Читать книгу The Camisade - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 4

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The good folk of Niort had seen the Royalist army march out of their town in the rosy light of the midsummer dawn. A horde some six or seven thousand strong, they had presented a motley but inspiring spectacle to the moist, admiring eyes of the loyal inhabitants. Most of them in their peasant garb--a garb adopted indeed by many who were not peasants--they thundered along in their wooden shoes, all bearing the device of the red kerchief, the consecrated heart upon their breasts, and the white cockade in their round hats.

In quitting Niort they were falling back before the Republican army under Westermann, dispatched by the Convention to make an end of these brigands, these mutinous yokels who had rebelled against the sacred authority of the nation, and who had snatched up arms for God and King--both of which institutions the Republic had abolished.

So the good folks of Niort had crowded to windows and doorways to cheer and speed them, shouting "Vive le Roi!" until they were hoarse as crows.

That had been at dawn. Now, at sunset, they crowded again to the doors and windows, and again they grew hoarse with shouting. But this time the cry was "Vive le République!" and the army they cheered was a detachment of the Blues under General Canclaux which came swinging into the town to the tune of the "Marsellaise"--a martial, orderly legion, vastly different from that peasant horde. This was Westermann's vanguard, some five thousand strong, sent to hold Niort as an outpost of the main army which lay at Nantes.

In a white-panelled room in a substantial house in the Rue de l'Eglise, Maître Falgoux, the attorney, sat moodily listening to the distant shouts of the crowd; he was short of stature and very slim, and there was something austere in the clear-cut, ascetic, wax-like face, in the grizzled tie-wig, the plain suit of black and steel buckles of his shoes. With him, beyond the table which gleamed faintly in the fading light, sat a young girl, whose eyes, dilated now by a certain dread, were as dark pools in the white oval of her face.

"Canaille!" he said softly, but with unutterable malignity, through teeth that were tight clenched. "Who that had heard them this morning could now believe his ears? Ha!" He laughed short and bitterly. "Long live the King at dawn, and long live the Republic at dusk. The epitome of Frenchmen! Ready to dance to any tune that's piped, ready to feed from any hand, be it clean or dirty."

"It is fear makes them shout now," said the girl, defending them, "not loyalty, as was the case this morning."

But he was not appeased. "Which is to say that they are cowards. And from cowards what can you hope for?"

The door opened and a man entered. He was of middle height, broad, powerfully built and bull-necked, with a swarthy, masterful face that was not without a certain virile beauty.

Maître Falgoux sprang to his feet.

"Well?" he demanded very eagerly. "What news?"

The new-comer advanced. He set his heavy riding-crop and conical hat upon the table, and briefly announced the strength of this Republican detachment which had come to occupy Niort.

"I have all that I remained to learn," he said, "and I have but paused that I might take my leave of you before I rejoin M. de Lescure."

"And shall you tell him also, Cadouin, of the reception which these dogs have given the Republican rabble?" Anger throbbed in the old man's voice.

But Cadouin merely shrugged. "What does it signify? They shout 'Live the Republic!' that their homes may escape violation. In their hearts, maître, they are loyal to us, and when we return--as return we shall, and very soon, to sweep this Republican filth out of Niort--they will cry 'Live the King!' once more and with redoubled energy."

"That is what I have been saying," exclaimed the girl, glad to have her faith confirmed.

He turned to her, and his dark eyes smouldered. He made her a slight, deferentail inclination, which lent a certain courtier-like grace to his clumsy figure. "Then, mademoiselle," he said, "you have proved yourself as wise as you are lovely."

Her eyelids flickered and her glance fell away before his devouring gaze. She drew back a little, beset by a confusion that obviously was not pleasurable. The compliment was gross and clumsy; moreover, her attitude must have made it plain to any man of insight that compliments from this visitor were not desired. But there was no man of insight present. Her father turned slightly aside, as if not to intrude upon what he conceived to be a private matter between his daughter and Cadouin, and occupied himself with his snuff-box.

"I pray you may be right," he said. "But their vile behaviour savours of cowardice, and I do not like cowards."

