XV How François Finds Despard and Has a Lesson in Politics, and of What Came of It
At evening he ventured to enter an inn at Soluce. A good bed and ample diet restored his courage; but he learned that the citizen with a wart, and an escort of a dozen soldiers, had passed the day before, on their way to Bvreux. Would he remain there, this friendly commissioner? No one knew. Evreux was Jacobin to the core. Then he thought of the marquis; it was well to be informed.
Yes; the Citizen Ste. Luce lived beyond Musillon.
The citizen juggler declared that he had once been in his service, but now that all men were equal, he could not lower the dignity of an equalized nation by serving him longer. He learned that the château of the marquis had not suffered, nor he, as he was never known to be absent, and no one molested him. This did not surprise François. In the South, at an earlier date, the peasants had burned hundreds of châteaux, but these riots had been mercilessly put down. The Jacobins meant to have peace in France, and at cost of blood, if that was requisite. To have peace at home was essential to the success of national defense on the frontier. In many parts of France, throughout the whole of the Terror, very many large land-owners were undisturbed. In fact, the Terror, and its precedent punishments, fell with strange irregularity on the provinces. The Dukes de Bethune-Charost, de Luynes, de Nivernais, and others who had not been active in politics, remained unhurt on their estates. For the émigrés was reserved a bitter hatred. Nor can we wonder at this result of the vast exodus which took place from ’89 to ’91—“l’émigration joyeuse,” as it was called by those who carried off means enough to live gay lives in Brussels while their country was in the convulsions of great social and political change.
François made haste to leave at dawn, and by nightfall was close to the town of Musillon. He found a wood road, and was soon deep in one of the marquis’s forests. In a quiet glade among rocks he put his effects in security, and, charging Toto to guard them, set out to inspect the town. The poodle did not like it. He ran back and forth, whining.
“Oh, stop that!” cried François. “Go back! Dost thou hear?”
Toto lay down, and set himself to secure what comfort the situation afforded.
Meanwhile François took to the main road until close to the village, and then left it for the fields, cautiously nearing the town, a small place of some twelve hundred souls. A monotonous double line of scattered one-story stone houses lay along the highway. Avoiding the village, François moved past and around the red-roofed Norman farm-houses which lay off from the main highway. Mounds of earth set around the houses walled in an orchard and an inclosure of many acres, so that, seen from the exterior, they had the appearance of being fortified. The lights were out, and François saw no one. Now and then a sentinel dog barked as the wanderer went by the gateways, in wonder at this unusual style of fence. At last he turned again toward the road.
The town was quiet. It was after nine at night. Having purposely lingered thus long, François approached the back of the inn, and became sure that it was empty of guests. A little beyond it was the village church, and as this was lighted, he approached it with care. The crosses of the burial-ground were gone. He stumbled over graves, and at last, standing on a tomb, got a fair glimpse of the interior of the church, for many of its windows were broken. It was full of people, and the murmur of noisy debate came to his ears. He felt that he must learn what was going on. With this in view, he kept under the deep shadow of the wall, and soon saw that the outer porch was crowded with men and women, listening through the open door. Favored by the darkness, he got unobserved into this mass of deeply occupied people, and was able at last to catch a little of what was going on. Yes; this was the club of Jacobins which his partner Despard had been sent to organize, one of the hundreds which soon conquered and led opinion all through the provinces.
He caught the usual denunciation of émigrés and of the ci-devant aristocrats. He had heard it all before; it did not help him.
Very soon an elderly man in peasant dress arose near the door. He spoke of something which they had considered as well to be done soon. He thought it better to wait until Citizen Commissioner Grégoire arrived. To arrest a ci-devant aristocrat like Ste. Luce was of course proper; but the people were excited, and might do mischief, and they knew that the Great Committee did not approve of riots. France must have rest. These outbreaks had ended elsewhere in the deaths of hundreds of peasants. He bade them wait, and, in fact, spoke with rare good sense. He was roughly interrupted. His speech was received with laughter and contemptuous cries, and, to François’s amazement, there was Despard on his feet, not twenty feet away. His old partner was somber-looking and red-eyed, but seemed to have lost his shyness of speech. He broke out into violent invectives, charging the previous speaker with indifference to the good of France. This man was no doubt a traitor. He had been in the service of the ci-devant. He had advised the people to wait. Were they not the rulers? The Jacobin clubs would see to this rat of a commissioner; let him come. Then, leaping on a chair, he began to contrast the luxury in which Ste. Luce lived with the meager life of the peasant. He talked of the great noble’s younger life, of his debauchery and hardness. All knew what he meant. Not he alone had suffered. How many of the children men liked to call their own were of noble blood?
