Читать книгу The Wounded Name - D. K. Broster - Страница 5

Soon afterwards he mounted into his English gig, with his English groom behind in charge of his rod and tackle, and drove down the village street in one of the most English of counties. But he was thinking, "A few weeks more, and I shall no longer be Mr. Laurent Courtomer of Keynton House, but M. le Comte de Courtomer in the family mansion that I have never seen in the Faubourg St. Germain where Mesdames Tantes, at least, will be in their element."

For Laurent's three great-aunts, "Mesdames Tantes de Roi," so christened by him on the analogy of those daughters of Louis XV who were thus known in the days of Louis XVI, were of a Royalist and Catholic fervour truly overwhelming. And of course, once in France, they would all, in French fashion, live together—as indeed they almost did now, settled in one small Devonshire village. But at least they were not all under one roof, and Laurent was not quite sure that he was longing for that increased proximity.

He soon pulled up before a door in a red brick wall, and in a few seconds was walking up a tiled path to the habitation of Mesdemoiselles de Courtomer. He knew that he must deliver his note in person, for the Aunts would consider it unpardonable if he merely left it without paying his respects.

The countenance of Augustine, their elderly, precise maid, bore signs of excitement.

"Yes, Monsieur le Comte," she said in response to his query at the door. "Mesdames are within. And they are receiving company."

"Really?" said Laurent. "In the morning?"

"A traveller, Monsieur le Comte. An old acquaintance just come over from France—M. le Baron de Vicq."

Laurent, by now in the hall, with an engraving of Louis XVI mounting the scaffold on one side of him and a bust of the Duc d'Enghien wreathed in immortelles on the other, murmured, "This is indeed great news!" For he seemed to remember having heard that in times inconceivably remote M. de Vicq had been a suitor for the hand of Tante Bonne or was it that he had been a flame of Tante Odile's? And, before he bowed respectfully over the hands of his venerable relatives, he beheld a withered but well-preserved old gentleman (yet younger, surely, by a decade than any of them) rise from a chair at a disappointingly equal distance from all of the old ladies ... from Tante Odile's majestic piety and grey curls, from Tante Clotilde's even greater majesty and even more denuded (and therefore even more imposingly becapped) head, and from the long-faded prettiness of Tante Bonne, the youngest, who wore the smallest cap of any, and the least hideous cameo, and no jet at all, so that Tante Clotilde had more than once been known to accuse this eighty-year-old junior of hers of an ineradicable tendency to levity.

But Tante Clotilde herself had undergone a change since Lady Day, when a fair wind from France had blown so many clouds out of the Royalist sky. Her majesty was not less, her loyalism even more pronounced, but a ribbon of a discreet maroon shade had replaced the black moiré round her cap, and her manner to all and sundry was marked by an unexampled benignancy. So that Laurent, when he had saluted her dry, shrivelled hand with the mourning ring, was almost startled by the sensible favour with which she kissed him on either cheek, for though the greeting was not a novelty, it was often frosty. Tante Clotilde considered that Laurent spoke English too well, and his mother's habit of occasionally calling him Laurence—"a girl's name"—was an abomination to her. But, willy-nilly, her great-nephew would have to be entirely French now.

M. de Vicq, on introduction, made him a bow of another generation, and the young man, having duly delivered his note, was inspired to announce his hope that if the newcomer were staying the night he would give the ladies his escort up to Keynton House; this addition to the party would, he assured him, procure his mother and himself the greatest pleasure. After the proper amount of pressing the old gentleman accepted, and Laurent thereupon began to make efforts to extricate himself from his great-aunts' drawing-room.

But this was not so easy. M. de Vicq, whose fervour appeared to be almost equal to that of the old ladies, had embarked on a rapturous description of the enthusiasm manifested at the entry of the Duc d'Angoulême, the King's nephew, into Bordeaux about three weeks before, the news of which had caused such joyful anticipations in the little court at Hartwell, and since, after all, Laurent was French and on the point of treading French soil, the narration was not devoid of interest. Only it had not the charm of entire novelty, and he would rather have heard it at another time. It must, therefore, have been a rather unfortunate spirit of contradiction which led him to remark that Brittany and Vendée, for all their long and glorious struggle on behalf of monarchy, had not at this particular juncture played much part in the imminent restoration of the royal house.

