3*B*tf*£'-J-'
CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
GIFT OF
Nixon Griffis
Cornell University Library
The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library.
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http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013585108
THE GIRONDIN
" Girondin : a native of, or deputy from, the Department of the Gironde, France " (Dictionary)
By HILAIRE BELLOC
^
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
LEEDS, AND NEW YORK
LEIPZIG : 35-37 Konigstrasse. PARIS : 61, rue des Saints-Peres
First published in 1911
TO
THE HORSES
PACTE and BASILIQUE
NOW WITH THEIR FATHER JOVE
Ov p.\v yd.p ri 7rou bjtJv 6'C{i)pdmpov avSpbs IIovtuv, ocnra re yaiav cirwrceiet rt xal Ipwei.
CONTENTS
I. In which the Girondin finishes Dinner . 7 II. In which the Girondin talks Politics . . 21
III. In which the Sovereign People play the Fool 39
IV. In which the Girondin fences too hard and
too long 59
V. In which several Lies are told in an Inn . 82 VI. In which a Postilion goes Mad . . .104 VII. In which a Sack of Charcoal is taken and
a Girl is left 122
VIII. In which a Sack of Charcoal is left and a
Girl is taken 137
IX. In which a Lover finds himself in the Dark 150 X. In which two Lovers find themselves in the
Daylight 164
XI. Showing how Men become Soldiers . .180 XII. Showing how Soldiers are not always so . 203 XIII. In which the Girondin, though by no means yet a Soldier, becomes very certainly a Ser- geant ; and in which a Chivalrous Fellow strikes a Blow for the Crown . . 219
vi CONTENTS.
XIV. Showing the Advantage there is for a German, in the Profession of Arms, that he should know the French Tongue . . . 239 XV. In which an Ostler is too Political . . 258 XVI. In which the Brethren of Equality and Fra- ternity are led to behave in a Manner most Unfraternal and Inequitable; and in which the Children of Light are un- mercifully Bamboozled .... 268 XVII. In which an Old Gentleman shows the Way
to an Old Lady 281
XVIII. In which an Old Lady shows the Way to a
Young Gentleman . . . .291
XIX. In which it Rains 307
XX In which it goes on Raining . . .321
XXI. Valmy 332
XXII. Which shows the Disagreeables attendant
upon the Use of Amateur Drivers in the
Conduct of Artillery; especially when
they are pressed for Time . . 353
XXIII. In which the Girondin complains of the
Weather 363
THE GIRONDIN.
CHAPTER I.
In which the Girondin finishes Dinner.
TN the year 1792 and in the month of August, in the early days of that month (to be accurate, upon the eighth), M. Boutroux, a wine merchant of some substance and of a singularly settled demeanour, sat at table in the town of Bordeaux, which was the seat of his extensive business.
The house in which the table was served was one of the old merchant houses overlooking the central quays of the city ; the windows of the room where he sat at meat (without lights, for the hour was early and the summer sky still bright) looked up and down stream over some miles of the noble river which nourishes the town.
8 THE GIRONDIN.
M. Boutroux sat at dinner. The table was of chestnut wood ; there was no cloth upon it : it was polished, and reflected good massive silver, the tints of early fruits, and the glistening of a decanter of dessert wine. At the end of the table his wife, a little, thin woman, erect and intensely prim, sat gingerly. The only other person seated there was his nephew, by name Georges, in age but twenty years, large in build, long in leg, dressed foppishly but rather negli- gently, and sitting in his carved chair, which faced the windows and the cool air of the river, more at ease and with less dignity than did his relatives.
He was not sullen, but he was bored, and the reason of his boredom was that M. Boutroux, his uncle, had for now more than twenty-five minutes very carefully detailed to him his lapses from right conduct, and the grievous burden that he had made himself to the household. His brown Gascon face with its crisped and curled black hair was half framed in his right hand as he leaned his head upon it, listening to the interminable harangue.
That speech had begun, as usual, with family history. The old gentleman had sighed over the unbusiness-like ways of the boy's dead father ;
THE GIRONDIN. 9
he had discreetly deplored the poverty of Georges' dead mother ; he had further deplored his own childlessness — for Georges was now his only heir. Next he had proceeded to his regular catalogue of the various social ranks of the town, and had introduced into that history, by way of re- frain, a comparison between himself, the solid merchant, and that very vile class of young, town nobility who, having next to nothing, and' never working, spent continually and were for* ever in debt — lacking probity and the proper virtues for which the Boutroux had now since the sixteenth century been renowned. He was careful to mention several names which he knew to be those of Georges' companions.
M. Boutroux the elder, stiff in a sky-blue coat with silver buttons, gorgeous at the neck with puffed lace, and a very handsome old man under his plain white tie-wig (which he thought the proper and dignified head-dress of a roturier), was willing to admit that the extravagances of his nephew had not yet bitten into the capital of the family fortune. Had he thought it useful to tell the truth (and Georges well knew it) it had not bitten into a month of the family income nor into a week of it. But M. Boutroux
the elder thought it necessary to enlarge. It
la
io THE GIRONDIN.
had of late become something of an amusement with him, and the indifference of his nephew to these remonstrances — an indifference only diver- sified by occasional respectful epigrams — exasper- ated him.
When he had done with the debts he turned to a more serious matter, and with a change of tone informed his heir that the shocking alliance which he had heard of from others must be at once and finally dismissed from his mind ; to which decisive sentence, uttered now perhaps for the fifteenth time upon as many successive days, Madame Boutroux added a singularly de- cisive assent.
"I require you, Georges," said his uncle in the tone of a judge delivering sentence, "to put the matter wholly out of your thoughts."
"I have never entertained it," said Georges, gazing out before him upon the shipping at the quays, and replying as he had already replied as often as his uncle had thus spoken.
" If you have entertained it," said M. Boutroux, senior, " dismiss it for ever from your mind."
"It has been entertained," said Georges, as wearily as youth would permit him to speak, "to my certain knowledge by .the young lady's mother and brother and by her sister who keeps
THE GIRONDIN. u
the little coffee-stall near the bridge, I have lately learned that, her confessor entertains it also ; and from what I can make out, my dear uncle, you entertain it more fixedly than any of them. Though why you should do so, since it is not to your advantage but to theirs, I can- not for a moment conceive."
" Georges," said his aunt, "you are lacking in respect to your uncle."
" Yes, dear aunt," said Georges, " but still more do I lack respect and even tolerance for the sister who keeps the coffee-stall by the bridge, the mother, the brother, and the confessors—against whom I have a very special grievance."
" You must not reply thus to your aunt," said M. Boutrpux with severity.
"I would not, my uncle," said Georges in a submissive tone, " had I not already so replied to the brother, to the sister who keeps the coffee-stall by the bridge, and more particularly to that very odious man the confessor, whom I verily believe to be in expectation of a commission upon the settlements."
M These are not the times, Georges," said his fj aunt, " in which to ridicule the priesthood." '
"I admit," said Georges penitently, "that it was not very chivalrous of me, since the poor man
12 THE GIRONDIN.
has now for some weeks been hiding in a cellar which is the property of the mother ; but you must set against this my considerable courage in speaking so frankly against the mother, who is no better than she should be, the young lady who keeps the coffee-stall, who is no better than she can be, and above all the brother, who I am very sorry to say is a patriot."
"We do not want you, Georges," said his uncle, " to introduce politics into what is a purely family matter."
" No," said Georges, " nor need they be intro- duced if we can only keep the brother out of it. A more ardent politician I never met ! "
After this reply there was a short silence. Georges occupied it in watching a large pilot cutter set out down the tide for the bar under the evening light. He was amused to see the halyard block jam as they put her down stream, and he remarked to himself half aloud, so that his uncle might hear it, that from the way the people on board were handling the sails they appeared to be patriots also.
"You will not," said old Monsieur Boutroux sternly, " divert my attention from this matter by your jests. Where is the unfortunate girl ? "
" Alas ! " said Georges with a sigh, " it is my
THE GIROND1N. 13
perpetual concern that I do not know. From the gaiety and attractions of the place, Libourne has often occurred to me as being the probable sanctuary of her refuge ; or possibly Barsac, for, young as she was, she was always a little too fond of wine."
" You do not know her direction ? " asked his aunt a little suspiciously.
"Not for the moment, dear aunt," answered Georges with respect, cutting an apple upon his plate into four quarters, and leaning over it thoughtfully as though the task engrossed him. "Not for the moment. . . . But, oddly enough, she knows mine. I could wish that our responsi- bilities were more equally divided."
Having said this he pursed his lips, compressed them, firmly enclosed the four quarters of the apple in the pressure of his left hand, and with a silver knife of nice workmanship, the handle of which terminated in a delicately chiselled faun's head, he cut the apple transversely and let the eight parts fall upon his plate. At these he gazed with open and rather sad eyes as upon a ruined world.
His uncle could bear no more. Whatever entertainment he received from these daily excur- sions, he would not tolerate further impertinence.
i4 THE GIRONDIN.
" You will find," he said a little grimly, rising up stiffly from his chair and pushing it back from him, while the family etiquette demanded that his wife and nephew should rise at the same time, "that this flippant habit of yours will ruin you with men less indulgent than myself."
He took the napkin from his neck, folded it carefully, and watched his nephew do the same, while Madame Boutroux made the sign of the cross discreetly upon her black silk bodice, and having done so, smoothed her thin black hair from her forehead upon either side of the parting thereof. Georges was silent. He made for the door.
" Are you going out again, Georges ? " said his uncle threateningly.
" My dear uncle," said Georges, looking at the ground, "yes. I am determined to settle matters once for all with the young lady of the coffee-stall, though I confess I dare not meet her mother nor the clerical gentleman whom she harbours in the cellar, which is the property of the family."
"You know that our friends from Laborde come this evening ? " said his aunt.
As she spoke there came up from the darkening quays outside a sound of many feet hurrying, an
THE GIRONDIN. 15
increasing sound, as though a gathering throng had business further on beside the river.
The foreign war, the prospect of invasion in the distant north, the imminence of some vague but enormous trouble in Paris — these and the rising fever of the Revolution during the past three years entered the minds of all three as that sound reached them, and as the young man stood with his hand upon the door and his aunt and uncle watching him.
The old man called to mind his nephew's con- nection with the localjaeohins. He had heard in a confused way that some disreputable fellow in connection with that trull — her brother was it ? — spoke too often at their club ... he felt rather than knew that the noise of the RevolutionjBas notjanlyjsongs and_yisions but must have food to feed it, and, that the rich would furnish the food. He was liberal — he trusJsdJie^ was liberal. He had no superstitions, he hoped ; he was for the nation. He was not an old-fashioned fool : not he ! He was for the King — if the King did his, duty; but he rftmgmhprftH__" rarefiilly (and hadj remembered for three years) that_he was__o£jhfi Third Estate. In his mind, which was so clear for businesT'"anci so confused where passions had to be judged, he mixed up the impoverished young
1 6 THE GlRONDIN.
Jiobles, the bawling young lawyers with their scum .of a following at the Jacobin Club, Georges' low ! amour — and Georges' going out that night. This \ last was nearest him. On that at least he could decide ; and he believed it connected with all three — anarchy, the nasty acquaintance, and spend- thrift youth.
" Georges," he said, " if you go out to-night you will never see me again."
"Yet if I do not go, my dear uncle," said Georges with due deference, "you will have the advantage of my society for but a very short time longer. Events will separate us into various prisons ; for the brother of whom I spoke — her brother, my dear uncle — has certain designs."
Madame Boutroux gave a terrified look at her husband, but he refused to meet her eyes.
"In these times," said the old man, his voice rising, "threats of that sort are common. Men use," he continued still louder, "young men especially, the disasters of the State for their own purposes. I forbid you to go."
" Madame," said Georges, turning to Madame Boutroux, and thus addressing her by a term unusually solemn and not common in French families of his rank, " I do assure you that the
THE GIRONDIN. 17
Club meets to-night, ... so far as I know, the young lady of the coffee-stall upon whom I was jesting just now is not admitted, . . . she has not suffered the Illumination of the Seventh House, . . . she has presumably no acquaintance with the Sacred Triangle, the two Pillars, or the Thirty-third Degree, yet her brother intends to be present. Madame, he will suggest certain action against this house ; he has heard that you have friends to-night."
"What are my few friends or my party to him ? " interrupted poor Madame Boutroux.
"Madame," continued Georges quietly, "these people have the oddest ideas about comfortable houses. He will bring others against this house to-night ; and it is my business," he continued firmly and rather sadly, " to interrupt him." He still held the handle of the door and gazed at the ground. " I propose to do it by persuasion ; but if that fails, then in company with two friendsj, and with my little sword."
M. Boutroux, senior, was so incensed by the speech thus addressed to his wife rather than to himself— for his tall, straight nephew had turned his back upon him to speak to his wife — that his last answer was in a tone of constrained passion.
1 8 THE GIRONDIN.
"Georges," he said, when the young man had done, "if you go out you go under my curse ; and if you return you will not be re- admitted."
Georges weighed the matter, and made irre- solutely as though to sit down again.
"Let him go," said Madame Boutroux, quite white, for she feared the Jacobins.
M. Boutroux, senior, did not answer, and Georges, without turning to meet his uncle's eye, slipped out of the room, down the broad stone staircase with its gilded balustrade, and when he came to the porter's lodge at the basement asked that the wicket in the big carved oaken doors which gave on to the street might be slipped open for him. Old Nicholas, the porter, who had held him on the day of his birth, smiled at him indulgently.
" O Master Georges, must you be out againj along the quays on such an evening as this ? The whole place is in a fume ! It is no time for amusement ! "
"I'm not going to amuse myself, Nicholas," said the young man quizzically. "At least I'm only going to amuse myself by interrupting the amusements of others. Good Nicholas, I'll be back, I hope, within two hours."
THE G1RONDIN. 19
Nicholas hesitated a moment, waiting for some thundering interjection from the first floor — for the whole household of domestics knew of the quarrel between the uncle and the nephew — but none came. He pulled the latch, and the young man stepped out with his little toy dress-sword at his side, in the full finery of his wealth, walk- ing high in his dark silk and his gold chain at the pocket and his shoe-buckles of silver ; he went as erect as though he were on some military errand.
The little wicket as it shut behind him seemed to make a louder echo than he cared to hear. He did what he had never done before on leaving that familiar door, he stepped out into the midst of the paved way where now in the quieted evening no traffic ran or passers hurried : he forgot the distant clamour of the crowd, and looked up at the front of the house. It was silent to him. He saw no face and no gesture from any domestic. His people were not watch- ing at the panes.
He sighed gently to himself and turned to the right to reach the great and noble bridge that spanned the very broad Garonne and formed a sort of triumphal entry on to the crescent quays of the city. He noted that the air was cooler,
20 THE GIRONDIN.
and also that the big clouds of a storm that must have passed far up the valley were drifting eastward majestically across the last light in the sky towards the distant Dordogne and Libourne.
CHAPTER II.
In which the Girondin talks Politics.
AT this crisis in the Revolution the bridge that crosses the Garonne had, on the city end of it, two large poles set one on either side of the way ; from these long tricoloured streamers de- pended. Passers-by had attached, in the manner of votive offerings, coins, little handfuls of wheat, and faded bouquets of flowers ; for the Republican attempt — and the masses_ofriie populace were akead^£fipxiblican„,.in feeling — was "Becoming a religion, and was blossoming out in shrines. ,
Georges Boutroux gazed at the poles and their offerings curiously and a little wearily. At the foot of one, in the evening light, he saw a woman wheeling up a gaudily painted stall upon which were glasses and appliances for the making of coffee and the serving of other drinks.
She was a young woman of the mountain sort, from a hundred miles to the south, very bold and
22 THE GIRONDIN.
careless in expression, with dishevelled, handsome hair ; her eyes were as fixed, as purposeful, and as rapid as a sailor's. They were brown eyes, and Boutroux, remarking them as he approached more closely, remembered that her sister's were less intense and perhaps a trifle more generous. He saluted her in the gravest manner, and she treated him in return much as a bargainer in the market treats a man whom he could quarrel with but hopes before quarrelling to make a profit upon.
"If you are coming to ask me a question, M. Georges," she said, "I shall not answer it you." As she said this, however, she smiled in a forced but ready manner.
"That," said Georges Boutroux gravely, "will depend upon the question. I want to ask where I may find your brother."
" Oh, my brother ! " said the mountain lady with something like humour in her fixed eyes, which were set far apart in her head, and were strong in aspect. " All the world knows where my brother will be to-night."
"Yes," said Georges gently, "and I shall be there too, but I want to know where I may first find him."
"Really, M. Georges," she said with the
THE GIRONDIN. 23
mercantile laugh which hundreds heard every day as they came to the little barrow to drink at evening, "you seem now as you seemed before, more intent upon the conversation of his ladies than on finding him. If he were really angry with you," she added a little menacingly, " you would soon find out where he is." And as she said this her eyes glanced at a spot somewhat to his own right.
He turned sharply round and saw the young man whom he was seeking.
The lady's brother was a curious figure. In quieter times one would have said that he had dressed up for the occasion or was on his way to a pageant ; but in moments of violent civil tumult ^ and of foreign war, when the State is invaded, and the most intense of political passions are in peril of final defeat, much may be excused.
He wore his own hair, not because he had been1 born a pauper (for recent political advancement had given him several francs a day), but because it seemed to him Republican to do so. In his right hand he carried carelessly — as a man to-day carries a pair of gloves — a bright red worsted cap imported from England, and of the sort that was then worn in England by brewers' journeymen, but was used in Bordeaux at that moment for a
24 THE GIROND1N.
cap of Liberty. Round his neck was hung, as one might hang a locket, a large leaden token upon a leathern string. This token was stamped in strong relief with a triangle, wherein was further stamped the figure of a seated woman. This figure represented Liberty, and it was holding in one hand an axe and in the other a sheaf of corn. His great cloth coat was open at the throat and showed some inches of his hairy chest ; the cuffs of it were turned up as though he had but recently left work, though as a fact he had hardly worked with his hands in the whole of his young life, and had not even pretended to do so since the time of the last National Federation which he had attended the year before in Paris. He was browner than Georges, shorter, but quite as Gascon. His hair also was black, his eyes resolute and determined, and his carriage betrayed that exceptional and virile courage which we associate with the valley of the Gironde — a military race. He wore knee- breeches of common stuff; his calves and shins were, by a curious affectation, bare. Over his feet he had drawn a pair of military boots, and he was foolish enough to carry girt on to him, by way of parade, a great curved light cavalry sword, ■to which indeed he had a sort of right; for he (was one of those irregular bodies of volunteers
THE GIRONDIN. 25
which the anarchic politics of the time toleratedl/ and even sanctioned. /
This personage — Henri Sorrel by name, or at least by baptism, but latterly Aristogeiton by democratic adoption, and yet more lately, by a change of judgment, Miltiades — looked at Georges Boutroux without anger but with considerable valour. He asked him what he wanted, calling him "Georges" and using the familiar thou of the French, in a manner which, only two years before, would have seemed to a young man of the wealthier classes of the city, coming from such a person, like a blow in the face.
