The Battle Of The Strong, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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Until she was fifteen Guida's life was unclouded. Once or twice her
mother tried to tell her of a place that must soon be empty, but her
heart failed her. So at last the end came like a sudden wind out of the
north; and it was left to Guida Landresse de Landresse to fight the fight
and finish the journey of womanhood alone.
This time was the turning-point in Guida's life. What her mother had been
to the Sieur de Mauprat, she soon became. They had enough to live on
simply. Every week her grandfather gave her a fixed sum for the
household. Upon this she managed, that the tiny income left by her mother
might not be touched. She shrank from using it yet, and besides, dark
times might come when it would be needed. Death had once surprised her,
but it should bring no more amazement. She knew that M. de Mauprat's days
were numbered, and when he was gone she would be left without one near
relative in the world. She realised how unprotected her position would be
when death came knocking at the door again. What she would do she knew
not. She thought long and hard. Fifty things occurred to her, and fifty
were set aside. Her mother's immediate relatives in France were scattered
or dead. There was no longer any interest at Chambery in the watchmaking
exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone from the beak of the blackbird
of persecution upon one of the Iles de la Manche.
There remained the alternative more than once hinted by the Sieur de
Mauprat as the months grew into years after the mother died--marriage; a
husband, a notable and wealthy husband. That was the magic destiny de
Mauprat figured for her. It did not elate her, it did not disturb her;
she scarcely realised it. She loved animals, and she saw no reason to
despise a stalwart youth. It had been her fortune to know two or three in
the casual, unconventional manner of villages, and there were few in the
land, great or humble, who did not turn twice to look at her as she
passed through the Vier Marchi, so noble was her carriage, so graceful
and buoyant her walk, so lacking in self-consciousness her beauty. More
than one young gentleman of family had been known to ride through the
Place du Vier Prison, hoping to get sight of her, and to offer the view
of a suggestively empty pillion behind him.
She had, however, never listened to flatterers, and only one youth of
Jersey had footing in the cottage. This was Ranulph Delagarde, who had
gone in and out at his will, but that was casually and not too often, and
he was discreet and spoke no word of love. Sometimes she talked to him of
things concerning the daily life with which she did not care to trouble
Sieur de Mauprat. In ways quite unknown to her he had made her life
easier for her. She knew that her mother had thought of Ranulph for her
husband, although she blushed whenever--but it was not often--the idea
came to her. She remembered how her mother had said that Ranulph would be
a great man in the island some day; that he had a mind above all the
youths in St. Heliers; that she would rather see Ranulph a master
ship-builder than a babbling ecrivain in the Rue des Tres Pigeons, a
smirking leech, or a penniless seigneur with neither trade nor talent.
Guida was attracted to Ranulph through his occupation, for she loved
strength, she loved all clean and wholesome trades; that of the mason, of
the carpenter, of the blacksmith, and most of the ship-builder. Her
father, whom she did not remember, had been a ship-builder, and she knew
that he had been a notable man; every one had told her that.
.........................
"She has met her destiny," say the village gossips, when some man in the
dusty procession of life sees a woman's face in the pleasant shadow of a
home, and drops out of the ranks to enter at her doorway.
Was Ranulph to be Guida's destiny?
Handsome and stalwart though he looked as he entered the cottage in the
Place du Vier Prison, on that September morning after the rescue of the
chevalier, his tool-basket on his shoulder, and his brown face enlivened
by one simple sentiment, she was far from sure that he was--far from
sure.
CHAPTER VII
The little hall-way into which Ranulph stepped from the street led
through to the kitchen. Guida stood holding back the door for him to
enter this real living-room of the house, which opened directly upon the
garden behind. It was so cheerful and secluded, looking out from the
garden over the wide space beyond to the changeful sea, that since Madame
Landresse's death the Sieur de Mauprat had made it reception-room,
dining-room, and kitchen all in one. He would willingly have slept there
too, but noblesse oblige and the thought of what the Chevalier Orvilliers
du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir might think prevented him. Moreover, there
was something patriarchal in a kitchen as a reception-room; and both he
and the chevalier loved to watch Guida busy with her household duties: at
one moment her arms in the dough of the kneading trough; at another
picking cherries for a jelly, or casting up her weekly accounts with a
little smiling and a little sighing.
