"You are gracious to observe it. With your permission, then." And he
resumed his seat. She continued on her way to the door and passed out upon
her errand.
When presently she returned they had almost unaccountably changed
places. It was Mme. de Plougastel who was seated in that armchair of brocade
and gilt, and M. de La Tour d'Azyr who, despite his lassitude, was leaning
over the back of it talking earnestly, seeming by his attitude to plead with
her. On Aline's entrance he broke off instantly and moved away, so that she
was left with a sense of having intruded. Further she observed that the
Countess was in tears.
Following her came presently the diligent Jacques, bearing a tray laden
with food and wine. Madame poured for her guest, and he drank a long draught
of the Burgundy, then begged, holding forth his grimy hands, that he might
mend his appearance before sitting down to eat.
He was led away and valeted by Jacques, and when he returned he had
removed from his person the last vestige of the rough handling he had
received. He looked almost his normal self, the disorder in his attire
repaired, calm and dignified and courtly in his bearing, but very pale and
haggard of face, seeming suddenly to have increased in years, to have
reached in appearance the age that was in fact his own.
As he ate and drank - and this with appetite, for as he told them he
had not tasted food since early morning - he entered into the details of the
dreadful events of the day, and gave them the particulars of his own escape
from the Tuileries when all was seen to be lost and when the Swiss, having
burnt their last cartridge, were submitting to wholesale massacre at the
hands of the indescribably furious mob.
"Oh, it was all most ill done," he ended critically. "We were timid
when we should have been resolute, and resolute at last when it was too
late. That is the history of our side from the beginning of this accursed
struggle. We have lacked proper leadership throughout, and now - as I have
said already - there is an end to us. It but remains to escape, as soon as
we can discover how the thing is to be accomplished."
Madame told him of the hopes that she had centred upon Rougane.
It lifted him out of his gloom. He was disposed to be optimistic.
"You are wrong to have abandoned that hope," he assured her. "If this
mayor is so well disposed, he certainly can do as his son promised. But last
night it would have been too late for him to have reached you, and to-day,
assuming that he had come to Paris, almost impossible for him to win across
the streets from the other side. It is most likely that he will yet come. I
pray that he may; for the knowledge that you and Mlle. de Kercadiou are out
of this would comfort me above all."
"We should take you with us," said madame.
"Ah! But how?"
"Young Rougane was to bring me permits for three persons - Aline,
myself, and my footman, Jacques. You would take the place of Jacques."
"Faith, to get out of Paris, madame, there is no man whose place I
would not take." And he laughed.
Their spirits rose with his and their flagging hopes revived. But as
dusk descended again upon the city, without any sign of the deliverer they
awaited, those hopes began to ebb once more.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr at last pleaded weariness, and begged to be
permitted to withdraw that he might endeavour to take some rest against
whatever might have to be faced in the immediate future. When he had gone,
madame persuaded Aline to go and lie down.
"I will call you, my dear, the moment he arrives," she said, bravely
maintaining that pretence of a confidence that had by now entirely
evaporated.
Aline kissed her affectionately, and departed, outwardly so calm and
unperturbed as to leave the Countess wondering whether she realized the
peril by which they were surrounded, a peril infinitely increased by the
presence in that house of a man so widely known and detested as M. de La
Tour d'Azyr, a man who was probably being sought for by his enemies at this
moment.
Left alone, madame lay down on a couch in the salon itself, to be ready
for any emergency. It was a hot summer night, and the glass doors opening
upon the luxuriant garden stood wide to admit the air. On that air came
intermittently from the distance sounds of the continuing horrible
activities of the populace, the aftermath of that bloody day.
Mme. de Plougastel lay there, listening to those sounds for upwards of
an hour, thanking Heaven that for the present at least the disturbances were
distant, dreading lest at any moment they should occur nearer at hand, lest
this Bondy section in which her hotel was situated should become the scene
of horrors similar to those whose echoes reached her ears from other
sections away to the south and west.
The couch occupied by the Countess lay in shadow; for all the lights in
that long salon had been extinguished with the exception of a cluster of
candles in a massive silver candle branch placed on a round marquetry table
in the middle of the room - an island of light in the surrounding gloom.
The timepiece on the overmantel chimed melodiously the hour of ten, and
then, startling in the suddenness with which it broke the immediate silence,
another sound vibrated through the house, and brought madame to her feet, in
a breathless mingling of hope and dread. Some one was knocking sharply on
the door below. Followed moments of agonized suspense, culminating in the
abrupt invasion of the room by the footman Jacques. He looked round, not
seeing his mistress at first.
"Madame! Madame!" he panted, out of breath.
"What is it, Jacques!" Her voice was steady now that the need for
self-control seemed thrust upon her. She advanced from the shadows into that
island of light about the table. "There is a man below. He is asking... he
is demanding to see you at once."
"A man?" she questioned.
"He... he seems to be an official; at least he wears the sash of
office. And he refuses to give any name; he says that his name would convey
nothing to you. He insists that he must see you in person and at once."
"An official?" said madame.
"An official," Jacques repeated. "I would not have admitted him, but
that he demanded it in the name of the Nation. Madame, it is for you to say
what shall be done. Robert is with me. If you wish it... whatever it may
be... "
"My good Jacques, no, no." She was perfectly composed. If this man
intended evil, surely he would not come alone. Conduct him to me, and then
beg Mlle. de Kercadiou to join me if she is awake."
Jacques departed, himself partly reassured. Madame seated herself in
the armchair by the table well within the light. She smoothed her dress with
a mechanical hand. If, as it would seem, her hopes had been futile, so had
her momentary fears. A man on any but an errand of peace would have brought
some following with him, as she had said.