Georges saluted with an excessive courtesy, and " thouing " in return, and giving his companion his Greek name with a sonorous accent, said that he wanted nothing more than to accompany him, and to speak with him, as they both walked towards the meeting of the Section — to the Club.
The plebeian was willing enough, and they went off. As they went, the sister at the coffee- stall called after them with the loud, harsh, and shrill cry that women of the people use. Miltiades looked over his shoulder towards her, but Georges at that moment pulled at his dirty sleeve, so that he turned round again and did not hear. She had wished to warn him.
26 THE GIRONDIN.
"Miltiades," said Georges Boutroux gravely, "do you know I nearly called you Aristogeiton ? It used to be your name."
"I changed it," said Miltiades nervously, and a little sullenly — they were many together in the body that had turned towards the Club, and he did not wish to be made ridiculous. " I changed it."
" But why ? " said Boutroux innocently.
"Well, it began with," Aristo-Miltiades was answering, when Georges interrupted him with reserved sympathy. " Of course," he said ; " I see."
As the two young men went through the streets towards the meeting-place, others and others again joined them, as disparate as could be.
A little shuffling old gentleman of the local nobility came up last of all ; he never by any chance met Georges without linking an arm in his and borrowing a little silver — and so he did to-night.
Two big stevedores from the docks were with him, silly and good-natured, delighted (but a little shy) to be mixing with the wealthy. One of them dug the aged noble in the ribs and hurt him. A pale young Jew who sold books and had keen, rather furtive, and very rapidly moving
THE GIRONDIN. 27
eyes joined in ; he was a man who really expected something of the new world, and something apoca- lyptical, unnatural, and to his own advantage. He was full of things lurid and dramatic, but he was not sure the war would not be dangerous. A broken lawyer on the make was there also, with a fixed face and a determination to become a master of men — a thing which in his thirty-two most unsuccessful years he had not yet become. A grave young officer of guns was with them too, proud and somewhat sullen. They were a group of nearly a hundred when they reached the hall.
At the door there was no password ; for though they were all of the Brethren, the meeting was not secret. The Sections were duly constituted ; this was a meeting of the Section, and any citizen might come in. Yet several chose to give a password, flauntingly enough, to a little haggard man that stood at the door, for all the world like a man taking tickets at an entertainment ; and apparently the password that night was " The Human Race."
Boutrbux, as he passed in, put his hand for a moment on the shoulder of the little haggard man, who looked scared as he did so, and said, " Is the password to-night c The Human Race ' ? "
28 THE GIRONDIN.
"Yes — there is no password — certainly," said the little man, startled out of all knowledge.
" I'm glad to hear it," said Boutroux. "I thought it might be ' equality ' or ( brotherhood ' or some- thing of that sort. I get mixed." He looked the little haggard man deeply in the eyes. " The human race," he said, "and be damned to it. But bear it in mind. We both belong to it." And with that he went in.
Several of the group looked at him suspiciously, but he turned to the one who seemed the most intelligent (and also the most suspicious) and said, " Believe me, gentlemen ; it is profoundly true." He went in and took his place on a rough bench beside the others.
The room was long, low, and narrow : it had served in turn for a small wine-market, for a dancing-hall, and for a place of public meeting. It had latterly been acquired by the city for the regular meeting of this Section. Five dirty oil lamps hung from the apex of its ridgeboard, above the gangway that separated the seats upon either side ; and they swung but little higher than a man's head. Some three hundred men were present, of whom perhaps half a dozen were a little drunk ; the rest were sober. Half of the audience were smoking tobacco in pipes, as was
THE GIRONDIN. 29
the custom of the populace. One or two of the wealthier people took snuff from time to time. On the platform at the end six solemn men were grouped : three in the careful dress of the middle class, one military and singularly dishev- elled, one a constitutional priest — a country parish priest with a heavy, careless look — the last a tall, fine fanatical figure whose glance and gesture immediately arrested the eye, for they seemed to carry the whole spirit of the Revolution.
This last one rose, struck the table with a hammer, and asked for the minutes of the last meeting. The old and decrepit noble at Boutroux's side protested. It was a meeting of the Section, he urged, not of the Jacobin Club. He was there as a member of the Section, not of the Club.
Grumblings began to arise ; several citizens cast doubts upon the interrupter's private morals, while one deep-voiced man in his immediate neighbour- hood compared him successively to a number of insignificant animals. Boutroux pulled the old noble down sharply by the tail of his laced coat ; he tore it, and then, to apologise for an unworthy action, whispered in his ear with something of the license that is permitted to a creditor.
"I am here for something really important,
3o THE GIROND1N.
M. de Riserac. You will do me a favour by not angering them."
The old man's interruption was neglected. Every man there was of the Club, and the meeting soon proved itself not a gathering of the Section nor a debate between electors, but a strict meeting of that organisation which within two days was to raise Paris in arms, to storm the palace, and conquer the executive power throughout the whole country.
The minutes were read briefly, passed by a show of hands only interrupted by a drunken man who tried to speak and failed and was treated by the President to a short lecture on the civic virtue of sobriety. Then without speeches and without delay the bureau upon the platform proceeded to business, and the first item read was a list ; it was a list of " men to respond to the call in case of necessity." Name after name was droned out, and approved. Nearly every name was known either by its attachment to the new revolutionary militia forces or the public rhetoric of the town, or by a recommen- dation from the mother society in Paris. The list was approved in its entirety, and every man present knew who could be depended upon when — for every man now knew that fighting
THE GIRONDIN. 31
was not far off — the people might be called upon to rise.
""When that was over, speeches were made, simple and violent enough. They concluded with a short and very fine piece of measured prose which that presiding fanatic had prepared — and worthily prepared.
As he spoke the audience saw the invaders already upon the march, the treason of the King and of the Executive Government, the garrisoning of the palace, and the necessity for national action and for the destruction of all that impeded it. The careful, classical sentences suited the long tradition of those minds. The rhythm of those phrases sobered the drunkards : they filled the rest with that cold enthusiasm which, in the Latin tradition, is the precursor both of heroic deeds and of crimes.
The President's speech over, there succeeded short violent interjections rather than harangues, each raising the heat of the gathering in some degree until at last emotion was exhausted, and at a signal from the chair the evening ended.
Miltiades rose in his place. "I have urgent news before we separate," he cried, and he looked at Georges sideways, but Georges sat tight.
32 THE GIRONDIN.
" Is it information for the Executive ? " asked the President.
" Yes, information of a plot."
As Miltiades shouted the word, many stopped on their way out, and several turned as though to stay.
The President called to them all in his clear tones, " The sitting is over, citizens ; there is no need for any to remain save the Executive. We shall do our duty."
At this they moved outward again, but slowly, towards the door.
It was about half-past nine o'clock. The room had emptied.
Boutroux put his hand a little heavily upon Miltiades' shoulder, shook off the aged noble who tried to cling to him, and said to the plebeian, —
" Miltiades, I will come up to the table with you and help you. I may be of use."
The plebeian was not without sentiment. He had always thought it hard to hide from Boutroux where his sister might for the moment be : he felt himself under a sort of obligation mixed, as it must always be with men of peasant blood, with the hope of future gain. Anyhow he felt awk- ward to have Boutroux there.
"It's secret," he muttered; "you can't help."
THE GIRONDIN. 33
" Who knows ? " replied Georges pensively ; " a friend is always useful. For instance, you might be wrong and so get suspected. ... I had better come."
They went up to the table together. The men on the platform were engaged upon another list in a smaller book ; it was closed rapidly over the finger of the President as they approached.
" What have you to say, Citizen ? " he asked sol- emnly of Miltiades, ignoring Georges altogether.
Mikiades mumbled a few words sullenly.
" We know the house," answered the President ; " we have marked it."
Here Boutroux intervened.
"I ought to know against whom action may be taken," he said, " if action becomes necessary."
"Action will be necessary," said the President, speaking fixedly like a statue.
"Yes," answered Boutroux as easily as ever, "and we must all know against whom it will be taken, or there will be confusion." Then as though he were mentioning a taste in wine, he added, "I have several reasons for saying that I would much rather it were not taken, among other places, against my uncle's house. For instance, I live there."
The President, looking at him with a complete
34 THE GIRONDIN.
sincerity, said, "If I call on you, Citizen, you must do your duty."
"Certainly, Citizen," said Boutroux ritually. (He had made young ladies laugh often enough at the absurd term " Citizen ; " he had a killing trick of using it suddenly in drawing-rooms.)
"Citizen, no just man will suffer," the Presi- dent intoned, "and the property of all, just or unjust, will be spared by the majesty of the People."
"That is it," said Boutroux gently, smiling at that member of the six directors who seemed to him the coarsest and most human. " I took the trouble of coming up here, before getting into the much fresher air outside, to tell you that my uncle is among the just, and that it will be singularly convenient to me if his property should be quite particularly secure in trusting to the majesty of the People."
Miltiades looked awkward for a moment, and Boutroux waited for his answer.
" No one threatens your uncle," said the fanatic President gravely, but he was imprudent enough to add, " Wealth is indifferent to the high indig- nation of the people ; but if traitors. . . ."
" You have furnished me with the very word," interrupted Boutroux. " The very word ! I had
THE GIRONDIN. 35
it on the tip of my tongue, and now you remind me of it ! President, the whole point is, that my uncle does not happen to be a traitor ; it is a most important point both to him and to the jusdy indignant populace. It is a major point ; on such a night as this a really capital point," and Boutroux shot a glance at the coarse man in whom he hoped to find an ally.
The coarse man, who was also good-humoured and loose, burst into a loud guffaw. " Citizen ! " said he, "Citizen ! I verily believe you are a Gaul ! "
The Cure, who had been to school thirty years before, took a pinch of snuff" and said "Attic salt," twice, but no one understood him nor cared for what he said. The coarse man sud- denly began to laugh and could not cease from laughing ; he laughed until the tears came into his eyes. The fanatic was indignant, but the virility of the coarse man conquered.
"Citizen Boutroux," he coughed between his gasps, " you will be the death of me ! Ho ! you will be the death of me ! 1 like you as much in a revolution as I did in the wine- cellars before revolutions were dreamed of, and when you were a silly lad of seventeen. Lord ! boy, patriotism can go bail and give security like anything else ! "
36 THE GIRONDIN.
"Exactly," said Boutroux. "The shame and the disgrace that I should feel if my family should prove in any way lacking to the popular cause would make me forget a paltry loss of cash. Still, since we are speaking of cash " — he looked round him — " I am willing to call it a thousand. Will the Section accept such a guarantee ? Shall I sign ? "
"We are better without signatures," said the President calmly, "and there is no price for treason."
" Precisely," said Boutroux. " I wanted to add that at the first hint of treason — nay, of cooling enthusiasm — escheat the money. But there is something I should warn you against. My uncle sometimes suffers from delusions, and when he is not himself he talks at random. Would you only remember that on the guar- antee of yet another thousand 1 guarantee him — if he say anything uncivic — to be suffering from delusions ? "
" Do you warrant his words ? " said the President, turning to Miltiades.
"I've given true information," grumbled the man. "I might have shown favour, and I did not." He wished that thousand had come his way ; he suspected that if he held firm another sum might find its way to him.
THE GIRONDIN. 37
" A thousand livres," said the President, fall- ing into the old vocabulary and talking stiffly, " is but the wages of an honest labouring citizen for one year ; and to men like you," he added sternly to Boutroux, " it is but the price of a debauch — and Liberty is not to be bought, nor is the Nation. Nevertheless we will accept your guarantee."
"Especially about the delusions," said the fat man who kept the wine-cellar, laughing again uproariously.
"Yes," answered Boutroux quietly, "that is the point I most particularly wish to make. My uncle sometimes puts things in such an exasperating way ! " And he sighed. " But I am guaranteeing in that amount that he means well. And here," said he, suddenly pulling out a bunch of dirty notes, " is half of it. And the other half," he said, sighing again as though he were intolerably bored, "on the day after you may have had occasion to visit him."
The President locked the money into a metal box, wherein he also put a minute of the name and time. Then they went out all in company.
Miltiades, walking beside Boutroux, looked at him now and again in the darkness with curiosity, with fear, and with some respect.
38 THE G1RONDIN.
" I had to do my duty," he said. . . .
Boutroux did not answer, but strode on.
" I had to do my duty," said Miltiades again ; there was swagger in his tone, and at the same time a hint of bargaining. "My sister . . ." he continued.
"There now," caught up Boutroux pleasantly, "that fatal topic. . . ! Do you know, Aristo- geiton — Miltiades, I mean — if there is one sub- ject on which my uncle and you might differ (should you do him the honour to visit him with the deputation) ..."
"You are your own master, and it's all in your own hands," answered Miltiades savagely. "Your house and your uncle and all he has . . . you may keep it or lose it."
" Precisely," answered Georges.
CHAPTER III.
In which the Sovereign People play the Fool.
"tj^OR the next few minutes they strode side by side in silence, the others at their heels.
The street upon that August night was oppres- sive with a heavier air than Boutroux had expected upon leaving that closed, packed, and heated lamp -lit hall. A complete stillness presaged thunder, and one could just see to the north- ward, above the broad river, high banks of cloud making a black emptiness against the few stars of the zenith.
They all went on together through another hundred yards of narrow ways, to where an old arch spanned a lane — on the way to the broad quays ; there the little group would disperse, but on their way it was their business to cross through the courtyard of an inn which, in the labyrinth of the old town, the thoroughfare skirted from one arched house to another, and the courtyard
4o THE GIRONDIN.
was a rectangle of uneven pavement lying to one side of the kennel. As they came to this through the tunnel of the arch, they heard voices and movement in the recessed courtyard beyond : they saw the glare of great lamps contrasting with the tiny glimmer of the oil lantern which the Corporation maintained slung above that open way, and Boutroux heard Miltiades call over his shoulder to his companions that it must be the Paris courier with news.
Two or three score men, not more, of every age and dress, were gathered in a little group round the high carriage with its tarpaulin already cast over it and its stack of unlowered luggage strapped upon the roof. The shafts were leaning upright and back against the body of the vehicle, for the horses had been taken out of it. Up on the box-seat, holding a carriage lamp close to a printed sheet, stood one of the postilions familiar to the little crowd under the name of Arnan, and they encouraged him to read with jests and occasional applause.
The head ostler came out in the midst of this as the men from the Section joined the rest, Boutroux and Miltiades with them ; he called to the postilion angrily to come down, and received for his pains a mixed volley from the crowd :
THE GIRONDIN. 41
some asking him why he was not in Conde's army, some why he was not with the Prussians, some bidding him go and garrison the King's Palace in Paris. The man was old, grim-faced, and brave ; he answered, as though he were a crowd himself instead of one man against so many, that rather than be a traitor to his King he would drown himself in the Gironde.
A large fat boy standing near him said : " Perhaps you will be saved the trouble." The ostler threw him to the ground. There was the beginning of a scuffle, when the high voice of the postilion, continuing to read, withdrew the rioters from the beginning of their riot, and the old ostler, muttering a native curse and signing the cross upon himself, went back into the darkness of his stables until it should please his subordinate to finish his patriotic work.
The postilion continued to read : " There were
rumours ; the invaders were upon the march ;
they had not -crossed the frontier ; La Fayette
had certainly betrayed the State." .... At
the mere name of La Fayette a dozen of them
booed so loudly that the renewed assertion of
that man's betrayal was lost in the noise. The
postilion held up his hand and continued to read : —
"It is certain that the Erecutive power will 2a
42 THE GIRONDIN.
arm the Tuileries. His guard of foreign mer- cenaries has already received orders to march from Rueil ; several of the Sections in Paris have taken Austrian gold and have betrayed the State and are marching to aid the King."
At this point in the postilion's reading a very large foolish man, with a face inordinately red, said thickly : " That is a lie ! "
The postilion showed some pride of bearing. " Gentlemen," he said, " the citizen is drunk ! "
" That is quite true," said the citizen in question, " and also you are a liar."
Two of his neighbours fell upon the interrupter and began to hit him rather gently with their fists, saying, " Hold your tongue, fool ; we want to hear the news."
He was drunkenly gentle with them in turn, but continued to mutter : " It is a lie ! All the Sections are loyal to the Revolution." Then he added a little inconsequently, " and the King is a pig ! " But he did not interrupt again.
The postilion continued his reading : "The volunteers enlisted already number eleven thou- sand. The Federals from Marseilles rival in zeal for Liberty the Federals from Bordeaux." . . . This sentence he had made up, and it sounded well. There were murmurs of approval. "It
THE GIRONDIN. 43
is the general opinion," read on the postilion sententiously, "of those best informed in the capital, that events cannot be long delayed."
" You hear that ? " said Miltiades, in a feverish whisper to Boutroux, as the postilion went on with his news.
"I do," said Boutroux gravely, smiling to himself in the darkness and watching calmly the mobile, uncontrolled face of the postilion as the light of the carriage lamp picked it out against the darkness. "It is very pregnant. Events ! If that were all, it would be no great matter ; but the devil of it is," he added thought- fully and as though weighing his words, "the devil of it is they will not be long delayed."
All this while the crowd was increasing. Young lads had run from its outskirts to summon new- comers, until the throng had grown to be many hundreds strong, and filled up the whole of the courtyard, making a packed and rather ill-tempered mass in its darker corners. These late comers only heard the last words — they were a pro- clamation that the "country was in danger," and an appeal to the revolutionary party for volunteers.
The night with all, and wine with many, had led to exaltation, when — at that most ill-timed
44 THE GIRONDIN.
occasion — a great gilt coach, lumbering, drawn by four fat horses, the two near mounts ridden by postilions in antiquated livery, tried to force its way from the one arch to the other along the thoroughfare. The crowd was too dense, for its passage, and a rumour rose about it. The rumour grew to a loud quarrel ; a bare- armed blacksmith in his leathern apron tore at the hinged door until it gave way. A moment more and the two postilions were dragged from their saddles, there were cries, and after the cries blows.
The interest of the mob turned from the reader of the dispatch on the box-seat of the diligence to this new adventure. Some said it was the Mayor, others mentioned the name of an unpopular squire who had stuck out for the old wages in the vineyards. Others of simpler mind said that any one travelling in such a splendid coach must necessarily be an Austrian
spy- Meanwhile, within the coach, women's voices
shrilly protested against the indignity and the
danger ; and Boutroux, edging through the crowd,
observed (and sighed as he observed them) two
friends of his aunt's, decayed gentry of Laborde,
down river, whom she affected for their noble
THE GIRONDIN. 45
name. They must have come that moment from his uncle's house, and Georges smelt danger.
Round the coach one of those spontaneous' committees which the Revolution had the genius to form at a moment's notice was already chosen ^ its leader was naturally the man who had pre- sided at the meeting of the Section from which they had all just come.
