BEYOND THE SHADOW.
I thank Heaven that I saw little more than I have told. A score of
feet trampled on me as the murderers stumbled this way and that,
and bruised me and covered me with blood that was not my own. And I
heard screams of men in the death-throe, ear-piercing shrieks of
women--shrieks that chilled the blood and stopped the breath--mad
laughter, sounds of the pit. But to rise was to court instant death,
and, though I had no hope and no looking forward, my momentary passion
had spent itself and I lay quiet. Resistance was useless.
At last I thought the end had come. The body that pressed on me, and
partly hid me, was abruptly dragged away; the light came to my eyes,
and a voice cried, briskly: "Here is another! He is alive!"
I staggered to my feet, stupidly willing to die with some sort of
dignity. The speaker was a stranger, but by his side was Buton, and
beyond him stood De Geol; and there were others, all staring at me,
face beyond face. Still, I could not believe that I was saved. "If you
are going to do it, do it quickly," I muttered; and I opened my arms.
"God forbid!" Buton answered hurriedly. "Enough has been done already,
and too much! M. le Vicomte, lean on me! Lean on me, and come this
way. _Mon Dieu_, I was only just in time. If they had killed you----"
"That is the fifth," said De Geol.
Buton did not answer, but taking my arm, gently urged me along, and De
Geol taking the other side, I walked between them, through a lane of
people who stared at me with a sort of brutish wonder--a lane of
people with faces that looked strangely white in the sunshine. I was
bareheaded, and the sun dazzled and confused me, but obeying the
pressure of Buton's hand I swerved and passed through a door that
seemed to open in the wall. As I did so I dropped a kerchief which
some one had given me to bind up my shoulder. A man standing beside
the door, the last man on the right-hand side of the lane of people,
picked it up and gave it to me with a kindly alacrity. He had a pike,
and his hands were covered with blood, and I do not doubt that he was
one of the murderers!
Two men were carrying some one into the house before us, and at the
sight of the helpless body and hanging head, sense and memory returned
to me with a rush. I caught Buton by the breast of his coat and shook
him--shook him savagely. "Mademoiselle de St. Alais!" I cried. "What
have you done to her, wretch? If you have----"
"Hush, Monsieur, hush," he answered reproachfully. "And be yourself.
She is safe, and here, I give you my word. She was carried in among
the first. I don't think a hair of her head is injured."
"She was carried in here?" I said.
"Yes, M. le Vicomte."
"And safe?"
"Yes, yes."
I believe that at that I burst into tears not altogether unmanly; for
they were tears of thankfulness and gratitude. I had gone through very
much, and, though the wound in my arm was a trifle, I had lost some
blood; and the tears may be forgiven me. Nor indeed was I alone in
weeping that day. I learned afterwards that one of the very murderers,
a man who had been foremost in the work, cried bitterly when he came
to himself and saw what he had done.
They killed in Nimes on that day and the two next, about three hundred
men, principally in the Capuchin convent--which Froment had used as a
printing-office, and made the headquarters of his propaganda--in the
Cabaret Rouge, and in Froment's own house, which held out until they
brought cannon to bear on it. Not more than one-half of these fell in
actual conflict or hot blood; the remainder were hunted down in lanes
and houses and hiding-places, and killed where they were found, or,
surrendering at discretion, were led to the nearest wall, and there
shot.
Later, both in Paris and the provinces, this severity was commended,
and held up to admiration as the truest mercy; on the ground that it
stamped out the fire of revolt which was on the point of blazing up
and prevented it spreading to the rest of France. But, looking back, I
find in it another thing; I find in it not mercy, but the first, or
nearly the first, instance of that strange contempt of human life
which marked the Revolution in its later stages; of that extravagance
of cruelty which three years afterwards paralysed society and
astounded the world, and, by the horrible excesses into which it
occasionally led men, proved to the philosophers of the Human Race
that France in the last days of the eighteenth century could do in the
daylight, at Arras and Nantes and Paris, deeds which the tyrants of
old confined to the dark recesses of their torture-chambers: deeds--I
blush to say it--that no other polite country has matched in this age.