The door opened again, and Jacques reappeared; after him, stepping
briskly past him, came a slight man in a wide-brimmed hat, adorned by a
tricolour cockade. About the waist of an olive-green riding-coat he wore a
broad tricolour sash; a sword hung at his side.
He swept off his hat, and the candlelight glinted on the steel buckle
in front of it. Madame found herself silently regarded by a pair of large,
dark eyes set in a lean, brown face, eyes that were most singularly intent
and searching.
She leaned forward, incredulity swept across her countenance. Then her
eyes kindled, and the colour came creeping back into her pale cheeks. She
rose suddenly. She was trembling.
"Andre-Louis!" she exclaimed.
That gift of laughter of his seemed utterly extinguished. For once
there was no gleam of humour in those dark eyes, as they continued to
consider her with that queer stare of scrutiny. And yet, though his gaze was
sombre, his thoughts were not. With his cruelly true mental vision which
pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation - which
properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed - he perceived the
grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment he
experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely
from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all things
considered, the more or less accidental fact that she had brought him into
the world could establish between them any real bond at this time of day!
The motherhood that bears and forsakes is less than animal. He had
considered this; he had been given ample leisure in which to consider it
during those long, turbulent hours in which he had been forced to wait,
because it would have been almost impossible to have won across that
seething city, and certainly unwise to have attempted so to do.
He had reached the conclusion that by consenting to go to her rescue at
such a time he stood committed to a piece of purely sentimental quixotry.
The quittances which the Mayor of Meudon had exacted from him before he
would issue the necessary safe-conducts placed the whole of his future,
perhaps his very life, in jeopardy. And he had consented to do this not for
the sake of a reality, but out of regard for an idea - he who all his life
had avoided the false lure of worthless and hollow sentimentality.
Thus thought Andre-Louis as he considered her now so searchingly,
finding it, naturally enough, a matter of extraordinary interest to look
consciously upon his mother for the first time at the age of
eight-and-twenty.
>From her he looked at last at Jacques, who remained at attention,
waiting by the open door.
"Could we be alone, madame?" he asked her.
She waved the footman away, and the door closed. In agitated silence,
unquestioning, she waited for him to account for his presence there at so
extraordinary a time.
"Rougane could not return," he informed her shortly. At M. de
Kercadiou's request, I come instead."
"You! You are sent to rescue us!" The note of amazement in her voice
was stronger than that of het relief.
"That, and to make your acquaintance, madame."
"To make my acquaintance? But what do you mean, Andre-Louis?"
"This letter from M. de Kercadiou will tell you." Intrigued by his odd
words and odder manner, she took the folded sheet. She broke the seal with
shaking hands, and with shaking hands approached the written page to the
light. Her eyes grew troubled as she read; the shaking of her hands
increased, and midway through that reading a moan escaped her. One glance
that was almost terror she darted at the slim, straight man standing so
incredibly impassive upon the edge of the light, and then she endeavoured to
read on. But the crabbed characters of M. de Kercadiou swam distortedly
under her eyes. She could not read. Besides, what could it matter what else
he said. She had read enough. The sheet fluttered from her hands to the
table, and out of a face that was like a face of wax, she looked now with a
wistfulness, a sadness indescribable, at Andre-Louis.
"And so you know, my child?" Her voice was stifled to a whisper.
"I know, madame my mother."
The grimness, the subtle blend of merciless derision and reproach in
which it was uttered completely escaped her. She cried out at the new name.
For her in that moment time and the world stood still. Her peril there in
Paris as the wife of an intriguer at Coblenz was blotted out, together with
every other consideration
- thrust out of a consciousness that could find room for nothing else
beside the fact that she stood acknowledged by her only son, this child
begotten in adultery, borne furtively and in shame in a remote Brittany
village eight-and-twenty years ago. Not even a thought for the betrayal of
that inviolable secret, or the con- sequences that might follow, could she
spare in this supreme moment.
She took one or two faltering steps towards him, hesitating. Then she
opened her arms. Sobs suffocated her voice.
"Won't you come to me, Andre-Louis?"
A moment yet he stood hesitating, startled by that appeal, angered
almost by his heart's response to it, reason and sentiment at grips in his
soul. This was not real, his reason postulated; this poignant emotion that
she displayed and that he experienced was fantastic. Yet he went. Her arms
enfolded him; her wet cheek was pressed hard against his own; her frame,
which the years had not yet succeeded in robbing of its grace, was shaken by
the passionate storm within her.
"Oh, Andre-Louis, my child, if you knew how I have hungered to hold you
so! If you knew how in denying myself this I have atoned and suffered!
Kercadiou should not have told you - not even now. It was wrong - most
wrong, perhaps, to you. It would have been better that he should have left
me here to my fate, whatever that may be. And yet - come what may of this -
to be able to hold you so, to be able to acknowledge you, to hear you call
me mother - oh! Andre-Louis, I cannot now regret it. I cannot... I cannot
wish it otherwise."
"Is there any need, madame?" he asked her, his stoicism deeply shaken.
"There is no occasion to take others into our confidence. This is for
to-night alone. To-night we are mother and son. To-morrow we resume our
former places, and, outwardly at least, forget."
"Forget? Have you no heart, Andre-Louis?"
The question recalled him curiously to his attitude towards life
- that histrionic attitude of his that he accounted true philosophy.
Also he remembered what lay before them; and he realized that he must master
not only himself but her; that to yield too far to sentiment at such a time
might be the ruin of them all.
"It is a question propounded to me so often that it must contain the
truth," said he. "My rearing is to blame for that."
She tightened her clutch about his neck even as he would have attempted
to disengage himself from her embrace.