If, by chance, it had been proposed by the sieur to adjourn to the small
sitting-room which looked out upon the Place du Vier Prison, a gloom
would instantly have settled upon them both; though in this little front
room there was an ancient arm-chair, over which hung the sword that the
Comte Guilbert Mauprat de Chambery had used at Fontenoy against the
English.
So it was that this spacious kitchen, with its huge chimney, and paved
with square flagstones and sanded, became like one of those ancient
corners of camaraderie in some exclusive inn where gentlemen of quality
were wont to meet. At the left of the chimney was the great settle, or
veille, covered with baize, "flourished" with satinettes, and spread with
ferns and rushes, and above it a little shelf of old china worth the
ransom of a prince at least. Opposite the doorway were two great
armchairs, one for the sieur and the other for the Chevalier, who made
his home in the house of one Elie Mattingley, a fisherman by trade and by
practice a practical smuggler, with a daughter Carterette whom he loved
passing well.
These, with a few constant visitors, formed a coterie: the huge,
grizzly-bearded boatman, Jean Touzel, who wore spectacles, befriended
smugglers, was approved of all men, and secretly worshipped by his wife;
Amice Ingouville, the fat avocat with a stomach of gigantic proportions,
the biggest heart and the tiniest brain in the world; Maitre Ranulph
Delagarde, and lastly M. Yves Savary dit Detricand, that officer of
Rullecour's who, being released from the prison hospital, when the hour
came for him to leave the country was too drunk to find the shore. By
some whim of negligence the Royal Court was afterwards too lethargic to
remove him, and he stayed on, vainly making efforts to leave between one
carousal and another. In sober hours, none too frequent, he was rather
sorrowfully welcomed by the sieur and the chevalier.
When Ranulph entered the kitchen his greeting to the sieur and the
chevalier was in French, but to Guida he said, rather stupidly in the
patois--for late events had embarrassed him--"Ah bah! es-tu gentiment?"
"Gentiment," she answered, with a queer little smile. "You'll have
breakfast?" she said in English.
"Et ben!" Ranulph repeated, still embarrassed, "a mouthful, that's all."
He laid aside his tool-basket, shook hands with the sieur, and seated
himself at the table. Looking at du Champsavoys, he said:
"I've just met the connetable. He regrets the riot, chevalier, and says
the Royal Court extends its mercy to you."
"I prefer to accept no favours," answered the chevalier. "As a point of
honour, I had thought that, after breakfast, I should return to prison,
and--"
"The connetable said it was cheaper to let the chevalier go free than to
feed him in the Vier Prison," dryly explained Ranulph, helping himself to
roasted conger eel and eyeing hungrily the freshly-made black butter
Guida was taking from a wooden trencher. "The Royal Court is stingy," he
added. "'It's nearer than Jean Noe, who got married in his red
queminzolle,' as we say on Jersey--"
But he got no further at the moment, for shots rang out suddenly before
the house. They all started to their feet, and Ranulph, running to the
front door, threw it open. As he did so a young man, with blood flowing
from a cut on the temple, stepped inside.
CHAPTER VIII
It was M. Savary dit Detricand.
"Whew--what fools there are in the world! Pish, you silly apes!" the
young man said, glancing through the open doorway again to where the
connetable's men were dragging two vile-looking ruffians into the Vier
Prison.
"What's happened, monsieur?" said Ranulph, closing the door and bolting
it.
"What was it, monsieur?" asked Guida anxiously, for painful events had
crowded too fast that morning. Detricand was stanching the blood at his
temple with the scarf from his neck.
"Get him some cordial, Guida--he's wounded!" said de Mauprat.
Detricand waved a hand almost impatiently, and dropped upon the veille,
swinging a leg backwards and forwards.
"It's nothing, I protest--nothing whatever, and I'll have no cordial, not
a drop. A drink of water--a mouthful of that, if I must drink."
Guida caught up a hanap of water from the dresser, and passed it to him.
Her fingers trembled a little. His were steady enough as he took the
hanap and drank off the water at a gulp. Again she filled it and again he
drank. The blood was running in a tiny little stream down his cheek. She
caught her handkerchief from her girdle impulsively, and gently wiped it
away.
"Let me bandage the wound," she said eagerly. Her eyes were alight with
compassion, certainly not because it was the dissipated French invader,
M. Savary dit Detricand,--no one knew that he was the young Comte de
Tournay of the House of Vaufontaine, but because he was a wounded
fellow-creature. She would have done the same for the poor beganne, Dormy
Jamais, who still prowled the purlieus of St. Heliers.
