CHAPTER I

Produced by Marcia Brooks, Al Haines, Paulina Chin & the

online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at

http://www.pgdpcanada.net

THE YELLOW POPPY

BY

D. K. BROSTER

AUTHOR OF MR. ROWL, ETC.

DUCKWORTH

3, HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W:C:

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_First Published_ — 1920

_Second Impression_ — 1925

_Third Impression_ — 1926

TO

GERTRUDE SCHLICH

MOST GENEROUS AND INSPIRING OF CRITICS

THIS BOOK

WHICH IS SO MUCH HERS ALREADY

“I love you, loved you . . . loved you first and last,

And love you on for ever . . .

. . . I had known the same

Except that I was prouder than I knew,

And not so honest. Aye, and as I live

I should have died so, crushing in my hand

This rose of love, the wasp inside and all,—

Ignoring ever to my soul and you

Both rose and pain,—except for this great loss,

This great despair . . .”

_Aurora Leigh._

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE WEDDING GIFT

I. “WHAT IS MIRABEL?” 11

II. THE GIFT IS OFFERED 19

III. THE GIFT IS RECEIVED 29

IV. A VERY YOUNG MAN 41

V. _TU MARCELLUS ERIS_ 49

BOOK II

MIRABEL

I. M. THIBAULT IN CONVERSATION 63

II. LE PALAIS DE FAIENCE 71

III. NINE YEARS—AND BEYOND 78

IV. JADIS 88

V. THE JASPER CUP 99

VI. THE ROMAUNT OF ROLAND 111

VII. CHILDE ROLAND COMES TO THE DARK TOWER 119

VIII. HIS SOJOURN THERE 126

IX. HIS DEPARTURE THENCE 135

X. THE KNIGHT’S MOVE 141

XI. CHECK TO THE KNIGHT 155

XII. THE ROOK’S MOVE: CHECK TO THE ROOK 165

XIII. THE BISHOP’S MOVE 177

XIV. PLOTTER AND PRIEST 184

XV. UNDER THE SEAL 191

XVI. THE QUEEN’S MOVE 198

BOOK III

LE CLOS-AUX-GRIVES

I. THE COURT OF CHARLEMAGNE 209

II. M. DE KERSAINT ANSWERS FOR A KINSMAN 215

III. M. DE KERSAINT ANSWERS FOR HIMSELF 225

IV. A MOONLIGHT WALK IN THE FOREST 236

V. WHAT THE ABBÉ THOUGHT OF IT 246

VI. _MEMINI ET PERMANEO_ 253

VII. THE CHURCH MILITANT 260

VIII. THE PAWN RETURNS TO THE BOARD 267

IX. THE CHOICE 278

X. “AFTERWARDS” 286

XI. AMONG THE WATCHERS 295

XII. THE CENTRE OF THE LABYRINTH 304

BOOK IV

THE YELLOW POPPY

I. FULFILMENT 315

II. THE YELLOW POPPY 324

III. THE COST OF ANSWERED PRAYER 331

IV. WAR . . . AND TREATIES 340

V. ALONE IN ARMS 353

VI. “SWORD, THY NOBLER USE IS DONE!” 362

VII. HOW AT THE LAST THE WINE WAS NOT DRUNK 371

VIII. WHAT WAS LEARNT AT VANNES 381

IX. THE RUBIES OF MIRABEL 387

X. THE LAST CONFLICT 398

XI. GASTON GIVES UP THE YELLOW POPPY 411

XII. FOR SOME THE WORLD IS EMPTY 421

XIII. TO THE UTTERMOST 432

BOOK I

THE WEDDING GIFT

“And so, self-girded with torn strips of hope,

Took up his life, as if it were for death

(Just capable of one heroic aim),

And threw it in the thickest of the world.”

_Aurora Leigh._

NOTE

Any reader familiar with the figure of the gallant and unfortunate Louis

de Frotté will realise why neither he nor the Normandy which he led so

well play any part in these pages—not indeed that he has served as

prototype for any character in them, but because to have introduced him

also would have been to overblacken the reputation of Bonaparte. Yet

that which is here laid to the First Consul’s charge is no libel, for

the deeds done at Alençon and Verneuil in mid-February, 1800, are

written in history.

CHAPTER I

“WHAT IS MIRABEL?”

“I wish I had been taught how to make a bed!” complained Roland de

Céligny, as he wrestled with his blanket in the half-darkness of the

attic.

“You may think yourself lucky to have a bed to make!” retorted a comrade

who sat cross-legged on a neighbouring pile of sacking. “Mine cannot be

‘made,’ though a careless movement will reduce it to its component

elements.”

“The devil! If I tuck in the blanket this side, it won’t reach to the

other!” pursued the young grumbler, fiercely demonstrating the truth of

his accusation, where he knelt by a mattress placed directly on the

floor.

“From this, my paladin, learn that the gifts of Fate are evenly

distributed,” returned he of the pile of sacking. Since one of his arms

was in a sling, it is possible that he would not have been capable even

of the Vicomte de Céligny’s unfruitful exertions, but he did not say so.

On the contrary, he looked at his friend’s performance with the air of

one who in a moment will say, “Let me do it!”

“If you would only take less——” he began.

“For Heaven’s sake be quiet, you two!” entreated a third voice. “One

cannot count, much less think, in your chatter . . . Two

tierce-majors. . . .”

The owner of this voice, a man of about forty-five or fifty, sat at a

table in a corner playing piquet by candlelight with another. There is

no reason why you should not play piquet, even if you are a Chouan

officer in the late April of the year of grace 1799—or, if you prefer

it, which in that case is unlikely, Floréal of the year VII of the

Republic—and are concealed at the top of an old house at Hennebont in

Brittany with a bandage on your head, and an ache within it which may

well justify a little impatience to noise. When, in addition, your

partner refuses to play for money, the game becomes so harmless as

almost to be meritorious.

To the appeal of the piquet-player—his superior officer into the

bargain—the wounded critic on the sacking made no reply save a grimace.

The time selected for bedmaking by the very good-looking young man who

was engaged in it was not, as might be guessed, a morning hour; it was,

on the contrary, nine o’clock in the evening. Two candles stuck in the

necks of bottles gave the card-players their requisite illumination;

another, standing on a dilapidated chest of drawers, shone on the book

which a third young man, sitting astride a chair, had propped on its

back and in which he appeared to be immersed.

The attic thus meagrely lit was spacious, and full of odd corners, but

crowded with tables and chairs and cupboards, for it was the top floor

of a furniture dealer, where he stored his old or unfashionable goods,

many of which had been piled up on the top of each other to make more

room, and where two or three huge old wardrobes, jutting out like dark

shadowy rocks from the walls, still further reduced the space available

for occupation. Yet though it was, patently, a refuge, it was also a

rendezvous.

In this spring of 1799 the Directory, the cruel and incapable, was still

prolonging its dishonoured existence, and after ten years of torment the

French people were still enslaved—to an oligarchy instead of to a

monarchy. The liberty dangled so long before their eyes, the liberty in

whose name so many terrible crimes had been committed, seemed further

away than ever. Inert and exhausted, pining under a leprosy of political

corruption, her credit and trade almost ruined, the mere ghost of what

she had been, France was sighing for the master that she was impotent to

give herself, the man who should overturn her new tyrants and raise her

up once more to her full stature. And to most minds in the West, that

home of loyalty, only one master was conceivable, and that was Louis

XVIII., the King who had never reigned.

In the West, moreover, at this moment, the Chouannerie, that sporadic

guerrilla warfare of profoundly Royalist and Catholic stamp, indigenous

to Brittany, Anjou, and Maine since the overthrow of the great Vendean

effort in 1793, was showing signs of reviving—under persecution. It had

indeed been temporarily stamped out at the pacification of three years

ago, but that pacification had left the Royalists of Brittany and the

neighbouring departments in a position which gradually proved to be

intolerable. They were not at war, yet they lived in continual peril,

not one of them sure of his liberty or even of his life. After the

scandalous _coup d’état_ of Fructidor, ’97, the promised religious

freedom was not even a name, and political freedom, especially in the

western departments whose elections had been so cynically annulled, was

a mere farce. It came, in fact, at last to this, that the Minister of

Police could recommend that the Royalists of those regions should be

“caused to disappear” if necessary; tyranny unashamed had replaced

oppression.

Naturally enough, in 1798 the Chouan began to make his appearance once

more. At first he merely robbed couriers and diligences of public money.

But this not very creditable activity was on the surface; underneath, in

the hands usually of gentlemen, the work went secretly forward of

organising that indomitable and tenacious peasantry, at once pious and

cruel, and of transforming brigandage into real war; and so, throughout

the West, might be found wandering Royalist leaders with their little

staffs, striving to keep effective the Chouans who had once fought, and

to enrol and arm fresh volunteers. To such a band, commanded by the

Marquis de Kersaint, an _émigré_ distinguished in Austrian service who

had not long come over from England, belonged these five men in the

furniture-dealer’s attic.

They were not, at this moment, in very enviable case, for besides that

two of them were wounded, they and their handful of peasants—since

scattered—had yesterday come off second best in an unexpected collision

with Government troops in the neighbouring department of Finistère, and

they were now beginning, moreover, to be anxious about the safety of

their leader, who, with a guide, had taken a more circuitous route to

Hennebont in order to gather certain information. And his presence here

was urgent because it had long been arranged that he and his two elder

subordinates should meet and confer in Hennebont with Georges Cadoudal,

the famous peasant leader of the Morbihan, concerning the better

organisation of the wilder and more westerly region of Finistère, which,

it was whispered, M. de Kersaint was eventually to command in its

entirety. Yesterday’s misfortune had made such a meeting more, not less,

necessary; and so here, half-fugitive, M. de Kersaint’s officers were,

having had the luck to slip unobserved into the little town in the dusk.

But now there were rumours of a _colonne mobile_ on the road which their

leader would probably take; and in any case there was always

danger—danger which the three young men who formed a sort of bodyguard

of aides-de-camp to him considered would have been lessened for him had

they shared his odyssey. But M. de Kersaint had apparently thought

otherwise.

* * * * *

The game of cards in the corner came at last to an end, and the

opponents added up their scores.

“You have won, Comte,” said the bandaged player’s adversary, leaning

back in his chair. The candle-light which threw up his companion’s

somewhat harsh features shone in his case on a nondescript round face

with no salient characteristics. By this and by his peasant’s attire he

might well have been a small farmer; but on the other, him addressed as

“Comte,” the gaily embroidered Breton vest and short coat sat less

naturally.

“Yes, I suppose I have,” returned the latter. He drew out his watch and

frowned. “They ought really to be here by now,” he observed.

“I doubt if it is quite dark enough outside,” replied his late

adversary. “Le Blé-aux-Champs would hardly risk bringing M. de Kersaint

into Hennebont while light remained.”

“I wish he had not gone to Scaër,” muttered the other.

“You do not think that anything has happened to M. le Marquis, do you,

sir?” asked Roland de Céligny.

“No,” replied M. de Kersaint’s second-in-command. “I will not believe in

misfortune; it is the way to bring it about.”

“Perhaps this is they,” suggested Artamène de la Vergne, the youth with

his arm in a sling, as a step was heard on the echoing stairs. And even

the silent reader lifted his head from his book to listen.

But the moment of suspense which followed was not lightened when the

door opened and old M. Charlot, the furniture-dealer, himself appeared

on the threshold, candle in hand, tinted spectacles on nose. In a

silence of expectancy he came in and shut the door carefully behind him,

while five pairs of eyes stared at him uneasily.

“Gentlemen,” he began in a cautious voice, looking round on the forms

ensconced among his shadowy furniture, “is not one of you a priest?”

The second piquet-player bent forward. “Yes, I am,” he surprisingly

admitted. “Do you want me?”

“There is an old lady very ill next door, Monsieur l’Abbé, an old Mlle

Magny, who has been a respected inhabitant of this town for many years.

It is not that she wants a confessor or the Last Sacraments, because she

had them two or three days ago; it is that to-night she is wandering so

much that her niece, who looks after her, came in to me about it just

now in great distress. The old lady seems to have something on her mind,

and Mme Leclerc thought that if she could get a priest, an _insermenté_,

of course——”

The Abbé who looked so little of an Abbé interrupted. “I am quite ready

to go to her, Monsieur Charlot, if it is necessary, but I should have

thought that, rather than summon a stranger, the poor lady’s relatives

would have had recourse to the priest who confessed her the other day.”

“Yes, mon père,” replied the old man, “but you see he lives very retired

outside the town since Fructidor, and there is always a certain risk for

him in coming, and seeing that you were on the spot, and not known here

for a priest . . .”

The word “risk” appeared to have decided the question, for at it the

Abbé in the peasant’s dress had risen.

“I will come at once,” he said without more ado, and walked round an

intervening barrier of upturned chairs.