"You do not blame me for your rearing? Knowing all, as you do,
Andre-Louis, you cannot altogether blame. You must be merciful to me. You
must forgive me. You must! I had no choice."
"When we know all of whatever it may be, we can never do anything but
forgive, madame. That is the profoundest religious truth that was ever
written. It contains, in fact, a whole religion - the noblest religion any
man could have to guide him. I say this for your comfort, madame my mother."
She sprang away from him with a startled cry. Beyond him in the shadows
by the door a pale figure shimmered ghostly. It advanced into the light, and
resolved itself into Aline. She had come in answer to that forgotten summons
madame had sent her by Jacques. Entering unperceived she had seen
Andre-Louis in the embrace of the woman whom he addressed as "mother." She
had recognized him instantly by his voice, and she could not have said what
bewildered her more: his presence there or the thing she overheard.
"You heard, Aline?" madame exclaimed.
"I could not help it, madame. You sent for me. I am sorry if... " She
broke off, and looked at Andre-Louis long and curiously. She was pale, but
quite composed. She held out her hand to him. "And so you have come at last,
Andre," said she. "You might have come before."
"I come when I am wanted," was his answer. "Which is the only time in
which one can be sure of being received." He said it without bitterness, and
having said it stooped to kiss her hand.
"You can forgive me what is past, I hope, since I failed of my
purpose," he said gently, half-pleading. "I could not have come to you
pretending that the failure was intentional - a compromise between the
necessities of the case and your own wishes. For it was not that. And yet,
you do not seem to have profited by my failure. You are still a maid."
She turned her shoulder to him.
"There are things," she said, "that you will never understand."
"Life, for one," he acknowledged. "I confess that I am finding it
bewildering. The very explanations calculated to simplify it seem but to
complicate it further." And he looked at Mme. de Plougastel.
"You mean something, I suppose," said mademoiselle.
"Aline!" It was the Countess who spoke. She knew the danger of
half-discoveries. "I can trust you, child, I know, and Andre-Louis, I am
sure, will offer no objection." She had taken up the letter to show it to
Aline. Yet first her eyes questioned him.
"Oh, none, madame," he assured her. "It is entirely a matter for
yourself."
Aline looked from one to the other with troubled eyes, hesitating to
take the letter that was now proffered. When she had read it through, she
very thoughtfully replaced it on the table. A moment she stood there with
bowed head, the other two watching her. Then impulsively she ran to madame
and put her arms about her.
"Aline!" It was a cry of wonder, almost of joy. "You do not utterly
abhor me!"
"My dear," said Aline, and kissed the tear-stained face that seemed to
have grown years older in these last few hours.
In the background Andre-Louis, steeling himself against emotionalism,
spoke with the voice of Scaramouche.
"It would be well, mesdames, to postpone all transports until they can
be indulged at greater leisure and in more security. It is growing late. If
we are to get out of this shambles we should be wise to take the road
without more delay."
It was a tonic as effective as it was necessary. It startled them into
remembrance of their circumstances, and under the spur of it they went at
once to make their preparations.
They left him for perhaps a quarter of an hour, to pace that long room
alone, saved only from impatience by the turmoil of his mind. When at length
they returned, they were accompanied by a tall man in a full-skirted shaggy
greatcoat and a broad hat the brim of which was turned down all around. He
remained respectfully by the door in the shadows.
Between them the two women had concerted it thus, or rather the
Countess had so concerted it when Aline had warned her that Andre-Louis'
bitter hostility towards the Marquis made it unthinkable that he should move
a finger consciously to save him.
Now despite the close friendship uniting M. de Kercadiou and his niece
with Mme. de Plougastel, there were several matters concerning them of which
the Countess was in ignorance. One of these was the project at one time
existing of a marriage between Aline and M. de La Tour d'Azyr. It was a
matter that Aline - naturally enough in the state of her feelings - had
never mentioned, nor had M. de Kercadiou ever alluded to it since his coming
to Meudon, by when he had perceived how unlikely it was ever to be realized.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr's concern for Aline on that morning of the duel
when he had found her baif-swooning in Mme. de Plougastel's carriage had
been of a circumspection that betrayed nothing of his real interest in her,
and therefore had appeared no more than natural in one who must account
himself the cause of her distress. Similarly Mme. de Plougastel had never
realized nor did she realize now - for Aline did not trouble fully to
enlighten her - that the hostility between the two men was other than
political, the quarrel other than that which already had taken Andre-Louis
to the Bois on every day of the preceding week. But, at least, she realized
that even if Andre-Louis' rancour should have no other source, yet that
inconclusive duel was cause enough for Aline's fears.
And so she had proposed this obvious deception; and Aline had consented
to be a passive party to it. They had made the mistake of not fully
forewarning and persuading M. de La Tour d'Azyr. They had trusted entirely
to his anxiety to escape from Paris to keep him rigidly within the part
imposed upon him. They had reckoned without the queer sense of honour that
moved such men as M. le Marquis, nurtured upon a code of shams.
Andre-Louis, turning to scan that muffled figure, advanced from the
dark depths of the salon. As the light beat on his white, lean face the
pseudo-footman started. The next moment he too stepped forward into the
light, and swept his broad-brimmed hat from his brow. As he did so
Andre-Louis observed that his hand was fine and white and that a jewel
flashed from one of the fingers. Then he caught his breath, and stiffened in
every line as he recognized the face revealed to him.
"Monsieur," that stern, proud man was saying, "I cannot take advantage
of your ignorance. If these ladies can persuade you to save me, at least it
is due to you that you shall know whom you are saving."
He stood there by the table very erect and dignified, ready to perish
as he had lived - if perish he must - without fear and without deception.