But with these crimes--and be it understood I do not refer here to the
work of the guillotine--I thank God that I have at this time nothing
to do. They left their traces on later pages of my life--as on the
life of what Frenchman have they not?--and some day I may revert to
them. But my task here barely touches them. It is enough for me to say
that of eighteen men who shared with me the horrors of the alley by
the Capuchins, four only lived to tell the tale, and look back on the
walls of Nimes; they and I owing our lives in part to the timely
arrival of Buton and some foreign representatives, who did not share
the Cevennols' fanaticism, and partly to the late relenting of the
murderers themselves.
Of the four, Father Benoit and Louis St. Alais were two, and strange
was the meeting, when we three, so wonderfully preserved, with clothes
still torn and disordered, and faces splashed with blood, came
together in the upstairs _salon_ at Madame Catinot's. The shutters of
the room, with the exception of one high corner shutter, were still
closed; dead ashes lay white and cold in the empty fire-place, that
had blazed so cheerfully in my honour the night I supped with Madame
Catinot. The whole room was gloomy and chill, the furniture cast long
shadows, and up the stairs came the clamour of the mob, that having
seen us into the house eddied curiously round the scene of the murder,
and could not have enough of it.
A strange meeting, for we three had all loved one another, and by
stress of the times had been separated. Now we met as from the grave,
ghostly figures, livid, trembling, with shaking hands and eyes burning
with the light of fever; but with all differences purged away. "My
Brother!" "Your Brother!" and Louis' hands met mine, as if the dead
man who had died with the courage of his race joined them; while
Father Benoit wrung his hands in uncontrollable grief or walked the
room, crying: "My poor children! Oh, my poor children! God have mercy
on this land!"
A low sound of women's voices, and weeping, with the hurrying of feet
going softly to and fro, came from the next room: and that it was, I
think, that presently calmed us, so that except for an occasional
burst of grief on Louis' part we could talk quietly. I learned that
Madame St. Alais lay there, sadly injured in the _melee_, either by
her fall or a blow from a foot; and that Denise and Madame Catinot and
a surgeon were with her. The very room in its gloom was funereal, and
we talked in whispers--and then sank into silence; or again one or
other would rise with a shudder of remembrance, and walk the room with
heaving breast. Presently, the sound of guns coming to our ears, we
forgot ourselves for a while and talked of Froment, and what chance of
escape he had, and listened and heard the mob raving and howling as it
surged by; and then talked again. But always as men who were no longer
concerned; as men whom death had released from the common obligations.
Presently they came and called Louis, who went to his mother; and then
after another interval Father Benoit was summoned, and I walked the
room alone. Silence after so great commotion, solitude, when an hour
before I had dealt death and faced it in that inferno, safety after
danger so imminent, all stirred the depths of my heart. When, in
addition, I thought of St. Alais' death, and recalled the brilliant
promise, the daring, the brightness of that haughty spirit now for
ever quenched, I felt the tears rise again. I paced the room in
uncontrollable emotion, and was thankful for the gloom that allowed me
to give it vent. Old times, old scenes, old affections rose up, and my
boyhood; I remembered that we had played together, I forgot that we
had gone different ways.
After a long time, a long, long time, when evening had nearly come,
Louis came in to me. "Will you come?" he said abruptly.
"To Madame St. Alais?"
"Yes, she wants to see you," he replied, holding the door open, and
speaking in the dull even tone of one who knows all.
After such a scene as we had passed through comes reaction; I was worn
out and I went with him mechanically, thinking rather of the past than
the present. But no sooner was I over the threshold of the next room,
which, unlike that I had left, was brilliantly lit by candles set in
sconces, the shutters being closed, than I came to myself with a
shock. Propped up with pillows on a bed opposite the door, so that I
met her eyes and had a full view of her face as I entered, lay Madame
St. Alais; and I stood. Her face was white with a red spot burning in
each cheek; her eyes matched the colour in brilliance; but it was
neither of these things that brought me up suddenly, nor--though I
noticed it with foreboding--the way in which she plucked at the
coverlet when she spoke. It was something in her expression; something
so unfitting the occasion, so bizarre and light that I stood appalled.
She saw my hesitation, and in a gay and slightly affected tone, that
in a moment told the story, a tone more dreadful under the
circumstances than the most pathetic outbursts, she reproached me with
it. "Welcome, M. le Vicomte," she said. "And yet I am glad to see that
you have some modesty. We will not be hard on you, however. A late
repentance is better than none, and--where is my fan, Denise? Child,
my fan!"
Denise rose with a choking sound from her seat by the bed, and must, I
think, have broken down; we had all nerves worn to the last thread.