The two ladies were on foot at the step of their carriage, still protesting in a torrent of complaint : he was gravely putting questions in the manner of a judge, deciding what the proper action of The People should be, and he was re- iterating with quiet insistence, —
"We must know, ladies, otherwise how can we form a reasoned judgment ? "
Since they would not answer, but continually threatened and implored by turns, the evidence of one of the riders was taken ; and to the formal question whence they had come and whither they were going, this man answered that they had come from a social evening at the house of M. Boutroux, the merchant, and as for their destina- tion, it was no further than the Hotel of the Shield, in that same city.
The President gravely told them that that was enough, and that it would have saved much
46 THE GIRONDIN.
trouble had answers been given earlier. He named two men who happened to be roughly armed, one with a sort of crowbar, the other with an old sword, and told them off to hold the horses' bridles and to lead them to that hotel, so that there should be no misunderstanding.
The coach thus escorted went off, pitifully enough, the packed crowd pressing upon itself with a sort of spontaneous discipline to make way for the vehicle ; the door of the carriage with its dingy coat of arms, torn off its hinges, lay smashed upon the ground ; a man lifted a painted portion of it and denounced the sign of nobility ; the old ladies re-entered their gaping vehicle, and with such dignity as they could command resumed their way.
When they had passed and the crowd had closed again behind them, it was as Boutroux feared : the President, stepping up on to the three stones which served as a mount to the inn, very gravely announced to the mob that there had plainly been held — or was perhaps still holding — a meeting at the house of Citizen Boutroux, a man suspected by some and marked for a deputation ; that it was the duty of all patriots to see whether the local Austrian Com- mittee had not held one of its political meetings
THE GIRONDIN. 47
there that night. He said he would not dwell upon the armorials of the carriage, nor upon the unusual hour of its appearance, nor upon the insolence displayed by the occupants of it to- wards the people. He begged them, in their approaching visit to the Boutroux town-house, to respect the rights of a Citizen, but at the same time to remember those of the State and of the Revolution.
For five minutes more he indulged in the rhetoric proper to the time, and when he got down from his eminence the thousand or so that had now gathered in that small space were already marshalled for an attack. A woman of the market-place who had stopped casually upon her way home to see why so many had been drawn together, thought it proper to strike up the new hymn of the Marseilles men, which, three weeks before, had reached the city. And the whole company of them took in a lurching way the shortest line for the quays and the wealthy houses — and with them went Georges Boutroux, cursing their betrayal, heartily wishing his money back in his pocket, communing with himself and deciding that the best plan in a critical moment was to have no plan.
As he went, Miltiades, who still stuck close
48 THE GIRONDIN.
to him, nudged him maliciously in the ribs and said : "You will do your duty, Citizen ?"
"Certainly, Citizen," said Boutroux gravely. "It is the only trade I know." He made it his business, as they went through the narrow paved lanes between the tall old houses, to edge a little to the left on the outer side of the throng. At last, just as the head of the noisy procession debouched upon the quays, he got his opportunity.
He lurched away from Miltiades' side into the shadow of a small alley, swiftly ran down it, doubled through a yet narrower courtyard that ran at right angles, and continuing his pace and knowing every inch of the surroundings, came out by the broad riverside at the very corner of his uncle's house. He stood near the door of it and saw the company which he had just left approach, swirling and singing, up the quays. He stood where he hoped to be unnoticed, in the corner of the heavy carven porch ; the lamp hung from its gilded and delicate metal ornament above his uncle's doorway, throwing a complete and blinding shadow over the spot where he hid. There was yet another coach standing ready at the door : the last guests entering it were making their profuse farewells and handing their vales to
THE GIRONDIN. 49
the porter and his wife. The mob was approach- ing rapidly, and Boutroux dared not step out into the light to warn the household lest the first rank of the rioters should note his action and burst in. The great oaken doors were clapped to just in time, the postilions cracked their whips, the coach rattled off swiftly northward along the river. A few larrikins pursued it, barefooted, shouting insults, but there was nothing worse. The mass of the mob as it arrived swarmed round; the lodge window and clamoured for the master of the house and for his remaining guests.
Georges still lay hid, and watched them. He knew his uncle's temper ; he knew also, what his uncle did not, the temper of these men ; and he knew that his moment had not yet come.
For some moments the confused noise of the crowd, the song from Marseilles which the heavy market woman continued singing too loudly, too high, and too flat (though many begged her to be silent), the disputes of several as to what should be done, were all at last quieted, and the President stepped out of the half circle of their front in a manner somewhat theatrical but not undignified ; he knocked heavily at the door.
Through a tiny iron grating, perhaps six inches square, which was worked in the wicket of that
50 THE GIRONDIN.
massive oak, Nicholas the porter asked what they wanted.
Georges Boutroux, hiding there round the corner of the porch, his nerves all at tension in the shadow, had an odd feeling of familiarity and of home ; he knew that voice so well ! He had known it every hour of his life up to this last hour, and to hear it under such a circumstance seemed so like the odd and inexplicable grotesque of a dream !
A man in the mob shouted out : " We want to get in ! "
The President, more courteously, and in a low tone, reassured the servant. "Believe me," he said, "no such uncivic act is intended." Then in his clear chiselled voice, which could be heard, and which he intended to be heard, by all the nearest of his followers, he added : " We desire to know in the name of The People who is in this house and what their business may be."
The porter said he would convey the gentle- man's message to his master. He snapped the shutter behind the little grating, and for perhaps two minutes the mob amused itself by most un- civic threats to burn down the house, and by other less congruous proposals, half of which were directed against the personal appearance of
THE GlRONDIN. $t
its master, and half against that exceedingly un- popular character, the King of France and of Navarre. The intempestive market woman had again begun her loud Marseillian song — and (from the honour borne to her sex) no one of the Sovereign People had yet clapped his hand upon her mouth — when a hush fell even upon her at the sound of windows opening, the grind- ing of the iron fastening that held them, and the sight of M. Boutroux the merchant, coming out into the summer night and standing upon his own balcony, looking down upon the angry crowd.
I should be doing M. Boutroux, senior, a wrong were I to deny that he felt the dignity of the situation : he was a single figure, the lights were behind him, he was on a fine isolated balcony ; the Sovereign People were below. He had read of such situations.
The fine and nicely poised figure of the old man, its careful black silk dress, the more par- ticular for such an occasion of ceremony as that which he had just concluded, his obvious courage, and perhaps the secret pleasure he took in so dramatic an occasion, moved his fellow country- men below ; and a lad who threw a tomato at him and missed, was for this act cuffed about the head by his attendant father until he wept with pain
52 THE GIRONDIN.
and mortification — but he should have known the value of the unities in all affairs of the stage.
M. Boutroux, senior, spoke.
"I desire first," said he in Very clear and precise tones, which unpleasantly reminded some of the audience of the tones of a magistrate upon the bench — "I desire to know, first, who is your spokesman and under whose order you are acting."
Above the confused noise of many the Pre- sident, who knew his place, at once replied, and was at once heard, —
"There is no time for a vote, Citizen Bou- troux, and I speak for those present and for the Section."
M. Boutroux, senior, looked at them for a moment in the calm dignity of his sixty-eight years and without replying. " I take it," said he solidly, "you are the Section."
Upon which reply the political lady from the market once more began her interpretation of the Marseillaise ; but this time the respect borne to her sex was of no avail, and an onion dealer put his hand over her mouth so that no sound came from it but a sort of low moaning, and after that two gasps.
" You are the Section," said M. Boutroux again,
THE GIRONDIN. 53
as though upon reflection. "Then I must cer- tainly reply to your constituted authority."
There was no irony in his tone, and, though his mouth was set, there was none apparent in his expression either. This last, indeed, they could but dimly discern, for the light that singled him out in that conspicuous position shone from the room within.
"May I first ask what the Section requires of me?" '
" We wish to know," said the President, stand- ing and looking upward in a manner that he felt to be a little undignified and somewhat at a strain, " who is meeting in your house to-night, and for what purpose ? "
"The answer is simple enough," said M. Boutroux with grave courtesy, and in a loud voice that rang over all the crowd. "There are present in my house to-night, and at this moment, myself, my wife, my six domestics, my porter, and his wife."
" Others have been here," said the President, a little menacingly.
" You are quite right," answered M. Boutroux imperturbably, and still in the manner of the quiet orator ; " there have been in numbers, if I recollect aright, seventeen. In quality, five families of the
54 THE GIRONDIN.
neighbourhood, my friends. We have drunk lemonade and eaten fruit, and we have listened to a little music."
"We shall require their names," said the Presi- dent, conscious that this dialogue was becoming ridiculous.
"The names shall be furnished you at once," said M. Boutroux ; " a list shall be given to my porter and shall be handed to you. Have you anything further to ask ? "
/ The President was in a quandary. He had /nothing further to ask, but the mob had some- thing further to do. The President was a leader of democracies, and he managed the thing well. He stepped back a few paces so as not to crane his neck ridiculously, as he had been doing; he turned a little so that he seemed to be addressing the crowd as well as this most unpopular and wealthy man, and then said with due solemnity, but in a loud and vigorous tone, —
"When we have received your report, Citizen Boutroux, we shall take the document (I beg you to execute it upon stamped paper) back to the Section — which 1 may tell you sits perma- nently to-night after the news from Paris— and we shall there debate upon your evidence. I think we are agreed ? " said the President to the
THE GIRONDIN. 55
Sovereign People, some of whom made a shuffling noise with their feet, most of whom were silent, and one only of whom, the political lady, shouted a wild approbation, adding the epithet "Pig," addressed to whatever in her mind stood for those social forces which did not meet with her approval.
There was a silence as though the Sovereign People were ruminating upon the wisdom of the lady's judgment. Then the President continued, in a manner matter of fact and absolute, —
"We shall leave guards at your door, and to- morrow, at our convenience, we will summon you for further examination. We hope you will be agreeable."
"You are very good," said M. Boutroux, senior ; " my action will depend upon the cir- cumstances that may arise." Then raising his voice a little, he said: "Citizens of the Section and your Mr. President, I wish you a very good night." He stepped back briskly, turned the iron catch of the tall windows, pulled the curtain across them, and so signified that the political interview was at an end. A large stone came crashing through a pane, and Madame Boutroux within that room, paling with fear as she did with every emotion, jumped.
$6 THE GIRONDIN.
"It is nothing," said M. Boutroux, raising his hand in a majestic calm. "These things are inevitable in revolutions."
There was no further demonstration. Indeed, had Madame Boutroux known it, she would have been pleased to see that the boy who threw the stone was reproved for his lack of civic sense by the President on the quays with- out ; though that boy was little to blame, for he was but thirteen years old, and loved to throw a stone.
The noise of their feet was heard tramping off down the quays towards the bridge. There came a rhythm into that tramp, and a deep, robust voice started a marching song.
M. Boutroux, senior, meanwhile rang a little copper bell upon the table, and one of his ser- vants appeared. He ordered writing materials and sand, and began deliberately to make out his list of those who had been present that evening at his little party.
Madame Boutroux, with fixed, angry lips and folded hands, watched him, and would neither interfere nor help. Once when a name escaped him, he asked her for it. She told him with a thin majesty that she would have nothing to do with it, and went upstairs to pray at her little
THE GIRONDIN. 57
chair. She prayed for the saintly Madame Elisa- beth, for the Queen and the Royal Family, for the Bishop and the Clergy, the Pope, the Altar and the Throne, and she found in her book a special prayer for Times of Tumult, which she was careful to recite both in the French and in the Latin, for it had a virtue of its own.
As for her husband, he sat up quite half an hour longer, adding to the list of names a careful annotation showing how each possessor of such a name was legally entitled to travel, had taken no part in any movement offensive to the Depart- ment, to the Sections, to the Municipality, to the Assembly, or to the Crown. And this was not difficult, for, of all his guests, one only had been a male under the age of forty, and he was a very simple young man engaged in the commerce of wine, and chiefly occupied in learning the English tongue.
When M. Boutroux had completed his list and his annotation thereupon, he wrote at the bottom a formal sentence of protest against the interruption of his evening, a claim upon certain constituted authorities against the Section, his adherence to the constituted power of the Section, and then he signed the whole, sloping uphill from left to right in a firm, delicate handwriting, " Boutroux,"
58 THE GIRONDIN.
and added his civic qualifications, his academic degrees, and the rest. This done, he sanded the whole over carefully, folded it into a neat cachet, and went down himself to the echoing basement porch, where he found Nicholas the porter very- much perturbed, but very sleepy.
"Give this," he said, "through the grating — do not open the wicket — to whoever remains outside for its reception. Then go to bed. And, Nicholas," he added severely, "admit no one at all. Above all, you shall not admit my unhappy nephew, who is the author of all our troubles."
His face sterner than it had yet been during the excitement of this passage, the old man turned, erect and almost vivacious, neglecting the good-night which for so many years he had invariably extended to his dependants, and went firmly up the stairs.
When he reached his room he did not undress. He saw the light in his wife's oratory : it filled him with contempt ; he locked his door, lay down (dressed as he was in his gala clothes) upon his curtained bed, lit a candle, and set himself to pass the few hours of darkness, until the danger might be renewed, in reading his favourite story from Voltaire, which was "The Huron."
CHAPTER IV.
In which the Girondin fences too hard and too long.
"IV/rEANWHILE, in his dark corner, hidden outside the doors of the house, Georges Boutroux had listened to all that his uncle had said, and to all that the President had replied, and throughout the scene had remained so hidden.
He did not disclose himself when the President chose two men out of the thousand or so present to mount guard before those doors during the night, and he waited with crossed arms in his dark corner until the mob with its noise and its occasional cheering, and its songs and its growing rhythm and military tramp, had disappeared into the night.
When they were quite lost, and the sound of them no longer reached him, he strolled along the neighbouring houses, crossed the broad quay to the riverside, leant against the stone parapet
60 THE GIRONDIN.
there overhanging the water, and with his hands in his pockets watched the blank window panes.
He thought it must be midnight. He had heard a chime a few moments before ; but whether it were the half-hour or the three-quarters he could not recall. All the casements of the house were dark. There was not even a ray shining outward from the usual watch-lamp in the porter's room in the ground floor to the side of the door, so closely were the curtains pulled ; and, pacing up and down before those doors with the regularity of soldiers, two men full of the importance of their mission, occupied and irritated his mind. An oil lamp was swung across the broad street at this point ; its light was just sufficient to show their figures.
The night was very dark indeed and perfectly still. The thunder clouds that had been rising ever since he had left the hall with his companions of the Sections now occupied the greater part of the sky, and already far off up river one or two vague flashes had announced the approach of the storm.
Georges strolled across the large paved way, sauntered in his fine dress, with his little sword tilted at his side, and his tall figure taller in the darkness, till he came quite close to those two
THE GIRONDIN. 61
sentinels whom the populace had set outside his uncle's portal. He stood not ten feet off, watching them for some moments ; they knew who he was, and they therefore neither challenged him nor noticed his presence. Their regular pacing back and forth continued to exasperate his mood. He had paid his money to the Section ; he had bought off such insults ; he felt himself tricked and betrayed.
Each of the sentinels was armed after the rough fashion of the populace in the Sections : one with a pike, the other with a large old-fashioned sword, a curved, light cavalry sword ; and peering closer Georges saw that this one was — of all men — Miltiades !
Georges hailed him, but Miltiades did not answer ; he maintained his solemn pacing to and fro, and disdained all interruption.
There stood before the house, a few feet from the door, a rounded post of stone, convenient for a man to hoist himself up on if he were willing to sit and dangle his feet at some inches from the ground. Georges Boutroux scrambled up upon it, sat there and fixed Miltiades with his eyes, slowly swinging his glance, pendulum-like, as that amateur sentry stolidly paced to the end of his beat ; swinging it back again as Miltiades crossed
62 THE GIRONDIN.
to the other end of the measure ; and so for half a dozen times.
Georges again broke the silence. It was as Miltiades was crossing him for the seventh time that he asked him "at what hour he would be relieved."
The Jacobin did not reply ; he continued his pacing. Georges continued his taunt, raising and lowering his voice as the other distanced and neared.
"It was a mistake to give money down," he said ; " wages are best paid to the unskilled labourer after his work is done — one can trust him better so. And, by the way, is it not an error to trust common men with arms ? They might misuse them — nay, they might wound themselves. Miltiades, my great commander, I have a mind to sleep in my bed to-night, and I paid for the convenience, did I not ? . . . I seem to remember it that I bespoke an expensive inn. . . . I did not pay with the object that any foreman might pick men from the gutter to play at soldiers outside my window. ... I have a whim about my house, Miltiades — I have a point of honour in the matter of my sleeping-places, Miltiades, as some men have of other more human possessions — I like it to be left alone at night. . . ."
THE GIRONDIN. 63
Here the sentry was crossing just before him again, and Georges added in a tone that was soft and exceedingly provocative : " When are you relieved ? Must I wait here to discover, or will you let me go indoors first ? "
Miltiades answered for the first time.
" I have orders," said he shortly, not so much as looking round on his interlocutor — " I have orders to speak to no one. I am on sentry-
"Well," said Georges, yawning and stretching his arms, " there's the devil of it ! If I knew at what hour you were to be relieved, I would go off" and have a glass, and come back to speak when you were more at leisure, and perhaps to share your wages . . . (though it is true I have mounted no guard) . . . and then I might slip in — who knows ? "
Miltiades said nothing, but continued his solemn pace. He was almost out of sight in the darkness and back again for the twentieth time before he was addressed again.
"Miltiades," said the tall young gentleman, " do you happen to have about you another sword ? "
"No," said Miltiades shordy, and passed.
"That is awkward," said Georges, raising his
64 THE G1RQNDIN.
voice a little with every step by which the other removed. " That is awkward, because I am getting cold in spite of the warmth of the night . . . and I must take some exercise. 1 have heard it said," he continued in a monologue which he modulated for the other to hear as he approached and passed again — "I have heard it said that it is quite easy to fence with a rapier against a cavalry sword. . . . I've even seen it done ! "
The swart Miltiades was stubborn and continued his pacing, crossing once more before that stone pillar on which Georges sat.
"And I believe," continued Georges, a little more vivaciously, "that it can be done quite easily ... it would be fun to try." He slipped down from the stone pillar to the ground.
Miltiades had turned again, when he saw Georges Boutraux, standing in his path, suddenly draw his rapier — the little toy rapier of his evening dress— and put himself upon his guard Miltiades halted. "I have orders," he said plainly, "to cut any one down who tries to enter this house." He looked squarely into Georges' eyes as he had done earlier in the night ; it was evident that he liked playing at soldiers.
THE GIRONDIN. 65
"That is what I want to test," said Georges. "When you cut down a man you cut in carte. If you thrust, it is another matter ; but if you cut in carte I can parry."
" Don't be a fool ! " answered Miltiades.