Andre-Louis came slowly forward until he reached the table on the other
side, and then at last the muscles of his set face relaxed, and he laughed.
"You laugh?" said M. de La Tour dAzyr, frowning, offended.
"It is so damnably amusing," said Andre-Louis.
"You've an odd sense of humour, M. Moreau."
"Oh, admitted. The unexpected always moves me so. I have found you many
things in the course of our acquaintance. To-night you are the one thing I
never expected to find you: an honest man."
M. de La Tour d'Azyr quivered. But he attempted no reply.
"Because of that, monsieur, I am disposed to be clement. It is probably
a foolishness. But you have surprised me into it. I give you three minutes,
monsieur, in which to leave this house, and to take your own measures for
your safety. What afterwards happens to you shall be no concern of mine.
"Ah, no, Andre! Listen... " Madame began in anguish.
"Pardon, madame. It is the utmost that I will do, and already I am
violating what I conceive to be my duty. If M. de La Tour d'Azyr remains he
not only ruins himself, but he imperils you. For unless he departs at once,
he goes with me to the headquarters of the section, and the section will
have his head on a pike inside the hour. He is a notorious
counter-revolutionary, a knight of the dagger, one of those whom an
exasperated populace is determined to exterminate. Now, monsieur, you know
what awaits you. Resolve yourself and at once, for these ladies' sake."
"But you don't know, Andre-Louis!" Mme. de Plougastel's condition was
one of anguish indescribable. She came to him and clutched his arm. "For the
love of Heaven, Andre-Louis, be merciful with him! You must!"
"But that is what I am being, madame - merciful; more merciful than he
deserves. And he knows it. Fate has meddled most oddly in our concerns to
bring us together to-night. Almost it is as if Fate were forcing retribution
at last upon him. Yet, for your sakes, I take no advantage of it, provided
that he does at once as I have desired him."
And now from beyond the table the Marquis spoke icily, and as he spoke
his right hand stirred under the ample folds of his greatcoat.
"I am glad, M. Moreau, that you take that tone with me. You relieve me
of the last scruple. You spoke of Fate just now, and I must agree with you
that Fate has meddled oddly, though perhaps not to the end that you discern.
For years now you have chosen to stand in my path and thwart me at every
turn, holding over me a perpetual menace. Persistently you have sought my
life in various ways, first indirectly and at last directly. Your
intervention in my affairs has ruined my highest hopes - more effectively,
perhaps, than you suppose. Throughout you have been my evil genius. And you
are even one of the agents of this climax of despair that has been reached
by me to-night."
"Wait! Listen!" Madame was panting. She flung away from Andre-Louis, as
if moved by some premonition of what was coming. "Gervais! This is
horrible!"
"Horrible, perhaps, but inevitable. Himself he has invited it. I am a
man in despair, the fugitive of a lost cause. That man holds the keys of
escape. And, besides, between him and me there is a reckoning to be paid."
His hand came from beneath the coat at last, and it came armed with a
pistol.
Mme. de Plougastel screamed, and flung herself upon him. On her knees
now, she clung to his arm with all her strength and might.
Vainly he sought to shake himself free of that desperate clutch.
"Therese!" he cried. "Are you mad? Will you destroy me and yourself?
This creature has the safe-conducts that mean our salvation. Himself, he is
nothing."
>From the background Aline, a breathless, horror-stricken spectator of
that scene, spoke sharply, her quick mind pointing out the line of
checkmate.
"Burn the safe-conducts, Andre-Louis. Burn them at once - in the
candles there."
But Andre-Louis had taken advantage of that moment of M. de La Tour
d'Azyr's impotence to draw a pistol in his turn. "T think it will be better
to burn his brains instead," he said. "Stand away from him, madame."
Far from obeying that imperious command, Mme. de Plougastel rose to her
feet to cover the Marquis with her body. But she still clung to his arm,
clung to it with unsuspected strength that continued to prevent him from
attempting to use the pistol.
"Andre! For God's sake, Andre!" she panted hoarsely over her shoulder.
"Stand away, madame," he commanded her again, more sternly, "and let
this murderer take his due. He is jeopardizing all our lives, and his own
has been forfeit these years. Stand away!" He sprang forward with intent now
to fire at his enemy over her shoulder, and Aline moved too late to hinder
him.
"Andre! Andre!"
Panting, gasping, haggard of face, on the verge almost of hysteria, the
distracted Countess flung at last an effective, a terrible barrier between
the hatred of those men, each intent upon taking the other's life.
"He is your father, Andre! Gervais, he is your son - our son! The
letter there... on the table... 0 my God!" And she slipped nervelessly to
the ground, and crouched there sobbing at the feet of M. de La Tour d'Azyr.
Across the body of that convulsively sobbing woman, the mother of one
and the mistress of the other, the eyes of those mortal enemies met,
invested with a startled, appalled interest that admitted of no words.
Beyond the table, as if turned to stone by this culminating horror of
revelation, stood Aline.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr was the first to stir. Into his bewildered mind
came the memory of something that Mme. de Plougastel had said of a letter
that was on the table. He came forward, unhindered. The announcement made,
Mme. de Plougastel no longer feared the sequel, and so she let him go. He
walked unsteadily past this new-found son of his, and took up the sheet that
lay beside the candlebranch. A long moment he stood reading it, none heeding
him. Aline's eyes were all on Andre-Louis, full of wonder and commiseration,
whilst Andre-Louis was staring down, in stupefied fascination, at his
mother.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr read the letter slowly through. Then very quietly
he replaced it. His next concern, being the product of an artificial age
sternly schooled in the suppression of emotion, was to compose himself. Then
he stepped back to Mme. de Plougastel's side and stooped to raise her.