But Madame Catinot saved the situation. Hastily reaching a fan from a
side table she laid a firm hand on the younger woman's shoulder as she
passed, and gently pressed her back into her seat.
"Thank you, my dear," Madame St. Alais said, playing an instant with
the fan, and smiling from side to side, as I had seen her smile a
hundred times in her _salon_. "And now, M. le Vicomte," she continued
with ghastly archness, "I think that you will have the grace to say
that I was a true prophet?"
I muttered something, heaven knows what; the scene, with Madame's
smiling face, and the others' bowed shoulders and averted eyes, was
dreadful.
"I never doubted that you would have to join us," she went on, with
complacency. "And if I were cruel, I should have much to say. But as
you have returned to your allegiance before it was too late, we will
let bygones be bygones. His Majesty is so good that--but where are the
others? We cannot proceed without them."
She looked round with a touch of her native peremptoriness. "Where is
M. de Gontaut?" she said. "Louis, has not M. de Gontaut arrived? He
promised to be here to witness the contract."
Louis, from his place by one of the closed windows, where he stood
with Father Benoit and the surgeon, answered in a strained voice that
he had not yet arrived.
Madame seemed to find something unnatural in his tone and our
attitude, she looked uneasily from one to the other of us. "There is
nothing the matter, is there?" she said, flirting her fan more
vigorously. "Nothing has happened?"
"No, no, Madame," Louis answered, striving to soothe her. "Doubtless
he will be here by-and-by."
But a shadow of anxiety still clouded Madame's face. "And Victor?" she
said. "He has not come either? Louis, are you sure that there is
nothing the matter?"
"Madame, Madame, you will see him presently," he answered with a
half-stifled sob; and he turned away with a gesture of horror, which,
but for one of the curtains of the alcove, she must have seen.
She did not, though there was enough in this to arouse a sane person's
suspicions. As he spoke, however, Madame's eyes fell on me, and the
piteous anxiety which had for the moment darkened her face, passed
away as quickly as the shadow of a cloud passes on an April morning.
She took up her fan again, and looked at me gaily. "Do you know," she
said, "I had the strangest dream last night, M. le Vicomte--or was it
when I was ill, Denise? Never mind. But I dreamed all sorts of
horrors; that our house here was burned, and the house at Cahors, and
that we had to fly and take refuge at Montauban, and then--I think it
was at Nimes. And that M. de Gontaut was murdered, and all the
_canaille_ were up in arms! As if--as if," she continued, with a
little laugh, cut short by a gasp of pain, "the King would permit such
things, or they were possible. And there was something--something
still more absurd about the Church." She paused, knitting her brows;
and then with a touch of her fan dismissing the subject: "But I
forget--I forget. And just when it was most horrible I awoke. It was
all absurd. So extravagant you would all be ill with laughing if I
could remember it. I fancied that a pair of red-heeled shoes were as
good as a death warrant, and powder and patches condemned you at
once."
She paused. The fan dropped from her hand, and she looked round
uneasily. "I think--I think I am not quite well yet," she said in a
different tone, and a spasm crossed her face--it was plain that she
was in pain. "Louis!" she continued petulantly, "where is the notary?
He might read the contract. Doubtless Victor and M. de Gontaut will be
here before long. Where is he?" she continued sharply.
It is easy to say that we might have played our parts; but the pity
and the horror of it, falling on hearts already tortured by the scenes
of the day, fairly unmanned us. Denise hid her face, and trembled so
that the chair on which she sat shook; and Louis turned away
shuddering, while I stood near the foot of the bed, frozen into
silence. This time it was the surgeon, a thin young man of dark
complexion, who put himself forward.
"The papers are in the next room, Madame," he said gravely.
"But you are not M. Pettifer?" she answered querulously.
"No, Madame, he was so unwell as to be unable to leave the house."
"He has no right to be unwell," Madame retorted severely. "Pettifer
unwell, and Mademoiselle St. Alais' contract to be signed! But you
have the papers?"
"In the next room, Madame."
"Fetch them! Fetch them!" she answered, her eyes wandering uneasily
from one to another. And she moved in the bed and sighed as one in
pain. Then, "Where is Victor? Why does he not come?" she asked
impatiently.
"I think I hear him," Louis said suddenly. It was the first time he
had spoken of his own free will, and I caught a new sound in his
voice. "I will see," he went on, and moving to the door he gave me a
sign, as he passed, to follow him.
