Читать книгу The Wounded Name - D. K. Broster - Страница 8

As Laurent de Courtomer tied his stock that evening in his own bedroom, he was both thoughtful and excited. To fall into the river and narrowly escape drowning, to have a total stranger risk his life for him over it, to discover that the stranger in question was someone he knew about and admired, and, finally, to possess him at the moment as a guest under his own roof—these were sufficient reasons why the stock should be well tied ... and sufficient excuse for the fact that it was not.

Nor had Laurent quite shaken off the shyness which had unexpectedly descended upon him when he was driving home from the Three Trouts with L'Oiseleur beside him—that sudden hot conviction that he, with nothing to his credit, had been chattering too freely to this young hero. Had or had not M. de la Rocheterie seemed a little remote, a little withdrawn, during that drive?

A knock at the door, interrupting these cogitations, heralded the entrance of Mme de Courtomer, looking charming but pale. Laurent's heart smote him as he turned round from the dressing-table. She kissed him long and closely; she had not yet got over her emotion.

"I am just going down to the drawing-room, my darling," she said. "I hope M. de la Rocheterie may be there; I want to see him alone. When you brought him to me in the garden I was, I fear, rather selfishly absorbed in thoughts of you and your danger."

Laurent nodded. "He tried to make me promise not to mention what he did, but of course—"

"An absolute stranger, Laurent! And such a risk! I cannot get accustomed to the idea!"

Like her son, Mme de Courtomer seemed a firm believer in the theory of "intention." Yet it had already been made perfectly clear to her by M. de la Rocheterie himself that he had in no sense saved Laurent's life.

"Maman," said Laurent, putting his arm round her, "if you can't get some more colour into those cheeks I shall not eat any dinner. Dearest, dearest little mother, I did not do it on purpose!—See now, I am going to kiss them very hard.... That's a trifle better! Now go down and thank M. de la Rocheterie for spoiling a very elegant suit of clothes—if he gives you the chance. Unless I have gauged him wrongly, you will not get very far."

"There is one thing that comforts me, Laurent," said Virginia de Courtomer, "and that is, that you would have done just the same in similar circumstances."

"Perhaps," replied her son. "But not so quickly!"

The enlightenment of M. de Vicq and the old ladies that evening was indeed great fun, only it was too soon over, and Laurent was a little afraid of embarrassing his guest, who seemed genuinely averse from anything resembling posing or display. But, probably just because he was so free from self-consciousness and so simply dignified, he took the ensuing adulation lightly, and yet with a fine courtesy as if he were aware that he was a young man receiving the homage of the old. If he found the worshippers a little absurd, he did not betray it. The impression which he had produced on Tante Clotilde, even before she realized whom the "Monsieur le Vicomte de la Rocheterie" of Laurent's introduction cloaked, was marked by her making him the suggestion of a curtsey of fifty years ago, with all Versailles behind it—an honour which no Englishman ever received from her. And M. de la Rocheterie had kissed her hand in a manner which also had tradition behind it. Yet more important to Laurent, really, than the unqualified success of his little coup de théâtre, than the joy of being able to whisper to M. de Vicq, "I expect you think, Monsieur, that L'Oiseleur has shaved since you saw him last? I expect he has—but not to that extent!" was his mother's murmur to him, just before they went in to supper. "Your Chouan has already enslaved me, Laurent, I think he is charming!"

But now supper was going forward, and M. de la Rocheterie was making obvious efforts to efface himself, to avoid being what he had become, the centre of the little festivity. But with everybody determined to make him so, it was impossible to get out of the position. First of all, M. de Vicq's mistake of the packet had to be explained. It appeared that L'Oiseleur had come over in it, and that he had heard another passenger being pointed out as himself, "which," as he added with a little smile, "enabled me to escape an attention that I had then no idea I should encounter."

"Ah, Vicomte," interposed Tante Clotilde significantly at this, "you are doubtless in England—am I indiscreet?—on the King's business?"

One felt it almost needed courage to reply, as L'Oiseleur did, "No, Madame; on a purely private matter." However, Tante Clotilde's large face wore the air of one who "knows better."

"I think," said M. de Vicq, then addressing him, "that I once had the pleasure, a few years ago, of meeting a gentleman of your name—a good deal older than you, however. Your father, perhaps?"

The young man's face changed subtly. "My father was guillotined with my mother, during the Terror, Monsieur."

It only needed this avowal to complete his prestige in the eyes of the Aunts. A ripple of emotion went round.

"Where did you meet M. de la Rocheterie, did you say, Laurent?" enquired Tante Clotilde when she had contributed to it.

"In the river, ma tante."

The old lady looked severe, for she did not like being jested with. "Please express yourself more accurately, great-nephew!" So Laurent elaborated, without changing, his statement.

On the heels of the ensuing sensation M. de Vicq asked suddenly whether it was true that the guest possessed, or was popularly supposed to possess, a talisman of some kind.

"Quite true, Monsieur," responded L'Oiseleur soberly. "I really have it—a magic garter, or jartier, as the common folk call it." Then he caught Laurent's eye, and smiled. "But its virtue is, of course, all nonsense."

"The popular voice, in short, ascribes to the possession of a charm what is in reality due solely to your own skill and valour!" observed M. de Vicq rather sententiously, but pointing this remark as a compliment by a bow.

"I did not mean that!" said Aymar de la Rocheterie, looking for the first time a trifle disconcerted. "And I spoke too strongly, for undoubtedly my possession of the jartier has influenced my men and given them confidence—they are exceedingly superstitious—so in that way the thing has its value. That is, in fact, why I wear it."