His fluent passion, his ease of speech, his apparent freedom from his usual mood of fear, astonished François. At last Despard became more excited, raved wildly, grew incoherent, paused, burst into horrors of blasphemous allusion, and, utterly exhausted, reeled, and dropped into his chair, amid wild applauding cries and a dozen vain efforts of speakers eager to be heard. As if satisfied, the crowd waited no longer to listen, and issued out in just the mood Despard had desired to create. François stepped aside, unnoticed. Among the last, surrounded by a gesticulating group, came Despard, silent, exhausted, his head bent down. A voice cried out: “To-night! Let us do it to-night!” Despard said slowly: “No, not to-night. He is not there—he is not there. Perhaps to-morrow; we shall see. I must have rest—rest.”
“Is he mad?” thought François. “Diable! How he hates him! Why is he not afraid?” He had once heard the choir-master tell of a feeble, timid nun who had killed two people; and this man, he supposed, might be, like her, crazed. No matter; he must use him. The crowd dispersed, and, following Despard at a distance, François saw him enter the house of the village priest, who had long since said his last prayer in the garden of the Carmelites.
For an hour, and until all was still, François walked to and fro behind the house. Suddenly a door opened and closed. François moved around the house. He saw Despard go out on the road. After looking about him, the Jacobin walked swiftly away, and was soon past the farthest houses.
“Dame!” said François, “let us go after him. What can he mean? It becomes amusing.” Moving with care in the shadows at the side of the road, he followed Despard, who walked down the middle of the highway, now and then stopping short and cracking his finger-joints, as he used to do when worried, or clasping his hands over the back of his neck.
The thief smiled as he went. He was again the savage of the streets, with all his keen wits in play, and vaguely aware of pleasure in the use of his training. He looked about him, or stole noiselessly from one depth of gloom to another across some less shadowed place. He put out with care one long leg and then the other tentatively, like great feelers, and yet got over the ground with speed, as was required, for Despard walked at a rate which was unusual. The great ears of his pursuer were on guard. Once, when Despard stopped of a sudden, François was near enough to hear him crack his knuckles as he pulled at them. As Pierre stood, he threw up a hand as it were in the eager gesture of a speech, or in silent, custom-born attestation of some mentally recorded vow. Then he went onward, silent, and was for a moment lost to view in the aisles of the forest into which he turned. François moved faster, dimly seeing him again. The Jacobin hurried on. The man who followed him was smiling in the darkness, and was feeding curiosity with the keen satisfaction he felt in a chase which was not without a purpose.
Despard seemed to know the great forest well. It soon became more open. He came to a low garden wall, and, climbing it, was heard to tumble on the farther side with a crash of breaking earthenware. He had come down on a pile of garden pots. The thief reflected for a moment that his partner must have lost the agility of his former business, and himself approached the wall with care. Moving to one side, he dropped to the ground, as quiet as a prowling cat.
There was no moon, but the night was clear, and over against the star-lit space he saw the silhouette of a vast château—angles, gables, turrets with vanes. The man whom he hunted moved across the garden, through rose-hedges, under trees, as if reckless as to being heard. Once he fell, but got up without even an exclamation; and so on and on in stumbling haste until he stood upon the broad terrace in front of the building.
François was for a little while at leisure to look about him. Despard, with a sudden movement, strode to the foot of the broad steps which led up to the lofty doorway of the château. Here again he stayed motionless. François, now used to the partial obscurity of the night, took quick note of the white gleam of vases, of a fountain’s monotonous murmur, of statues, dim gray blurs seen against the dark wood-spaces beyond; the great size of the house he saw, and that three or four windows showed lights within.
What was Despard about to do? François waited. Then he heard now and then, rising and falling, the faint notes of a violoncello. At this moment he saw that Pierre was gesticulating, and at last caught sound of speech. He was too far away to be clearly seen or distinctly heard. François sat down, took off his shoes, tied them over his neck, and went down on all fours. It was one of his old tricks to amuse thus the children gathered before the show-booth. He could become a bear or an elephant, and knew how to simulate the walk of beasts. Now he approached Despard on his hands and feet, and, seen in the partial gloom, would have seemed a queer-looking animal. A closely clipped row of box lay between them and bordered the broad roadway leading to the portal.
His approach was noiseless. Even if it had not been, it is unlikely that Despard would have noticed it. The quadruped knelt, and set his eyes to see and his ears to hear, being now only six feet away. His own fate was deeply involved. He cared little for the marquis, but up out of the dark of memory came the tender sweetness of the face of the widowed daughter. No word of her brief pleading was forgotten by this man who craved regard, affection, respect, consideration—all that he had not. It was only a flash of thought, and again he was intently receptive.
