Its only remaining occupant, the Abbé Chassin, looked up from his breviary where he sat on the old brocade sofa.
“I could wish,” he observed, “that they had departed earlier—or at least that young La Vergne had done so, before he brought about what happened last night, by his mention of the word ‘Mirabel.’ But what, Gaston, in the name of all the saints, possessed you to force me to give you the memorandum like that, before everybody? Of course I only meant to put it into your hands when we were alone!”
The Marquis de Kersaint, seeming to find it perfectly natural to be addressed thus familiarly by his inferior, shrugged his shoulders. “Why then, my dear Pierre, did you, in your turn, say before everybody that your information was for my private ear? A slip of that kind is unlike you. How could I possibly accept for my private ear any news about the place?”
“No, perhaps not, but your persistence, if you will forgive my saying so, rather drove me into a corner. However, I dare say we were both equally to blame, I for not being readier-witted, and you for—well, for taking the bull a little too much by the horns.”
M. de Kersaint, evidently not at all resenting these criticisms, looked down at the priest. “Above all things I did not want to create a mystery,” he said.
“And instead of that you created a kinsman,” observed the Abbé with a half smile, and then became grave again. “It was very unfortunate, the whole thing, but naturally we had neither of us any idea of what it was going to lead to.”
The Marquis de Kersaint’s face darkened. He turned away, and began to walk up and down. “You made a fine holocaust of my imaginary family,” he said after a moment.
“I had to stop him somehow,” replied the Abbé briefly. He had closed his book, and was watching the pacing figure.
“So that,” said M. de Kersaint after another silence, “that is how a Frenchman, an émigré himself, judges the conduct of the Duc de Trélan! I thought it was only in England that they did not understand.”
The priest had risen. “Gaston,” he said firmly, “as I said to the Comte last night, and as I would repeat it at my last hour, in the matter of Mme de Trélan’s death I hold that no one was to blame—save her murderers. She could not have been saved. Did his Highness the Duc de Penthièvre save his daughter? We know that he tried. Not an archangel could have saved Mme de Lamballe. So with Mme de Trélan that day. You know that as well as I, and M. de Brencourt, if he were not ridden by some demon of spite, knows it too.”
“She went through that door, as he said,” continued M. de Kersaint. He had come to a standstill; his face was ashen. “She saw . . . all that . . . before——And she might have taken the road to England and safety two years earlier.”
“It is true,” answered the priest. “She had the chance.”
“Yes,” said his foster-brother, looking at him as if he did not see him, “she had the chance . . . and refused it. I cannot tell de Brencourt that. But, O my God, what a tragedy of mistakes!”
He was backed now against a huge old wardrobe, motionless, almost as if he were nailed to it, voice and eyes alike full of that seven years’ old horror and anguish.
“It was but a mistake, a misunderstanding, then, Gaston,” said the priest quickly. “You acknowledge that, you see!”
The man against the wardrobe gave a laugh. “But what is worse than a mistake, Pierre? Not a crime, certainly. Mistakes appear, at least, to be more heavily visited in this world. It seems to me that I am about to begin a fresh series of payments for mine. . . . As for her, if she made any, she paid—how much more than paid!—in that moment of martyrdom that does not bear thinking of, that I still dream about, it seems to me, almost every night. . . . Now, if it is to be dragged out as de Brencourt dragged it yesterday, I shall wish you had not turned me from my purpose seven years ago.”