He began his pacing again and turned his back to Boutroux ; he was thinking, as he moved away, what he should do if his adversary proved stub- born, when he felt in the fat of the left shoulder, just below the shoulder blade, a sharp sting such as a man may feel when a hot coal touches him or the flick of a whip. He turned round furiously. Georges Boutroux had pricked him with the rapier. He cut violently at him with a downward stroke, awkwardly enough, and his cavalry sword slipped and spent itself along the other's easy guard ; he almost over-reached.
"I told you how it would be," said Georges. " I am determined to see whether it is true or not that a rapier can fence with a cavalry sword, for I have always heard that it can." He put up his left hand for a balance, threw himself into the posture his fencing school had taught him, and played with the point of the weapon as though he were seeking some other mark wherein to worry the bull.
Miltiades growled. "I can kill you," he said.
66 THE GIROND1N.
As he said it he clenched his left arm behind his back and put his cavalry sword up to the guard.
"That's just what I wanted to see," said Georges, in the tone of a man who is playing chess. "I don't believe you can. I have a mind to stick you in the gizzard, wherever that may be : it is an organ I have often heard of but never seen. Meanwhile, lest I should murder a brother-in-law before the wedding, or a claimant in blackmail before due payment, or anyhow a good companion though one a trifle importunate for cash, I beseech you to settle it with me here whether a rapier can or can not hold its own against a cavalry sword. If you only knew how often I have heard that issue discussed ! "
Miltiades was not ready at repartees ; he said suddenly : " I . . ." and lifted his blade.
"I, on the other hand . . ." said Boutroux, and he lunged suddenly. . . .
Miltiades parried : he was too strictly occupied to think of calling the other sentry to his aid ; he parried, and immediately after he had parried he thrust too low, and all his weight went after the heavy blade. Georges stepped to the right sharply, the cavalry sword just shaved his hip ; he pointed and lunged home. Georges felt "his blade bend hard, and the cloth give and the
THE GIRONDIN. 67
flesh. Then the steel went suddenly in — too easily. Miltiades' big body seemed to stumble up against the handle of the rapier and to lean on it ; for a doubtful, suspended moment in the half darkness Georges Boutroux could just see a puzzled look in the fellow's eyes.
Then the cavalry sword swiped vaguely and angrily in the air, and caught Boutroux a great crack in the rib ; but that sword did not pierce a wound. Boutroux withdrew his blade with a sharp gesture from the cloth and the flesh ; and the hilt pulled away from the other's body, Mil- tiades doubled forward like a man who would vomit. The cavalry sword fell from his hand, held to his wrist only by its leather thong. Then down he went, collapsing into a heap of clothes.
" I told you how it would be," said Georges to that heap of clothes which still moved a little — he said it sternly. " You ought to thrust with the sword. . . ."
But from Miltiades there was no answer, except the low noise of a man not in pain, but so weak from something that he could no more : after that there was no sound.
Georges breathed deeply and went upon one knee to look closely into the dead man's face. The
68 THE G1RONDIN.
other sentry came up at a run from his thirty yards away in the darkness.
" What have you done ? " he cried. He was a blond, rather inept young man, frightened at the circumstance, and his tall pike shook in his hand.
" Don't argue," said Georges shortly. He slipped the leathern thong of the sword from Miltiades' wrist and over the dead man's still limp right hand. He strung it across his own right, grasped the sword, stood at his full height, and said : " I'm a little blown, my friend ! "
" What has happened ? " asked the young man with the pike again.
" It is an accident," said Georges, " a very deplorable accident. You see, I belong to this house . . . and . . . and he knew it."
The young man with the pike looked down at the heap of clothes from which no moan pro- ceeded. He turned the fallen man's face up into the glimmer of the light of the lantern where it swung high above them, from its cord across the street. " Is he dead ? " said the young man with the pike, scared and worried.
" 1 hope not," said Georges, " I sincerely hope not. . . . But I tell you I belong to this house, and I want to get in."
The young man with the pike turned sullen.
THE GIRONDIN. 69
" You'll have to answer for this to-morrow ! " he said angrily.
" No doubt," said Georges ; " but meanwhile 1 want to get into my uncle's house."
He hoisted himself clumsily upon the stone pillar again, his dress rapier lying useless on the pavement, with a few marks of blood upon it still ; and he faced that other adversary.
"To tell you the truth, Citizen," he said nervously, "I am full of prejudices, and the ',' thundery weather or something else has heated j my blood."
The man with the pike edged nearer to the door and set his weapon forward doggedly. "You have killed my companion," he said, "and you shall answer for it. But I have my orders."
"You are not certain that he is dead," said Georges gently, "and I should doubt it. A man does not die so easily . . . but I do fancy he is grievously the weaker for his wound . . . he must have lost blood, my friend, or in that swipe of his he would have broken a rib of mine. As it is, I have a terrible great stitch in my side. I don't know what it is," he added, swinging his feet against the stone pillar, "but there is something I can't stomach in seeing two men mounting guard before my own
70 THE GIRONDIN.
door — or for the matter of that, one man." He felt recovered, and his voice was easy and strong.
"1 have my orders," said the young fellow with the pike again sullenly.
"Now the problem," continued Boutroux in the same tone, scratching his nose the while with the forefinger of his left hand, "the pro- blem of the cavalry sword against the pike is quite another matter. . . . There you stand with your great pike, and you have a reach, I suppose " (and he put his head on one side thoughtfully), "of a good six feet from your body, counting to the tip of the unpleasant thing you hold . . . it is certainly awkward ! "
He slid from the stone pillar, stood up, shook his legs into stiffness, clenched his left fist behind his back, and put the sword on guard.
"You would be wiser to go before there is trouble," said his opponent as methodically as he could.
"That," acquiesced Boutroux heartily, "is undoubtedly true ; but it applies to us both. It is always unwise to meddle with edged tools." And he tapped the head of the pike aggressively with the flat of the great sword.
The other lunged at him with his long,
THE GIRONDIN. 71
clumsy weapon rather half-heartedly and as though by way of empty menace only ; he was evidently doubtful in the use of arms. "Get out ! " he said.
" No," said Boutroux, " that is against my inclinations. I want to get in. If you would but go home quietly like a sensible man, carry- ing your pike slantways across your shoulder (if you feel more grandly so), or balanced level (which I believe is the more orthodox drill), nay, if you would but drop it where it is (for it is a heavy thing to carry about) and walk away like a good fellow, what a mountain of trouble would be saved ! "
" If you do not cease . . ." said the other, raising his voice.
"Hush," begged Boutroux soothingly, "hush! no shouting, I pray ! My people are old folk, and they detest brawling at night outside their doors. Why, they have reproved me for no more than having myself seen home by one or two jovial companions ! Come, there are only us two, and no one to see. Which is it to be ? Will you cover yourself with glory and be hurt, or will you be off? For it is getting late, and only just now I felt the first drop of rain fall on me, and I fear there's going to be a storm."
72 THE GIRONDIN.
The other did not move. A patter of rain, big, slow, and heavy, began to sound.
"If only," continued Boutroux, "you had a sword as I have, how simple it would be ! We would waltz round and round each other in the prettiest fashion, and clash and parry and make all the music that butchers make when they sharpen their knives on their steels outside their shops. But that ugly great pike of yours is such an intolerable clumsy thing that I know not how to deal with it." He advanced to- wards the door in one sharp step, and as he did so, the other plunged the pike awkwardly against him, caught the cloth of his sword arm, the shirt beneath it, and the skin, and grazed the surface of the flesh.
Boutroux was hurt sharply, and intolerably vexed. He swore, not loudly. He cut once and thrust twice, edging round his opponent, then he closed well in ; but that irresolute man, finding his heavy pike in his way at close quarters, had dropped his weapon and was clawing out desperately with his hands as though he would hold the sword. The blunt sword did no work save strike and bruise. Boutroux, more angry as he pressed the man back, struck at his head. The man weakly put
THE GIRONDIN. 73
up one arm to guard it. Boutroux struck again ; and he felt, or thought he felt, the fore- arm break at the blow. But even as he felt it his own arm weakened — it was bleeding badly at the new surface wound in his arm — and that curious, acrid, sinking feeling which goes with the loss of blood pervaded him in the darkness. Still he pressed upon that other, striking away with his iron, too close and too cramped, and more and more weakly.
The irresolute, disarmed, and tall young sentry, beaten like a beefsteak for cooking, bewildered, dazed with bangs about the head, and vaguely imagining that war must be a damnable thing, broke suddenly away and ran.
Boutroux ran after — and was surprised to find how stumblingly and ill he ran. He fell prone in the first few yards ; and as he lay sprawling, and wondering why it was so difficult to rise, he heard the echoing and rapid scamper of his late opponent diminishing further and further off down the empty stoneway of the quays.
He lay on there stupidly, listening to the
flying feet with a sort of pleasure, hearing the
tiny tap, tap, tap grow less and less, but still
just catching it. He knew, as his bewildered
mind received pain, wet, and silence all at
3a
74 THE GIRONDIN.
once, that things were changing. The earth seemed to be moving. He thought for a moment that he was on a ship : he felt woefully sick. He tried to vomit, and failed ; and dur- ing that confusion he was aware that a violent rain was falling. With one doubtful, unfocussed eye he could see the splashing of the drops in the lamplight. Then, for he did not know how long, his mind was filled with nothing but the perpetual crashing of thunder. . . .
******
He emerged from such a stupor as a man may emerge from an ill-conditioned and unhealthy sleep. The rumbling of the thunder, now more distant, was the sensation to which he first attended. Then he noted that it was lighter, that it was dawn. The storm had washed the streets and the air ; the trees far off beyond the river stood out quite still, and wonderfully sharp. His brain cleared as he watched them, lying there upon the pavement. He shivered, and found that it was cold.
He tried to raise himself upon his right elbow, and suffered so acute a spasm of pain as he had not yet felt in his life ; and when he raised his head he saw the cause of the extreme weak- ness which had made him swoon.
THE GTRONDIN. 75
All round his right hand, as it lay limp on the pavement, was a mass of dirty, rainwashed blood ; it was from his wound. He looked at the blood curiously for a moment, tangled in the cut of the cloth ; he had never been wounded before, and he did not like it.
He turned his head weakly. On the wall above him was a ring, an iron ring set in a staple, such as men tie the bridles of their horses to when they stop and call at a house ; he could just reach it with his left hand. He did so, pulled himself up with an incredible effort, and staggered to his feet.
" I have read a good deal about fighting," he said to himself. "It is quite, quite different from what I had imagined from my reading."
He took his right forearm in his open left hand gently and tenderly as though it had been a baby. He dandled it a bit, and moved it until it was somewhat more easy.
Then he remembered what he had read about the danger of dirt in wounds.
He very methodically took out his toy-penknife, and with the tiny blade of it he cut off all the cloth that lay above the wound. Then with the same instrument he cut the shirt wrist off as well and flung it from him. He bethought him what
76 THE GIRONDIN.
to do for a bandage. He cut a long strip from the upper part of the shirt sleeve, he staggered across the quay to the riverside, dipped the stiffening wound in the water by way of washing it — and wondered as he did so whether the water were clean enough to satisfy a surgeon — then he wound his strip of linen round and round by way of bandage, and having so done, quenched an intolerable thirst which he suddenly felt, and quenched it most unwisely in the brackish water of the Garonne. But wise or no, the draught revived him.
He remembered what he had next to do, and he went feebly, haltingly, very unready but determined, towards his uncle's door on the far side of the street some hundred yards away.
Even in such a dire circumstance Boutroux could not neglect the beauty of that morning. It seemed as though the politics and the violence and the bloodshed of the night belonged to some nasty drunken play-acting which he had seen upon a stage and had followed a thought too vividly.
The beautiful sweep of the city, the long and lovely crescent of the quays, stood lonely and clean in the early light ; the air was quite lucid since the storm that had purged it, and every mast and yard, and the very details of the rope-
THE GIRONDIN. 77
work upon the ships, showed like things deliber- ately drawn by some strong and decided hand.
He felt an odd peace ; he remembered how quarrels even between an old man and his heir belonged to the night. He felt how very differ- ent was every new morning from the fevers of its preceding darkness ; he even began a sort of little comedy with himself: how he would speak to his aunt and uncle of what he had done ; how they would welcome him — for they could not mistake his courage or his devotion to their roof and their door.
He came up to that door — he was careful not to note under the dawn the body of a dead man. He knocked at the door gently, then louder ; there was no answer.
He tapped at the porter's window gently again, and again louder. He saw the curtain drawn aside, and old Nicholas' head appearing, a dirty cotton nightcap on his poll, a frightened look in his eyes. Old Nicholas shook his head.
Georges Boutroux beckoned towards the wicket, and that faithful servant hobbled out to speak to him. Georges did not hear the familiar drawing of the bolt : all he heard was the unfastening of the little shutter behind the iron grating, and old Nicholas whispering to him, —
78 THE GIRONDIN.
" Oh, Master Georges, I have orders ! "
Weak as he was, the mood of the night was still strong upon Georges Boutroux wounded, and he said, in a voice which was less than his own, and sadly : " What ! Have you also got orders ? Every one seems to have orders ! And you, Nicholas, what are your orders ? "
" Oh, sir," said Nicholas in a frightened whisper, " I am to hold the door ! "
"Why," said Georges in his weak voice, and with the sickness coming back upon him, "that was what he said," and he motioned back with his head to the heap of clothes which had been Miltiades.
The old porter caught a glimpse through the little iron grating and shuddered.
"Master Georges," he muttered in another voice, "we heard a scuffle, but oh, we never dreamt ! Master Georges, I would give my life for you, I would indeed ! "
"And damn it all," said Master Georges, mastering his sickness, "I pretty nearly did give it for you ! "
" Master Georges, I know the master — I knew him before you were born. He will not let you in this day."
" Old Nicholas, if you do not let me in before
THE GIRONDIN. 79
the city awakens, and these things are discovered, they will take me and kill me. Do you know that ? "
" Master Georges, I could not make him under- stand. Master Georges, he said, 'Whoever you let in, even if you let in some one who would parliament from the mob, do not let in my nephew ; for I will never see him again.' Master Georges, he said that you were a traitor and the cause of all his misfortunes."
" My uncle," said Georges Boutroux in a sudden voice and with a weakening gesture, " is too fond of generalisation. We must respect this frailty in the aged." His mind rapidly surveyed his lessening chances. " Nicholas," he said, " I have no money."
"Oh, Master Georges," said the old man, "all I have is yours."
"Why then," said Georges, smiling at him, "let me have it. You shall not in the long run be a loser."
"And, Master Georges," said the old porter eagerly, " you should have wine if you are to go into hiding, and a little bread."
" Bread I can buy later," said Georges, " but a crust will do me no harm — and some sausage. As for wine, one can never have enough of it,
80 THE GIRONDIN.
for it makes blood ; and that, you see, my poor Nicholas, I have been uncorking rather recklessly. . . . Only, dear Nicholas, be quick ! " And even as he spoke a company of workmen half a mile away were gathering at one of the barges and beginning to unload. "The moment they see that," nodding with his head backwards towards the body at which he would not look, " the dance will begin. And I was never fond of dancing."
Old Nicholas hobbled the step to his room with fond tears all over his face. He came back, and through the lifted grating passed a bottle of wine which the young man hid in his coat pocket, the end of a loaf of bread, a hunk of sausage, and a pathetic bunch of assignats worth on their face value two hundred livres.
" If you'll put your hand through the grating, Nicholas," said Georges, " I will kiss it."
"Oh, Master Georges, it is I who should kiss your hand ! " said Nicholas.
"I will remember to give you an opportunity of doing that," said Georges, " upon some later occasion — but whatever you do, do not break your orders. The passion for obeying orders is very strong in Bordeaux just now, and the reputation of the family must be maintained."
The old man put out a hand like wrinkled,
THE GIRONDIN. 81
brown, and carven wood through the opening. Boutroux held it and kissed it gently. He turned his back upon the front of the house which was the only home he had known, and went off, not toward the bridge,, where he feared the traffic and recognition, but rapidly to the quayside.
The many boats that lay there he surveyed critically, though with a drooping and a wearied eye ; he saw one hitched by a looser knot than the rest, and with his unwounded left hand and arm unmoored it. He stepped in, and sculling at the stern with that same whole left arm, his wounded right arm supported in his fob, he gained the further shore. Without turning to see his city or his home again, Georges plunged through the growing grass of the aftermath towards the vineyards upon the low slopes half a mile away.
In this way did Boutroux begin his adventures.
CHAPTER V.
In which several Lies are told in an Inn.
I ""HERE was long grass — not the grass of the aftermath, but the wild, self-sown grass of centuries — in the empty flats just under the spring of the vineyard hills.
Boutroux lay in the depth of it, contented in spite of the throbbing of his wound. He drank a portion of his wine, and said to himself, " The best of wine will taste sour of a morning." And he wondered what vintage it was, knowing that old Nicholas would have given him the best ; but he could not decide.
He ate his sausage and his bread. He ceased to care very much, as drowsiness came upon him, either for that through which he had passed, or for the memory of his home, or for whatever might lie before him. He yawned in comfort, looked drowsily with half- closed eyes at the city beyond the river and the tall masts.
THE GIRONDIN. 83
The confused recollection of the night, with its violence and its quarrel and its bloodshed, fatigued him, and at last fatigued him pleasantly, so that he fell into a profound sleep.
When he woke from this it was already after- noon. The sun was still high, but its light was mellow, and Boutroux woke to feel a mixture of two things : the content that comes from a deep and satisfying slumber, and the angry in- flammation of his arm.
Then he began to remember. The light told him that many hours had passed, and that it was late in the afternoon ; and he clearly con- ceived what must be happening in the city beyond the broad stream upon that Thursday, the 9th of August.
He sat up in the grass and peered with close eyes at the very distant houses, as though he hoped over such a stretch of land and water to make out what was happening there. He thought how, long before this, that which had been Miltiades would have been discovered. The Section would have met ; the Club was not slow to action ; the city authorities would have had to take cognizance of the death ; and the police would be moving, too.
He wondered what witnesses they had found;
84 THE GIRONDIN.
where they would think that he had taken his flight ; whether the boat would be missed — he had had the sense to cast it adrift. He only hoped it had gone far down the stream, and had not caught near by in the reeds of the river bank. He wondered whether the Section or the authorities had entered that house to take the depositions ; whether old Nicholas would lie or be silent, or would blurt out the story of his escape. He could see his uncle, whom the city respected and feared for his wealth, sitting digni- fied at his table and answering with disdain whatever questions might be put to him, and repudiating him, Georges, and leaving him to his fate ; he had no doubt of that. Then he began wondering where news would be sent, and by whom. One thing grew clearer and clearer to him as these appreciations of danger succeeded each other in his mind : he must get off northward by the by-paths. And he only wished he knew more of the countryside.
As he so planned his wound began to pain him again and to throb. He attempted to re- move the bandage upon it. It had dried, and he found the pain of tearing it off excruciating. He set his teeth, pulled hard, and partly opened the wound again. He was interested as well as
THE GIRONDIN. 85
suffering: he thought it rather grand to have a wound. It was evident to him that he must get it bandaged by some one who understood such things, and he reflected a little grimly that he might understand them himself before he had ended his adventures, for wounds were becoming common, and times were worsening.