“That is very good of your reverence,” said M. Charlot in a tone of

relief, moving towards the door. “She has been an excellent Christian in

her time, that poor lady, and shrewd enough too, but now she lies there,

so her niece says, talking continually of some place—or person,

maybe—called Mirabel, and of a wedding. And nothing——”

“_Mirabel!_” ejaculated the Abbé, stopping short.

“O, Monsieur l’Abbé!” exclaimed M. Charlot, struck by his tone, “if you

know something about this Mirabel, then surely the good God has sent you

to the poor soul! I will take you there at once.”

He opened the door for the priest, who went through it without another

word. None of the three young men, all watching these two protagonists,

noticed that the wounded piquet-player also had risen abruptly from his

seat at the mention of the name which had so affected his companion, had

stared after them a second or two, and that he now let himself fall into

his chair again with a despondent gesture, and took his bandaged head

between his hands.

“Now the Abbé’s got a job to occupy him,” said Artamène de la Vergne in

a sleepy voice. “I wish I had; or that M. de Kersaint and Le

Blé-aux-Champs would arrive quickly, so that I could go to sleep without

the prospect of being waked up again immediately.”

“The true campaigner can sleep at any time, and for any length of time,”

remarked Roland complacently. “It is early yet, at least I think so. My

watch has stopped.”

“And mine is lost,” responded the Chevalier de la Vergne. “Lucien is

sure to have his, and it is sure to be correct. Ask him the time.”

“Lucien!” said Roland. No answer from the reader.

“Lucien, deaf adder!” supplemented Artamène.

“I believe he is asleep,” muttered the Vicomte de Céligny, and by a

snake-like elongation of body and arm he contrived to reach a leg of the

student’s chair and to shake the same.

“I wish _you_ were asleep!” exclaimed his victim, lifting a mildly

exasperated face. “What in Heaven’s name do you want?”

“The time, dear friend.”

Lucien du Boisfossé pulled the watch from his fob. “A quarter—no,

seventeen minutes past nine.”

“What are you reading?” demanded Artamène.

“The _Æneid_ of Virgil,” replied Lucien, his eyes on the page again.

The questioner gave an exclamation, almost of horror. “Ye gods! He is

reading Latin—for amusement!”

“A quarter past nine,” remarked Roland reflectively. “This time

yesterday I was——”

“Don’t chatter so, Roland le preux! You disturb our Latinist . . . and

also,” added Artamène in a lower tone, “run the risk of breaking into M.

de Brencourt’s meditations. Look at him!”

The bandaged piquet-player, who still sat by the table, seemed indeed

sunk in a profound abstraction, letting the idle cards fall one by one

from his fingers. It was plain that he did not know what he was doing.

“I wager he is thinking of a woman,” whispered Artamène, bringing

himself nearer to his friend. “It seems a quieting occupation; suppose

we think of one too! But on whom shall I fix my thoughts . . . and you,

Roland?”

A slight flush, invisible in the poor light, dyed young de Céligny’s

cheek as he answered, with a suspicion of embarrassment, “I will think

of that poor old lady next door. Will the Abbé exorcise her, do you

think, from the spell of . . . what was it—Mirabel? And, by the way,

what is Mirabel?”

“The name of a kind of plum, ignoramus,” replied Lucien du Boisfossé

unexpectedly. He yawned as he spoke.

“Plainly our Lucien has been studying the Georgics also,” commented

Artamène.

“An encyclopaedia would be more to the point!” retorted Roland. And

raising his voice, he said, “Comte, what is Mirabel?”

The older man heard, even with a little start. He laid down the cards

and came out of his reverie.

“Mirabel, gentlemen, is the name of a property and château near Paris,

the château that was begun for François I. You may have heard of it. It

belongs, or belonged, to the Duc de Trélan.”

“Trélan,” observed the young Chevalier de la Vergne reflectively. “I

seem to remember the name in connection with the prison massacres in

September, ’92. He was killed in them, I think?”

“No,” replied the Comte de Brencourt sombrely. “He was never in prison.

He had emigrated. It was his wife who was butchered—with Mme de

Lamballe.”

“Morbleu!” exclaimed Artamène. “And the Duc is still alive, then?”

“I believe so,” replied M. de Brencourt, even more sombrely.

“Where is he now?” asked Roland.

“Somewhere abroad—in England or Germany.”

“Worse than being dead!” observed Artamène, lying down and pulling the

covering over him.

CHAPTER II

THE GIFT IS OFFERED

And next door, in a tidy but overcrowded bedroom, the Abbé Chassin,

without any of the marks of his office, sat and listened to the babbling

of an old spinster lady who was to terminate an uneventful and

singularly respectable life as the messenger of destiny to not a few

people.

The heavy curtains were pulled back from the side of the small

fourposter by which the priest sat, and the candlelight fell soft and

steady on the old, old blanched face within the neat capfrill, itself

scarcely whiter than the visage it surrounded. On the waxlike

countenance, amid all the signs of nearing death, was the imprint of

that masterfulness which sometimes descends with age upon a certain type

of old lady. And Mlle Magny was talking, talking continuously and

pitifully, her eyes fixed, her shrivelled fingers pleating and plucking

the edge of the sheet in the last fatal restlessness. Those hands were

the only things that moved.

“I ought to have had it ready . . . but I did not know in time, I did

not know! All these years to have had it in the family, and not to have

known that it was there! But perhaps I shall be in time after all—they

cannot have come back from the chapel yet, surely. But I must be quick,

I must be quick! . . . and when the bride gives round the sword-knots

and the fans to all the fine company I shall offer my gift to the young

Duc. But I must be quick . . .”

And the withered hands, abandoning the sheet, began to fumble over the

bed as if searching for something.

The Abbé bent forward and laid one of his own gently on the nearer.

“Cannot I help you, my daughter—cannot I do something for you?”

The eyes turned a moment; the brain, deeply absorbed in the past though

it was, seemed to grasp this intrusion from the present, even to the

pastoral mode of address.

“You are a priest, Monsieur? That is good—that is good! Yes, you can

open this casket for me,” and she made as if she held it. “And inside

you will find the wedding gift for the young Duc de Trélan—but you must

be quick, quick! They will be back from the chapel! . . . Ah, I cannot

find the key—I cannot turn the lock! My God, if I should be too late

after all! Mon père, mon père, help me! . . . But, mon père, you are

doing nothing!”

The Abbé looked round in desperation. He could see nothing that at all

resembled a locked casket among the little treasures of the old lady’s

room, the pincushions, the images of devotion, all the prim collection

of a blameless lifetime. But in a moment the struggle with the imaginary

lock came to an end, and as the tired hands relaxed a smile crept about

Mlle Magny’s indrawn mouth.

“How handsome he is, Monseigneur Gaston!” she said in a tone of

admiration. “My dear lady will be proud of him to-day! They will dance

to-night after the wedding, and I shall see it all, as my lady wishes.

But none of the fine ladies there will have given the bride such a gift

as I shall give the bridegroom, though I am only his dear mother’s

maid. . . . But why does the Abbé not bring it to me? When the bride

gives round the swordknots and the fans——”

“Madame,” gently interrupted the priest, “if you will tell me where your

gift is, I will bring it to you instantly.”

A look of cunning swept over the dying old woman’s face, and a faint

sound that was like a chuckle came from her lips.

“Ah, no, I have hidden it well!” she replied unexpectedly, “hidden it

nearly as securely as the treasure of Mirabel itself. You will not find

it in a hurry, Clotilde!”

Who was Clotilde, wondered the priest? The niece with whom she lived,

probably. But what was this about a ‘treasure’ in Mirabel?

“To think,” went on the old voice musingly, “that the precious paper was

all these years in Cousin François’ dining-room, and all those scores of

years before that, since the time it was stolen. And all the dead and

gone Duchesses might have had the rubies to wear. I might have clasped

the necklace round my sainted lady’s own neck. Now the new Duchesse will

be the first to put it round her pretty throat.”

The priest gave a little shiver. Still that wedding eight-and-twenty

years ago! . . . Since then the pretty throat of which she spoke had

known a very different necklace . . . but of the same colour . . .

“But if you have hidden the rubies, Madame,” he hazarded, bewildered

between the ‘treasure’ and the ‘paper,’ the ‘gift’ and what was

concealed, “you will not be able to give them to the bride.”

“It was not I who hid them!” responded Mlle Magny impatiently. “It was

the first Duc, in the days of Mazarin, who hid a great store of money

and jewels at Mirabel. And no one was ever able to find them again.

Stolen . . . hidden . . . hidden . . . stolen . . . they make a

beautiful couple, and when Monseigneur de Paris has married them and the

nuptial mass is finished. . . .”

A long pause. Then the old lady whispering, “Sainte Vierge, how tired I

am!” clasped her hands on her breast. The Abbé got up and bent over her.

Her eyes were closed, and he heard her murmur indistinctly, “_Mater

amabilis, virgo prudentissima_, grant me soon to see my sainted lady!”

To be on the brink of so important, so long-lost a secret—too late for

it to be of use . . . yet, after all, perhaps, not too late—and to be

baffled at the very moment of discovery! When such an extraordinary

coincidence had brought him, of all men in the world, to this bedside,

for its possessor to take the secret unrevealed out of life with her! It

was hard!

Yet, as M. Chassin was a priest, he put away regret, and tried to think

only of the needs of this soul about to pass through the great door.

Mlle Magny had had the last rites, that he knew. Was the moment come for

the commendatory prayer? He slipped his fingers round her wrist. But the

pulse, though feeble and irregular, was not at the last flutter. And

slowly, as if his touch had roused her, the old lady opened her eyes

again. The look in them was different; meeting it, the priest knew that

she was no longer wandering in the mists of nearly thirty years ago. She

was back in the present; so much so, indeed, that she was capable of

astonishment at seeing this unknown man in peasant’s dress bending over

her—more, of resenting it.

“Who are you, Monsieur, and . . . what . . . what are you doing here?”

she demanded, in a tone which, if scarcely more than the frailest of

whispers, yet conveyed some of that masterfulness which was written on

her face.

“I am a priest, Madame, an _insermenté_, and M. Charlot, your neighbour,

brought me here, at your niece’s desire.”

“Clotilde always . . . takes too much upon herself,” said the thread of

a voice in a tone of displeasure. “I have already had . . . the Last

Sacraments.”

“Yes, Madame,” assented M. Chassin, realising that Mlle Magny’s recovery

of her senses was not advancing him much. “It was not for the purpose of

administering you that I came.”

Her look asked him what his purpose was.

“Because, my daughter, you were speaking of—Mirabel.”

“Nonsense!” retorted Mlle Magny quite sharply. “I am not in . . . in the

habit of . . . discussing my past life with strangers!”

“You have been ill, Madame,” said the priest gently. “And has not

Mirabel something to do with your present life too?” Then, being a man

who knew how to wait, he took his seat beside her again, and exercised

this power.

“Have I been wandering?” asked the dying woman, suddenly turning her

eyes upon him.

“A little, yes.”

“I have been very ill . . . and they tell me I shall not get

better. . . . Is that so, Father?”

“It is what I have been given to understand, my daughter. But you have

made your peace with God.”

“Yes,” said she. “But there is something else that I desire to do . . .

before I die . . . yet God knows how I am to do it.”

The priest bent forward. “God does indeed know, my daughter, and it was

doubtless He Who sent me here to-day. You wish, do you not, to give into

the hands of the Duc de Trélan a paper now in your possession concerning

a treasure which has been for many years hidden in his château of

Mirabel.”

A flush rose in the ivory face. “I talked of that?”

“Of that—and of a wedding at Mirabel.”

Mlle Magny put a trembling hand over her eyes. “Indeed, you must forgive

me! . . . All these years I cannot forget it—the lights, the jewels,

the beauty of that couple, my lady’s happiness. For I was tirewoman, mon

père, during many years, to the Duchesse Eléonore, the Dowager Duchess,

a saint on earth. God rest her soul! She only lived for a short time

after her son’s marriage.”

The priest nodded, as one who knows already. “I, too, have cause to say

‘God rest her!’—And the paper you spoke of?”

“What paper?” demanded the old voice, suddenly suspicious again.

“The paper containing the secret of the hoard hidden at Mirabel in

Mazarin’s time, which has come into your hands, Madame, and which you

were wishing that you could have given to the Duc de Trélan on his

wedding day so many years ago.”

There was silence from the bed. “Well,” said the old lady at last, with

more animation, “if I told you . . . all that . . . I may as well tell

you the rest.”

And slowly, with pauses for breath, she told him how the Duc de Trélan

of Mazarin’s day, implicated in the rebellion of the Fronde, and not

knowing which party would finally triumph in that kaleidoscope of civil

conflict, buried gold and jewels in his once-royal château of Mirabel

and made a memorandum of the hiding-place for his son, then away

fighting with Condé. The Duc himself had to flee before Mazarin’s

vengeance and died in exile; Mirabel was for a space confiscated, and

when the next Duc was reinstated the treasure could not be found. The

memorandum of its hiding-place had been stolen by the late Duc’s

steward, who offered to sell it for a large sum to the successor to the

title. Suspecting a hoax the latter refused; yet, as was not difficult

for a great noble in those days, he procured a _lettre de cachet_

against the offender, who dragged out the rest of his life in prison.