Dear saints, thought the priest, looking at him compassionately, are we, after all he has suffered, to go once more through the inferno of those dreadful days in England? For a moment he saw again that lofty, richly-furnished room in London where the proudest man whom Pierre Chassin had ever met or read of sat with his whole existence fallen in a day to ruins about him—his honour tarnished and his self-respect in the dust. For he had that day received the appalling news of his wife’s butchery in prison—not having known, even, that she was a prisoner—and he had heard also that he was in consequence being talked about in no flattering terms throughout those same London drawing-rooms where he had been so courted. Indeed—not then knowing why—he had that very morning been cut in St. James’s Street by two of his most intimate English acquaintances. . . . The candlelight on his escritoire, running over the darkly shining mahogany before him, had showed the weapon ready to his hand when the shabby little émigré priest, who had come hotfoot at the news, succeeded in forcing his way past the terrified servants into that forbidden room . . . only to be ordered, in a voice that made him quail, to depart instantly. He had sometimes wondered himself what had given him the courage to disobey, and to stand, as he had done, for a whole night between the Duc de Trélan and suicide. Even to-day he could scarcely bear to think of the naked agony and conflict of that vigil, and it was very rarely referred to by either of them.
He went up to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “O my brother, if you would only cease to torment yourself! You have not, you never have had, a shadow of real responsibility for your wife’s death.”
“Easy to believe, is it not?” remarked the other with a ghastly smile, “when men speak still as de Brencourt spoke last night!”
The Abbé made an almost impatient movement. “It is quite impossible that the Comte really thinks what he says! Why, thousands of men emigrated without their wives,—just as some wives without their husbands—and no one thought it anything but natural and right in those days . . . a duty even! All the noblesse were equally blinded as to what was coming. And can you seriously maintain that any blame attaches to you for what happened two years later, because you were no clearer-sighted than the rest—the rest who, like you, were in exile?”
“But the rest,” said the Marquis de Kersaint, staring down before him at his locked hands, “were not, in 1792, merely amusing themselves in exile, whatever they may have been doing in 1790. . . . Even though I had not been by her side, if I had been where I ought to have been long before, in the army of the Princes or with Condé, do you think that de Brencourt would say . . . those things? Or that they would be like death to me, if he did? . . . You see you cannot answer that, Pierre!”
“Mon frère,” said M. Chassin quietly, “that delay has been expiated. The question for the moment is, whether M. le Comte suspects your identity.”
M. de Kersaint moved a little. “Do you think he possibly can? I never remember seeing him before in my life, until he was assigned to me last December in Jersey as my lieutenant.”
“And if he had ever chanced to see you before the Revolution,” went on the priest musingly, “this bitter resentment he seems to have would have shown itself ere now. No, he could have had no grounds for suspicion of any kind before last night and the business of Mirabel. It was evidently only the mention of that name that roused him. If he begins to have . . . ideas . . . my advice to you, Gaston, is to tell him who you are. He knows, as most people do, about the part you played at Rivoli, not to speak of what you are doing now, so he would not continue——”
“Never!” broke in the Marquis, making a violent gesture of negation. “I desire never to hear that old name of mine again in this life! And I forbid you once more to tell anyone in the world—anyone—whatever you might think would be gained by it! Is it a promise?”
“You have had my promise once for all, Gaston.”
“I will never see you again if you break it!” said his foster-brother with vehemence.
“Have I kept it so ill these seven years, then, that you think a threat is necessary?” asked the priest gently.
“Oh, my dear Pierre, forgive me!” cried the other instantly, and he held out his hand. “When a man starts threatening the best friend he ever had, to whom he owes not only his life but his sanity, it looks rather as if that sanity was leaving him!”
“I do not see much signs of that,” said the priest, with a smile, as he took the proffered hand. “And last night’s business was horrible. I have always thought,” he went on reflectively, “that M. le Comte was an embittered man.”
“If I had known,” said his foster-brother in a low voice, “that he had ever met her, I would never have consented to work with him. . . . But I never should have known save for this strange business of Mirabel.”
“And that is a business which must be attended to, I suppose,” the priest reminded him.
“Yes, I suppose so, too,” said M. de Kersaint rather wearily. He went to the nearest table, and sitting down pulled out the parchment and flattened it out on it. The Abbé came and studied it over his shoulder for a while in silence.
“Well, what do you think of it, Gaston?”