"I will wait," he murmured to himself, "until I come across some more of this civilian fighting, and nose out the doctor of it. But meanwhile, wounds make one look a trifle too partisan."
As he was so thinking and speaking to him- self, he heard behind him the creaking of a country cart, drawn by two stout, slow oxen, their heads bent beneath a heavy yoke. He saw seated in the cart a very small, weazened old man, with thin, grey hair under an extremely dirty felt hat, shaven cheeks and chin, and little eyes as sharp and bright as augers.
The cart stopped, and its driver asked Bou- troux, guessing by his fine dress that he must have a watch upon him, what was the time of day.
Boutroux had almost pulled out the little gold watch with his name engraved on it, when he thought better of the matter.
" I cannot tell you," he said, shaking his head.
86 THE GIRONDIN.
" I have had a most unfortunate adventure, and my valuables have been taken from me." With that he sighed, and continued to nurse his wounded arm.
The old man looked at him keenly. "Where did this happen to you ? " he said.
" On the river," said Boutroux readily. " My people are already many miles up-stream. We \ were passengers from Nantes. My father and his family were still aboard and the ship anchored in the stream, when I offered two fellows some- thing to row me along in the early morning to see the city from the water. They set upon me, and in the struggle I was wounded, as you see. They stunned me, and put me ashore here upon the country side of the stream."
The old peasant continued to gaze at him. "Where does your father's ship lie?" he asked.
"It is not my father's ship," corrected Bou- troux gently. " He is only a passenger upon it ; and I think," he added doubtfully, shading his eyes from the declining sun with his left hand and gazing up-stream to see if there were any- thing there in the semblance of a vessel — "yes, I think that is her moored nearest to the bridge."
" What is her name ? " said the peasant.
THE GIRONDIN. 87
" The Helene," answered Boutroux briskly, " the Helene of Nantes — it is on her stern. If you are going that way you shall take me there, and I will see that you are rewarded."
The old peasant shook his head. " I'm not going to the city to-day," he said, " money or no money. There's been fighting. . . ." He looked doubtfully at the young man, and added, " I will take you for one livre, if you can promise me that sum, to the nearest village upon the highroad, and there you can fend for yourself."
Boutroux remembered his tale. " My valu- ables, as I told you, have been taken from me, but I am good for more than a few livres anywhere on the highroad," he said. " The master of the post-house will know me, for one.
The old peasant communed with himself and risked it, and Boutroux clambered up by his side.
The jolting of the cart over the rough vine- yard way caused him no little pain in his swollen arm. He found the very slow progress of the vehicle and the silence of the old peasant, still gazing over his oxen's heads and uttering an occasional rustic cry to encourage them, exas- perating. The ride was not six miles, but it
88 THE GIRONDIN.
consumed three hours, and it was already evening and the sun had set when they saw before them the low- tiled roofs of a village. Their strict alignment told Boutroux that they stood along the great highroad. It was dark by the time the ox -cart had paced its humble way to the old peasant's barn in the main street.
Boutroux stepped down in the half-light, and the little old man, fixing him steadily and by no means politely with his gaze, said, —
" What about that livre ? What about that franc?"
" Old man," said Boutroux, " will you give me half an hour to find it in ? "
" No," said the old man.
" Yet you will get it so and in no other way, for I know a man in this village."
"I will come with you," said the old man simply.
The necessity of hiding his name and progress, and yet the necessity of paying off so impor- tunate a hanger-on, and the necessity of main- taining his first story of a robbery, between them troubled Boutroux not a little. An idea struck him.
"Will you let me find it if I promise you two?"
THE GIRONDIN. 89
The peasant shook his head.
" Will you let me find it if I promise you one silver scutcheon ? "
" No," said the peasant, " I must follow you and get my livre."
" Very well," said Boutroux triumphantly, " you shall learn now that all this was to test you. For I have the money upon me, as you shall see." And fishing out the assignat, he paid it in the other's palm, trusting to an argument which should cover his tracks.
But the old peasant did not budge. He looked carefully at the inscription in the light of a neigh- bouring window, stretched the paper, pocketed it, and said steadily, —
" Then what you told me was a lie ? "
" It was," said Boutroux cheerfully.
" How did you come by your wound ? " asked the old man.
"Father," replied Boutroux, with something threatening in his voice, "if you ask me how I came by my wound or catechise me further, or by so much as half an inch show that curiosity in my movements which I do not choose to gratify, I will indeed show you how I came by my wound, and that in such a manner as to give you what I gave the man who gave it me. Believe me, father,
9o THE GIRONDIN.
when I have argued the matter out with you so, you will understand it more thoroughly."
The little old man was silent. He said, —
" I believe you are a bad son ; I believe you are a wastrel. This matter shall be looked into."
He went to his oxen's heads and began backing them into the barn, and Boutroux, not allowing himself to exaggerate his pace, though he would have given much to run off and be free from this chance enemy, sauntered up the great road which the village lined on either side ; as he went he raged in his heart. It seemed as though every one were the enemy of the unfortunate, and so raging inwardly he went on till he came to the extreme end of the street and saw there the sign and lights and heard the noises of an inn.
" In an inn," he thought, " one may always find diversion and sometimes refuge. An innkeeper is an important man in such a place : he will be the postmaster as well, and if I make it worth his while he will protect me from any insolence."
With that in his mind Boutroux sauntered into the main room of the inn, lifted his hat — crumpled with the night's adventure and with his sleep in the grass — and called for a mug of wine.
He was seated in a dark corner, some feet away from the half-dozen or so who were gathered in
THE GIRONDIN. 91
the room. He leant his head on his hand to shade his face from the distant lamp. Soon the wine was brought him by the postmaster himself, and Boutroux, watching that man's not kindly face, beneath the shadow of his hand, asked if there were any news of the city.
" Oh yes, news of a sort," said the postmaster, eyeing him and his torn, muddy finery, his tousled head, and his tired face suspiciously, but at the same time hoping to entertain a customer who, however bedraggled by weather or accident, was by his dress apparently wealthy. "There was trouble last night . . . it's led to more to-day."
" What happened ?" asked Boutroux, sick within himself in his anxiety for the reply.
"I don't take sides," said the postmaster, hesi- tating ; " I'm a public servant ; I keep this inn, and I trust I serve my customers faithfully. And the King also."
At the word "King," several in the company laughed. The postmaster reproved them.
" I know my duty," he said ; and then he added in a lower tone to Boutroux, "You mustn't mind my questions ; the authorities have sent a list of them from the city ; they're looking for a man who's wanted ; and I've had to get every one to sign as a matter of form since the coach came in."
92 THE GIRONDIN.
He was silent for a moment as he drew from his pocket a sheet of paper — a printed form half filled in with writing. He looked at it, and then closely at the young man again. " What is your name ?" he asked.
" Marchand," answered Boutroux readily, "Mar- chand, Victor. I was coming from Saintes, where my father is Procurator. He sent me in our carriage to reach Bordeaux this evening, but we had a spill. I walked on here to get a relay, but I shan't go further to-night ; I shall sleep here."
" Oh ! " answered the postmaster ; he was re- lieved that this suspicious guest should sleep at the inn ; it gave him time to decide about some- thing. Meanwhile he reached down a great book, opened it at a dirty page full of scrawls, and pushed it towards Georges. " Sign here," he said.
Georges, mastering the pain in his forearm, signed with his uncertain right hand, " Marchand, Victor." And the book was replaced.
" What was the trouble in the city ? " he said quietly to the postmaster.
" I tell you I don't take sides," said that func- tionary again.
A short, good-natured, low-browed young fellow in a rough cotton shirt, with a dirty stuff jacket
THE G1RONDIN. 93
tied round his neck, his arms out of the sleeves, broke into a loud laugh.
" You are too squeamish," he said. " You were ready enough before the gentleman came in. Fact is," he went on, looking partly in envy and partly in jest and partly with a sort of spite at Boutroux's ruined smart clothes, " they've been un-nesting some aristo's in the city."
" When ? " said Boutroux gently.
"Last night," sneered the young man. . . . " And to-day, good work ! "
"That's not honest business," broke in the postmaster hurriedly, "and I won't have politics in my house. There's been too much already ! "
A wealthy-looking peasant, elderly and solid, contributed his view. " It is our business to get the murderer," he said.
" Of course," said the innkeeper nervously.
" Oh ! the Club'U see to that," said the young man who had spoken first. " It's their man was killed — the man who- killed him was a spy — and the old devil who sent him was at the back of it."
"We've no proof of that," said the peasant judicially.
" Well," said the young man, " the * authorities ' you're so keen on may catch the assassin first ;
94 THE GIRONDIN.
but I'll put my money on the Club — they're all over the country for him."
Two grooms who were present nodded in assent, and a gentleman in rather subdued clothing and with a worried face — a lawyer, one would say by his appearance — who was eating an omelette and drinking a glass of wine at a more distant table, looked up furtively.
The young man added : " And I hope they scrag the old devil too ! "
One of the grooms spat on the ground to relieve the pipe which he was smoking, puffed at it twice, and said, —
" Old Boutroux, to hell ! "
The other nodded again, and said : " Yes, and his wife."
" Do you know them ? " said the young, low-browed man in the shirt, glancing suspiciously at Georges.
" Yes," said Georges frankly, " I do. I know them well. It was only quite a short time ago that I was in their house. I should be sorry if anything happened to them."
" Monsieur knows perfectly well," said the innkeeper and postmaster rapidly, " that these men who are speaking are worthless. Pay no attention to what they say, sir. They speak and
THE GIRONDIN. 95
imagine horrors. Monsieur Boutroux is a good Patriot ; he has repudiated his nephew, sir. It was his nephew who did it ... a spy, sir, a man in pay of the Austrians."
"He killed an honest working man worth ten of him," said the elderly peasant.
Boutroux smiled serenely at them all.
" Your opinions are various, gentlemen ! " he said. " It seems," he added, turning to the innkeeper, "that there's been a murder, and the police want the murderer ? "
The innkeeper nodded.
" Aye ! " broke in the young labourer savagely, "but the Club want him now, and they'll get him — he was one of their own — the dirty traitor ! "
" He was a spy," repeated the groom. " So was his old devil of an aunt ; and she hid priests, and he was a Jesuit himself ! "
Again the innkeeper begged for peace. " Don't hear them, sir ! " he said to Georges. " They're scum — ignorant scum ! At least I can answer for it in the case of my two grooms. As for that third fellow," he said contemptuously, jerking his thumb at the young workman in the shirt, " I can tell you less, for he has only been a journeyman with me now for a week. We all respect Monsieur Boutroux here — we are most concerned
96 THE GIRONDIN.
for him in his affliction for the worthless heir."
" Go easy, master," said the young workman good-humouredly. " The gentleman wants to . learn."
" Exactly," said Boutroux. " I have not been to Bordeaux since six weeks ago, and I should be sorry if anything had happened to my old friends."
"Oh, nothing has happened to them," said the groom, spitting again. "What ever does happen to the rich ? "
" You might be more gracious to the gentleman," said the postmaster. "One would think he had done you an injury ! "
The groom then added a little more civilly : "It's what they did to the People, that's what puts our backs up."
" But hang it all," said Boutroux with an easy laugh, " what did they do ? What's it all about?"
" Only killed one honest man by treachery, and would have killed a dozen others," sneered the groom.
" Oh, nonsense," said Georges easily ; " I know the Boutroux well. Why, the old gentleman and his wife don't go about killing people."
THE GIROND1N. 97
"Do not believe what they say, sir," said the postmaster for the third time, in an agony lest he should lose wealthy custom. " They are worthless hangers-on and corner boys, these loafers of mine ; they repeat anything they hear."
"Well, there was a man dead anyhow," said the groom, leaning his face forward angrily and showing his teeth, " because I saw him."
"Yes," said his companion, "and I saw him too, and 1 saw what he was killed with."
The postmaster was again about to intervene, but Georges put up his hand.
"Pray, sir," he said, "let me hear the story out. It is of a natural interest to me. Madame Boutroux was one of my own aunt's few friends, and my own uncle has spoken most highly to me of M. Boutroux since 1 was quite a child. I think it true to say that my uncle thought M. Boutroux not only a good but a great man."
Said the groom : " It doesn't take long to tell. They live in the Section of the Great Bridge ; the Section heard that they were in a conspiracy, and that the committee were meeting in their rooms only last night, and that arms were stacked in their cellars. They sent a deputation to see the old traitor ; he refused to see them or to speak to them. Just as the deputation was
98 THE GIRONDIN.
leaving the door, he appeared on the balcony and shot at them, hitting a large number, including a woman, a Patriot. I have seen her myself, and she told me of it. When they had gone, one man was missed. In the morning they sent to fetch him, and found him lying dead outside the door. That is the news."
" Dear me ! " said Georges, betraying an in- creasing interest. " So the man was shot ? "
The groom nodded.
" No, he wasn't," said his companion ; " he was stabbed."
"He was shot, I tell you," said the first man angrily.
"And I tell you," said the other equally positively, " that he was stabbed"
" And I tell you both," said the young artisan, "that you are fools : he was stuck with a rapier. I saw the wound, and so did many of the crowd."
"There was a crowd, then, when you left the city ? " said Georges, indifferently.
"Aye," said the young workman, "it was about two hours ago when I left. There was a large crowd roaring round the house. Don't listen to what they say," he added, shaking his head over his shoulder towards the grooms. "They've got hold of this morning's nonsense.
THE GIRONDIN. 99
I'm telling you what happened. It was a porter at the quays. His sister keeps a coffee-stall there, and he's got another sister dancing at Libourne in the theatre there."
" I thought so," murmured Georges.
"You thought what ?" asked the artisan sharply.
"Why, I thought," said Georges quickly, "it would be some poor fellow of the People who had suffered. It is always so."
" It is," said the young workman, to whom they were all now listening as the latest bearer of the most authentic news. " But it wasn't old Boutroux' s own act, nor his wife's. Some in the Section went and apologised to them to-day at three o'clock, and they're going to give old Boutroux a civic crown. He's subscribed for the volunteers. He's all right. He's got a dirty dog of a nephew who used to go about with the Austrian party ; got above himself — had himself called * de ' Boutroux ; and then he would pretend to be hand and glove with the Section. Oh, he was rare ! That's the man that killed the poor fellow. . . ." The workman pursed his lips and added the syllable, " Poz' ! "
" Yes, that'll be him," said the grooms.
" I don't like to believe it ; I knew the little cuss," said Georges. " He used to borrow money,
ioo THE GIRONDIN.
and he drank a little, but I don't think he'd kill a man."
" That's the one," repeated the young workman, striking his hand on his knee conclusively ; " that's him ! "
The two grooms nodded. The postmaster said sententiously, —
" Well, one hears many different stories from different people, sir, doesn't one ? "
"Yes," said Georges, as though he only half heard ; he was thinking rapidly and hard — but as yet he had no plan.
The postmaster leant over to Georges and whispered : "The fact is, sir (since you know the family, I may as well tell you), it's the King's party who are hottest ! They don't believe the young man did it — but they're down on him. They say he was a dirty fellow to join the Jacobins, seeing his birth and all, and they're keener on him than any ! We've got one here, sir, in the town : an old colonel, retired — says he knows him. He won't let him go if he sees him ! "
" No ?" said Georges indifferently — and suddenly alive to a new peril.
But even as he said it the old man of the ox- cart came shuffling in and asked for wine.
THE GIRONDIN. 101
The old man's glance was furtive. He touched his hair as ritual bade, and bowed, as ritual also bade, to each of the company, rheumatically ; he had not yet seen Georges. The innkeeper moved to greet the newcomer. Georges Boutroux rose stealthily in his corner, and muttering to himself, " It never rains but it pours ! " he began to creep by inches towards the neighbouring door.
The young workman was looking down at the floor, swinging his hands between his knees ; the two grooms were gazing at the small cooking fire in the great open chimney — small as it was, it was oppressive in that weather ; the lawyer- looking man was untying the napkin from his neck, having finished his meal : for the moment no one was looking at Georges.
He was up ; he was out of the door quite silently, like a ghost, slipping behind his host's back ; he was out the room in the winking of an eye, and already he had formed his plan.
He had seen outside the inn a chaise with lamps lit and hood up, and an ostler hooking the two horses' traces to the car. He divined that the lonely lawyer-like gentleman who had just com- pleted his meal and seemed in some terror of democracy was on his way north. Georges' plan matured as he crept into the passage. He
102 THE GIRONDIN.
marvelled to find his mind working so quickly. He thought to himself, " It is a pity my uncle did not make me a solicitor or a thief, or some- thing of that kind ; but I myself did not know my own aptitudes."
He slipped up the shadow of the house towards the stables.
It was as he imagined ; in a little harness-room, under the light of a swinging lamp, a postilion in shirt and drawers was drawing on his riding- breeches ; his yellow jockey cap and smart blue coat lay ready by him, as did his whip and gloves and his two jack-boots.
Boutroux came into that little room displaying in his outstretched fist a bunch of notes, and as he did so, said to the astonished fellow who stood ready to curse or cry out, —
" One hundred livres ; do you see ? If you will listen to me you will in a few moments be worth one hundred livres. If you interrupt me you will not have one." He pulled the assignats forth in a wad, got the man right in the eye with a steady look, and continued, " You are rider to the chaise to-night, and your post is Mirambeau."
The postilion, full of mystery and tasting adventure, said yes. He was a blue-eyed, tow- headed boy of perhaps eighteen years.
THE GIRONDIN. 103
" Would you put your foot out that I may measure it with mine ? " said Georges rapidly. The postilion did so. Georges' foot was a little the smaller. "I will keep my own boots," he said.
"I will dress in your clothes," said Georges in a rapid measure, " and you will dress in mine. See, in this coat of mine, I put this hundred livres. I will put on your clothes and cap, and walk out to the chaise in your clothes and mount. You shall follow me to see fair play. You shall follow in your shirt sleeves. I shall be holding my own coat with the hundred livres in it. You will hold the two horses' heads. In your own interests, you will not let them go until I hand you that coat, and also in your interests, and as you desire to keep what is in it when you have it, you will let the horses go. Do you under- stand ? It is a check on either of us cheating — my family are in commerce, and I have learned such ways."
The postilion nodded. He did not understand, and he did not care. A hundred livres was an overwhelming sum, and he saw it there with his own eyes, staring him in the face.
The machinery of the transfer was perfected.
CHAPTER VI.
In which a Postilion goes Mad.
AT the door of the stable where it gave upon the street, Boutroux, dressed in the pos- tilion's clothes, with the postilion's large, peaked hunter's cap drawn low over his eyes, and affect- ing the postilion's swagger, advanced towards his mount. The nervous professional man who had been so silent during the altercation at the inn was already hidden in the depths of the chaise, for the showery thundery weather which still threatened had caused his host to put up the hood of it.