I muttered something, and did so. In the room in which I had waited,
the half-shuttered room of gloom and shadows, from which Louis had
fetched me, we found the surgeon groping hastily about. "Some paper,
Monsieur," he said, looking up impatiently as we entered. "Some paper!
Almost anything should do."
"Stay!" Louis said, his voice harsh with pain. "We have had too much
of this--this mockery. I will have no more."
"Monsieur?"
"I say I will have no more!" Louis answered fiercely, a sob in his
throat. "Tell her the truth."
"She would not believe it."
"At any rate, anything is better than this."
"Do you mean it, Monsieur?" the surgeon asked slowly, and he looked at
him.
"I do."
"Then I will have no part in it," the man answered with gravity. "I
acquit myself of all responsibility. Nor shall you do it, Monsieur,
until you have heard what the inevitable result will be."
"My mother cannot recover," Louis said stubbornly.
"No, Monsieur, nor will she live, in my opinion, more than a few
hours. When the fever that now supports her begins to wane she will
collapse, and die. It depends on you whether she closes her eyes,
knowing none of the evil that has happened, or her son's death; or
dies----"
"It is horrible!"
"It is for you to choose," the surgeon answered inexorably.
Louis looked round. "There is paper there," he said suddenly.
I suppose that we had been absent from the room no more than a couple
of minutes, but when we returned we found Madame St. Alais calling
impatiently for us and for Victor. "Where is he? Where is he?" she
repeated feverishly. "Why is he late to-day of all days? There is
no--no quarrel between you?" And she looked jealously at me.
"None, Madame," I said, with tears in my voice. "That I swear!"
"Then why is he not here? And M. de Gontaut?" Her eyes were still
bright; the red spot burned still in her cheeks; but her features had
taken a pinched look, she was changed, and her fingers were never
still. Her voice had grown harsh and unnatural, and from time to time
she looked round with a piteous expression as if something puzzled
her. "I am not well to-day," she muttered presently, with a painful
effort to be herself. "And I forget to be as gay as I should be.
Mademoiselle, go to M. le Vicomte, and say something pretty to amuse
us while we wait. And you, M. le Vicomte! In my young days it was
usual for the _fiance_ to salute his mistress on these occasions. Fie
on you! For shame, Monsieur! I am afraid that you are a laggard in
love."
Denise rose, and came slowly to me before them all, but no word passed
her pale lips, and she did not raise her eyes to mine. She remained
passive when in accordance with Madame's permission I stooped and
kissed her cold cheek; it grew no warmer, her eyes did not kindle. Yet
I was satisfied, more than satisfied; for as I leant over her I felt
her little hands--little hands I longed to take in mine and shelter
and protect--I felt them clutch and hold the front of my coat, as the
child clings to its mother's neck. I passed my arm round her before
them all, and so we stood at the foot of Madame's bed, and she looked
at us.
She laughed gaily. "Poor little mouse!" she said. "She is shy yet. Be
good to her, _mon cher_, she is a tender morsel, and--I don't feel
well! I don't feel well," Madame repeated, abruptly breaking off, and
lifting herself in bed, while one hand went with difficulty to her
head. "I don't--what is it?" she continued, the colour visibly fading
from her face and leaving it white and drawn, while fear leapt into
her staring eyes. "What is it? Fetch--fetch some one, will you?
The--the doctor! And Victor."
Denise slipped from my arm, and flew to her side. I stood a moment,
then the surgeon touched my arm. "Go!" he muttered. "Go. Leave her to
the women. It will be quickly over."
And so Madame St. Alais gave Mademoiselle to me at last; and the
compact for our marriage, into which she had entered so many years
before with my dead father, was fulfilled.
* * * * *
Madame died next morning, being taken not only from the evil to come,
but from that which was then present, and roared and eddied through
the streets of Nimes round the unburied body of her son; for she died
without awaking from the delirium which followed her hurt. I went in
to see her lying dead and little changed; and in the quiet decorum of
the lighted chamber I thought reverently of the change which one
year--one brief year had made, coming at the end of fifty years of
prosperity. It seemed pitiful to me then, as I stooped and kissed the
waxen hand--very pitiful; now, knowing what the future had in store,
remembering the twenty years of exile and poverty and tedium and hope
deferred, that were to be the lot of so many of her friends, of so
many of those who had graced her _salons_ at St. Alais and Cahors, I
think her happy. Possessed of energy as well as pride, a rare
combination in our order, she and hers dared greatly and greatly lost;
staked all and lost all. Yet better that, than the prison or the
guillotine; or growing old and decrepit in a strange land, to return
to a _patrie_ that had long forgotten them; that stood in the roads
and jeered at the old berlins and petticoats and headgear that were
the fashion in the days of the Polignacs.