“I have very little doubt that it is genuine. As a child, I once heard my grandfather speak of the legend, but he dismissed it as being only a legend. In those days I thought the idea romantic and fascinating. Did I never mention it to you when I came to Rosmadel?”
“Never,” said the priest, suddenly seeing himself as he was in those days, a little barefooted boy going birdsnesting with a young prince in velvet whom he had the right to call brother. “Had you done so I should not have forgotten it.”
“I do not believe that I ever gave it a thought after I came to man’s estate,” went on the Marquis musingly. “It must have gone back to the region of fairy stories. And this old lady—what was her name?—you did not mention it, I think.”
“Purposely so,” replied the Abbé, dropping into a chair beside him. “Her name was Magny, Mlle Magny. She was for years, she said, tiring-woman to Mme la Duchesse Douairière.”
His hearer clasped his hands over his eyes. “I remember the name,” he said after a moment. “I recall her too, I think. She must be well advanced in years now.”
“She was yesterday,” agreed the priest. “To-day—who knows?”
The Marquis looked up. “She is dead then? I did not gather that.”
“She died while I was with her.” They both fell silent, M. de Kersaint fingering the parchment—gone back also, thought the priest, to a distant wedding-day.
“Gaston, give me your hand!” he said suddenly, stretching out his own. “No, not that one, the other.” And when the Marquis in surprise had complied, the Abbé, holding the so dissimilar fingers in his own, tapped with a forefinger on the signet ring that one of them bore, and said, “Are you wise to wear that?”
M. de Kersaint looked down at the crest cut in the emerald. “I have always worn it—without reflecting, I suppose—when I gave up everything else. One is inconsistent, no doubt. I never use it, of course.”
“But anybody—anybody interested—can make out what the device is, though oddly enough it never struck me till last night when your hand was on the table and the candlelight fell on it.”
“It means nothing to him probably.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said the priest, releasing the hand.
The Marquis slipped off the ring. “Very well. I will give up wearing it then.—Though, indeed, I might use it to support my claim of being akin . . . not that I am likely to wish to do that again!”
“Your kinship is by marriage, remember. You would never use the same arms. And, Gaston, having once declared yourself a kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s you will have to keep it up, in order to get at the money.”
The Marquis, putting the ring in his pocket, frowned at this obvious truth.
“I suppose I shall. Let us think about this business then, before de Brencourt comes back, as he may do any moment. Now, am I to take on myself to give permission for the further rifling of my ‘kinsman’s’ property, or shall I go through the farce of writing him a letter?”
“If you do that, a certain time must be allowed to elapse before you could . . . receive a reply.”
“Precisely,” said the Marquis de Kersaint. In spite of everything a gleam of rather grim amusement flitted over his face. “And I need not point out to you that the money would be like manna from heaven at this moment. So large a sum, absolutely at one’s own disposal—why, one might organise and arm Finistère almost as well as Cadoudal is arming the Morbihan. There is no time to lose, for, as it is, when we get possession of the treasure—if we ever do—it will be useless in its present state—coin of the time of Louis XIII. and Henri IV. It would have to go to England. Bertin would see to that, of course.”
The Abbé nodded. “But Bertin is not the man to get it out of Mirabel. What staff, if any, do you suppose the Directory maintains in the place?”
Mirabel’s owner shook his head. “I have no idea. I only know that it is a museum, which implies a guardian of some sort. I had rather for our purposes that it was empty and falling into ruins. Make a note, Pierre, to write to Bertin or someone to find out the dispositions there.”
The Abbé nodded again. “I imagine, then, that you will not write the letter to M. de Trélan—you will take the responsibility on your own shoulders, as you hinted at doing last night.”
“Yes,” said M. de Kersaint, leaning back in his chair. “And I shall probably go to Mirabel myself.”
The priest jumped. “Gaston, that would be madness!”
“Why?”