It was clear, however, that Detricand felt differently. The moment she
touched him he became suddenly still. He permitted her to wash the blood
from his temple and forehead, to stanch it first with brandied
jeru-leaves, then with cobwebs, and afterwards to bind it with her own
kerchief.
Detricand thrilled at the touch of the warm, tremulous fingers. He had
never been quite so near her before. His face was not far from hers. Now
her breath fanned him. As he bent his head for the bandaging, he could
see the soft pulsing of her bosom, and hear the beating of her heart. Her
neck was so full and round and soft, and her voice--surely he had never
heard a voice so sweet and strong, a tone so well poised, so resonantly
pleasant.
When she had finished, he had an impulse to catch the hand as it dropped
away from his forehead, and kiss it; not as he had kissed many a hand,
hotly one hour and coldly the next, but with an unpurchasable kind of
gratitude characteristic of this especial sort of sinner. He was just
young enough, and there was still enough natural health in him, to know
the healing touch of a perfect decency, a pure truth of spirit. Yet he
had been drunk the night before, drunk with three noncommissioned
officers--and he a gentleman, in spite of all, as could be plainly seen.
He turned his head away from the girl quickly, and looked straight into
the eyes of her grandfather.
"I'll tell you how it was, Sieur de Mauprat," said he. "I was crossing
the Place du Vier Prison when a rascal threw a cleaver at me from a
window. If it had struck me on the head--well, the Royal Court would have
buried me, and without a slab to my grave like Rullecour. I burst open
the door of the house, ran up the stairs, gripped the ruffian, and threw
him through the window into the street. As I did so a door opened behind,
and another cut-throat came at me with a pistol. He fired--fired wide. I
ran in on him, and before he had time to think he was out of the window
too. Then the other brute below fired up at me. The bullet gashed my
temple, as you see. After that, it was an affair of the connetable and
his men. I had had enough fighting before breakfast. I saw your open
door, and here I am--monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, mademoiselle!" He
bowed to each of them and glanced towards the table hungrily.
Ranulph placed a seat for him. He viewed the conger eel and limpets with
an avid eye, but waited for the chevalier and de Mauprat to sit. He had
no sooner taken a mouthful, however, and thrown a piece of bread to
Biribi the dog, than, starting again to his feet, he said:
"Your pardon, monsieur le chevalier, that brute in the Place has knocked
all sense from my head! I've a letter for you, brought from Rouen by one
of the refugees who came yesterday." He drew from his breast a packet and
handed it over. "I went out to their ship last night."
The chevalier looked with surprise and satisfaction at the seal on the
letter, and, breaking it, spread open the paper, fumbled for the
eye-glass which he always carried in his waistcoat, and began reading
diligently.
Meanwhile Ranulph turned to Guida. "To-morrow Jean Touzel and his wife
and I go to the Ecrehos Rocks in Jean's boat," said he. "A vessel was
driven ashore there three days ago, and my carpenters are at work on her.
If you can go and the wind holds fair, you shall be brought back safe by
sundown--Jean says so too."
Of all boatmen and fishermen on the coast, Jean Touzel was most to be
trusted. No man had saved so many shipwrecked folk, none risked his life
so often; and he had never had a serious accident. To go to sea with Jean
Touzel, folk said, was safer than living on land. Guida loved the sea;
and she could sail a boat, and knew the tides and currents of the south
coast as well as most fishermen.
M. de Mauprat met her inquiring glance and nodded assent. She then said
gaily to Ranulph: "I shall sail her, shall I not?"
"Every foot of the way," he answered.
She laughed and clapped her hands. Suddenly the little chevalier broke
in. "By the head of John the Baptist!" said he.
Detricand put down his knife and fork in amazement, and Guida coloured,
for the words sounded almost profane upon the chevalier's lips.
Du Champsavoys held up his eye-glass, and, turning from one to the other,
looked at each of them imperatively yet abstractedly too. Then, pursing
up his lower lip, and with a growing amazement which carried him to
distant heights of reckless language, he said again:
"By the head of John the Baptist on a charger!" He looked at Detricand
with a fierceness which was merely the tension of his thought. If he had
looked at a wall it would have been the same. But Detricand, who had an
almost whimsical sense of humour, felt his neck in affected concern as
though to be quite sure of it. "Chevalier," said he, "you shock us--you
shock us, dear chevalier."