Despard stood, shaking his arms wildly, looking here and there, up and down. At last he spoke, and so loud that François watched him, amazed at his unnatural lack of caution.
“To-morrow I, Pierre Despard, shall be master. I shall no more be afraid. I shall see thee tremble on the tumbrel. I shall see thee shudder at the knife.”
François had an uncontrollable shiver, predictive, sympathetic. Could he trust this creature? There was no help for it. He recalled with a smile one of the Crab’s proverbs: “Monsieur Must is a man to trust.” She had many and vile sayings; this was one of the few that were not swine-wisdom.
As the man went on speaking, his hands threatened the silent house or snatched at some unseen thing. He stood again moveless for a moment, and then threw out his hands as if in appeal, and called aloud: “Renée! Renée! art thou here? Oh, could he not have spared thee to me—to me, who had so little? And he had so much! Oh, for the name he should have spared thee! For the shame—the shame. Renée, his own child’s name. My Renée is dead, and his—his Renée lives; but not long—not long.”
“Dieu!” murmured François. “Let him have the man. Dame! I should have killed him long ago.”
Pierre was raving, and was only at times to be understood. He seemed to be seeing this lost Renée, and was now rational and again incoherent or foolishly vague.
François hesitated; but at this moment a window on the second floor was cast open, and a man, who may have heard Despard, showed himself. François looked up, and saw a slight figure framed in the window-space clear against the light behind him.
Despard cried out in tones of terror: “The marquis! the marquis!” and, turning, fled down the terrace and along the avenue.
“Queer, that,” muttered François. “He is afraid. I must have him.” He put on his shoes in haste, and with great strides pursued the retreating figure, hearing, as he ran, the servant crying from the window, “Who goes there?”
A hundred yards away from the house, Despard, terrified at the nearing steps, turned into a side alley, and at last tore through a thicket to the left.
In an instant François had him by the collar. The captured man screamed like a child in a panic of alarm, while François shook him as a terrier shakes a rat.
“Mille tonnerres! idiot, keep quiet! Don’t kick; it is no use. Thou wilt have the whole house after thee. ’T is I—François. Keep quiet! Look at me—François. Dost not hear?” At last he was quieted.
“What scared thee, mon ami?”
“I saw him—I saw the marquis! I saw him!”
“Monsieur—the marquis? He is thrice that fellow’s size.”
They were now seated on the ground, Despard panting, and darting quick glances to right and left like a frightened animal.
“Come, Pierre, tell me what all this means. Art gone clean out of thy wits?”
“Why dost thou ask? Thou dost know well enough. I have waited—waited. Now I have him.”
“Dame! Thou? Thou wilt never face him. Thou art afraid.”
“I am now. I shall not be to-morrow night. There will be hundreds. I shall look! I shall see!”
“For Heaven’s sake,” cried François, “talk a little sense. A man who fears a mouse to talk of killing this terrible fellow!”
“The law will kill him, not I. The law—the knife.”
“Stuff! A certain commissioner, Grégoire, is after thee, and, worse, after me. He hath a wart on his nose. I ran away to avoid those cursed Jacobins. Passport all right—name of Jean François. Mind thee! My father is old and failing. Thou wilt have to find me a papa. Grégoire has—he has doubts, this Grégoire. So have I. When I told him you were my friend, he shut me up in a cellar, and that I liked not. I was a fool to run away; but, mon Dieu! there was my errand—to see that poor father—all set out on my passport, and the man with the wart inquisitive. I had to get here and find my papa.”
Another man’s difficulties took off Pierre’s mind from his own. He was clear enough now, and asked questions, some hard to answer, but all reasonable.
François related his story. The fencing-master had fallen under suspicion and run away. He, François, likewise suspected, had got a passport from a Jacobin fencing-pupil, and come hither to fall on the neck of his dear friend Pierre. It was neat, and hung together well. It had many omissions, and as a whole lacked the fundamental quality of truth, but it answered. When a man’s head is set to save his head, it may not always be desirable to be accurate.
Pierre reflected; then he cried out suddenly: “This Grégoire! That for him! Let him take care. Art thou still a Royalist?”
François was a Jacobin of the best, unjustly suspected. He was eager to know what deviltry was in Pierre’s mind as to this marquis; and there, too, was the daughter. If he meant to stir these peasants to riot in order to gratify himself and his well-justified hatred, that might sadly influence François’s fate. The central power in Paris was merciless to lawless violence which did not aid its own purposes.