“Why? You know that as well as I. It is a great risk for anyone to run, and for a general himself to incur a hazard which he should assign to a subordinate is not only folly, but culpable folly. What would happen to all the plans for Finistère if you got laid by the heels? And think of the self-betrayal! Could you wonder if those quick-witted young men of yours, if M. de Brencourt, if all who got to know of it asked themselves why you did such an extraordinary thing as to go on this quest in person?”
M. de Kersaint looked at him musingly. “You have a terrible habit of being in the right, mon frère. I believe you want to go yourself!”
“Well, I think I should not do amiss, though I do not know Mirabel.”
“I wonder if you know what a good opinion of yourself you have!” said the Marquis, smiling. “No—though I dislike sending him there—I think that de Brencourt is the man to go.”
“Has he ever been there, do you think?” asked the priest, hesitating a little.
The Marquis looked away. “No, I should doubt it,” he said after a moment. “I shall have to ask him, I suppose. But here is my ancestor’s plan, and naturally I can give him all necessary details.”
“You must be careful how you do that—remember that you are only a distant kinsman.”
“I am not likely to forget it,” retorted the Marquis. “I would far rather not, but I think I must send the Comte. He is the man I should naturally have sent.”
“Roland de Céligny was dying to go, was he not?”
“Harebrained boy, yes! But I told him and La Vergne that I would have none of it. It is no work for children. He will be safely out of the way with his grandfather till I send for him again—though to be sure I should have preferred to keep him with me.”
“I hope his grandfather will be grateful to you for your self-denial.”
“Highly improbable, I should think,” observed the Marquis sardonically. “I can do no good thing in that quarter.”
“I can understand that it is not work for Roland,” pursued the priest meditatively, “but, as far as risk goes, he ran enough of that with us at la Croix-Fendue the day before yesterday.”
“Of a soldier’s death, perhaps, but not of any other. Not that again, please God!” A look of bitter regret passed over his face. “O Pierre,” he said in a low voice, “if only that boy had been born . . . at Mirabel!”
“Yes, yes!” assented the priest sadly. Things might indeed have been otherwise if Mirabel had not in its last days been a childless house.
“When I see his grandfather again——” the Marquis was beginning—and was cut short by the sound of steps on the stairs. In an instant he was the man who had entered the attic yesterday evening, not the man who for the last three-quarters of an hour had been talking without reserve to his only intimate.
“De Brencourt—and Georges,” he said, and rising, stood waiting to receive the most notable of all the Royalist leaders, and that a peasant. In another moment the latter stood on the threshold, a massive Breton of about thirty, bull-necked, wide-shouldered, with short and very closely curling reddish hair.
The Marquis went forward and held out his hand. “Monsieur Cadoudal, I am honoured to meet the bravest of the brave.”
The Chouan’s great grip engulfed the strong, slender fingers. “And I in my turn,” he said, with a natural dignity, “salute the hero of Rivoli. You bear a Breton name, Monsieur le Marquis.”
“I have—or had—property in Brittany,” replied M. de Kersaint, hesitating for a moment, “but I am not a Breton.”
Georges Cadoudal was Breton—to the backbone—and in the discussion which followed Pierre Chassin had leisure to realise the force and unswervingness of his countryman’s personality, his warlike and (on a small scale) his administrative genius, and his justness of political outlook. For he knew perfectly well that as long ago as last summer, when Cadoudal had come back from his refuge in England to reorganise the Morbihan, he had urged the Bourbons to immediate action, pointing out that Hoche was no more, Bonaparte shut up (as he still was) with his best troops in Egypt, and the Republican armies being drawn off to the frontiers to face other foes. It was the hour to seize. But the advisers of the King and of his brother the Comte d’Artois, who was more particularly concerned with the affairs of the west, were, as usual, swayed by the evil genius which always seemed to haunt their counsels, and did nothing. Against that ineptitude Cadoudal, like all the Royalist leaders, past and present, had continually to struggle—as if there were not enough difficulties and more than enough dangers, without instructions from overseas that were always either futile or too late. If only, thought the Abbé, they do not trip Gaston’s feet in the future . . . He watched him now, listening to Cadoudal’s explanation of his system of “legions” in the Morbihan and in Loire-Inférieure, and how he had brought it about.