"The most painful things, and the most wonderful too," said the
chevalier, tapping the letter with his eye-glass; "the most terrible and
yet the most romantic things are here. A drop of cider, if you please,
mademoiselle, before I begin to read it to you, if I may--if I may--eh?"
They all nodded eagerly. Guida handed him a mogue of cider. The little
grey thrush of a man sipped it, and in a voice no bigger than a bird's
began:
"From Lucillien du Champsavoys, Comte de Chanier, by the hand of a
faithful friend, who goeth hence from among divers dangers, unto my
cousin, the Chevalier du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir, late Gentleman
of the Bedchamber to the best of monarchs, Louis XV, this writing:
"MY DEAR AND HONOURED Cousin"--The chevalier paused, frowned a
trifle, and tapped his lips with his finger in a little lyrical
emotion--"My dear and honoured cousin, all is lost. The France we
loved is no more. The twentieth of June saw the last vestige of
Louis's power pass for ever. That day ten thousand of the
sans-culottes forced their way into the palace to kill him. A faithful
few surrounded him. In the mad turmoil, we were fearful, he was
serene. 'Feel,' said Louis, placing his hand on his bosom, 'feel
whether this is the beating of a heart shaken by fear.' Ah, my
friend, your heart would have clamped in misery to hear the Queen
cry: 'What have I to fear? Death? it is as well to-day as
to-morrow; they can do no more!' Their lives were saved, the day
passed, but worse came after.
"The tenth of August came. With it too, the end-the dark and bloody
end-of the Swiss Guard. The Jacobins had their way at last. The
Swiss Guard died in the Court of the Carrousel as they marched to
the Assembly to save the King. Thus the last circle of defence
round the throne was broken. The palace was given over to flame and
the sword. Of twenty nobles of the court I alone escaped. France
is become a slaughter-house. The people cried out for more liberty,
and their liberators gave them the freedom of death. A fortnight
ago, Danton, the incomparable fiend, let loose his assassins upon
the priests of God. Now Paris is made a theatre where the people
whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every
street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a
vast charnel-house. One last revolting thing alone remains to be
done--the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved
will have no name and no place in our generation. She will rise
again, but we shall not see her, for our eyes have been blinded with
blood, for ever darkened by disaster. Like a mistress upon whom we
have lavished the days of our youth and the strength of our days,
she has deceived us; she has stricken us while we slept. Behold a
Caliban now for her paramour!
"Weep with me, for France despoils me. One by one my friends have
fallen beneath the axe. Of my four sons but one remains. Henri was
stabbed by Danton's ruffians at the Hotel de Ville; Gaston fought
and died with the Swiss Guard, whose hacked and severed limbs were
broiled and eaten in the streets by these monsters who mutilate the
land. Isidore, the youngest, defied a hundred of Robespierre's
cowards on the steps of the Assembly, and was torn to pieces by the
mob. Etienne alone is left. But for him and for the honour of my
house I too would find a place beside the King and die with him.
Etienne is with de la Rochejaquelein in Brittany. I am here at
Rouen.
"Brittany and Normandy still stand for the King. In these two
provinces begins the regeneration of France: we call it the War of
the Vendee. On that Isle of Jersey there you should almost hear the
voice of de la Rochejaquelein and the marching cries of our loyal
legions. If there be justice in God we shall conquer. But there
will be joy no more for such as you or me, nor hope, nor any peace.
We live only for those who come after. Our duty remains, all else
is dead. You did well to go, and I do well to stay.
"By all these piteous relations you shall know the importance of the
request I now set forth.
"My cousin by marriage of the House of Vaufontaine has lost all his
sons. With the death of the Prince of Vaufontaine, there is in
France no direct heir to the house, nor can it, by the law, revert
to my house or my heirs. Now of late the Prince hath urged me to
write to you--for he is here in seclusion with me--and to unfold to
you what has hitherto been secret. Eleven years ago the only nephew
of the Prince, after some naughty escapades, fled from the Court
with Rullecour the adventurer, who invaded the Isle of Jersey. From
that hour he has been lost to France. Some of his companions in
arms returned after a number of years. All with one exception
declared that he was killed in the battle at St. Heliers. One,
however, maintains that he was still living and in the prison
hospital when his comrades were set free.