Before his arrest, however, he had placed the memorandum in the hands of

a friend; but the friend never took any steps to utilise it, and merely

preserved it in such a manner that it was to all intents and purposes

lost—for he pasted the parchment, face downwards, against the back of

his wife’s portrait. Probably, said the old lady, he was waiting till

the man who had confided it to him came out of prison; but this the

steward never did, and a short time before his death in captivity his

friend, Mlle Magny’s great-great-grandfather, died too. And there,

gummed against the picture of the flourishing bourgeoise dame of Louis

XIII.’s day, the parchment had remained for nearly a hundred and fifty

years, till, some two years ago, on Cousin François’ death, the portrait

had come into Mlle Magny’s possession, and the old lady herself, in

examining it, had lighted on the parchment, and realised of what irony

Fate was capable.

“Ah, if only I had had it earlier!” she concluded wistfully. “What a

gift to have made my sainted lady, who was sometimes pressed for money

for her charities, since, like all the Saint-Chamans, both her husband

and her son spent their means royally. And now these two years that I

have had it it is useless! Where is the Duc de Trélan now? Alas, we know

where his wife, the Duchesse Valentine, went! . . . And what is Mirabel

to-day?”

“No, Madame,” said the priest, as the voice ceased exhausted, “two years

ago you could have done nothing. But to-day, as Heaven has so ordered

it, you can give that paper to the Duc de Trélan, if you wish.”

She turned her sunken eyes on him again. The lustre was already fading.

“And how is that, if you please?”

“Because I am . . . in close touch with the Duc. If you commit the paper

to me he shall have it before—before I am many days older.”

“But—if he is still alive—he is an émigré . . . has been an émigré for

many years!” objected Mlle Magny incredulously.

“Nevertheless I am in close touch with him.”

The failing eyes of the sick woman searched his face—that commonplace

visage out of which looked neither good nor evil. It was difficult to

read.

“I have nothing but your word for that,” she said, while suspicion and a

wistful desire to trust him strove together in look and tone.

The priest put his hand into a pocket of his embroidered vest and pulled

out an ornate rosary of ebony and silver. Taking one of the silver

paternoster beads between his finger and thumb; he bent over Mlle Magny

and held it near her eyes. “Can you see what is engraved on that bead,

Madame? It is not a sacred emblem.”

The old lady put up her feeble hand and tried to push his a little

further off. “You are holding it too near, mon père,” she said

irritably. “I am not so blind as that. . . . It looks like . . . it is

very worn . . . yet it looks like a bird of some kind, with wings

outspread. What is that doing on a chaplet? Is it on the rest of the

beads?”

He showed her. “Victor, Cardinal de Trélan, in the early days of the

century, seems to have had a strange fancy for his family crest on his

rosary. There is his monogram on one bead. That bird, Madame, is the

Trélan phoenix, and the present Duc gave me this old rosary at my

ordination.”

Instantly she seized his hand. “The Trélan phoenix! Let me look again!

Yes, it is, it is! Ah, to see it once more after all these years!” And

as the priest relinquished the chaplet, the Duchesse Eléonore’s

tirewoman, almost sobbing, put it to her lips.

The Abbé waited, and after a moment she turned on him moist eyes and

said, puzzled, “But . . . but . . . I seem to remember . . . ordination

. . . the Cardinal’s rosary . . . it was surely to the young Duc’s

foster-brother, a Breton peasant, whom I never saw . . . that it was

given . . . when he took orders?”

“You remember quite rightly, Madame. And I am that foster-brother, that

Breton peasant, Pierre Chassin.”

Had he suddenly revealed himself as Louis XVIII. or the Comte d’Artois

the devoted old spinster could scarcely have shown more emotion.

“God be praised! God be praised for this mercy!” she quavered. “His

foster-brother! Yes, I remember hearing from my lady all about your

mother. Six years before I entered her service it was . . .”

“—Remembering then, Madame, what I too owe to your lady of blessed

memory, and to the Duc, who, as you probably know, had me educated and

gave me a cure on his estates in the south, you may trust me, may you

not, with the document?”

“Yes, indeed!” returned the old lady, and there was no shadow of doubt

in her tone now. But the shock of joy, her devotion to the great family

with whom her life had been bound up, and the advent of this man who, if

he were not himself the rose, was almost a graft from the tree—all

these seemed to have benumbed her faculties, for she lay quiet, tears of

weakness and happiness stealing from under the closed lids. Presently

she said,

“He is in France again then, the Duc?”

“I am afraid I cannot tell you that, my daughter. But, on the faith of a

Christian and a priest he shall have the secret in his hands very

shortly.”

“He will not be able to make use of it now.”

“Who knows? And if not now, when happier days come, perhaps. If he can

make use of it, it will be of immeasurably greater service to him to-day

than it would ever have been a quarter of a century ago. For this much I

can tell you, Madame, that, wherever he is, he is fighting for the

King.”

“As a Trélan should!” she murmured with a smile. But the smile had gone

when she added, “And the terrible fate of his wife, the Duchesse

Valentine?”

“It broke his heart,” said the priest briefly.

“My lady was spared much,” murmured Mlle Magny. She passed a shaking

hand over her eyes. “So much blood . . . and Mirabel deserted. . . . Are

the candles going out, mon père, or is it my eyes? N’importe—you can

still find the parchment . . . that little closed frame by the mirror

yonder. If you open it you will know the face.”

He did. It was a little pastel drawing of the Duchesse Eléonore, his

patroness, wearing the widow’s weeds in which he best recalled her. He

came back to the bed holding it.

“It was to have been buried with me, that little picture . . . it still

shall be. Clotilde knew how fond I was of it—but she would never have

guessed anything else, poor fool . . . I took a lesson from my forbear

. . . Tear off the paper at the back, mon père.”

M. Chassin obeyed, and as he peeled off the pinkish, speckly paper

recently pasted there, a piece of yellow parchment doubled up against

the real back of the picture was disclosed. It was folded in four, and

on it was written in brownish ink the single word, “Mirabel.”

“Open it!” said the voice from the bed, grown very weak now.

The priest obeyed. As he unfolded the parchment with no very steady

hands, his eyes were greeted with a sort of rough sketch-map of some

complexity, underneath which was written, in a crabbed seventeenth

century hand:

“Plan de l’endroit dans mon chasteau de Mirabel où j’ay fait enterrer

plusieurs milliers de pistoles et divers parements de pierreries de feu

ma femme, à cause des troubles sévissant en ce royaume.” And he caught

sight of “Item, 10 sacs contenant chascun 2,500 pistoles . . . Item, un

collier de rubis des Indes fort bien travaillé . . . Item, une coupe en

or ciselé dite de la reyne Margueritte” . . .

The whole was inscribed “Pour mon fils hault et puissant seigneur Gui de

Saint-Chamans, Marquis de la Ganache, Vicomte de Saint-Chamans,” and

signed, “Fait par moy a mon dit chasteau de Mirabel ce six avril de l’an

mil six cent cinquante-deux, Antoine-Louis de Saint-Chamans, Duc de

Treslan.”

“This is indeed——” began the priest as soon as he could find voice,

when, glancing off the parchment, he saw the change which, in the brief

space of his study of the document, had come over the face on the

pillow. Mlle Magny had used her last reserve of strength over this

matter; it was gone now, and she was going too.

“Promise me, Father!” she gasped out as he bent over her.

“I promise you, my daughter, as I hope myself for salvation!”

The drawn lips smiled. “I can say my _Nunc Dimittis_ . . . Bless me,

Pierre Chassin!”

He raised his hand. “_Benedicat te_ . . .” and passed straight on to the

“Go forth, O Christian soul . . .”

By the end she was unconscious, and a quarter of an hour later, the

weeping Clotilde on one side of the bed and the proscribed priest

praying on the other, Mlle Magny, her last thoughts on earth occupied

with the house of Trélan, went through the great door to meet her

sainted lady, leaving on its hither side the secret of Mirabel to bring

about results undreamt of.

CHAPTER III

THE GIFT IS RECEIVED

All this while the occupants of M. Charlot’s attic, which the Abbé had

so abruptly quitted, were taken up with their own anxieties, and though

they had at last fallen silent, the chiaroscuro of their abode was

fairly throbbing with uneasiness. What made their leader, with a guide

above suspicion, so late in finding his way from Scaër?

At last, just about the moment that M. Chassin, next door, had finished

the _Proficiscere_ and was calling for “Clotilde,” the Vicomte de

Céligny exclaimed, not for the first time, “This must be they!” The four

men strained their ears, for a noise could certainly be heard on the

staircase.

“Dame! it sounds as though Le Blé-aux-Champs were drunk!” observed

Artamène.

“Or hurt!” added the Comte de Brencourt, listening uneasily.

The heavy, shuffling footsteps which they had heard ascending the stairs

paused outside the door. Roland sprang up and opened it, drawing back

instantly with a little cry. Two men, both in Breton costume, stood on

the threshold, the elder and taller supporting the other, a young

saturnine-looking peasant, whose face was sulky with pain, and whose

unshod left foot was enveloped in a stained and muddy handkerchief.

“Monsieur le Marquis!” cried Roland and Artamène together, “What has

happened?”

“Nothing very serious,” replied the elder newcomer cheerfully. “We

startled a _colonne mobile_ in the dusk, that is all, and our poor

Blé-aux-Champs has a ball through his foot.”

“But you yourself are unhurt, de Kersaint, I hope?” asked the Comte de

Brencourt, not without anxiety, as he came forward from his corner. “We

were getting very uneasy about you.”

“I am untouched, thank you. But this lad of mine——”

“Let him lie down on my mattress, sir,” suggested the Vicomte de

Céligny, and, as it happened to be the nearest to the door, the young

Chouan, after vain protests, hobbled towards it, his arm still round his

leader’s neck.

“Yes, lie down, mon gars,” said M. de Kersaint, lowering him to the

pallet, “and we will see what can be done for this foot.” He looked

round. “Where is our surgeon-in-chief, the Abbé?”

“Confessing or otherwise ministering to a dying woman next door,”

replied M. de Brencourt. “M. Charlot came in for him.”

The Marquis de Kersaint raised his eyebrows a trifle, but made no

comment. “I am afraid that we are somewhat of an infirmary here

altogether,” he remarked. “What of your injuries, Comte—and yours, La

Vergne?”

“I do not deny that I have a headache,” returned M. de Brencourt. “But,

as for the cause, the Abbé dressed the scratch this afternoon, and

reported that it was doing excellently. My wrist” he showed a bandage

“will, he says, take a little longer to heal.”

“And your safe arrival, Monsieur le Marquis, has done even more for my

arm than the Abbé’s ministrations,” said Artamène.

M. de Kersaint smiled at him and shook his head, as he knelt down by the

prostrate guide and began to take the handkerchief off his foot. He

would have been more or less than human if he had not known that he was

idolised, as well as feared, by these well-born young followers of his.

“Let me do that, Monsieur le Marquis!” now begged Roland, while the

thoughtful Lucien produced from the recesses of the attic a bowl of

water and some torn linen.

But the Marquis de Kersaint, asking Roland when he had ever dressed a

gunshot wound, went through the process with a deftness which suggested

that he himself had dressed not a few. The young peasant, who had lain

with his face hidden in the pillow, caught his hand as he finished and

carried it dumbly to his lips.

“There, mon gars,” said his leader kindly, as he withdrew it. “Lie there

and be as comfortable as you can under the circumstances. The ball has

gone clean through, which is a great mercy. Roland, put a covering of

some kind over him.—Thank you, Lucien; yes, I should like some fresh

water. You can put it on that convenient chest of drawers yonder.”

As he stood there, washing the blood off his hands, it was not difficult

to understand the attraction that the Marquis de Kersaint might possess

for either sex or any age. As a young man he must have been

superlatively handsome, and now the grey at his temples only served to

emphasize his appearance of extreme distinction. Just as his dark,

slightly rippling hair gained by contrast with that touch of Time’s

powder, so the peasant’s dress which he wore merely set off the natural

air of command that hung about him—an air of which it was plainly

impossible for him to divest himself, even for purposes of disguise. It

was innate in the whole poise of his tall figure, in the aquiline nose

with its delicate nostrils, in the imperious glance of the fine grey

eyes. Yet there was a measure of geniality about the mouth—of the kind

that it is not wise to presume upon. Everybody in the attic knew that.

“Well, my children, and what have you been doing since you arrived?” he

asked, looking round as he dried his hands. “Lucien, I see, has got hold

of a book as usual. What have you been reading, Lucien?”