"Therese," he said.
Obeying, by instinct, the implied command, she made an effort to rise
and to control herself in her turn. The Marquis half conducted, half carried
her to the armchair by the table.
Andre-Louis looked on. Still numbed and bewildered, he made no attempt
to assist. He saw as in a dream the Marquis bending over Mme. de Plougastel.
As in a dream he heard him ask:
"How long have you known this, Therese?"
"I... I have always known it... always. I confided him to Kercadiou. I
saw him once as a child... Oh, but what of that?"
"Why was I never told? Why did you deceive me? Why did you tell me that
this child had died a few days after birth? Why, Therese? Why?"
"I was afraid. I... I thought it better so - that nobody, nobody, not
even you, should know. And nobody has known save Quintin until last night,
when to induce him to come here and save me he was forced to tell him."
"But I, Therese?" the Marquis insisted. "It was my right to know."
"Your right? What could you have done? Acknowledge him? And then? Ha!"
It was a queer, desperate note of laughter. "There was Plougastel; there was
my family. And there was you... you, yourself, who had ceased to care, in
whom the fear of discovery had stifled love. Why should I have told you,
then? Why? I should not have told you now had there been any other way to...
to save you both. Once before I suffered just such dreadful apprehensions
when you and he fought in the Bois. I was on my way to prevent it when you
met me. I would have divulged the truth, as a last resource, to avert that
horror. But mercifully God spared me the necessity then."
It had not occurred to any of them to doubt her statement, incredible
though it might seem. Had any done so her present words must have resolved
all doubt, explaining as they did much that to each of her listeners had
been obscure until this moment.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr, overcome; reeled away to a chair and sat down
heavily. Losing command of himself for a moment, he took his haggard face in
his hands.
Through the windows open to the garden came from the distance the faint
throbbing of a drum to remind them of what was happening around them. But
the sound went unheeded. To each it must have seemed that here they were
face to face with a horror greater than any that might be tormenting Paris.
At last Andre-Louis began to speak, his voice level and unutterably cold.
"M. de La Tour d'Azyr," he said, "I trust that you'll agree that this
disclosure, which can hardly be more distasteful and horrible to you than it
is to me, alters nothing, - since it effaces nothing of all that lies
between us. Or, if it alters anything, it is merely to add something to that
score. And yet... Oh, but what can it avail to talk! Here, monsieur, take
this safe-conduct which is made out for Mme. de Plougastel's footman, and
with it make your escape as best you can. In return I will beg of you the
favour never to allow me to see you or hear of you again."
"Andre!" His mother swung upon him with that cry. And yet again that
question. "Have you no heart? What has he ever done to you that you should
nurse so bitter a hatred of him?"
"You shall hear, madame. Once, two years ago in this very room I told
you of a man who had brutally killed my dearest friend and debauched the
girl I was to have married. M. de La Tour d'Azyr is that man."
A moan was her only answer. She covered her face with her hands.
The Marquis rose slowly to his feet again. He came slowly forward, his
smouldering eyes scanning his son's face.
"You are hard," he said grimly. "But I recognize the hardness. It
derives from the blood you bear."
"Spare me that," said Andre-Louis.
The Marquis inclined his head. "I will not mention it again. But I
desire that you should at least understand me, and you too, Therese. You
accuse me, sir, of murdering your dearest friend. I will admit that the
means employed were perhaps unworthy. But what other means were at my
command to meet an urgency that every day since then proves to have existed?
M. de Vilmorin was a revolutionary, a man of new ideas that should overthrow
society and rebuild it more akin to the desires of such as himself. I
belonged to the order that quite as justifiably desired society to remain as
it was. Not only was it better so for me and mine, but I also contend, and
you have yet to prove me wrong, that it is better so for all the world;
that, indeed, no other conceivable society is possible. Every human society
must of necessity be composed of several strata. You may disturb it
temporarily into an amorphous whole by a revolution such as this; but only
temporarily. Soon out of the chaos which is all that you and your kind can
ever produce, order must be restored or life will perish; and with the
restoration of order comes the restoration of the various strata necessary
to organized society. Those that were yesterday at the top may in the new
order of things find themselves dispossessed without any benefit to the
whole. That change I resisted. The spirit of it I fought with whatever
weapons were available, whenever and wherever I encountered it. M. de
Vilmorin was an incendiary of the worst type, a man of eloquence full of
false ideals that misled poor ignorant men into believing that the change
proposed could make the world a better place for them. You are an
intelligent man, and I defy you to answer me from your heart and conscience
that such a thing was true or possible. You know that it is untrue; you know
that it is a pernicious doctrine; and what made it worse on the lips of M.
de Vilmorin was that he was sincere and eloquent. His voice was a danger
that must be removed - silenced. So much was necessary in self-defence. In
self-defence I did it. I had no grudge against M. de Vilmorin. He was a man
of my own class; a gentleman of pleasant ways, amiable, estimable, and able.
"You conceive me slaying him for the very lust of slaying, like some
beast of the jungle flinging itself upon its natural prey. That has been
your error from the first. I did what I did with the very heaviest heart -
oh, spare me your sneer! - I do not lie, I have never lied. And I swear to
you here and now, by my every hope of Heaven, that what I say is true. I
loathed the thing I did. Yet for my own sake and the sake of my order I must
do it. Ask yourself whether M. de Vilmorin would have hesitated for a moment
if by procuring my death he could have brought the Utopia of his dreams a
moment nearer realization.
"After that. You determined that the sweetest vengeance would be to
frustrate my ends by reviving in yourself the voice that I had silenced, by
yourself carrying forward the fantastic apostleship of equality that was M.
de Vilmorin's. You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did
not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us
was right, which rong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the
foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion.
Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must
follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there
will rise up an ideal form of society? Don't you understand that society
must re-order itself presently out of all this?
"But why say more? I must have said enough to make you understand the
only thing that really matters - that I killed M. de Vilmorin as a matter of
duty to my order. And the truth - which though it may offend you should also
convince you - is that to-night I can ook back on the deed with equanimity,
without a single regret, apart from what lies between you and me.
"When, kneeling beside the body of your friend that day at Gavrillac,
you insulted and provoked me, had I been the tiger you conceived me I must
have killed you too. I am, as you may know, a man of quick passions. Yet I
curbed the natural anger you aroused in me, because I could forgive an
affront to myself where I could not overlook a calculated attack upon my
order."
He paused a moment. Andre-Louis stood rigid listening and wondering.
So, too, the others. Then M. le Marquis resumed, on a note of less
assurance. "In the matter of Mlle. Binet I was unfortunate. I wronged you
through inadvertence. I had no knowledge of the relations between you."
Andre-Louis interrupted him 'sharply at last with a question: "Would it
have made a difference if you had?"
"No," he was answered frankly. "I have the faults of my kind. I cannot
pretend that any such scruple as you suggest would have weighed with me. But
can you - if you are capable of any detached judgment - blame me very much
for that?"
"All things considered, monsieur, I am rapidly being forced to the
conclusion that it is impossible to blame any man for anything in this
world; that we are all of us the sport of destiny. Consider, monsieur, this
gathering - this family gathering - here to-night, whilst out there... 0 my
God, let us make an end! Let us go our ways and write 'finis' to this
horrible chapter of our lives."
M. le La Tour considered him gravely, sadly, in silence for a moment.
"Perhaps it is best," he said, at length, in a small voice. He turned
to Mme. de Plougastel. "If a wrong I have to admit in my life, a wrong that
I must bitterly regret, it is the wrong that I have done to you, my dear...
"
"Not now, Gervais! Not now!" she faltered, interrupting him.
"Now - for the first and the last time. I am going. It is not likely
that we shall ever meet again - that I shall ever see any of you again - you
who should have been the nearest and dearest to me. We are all, he says, the
sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving
with purpose. In life we pay for the evil that in life we do. That is the
lesson that I have learnt to-night. By an act of betrayal I begot unknown to
me a son who, whilst as ignorant as myself of our relationship, has come to
be the evil genius of my life, to cross and thwart me, and finally to help
to pull me down in ruin. It is just - poetically just. My full and resigned
acceptance of that fact is the only atonement I can offer you."
He stooped and took one of madame's hands that lay limply in her lap.
"Good-bye, Therese!" His voice broke. He had reached the end of his
iron self-control.
She rose and clung to him a moment, unashamed before them. The ashes of
that dead romance had been deeply stirred this night, and deep down some
lingering embers had been found that glowed brightly now before their final
extinction. Yet she made no attempt to detain him. She understood that their
son had pointed out the only wise, the only possible course, and was
thankful that M. de La Tour d'Azyr accepted it.
"God keep you, Gervais," she murmured. "You will take the safe-conduct,
and... and you will let me know when you are safe?"
He held her face between his hands an instant; then very gently kissed
her and put her from him. Standing erect, and outwardly calm again, he
looked across at Andre-Louis who was proffering him a sheet of paper.
"It is the safe-conduct. Take it, monsieur. It is my first and last
gift to you, and certainly the last gift I should ever have thought of
making you - the gift of life. In a sense it makes us quits. The irony, sir,
is not mine, but Fate's. Take it, monsieur, and go in peace."
M. de La Tour d'Azyr took it. His eyes looked hungrily into the lean
face confronting him, so sternly set. He thrust the paper into his bosom,
and then abruptly, convulsively, held out his hand. His son's eyes asked a
question.
"Let there be peace between us, in God's name," said the Marquis
thickly.
Pity stirred at last in Andre-Louis. Some of the sternness left his
face. He sighed. "Good-bye, monsieur," he said.
"You are hard," his father told him, speaking wistfully. "But perhaps
you are in the right so to be. In other circumstances I should have been
proud to have owned you as my son. As it is... " He broke off abruptly, and
as abruptly added, "Good-bye."
He loosed his son's hand and stepped back. They bowed formally to each
other. And then M. de La Tour d'Azyr bowed to Mlle. de Kercadiou in utter
silence, a bow that contained something of utter renunciation, of finality.
That done he turned and walked stiffly out of the room, and so out of
all their lives. Months later they were to hear if him in the service of the
Emperor of Austria.
Andre-Louis took the air next morning on the terrace at Meudon. The
hour was very early, and the newly risen sun was transmuting into diamonds
the dewdrops that still lingered on the lawn. Down in the valley, five miles
away, the morning mists were rising over Paris. Yet early as it was that
house on the hill was astir already, in a bustle of preparation for the
departure that was imminent.
Andre-Louis had won safely out of Paris last night with his mother and
Aline, and to-day they were to set out all of them for Coblenz.
To Andre-Louis, sauntering there with hands clasped behind him and head
hunched between his shoulders - for life had never been richer in material
for reflection - came presently Aline through one of the glass doors from
the library.
"You're early astir," she greeted him.
"Faith, yes. I haven't been to bed. No," he assured her, in answer to
her exclamation. "I spent the night or what was left of it sitting at the
window thinking."
"My poor Andre!"
"You describe me perfectly. I am very poor - for I know nothing,
understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.
Then... " He threw out his arms, and let them fall again. His face she
observed was very drawn and haggard.
She paced with him along the old granite balustrade over which the
geraniums flung their mantle of green and scarlet.