"Oh, que si, Monsieur!" exclaimed the Baron, shocked; and Tante Clotilde said, "Fie, nephew!" in her deepest voice, and he was assured that under the rule of "the Corsican" more than thirty secondary chiefs had perished in that region for the Cause, and their names began to shower upon him.

"I take back my remark!" cried the young man, laughing. "Besides, after all, mes tantes, you are not mentioning a leader who is alive, which is better. What about that fellow in Brittany—L'Oiseleur, the Fowler, who is always luring the enemy into difficult positions, and who is personally so lucky that he is supposed to possess a charm of some sort? ... Or is that all a myth, and his defence of the burning mill also?"

M. de Vicq almost started from his chair. "What an extraordinary thing that you should speak of L'Oiseleur to-day, Monsieur!" he exclaimed. "No, indeed, he is no myth! I have seen him—I saw him (though for the time I had forgotten it) no later than yesterday, and on the very packet which brought me from Brest to Plymouth."

"The Plymouth packet! Why, what was he doing there?" ejaculated Laurent and the old ladies in the same moment.

"I do not in the least know, Mesdames," replied the visitor, "and as I spent all the time of the voyage most miserably in the cabin below, I knew nothing of our distinguished passenger till we were disembarking at Plymouth. But then, as we were massed on the deck, eager for the shore, I heard a compatriot say, 'That's he—that's L'Oiseleur!'" And so I saw the personage pointed out—a rather stern, rough-looking man of fifty or so, with thick dark hair, somewhat unshorn, a real Chouan type. Greatly moved, I wished to shake him by his heroic hand, but in the press I could not, and I lost sight of him thereafter."

"Owing to his amulet, perhaps," observed Laurent idly. "But I had a notion that he was quite young, this famous fighter, and that he was a gentleman—titled, in fact. Of course I must have been wrong.—Now, if you will excuse me, mes tantes ..."

"Yes, I, too, had previously thought that L'Oiseleur was gently born," said M. de Vicq slowly, "for he bears an old and honoured name—that of La Rocheterie; but this man could not have been a gentleman. Yet that does not prevent—"

"No, indeed!" cried the noble dames, generously waiving the claims of their caste to exclusive leadership. "Think of the great, the sublime, the sainted Cathelineau—a mason's son—"

"Think of Stofflet, a gamekeeper—"

"Think of Cadoudal, think of Guillemot—"

"Think of a salmon!" said Laurent irreverently to himself. And, by concentrating his will-power on that object, he did at last succeed in making his escape.

But as he drove between the high hedges, making for a chosen spot some five miles up the river, he found his mind running, despite himself, on the twenty years of struggle in the never-conquered west of France. He had been too young to take part in its earlier manifestations, and it was only in the last eighteen months or so that these had begun again, often with the formation of bands of "réfractaires," conscripts who would not serve Napoleon, led by gentlemen who equally refused. And among these was this well-nigh legendary "L'Oiseleur," audacious, undefeated, almost invisible, so swiftly and mysteriously did he move and strike—"jeune homme du plus brillant courage, adoré par ses hommes," as Laurent had heard him called. The double encomium was certainly borne out by his famous defence of the mill at Penescouët, where he and eighteen men were said to have kept five hundred Imperialists, troops of the line, at bay for more than four hours, till the soldiers were at last obliged to send for reinforcements, and contrived to burn the place over their heads. And even then the little band had operated a retreat almost more wonderful than their defence.

And now, if M. de Vicq were correct, this gallant fighter was in England, a shaggy, middle-aged peasant, not, after all, the young man of Laurent's own class who had seized the opportunity which he had missed. For it must be rather fine to have contributed by something more than prayers and wishes to restore Louis XVIII to that throne of his ancestors which, in a few weeks, he would almost certainly mount.