“This is what he has been reading, Monsieur le Marquis!” cried the young

Chevalier de la Vergne, snatching up du Boisfossé’s Virgil whence he had

laid it, face downwards, on his chair. And holding the book with the

hand which rested in the sling, of which he still had the use, he

flourished his other arm at Roland, who was standing near, and began to

declaim at him the famous lament out of the sixth book for the untimely

dead Marcellus—

_“Heu miserande puer! si qua fata aspera rumpas,_

_ Tu Marcellus eris. Manibus date lilia plenis_

_ Purpureos——”_

He had got no further when, to his enormous surprise, the book was

gently but firmly taken out of his hand.

“Do not repeat those lines, boy, over anyone young, as you are doing at

this moment,” said M. de Kersaint quietly looking, not at him, but at

Roland. “I always think they are unlucky. . . .”

And before the two young men had time to recover from their astonishment

he had walked over to the other side of the attic, and joined his second

in command at the little table to which the latter had returned.

“I have some papers here, de Brencourt,” he said, sitting down, “which

we could look at till the Abbé returns. Undoubtedly our attempt was

premature . . . but unless we can get money it always will be premature.

I have seen ‘Sincère’; he could join us with at least two hundred and

fifty men if we could only provide arms for them.”

“Always the same cry—insufficient arms and ammunition,” remarked his

lieutenant rather bitterly. “How is anything considerable going to be

done in Finistère if there is always this lack? And we could get both in

plenty from England if we only had the money to buy them with.”

“Exactly,” said the Marquis. “But where the money is to come from I do

not know—beyond the not very generous subsidy which the British

Government has promised me for the summer.—Well, we must take counsel

with Georges when he comes. Now, look at these figures.”

And he and the Comte de Brencourt were still bending over the papers

which he had spread out on the table when the three young men, who had

withdrawn themselves as far as possible from the conclave of their

superiors, became aware that the priest was once more in their midst. He

had entered among the shadows very quietly.

“A la bonne heure, Monsieur l’Abbé!” said Roland de Céligny. “Monsieur

le Marquis has arrived.” And he indicated the other side of the attic.

“And have you been to the wedding at Mirabel?” enquired Artamène

mischievously.

The Abbé Chassin quickly turned on him with a frown, putting his finger

to his lips. But he was too late; the words were out, and, though the

culprit had moderated his voice, they had been heard. And Artamène,

roused at once to interest and alertness by the priest’s gesture, was

somehow aware of a sudden stiffening of M. de Kersaint’s whole figure,

ere he said, turning round from the table, “What is this about . . .

Mirabel?”

The Abbé seeming in no great haste to answer, it was M. de Brencourt who

replied, “The old lady whom the Abbé has been visiting next door is,

apparently, suffering from delusions about Mirabel—that château of the

Duc de Trélan’s near Paris. That is what M. de la Vergne means.”

“This is interesting,” observed the Marquis de Kersaint, turning further

round to look at the little priest, who had not advanced a step since

Artamène’s jest. “And did you learn anything fresh about Mirabel, Abbé?”

“Yes, I did, Monsieur le Marquis,” answered the priest rather shortly.

“May we hear it?”

M. Chassin was silent, and seemed to be considering this request.

Artamène saw his face, and it was oddly perturbed.

“We are not, I hope, inviting you to reveal the secrets of the

confessional?”

“No.”

“Why may we not hear it, then?”

“Because,” said the Abbé gravely, “it is more suited for your private

ear, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“Why?” asked M. de Brencourt, instantly, looking from one to the other,

“why for M. de Kersaint’s private ear?”

This question the Abbé seemed totally unable to answer, and after a

second or two the Marquis de Kersaint said carelessly to his

subordinate, “Because M. Chassin knows that I am a kinsman of the Duc de

Trélan’s, I suppose.”

“A kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s—you!” exclaimed the Comte de

Brencourt in obvious surprise. “A near kinsman?”

“No, no, very distant,” replied his leader quickly. “And that is why I

cannot conceive how a disclosure affecting his property can possibly be

destined for my ear alone. So let us all hear it, if you please,

Monsieur l’Abbé.”

M. de Brencourt, still under the empire of surprise or some other

emotion, continued to look at this kinsman of M. de Trélan’s very

fixedly; so, from where he still stood near the door, did the priest. A

better light would have revealed entreaty in his eyes.

“Well, Monsieur l’Abbé, I am waiting!” said the Marquis de Kersaint

rather haughtily, and in the fashion of a man who has never been used to

that discipline.

The Abbé set his lips obstinately. “It will keep well enough till

to-morrow, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“What, a communication from the dying? And who knows whether we shall

all see to-morrow? Come, Abbé, I command you!—Roland, a chair here for

M. Chassin.”

Whether the priest could have stood out, had he willed, against that

masterful voice and gesture, at any rate he did not.

“Very well, Marquis,” said he, and Artamène, thrilled to the core,

thought, “‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!’ That’s what he would really

like to say, our Abbé!” And since their leader had intimated that the

matter was not private after all, he applied himself to listen with all

his ears. Roland, looking rather troubled, set a chair at the table for

the priest and stood back.

“You must know then, Monsieur le Marquis,” began the Abbé in a low

voice, “that the old lady whom I have been visiting had been present at

the festivities in 1771, when the . . . the young Duc de Trélan married

his bride.”

“That beautiful and most unfortunate lady!” commented M. de Brencourt

under his breath.

The Marquis glanced at him for the fraction of a second, and the priest

went on, nervously rubbing his hands together, and rather pale:

“It seems that there is a legend of a treasure hidden in Mirabel since

the days of the Fronde, a treasure whose whereabouts no one has ever

been able to discover. Since you are a kinsman of M. de Trélan’s,

Monsieur le Marquis, it is possible that you have heard of the legend?”

M. de Kersaint nodded thoughtfully. “I believe I have heard of it. Yes?”

“The story appears to be true. The document describing the hiding-place

of the treasure was stolen at the time—nearly a hundred and fifty years

ago—and came into the possession of this old lady’s family, but in such

a way that it was only recently rediscovered by the old lady herself.”

“What an extraordinary tale! Well?”

“Since then she had desired to give it to the Duc, but could not, as he

was not in France. And in her delirium just now, fancying herself back

at the wedding, she was talking so persistently of offering to the . . .

the young couple, as a wedding gift, this paper, which would help them

to what was after all their own, that M. Charlot——”

“A wedding gift for de Trélan and his wife!” interposed the Comte de

Brencourt with a laugh. “Bon Dieu, what irony, considering how their

wedded life ended!”

“Surely that need not concern us now, Monsieur de Brencourt!” said his

leader coldly. “Go on please, Abbé.”

“By the most curious coincidence,” pursued M. Chassin, his eyes fixed on

the Marquis, “M. Charlot asked me, as a priest, to see if I could not

set the old lady’s mind at rest by some means. She did at last regain

control of her senses, and I was able in the end to assure her that I

could and would despatch the document, if she entrusted me with it, to

the proper quarter.”

“And she gave it you?” asked the Marquis, bending forward with some

eagerness.

“I have it here now,” answered the priest, touching his breast.

M. de Kersaint drew back again, and Artamène was struck with his

resemblance to a chess player who is meditating the next move. But only

the Marquis de Kersaint himself and the man whom he had forced into

playing out this gambit with him, fully realised the awkward position

into which his insistence had got them.

“So I must make it my business to despatch it, somehow, to M. le Duc,”

finished the Abbé. “It was of course my knowledge that you were kin to

him, Monsieur le Marquis, which made me accept the trust, as I knew I

could rely on your assistance.”

But the Marquis was looking down at the table and said nothing.

“The document will hardly be of much use to M. de Trélan when he does

get it,” remarked the Comte de Brencourt. “Mirabel, I have heard, is now

a museum or something of the sort; at any rate it is in government

hands. And M. de Trélan—where is M. de Trélan? In England still? No,

hardly. One never hears of him. Perhaps he is dead.”

“No, he is alive,” replied his kinsman briefly, lifting his eyes for a

second.

“Ah! But how is he going to profit by this treasure, even if it is still

there?”

“Nevertheless, I must fulfil my trust,” observed M. Chassin, looking

across the table at M. de Kersaint’s lowered head.

“Oh, undoubtedly, Abbé, though I do not know how you are going to do it

even with M. de Kersaint’s cousinly . . . is it cousinly? . . .

assistance. What do you yourself think of the problem, Marquis?”

The Marquis de Kersaint raised his head. “I think,” he said slowly,

looking hard at M. Chassin, “that the Abbé is right. M. de Trélan must

be informed, somehow. But at the same time, since it is practically out

of the question for him, in exile, to take any steps in the matter—and

would be difficult and dangerous even were he in France—and since our

need for money is so pressing at this moment, I would propose——”

“What?” asked the Comte.

“To ask, as his kinsman, for his authorisation to use the treasure, if

we can come at it, for the needs of Finistère—that is to say, for the

King’s service.”

“O sir, do you think we could!” cried Roland eagerly, starting forward.

“O, Monsieur le Marquis, send us to Mirabel!” cried Artamène.

“You are going too fast, gentlemen. We must first get the Duc’s leave to

pillage his property, even though it be confiscated.”

“Do you think you will have difficulty in getting it?” asked the Comte

de Brencourt, narrowing his eyes.

“No, I do not think so. As you have yourself pointed out, Comte, how is

M. de Trélan going to profit, in any case, by this suddenly revealed

hoard?”

“Well, when the King comes into his own again, it would be of no small

service to the Duc, a fund in his own château! I expect his financial

resources, great as they once were, are much embarrassed. He could

hardly have been accused of husbanding them!”

“You seem to know a great deal about the private affairs of M. de

Trélan, Comte!” observed M. de Kersaint drily, turning and looking at

him. “I might observe that no honest man has gained by the Revolution,

and that those with much to lose have lost proportionately. However, if

my kinsman takes the view that you suggest—which I do not think he

will—he must be induced to look upon our present proposed use of the

money as a loan to His Majesty. After all, it was never of any advantage

to him as long as he was unaware of its existence or of its whereabouts,

and of these, apparently, he never would have known but for the

extraordinary coincidence of which the Abbé has just told us.”

“But,” suggested M. de Brencourt, “before approaching him on the

subject—through you—might it not be as well to get a sight of this

precious document, so that we may form some idea as to whether the

amount will repay the risking a man’s neck to find, and whether it will

prove easy to come at?”

The priest and M. de Kersaint looked at one another. “Yes. I think we

might do that without indiscretion,” said the latter, after a moment’s

hesitation. “Do not you, Abbé?”

M. Chassin made no reply in words, but drew out from his coat the

parchment received from the dying woman and gave it into the hands of

his leader. The Marquis de Kersaint spread out the ancient memorandum on

the table, moved the candles in their bottles nearer, and the three men

studied in silence the rough diagram and its legend. Nor were Roland and

Artamène, in the background, innocent of craning their necks to see

likewise.

“Ten bags—two thousand five hundred pistoles in each,” murmured the

Comte reflectively. “How much is that, I wonder, in modern money? And

there are jewels too, apparently.”

The Marquis de Kersaint’s lips were compressed, his face an enigma. “It

certainly appears to be worth taking risks for,” he said at last. “Money

is what we most need in the world now for Finistère. We can get the men;

the last few months have shown me that clearly, but of what use are

unarmed men?”

“Less than none,” observed his second in command. “This document,

therefore, seems singularly like a gift from heaven.”

“I shall certainly communicate with M. de Trélan without delay,” said

the Marquis. “May I keep this parchment, Abbé?”

“I had hoped that you would charge yourself with its despatch, Monsieur

le Marquis,” replied the priest, and M. de Kersaint without more ado

folded it up and put it in his breast.

“It seems to me, de Kersaint,” said the Comte de Brencourt reflectively,

playing with the cards which still strewed the table, “that, considering

all things, the exceptional circumstances, our pressing needs, the

possibility that you may never succeed in communicating with the

Duc—wherever he may be—that we could hardly be blamed if we took the

law into our own hands, and did not wait for his authorisation. After

all, the risk would be ours.”

“That solution had already occurred to me, I admit,” said the Marquis,

with the ghost of a smile, while mute applause from MM. de Céligny and

de la Vergne greeted the Comte’s suggestion. “But the affair is in a

sense the Abbé’s, and entrusted to him.”

“I am quite content to abide by your decision, Monsieur le Marquis,”

replied the priest sedately.

“But, de Kersaint,” objected the Comte, evidently struck by a sudden

idea, “have you not some reversionary interest in the treasure yourself,

if you are kin to M. de Trélan? Should we not ultimately be robbing you,

perhaps?”

“No, I am not sufficiently nearly related to the Duc for that,” returned

the Marquis quickly. “I am connected with him by marriage only—a

distant kinsman.”

“Perhaps you will allow me to congratulate you on that, then,” said M.

de Brencourt in a sombre tone. “For myself, I should not care to think

that I had near ties of blood with a man who, in safety himself, left

his wife to perish as he did!”