"Oh, not cowardice, but a wise discretion," said Cadouin, smiling. "Just such a discretion as bids me not to linger here in obedience to my ardent wishes." And again his eyes sought the girl's face, but sought in vain, A slight frown drew his dark brows together. "Already I have perhaps been foolish," he added. "I have risked a deal to come to you, for these Republicans understand organisation, and when they occupy a town they make themselves masters of it indeed. The gates will already be in their hands, and none may pass out whose papers are not in order--who cannot display the civic card."

"Then--" began the other in some alarm,

"Oh, I know what I am doing, Monsieur Falgoux. I do not leave by any of the gates, but by way of your garden and the river. Blaise shall ferry me over, and I will swim my horse. They have not yet had time to post sentries on the farther bank, if, indeed, it has so much as occurred to them." He held out his hand. "Au revoir, then, maître. You shall see me soon again."

Maître Falgoux took the outstretched hand and pressed it warmly.

"Au revoir, my son," he said affectionately. "God guard you!" He turned to his daughter. "Summon Blaise, Madeleine, and then conduct Monsieur Cadouin."

She made no demur, although the task was one she willingly would have escaped. It was not only that Cadouin was himself so utterly distasteful to her, but that she feared how he might profit by this opportunity. Of intent her father did not accompany them; that, too, was plain; and so, having summoned Blaise, she set out across the garden with the old servant and the young Royalist. But this was not at all to the young Royalist's pleasure. He conceived that Blaise's society might very well be foregone, and, being by nature free from foolish hesitancy, he bade the servant go ahead and make ready the boat.

Thereafter he hung back a little, and the twain proceeded slowly through the twilit garden, Cadouin leading his horse.

"I hope, mademoiselle," he said, softly, "that you understand how impossible it would have been for me to have departed without coming to take my leave of you."

"It might have been wiser, monsieur," she replied, feeling that she must say something, and seeking for something that should be neither committal nor yet unkind.

"Wiser, perhaps. But would you have me wise to such a point as this?"

"I would not have you endanger your life unnecessarily, monsieur."

"You care, then, Madeleine? It would grieve you were my life cut short?"

"Naturally, monsieur," she answered, her tone so restrained as to forbid the further pursuit of this theme.

But it was not easy to restrain or rebuff Cadouin. "Yet to have gone without seeing you again merely out of consideration of my safety--why, faith, that were too high a price to pay for safety, I think."

His insistence upon the risks he ran disgusted her a little--and the more since she perceived his boastful hollowness. Yet she desired to be gentle with him.

"You should remember, monsieur, that you have a duty towards the Royalist army, and that to jeopardise your life is not quite to accomplish that duty."

"I was not thinking of duty," said he.

"Then I beg that you will, monsieur," she answered him, and this time there was no mistaking the forbidding asperity of her voice.

If Cadouin was not the man to shirk obstacles, neither was he the man to batter his head against a wall. He was not so unintelligent as not to perceive that the season was unpropitious to his wooing. He assured himself that there was nothing surprising, perhaps, in this, considering the state of nerves in which every woman must be who lives amid such constant marching and counter-marching. So he lapsed into silence, and in silence they came to the edge of the gleaming river where Blaise waited with the boat. Yet at the moment of departure he must revert to his frustrated courtship. He took her hand and held it a moment in his own, never heeding how limply it was surrendered.

"Mademoiselle," he said, insisting upon that note of pathos which he conceived must end by melting her reserve, "you know what the times are. We who part here this evening may never meet again. The countryside is infested by the agents of this execrable Republic. I ride amid danger."

"I will pray Heaven to watch over you, monsieur," she said, but so cold and formally that he dropped her hand, and with a short "Adieu," which sounded more like an expletive than a valediction, he stepped at last into the waiting boat.

She found her father waiting for her in the panelled room, where by now the candles had been set and the shutters closed.

"He got safely away?" he greeted her.

"No doubt," she answered shortly. She drew a chair to the table and sat down.

He raised his eyebrows and scanned her in silence for a moment. "No doubt?" he echoed. "But did you not wait to ascertain?"

"I did not think there was the need. I conducted him to the boat as you bade me."