Boutroux mounted, with his discarded coat in his hand. The fellow he had looted was standing in his shirt sleeves holding the horses. He took the coat, and let the horses go.
Boutroux caught the reins of the led horse in his right hand, holding that hand gingerly against his side, and wondering how the wound
THE GIRONDIN. 105
would fare if the led horse pulled. But these old hack horses were like circus horses for training, he reflected, and like feather beds for slackness ; and as soon as he was out in the darkness he would take the reins of both in his left hand.
He was supposed to know the road; at least, no instructions were given him. Georges had come from the north some half-dozen times in his young life, and he knew that his next stage would not be further than Mirambeau, and that there his fare would sleep. But he also knew that at Mirambeau there would be lights, and men acquainted with the work, and a dozen stable - fellows, perhaps, too much inclined to question a postilion. He had no intention of reaching Mirambeau.
It was perhaps half-past nine when he heard
the order to start. Hardly was it given when
the master of the house shouted after him an
order to stop for some further directions or
other which he had forgotten. Boutroux suddenly
spurred the horse he was riding, the old thing
bolted forward, and the light and rather rickety
chaise was ofF at top speed, rolling dangerously
upon the paved highroad.
To play the postilion is not an easy thing. ia
106 THE GIRONDIN.
It is a trade by itself — half a gunner's and half a groom's. It has to do with horses — that is bad enough ; but also it involves some knowledge of the road. To play it as Boutroux desired to play it needed much more ; it needed a knowledge of things off the road as well, for on that main road he was determined he would not remain. He knew too well what might soon be behind him ! Once or twice as he sped on he thought that he heard some cry from his fare. He still spurred steadily forward, not sparing his cattle at the hills ; and he thought to himself, " What fare ever yet complained of a round speed ? " So he pressed forward.
The deluge of rain which had been threaten- ing as they started broke upon them before Etaudiers. They clattered through the village — every light of the place out, and no witnesses to the drive — under a pouring and deafening shower ; and at Etaudiers it was — or, rather, just outside the village — that Boutroux's determination was taken.
Cross-roads may lead anywhere : they may end in ploughed fields, in dead walls, or in quarries ; and cross-roads at night may lead one straight to the devil. But Boutroux was going to risk it.
THE GIRONDIN. 107
The barest glimmer of a road in the darkness leading to the right just outside Etaudiers deter- mined him. N
He spurred again, suddenly, so that with a heavy jolt the chaise lurched forward, and he found himself and it off the highway on a drenched earthen road, heavy going and almost impassable. He could feel the strain on the traces against his calves, but he urged the animals on, and somehow they stumbled through.
He had turned so sharp a corner that the rain beat now from the right side of the carriage and on the right flanks of the beasts, upon the right cheek of his face. The sudden passage from the paved highroad into the muddy land made a curious silence, in which one could hear the sough of the tired hoofs in the mud, even the very pattering of the rain. Boutroux was so intent upon his escape that he had almost forgotten the existence of the chaise behind him. He had quite forgotten the existence of his passenger, when he felt a very violent dig in the small of his back, and loud but inchoate sounds about " the wrong road " reached him through the roaring of the storm.
He set his teeth, shouted to his horses, and, as the going got a little drier at the top of a
108 THE GIRONDIN.
rise, compelled them to one further effort. The rain was gradually ceasing, the wind falling with it, and save the continual beat of his mounts' feet there was nothing to interrupt the protests now rising in violence from the unhappy man between the wheels, and he heard first a series of oaths, then two or three reasoned protests, then after a short silence a really frenzied appeal. But Etaudiers was not yet far enough away, and Boutroux still pressed on.
He had covered all but another league, in which he must have received some hundreds of heavy thrusts in the back unheeded, before the condition of his horses upon such a road gave him some reason to pause. He had gone from his starting-place at full speed for at least twelve miles. Hills which by the strict regulation of the law he was bound to walk he had taken at a canter on the highroad ; for now some miles he had left that highroad for a country track on which no post - horse was warranted ; and there were very evident signs in his own mount, and even in the led horse, that they had come to the end of their tether. He let them fall to a walk, and then at last the words of the gentleman who had commanded his services could be consecutively made out. Boutroux
THE GIRONDIN. 109
turned round with a pleasant smile, his young, handsome face lit strongly by the carriage lamps, pulled his beasts to a halt, and asked what might be the matter.
" The matter ! " said the unfortunate lawyer. " The matter is, you dirty fool, that you will find yourself in jail with the break of day ! "
Boutroux shook his head gently, and his smile was really beautiful in the lamp-light, had the exasperated traveller's mood only permitted him to appreciate its beauty. " Oh no," he said in a gentle manner, but (as he hoped) a little oddly. " Oh no ; I shall not be in jail — I shall be in the Kingdom of my Father. It lies," he added ecstatically, " a little beyond the Hills of Gold."
" Good God ! " cried the lawyer loudly. Then he muttered to himself, " I have to deal with a madman."
" Very far away," continued Boutroux, fixing him with large eyes in the lamplight as he turned half round, continuing his harangue and touching his horses to an easy walk — " very far beyond the Hills of Gold is the Kingdom of my Father — and it is there we ride, dear friend ! "
His fare made but a dark mass against the hood of the carriage, and Boutroux, reflecting how pale and conspicuous his own face must
no THE GIRONDIN.
be in the lamplight seen from the darkness, deliberately affected a most ecstatic air : his eyes turned upward under the heavy peak of his cap and sought his native skies as the tired horses plodded forward.
"Beyond the Hills of Gold," he said, "you will see these mortal beasts transformed, for my Father when He gave them to me gave them also wings, which they spread with the first rays of the morning; then shall your chariot also be turned into pure fire, and we will mount the skies."
The lawyer prided himself upon his knowledge of men and his rapidity of decision. He had seen things like this in the courts. It was really most unfortunate in the middle of the night . . . but there were ways of dealing with it.
" Monsieur the Prince-Postilion," he said, with profound deference in his tone, " I knew very well when I watched you mounting that you were not of earthly kind. I might have guessed that such as you would take me to the Blessed Realms. But since you did not tell me so in plain terms, why, I have come quite ill-accoutred and unprovided for that signal honour and for the Palace of the Skies. My clothes are drenched ; I am fatigued ; I have no change to speak of. I
THE GIRONDIN. m
would not dare to enter the glories you propose to me until I am a little better groomed. Will you not, therefore, of your courtesy reach me the highroad again by the next turning? When we make Mirambeau, I have friends there who will put me into a proper suit of clothes, that I may continue my journey with you on to glory. There is a road," he added tentatively, "whereby we can reach the Land of the Blessed through Mirambeau ; it is a shorter road."
"The Mirambeau to which we go," said Bou- troux very gravely, " is another and a better Mirambeau, where the Bright Ones walk in peace that serve my Father." The horses went dumbly forward.
" I have always heard," answered the lawyer patiently, and with a mild, intelligent look, very sympathetic, and as though he quite understood the business — "I have always heard that the road to the Celestial City branches off about half a league from Mirambeau, beyond the square at the sign of The Pig That Spins."
Boutroux shook his head decisively. " You are quite wrong," he said with quiet firmness. "That is one road, but it is a long way round. I have promised," said he, "this very night to carry you into the Kingdom." Then changing
ii2 THE GIRONDIN.
his tone suddenly to one of the utmost ferocity, he added in a scream : " Bound and delivered ! Do you understand? Fast bound!" He mut- tered fiercely, " And delivered — gagged."
He glared at his wretched fare as he said this, dropped his eyes again, and changing as suddenly back again to an extreme gentle- ness, he almost whispered, "Are you a lawyer, sir?"
The passenger bethought him of a method which he had found very useful in a past crisis with a client whom he tamed.
"Yes, I am," he answered loudly and firmly, " and I can make you answer for your foolery ! "
"A lawyer!" crooned the young man in a happy and inspired voice — "a lawyer ! The Man of Sin ! " Then he looked up and nodded affirmatively and gaily : " It's what I wanted ! You're the one " — his voice rose — "and you must get there bound and delivered: sealed, bound, and delivered ! "
For a quarter of an hour nothing further was said upon either side. Boutroux from time to time roared, laughed, and cursed to himself. The horses, too fatigued to canter or even to trot, wearily pulled the chaise along the now sandy road of the upland ; there was nothing but black
THE GIRONDIN. 113
and wholly silent night all round. Then the lawyer tried another ruse.
" Monsieur the Postilion," he said severely, " I am not worthy to enter that Kingdom. There is in Mirambeau a priest who will absolve me, and when I am shrived I will continue the journey with you."
Boutroux shouted to him without turning round, —
" Do not talk to me of Priests ; we will not hear of them in my Kingdom. A great fate is offered you, and you must take it whether or no. Besides which " — and here his voice suddenly rose again — " you are to be bound and delivered : I promised that ! Oh ! " he ended, smacking his lips, "you will be all the choicer served up in the midst of your sins."
"Monsieur the Postilion," said the lawyer, saying this time what was undoubtedly true, " I am in your hands."
He rapidly began to cast about for safety. There was, no escape by wheedling or coaxing: he must get help from outside. He held his tongue, therefore, and as the chaise slowly rolled forward he waited for the dawn.
From early youth Boutroux had known how great an aid it was to the fatigue of travel to
1 14 THE GIRONDIN.
indulge in song ; during the next league and more of that slow progress, therefore, he sang.
Into snatches of tavern songs which were famil- iar to him, and some of which his unhappy fare recognised, he interpolated glorious gusts of pro- phecy— fierce, chaunted denunciations of the rich, little dancing refrains and visions of a world to come. From these in turn he would relieve himself by a loud whistling and occasionally by a well-chosen burst of maniacal laughter. After each of these he did not neglect to turn his face fiercely over his right shoulder, unlip a row of white teeth, and mutter at the man of law, " Bound and delivered ; mind that ! Trussed like a fowl, — and the choicer for your sins ! "
So he continued, working his instrument of fear, until at last far off upon the plain a very distant twinkling light threatened human habita- tion and danger. He drew rein and halted.
The wretched beasts shook and shivered though the damp night was warm ; a low and eerie wind blew in the scant trees which were here planted in a group by the roadside. Boutroux stiffly and deliberately dismounted.
" It is here," he said simply, " that I am to wait until the Messengers of the Kingdom meet us with the dawn." He lowered his head as he
THE GIRONDIN. 115
spoke thus, but kept his eyes lifted, fixed with a dreadful glare upon his victim, and made with his hands the firm gesture of a man who ties knots in cords and binds a prisoner.
"You are right," said the lawyer patiently; "I see the lights of their advance. I believe they are coming towards us. It might be wiser to go forward perhaps ; it would be more courteous to greet them so."
" You are wrong ! " said Boutroux decidedly, standing at his horses' heads, stiffly and in an expectant attitude. " It is against the rules. We have no rule or custom more observed in our society," he added in a louder voice, "than to wait at this sacred spot for orders ; it is the gate of the Kingdom."
" I see," said the lawyer ; " I understand."
For a good half-hour the pair remained there facing each other, the lawyer seated in his chaise with folded arms, flattering himself that with the day he would know how to deal even with such a case as this, Boutroux humming occasionally little snatches of songs, and then falling into silence or crooning happy prophecies of a delight- ful land, or describing in awful phrases the tortures that await wicked men.
In the east, to which the horses' bowed and
n6 THE GIRONDlN.
weary heads were turned, a faint glimmer of day began to be apparent. At first you could not tell whether it were not a mere paling of the stars or a glimmer of mist that was drifting before them ; but the light rose and grew, it smelt of morning, and very soon they were both of them aware of the dawn. They lapsed into a complete silence and watched it, each in his different mood.
When it was light enough for Boutroux to see the face of his companion he watched it narrowly, and perceived him to be exceedingly afraid.
The lawyer had got down from the chaise and was pacing backwards and forwards, slapping his hands upon his shoulders to keep warm in the chill of the dawning, and waiting until a some- what broader day should enable him to take his measures. Had he been but a trifle more courageous, he would have closed with the lunatic ; but he was just not courageous enough, and that madman kept him steadily fixed with his eyes.
Under the growing light the landscape was now clear. Hedgeless fields, of stubble and crop alter- nately, stretched out infinitely upon every side. The lawyer stood apart with folded arms and glanced anxiously over those fields. The dis- tant single light still glowed, a yellow patch, in
THE GIRONDIN. 117
the window of a farmhouse a mile away, and sure enough, two men and a woman, with the implements of labour carried over their shoulders, were proceeding from it towards the harvest land.
" I think," said the lawyer tentatively, watching the effect of his words — " I think these are the messengers of your Father ? "
" I have no doubt," answered Boutroux in a low, grave, and reverent voice ; " 1 know them, and they will soon be here."
" It is only reasonable," said the lawyer, " that I should meet them." He began the first few steps towards the fields, tremulously, not know- ing how the move might strike the cunning of his ravisher. He was overjoyed to find that his escape was approved. And just as he got out of earshot he heard Boutroux's loud tone telling him with decision to announce the ad- vent of the young Heir with his Winged Horses, his Man of Sin, and his Chariot of Fire.
The lawyer was not accustomed to damp fields even upon a light soul ; he was not in a mood to negotiate them easily. He pressed forward feverishly over the six or seven hundred yards that separated him from succour : he did not dare cry out until many minutes had passed,
n8 THE GIRONDIN.
and until he was not only within hail of the peasants, but nearer to them than to his very formidable postilion. When he judged that such action was safe, he cried out at the top of his voice for help.
The group of peasants stopped ; they saw the post-chaise, the official uniform of the postilion's distant figure ; they remembered that the law compelled them to lend re-mounts for a breakdown, and without a moment's hesita- tion they turned and ran in an opposite direc- tion, lest such a sacrifice should be required of them. After them ran the lawyer, and as a stern chase is a long one, it was perhaps an- other quarter of an hour before his frenzied appeals reached them in any understandable shape. When they saw that something more than an ordinary breakdown was toward, they turned and awaited him. He came up with them. He was haggard with the experience of that dreadful night, drenched, most unhappy, and almost breaking down with physical fatigue; the clods were heavy on his thin, buckled shoes, and in general he presented that lamentable spectacle of a well-to-do man in distress — a spectacle always intensely agreeable to the poorer classes, but more especially delightful when they
THE GIRONDIN. 119
see a chance to profit by it. As he came up to them, he panted out, —
" Gentlemen, I implore you ! Madame, I implore you ! A dreadful thing has happened : a man has gone mad ! "
They looked at him stolidly, and did not answer.
"Gentlemen," he said again, "I implore you in Christian charity ! Madame, a man has gone mad ! It is but your duty to help me bind him and to restore him to his people ! "
" What man ? " said the leading peasant sus- piciously. The lawyer had now come up with them, and was standing face to face.
" My driver ! " he continued, gasping. " He has gone mad, and calls himself a son of heaven ; and he has landed me in this dreadful place ! 1 must require your help. I must require it in the name of the law. People of importance await me to-day in Niort."
" Oh, there's nothing dreadful about our place," said the woman shrewishly ; " you must be a little more civil in your speech. We are not in the time of the lords, remember7^~~She looTced "at. fum suspiciously. "What brought you here ? "
"That chaise," the lawyer answered foolishly
120 THE G1ROND1N.
enough, "that accursed chaise, and its devil of a driver."
The peasant whom he had first addressed watched him for a moment in silence. " I see nothing in your story," he said brusquely, and noting with suspicion the crumpled broadcloth of the wealthier man. " It's you that seems a little unsettled. If there has been a breakdown your postilion will know how to find help : it is his business."
" You do not understand," said the lawyer ; " he is mad ! he is unfortunately run mad ! He called me the Man of Sin."
"Well, there is a method in his madness," said the peasant with a grin, " and he seems to be taking a better course than you for finding proper succour." He pointed with his finger over his interlocutor's shoulder. The lawyer turned round, and at once began waving his arms in frenzy and shouting, for what he saw was this : the chaise standing, horseless and alone upon the way, and very far off upon the edge of the countryside, just turning into a wood that fringed the horizon, the postilion upon his mount, with the led horse following. Even at that distance he could see that the led horse went reluctantly, wearied beyond measure with such a series of madcap adventures.
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A moment later, the unhappy lawyer had no occasion now to continue his shouting and his gestures. The insane postilion had disappeared into the woods, and he was there with the peasants in the bare plain alone.
How he bargained with them for a mount to take him to the nearest post upon the high- road, how they fleeced him, how he threatened vengeance, how upon that account other men, labouring in the fields, surrounded him and showed the new temper of democracy, how het was compelled to jaesac, that —he—had, no title, but was an honest patriot, and how at las£— atr the cost of all the ready"money upon him — he obtained a very stubborn old she-donkey and a cow to pull his vehicle back to Etaudiers, would be of entertainment to any history con- cerning his adventures, but they have nothing to do with Boutroux, who was by this time in the depths of the high wood, and for the moment saved.
CHAPTER VII.
In which a Sack of Charcoal is taken and a Girl is left.
"DOUTROUX'S vague knowledge of the country told him that he might not be far from Chiersac. Once well into the high wood (for the earthen country road soon became a wandering track therein) he dismounted and patted his poor mount upon the neck.
" It is a thousand pities," he said, fondling him, " that you should have to suffer so much for me ! But what would you ? Men in necessity ill-use their own kind, let alone d umb brutes. I have no oats for you," he added sadly, as the two patient beasts stretched out their heads towards him, and one of them took a gentle bite at his sleeve, " but there's plenty of grass."
He mercifully took the bits from their mouths and strapped them by the buckle to the rings of the harness. He saw that the loops of the
THE GIRONDIN. 123
traces were tied up high, so that the leather should not drag and hamper the animals in their going ; he loosened the girth of the saddle on the near horse to give him ease ; he slipped the irons up, so that if he felt inclined to roll he should do himself no harm. And having done these things he made his horses a little speech, saying, —
" Good horses, I am an exile ; and I must confess it to you who have never told lies in your life, that within the last twenty-four hours 1 have told some hundreds of lies : but," he added, sighing, " it was fate ! " And as he said it one of the horses neighed.
" Precisely," continued Boutroux ; " that is the way I feel about it too. There are times when a man must lie. And now, horses, I must dismiss you. Do not follow me. You may have observed from my actions perhaps (though you horses are stupid beasts) that I was not keen on being followed during these last few hours of my life. Go," he concluded gently, "find your way home. Even if you cannot do it you will be stolen by some other of my human sort ; and since horses are always serviceable, you will be more sure of food than 1."
He strode into the underwood. For a yard or two the poor brutes made as though to follow him.
i24 THE GiRONDiN.
" I hate to do it, but with sheer stupidity genius itself cannot argue ! " he thought, and lifting a piece of dead wood that lay there he threw it at his former friends. Both looked astonished, one a little hurt. They turned from him, and browsing the coarser grass beneath the trees, made vaguely for home.