An electric shock seemed at these words to communicate itself to the

other two men. M. de Kersaint’s right hand, which rested on the table in

the ring of candlelight, was seen instantly to clench itself. The next

instant the Abbé, by a sudden clumsy movement, sent the candle nearest

to him to the floor where, with a crash of the bottle, it was

immediately extinguished.

“Pardon me, Monsieur le Comte!” he interposed quickly, bending forward.

“—Dear me, how awkward I am!—Pardon me, but you do the Duc de Trélan a

great injustice, surely! How could he, an émigré to whom France was

closed, possibly rescue a woman immured in a Paris prison? The thing is

preposterous. Besides, he probably knew nothing about her being there

till all was over. I have heard that Mirabel was not sacked till August

the thirtieth, and the prison massacres, you will remember, began on the

second of September.”

“You seem very much the champion of M. de Trélan, Abbé!” remarked the

Comte, looking at him hard. “You have wasted a candle over him.”

“One should try, surely, to be just to those who cannot answer for

themselves,” retorted the priest. “Moreover, I am certain M. de Kersaint

would bear me out in what I say.”

“He does not seem to be in any great haste to do so,” observed the

other, half to himself, and his eyes suddenly moved to the clenched

hand.

“I am too much amazed at your attack on my kinsman,” retorted the

Marquis, in a voice unlike his own. “It is incredible that such a thing

should be said in France of M. de Trélan—that he could have saved his

wife and did not!”

The Comte shrugged his shoulders. “I do not know that it is what others

say, for I imagine that few people trouble their heads about de Trélan

now-a-days. But it is what I think—though as a matter of fact you are

putting more into my words than I actually uttered. Perhaps I am

prejudiced. I knew that lady many years ago,” he went on, with lowered

eyes, fidgeting with the cards again, “the most gracious of God’s

creatures, and to remember that she went, abandoned by everybody,

through _that_ door, saw, as her last glimpse of life, those obscene

faces, that gutter running with blood, that mound of——”

The priest jumped up and seized him by the arm. “For God’s sake, stop,

Monsieur de Brencourt!” he whispered. “Do you not know that most of M.

de Kersaint’s family perished in the massacres!”

And at that the Comte did stop. After a moment M. de Kersaint removed

the hand with which he had covered his eyes.

“I should indeed be glad if you would spare me that subject,” he said,

in a scarcely audible voice, not looking at either of them. Even the one

remaining candle showed him to be frightfully pale. “I . . . I cannot

. . . perhaps we should finish this discussion . . . in the morning. It

is already very late.”

“Yes, it is very late,” agreed the Comte, plainly rather horrified. He

leant over the table. “Can you forgive me, Marquis? Of course I was not

aware, and I regret——”

“I knew that,” said M. de Kersaint with a palpable effort, and touched

the hand which the other held out. And so ended the reception of Mlle

Magny’s wedding gift.

CHAPTER IV

A VERY YOUNG MAN

Roland de Celigny, waking with a start, wondered for a moment where he

was. Then he raised himself on his elbow and looked about him.

The dawn was slipping a slim, cool hand into the strangely populated

attic, and the grey light invested furniture and sleepers alike with

quite a different appearance from last night’s. Roland himself had

insisted on giving up his pallet permanently to Le Blé-aux-Champs,

because of his hurt, and had ensconced himself at the other side of the

attic. Over in his old place Chouan and noble, alike young and alike

wounded, lay side by side, the only difference in their condition being

that the peasant, for all his protests, had the better couch. But, like

M. de Brencourt, huddled on the little sofa of worn, gilt-striped rose

brocade, and the Abbé, of whom he could see only the feet projecting

round a wardrobe, they both appeared to be asleep, despite their

injuries; and Roland knew that Artamène’s gave him no slight pain at

times.

But he could not be altogether sorry for his friend’s wound. For, since

it was M. de la Vergne’s right arm that had suffered, it had fallen to

the Vicomte de Céligny to write at his dictation a line of reassurance

to his mother and sister in Finistère. And thus Roland’s own fingers had

formed, if his brain had not originated, the words which would

undoubtedly have the happiness of penetrating into the little ears of

Mlle Marthe de la Vergne, even, probably, that of being read by her

brilliant dark eyes. And she would know, too, from the contents of the

letter who had penned it. The question whether she would care was one

which he did not like to press overmuch, for he had very little to go

upon, poor Roland, since Marthe had grown up—one meeting under the eyes

of Mme de la Vergne in the wide, cool salon of the château with its

shining floor, and Mlle Marthe rising from tambour work at its farther

end; and one brief message of good wishes with which his friend

Artamène, her fortunate brother, was found to be charged when Roland met

him a few weeks ago at the rallying-place.

Roland could have wished that his friend’s flesh wound were his own,

that he also had something with a tinge of suffering and heroism about

it, of which Mlle Marthe could have been informed, to which she might

even have given a moment’s regret. Or, better still, if it could have

been, that the injury had happened so near the Château de la Vergne as

to leave no alternative but to take the sufferer in and tend him there.

Alas, Roland neither possessed the requisite damage, nor had the Château

de la Vergne the desired proximity to the scene of the little defeat at

la Croix-Fendue.

Besides, if anything untoward happened to him, he was under promise to

return, if possible, to his grandfather, with whom he lived.

Roland did not remember his mother, and of his father, though he had

died only about a year and a half ago, he had seen extremely little.

Three years after Mme de Céligny’s death he had been committed, a child

of five years old, to the care of his maternal grandfather, the Baron de

Carné, and by him he had been brought up at Kerlidec, in Brittany,

separated by the breadth of France from his patrimony near Avignon. He

had seldom visited this, or his morose parent, though when he did, M. de

Céligny had always made a point of initiating him, young as he was, into

the management of the estate which would one day be his—for the

Vicomte, unlike so many landowners in those troubled years, had never

been dispossessed. But Roland was much fonder of the stern and

passionate old man who had brought him up, and who had for him such

exquisite tendernesses; and he had become too much accustomed to living

with a grandfather rather than with a father to find the arrangement

surprising. He had, moreover, few friends of his own age to comment on

its unusual character, since his education had been entirely conducted

at Kerlidec by his grandfather and a tutor or two. Artamène de la

Vergne, who lived at no very great distance, was, in fact, his only

intimate.

Yet in the end, through no fault of the Vicomte de Céligny’s other than

an unfortunate choice of the moment of his death, his estates did not

come to Roland at all. He died very suddenly of heart disease just after

the coup d’état of ’97, and the Directory at once seized the property on

the specious pretext that the heir was an émigré. Because the events of

Fructidor had revived the legislation against that unfortunate class, it

had taken a year and a half and very cautious moves indeed on the part

of the Baron de Carné even to get his grandson’s name removed from that

inauspicious list on which, like many another, it wrongly figured, and

Roland was not yet in possession of his inheritance. His present

proceedings, if the Government became aware of them, were still less

likely to hasten that event.

And these proceedings had been entered into against M. de Carné’s

wishes; another had overborne that strong will of his. To this day

Roland could not quite understand how it had been done. For a moment he

lived again through the episode of his quasi-abduction from Kerlidec

last February;—that strained interview (at part of which he had been

present) between his grandfather and the tall, commanding visitor who,

turning out, to Roland’s surprise and delight, to be the Marquis de

Kersaint, the hero of the lost day of Rivoli, enlisting likely young men

to fight for the King later on in Finistère, had asked M. de Carné if

Roland might come with him——provided Roland himself were willing. Of

Roland’s willingness—rather, rapture—there could be no question, but

M. de Kersaint had insisted on the Baron’s formal consent; and this, on

the understanding that Roland was to be regarded strictly as a loan, and

returned, had been given . . . but given with such palpable, almost

venomous hostility that the youth could not imagine why it should have

been vouchsafed at all.

The end of the episode, too, just because it puzzled him, was bitten

into his memory. Grandfather and grandson were on the perron watching

the unbidden guest ride away down the dripping avenue—for Roland was to

join him, with Artamène, a few days later—and Roland, boylike, had

exclaimed at his admirable seat on a horse.

“As you say, Roland, a damnably good seat!” M. de Carné had returned

harshly. “A damnable air of assurance altogether! Quite enough to turn a

young man’s head, or for that matter a——” He checked himself, and said

with bitterness that they must begin to think of Roland’s preparations.

And when the young man remorsefully replied, “Not yet, grandpère! It is

growing dark; let us think of our game of chess!” his grandfather

retorted, looking at him in a way that he could not fathom, “Chess! Poor

little pawn, you have been taken!”

But if it were so, the pawn certainly had no objection.

And now, indeed, feeling a sense of elation, almost of importance, at

being apparently the only one awake in this company, Roland looked past

the intervening furniture towards the two large chairs in which M. de

Kersaint had elected to spend the night. Well, he was still stretched in

them, long and rather shadowy in outline, but Roland doubted if he were

asleep, for as he gazed at him he heard the Marquis move and sigh.

The adoration tempered with awe which Roland felt for him had received,

if it needed it, a fresh impetus through last night’s happenings. An

eager and interested witness of the scene’s beginning, an unwilling and

indignant one of its close, Roland had felt, and still felt, that he

hated M. de Brencourt for the torture to which, even unwittingly, he had

put him, as anyone could see. And why, as Artamène had whispered to him

afterwards, had M. de Brencourt displayed such an aversion to the Duc de

Trélan?

What was M. de Kersaint going to do, he wondered, about this business of

Mirabel? The name seemed to have a faintly familiar sound, though he

could have sworn that he had never heard it before. As he strove to

recover the connection a glorious thought shot suddenly into his mind.

If only M. de Kersaint would let _him_ go to Paris in search of this

treasure! There—if his search were successful, as of course it would

be—shone in truth a deed worthy to lay at the feet of Mlle Marthe de la

Vergne!

Wrapped in the warm and rosy imaginings which this idea brought to him

Roland dropped off to sleep again—a light slumber in which he had a

distinct impression that M. de Kersaint came and stood for some time

looking down on him, and from which he woke to find the attic grown

considerably lighter, and M. de Kersaint’s sleeping-place, to which he

instantly glanced, empty. Everybody else seemed to be slumbering as

before.

It was a moment or two before Roland’s eyes found his leader, in the

farthest corner of the attic, seated sideways at a little table,

writing—at least, with a pen between his fingers. His chin was propped

on his fist, and the young daylight as it entered silhouetted his fine

profile with sufficient clearness for the observer to be sure that his

thoughts were not pleasant ones.

“All his family massacred!” sprang into Roland’s mind. “He is thinking

of that—or of how to retrieve la Croix-Fendue, or perhaps how to get

the treasure from Mirabel . . . How handsome he is!” And on Roland,

himself as unconscious of his own good looks as it is possible for a

young man to be, came the resolve to use this Heaven-sent opportunity

for the furtherance of his own desires.

Rising very quietly from the floor, he picked his way, half dressed as

he was, among furniture and sleepers till he came to the window.

“Monsieur le Marquis!”

M. de Kersaint started and looked round. “Roland, what are you doing?”

he asked in a whisper.

“I have been awake before,” said Roland, as if that were a reply.

“Well?”

“I want to ask you something, sir.”

“If,” said M. de Kersaint, studying him as he stood there in his shirt

and breeches, “if it is to repeat La Vergne’s request of last night

about Mirabel, I may as well tell you at once, my boy, that it is of no

use.”

The youth’s visage so manifestly fell that his leader could not help

smiling.

“I see that I guessed right. No, my dear boy, this business, if ever it

gets itself done at all, is work for a much older head than yours.”

“I am not so young, Monsieur le Marquis,” pleaded the aspirant, in the

same discreet tone. “I shall be twenty this year.”

“Yes, but not until the very end of it,” retorted M. de Kersaint with

promptitude.

The child of December was first taken aback, then flattered, that the

date of his obscure birthday should be known to his hero, who was now

looking at him half-teasingly, a mood in which Roland especially adored

him. Then the petitioner recovered himself.

“But even if you think me young, sir,” he went on with fervour, “nobody

here, however much older he is——”

“Has any experience of house-breaking,” he was going on to say, when the

words were cut short by a grasp on his arm. He turned, and M. de

Kersaint, who had momentarily lowered his gaze, lifted it at the same

instant so that they both beheld the Chevalier de la Vergne, sling and

all.

“What, another!” exclaimed M. de Kersaint. “Morbleu!”

“I felt sure that he was trying to steal a march on me, Monsieur le

Marquis,” explained Artamène. “If anyone is to go to Mirabel——”

“It would certainly not be you, La Vergne, with that arm,” interposed

his leader. “However, there is no question of Mirabel for either of

you.”

“But——” began both the candidates.

“If you want to know my plans, gentlemen,” said M. de Kersaint then,

with a touch of impatience, real or assumed, “they are, as far as

regards yourselves, these—a return, for the present, to your own

firesides.”

“We are to go back home!” ejaculated the horror-struck Artamène.

Amusement shot again into M. de Kersaint’s eyes at the tone, but because

of its pitch he laid his finger on his lips. “It is not designed as a

punishment, believe me, my children. But our drawing of the sword was

premature; I always feared it, and I have resolved, for the present, to

disband. It will only be for a month or two, probably.”

