“So I went back to the world, to the lowest rank. I had implored His
Holiness not to create me cardinal, and at last the Holy Father
yielded, but only on one condition. He reserved me a cardinal _in
petto_—you know what that is, Louis; it means a cardinal created, but
not announced, whose cardinalate, when it is announced, ranks from the
date of the original creation. Then I became the vicaire of a little
cure in the Angoumois, dropping my name of De Vergy, and using that of
Des Graves, which had long been in my family; and in a year or two
after the Pope died. One day there came to me a man who had been my
friend since childhood, though not a Catholic, saying, ‘If you are
resolved to persist in this folly, at least let me be assured that you
have enough to live upon. My benefice at home is vacant; come to it,
and you shall educate my boy as well.’ . . . No, wait till I have
finished! . . . I accepted. I went to my friend’s living; I was
there, as you know, many years . . . many years. Clement XIII. was
dead; Clement XIV. knew nothing of me; all the past was forgotten.
Suddenly—it was in the autumn of ’92—Pius VI. came on the records of
the negotiation which I had carried through twenty-five years before,
and the honour reserved for me by Clement XIII. He discovered my
whereabouts, and, thinking that he might need a representative in
Vendée—Monseigneur de Mercy being dispossessed—sent a special
messenger——”
“Monsignor Cantagalli, of course,” ejaculated his listener.
“Yes . . . Lie down, Louis! . . . Out of regard for my personal
safety he did not proclaim me cardinal at that dangerous juncture, but
he referred to Clement’s action, left me with discretionary powers,
and charged me to repair to Rome when I could no longer be of use in
Vendée. And since God has seen fit to bless the means employed by His
Holiness to get me out of Nantes, I suppose He has some work for an
old man to do, in Rome or elsewhere. . . . At any rate, it is my duty
to go there. That is why I cannot accompany you to Suffolk.”
There was a long silence, while Louis gazed at the priest, thunderstruck,
out of his great hollow eyes. Then he said, in an awed tone: “Did
Gilbert ever know all this?”
“I told him,” answered the Cardinal, “the night before he died.”