The sun had risen, the heat was increasing. The insects of; August buzzed drowsily in the wood, and content came upon the young man again as it had come upon him when he had landed from the boat upon the northern shore of the Gironde twenty-four hours before. His fatigue also came upon him so strongly that he fell, stupidly happy, under the low branch of a short oak, and dropped at once into a profound and satisfying sleep.
As Boutroux slept he dreamed. He dreamed a curious dream — vivid and yet mixed with memory.
It seemed to him in his dream that he was still in that wood, but that the wood was home ; and that in some way it was upon the fringe of a kingdom, and that the kingdom belonged to his people and his line. He thought he saw himself going through the wood for hours and hours, and as he went he spoke to beasts that passed him —
THE GIRONDIN. 125
wild deer and the birds of the greenwood, and little rabbits that were not afraid, and squirrels in the branches, and now and then a horse grazing at random. And it seemed to him that these answered him in various manners — pleased or unpleased, shy, pert, grave, humorous, angered, or loving — as might men. It seemed to him that he was conscious as he walked — that he divined very well — how every step he took he was taking deeper and deeper into some kingdom of his own, and yet farther and farther away from a dear home and things he knew. He felt like an exile who happened also to be upon a pilgrimage.
Just as he was coming out of that wood of his dream and half saw, or thought he saw, a very glorious landscape beyond, in which, in some odd way, was resumed all that he had lost and all that he should find, he stirred, his mind lost ease ; that landscape resolved itself into a mist and confusion of sunlight shining through green boughs. The outlines of those boughs grew precise, and he woke suddenly to this world. He sat bolt upright and stared with seeing eyes, first at the real things about him, then inwards at his fate. He began to revolve the same.
"Boutroux," said he gravely, "in the next lie you tell you must either lie freely as should a
126 THE G1RONDIN.
citizen in the third year of Liberty, or con- strainedly : for if you are dressed anyhow — even as a pauper — you will be free to lie freely ; but if you are dressed as a postilion you will be constrained to lie constrainedly, having to lie up to your clothes as it were, as do dukes and politi- cians and patriots, and scum of that kind. Boutroux, since lie you mus.t, I prefer you should lie as a free man ; therefore you must get rid of this postilion's garb. Boutroux," he added, " there are some who would be puzzled what to do, well knowing that men naked are fallen upon by the guard and thrust into prison, knowing also that men must see their fellow men in villages or towns if they are to live, and knowing that in such places are guards especially to be found — game-keepers and police, and chance patrols and authorities. A foolish man, Boutroux, might think it impossible to get out of such a dilemma, either to go as a postilion or to go naked — and either is fatal. But you, Boutroux, have more mastery, I hope, over your fate ! "
He first took off his coat and carefully turned it inside out. He was delighted to note that the lining was black. He next pulled off his postilion's knee-breeches, turned them inside out, and found the lining of those to be black also. " That," he
THE GIRONDIN. 127
said gravely, "is as it should be." The black coat and the black knee-breeches (as they now were) he carefully donned again, and began to consider his next act. He bethought him of his cap.
" To wear no headgear is eccentric, but no man is imprisoned for it," he said, "while to wear a postilion's cap is to be a postilion."
From the pocket of his coat, now turned inside out against his shirt, he drew a matchbox and tinder. With these he lit a little fire of dry twigs, whereon most thoughtfully he burned his cap ; and as it burned he said to it, —
" Not because you are a heretic, my cap, do I burn you — for the Rights of Man have done away with all that — but because, you will not conform with the rest of your society. Who can wear a yellow postilion's cap with black clothes ? Burn, and may God have mercy on your soul ! "
His spurs he unbuckled, and put them into that inner pocket. Then taking the ash of the little fire whereon he had immolated his head- gear, he deliberately smeared it upon his face and hands, and quenching a coal of it in a puddle of dirty water hard by, he rubbed the black streaks of the char upon his forehead and round his mouth. " If I had a mirror," he murmured, "I would make it as it should be, and every
128 THE GIRONDIN.
stroke would tell. But as it is I must do what bad artists do, and must trust to blur." With these words he rubbed hard at the streaks he had drawn, so as to mix them with the remaining ashes on his face ; he was careful to blacken round the eyes especially, that the whites might show clear, and round the lips that the teeth might be equally apparent.
"In this way," he said, "men know a char- coal burner." And where a speck of white thread appeared upon the seams of the black lining which he now wore inside out, he rubbed it with the same charred stick to darken it.
Having done all these things it occurred to him that the old proverb "Who sleeps dines" was especially true in this, that he who wakes is hungry. He had not eaten since his snack of the evening before, and he was a little puzzled to know how a charcoal-burner could earn a living where, for all he could see, no charcoal had ever been made since the beginning of the world ; but he noted that the wood about him had beech trees in it, and as he sniffed the air he thought he caught a smell of smouldering. So he went forward in hope and faith for charcoal- burners' heaps.
" It is one thing," thought Boutroux, " to cover
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one's tracks, and it is another thing to earn one's living ; but to do the two together is well-nigh impossible."
So musing he pushed through the undergrowth, following the ancient rule that one should on a high land always go down-hill if one would seek man, till in half an hour or so he came suddenly out of that dense growth on to a sunlit meadow where a stream trickled from the damp- ness of the wood which he had just left.
Hardly was he twenty yards on, over the pleasant grass, when a young girl, fresh, beautiful, and strong, with her pail balanced in her right hand and her left arm akimbo, called to him from a gate far off, —
" Charcoal-burner, we shall need a sack ! "
"God is in it," said Boutroux piously. "I thought as much : they do make charcoal in this wood. It will go hard if I make none with them." He shouted roughly back, " When, Beauty ? "
" Never if you talk like that," she said ; " but before night if you would wish to see my father's money, you may tell your dirty gang."
He smiled at her with the whiteness of his teeth upon his blackened face ; she smiled at him, and he went back into the forest.
i3o THE GIRONDIN.
"Heaven," said he as he got into the high wood again, "who has provided charcoal-burners unexpectedly, and a wench and her father for customers, will not allow this sparrow to fall unnoticed to the ground. But from what I know of Heaven it will not teach me how to burn charcoal ; and even if it did, for all I know the process may be one of weeks — and though I am willing to steal, yet, God help me ! I have no sack."
It is related of Ulysses that the extremity of evil was but a spur to him, and opportunity a gate of delivery. It shall be related of Boutroux that whether it was his youth or his good fortune or the gods that smile on exiles, something would always suggest to him what a man should do ; and so it was upon that day and in that hour, for he said to himself, " Since there are charcoal- burners, how should they be found ? By their folly and the folly of other men, as human things are always found ! " And having come to that conclusion, and seeing that the girl had gone indoors again, he crept carefully under the cover of the wood towards a more distant farm which lay upon the edge of the greenery, and when he got there he saw a young man digging with a spade in the garden-patch, and he said to him, —
THE GIRONDIN. 131
"I've come for the money for that sack of charcoal."
"We've had no sack of charcoal," said the lad roughly. "Who sent you ? "
" My mates," said Boutroux as roughly.
"You can go back and tell your fools of mates that they have mistaken the house, or that you have." And the boy went on digging. But as he plunged his spade vigorously into the earth he was inspired to add, "Besides which, they have no right to be burning at the White Cross, for that is village land."
"It is not," said Boutroux in the challenging tone of one who had studied the ground and known the spot for years.
"It is," said the young man, looking up and sweating in that heat, his eyes angry under his wet brows, " It's village land two hundred toises from the edge of the wood all round. The White Cross marks it, and they're on this side of it I "
"In a manner of speaking," said Boutroux cautiously, " they are."
"Well," said the other triumphantly, "there you are ! Pace the path and see if it's not within the two hundred toises ! I'll come with you." And as he said it he came through the wicket
1 32 THE GIRONDIN.
of the hedge across which they had been talking and began measuring strides along a widening path through the underwood.
" I was only joking," said Boutroux hurriedly. " I know it's village land. I didn't mean to rile you," he added good-humouredly, " but I did think it was here I was to come for the money."
"Well, it isn't," said the young man a little mollified and turning back to his digging. "It's in hell for all I know, but it isn't here."
"It must be somewhere about," muttered Boutroux, and he disappeared down the path.
It led him, as he had expected, to an open clearing, and in that clearing he saw the stack of faggots, the little hut of turf, the cut stumps, and the signs of past dead fires which mark the burning of charcoal in a wood.
How often in another day, as a child walking with his nurse in the woods of home near the city, he had seen such camps, but never had he wondered till now exactly how the trade was run. Nor did he continue to wonder about that or to care about it when once his eyes had fallen upon a large sack full of that which was to him at the moment more precious than gold, but unfortunately it served as a pillow for a huge and sleeping man.
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This giant was snoring in the noonday rest : one arm was under his head to shield his face from the rough edges of the charcoal in the sack, the other lay listless along his side. Beside him a leathern bottle of wine half emptied, and a loaf which had formed his meal, lay at random.
"My dear grandmother," said Boutroux in his heart, "who died three years ago, used always to tell me that I should choose business before pleasure, and she would add, 'where you think you have an equal choice so far as duty is con- cerned, take the more difficult course and you will be right.' It is therefore," he sighed, "my business first to shift that sack, and only if I accomplish that successfully shall I have any right to steal this wine and bread. It is by attention to things in their right order that men prosper."
There is a game called spillikins, in which a man wins by moving a number of delicate ivory spills intertwined one with another, and by moving them in such a manner that he separates them without shaking any one by the movement of its neighbour. This, on a larger scale, was Boutroux's task.
He began wisely enough by giving the charcoal sack a vigorous kick so that the sleeper's head bumped heavily against the ground. His snore
134 THE GIRONDIN.
was suddenly interrupted and caught in a violent spasm within the convolutions of his head ; he gasped, squirmed as though he would wrestle with the ground, then oddly sighed again, rolled on his back, and let his great arms spread out in the shape of a cross ; his head fell back stark against the earth, and in a moment was snoring again.
Boutroux looked at him with wonderment. " If you had woken," he said, " you would have compelled me to yet another lie. ... I have carried nothing heavy, though I have often boasted of it and lied in clubs. But you, my charcoal sack, be light to me. I should imagine from what I know of the stuff that it wasn't a patch upon wheat for weight."
Saying this he very silently and gingerly crouched down, slung the burden upon his shoulder, and finding it bearable began to stagger off, when suddenly he remembered something.
"A man does not live by charcoal alone," he muttered.
He crept back in that noontide heat and over the coarse grass without a sound, avoiding every twig, and holding his very breath for silence : he lifted the huge round loaf and the gourd of wine most tenderly as though they were young
THE GIRONDIN. 135
children whom he loved, got his sack upon his back again, with his free left hand, and made down the path towards the hamlet and the two farms. He had heard that labouring men slept at noon for but a short while : nevertheless he halted upon the edge of the wood, hastily ate a slice of the bread and drank a gulp of the wine, recognised when he had satisfied himself that it was wiser to restore them, went back and laid them where he had found them ; re- turned, took up his charcoal sack again, and bore it across the meadow towards the gate where he had seen the young girl in her beauty and her strength, holding the pail balanced with her arm akimbo.
" Now I could have drawn that," said Boutroux, looking at the now empty landscape, the gate, the wall, the small white farmhouse, and the falling open valley below. "I could have drawn it, but if I had, what good would that have been to me ? It is my business to deliver this sack of charcoal to the farmer. He needs the sack and I the money. Nay, he has positively ordered the sack, and I have been at very great pains to obtain it. This is commerce : this is as it should be : this is exchange. Here are two citizens satisfied."
136 THE GIRONDIN.
With this he had come up to the house, and he knocked at the door of it, slipped down his sack upon the big threshold stone, leant negli- gently against the door-post and waited until they should open from within. While he so waited he considered to himself how excellent had been his meal ; and he made a rule which he then determined firmly to keep the whole of his life, which was this : never to take wine if he could help it without bread, and still more surely never to take bread if he could possibly help it without wine.
He heard steps within : the door opened, and in the cool dark room which it disclosed he saw the girl who had been the cause of all this labour, and from whom he hoped to receive its corresponding reward.
CHAPTER VIII.
In which a Sack of Charcoal is left and a Girl is taken.
~f~*HE girl came forward from within the house to the door ; her beauty was veiled by the darkness of the room, her upstanding figure was free, and Boutroux said within his heart that the circumstance of man was unworthy to the dignity of love. He regretted for a moment the charcoal with which he had rubbed his face, and the work upon which he chanced by fate to be engaged. He stood looking at her with a smile which under other circumstances would have been half ironical and half adventurous, but which appearing as a white row of teeth framed in that new black face of his was startling rather than subtle. "Why the devil can't you carry the sack on your shoulders ? " she said by way of greeting. "Have I cleaned that threshold stone for no- thing ? Great brute ! "
5a
138 THE GIRONDIN.
Boutroux did not understand, but he under- stood when she put into his hand a silver piece in earnest of payment.
" Pick it up ! " she shouted like a young commander ; " pick it up, and go round to the back."
He hoisted the sack upon his shoulder again, making as though it were a great burden, and awaited her orders, bent beneath his burden. But he affected strength by looking up brightly as he did so, his white teeth gleaming again against the darkness of his dirty skin, and his eyes the brighter for such a background.
"You're not one of those who brought it before," she said.
"Not I," he answered richly. "I am plying three trades just now : to the one I am fast becoming used, which is wandering ; to the second, which is charcoal-burning, I am but a very new hand ; the third I have known and practised most thoroughly for now three years, and I thought myself a master at it," he con- tinued, swinging the bag over his other shoulder by way of a rest, and drawing himself up so that she marvelled how he could bear the weight of it in such an attitude. " I thought myself a master at it ; but as one lives one learns. . . ."
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" What is that third trade of yours ? " she said.
" It is a form of hunting," he answered ; " it is a kind of hunting in which the hunter him- self is always wounded, and even the hare does not usually escape a wound."
"That," said the girl as she strode by his side, short - kilted, and already amused, "is a proverb of your village. We do not know it here."
" I shall be happy to expound its full meaning in good time," said Boutroux from beneath his sack.
The girl said nothing in reply, but abruptly : " My father keeps his charcoal in a barn he has. I will take you to that barn." And she did so, but not by the shortest road.
" It is a proverb of my village," he answered, after thinking a little while, "and 1 myself have never quite understood it ; we have it in another form. We say that in that hunting the joy is all at the beginning, before the chase is up, and the sadness all at the end, and the worse for successful ending. But we say that either way there is no weariness in that hunting."
"You learnt that proverb also, I think," she said with a good laugh, "in your own country. We have no such proverb here."
" Well then," said he, forgetting the path and
i4o THE GIRONDIN.
everything but her, " have you this proverb, 'In that hunting the quarry knows the hunter better than the hunter knows the quarry ' ? "
" No," said she.
" Or have you this : ' The quarry fears the huntsman, but the huntsman fears the quarry more ' ? "
" No," said she again stubbornly, " this would seem to be spoken of the hunting of wolves and of wild boars, which doubtless swarm in that wild bad land of yours. For no other beast turns upon him that hunts or tries to rend him."
"Young lady," said Boutroux with great courtesy, as he shifted his sack again to the other shoulder a little more wearily, "first let me tell you that the path is getting long ; and secondly, let me tell you that the quarry of which I speak does turn and rend the hunter. It is its nature so to do."
" But is the chase not wounded too ? " she said.
" Oh, child," he answered, sighing, " have I not told you that both are wounded ? Hunter and hunted too ! "
"Never yet," she said in a lower tone, "has any charcoal-burner called me a child."
"And never yet," he answered in a tone yet
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lower than hers, "has any child, however beauti- ful, called me a charcoal-burner."
They had come to the end of a field, where a slovenly gate led the path round and through to other paddocks of the croft. The moment was propitious for a halt in their little journey. The sun in its early afternoon decline was at once hot and beneficent. She looked at him under the shade of her great hair, and asked him whether the burden were not heavy, and whether he would not rest a moment.
" It is very heavy ! " he said, and slipped it to the ground as if it were indeed of a great weight ; and then he sat down beside it, his legs stretched out, his back resting upon the burden, and his eyes looking up at hers as she stood above him.
" Charcoal-burner," she said, " I have known no charcoal-burners come to my father's house, though they come so often during the charcoal- burning days, who seemed so little fitted to their trade as you. Now, if you have some- thing that you are not saying and that you would wish to say, say it, and 1 will keep faith ; for I know very well that this forest is sometimes a refuge in days like ours."
When she had said this she watched him
i4a THE G1RONDIN.
with a little smile, looking for a new look in his eyes ; and he, putting on an appearance of due sadness, said, —
"Young lady, it is not one hour since I met you, and yet the thing 1 have to say is very near my heart."
She went a little further off, and leaned against the gatepost, still looking down at him.
"Charcoal-burner," she said, "you are not a charcoal-burner at all, for you speak like the men in the cities."
" Will you hear what I have to say ? "
" Certainly," said she, half humbly.
" It is this," he answered. " I have now been loose and flying, not without fear, for a day and for half a day, and in all that time and in all this heat I have had but three hours of sleep, and one bottle of good and two sub- sequent gulps of raw wine ; and I do most earnestly beseech you by my patron Saint, St. George as he once was — for God knows his status nowadays — that you will bring me that cool refreshment and drink which your kind face should promise me."
When she had gazed at him for a little while, smiling less strongly, but not wholly ceasing to smile, she said at last : " I will bring it you,
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though you have burned no charcoal — no, nor anything, I think, in all your life but things you had no right to burn."
She turned her back upon him and strode off resolutely across the meadows in a direction she knew, while Boutroux lay there, not unhappily, and considered the largeness of the world.
" It is evident," he murmured to himself, " that proper adventure and a change in things, large acquaintance and refreshment of every kind, lie open before the feet of any man whatsoever that chooses to travel. I could have wished," he added silently in his heart, " that my occasion for travel had been a little more genial, for every man has roots to him, and mine are all dragged out of the earth to-day, for ever. But Lord, the large- ness of the world ! "
As he so pondered in that happy and mellowing sunlight, he glanced drowsily here and there, through half-shut lids, at the meadows and the highland hedges and the more distant woods. It was very still, a crowd of midges was buzzing over the brookland below, and already the grasshoppers had begun their loud chirping in the roots of the aftermath. Nature was full and pleased ; he was content to fix those drowsy, half-shut eyes of his upon an edge of the near woodland where a bird
i44 THE GIRONDIN.
and its mate walked and hopped oddly together, picking for sustenance in the leaf mast, and helping one another. The one walked proudly, the other with seduction ; the one was brave, he thought, in the eyes of its mate, and its mate, he imagined, in the eyes of the brave one, beautiful. Nay, the beauty of the one and the courage of the other, in some way communicated themselves to his mind : he blessed the two birds and wished them happi- ness. But even as he did so, some movement of his, or some approach of another animal in the underwood, frightened them, and first the male, glancing round by way of guard, gave a little cry, then his mate rose, and both together took the broad heaven and flew.
" It was a pretty sight," thought Boutroux, "and now they are off to the sky." He would have carried his thought further had not that girl with whose conversation he had so lately been filled, appeared near by with a flagon in either hand. She had come through some opening in the hedge and he had not noticed her.