“But—but you will send for us again, sir?” stammered Roland. All the

brightness seemed suddenly to have departed from life.

“Most certainly. I could not get on without my aides-de-camp. Now go

back to your beds and leave me to finish what I am doing.”

It was two exceedingly dispirited young men who returned to their

couches. “To be sent home like schoolboys!” whispered Roland, who had

left his with such hopes. But they were too dejected to discuss the

catastrophe. Happy Lucien, who had slept through its announcement! They

sat side by side on Artamène’s blanket, and looked at each other, while

close by the young Chouan, who was awake, moved restlessly. What, if

they were going to separate, was to become of him? Perhaps this unspoken

query gave Artamène his great idea.

“I am not fit to take the journey to La Vergne alone,” he whispered

suddenly in Roland’s ear. “Will you escort me?”

“Will I not?” responded his friend, his eyes sparkling again.

* * * * *

With the full advent of morning came the good M. Charlot and a servant,

bringing coffee and rolls to the unaccustomed guestchamber. To this

welcome refreshment he joined the more than welcome news that the troops

who had nearly intercepted the Marquis and his guide last night had

marched out at dawn, and in an hour or so it would be quite safe to

depart. Also, the wounded man could now be moved downstairs to a bed and

cared for until his foot was healed.

“Excellent, my dear Monsieur Chariot,” said the Marquis de Kersaint.

“And—the other matter?”

“I have already sent to the place, Monsieur, and a message has come back

that the person your honours are expecting has not yet arrived.”

Artamène and Roland looked at each other over their coffee-bowls. They

cherished a faint hope, now rapidly withering, that they might catch a

glimpse of this famous person ere departing.

But very shortly afterwards, as it seemed, the three of them had put

together their small belongings, had received their last instructions,

and had learnt how, when the summons came to them again, it would

probably be to a more lasting campaign. The Marquis de Kersaint hoped by

the summer to have a regular headquarters at least—to keep always on

foot an army of Chouans was impossible—in short, to be in a larger way

of business. But even these bright predictions did not cheer ‘les

jeunes,’ as the Abbé called them, very much.

“All I can do, mes enfants,” said their leader to them in conclusion,

“is to wish you a safe return and a better meeting. Remember my

recommendations as to prudence in your journeys.—I am not sure that I

ought to let you travel in that condition, Artamène.”

And when the youth hastened to inform him that he would have the

advantage of Roland’s care and company M. de Kersaint smiled and said,

“Very well. But, Roland, remember that your real destination is not La

Vergne, but Kerlidec. My honour is engaged, as you know, in sending you

back to your grandfather. Good-bye, Lucien; you will now have leisure to

proceed with your study of the Mantuan.”

The Abbé had already given them his blessing; the Comte had gone to the

place appointed to await Cadoudal. Even Le Blé-aux-Champs had been

carried downstairs. So when the Marquis had shaken hands with them there

was nothing for the three young men to do but to go. And they went.

But they had not got beyond the next turn on the dusky staircase before

they heard M. de Kersaint’s voice on the landing above them.

“Roland,” it called down, “come back a moment, will you? I have a

message for M. de Carné.”

Wondering, the young Vicomte went up again, nearly to the top, where the

tall figure was standing.

“I only wish you to point out to him,” said the Marquis, “that I am

fulfilling my promise. That is all.”

Then he added, in a different tone, “May God keep you, my boy!” and

stooping, kissed him on the forehead.

CHAPTER V

_TU MARCELLUS ERIS_

“And so, _exeunt_ ‘les jeunes,’” said the Marquis de Kersaint, coming

back into the attic and shutting the door after him.

Its only remaining occupant, the Abbé Chassin, looked up from his

breviary where he sat on the old brocade sofa.

“I could wish,” he observed, “that they had departed earlier—or at

least that young La Vergne had done so, before he brought about what

happened last night, by his mention of the word ‘Mirabel.’ But what,

Gaston, in the name of all the saints, possessed you to force me to give

you the memorandum like that, before everybody? Of course I only meant

to put it into your hands when we were alone!”

The Marquis de Kersaint, seeming to find it perfectly natural to be

addressed thus familiarly by his inferior, shrugged his shoulders. “Why

then, my dear Pierre, did you, in your turn, say before everybody that

your information was for my private ear? A slip of that kind is unlike

you. How could I possibly accept for my private ear any news about the

place?”

“No, perhaps not, but your persistence, if you will forgive my saying

so, rather drove me into a corner. However, I dare say we were both

equally to blame, I for not being readier-witted, and you for—well, for

taking the bull a little too much by the horns.”

M. de Kersaint, evidently not at all resenting these criticisms, looked

down at the priest. “Above all things I did not want to create a

mystery,” he said.

“And instead of that you created a kinsman,” observed the Abbé with a

half smile, and then became grave again. “It was very unfortunate, the

whole thing, but naturally we had neither of us any idea of what it was

going to lead to.”

The Marquis de Kersaint’s face darkened. He turned away, and began to

walk up and down. “You made a fine holocaust of my imaginary family,” he

said after a moment.

“I had to stop him somehow,” replied the Abbé briefly. He had closed his

book, and was watching the pacing figure.

“So that,” said M. de Kersaint after another silence, “that is how a

Frenchman, an émigré himself, judges the conduct of the Duc de Trélan! I

thought it was only in England that they did not understand.”

The priest had risen. “Gaston,” he said firmly, “as I said to the Comte

last night, and as I would repeat it at my last hour, in the matter of

Mme de Trélan’s death I hold that no one was to blame—save her

murderers. She could not have been saved. Did his Highness the Duc de

Penthièvre save his daughter? We know that he tried. Not an archangel

could have saved Mme de Lamballe. So with Mme de Trélan that day. You

know that as well as I, and M. de Brencourt, if he were not ridden by

some demon of spite, knows it too.”

“She went through that door, as he said,” continued M. de Kersaint. He

had come to a standstill; his face was ashen. “She saw . . . all that

. . . before——And she might have taken the road to England and safety

two years earlier.”

“It is true,” answered the priest. “She had the chance.”

“Yes,” said his foster-brother, looking at him as if he did not see him,

“she had the chance . . . and refused it. I cannot tell de Brencourt

that. But, O my God, what a tragedy of mistakes!”

He was backed now against a huge old wardrobe, motionless, almost as if

he were nailed to it, voice and eyes alike full of that seven years’ old

horror and anguish.

“It was but a mistake, a misunderstanding, then, Gaston,” said the

priest quickly. “You acknowledge that, you see!”

The man against the wardrobe gave a laugh. “But what is worse than a

mistake, Pierre? Not a crime, certainly. Mistakes appear, at least, to

be more heavily visited in this world. It seems to me that I am about to

begin a fresh series of payments for mine. . . . As for her, if she made

any, she paid—how much more than paid!—in that moment of martyrdom

that does not bear thinking of, that I still dream about, it seems to

me, almost every night. . . . Now, if it is to be dragged out as de

Brencourt dragged it yesterday, I shall wish you had not turned me from

my purpose seven years ago.”

Dear saints, thought the priest, looking at him compassionately, are we,

after all he has suffered, to go once more through the inferno of those

dreadful days in England? For a moment he saw again that lofty,

richly-furnished room in London where the proudest man whom Pierre

Chassin had ever met or read of sat with his whole existence fallen in a

day to ruins about him—his honour tarnished and his self-respect in the

dust. For he had that day received the appalling news of his wife’s

butchery in prison—not having known, even, that she was a prisoner—and

he had heard also that he was in consequence being talked about in no

flattering terms throughout those same London drawing-rooms where he had

been so courted. Indeed—not then knowing why—he had that very morning

been cut in St. James’s Street by two of his most intimate English

acquaintances. . . . The candlelight on his escritoire, running over the

darkly shining mahogany before him, had showed the weapon ready to his

hand when the shabby little émigré priest, who had come hotfoot at the

news, succeeded in forcing his way past the terrified servants into that

forbidden room . . . only to be ordered, in a voice that made him quail,

to depart instantly. He had sometimes wondered himself what had given

him the courage to disobey, and to stand, as he had done, for a whole

night between the Duc de Trélan and suicide. Even to-day he could

scarcely bear to think of the naked agony and conflict of that vigil,

and it was very rarely referred to by either of them.

He went up to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “O my brother, if

you would only cease to torment yourself! You have not, you never have

had, a shadow of real responsibility for your wife’s death.”

“Easy to believe, is it not?” remarked the other with a ghastly smile,

“when men speak still as de Brencourt spoke last night!”

The Abbé made an almost impatient movement. “It is quite impossible that

the Comte really thinks what he says! Why, thousands of men emigrated

without their wives,—just as some wives without their husbands—and no

one thought it anything but natural and right in those days . . . a duty

even! All the noblesse were equally blinded as to what was coming. And

can you seriously maintain that any blame attaches to you for what

happened two years later, because you were no clearer-sighted than the

rest—the rest who, like you, were in exile?”

“But the rest,” said the Marquis de Kersaint, staring down before him at

his locked hands, “were not, in 1792, merely amusing themselves in

exile, whatever they may have been doing in 1790. . . . Even though I

had not been by her side, if I had been where I ought to have been long

before, in the army of the Princes or with Condé, do you think that de

Brencourt would say . . . those things? Or that they would be like death

to me, if he did? . . . You see you cannot answer that, Pierre!”

“Mon frère,” said M. Chassin quietly, “that delay has been expiated. The

question for the moment is, whether M. le Comte suspects your identity.”

M. de Kersaint moved a little. “Do you think he possibly can? I never

remember seeing him before in my life, until he was assigned to me last

December in Jersey as my lieutenant.”

“And if he had ever chanced to see you before the Revolution,” went on

the priest musingly, “this bitter resentment he seems to have would have

shown itself ere now. No, he could have had no grounds for suspicion of

any kind before last night and the business of Mirabel. It was evidently

only the mention of that name that roused him. If he begins to have

. . . ideas . . . my advice to you, Gaston, is to tell him who you are.

He knows, as most people do, about the part you played at Rivoli, not to

speak of what you are doing now, so he would not continue——”

“Never!” broke in the Marquis, making a violent gesture of negation. “I

desire never to hear that old name of mine again in this life! And I

forbid you once more to tell anyone in the world—_anyone_—whatever you

might think would be gained by it! Is it a promise?”

“You have had my promise once for all, Gaston.”

“I will never see you again if you break it!” said his foster-brother

with vehemence.

“Have I kept it so ill these seven years, then, that you think a threat

is necessary?” asked the priest gently.

“Oh, my dear Pierre, forgive me!” cried the other instantly, and he held

out his hand. “When a man starts threatening the best friend he ever

had, to whom he owes not only his life but his sanity, it looks rather

as if that sanity was leaving him!”

“I do not see much signs of that,” said the priest, with a smile, as he

took the proffered hand. “And last night’s business was horrible. I have

always thought,” he went on reflectively, “that M. le Comte was an

embittered man.”

“If I had known,” said his foster-brother in a low voice, “that he had

ever met her, I would never have consented to work with him. . . . But I

never should have known save for this strange business of Mirabel.”

“And that is a business which must be attended to, I suppose,” the

priest reminded him.

“Yes, I suppose so, too,” said M. de Kersaint rather wearily. He went to

the nearest table, and sitting down pulled out the parchment and

flattened it out on it. The Abbé came and studied it over his shoulder

for a while in silence.

“Well, what do you think of it, Gaston?”

“I have very little doubt that it is genuine. As a child, I once heard

my grandfather speak of the legend, but he dismissed it as being only a

legend. In those days I thought the idea romantic and fascinating. Did I

never mention it to you when I came to Rosmadel?”

“Never,” said the priest, suddenly seeing himself as he was in those

days, a little barefooted boy going birdsnesting with a young prince in

velvet whom he had the right to call brother. “Had you done so I should

not have forgotten it.”

“I do not believe that I ever gave it a thought after I came to man’s

estate,” went on the Marquis musingly. “It must have gone back to the

region of fairy stories. And this old lady—what was her name?—you did

not mention it, I think.”

“Purposely so,” replied the Abbé, dropping into a chair beside him. “Her

name was Magny, Mlle Magny. She was for years, she said, tiring-woman to

Mme la Duchesse Douairière.”

His hearer clasped his hands over his eyes. “I remember the name,” he

said after a moment. “I recall her too, I think. She must be well

advanced in years now.”

“She was yesterday,” agreed the priest. “To-day—who knows?”

The Marquis looked up. “She is dead then? I did not gather that.”

“She died while I was with her.” They both fell silent, M. de Kersaint

fingering the parchment—gone back also, thought the priest, to a

distant wedding-day.

“Gaston, give me your hand!” he said suddenly, stretching out his own.

“No, not that one, the other.” And when the Marquis in surprise had

complied, the Abbé, holding the so dissimilar fingers in his own, tapped

with a forefinger on the signet ring that one of them bore, and said,

“Are you wise to wear _that_?”

