THE ATTEMPT ON THE PRINCE
And now I come to an affair of which there have been many accounts
written, some of them within a mile or two of the truth, the most but
sheer romantics. I have in my mind notably the account of the officer
Buhot printed two years after the events in question, in which he makes
the most fabulous statement as to the valiancy of Father Hamilton's
stand in the private house in the Rue des Reservoirs, and maintains that
myself--_le fier Eccossais_, as he is flattering enough to designate
me--drew my sword upon himself and threatened to run him through for his
proposition that I should confess to a complicity in the attempt upon
his Royal Highness. I have seen his statement reproduced with some extra
ornament in the _Edinburgh Courant_, and the result of all this is
that till this day my neighbours give me credit, of which I am loth to
advantage myself, for having felled two or three of the French officers
before I was overcome at the hinder-end.
The matter is, in truth, more prosaic as it happened, and if these
memorials of mine leave the shadow of a doubt in the minds of any
interested in an old story that created some stir in its time, I pray
them see the archives of M. Bertin, the late Lieut.-General of the
police. Bertin was no particular friend of mine, that had been the
unconscious cause of great trouble and annoyance to him, but he has the
truth in the deposition I made and signed prior to my appointment to a
company of the d'Auvergne regiment.
Well, to take matters in their right order, it was the evening of the
day I had given the letter to the Prince that Father Hamilton expressed
his intention of passing that night in the house of a friend.
I looked at him with manifest surprise, for he had been at the bottle
most of the afternoon, and was by now more in a state for his bed than
for going among friends.
“Well,” he cried peevishly, observing my dubiety. “Do you think me too
drunk for the society of a parcel of priests? _Ma foi!_ it is a pretty
thing that I cannot budge from my ordinary habitude of things without a
stuck owl setting up a silent protest.”
To a speech so wanting in dignity I felt it better there should be no
reply, and instead I helped him into his great-coat. As I did so, he
made an awkward lurching movement due to his corpulence, and what jumped
out of an inner pocket but a pistol? Which of us was the more confused
at that it would be hard to say. For my part, the weapon--that I
had never seen in his possession before--was a fillip to my sleeping
conscience; I picked it up with a distaste, and he took it from me with
trembling fingers and an averted look.
“A dangerous place, Versailles, after dark,” he explained feebly. “One
never knows, one never knows,” and into his pocket hurriedly with it.
“I shall be back for breakfast,” he went on. “Unless--unless--oh, I
certainly shall be back.” And off he set.
The incident of the pistol disturbed me for a while. I made a score of
speculations as to why a fat priest should burden himself with such an
article, and finally concluded that it was as he suggested, to defend
himself from night birds if danger offered; though that at the time had
been the last thing I myself would have looked for in the well-ordered
town of Versailles. I sat in the common-room or _salle_ of the inn for
a while after he had gone, and thereafter retired to my own bedchamber,
meaning to read or write for an hour or two before going to bed. In the
priest's room--which was on the same landing and next to my own--I heard
the whistle of Bernard the Swiss, but I had no letters for him that
evening, and we did not meet each other. I was at first uncommon dull,
feeling more than usually the hame-wae that must have been greatly
wanting in the experience of my Uncle Andrew to make him for so long a
wanderer on the face of the earth. But there is no condition of life
so miserable but what one finds in it remissions, diversions, nay, and
delights also, and soon I was--of all things in the world to be doing
when what followed came to pass!--inditing a song to a lady, my quill
scratching across the paper in spurts and dashes, and baffled pauses
where the matter would not attend close enough on the mood, stopping
altogether at a stanza's end to hum the stuff over to myself with great
satisfaction. I was, as I say, in the midst of this; the Swiss had gone
downstairs; all in my part of the house was still, though vehicles moved
about in the courtyard, when unusually noisy footsteps sounded on the
stair, with what seemed like the tap of scabbards on the treads.
It was a sound so strange that my hand flew by instinct to the small
sword I was now in the habit of wearing and had learned some of the use
of from Thurot.
There was no knock for entrance; the door was boldly opened and four
officers with Buhot at their head were immediately in the room.
Buhot intimated in French that I was to consider myself under arrest,
and repeated the same in indifferent English that there might be no
mistake about a fact as patent as that the sword was in his hand.
For a moment I thought the consequence of my crime had followed me
abroad, and that this squat, dark officer, watching me with the scrutiny
of a forest animal, partly in a dread that my superior bulk should
endanger himself, was in league with the law of my own country. That
I should after all be dragged back in chains to a Scots gallows was a
prospect unendurable; I put up the ridiculous small sword and dared
him to lay a hand on me. But I had no sooner done so than its folly was
apparent, and I laid the weapon down.
“_Tant mieux!_” said he, much relieved, and then an assurance that he
knew I was a gentleman of discretion and would not make unnecessary
trouble. “Indeed,” he went on, “_Voyez!_ I take these men away; I have
the infinite trust in Monsieur; Monsieur and I shall settle this little
affair between us.”
And he sent his friends to the foot of the stair.
“Monsieur may compose himself,” he assured me with a profound
inclination.
“I am very much obliged to you,” I said, seating myself on the corner of
the table and crushing my poor verses into my pocket as I did so, “I am
very much obliged to you, but I'm at a loss to understand to what I owe
the honour.”
“Indeed!” he said, also seating himself on the table to show, I
supposed, that he was on terms of confidence with his prisoner.
“Monsieur is Father Hamilton's secretary?”
“So I believe,” I said; “at least I engaged for the office that's
something of a sinecure, to tell the truth.”
And then Buhot told me a strange story.