François talked on and on slackly, getting time to think. Pierre’s speech had troubled him. He was puzzled as he saw more distinctly the nature of the man whom he was forced to trust. He did not analyze him. He merely apprehended and distrusted one who was to-day a shrinking coward and to-morrow a man to be feared less for what he might do than for what he might lead others to do when himself remote from sources of immediate physical fear. François did not—could not—fully know that he was now putting himself in the power of one who was the victim of increasing attacks of melancholy, with intervals of excitement during which the victim was eagerly homicidal, and possessed for a time the recklessness and the cunning of the partly insane.
“Come,” said François, at last; “you must hide me until you can find me that papa, or until Citizen Grégoire has come and gone. I like him not.”
“Nor I,” said Pierre. “But let him take care; I am not a man to be played with.”
François said he should think not, but that if he meditated an attack on that miserable ci-devant yonder, it were better to wait until Grégoire had come and gone.
This caution seemed to awaken suspicion. Pierre turned, and caught François’s arm. “Thou art a spy—a spy of the Convention!”
“Thou must be more fond of a joke than was once thy way. Nonsense! I could go back and warn the marquis. That would serve the republic, and well, too; for, by Heaven! if thou art of a mind to burn houses, Robespierre will shorten thee by a head in no time.”
“Who talks of burning houses? Am I a fool? I—Despard?”
“No, indeed. Thou—” François needed the man’s help, and felt that he was risking his own safety. He must at least seem to trust him. “Dost thou mean to arrest Ste. Luce?”
“I do.”
“But when?”
“Oh, in a day or two; no hurry.”
François knew that he was hearing a lie. “Good,” he said. “But I advise thee against violence.”
“There will be none. I control these people. Thou shouldst see; thou shouldst hear me speak.”
“Let us go,” said François, and they returned to the village without a word on either side. The hamlet was quiet. At the priest’s door François said: “Wait for me. I must fetch my bundle and Toto. I left them in the wood.” Pierre would wait. In an hour his ex-partner came back, and before he could knock was admitted by the anxious Jacobin.
When they were within the house, he told François that he lived alone. An old woman cooked for him, and came in the morning and went away at dusk. He, François, should have the garret; and, this being settled, they carried thither cold meats, bread, cheese, wine, and water, so as to provision the thief for a few days. There would be time to talk later. François asked a single question, saying frankly that he had heard Pierre speak to his club. Certainly he had power over the people. What was it he had meant to do, and when? Despard hesitated. Then the cunning of a crumbling mind came to his aid, and he replied lightly:
“We shall wait till Grégoire has gone. I told thee so already. Thy advice was good. I do not know. We shall see—we shall see.” The door closed after him. The man, descending the stair, paused of a sudden, the prey of suspicion. Why did François come hither? Was he a spy of the marquis—of the Convention? He feared François. To one in his state of mind little obstacles seem large, great obstacles small. He must watch him. He was in his power.
The man left within the room was not less suspicious. He hung a cover over the single window, locked the door, and lay down, with Toto at his feet, and at his side his rapier and pistols. He slept a tranquil sleep. Most of the next day he sat at the window, watching through a slit in the curtain the street below him. People came and went; groups gathered about the desecrated church; there was much excitement, but he could hear nothing. At dusk he saw a number of men, some with sticks and pikes, come toward the priest’s house. Owing to his position, he lost sight of them as they came nearer, but from the noise below he presumed them to have entered. He was, for many reasons, indisposed to remain uninformed. He waited. The noise increased. Pierre had not come to visit him, as he had said he would; and where was that much-desired father? He laughed. “Ah, Toto, one must needs be his own papa.” He had gone about all day in his stocking-feet to avoid being overheard. Now he bade Toto be quiet, and, opening the door, went cautiously down the stone stairway. It was quite dark. On the last landing he stood, intently listening. The hallway below was full of men, and evidently the two rooms on the ground floor were as crowded. He overheard Despard’s voice, angry and strenuous. The words he could not catch, but the comments of those in the wide hall were enough. The commissioner was coming, and would interfere. Despard was right. The marquis was about to fly, to emigrate. He must be arrested. They poured out, shouting, tumultuous, to join the excited mob in the street.
François went quickly up the stair. He cared little for the marquis, but he cared much for the pale lady whose face was stamped in his memory. Moreover, all this ruin and threatened bloodshed were not to his mind. A day’s reflection had enabled him to conclude that, between Grégoire and Despard, the situation was perilous, and that he had better disappear from the scene. Meanwhile he would warn the marquis, and then go his way.
He put on his shoes, took his bundle, his arms, and Toto, and, with his cloak on his shoulder, slipped quietly down-stairs. The house was empty. He went out the back way unseen, observing that the church was lighted, and seeing a confused mass of noisy peasants about the door.