M. de Kersaint looked down at the crest cut in the emerald. “I have

always worn it—without reflecting, I suppose—when I gave up everything

else. One is inconsistent, no doubt. I never use it, of course.”

“But anybody—anybody interested—can make out what the device is,

though oddly enough it never struck me till last night when your hand

was on the table and the candlelight fell on it.”

“It means nothing to _him_ probably.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said the priest, releasing the hand.

The Marquis slipped off the ring. “Very well. I will give up wearing it

then.—Though, indeed, I might use it to support my claim of being akin

. . . not that I am likely to wish to do that again!”

“Your kinship is by marriage, remember. You would never use the same

arms. And, Gaston, having once declared yourself a kinsman of the Duc de

Trélan’s you will have to keep it up, in order to get at the money.”

The Marquis, putting the ring in his pocket, frowned at this obvious

truth.

“I suppose I shall. Let us think about this business then, before de

Brencourt comes back, as he may do any moment. Now, am I to take on

myself to give permission for the further rifling of my ‘kinsman’s’

property, or shall I go through the farce of writing him a letter?”

“If you do that, a certain time must be allowed to elapse before you

could . . . receive a reply.”

“Precisely,” said the Marquis de Kersaint. In spite of everything a

gleam of rather grim amusement flitted over his face. “And I need not

point out to you that the money would be like manna from heaven at this

moment. So large a sum, absolutely at one’s own disposal—why, one might

organise and arm Finistère almost as well as Cadoudal is arming the

Morbihan. There is no time to lose, for, as it is, when we get

possession of the treasure—if we ever do—it will be useless in its

present state—coin of the time of Louis XIII. and Henri IV. It would

have to go to England. Bertin would see to that, of course.”

The Abbé nodded. “But Bertin is not the man to get it out of Mirabel.

What staff, if any, do you suppose the Directory maintains in the

place?”

Mirabel’s owner shook his head. “I have no idea. I only know that it is

a museum, which implies a guardian of some sort. I had rather for our

purposes that it was empty and falling into ruins. Make a note, Pierre,

to write to Bertin or someone to find out the dispositions there.”

The Abbé nodded again. “I imagine, then, that you will not write the

letter to M. de Trélan—you will take the responsibility on your own

shoulders, as you hinted at doing last night.”

“Yes,” said M. de Kersaint, leaning back in his chair. “And I shall

probably go to Mirabel myself.”

The priest jumped. “Gaston, that would be madness!”

“Why?”

“Why? You know that as well as I. It is a great risk for anyone to run,

and for a general himself to incur a hazard which he should assign to a

subordinate is not only folly, but culpable folly. What would happen to

all the plans for Finistère if you got laid by the heels? And think of

the self-betrayal! Could you wonder if those quick-witted young men of

yours, if M. de Brencourt, if all who got to know of it asked themselves

why you did such an extraordinary thing as to go on this quest in

person?”

M. de Kersaint looked at him musingly. “You have a terrible habit of

being in the right, mon frère. I believe you want to go yourself!”

“Well, I think I should not do amiss, though I do not know Mirabel.”

“I wonder if you know what a good opinion of yourself you have!” said

the Marquis, smiling. “No—though I dislike sending him there—I think

that de Brencourt is the man to go.”

“Has he ever been there, do you think?” asked the priest, hesitating a

little.

The Marquis looked away. “No, I should doubt it,” he said after a

moment. “I shall have to ask him, I suppose. But here is my ancestor’s

plan, and naturally I can give him all necessary details.”

“You must be careful how you do that—remember that you are only a

distant kinsman.”

“I am not likely to forget it,” retorted the Marquis. “I would far

rather not, but I think I must send the Comte. He is the man I should

naturally have sent.”

“Roland de Céligny was dying to go, was he not?”

“Harebrained boy, yes! But I told him and La Vergne that I would have

none of it. It is no work for children. He will be safely out of the way

with his grandfather till I send for him again—though to be sure I

should have preferred to keep him with me.”

“I hope his grandfather will be grateful to you for your self-denial.”

“Highly improbable, I should think,” observed the Marquis sardonically.

“I can do no good thing in that quarter.”

“I can understand that it is not work for Roland,” pursued the priest

meditatively, “but, as far as risk goes, he ran enough of that with us

at la Croix-Fendue the day before yesterday.”

“Of a soldier’s death, perhaps, but not of any other. Not _that_ again,

please God!” A look of bitter regret passed over his face. “O Pierre,”

he said in a low voice, “if only that boy had been born . . . at

Mirabel!”

“Yes, yes!” assented the priest sadly. Things might indeed have been

otherwise if Mirabel had not in its last days been a childless house.

“When I see his grandfather again——” the Marquis was beginning—and

was cut short by the sound of steps on the stairs. In an instant he was

the man who had entered the attic yesterday evening, not the man who for

the last three-quarters of an hour had been talking without reserve to

his only intimate.

“De Brencourt—and Georges,” he said, and rising, stood waiting to

receive the most notable of all the Royalist leaders, and that a

peasant. In another moment the latter stood on the threshold, a massive

Breton of about thirty, bull-necked, wide-shouldered, with short and

very closely curling reddish hair.

The Marquis went forward and held out his hand. “Monsieur Cadoudal, I am

honoured to meet the bravest of the brave.”

The Chouan’s great grip engulfed the strong, slender fingers. “And I in

my turn,” he said, with a natural dignity, “salute the hero of Rivoli.

You bear a Breton name, Monsieur le Marquis.”

“I have—or had—property in Brittany,” replied M. de Kersaint,

hesitating for a moment, “but I am not a Breton.”

Georges Cadoudal _was_ Breton—to the backbone—and in the discussion

which followed Pierre Chassin had leisure to realise the force and

unswervingness of his countryman’s personality, his warlike and (on a

small scale) his administrative genius, and his justness of political

outlook. For he knew perfectly well that as long ago as last summer,

when Cadoudal had come back from his refuge in England to reorganise the

Morbihan, he had urged the Bourbons to immediate action, pointing out

that Hoche was no more, Bonaparte shut up (as he still was) with his

best troops in Egypt, and the Republican armies being drawn off to the

frontiers to face other foes. It was the hour to seize. But the advisers

of the King and of his brother the Comte d’Artois, who was more

particularly concerned with the affairs of the west, were, as usual,

swayed by the evil genius which always seemed to haunt their counsels,

and did nothing. Against that ineptitude Cadoudal, like all the Royalist

leaders, past and present, had continually to struggle—as if there were

not enough difficulties and more than enough dangers, without

instructions from overseas that were always either futile or too late.

If only, thought the Abbé, they do not trip Gaston’s feet in the future

. . . He watched him now, listening to Cadoudal’s explanation of his

system of “legions” in the Morbihan and in Loire-Inférieure, and how he

had brought it about.

“But Finistère, Monsieur le Marquis,” finished the Breton, looking at

the keen patrician face opposite him, “will be a much more difficult

matter, because it is almost fresh ground. And you will find there many

fewer arms stored away than is the case in my command, where we have

been fighting on and off for six years.”

“I know it,” returned Finistère’s destined leader gravely. “I know I

have a very hard task before me. But I have just received good news,

Monsieur Cadoudal. I may be able to supply a good proportion of the

necessary arms myself. There is something equivalent to 12,000 louis

awaiting me in a kinsman’s château if I can secure it. As to

organisation, here is my scheme, if you will be good enough to glance at

it. Though I can never look to have a force like yours, I should hope in

the event of hostilities to be able to support your rear—though indeed

that would by no means counterbalance the immense benefit to me of

having you as a bulwark in front of me. Against the tide of attack we of

Finistère should at best be only a few pebbles—behind a rock.”

“At any rate, Monsieur le Marquis,” said ‘Georges,’ gazing at him hard

out of his deepset eyes, “I can tell, without even looking at your

scheme, that I should not have _sand_ behind me!”

* * * * *

An hour later Cadoudal, escorted by M. de Brencourt, having departed as

secretly as he had come, M. de Kersaint stood collecting the papers

strewn on the table. “I should have been happy to serve under that man,

instead of being his colleague,” he said musingly. Then he went and

looked out through the attic window at the remains of the mediaeval

fortifications of Hennebont, with their memories of the indomitable

spirit which had once defended them, housing in the breast of the

Comtesse Jeanne de Montfort.

“Pierre,” he said suddenly, “before we leave I have a fancy that I

should like to see the giver of this strange and belated wedding gift of

mine. Would it be possible, think you?”

“I do not suppose the niece would object, if you give me leave to

concoct some reason for the request,” replied the Abbé.

The Marquis gave a sort of smile. “You can say what you like. I am

afraid you must be getting inured to deception on my behalf. At any rate

I cannot betray myself to Mlle Magny now.”

No, one cannot betray oneself to the dead. And yet, who knows? . . .

Perhaps the old lady’s spirit, still hovering round the habitation it

had so recently quitted, could realise and be glad that her offering had

thus quickly found its goal. But candles burnt now at the head and feet

of that empty dwelling, and the face looked austere, and remote from

those old desires and admirations. M. de Kersaint took the holy-water

sprinkler which the priest handed to him, and shook a few drops on the

dead servitress of his house.

“Yes, I remember her,” he said in a low voice. “My mother always thought

so highly of her . . . I wish now that I had seen her alive, for I

should like to have thanked her for this great gift of hers, with its

possibilities for France. Could she have chosen a better time to make

it?”

He stooped over the bed, and, reverently lifting one of the old hands

folded over the crucifix, put a kiss on its icy, shrivelled surface,

while the priest gazed at him, full of sorrowful thoughts.

Eight-and-twenty years ago, when those closed eyes had looked on him in

his springtime, what might he not have become? Lucien, who had been

struck by it, had told him how M. de Kersaint had objected to last

night’s use of the _Tu Marcellus eris_, and the sad and lovely lines

rushed into the priest’s mind anew. Yes, more poignant than the lament

for youth cut off and blighted promise, was that for youth spent to no

end and promise wasted. _Tu Marcellus eris!_ At twenty-three he might

have been . . . at fifty-one? . . .

For what the man who stood there with him by the dead had since done to

redeem the light and sterile past he could not claim in his own name,

and she—the bride of Mlle Magny’s memories—to whom this late

justification of her faith in him would have been life’s supremest

happiness, was no longer on earth to see it.

Truly, as the great Latin knew, there was a bitter sense of tears in

human things.

BOOK II

MIRABEL

“And so, cold, courteous, a mere gentleman,

He bowed, we parted.

Parted. Face no more,

Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly out

Like some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,—

Aye, spit on and so wiped out utterly

By some coarse scholar! I have been too coarse,

Too human. Have we business, in our rank,

With blood i’ the veins? I will have henceforth none;

Not even to keep the colour at my lip.”

_Aurora Leigh_.

CHAPTER I

M. THIBAULT IN CONVERSATION

In spite of the bare six miles which separated it from Paris in spite of

its position only a little off the high-road there-from to

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a great peace reigned this afternoon over the

hamlet of Mirabel-le-Château, those few dwellings which had grown up,

for its convenience or by its favour, round the vast oblong mass of the

Renaissance palace from which they took their name. It was the light,

warm peace of early April sunshine, of occasionally rising April dust,

and of trees all brightly and freshly arrayed, but, whatever its

ingredients, it was a tranquillity entirely unappreciated by the one

human being in sight of Mirabel, the sentry in his box outside that

deserted palace. He was so bored with being sentry there!

Years ago, in the bad old days, as he was accustomed to regard them, if

he had been in Mirabel-le-Château at all—which was improbable, for he

was a Parisian—the village would not have been so deathly quiet, for,

vassal though it were of the great house which it was now his untoward

lot to guard, it beat at least with the life radiating to it from that

centre and reason of its being. But if all the remaining inhabitants of

Mirabel-le-Château could boast, in theory, of a glorious liberty, of

bowing the knee no more to M. le Duc de Trélan, nor even to the King of

France—but only to France’s five kinglets, the Directors, to the

military authorities who bled them by incessant conscription, and, in a

measure, to that member of the _Conseil des Anciens_ who had charge of

the château, Georges Camain—they certainly could not congratulate

themselves on the possession of overmuch gaiety or even of bread. In

those same bad old days the tyrannical owners of Mirabel had given them

work, or bread, or both; no one to-day gave them either, for there was

none to give. Besides, there were not now many inhabitants left in the

hamlet to receive. The village boys who, as boys will, had cheered on

the Paris mob which sacked Mirabel in the summer of 1792 lay, many of

them, as quiet as the bodies round which they had unthinkingly

danced—corpses themselves in the blood-stained soil of Flanders or

Switzerland or Italy or Syria. Those who lived were far away. In

Mirabel-le-Château now only the old and the women remained.

Certainly, in the bad old days, Mirabel-le-Château had been a more

cheerful and a more populous village; but then it had not been free.