"It is of him I write to you. He is--as you will perchance
remember--the Comte de Tournay. He was then not more than seventeen
years of age, slight of build, with brownish hair, dark grey eyes,
and had over the right shoulder a scar from a sword thrust. It
seemeth little possible that, if living, he should still remain in
that Isle of Jersey. He may rather have returned to obscurity in
France or have gone to England to be lost to name and remembrance
--or even indeed beyond the seas.
"That you may perchance give me word of him is the object of my
letter, written in no more hope than I live; and you can well guess
how faint that is. One young nobleman preserved to France may yet
be the great unit that will save her.
"Greet my poor countrymen yonder in the name of one who still waits
at a desecrated altar; and for myself you must take me as I am, with
the remembrance of what I was, even
"Your faithful friend and loving kinsman,
"CHANIER."
"All this, though in the chances of war you read it not till
wintertide, was told you at Rouen this first day of September 1792."
During the reading, broken by feeling and reflective pauses on the
chevalier's part, the listeners showed emotion after the nature of each.
The Sieur de Mauprat's fingers clasped and unclasped on the top of his
cane, little explosions of breath came from his compressed lips, his
eyebrows beetled over till the eyes themselves seemed like two glints of
flame. Delagarde dropped a fist heavily upon the table, and held it there
clinched, while his heel beat a tattoo of excitement upon the floor.
Guida's breath came quick and fast--as Ranulph said afterwards, she was
"blanc comme un linge." She shuddered painfully when the slaughter and
burning of the Swiss Guards was read. Her brain was so swimming with the
horrors of anarchy that the latter part of the letter dealing with the
vanished Count of Tournay passed by almost unheeded.
But this particular matter greatly interested Ranulph and de Mauprat.
They leaned forward eagerly, seizing every word, and both instinctively
turned towards Detricand when the description of de Tournay was read.
As for Detricand himself, he listened to the first part of the letter
like a man suddenly roused out of a dream. For the first time since the
Revolution had begun, the horror of it and the meaning of it were brought
home to him. He had been so long expatriated, had loitered so long in the
primrose path of daily sleep and nightly revel, had fallen so far, that
he little realised how the fiery wheels of Death were spinning in France,
or how black was the torment of her people. His face turned scarlet as
the thing came home to him now. He dropped his head in his hand as if to
listen more attentively, but it was in truth to hide his emotion. When
the names of Vaufontaine and de Tournay were mentioned, he gave a little
start, then suddenly ruled himself to a strange stillness. His face
seemed presently to clear; he even smiled a little. Conscious that de
Mauprat and Delagarde were watching him, he appeared to listen with a
keen but impersonal interest, not without its effect upon his
scrutinisers. He nodded his head as though he understood the situation.
He acted very well; he bewildered the onlookers. They might think he
tallied with the description of the Comte de Tournay, yet he gave the
impression that the matter was not vital to himself. But when the little
Chevalier stopped and turned his eye-glass upon him with sudden startled
inquiry, he found it harder to keep composure.
"Singular--singular!" said the old man, and returned to the reading of
the letter.
When he ended there was absolute silence for a moment. Then the chevalier
lifted his eye-glass again and looked at Detricand intently.
"Pardon me, monsieur," he said, "but you were with Rullecour--as I was
saying."
Detricand nodded with a droll sort of helplessness, and answered: "In
Jersey I never have chance to forget it, Chevalier."
Du Champsavoys, with a naive and obvious attempt at playing counsel,
fixed him again with the glass, pursed his lips, and with the importance
of a greffier at the ancient Cour d'Heritage, came one step nearer to his
goal.
"Have you knowledge of the Comte de Tournay, monsieur?"
"I knew him--as you were saying, Chevalier," answered Detricand lightly.
Then the Chevalier struck home. He dropped his fingers upon the table,
stood up, and, looking straight into Detricand's eyes, said:
"Monsieur, you are the Comte de Tournay!"
The Chevalier involuntarily held the silence for an instant. Nobody
stirred. De Mauprat dropped his chin upon his hands, and his eyebrows
drew down in excitement. Guida gave a little cry of astonishment. But
Detricand answered the Chevalier with a look of blank surprise and a
shrug of the shoulder, which had the effect desired.
"Thank you, Chevalier," said he with quizzical humour. "Now I know who I
am, and if it isn't too soon to levy upon the kinship, I shall dine with
you today, chevalier. I paid my debts yesterday, and sous are scarce, but
since we are distant cousins I may claim grist at the family mill, eh?"