He told me that Father Hamilton was now a prisoner, and on his way to
the prison of Bicêtre. He was--this Buhot--something of the artist and
loved to make his effects most telling (which accounts, no doubt, for
the romantical nature of the accounts aforesaid), and sitting upon the
table-edge he embarked upon a narrative of the most crowded two hours
that had perhaps been in Father Hamilton's lifetime.
It seemed that when the priest had left the Cerf d'Or, he had gone to
a place till recently called the Bureau des Carrosses pour la Rochelle,
and now unoccupied save by a concierge, and the property of some person
or persons unknown. There he had ensconced himself in the only habitable
room and waited for a visitor regarding whom the concierge had his
instructions.
“You must imagine him,” said the officer, always with the fastidiousness
of an artist for his effects, “you must imagine him, Monsieur, sitting
in this room, all alone, breathing hard, with a pistol before him on the
table, and--”
“What! a pistol!” I cried, astounded and alarmed. “_Certainement_” said
Buhot, charmed with the effect his dramatic narrative was creating.
“Your friend, _mon ami_, would be little good, I fancy, with a rapier.
Anyway, 'twas a pistol. A carriage drives up to the door; the priest
rises to his feet with the pistol in his hand; there is the rap at the
door. '_Entrez!_' cries the priest, cocking the pistol, and no sooner
was his visitor within than he pulled the trigger; the explosion rang
through the dwelling; the chamber was full of smoke.”
“Good heavens!” I cried in horror, “and who was the unhappy wretch?”
Buhot shrugged his shoulders, made a French gesture with his hands, and
pursed his mouth.
“Whom did you invite to the room at the hour of ten, M. Greig?” he
asked.
“Invite!” I cried. “It's your humour to deal in parables. I declare to
you I invited no one.”
“And yet, my good sir, you are Hamilton's secretary and you are
Hamilton's envoy. 'Twas you handed to the Prince the _poulet_ that was
designed to bring him to his fate.”
My instinct grasped the situation in a second; I had been the ignorant
tool of a madman; the whole events of the past week made the fact plain,
and I was for the moment stunned.
Buhot watched me closely, and not unkindly, I can well believe, from
what I can recall of our interview and all that followed after it.
“And you tell me he killed the Prince?” I cried at last.
“No, Monsieur,” said Buhot; “I am happy to say he did not. The Prince
was better advised than to accept the invitation you sent to him.”
“Still,” I cried with remorse, “there's a man dead, and 'tis as much as
happens when princes themselves are clay.”
“_Parfaitement_, Monsieur, though it is indiscreet to shout it here.
Luckily there is no one at all dead in this case, otherwise it had been
myself, for I was the man who entered to the priest and received his
pistol fire. It was not the merriest of duties either,” he went on,
always determined I should lose no iota of the drama, “for the priest
might have discovered before I got there that the balls of his pistol
had been abstracted.”
“Then Father Hamilton has been under watch?”
“Since ever you set foot in Versailles last Friday,” said Buhot
complacently. “The Damiens affair has sharpened our wits, I warrant
you.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “let me protest that I have been till this moment
in utter darkness about Hamilton's character or plans. I took him for
what he seemed--a genial buffoon of a kind with more gear than
guidance.”
“We cannot, with infinite regret, assume that, Monsieur, but personally
I would venture a suggestion,” said Buhot, coming closer on the table
and assuming an affable air. “In this business, Hamilton is a tool--no
more; and a poor one at that, badly wanting the grindstone. To break
him--phew!--'twere as easy as to break a glass, but he is one of a great
movement and the man we seek is his master--one Father Fleuriau of the
Jesuits. Hamilton's travels were but part of a great scheme that has
sent half a dozen of his kind chasing the Prince in the past year or
two from Paris to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Orleans, from Orleans to
Hamburg, Seville, Lisbon, Rome, Brussels, Potsdam, Nuremburg, Berlin.
The same hand that extracted his bullets tapped the priest's portfolio
and found the wretch was in promise of a bishopric and a great sum of
money. You see, M. Greig, I am curiously frank with my prisoner.”
“And no doubt you have your reasons,” said I, but beat, myself,
to imagine what they could be save that he might have proofs of my
innocence.
“Very well,” said M. Buhot. “To come to the point, it is this, that we
desire to have the scheme of the Jesuits for the Prince's assassination,
and other atrocities shocking to all that revere the divinity of
princes, crumbled up. Father Hamilton is at the very roots of the
secret; if, say, a gentleman so much in his confidence as yourself--now,
if such a one were, say, to share a cell with this regicide for a night
or two, and pursue judicious inquiries----”
“Stop! stop!” I cried, my blood hammering in my head, and the words like
to choke me. “Am I to understand that you would make me your spy and
informer upon this miserable old madman that has led me such a gowk's
errand?”
Buhot slid back off the table edge and on to his feet. “Oh,” said he,
“the terms are not happily chosen: 'spy'--'informer'--come, Monsieur
Greig; this man is in all but the actual accomplishment of his purpose
an assassin. 'Tis the duty of every honest man to help in discovering
the band of murderers whose tool he has been.”
“Then I'm no honest man, M. Buhot,” said I bitterly, “for I've no
stomach for a duty so dirty.”
“Think of it for a moment,” he pressed, with evident surprise at my
decision. “Bicêtre is an unwholesome hostelry, I give you my word.
Consider that your choice is between a night or two there and--who
knows?--a lifetime of Galbanon that is infinitely worse.”
“Then let it be Galbanon!” I said, and lifted my sword and slapped it
furiously, sheathed as it was, like a switch upon the table.
[Illustration: 198]
Buhot leaped back in a fear that I was to attack him, and cried his men
from the stair foot.
“This force is not needed at all,” I said. “I am innocent enough to be
prepared to go quietly.”