He closed his snuff-box with a vicious snap. "And you had not the grace to wait to see that he crossed in safety?" he ejaculated with some heat.

"It did not occur to me that there was any danger."

"You exasperate me," he informed her. "This good Cadouin, who is devoted to you, tarries at the risk of his life in a town invested by the Republican rabble merely that he may come to take his leave of you--for you may be sure it was not of me that he was thinking. Just that he may see you again he endangers his neck, and all the gratitude you can find it in your heart to display--"

But she interrupted him. "Monsieur talks too much of his danger," she said. "Brave men do not talk of danger when it exists, still less when it does not."

"When it does not? How when it does not?"

A wan smile crossed her pale face. "The gates of Niort are in the hands of the Republicans. None may pass without presenting a civic card. But on the farther bank of the Sèvre there are yet no Republican sentries. I ask you, then, my father, what risk Monsieur Cadouin incurred in in choosing to come this way?" He was nonplussed for the moment, and she continued: "Yet Monsieur Cadouin, whose only safe way out of Niort lay through our garden and by the river, comes here vaunting himself of the risk he runs to come and take his leave of us."

"Why are you so set against him?" he asked her suddenly, shifting his ground without scruple.

"I am not set against him," she replied. "I am indifferent to him."

"Why?" he insisted, his mouth tight as a trap.

"Because he does not succeed in arousing my regard. Perhaps it is that he makes such clumsy endeavours, and thereby but succeeds in wearying me."

He snorted impatiently. "It is just feminine perversity," said he. "Women are all the same. Their regard is forever bestowed upon worthless good-for-noughts. Here is an honest, upright, God-fearing fellow, a man fairly well born and of some substance, who can give you a good position in the world. He loves you; he wishes to make you his wife. But since he has all the virtues that a woman could desire in a husband he fails to arouse your regard!" he added with infinite scorn, breathing noisily through his thin nostrils. "What is the worth of your regard? A graceless fellow like that sometime apprentice of mine, that good-for-nothing Babylas, aroused it without an effort--a fellow I was constrained to send away because of his idle habits."

She bridled and he perceived it, and perceiving it his anger increased.

"That is not true, my father," she returned. "You did not dismiss him because of his idle habits. You dismissed him because he was poor and because he and I--"

"How?" he stormed, then checked. "So?" he considered her. "And after three years, in which his name has never ben mentioned, it seems that you can still change colour at the sound of it. So! What constancy!" he sneered. Then his pale countenance momentarily flamed. "And that is why Cadouin cannot arouse your regard. Now the truth is out. Now I understand you. You have been deceiving me these three years. Your thoughts have been with that vagabond all the time. You have corresponded with him?" he demanded.

He saw a crimson stain spread from her brow to her neck.

"Not for two years," she answered him in a low voice.

But that her eyes were averted she might have seen the sudden tightening of his lips, the cunning narrowing of his eyes.

"And you don't know what has become of him, perhaps?"

"How should I?"

"I will tell you, then. The last news I had of him--over a year ago--he was a Jacobin, a sansculotte, one of the hungry valetaille that followed at the heels of that ranting rascal Desmoulins in Paris, one of the canaille who have robbed France of her King and seek to rob her of her God."

She rose suddenly, now very white, her eyes seeming larger and more sombre than ever.

"I don't believe it!" she cried out in horror. "Babylas could never have done that."

On the instant a sharp rattling knock fell on the door of the house. Living amid alarms they checked their dispute at once to listen. They heard the door opened, a sound of voices coming gradually nearer, then along the passage rang the jingle of spurs and the clatter of a sabre.

Madeleine clutched her breast in alarm. Her father squared his shoulders to the mantelshelf and faced the door, his head thrown back, his mouth tight.

The door was thrust open, and under the lintel, stooping slightly on account of his height, stood an officer of the Repiblican army in his blue coat with its white facings and crimson epaulettes. In his hand he carried a great cocked hat decked with a tricolour cockade; his black hair was tied in a stiff military club, and his handsome face was smiling gently upon Maître Falgoux and his daughter.

They stared at him oncredulously. The man within that uniform came so aptly upon their talk of him that they might well mistrust the evidence of their eyes.

It was Babylas!