“But Finistère, Monsieur le Marquis,” finished the Breton, looking at the keen patrician face opposite him, “will be a much more difficult matter, because it is almost fresh ground. And you will find there many fewer arms stored away than is the case in my command, where we have been fighting on and off for six years.”
“I know it,” returned Finistère’s destined leader gravely. “I know I have a very hard task before me. But I have just received good news, Monsieur Cadoudal. I may be able to supply a good proportion of the necessary arms myself. There is something equivalent to 12,000 louis awaiting me in a kinsman’s chateau if I can secure it. As to organisation, here is my scheme, if you will be good enough to glance at it. Though I can never look to have a force like yours, I should hope in the event of hostilities to be able to support your rear—though indeed that would by no means counterbalance the immense benefit to me of having you as a bulwark in front of me. Against the tide of attack we of Finistère should at best be only a few pebbles—behind a rock.”
“At any rate, Monsieur le Marquis,” said ‘Georges,’ gazing at him hard out of his deepset eyes, “I can tell, without even looking at your scheme, that I should not have sand behind me!”
An hour later Cadoudal, escorted by M. de Brencourt, having departed as secretly as he had come, M. de Kersaint stood collecting the papers strewn on the table. “I should have been happy to serve under that man, instead of being his colleague,” he said musingly. Then he went and looked out through the attic window at the remains of the mediaeval fortifications of Hennebont, with their memories of the indomitable spirit which had once defended them, housing in the breast of the Comtesse Jeanne de Montfort.
“Pierre,” he said suddenly, “before we leave I have a fancy that I should like to see the giver of this strange and belated wedding gift of mine. Would it be possible, think you?”
“I do not suppose the niece would object, if you give me leave to concoct some reason for the request,” replied the Abbé.
The Marquis gave a sort of smile. “You can say what you like. I am afraid you must be getting inured to deception on my behalf. At any rate I cannot betray myself to Mlle Magny now.”
No, one cannot betray oneself to the dead. And yet, who knows? . . . Perhaps the old lady’s spirit, still hovering round the habitation it had so recently quitted, could realise and be glad that her offering had thus quickly found its goal. But candles burnt now at the head and feet of that empty dwelling, and the face looked austere, and remote from those old desires and admirations. M. de Kersaint took the holy-water sprinkler which the priest handed to him, and shook a few drops on the dead servitress of his house.
“Yes, I remember her,” he said in a low voice. “My mother always thought so highly of her . . . I wish now that I had seen her alive, for I should like to have thanked her for this great gift of hers, with its possibilities for France. Could she have chosen a better time to make it?”
He stooped over the bed, and, reverently lifting one of the old hands folded over the crucifix, put a kiss on its icy, shrivelled surface, while the priest gazed at him, full of sorrowful thoughts. Eight-and-twenty years ago, when those closed eyes had looked on him in his springtime, what might he not have become? Lucien, who had been struck by it, had told him how M. de Kersaint had objected to last night’s use of the Tu Marcellus eris, and the sad and lovely lines rushed into the priest’s mind anew. Yes, more poignant than the lament for youth cut off and blighted promise, was that for youth spent to no end and promise wasted. Tu Marcellus eris! At twenty-three he might have been . . . at fifty-one? . . .
For what the man who stood there with him by the dead had since done to redeem the light and sterile past he could not claim in his own name, and she—the bride of Mlle Magny’s memories—to whom this late justification of her faith in him would have been life’s supremest happiness, was no longer on earth to see it.
Truly, as the great Latin knew, there was a bitter sense of tears in human things.