"And how did you acquire this jartier?" enquired Tante Clotilde massively.

"A witch gave it to me, Madame."

"A witch—a real witch!" exclaimed his hostess. "Oh, how, Monsieur de la Rocheterie—and why?"

"The 'why' makes rather a long story, Madame."

"We shall hope to hear it, then, after supper," announced Mlle Clotilde de Courtomer in a tone that seemed to settle the whole matter.

"And, perhaps, the whole story of the Moulin Brûlé too?" hazarded M. de Vicq; but L'Oiseleur shook his head with a little smile.

Mme de Courtomer looked from one to the other. "What was the Moulin Brûlé?" she enquired of the old gentleman in a low voice.

But it was Tante Clotilde who replied for him. "My dear Virginia—really!—before the hero of Penescouët himself! The details which reached us of that exploit were, I doubt not, inadequate, but surely we all treasure them too securely in our memories to ask 'What was the Moulin Brûlé'?"

Poor Mme de Courtomer, thus brought to book at her own table, before and on account of her guest, flushed, M. de la Rocheterie bit his lip and looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and Laurent's anger was kindled.

"You forget, I think, ma tante," he said as politely as he could, "that my mother, after all, is not French by birth; and it is quite plain that no one can have told her the story, for it is not one which she could ever have forgotten."

"Quite so—very well said!" put in M. de Vicq hastily, and he gallantly monopolized the old lady's attention while the awkward wave in the conversation caused by the boulder she had cast into it spent itself. Indeed Laurent, looking down the table after a moment's silent fight with his annoyance, was relieved to find that the "hero of Penescouët" was smiling delightfully at his hostess, and heard her say, smiling, too, "Will you ever be able to forgive me, Monsieur de la Rocheterie?"

"Madame," replied L'Oiseleur, "you cannot conceive what a relief it is to find that there is one fortunate being in Royalist circles who has not been pestered with the tale of that detestable old windmill! I sometimes wish I had never seen the place!"

When the ladies, following English custom, had left them, M. de Vicq drew in his chair and concentrated his attention on his fellow-guest.

"I remember the Vendée, of course," he remarked, "and the great days of the Chouannerie, Cadoudal's days. You are too young to recall them, Monsieur—but you have relit the sacred fire!"

"No—only fanned the embers," said L'Oiseleur quickly. "The fire is always there. The Breton does not change. Indeed, some of mine are identically the same as those of the great days. And one has the same devotion to rely on, the same obstinacy to combat, the same superstitions to use or respect, and the same kind of warfare."

"That warfare of hedgerows and heather of which one has heard," put in Laurent, his chin on his hands, "and which needs, I imagine, a special aptitude."

"I suppose it does. At any rate, it is the only kind which the Breton really understands. You have to be always on the move; if you have very few men, as I had—at least at the beginning, when I started with twenty-five—that is easy. And if you keep moving you are not only invisible, but the enemy thinks your numbers are much greater than they are. I have never had more than six hundred men, but they were all picked, and if I had told any one of them to go immediately and cut off his hand the only delay would have been the finding of the chopper.... Well, that is all over now. I suppose I ought to say, Thank God. I do say it—but one does not like parting from one's comrades."

"You have disbanded them, then?"

"Not yet. But I shall do so directly the King is actually in Paris."

"The King in Paris!" exclaimed the Baron de Vicq in a rapt tone. And he began a loyal reverie on that theme, to which the two young men listened with becoming patience. Then he reverted somewhat abruptly to the question of L'Oiseleur's amulet, and asked so many questions about it, that in the end M. de la Rocheterie, beginning, Laurent fancied, to be slightly bored, offered to show it to him, and, while M. de Vicq murmured delightedly, "Monsieur, you are really too obliging!" took off his coat with an apology to his host and turned up the sleeve of his fine shirt.

Laurent, leaning back on his chair, his hands behind his head, looked on amused. Little exclamations broke from the old Royalist as, spectacles on nose, he bent over the table and scrutinized the circlet closely. "And that is really the fairy garter of the legend—dear, dear, how wonderful! After all these years ... so fresh and well-preserved ... there must be something in it, after all! It is indeed to be hoped, Monsieur, that you will never lose that!"

The owner of the jartier, with his bare arm stretched out before him on the mahogany, caught his host's eye over the grey head. "Yes, as you say, Monsieur, remarkably well-preserved!" And Laurent, smiling back, had a delightful sense of complicity with him. He was not going to tell the old fellow what he had told him!

"My last doubts are removed," murmured M. de Vicq, taking off his spectacles. "Now I know that I really have shaken L'Oiseleur and no other by the hand!"

The bearer of that name, who was turning down his shirt-sleeve, stopped, and flushed very slightly.

"Why, Monsieur, did you think I was an impostor?" he demanded. "Was that why you wanted to see the thing?" And he looked at the old gentleman very straight and challengingly.

Poor M. de Vicq, meeting the spark he had so tactlessly struck out, confounded himself in apologies; on which M. de la Rocheterie, evidently quickly penitent, but still with a little air not free from hauteur, begged his pardon for having suspected his motive, and, peace being restored, their young host suggested that they should join the ladies.

"Very interesting, that," he thought as he opened the door. "So he's got a hot temper under that quiet exterior of his! I think that, for all his modesty and charm, I should be sorry to take liberties with M. le Vicomte de la Rocheterie!"