Certainly, in that time of oppression, such of its inhabitants as were

so minded could flock on Sundays at the sound of the bell to the little

church and hear the white-haired curé say Mass and admonish them—two

proceedings which some of them found, strangely enough, to be of

assistance in their daily lives. Now that old man was slowly dying, a

deportee in the swamps of Cayenne, there was no one to say Mass, and

even the bell, the symbol of a cult, might on no account be rung. Yet

every tenth day these freed citizens were all but hounded into the bare

and desecrated church to hear a discourse on patriotism or the social

virtues. But were they not delivered from “the imbecile liturgy of the

priesthood” and all the superstitions of Catholicism? Was not Sunday

replaced by the more enlightened if penetratingly dull Décadi? And

whereas, in the bad old days, the master of Mirabel had all but owned

them, now, on the contrary they, or at least the French nation, claimed

to own Mirabel. It was true that singularly little benefit had accrued

to them from the change.

And thus the village of Mirabel-le-Château was less than half animate,

and the sentry from the guard-house opposite the Temple of Reason

(formerly the church) had to bear his dreadful affliction of ennui

unsolaced. Only a wooden barrier and some acres of gravel separated him

from the château behind him, for the great wrought iron gates, of the

finest Italian workmanship, had been destroyed when the present

proprietors entered so tempestuously on their new acquisition seven

years ago. These gates had been very economically replaced, all the time

that the deceased Convention was in power, by a cord bearing a knot of

tricolour ribbon and the legend, “Défense d’entrer,” written on a card

in violet ink that had run and paled with the rain. But now, under the

Directory, a neat wooden barrier spanned the wide space between the

stone gateposts with their mutilated shields and lions, a barrier

bearing a painted notice which, headed “Ci-devant château de Mirabel,

Bien National,” went on to state that since the Government intended

eventually to turn the château into a museum of art treasures, citizens

were already at liberty to visit it twice in the “décade,” on payment of

a fee. Practically nothing, as yet, had really been done towards the

formation of the proposed museum, and if the Directory, always pressed

for money, depended for this consummation on the payments of visitors it

could have amassed very little towards that object. Meanwhile it had

locked up such of the rooms as had not been entirely stripped of

pictures and furniture, installed a female concierge with power to

summon relays of _femmes de journée_ to her aid, and kept what seemed to

be a rather unnecessary sentry till nightfall at the entrance.

And this sentry, fixed bayonet and all, lounged to-day in his box as

though he had never known the meaning of drill, as though he were not a

National Guard from what had been one of the most turbulent sections of

Paris. He sighed as he sat there, his musket between his knees, he

fidgeted with his white cross-belts, he drummed with his heels; a member

of a free people felt himself very much in bondage this afternoon. He

would not be relieved till another hour and a quarter had dragged by.

For a few minutes’ conversation with some human being of whatever

station, sex, or age, he would have given almost anything that he could

think of. But the village, round the corner to his right, seemed

uninhabited as well as invisible; even the cabaret on his other hand,

between him and the high-road at right angles some half-mile away, might

as well have been shut, for all the company it was receiving or

emitting. Though he could not betake himself thither, sheer boredom was

making the Citizen Grégoire Thibault altruistic. To see anybody go in,

even. . . . And it was in looking dejectedly along the poplar-bordered

road to the Café du Musée that he became aware of a cloud of dust

settling down in the distance.

A little interest sprang into his veiled eye; he leant forward out of

his box and spat upon the ground with a return of vigour. That dust must

betoken the passing of the diligence from Paris to Saint-Germain. Now,

had it set down any one for Mirabel-le-Château? Very improbable; but if

it had the traveller would be obliged to pass him to get to the

hamlet. . . . There was nobody, of course, and, as to talk, only the

conversation of the poplars with the breeze. “Oh, sacré métier!” groaned

the Citizen Grégoire, and took out his pipe as a last resource. There

was no one to report him to the sergeant.

He pushed down the coarse tobacco by means of a handsome gold and

bloodstone seal with a coat of arms, loot from the great pillage, which

he had bought last year for ten sous on the Quai de la Mégisserie, began

to feel for his tinderbox, and stopped. The diligence _had_ set down a

passenger after all!

Down the sunlit road under the poplars was advancing the figure of a

woman, carrying a little covered basket in her hand. By her gait she was

young. So much the better. Thibault rose to his feet; it seemed too good

to be true.

It must be conceded that, as the godsend came nearer, he suffered a

measure of disappointment. The woman was not young—but neither was she

old. She was walking rather slowly, with her eyes on the ground, but

when she was quite near she lifted them and looked at him, and M.

Thibault perceived that she was about to stop of her own accord.

“Good-day, la femme!”

“Good-day, citizen sentry,” she returned. “This is the only entrance to

the château, is it not?”

Her voice was very sweet—though indeed any voice would have fallen like

music on the ears of Grégoire just then. The eyes which she raised to

him were noticeably well-set; under her decent black bonnet he saw fair

hair turning grey. She was tall and generously made; he took her to be

about forty-five. Then her little covered basket and her air of having

business there suddenly recalled to him a fact he had totally forgotten.

“Name of a pipe!” exclaimed he, slapping his musket. “Is it possible,

citoyenne, that you are the new concierge?”

The woman nodded. “Yes, citizen sentry. I was instructed to come this

afternoon. My baggage, a small trunk, should have arrived already.”

“I don’t believe it has,” said M. Grégoire Thibault musingly, and he

rubbed a rather bristly chin. “If I had seen anything of it, I shouldn’t

have forgotten that you were coming. But perhaps it arrived this morning

before I was on duty.” He appeared to be ruminating on this possibility,

but in reality he was thinking to himself, “She has been a fine woman,

that, once!” Aloud, he said, “I knew, of course, that Mère Prévost was

giving up her job, but I had forgotten that she was to leave to-day. Her

man has come back from the wars, I believe, short of an arm. And so you

are the new caretaker, citoyenne?”

He took another look at her. “Le diable m’emporte,” he thought this

time, “if she is not a fine woman still!”

Resting his musket against the sentry-box he went slowly, fishing out a

key, to the movable portion of the barrier. But having got there,

instead of unfastening the padlock he turned round again, leaning

against the bar.

“I’m sure I hope you’ll like this business, citoyenne,” he began

conversationally. “Pretty dreary, I take it, living alone in that great

house there, full of nothing but memories of the time of the Tyrant, and

of the bloodshed the day the people took it. If one believed in ghosts,

now——”

“You don’t believe in them, evidently, Citizen?”

“I hope I am a better patriot,” responded the National Guard with

dignity. “Ghosts, the so-called saints, prayers for the dead, the

Republic has done away with all that nonsense.”

“Yes, there has been a good deal done away with these last ten years.”

The tone of this remark a little puzzled Grégoire, but he continued

nevertheless, “Still, I must confess that Décadi doesn’t often see me at

the Temple, unless there’s a wedding. It’s just a little

wearisome. . . . But my wife in Paris goes to the Temple of Genius

regularly—the late _edifice Roch_, as you know—and says she likes it,

especially since they have instituted recitations by the children, and

our youngest took a prize. But what were we speaking of?—ah, the

château. Well, if I were not a good patriot, and disbelieved in saints

and angels and all that rubbish, I might be tempted to think that the

ci-devant Duchesse walked there o’ nights without her head, or maybe

with it, looking in her silks and satins as she did before they stuck it

on a pike, for I have heard that she was a famous beauty.”

“Yes, I have heard that,” said the newcomer with a shade of impatience.

“But I have also heard that it is incorrect,” she added.

“Well, beauty or not, it was all the same to her, poor wretch, when she

came out of La Force that day,” observed Grégoire, comfortably leaning

back on his elbows on the barrier. And having thus dismissed the subject

he went on, “The ci-devant Duc now,—supposed to be alive, he is. So you

won’t meet him walking there. Instead of Monseigneur we have M. le

Député Camain; he often comes, and sometimes the Citoyenne Dufour, who

used to be at the Opera, with him. She acts at the Ambigu-Comique now.

They say he’s going to marry her. Curious world, isn’t it, Citoyenne?

Think, if the Duc and Duchesse could see Mirabel now!” He laughed.

The new caretaker drew her shawl round her as if the April breeze caught

her. “I think I had better——” she began, making a fresh move towards

the barrier. And then she said abruptly, “You spoke just now of the Duc.

Has anything been heard—here in Mirabel-le-Château, I mean—about him?”

M. Grégoire shook a waggish finger at her. “No, no, nothing more is

known about him. And take care, citoyenne concierge!” he added grinning.

“It doesn’t do, since Fructidor, to be too much interested in

aristocrats as high up as that, especially when they are still émigrés.

But I believe from what I have heard, that Monseigneur le Duc could turn

any woman’s head. I don’t suppose, however, that you ever saw him, did

you?”

“I am from the provinces,” was the new concierge’s reply. “I only came

to Paris after the tenth of August.”

“Ah, you missed something!” said the National Guard regretfully. “I

wasn’t at the storming of the Tuileries, but I saw the place afterwards.

And this nest of ci-devants, as I daresay you’ve heard, was rushed two

days later, by patriots from Paris. Not so much fighting, of course, as

in the Place du Carrousel, since there were no troops here, but they

barricaded the place as well as they could, and the Duchesse’s maître

d’hôtel was killed outside her boudoir, and two or three servants on the

stairs and so on. Then the house was pretty well looted; I’ve heard the

citizen Camain regret that.”

The concierge looked away from him at the great façade. “And how was it

that the Duc escaped?” she asked.

“How did he escape! He did not need to escape!” retorted the sentry. “He

wasn’t there. He had emigrated long before that. That’s what saved him.”

“But he could not know, long before, what was going to happen in 1792,”

said the woman, almost as if she were defending M. de Trélan.

“Maybe not,” returned the National Guard indifferently. “All I know is

that he wasn’t here. But she was—the ci-devant Duchesse—and that was

the end of her, after a few days of La Force. Myself, I don’t approve of

murdering prisoners, especially those of the sex, though the woman

Lamballe, being such a friend of the female Capet—as we used to call

her before Thermidor—doubtless deserved what she got. But as for this

Duchesse, I have heard that she was always kind to the poor, here and

elsewhere. But what would you have? Mistakes happen.”

“Yes,” agreed the concierge, looking at him. “But, no doubt, she is well

out of this world. It is not too merry a one, Citizen, even, perhaps,

for a Duchesse.”

M. Thibault, who was in reality a sympathetic soul, and by no means the

blood-boltered patriot he liked to paint himself at times, said to this,

“You have known trouble, Citoyenne?”

“I have known what it is to lose my husband, my home, and every penny I

had. But I am not faint-hearted; do not think that! One goes on to the

end, does one not, citizen sentry—till the relief?”

“Sacré tonnerre, yes!” asseverated the citizen sentry, struck. “I see

you are a good-plucked one, Madame. Well, I shall like to think of you

behind me in the château there, and if ever there’s anything you want

doing for you, I’m your man. Grégoire Thibault is my name.”

The new concierge thanked him with a smile which caused a sensible

warmth to flow over the Citizen Grégoire, and made him regret still more

that he could not decently keep her waiting any longer. He fitted the

key slowly into the lock, saying, “You’ve got your warrant with you, I

suppose, Madame?”

The woman held it out at once—an official document duly stamped and

sealed, appointing the widow Vidal, sempstress, of the Rue de Seine,

concierge of the ci-devant château of Mirabel, in room of the woman

Prévost, resigning that charge. The document was signed by the Deputy

Camain, the administrator of Mirabel, and countersigned by one of the

five Directors, Larevellière-Lépeaux.

“‘Vidal,’” murmured the sentry, studying it. “Parfaitement.” He returned

the paper and at last unfastened the barrier. “Do you see those two bits

of balustrading, Madame Vidal, on either hand of the great steps? When

you get there you will find that there is a stairway the other side of

them, going down to the basement storey. The left-hand one has

‘Concierge’ on it. You go down there. Mme Prévost will probably be on

the look-out for you. Good-luck to you, Citoyenne!”

She bent her head again with that smile which had charmed him.

“Thank you, Citizen. I think I shall find my way. . . . Ah, there is one

thing I forgot. I have lived in Paris for some years with my niece Mme

Tessier, and it is probable that she may come to see me soon—that she

will come regularly, in fact. She will have a pass from M. Camain

himself. I suppose therefore that there will be no difficulty?”

“No, that will be all right. No need to bother about that,” replied M.

Thibault heartily.

And Mme Vidal passed through the barrier. As she did so she not

unnaturally glanced up at the broken stone lion on one of the gateposts

which still held between its paws the defaced shield of the Ducs de

Trélan. The man, who saw the movement, made a gesture of half-tolerant

contempt.

“Those watchdogs won’t bark at you now—nor at any one!” he remarked.

But Mme Vidal seemed not to have heard him; nor did he, on his side,

observe that she had caught her underlip between her teeth like one in

sudden pain. Then she began to walk steadily towards the great house.