"Have you decided what you are going to do?" she asked him.
"I have decided that I have no choice. I, too, must emigrate. I am
lucky to be able to do so, lucky to have found no one amid yesterday's chaos
in Paris to whom I could report myself as I foolishly desired, else I might
no longer be armed with these." He drew from his pocket the powerful
passport of the Commission of Twelve, enjoining upon all Frenchmen to lend
him such assistance as he might require, and warning those who might think
of hindering him that they did so at their own peril. He spread it before
her. "With this I conduct you all safely to the frontier. Over the frontier
M. de Kercadiou and Mme. de Plougastel will have to conduct me; and then we
shall be quits."
"Quits?" quoth she. "But you will be unable to return!"
"You conceive, of course, my eagerness to do so. My child, in a day or
two there will be enquiries. It will be asked what has become of me. Things
will transpire. Then the hunt will start. But by then we shall be well upon
our way, well ahead of any possible pursuit. You don't imagine that I could
ever give the government any satisfactory explanation of my absence -
assuming that any government remains to which to explain it?"
"You mean... that you will sacrifice your future, this career upon
which you have embarked?" It took her breath away.
"In the pass to which things have come there is no career for me down
there - at least no honest one. And I hope you do not think that I could be
dishonest. It is the day of the Dantons, and the Marats, the day of the
rabble. The reins of government will be tossed to the populace, or else the
populace, drunk with the conceit with which the Dantons and the Marats have
filled it, will seize the reins by force. Chaos must follow, and a despotism
of brutes and apes, a government of the whole by its lowest parts. It cannot
endure, because unless a nation is ruled by its best elements it must wither
and decay."
"I thought you were a republican," said she.
"Why, so I am. I am talking like one. I desire a society which selects
its rulers, from the best elements of every class and denies the right of
any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself - whether it be
the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government
by any one class is fatal to the welfare of the whole. Two years ago our
ideal seemed to have been realized. The monopoly of power had been taken
from the class that had held it too long and too unjustly by the hollow
right of heredity. It had been distributed as evenly as might be throughout
the State, and if men had only paused there, all would have been well. But
our impetus carried us too far, the privileged orders goaded us on by their
very opposition, and the result is the horror of which yesterday you saw no
more than the beginnings. No, no," he ended. "Careers there may be for venal
place-seekers, for opportunists; but none for a man who desires to respect
himself. It is time to go. I make no sacrifice in going."
"But where will you go? What will you do?"
"Oh, something. Consider that in four years I have been lawyer,
politician, swordsman, and buffoon - especially the latter. There is always
a place in the world for Scaramouche. Besides, do you know that unlike
Scaramouche I have been oddly provident? I am the owner of a little farm in
Saxony. I think that agriculture might suit me. It is a meditative
occupation; and when all is said, I am not a man of action. I haven't the
qualities for the part."
She looked up into his face, and there was a wistful smile in her deep
blue eyes.
"Is there any part for which you have not the qualities, I wonder?"
"Do you really? Yet you cannot say that I have made a success of any of
those which I have played. I have always ended by running away. I am running
away now from a thriving fencing-academy, which is likely to become the
property of Le Duc. That comes of having gone into politics, from which I am
also running away. It is the one thing in which I really excel. That, too,
is an attribute of Scaramouche."
"Why will you always be deriding yourself?" she wondered.
"Because I recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You
wouldn't have me take it seriously? I should lose my reason utterly if I
did; especially since discovering my parents."
"Don't, Andre!" she begged him. "You are insincere, you know."
"Of course I am. Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the
very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it,
we live by it; and we rarely realize it. You have seen it rampant and out of
hand in France during the past four years - cant and hypocrisy on the lips
of the revolutionaries, cant and hypocrisy on the lips of the upholders of
the old regime; a riot of hypocrisy out of which in the end is begotten
chaos. And I who criticize it all on this beautiful God-given morning am the
rankest and most contemptible hypocrite of all. It was this - the
realization of this truth kept me awake all night. For two years I have
persecuted by every means in my power... M. de La Tour d'Azyr."
He paused before uttering the name, paused as if hesitating how to
speak of him.
"And in those two years I have deceived myself as to the motive that
was spurring me. He spoke of me last night as the evil genius of his life,
and himself he recognized the justice of this. It may be that he was right,
and because of that it is probable that even had he not killed Philippe de
Vilmorin, things would still have been the same. Indeed, to-day I know that
they must have been. That is why I call myself a hypocrite, a poor,
self-duping hypocrite."
"But why, Andre?"
He stood still and looked at her. "Because he sought you, Aline.
Because in that alone he must have found me ranged against him, utterly
intransigeant. Because of that I must have strained every nerve to bring him
down - so as to save you from becoming the prey of your own ambition.
"I wish to speak of him no more than I must. After this, I trust never
to speak of him again. Before the lines of our lives crossed, I knew him for
what he was, I knew the report of him that ran the countryside. Even then I
found him detestable. You heard him allude last night to the unfortunate La
Binet. You heard him plead, in extenuation of his fault, his mode of life,
his rearing. To that there is no answer, I suppose. He conforms to type.
Enough! But to me, he was the embodiment of evil, just as you have always
been the embodiment of good; he was the embodiment of sin, just as you are
the embodiment of purity. I had enthroned you so high, Aline, so high, and
yet no higher than your place. Could I, then, suffer that you should be
dragged down by ambition, could I suffer the evil I detested to mate with
the good I loved? What could have come of it but your own damnation, as I
told you that day at Gavrillac? Because of that my detestation of him became
a personal, active thing. I resolved to save you at all costs from a fate so
horrible. Had you been able to tell me that you loved him it would have been
different. I should have hoped that in a union sanctified by love you would
have raised him to your own pure heights. But that out of considerations of
worldly advancement you should lovelessly consent to mate with him... Oh, it
was vile and hopeless. And so I fought him - a rat fighting a lion - fought
him relentlessly until I saw that love had come to take in your heart the
place of ambition. Then I desisted."