I have said that the riots in Nimes lasted three days. On the last
Buton came to me and told us we must go; that to avoid worse things we
must leave the city without delay, or he and the more moderate party
who had saved us would no longer be responsible. On this, Louis was
for retiring to Montpellier, and thence to the _emigres_ at Turin; and
for a few hours I was of the same mind, desiring most of all to place
the women in safety.
I owe it to Buton that I did not take a step hard to recall, and of
which I am sure that I should have repented later. He asked me bluntly
whither I was going, and when I told him, set his back against the
door. "God forbid!" he said. "Who go, go. Few will return."
I answered him with heat. "Nonsense!" I cried. "I tell you, within a
year you will be on your knees to us to come back."
"Why?" he said.
"You cannot keep order without us!"
"With ease," he answered coolly.
"Look at the state of things here!"
"It will pass."
"But who will govern?"
"The fittest," he replied doggedly. "For do you still think, M. le
Vicomte--after all that has happened--that a man to make laws must
have a title--saving your presence? Do you still think that the wheat
will not grow, nor the hens lay eggs, unless the Seigneur's shadow
falls on them? Do you think that to fight, a man must have powder on
his head as well as in his musket?"
"I think," I retorted, "that when a man who does not know the sea
turns pilot it is time to leave the vessel!"
"The pilot will learn," he answered. "And for quitting the vessel, let
those go who have no business on board. Be guided, Monseigneur," he
continued in a different tone. "Be guided. They have killed in Nimes
three hundred in three days."
"And you say, stay?"
"Ay, for there is blood between us," he answered grimly. "That has
been done now which will not easily be forgiven; that has been done
which will abide. Go abroad after this--and stay abroad! Or rather do
not--do not, but be guided," he continued, with rough emotion in his
voice. "Go home to the Chateau, and be quiet, Monsieur, and no one
will harm you."
There was much in what he said. At any rate, I thought the advice so
good that, after some hesitation, I not only determined to follow it,
but I gave it to the others. But Louis would not change his mind. A
horror of the country had seized him since his escape; and he would
go. He raised no opposition, however, when I asked him to give me
Denise; and within twenty-four hours of her mother's death she became
my wife, in that dark-shuttered house by the Capuchins' alley, Father
Benoit performing the service. Louis was at the same time married to
Madame Catinot, who was to share his exile. Needless to say there were
no rejoicings at these weddings; no _fete_ and no joy-bells, and no
bride-clothes, but sobs and wailings, and cold lips and passive hands.
But a bright day has sometimes a weeping dawn, and though for three
years or more our life knew perils enough and some sorrows--the story
of which I may one day tell--and we shared the lot of all Frenchmen in
those times of shame and stress, I had never, no, not for a day or an
hour, cause to repent the deed done so hurriedly at Nimes. Clinging
hands and warm lips, eyes that shone as brightly in a prison as a
palace, cheered me, when things were worst; and when better days came,
and with them grey hairs and a new France, my wife found means still
to grace, and ever more and more to share my life.
One word of the man to whom under God I owe it that I won her. He
survived, but I never saw Froment of Nimes again. On the third day of
the riots cannon were brought to bear on his tower, it was stormed,
and the garrison were put to the sword, one man only, I believe,
escaping with his life. That man was Froment, the indomitable, the
most capable leader that the Royalists of France ever boasted. He got
safely to the frontier and thence to Turin, where he was received with
honour by those whose aid might a little earlier have saved all. Who
fails must expect buffets, however; the cold shoulder was presently
turned to him; he was slighted, and as the years went on his
complaints grew louder. Once I sought to find and assist him, but he
was then engaged in some enterprise on the African coast, and my
circumstances were such that I could have done little had I found him.
Soon afterwards, I believe, he died, though certain information never
reached me. But dead or alive I owe him gratitude, respect, and other
things, among which I count the greatest happiness of my life.
THE END.