He rose to his feet with some gallantry, though a little stiffly after such adventures, and tried to take her burden from her. She put both flagons resolutely behind her back, and said : " How dp you know that they are yours ? "
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"I do not know," he said, "but I am very thirsty."
" Why, then," she answered pleasantly, " you shall be satisfied. Have you no mug or glass ? "
" I have none," he replied with great courtesy of inclination and of gesture, "and if you will not drink first I will not drink at all."
" My mother told me once," said the girl, " that women must not drink wine."
" There is something in that," said Boutroux ; "your mother was a wise woman. And what did she say of water ? "
" Oh, one may drink water ; but I am not thirsty. Nevertheless, since you need companionship, I will drink both wine and water with you."
When she had said this, she looked in his face, and in her soul she felt that the lines of it, and the strength of the eyes, and the laughter in the mouth were something that she would know and need. She drank from the one flagon and from the other in the Spanish fashion, and handed them to him.
" From which did you drink last ? " he asked.
" From the water," said she.
" Then I will drink from that first," he answered, taking a long draught therefrom. " And now " — catching the wine from her before she was aware
146 THE GIRONDIN.
— " 1 will drink the wine in order to remember your name by it."
"But 1 have not told you my name," she said.
" Nor need you," he answered, " for I know it already, and from now onwards I shall know it all my life."
When they had so drunk wine and water together in a sort of sacramental way, they said nothing more. He lifted his sack again, caring nothing whether it seemed light or heavy, nor willing to make believe before her or to deceive her any longer. But he went forward through the further small paddock along the path towards a rude strong hut of hewn logs that stood there, wherein was a store of charcoal, and in the dark recesses of it a sort of pen where a beast might stand, and in the pen dry fern litter that smelled well, and a little straw scattered over it, clean and good. He opened the sack and poured out its contents upon the charcoal heap.
" There," said he, " is the end of my tale."
" You shall be further paid for it," she said.
" You can pay me best," he answered, " with a little lodging, if it is safe that I should lodge here. The weather is warm, and, if you will believe me, I need concealment."
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She asked him suddenly : " What is your name ? "
" It is odd that you should ask me my name," he answered at once, and in quite another tone, " for your name I should never have asked. Have I not told you that I should never forget your name for all my life ? "
" But you do not know it," she answered again in a low voice, and very troubled.
" Oh yes," said he, speaking in the manner of the river Garonne when it runs at night with so sincere and so profound a noise, a noise so slight and yet proclaiming so great a depth and volume ; " I know your name. After a few moments I knew it for ever and ever."
This young woman, full of health and of the woods, in her eighteenth year as I have heard, a companion to the lads of the village, and an exchanger of taunts with the charcoal-burners of the forest, the stay of her father's house (for he was a widower), and the nurse and the upbringer of children younger than herself, had a face designed for some great moment.
She had never known how swiftly the gods may descend and strike, nor in what manner revelations come ; nor could she tell how little these great things may have to do with a complexion or an
i48 THE GIRONDIN.
accident of feature, or with vesture, or with any- thing at all but the body that men bear and the soul that makes it all. From that moment in her poverty she knew as much as ever has been known, and when she left him she said to him, —
" Whatever you may be, lie there close in con- cealment ; for I alone of all the household fetch and carry, and I will feed you, and I will preserve you. And God deal with me as I deal with you. You say that you know my name : I do not know your name, nor will I ask it, friend."
When she had said this she hurriedly left that hut and took the meadows back towards her home ; but though she had said that while he knew her name, she did not know his, yet in her eyes now was something sprung from him which no length of years would quite extinguish.
When she had gone, Georges Boutroux in the hut again considered, but in a very different mood, the vastness of this world. The place seemed a prison to him, and, as is the nature of prisons, he dared not break it. It called for companionship, as prisons will ; but again, as prisons do, it suggested only one companionship.
He was very greatly fatigued, he had done more than a man should do in every way ; he considered first what relief might be before him, and what
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opportunity for getting clean away. Next, and more drowsily as he fell back upon the fern litter and the straw, whether his trick with the char- coal had yet angered the charcoal-burners' camp, and whether they also were perhaps upon him. Lastly, as the good, sleep came down upon him like a happy mist, he wandered confusedly among the inward parts of his soul, counting that last hour and dwelling in it, and forgetting all the wild dance of the two days. He knew that it was something newer than ever he had known before. Then he saw the face and heard the voice so that it was already the beginning of a dream : he heard the low voice and he saw the sunburned face that was the woods and the spirit of them, and he saw the small hands holding from such arms the promise of refreshment and of peace. But after this even the beginnings of his dream left him, and he fell contentedly into his sleep.
CHAPTER IX.
In "which a Lover finds himself in the Dark.
' I SHE summer night upon the uplands and on the borders of the woods is cold : there is dew upon the grass, and in the open sky a chilliness which even the cattle feel in their byres, so that they crouch down upon the litter, or, if they are folded in the open, gather together for warmth.
But Boutroux was not cold : in that long sleep of his he knew a great contentment with which warmth was mingled, and his sleeping and half- dreaming brain imagined permanent satisfaction. For many hours he lay thus upon the straw above the fern litter in the dark refuge of the hut : when he woke, he woke so refreshed that he seemed for a moment in a new life ; he re- membered nothing — but bit by bit the rapid story of his quarrel, his exile, and his flight returned to him. He drew himself up upon his soft bed ; he
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found above him a rough and thick but good covering of wool which some one while he slept had gently laid there, and new straw heaped about his feet and knees. It was very early morning.
Everything smelt of morning, and the grey quiet light which came through the door of the shed and through the chinks of its woodwork proclaimed the hour before the sun. The little beasts of the woodland and the grass were already astir ; save for their movement there was no noise. He raised himself yet further, he found his arm less stiff; he unfastened the bandage, it came off easily and the surface of the wound was healed.
"It is wonderful," said Boutroux to himself, "what contentment and good novelty will do to a man ! They will close up his very flesh, and certainly they restore his soul."
Having so thought on the matter, he rose sharply from the fern litter and the straw, shaking them about him with a small noise. He coughed to clear his throat, and he had begun some sort of little song to cheer him, when he heard a low " Hush ! " and peering into the darker corner of the shed before him, he saw there the figure of his sleeping and his dreams.
She was leaning blotted out in the shadow
152 THE GIRONDIN.
against the wooden wall. Her arms were crossed upon her firm young breast. Her milking-pails and the yoke to which they were fastened stood upon the ground at her feet. The very faint light, reflected from the bright straw on to her visage, just barely showed its lineaments ; but he divined her eyes. She did not speak, but whispered, —
" Speak low. I have been here waiting for near an hour, lest you should be betrayed."
Boutroux approached her without any noise. She uncrossed her arms as he came and clasped her hands before her. He took her left hand and kissed it gently, and he thought, even in that half light, that her colour rose as he lifted his face to hers.
" There are several who would find you," she said again in a whisper, "but they cannot guess where you are, for they have been told nothing and they believe you to have fled. Only I warn you : and for that reason I rose while it was yet dark and came to watch until you were awake. But I would not waken you, for you suffered from a great fatigue ; and in your sleep, both in the night and now, you laughed and were taken with fever."
" It was you," he said, " who came in the night
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and put this cloth over me against the dampness and the cold, and it was you who put the straw about my feet and knees."
" It was I," she answered. " Here we keep much of the husbandry, and often my pails are left here for the milking, — so none could wonder."
" Nor do I wonder," he answered, " and I have better reason than they to understand."
As he said this to her, she lifted one arm a moment as though to lay it on his shoulder, but she let it fall again and would not. " Very soon," she said, " they will be all astir."
A cock crowed somewhere in the hamlet below ; he crowed a deep, gay note, full-hearted in his pride and challenging. In the high farm that was her father's he was answered shrilly by some young adventurous rival ; a third in the neighbouring croft took up the call. As those two heard these sounds, they heard also the hoofs of horses moving over the pavement of a stable far off, and the chink of iron ; and there came the whistling of a lad on his way to the fields and labour.
"You will stay here," she said. "You must not move, and you must trust me. I will bring you food."
"There will never be a time," he said, "that you may come, whether you bring me food or no,
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but I shall feed. And even when you are not here, I shall feed in a fashion upon a shade."
She would not answer him. She put the yoke upon her graceful shoulders so that they were bent to her labour, she straightened herself and swung the pails and went out to the field, short- kilted, walking strongly and with the morning upon her. He saw her for but a moment as she passed the door, but almost immediately, as she left him, there came palely through that same entry the first ray of the sun ; it bore with it a sort of miraculous enlivenment and a changing of all things as it came. And Boutroux thought to himself again : —
" Undoubtedly these are great days ! " Then he considered all that she had told him — how she had told him to lie close and to speak to none, and how she would visit him again.
An hour later she re-entered, calling carelessly over her shoulder to companions far off, and saying that when she had left her pails in the shed she would rejoin their company. She put down her burdens swiftly, and came to him where he in- habited his lonely place, and set before him in a hurried way a paper wherein there was cold meat and household bread, dark in colour, and a little salt.
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" I have no wine," she said in a low voice.
"Be pleased to hear," he answered more de- liberately, but in a voice as low, "that I cannot drink wine of a morning, having in my time drunk more than should be drunk at night ; but since it is you have brought this meat to me, there will be wine enough in it, I think, and in the bread as well."
She was gone immediately, so that none outside could have wondered at her delay ; and as she went out she called again to her companions, saying that the shed was too far a place to leave the pails in, and for the future she would borrow a neighbour's barn nearer to their own byres.
Meanwhile, Boutroux in his hiding all day long waited for the evening, and was as patient as his strength permitted him to be.
The sun had fallen to its afternoon : he was feeling drowsy with such enforced indolence and secrecy, when, before he was aware of it, she was at his side again, bringing this time wine with the bread and meat. She spoke with less content and more hurriedly than before ; she begged him not to move nor to make one sound until it should be dark, for he was in danger ; she promised him when it was dark to return and to tell him the
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story of his danger. And once more he obeyed her.
The evening of that day fell : the sounds of labour retired and were silenced, the grasshoppers after their loud evening chirping reposed, for the night chilled them. And Boutroux waited until it seemed to him that sleep had come down upon the hamlet and the charcoal-burners, and all the living things of the woodland and the clearing. As he so waited, he heard again the step which he now knew like his own name, and she was by him ; but she bore nothing save her message.
Her voice, which had been hurried and troubled when she had last brought him succour, was now more troubled and more hurried ; the tale she had to tell him was the tale he knew — for she, too, knew it now. And as she began to tell him his own story, coming slowly to it, and hesitating, she held him once involuntarily, and held him close, to com- plete her telling of it, and she spoke to him in a terror which was a great and a proud thing for him to hear ; for as he felt its source he himself could not be at all afraid — no, not even of those things that pursue a soul in darkness. And as for the pursuit of men — hearing her low voice and considering her care, he gloried in that peril.
Her speech was halting : she told him the
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last things first, so that he must question her gently, almost as by caresses. He thought she trembled, though she was so strong and well- poised.
" They neither know me nor where I am," he said.
" Friend," she whispered to him, " you said in that first speech of ours — which, oh my God, is surely all my life ago ! — that you were a hunter at times."
" All men are hunters at times," he said.
" Friend," she said, " when some brave thing is hunted and the hounds come upon it, not only in chase but on flank and flank, it goes hard with that quarry."
"It is the end of it," he answered tenderly, "or, at any rate, it is the end of that hunting."
" But," she said, with a little sob and laugh at his perpetually turning her phrase, " this hunting is no hunting of lovers, and they have you in chase and on either flank as well, for I will tell you : — This morning as I left you with the pails to go milking, I met no one, for the hour was early, only Peter in the hollow, the son of the man they call Rich Hamard, who has the main croft and farms the taxes here. And they say he has God's curse on him, with which the old
158 THE GIRONDIN.
woman cursed him ten years ago when he bade the sergeants distrain."
" All that is news to me," said Boutroux, hold- ing her in the darkness, " and whatever news you have is as pleasant as the noise of a brook. But 1 learn nothing of my fate."
"He did but salute me then," she continued in her whispered, halting anxiety, " but when an hour later I left you, having given you food in that brief moment, he was waiting with my companions at the well ; and he said, ' Jolse ' (which is their nickname for my name Joyeuse; and that is a nickname, for my true name is Isabel) — c Jo'ise, there are men in this country look- ing for coin.' "
"That is a thing, my dear," said Boutroux gently, "that twenty men to my own knowledge have looked for in their time, and only one or two now and then have found it."
"Oh, let me tell you," she said, and sighed. " He said to me threateningly, ' They are looking for coin.' ' For what coin ? ' said I, roughly. It is he who comes with a set wooing every Sunday eve before the Mass and on the eve of the feast days to sit by the fire ; and he claims to sit next me, and my father will have it so. Since it is so, I must treat him lovingly or roughly •
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I treat him roughly, for I will treat him in no other way."
"You do well," said Boutroux, "to treat all men roughly ; they are rough, and rough treat- ment is in the nature of roughness. Friend, rough on ! "
" Friend," she said, " when he spoke about that coin I knew what he meant. He meant the money paid you for the sack of charcoal."
" And why ? . . . And if they do ? . . . It was not marked," said Boutroux ; " and even if it were marked, I have it here, and I can bury it — none can know of that sack or of me, save you only."
"Friend," she said, "listen. The charcoal- burners say, and have said it to the Justice, that they had been robbed of their charcoal. They missed but that one sack ; of that they complain less. But they complain most about a purse in which they kept their common earnings, and of a fine roll of cloth which one of them had bought at the Fair. They will have it that a wandering man deprived them of these things. One says that he has seen him."
" Then he lies," said Boutroux ; " and that wandering man took nothing but the charcoal sack, and took it at a great risk, which paid for
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it. No — wait — he did also take good wine and doubtful bread. I remember his taking it, for it was I. But as for the purse, he never heard of it ; and for the roll of cloth, he would as soon steal a beech tree or a wolf trap to burden him upon his going."
"Then," she went on still fevered, "in the village one and another complains to the Justice during the day that they have lost this or that ; and, friend, in a word, they are hunting for a man."
" See how a hunter can be hunted ! " said Boutroux. " It is a double world."
"I would have you out by night," she said, " here and now, although your going would leave me so that after these few hours all the rest of my life would be ringing like a steeple at a dying, with nothing else but the dying of these few hours. But I cannot have it so, because there is another thing."
" And what is that ? "
" If I tell you, you will be angry," she answered, and was silent ; and though he questioned her and pressed her, she would tell him nothing at all, nor speak to him for a little while. Then she said, —
"In the great city there was some one who
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killed a man, and he did it against The People. They say that they -have traced him to our woods, and the Commune has been advised by the Commune of the city, and the Commune of the city has sent armed men. Now, though you should go by night, they know you, friend (for you I think it was that killed the man) ; you would not traverse this country, which is unknown to you, at the first dawning, without falling into some village without disguise, and you would be caught and held."
"It was I," said Boutroux, "who killed the man."
He felt the form that he held shrink at those few words, and for a moment something lifted in his mind, letting in a light, as it were, upon his reason, and making him afraid of his own self. He heard again the first engagement of steel, and it seemed to him in a sort of lightning vision something so evil that he would have no more to do with it than with venom or with treason. He smelt sulphur in the sparks of the steel ; but, as rapid as the flash of those sparks in his memory, the impression faded, and he was back in his old security.
"I fought,", said he a little sullenly. "If it
had been he that had had the better of me. my
6
1 62 THE GIRONDIN.
ghost would never have complained — least of all to a woman."
" Friend," she said softly, " I am not blaming you."
" Did they tell you more ? " he added ; " did they speak of a house or of friends ? Or did they give you any name or description ? "
" No," she said in a bold whisper, and lied ; for in the gossip and the offered reward, in the speech of his pursuers, and from his own manner, she had easily made out the truth, and she knew him for what he was : his name, his house, and all his story.
" I am tired to hear so much of these perils," he said to her in another tone. " I can see, through the door of this open prison, that the moon is up. I dare not go out with you, for you tell me that everything is watched, and yet you tell me also that this place cannot be suspected."
She grasped his wrists with her hands, and he wondered at their sudden strength in the darkness.
"Oh," she said, "try no more adventures, but wait until 1 show you a way ; for in that moonlight, if they should see from any window any form coming hence it would go very ill ;
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and if they should see two together, two would suffer, friend, for how would my people bear to see me with a stranger ? "
" I will not go out," he said. ..." How clear are these nights, from the midnight onward, when the moon has risen ! "
" You shall stay here," she said, " and I will come always at night-fall, and I will be with you all the unknown hours, and leave you a little before the dawning, and there shall be our farewells. For in a little time, when seven days have passed, and we have the dark of the moon, and I have found some tale to tell, and some wrong scent to put them on, then, oh my friend, you will go out, and I will go with you. But I shall not follow you beyond some place of safety, which I shall have prepared."
"If I so desire," he said, "you will follow me."
She answered nothing at all. For all that night, until just before the dawning, they were together in the hiding-place.
CHAPTER X.
In which Two Lovers find themselves in the Daylight.
CO one day passed, and another, and twice in every daylight she brought him food ; and after the fall of night he would sometimes creep out a little and breathe the air and look furtively from the shadow of the low wooden wall at the lights in the houses far off, and wait until, when all those lights were darkened, before the rising of the moon, she would come to him where he awaited her. And it seemed to him during those •days as though many years were passing, and it seemed to him also as though two lives had been appointed for him — one the life before he knew such vigils, but the other the life after them.
Never in all those long secret companionships did he hear her voice aloud, nor she his ; nor did they dare go out alone together beyond the walls of his hiding-place or breathe the air outside, until,
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upon the evening of the seventh day, while the lights were still shining in the windows, and long before he had expected her, he heard footsteps, not at the door, but behind the hut, and through the chinks of it a voice that called him gently, not by any name, but calling him friend.
" You must rise," she said, " friend, if you are sleeping ; and if you are not sleeping you must rise. You must come crouching round swiftly to the back here where I am and where is a deep shadow, and then we will go together to a place I know."
Even as she spoke in whispers, those whispers were so lamentable that his heart broke for her. And when he came to her in that shadow, he said, "What does it matter to me, Joyeuse, whether I escape or no ? "
" Ah," said she, " friend, shall we be longer one with the other if they make you a prisoner ? I think not ! You are caught every way if you remain ; and if you do what I shall tell you, though we never see each other any more, you shall be free ; and if you are free it is with God and His holy ones whether we meet again." When she had said this she went quickly before him along the darkness of the hedge towards the brook and the line of the woodland, and he
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followed. Then she went by a path she knew into the underwood, and he still went after.
As they went the last sounds of the village were lost behind them, and sleep came upon it and upon the wild wood ; and as it was the dark of the moon, they went secure from men. Twice he called to her, and twice he would have halted ; but she answered only by commands and still went forward,