"Until you saw that love had taken the place of ambition!" Tears had
been gathering in her eyes whilst he was speaking. Now amazement eliminated
her emotion. "But when did you see that? When?"
"I - I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time... surely, Aline,
that morning when you came to beg me not to keep my engagement with him in
the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?"
"For him! It was concern for you," she cried, without thinking what she
said.
But it did not convince him. "For me? When you knew - when all the
world knew what I had been doing daily for a week!"
"Ah, but he, he was different from the others you had met. His
reputation stood high. My uncle accounted him invincible; he persuaded me
that if you met nothing could save you."
He looked at her frowning.
"Why this, Aline?" he asked her with some sternness. "I can understand
that, having changed since then, you should now wish to disown those
sentiments. It is a woman's way, I suppose."
"Oh, what are you saying, Andre? How wrong you are! It is the truth I
have told you!"
"And was it concern for me," he asked her, "that laid you swooning when
you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my eyes."
"Wounded? I had not seen his wound. I saw him sitting alive and
apparently unhurt in his caleche, and I concluded that he had killed you as
he had said he would. What else could I conclude?"
He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him. He fell back, a
hand to his brow. "And that was why you fainted?" he asked incredulously.
She looked at him without answering. As she began to realize how much
she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his
error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.
He held out both hands to her.
"Aline! Aline!" His voice broke on the name. "It was I... "
"0 blind Andre, it was always you - always! Never, never did I think of
him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when...
when that theatre girl came into your life, and then... " She broke off,
shrugged, and turned her head away. "I thought of following ambition, since
there was nothing left to follow."
He shook himself. "I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad," he
said.
"Blind, Andre; just blind," she assured him.
"Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen."
"And yet," she answered him with a flash of the Aline he had known of
old, "I have never found you lack presumption."
M. de Kercadiou, emerging a moment later from the library window,
beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if
each saw Paradise in the other's face.
resumed his seat. She continued on her way to the door and passed out upon
her errand.
When presently she returned they had almost unaccountably changed
places. It was Mme. de Plougastel who was seated in that armchair of brocade
and gilt, and M. de La Tour d'Azyr who, despite his lassitude, was leaning
over the back of it talking earnestly, seeming by his attitude to plead with
her. On Aline's entrance he broke off instantly and moved away, so that she
was left with a sense of having intruded. Further she observed that the
Countess was in tears.
Following her came presently the diligent Jacques, bearing a tray laden
with food and wine. Madame poured for her guest, and he drank a long draught
of the Burgundy, then begged, holding forth his grimy hands, that he might
mend his appearance before sitting down to eat.
He was led away and valeted by Jacques, and when he returned he had
removed from his person the last vestige of the rough handling he had
received. He looked almost his normal self, the disorder in his attire
repaired, calm and dignified and courtly in his bearing, but very pale and
haggard of face, seeming suddenly to have increased in years, to have
reached in appearance the age that was in fact his own.
As he ate and drank - and this with appetite, for as he told them he
had not tasted food since early morning - he entered into the details of the
dreadful events of the day, and gave them the particulars of his own escape
from the Tuileries when all was seen to be lost and when the Swiss, having
burnt their last cartridge, were submitting to wholesale massacre at the
hands of the indescribably furious mob.
"Oh, it was all most ill done," he ended critically. "We were timid
when we should have been resolute, and resolute at last when it was too
late. That is the history of our side from the beginning of this accursed
struggle. We have lacked proper leadership throughout, and now - as I have
said already - there is an end to us. It but remains to escape, as soon as
we can discover how the thing is to be accomplished."
Madame told him of the hopes that she had centred upon Rougane.
It lifted him out of his gloom. He was disposed to be optimistic.
"You are wrong to have abandoned that hope," he assured her. "If this
mayor is so well disposed, he certainly can do as his son promised. But last
night it would have been too late for him to have reached you, and to-day,
assuming that he had come to Paris, almost impossible for him to win across
the streets from the other side. It is most likely that he will yet come. I
pray that he may; for the knowledge that you and Mlle. de Kercadiou are out
of this would comfort me above all."
"We should take you with us," said madame.
"Ah! But how?"
"Young Rougane was to bring me permits for three persons - Aline,
myself, and my footman, Jacques. You would take the place of Jacques."
"Faith, to get out of Paris, madame, there is no man whose place I
would not take." And he laughed.
Their spirits rose with his and their flagging hopes revived. But as
dusk descended again upon the city, without any sign of the deliverer they
awaited, those hopes began to ebb once more.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr at last pleaded weariness, and begged to be
permitted to withdraw that he might endeavour to take some rest against
whatever might have to be faced in the immediate future. When he had gone,
madame persuaded Aline to go and lie down.
"I will call you, my dear, the moment he arrives," she said, bravely
maintaining that pretence of a confidence that had by now entirely
evaporated.
Aline kissed her affectionately, and departed, outwardly so calm and
unperturbed as to leave the Countess wondering whether she realized the
peril by which they were surrounded, a peril infinitely increased by the
presence in that house of a man so widely known and detested as M. de La
Tour d'Azyr, a man who was probably being sought for by his enemies at this
moment.
Left alone, madame lay down on a couch in the salon itself, to be ready
for any emergency. It was a hot summer night, and the glass doors opening
upon the luxuriant garden stood wide to admit the air. On that air came
intermittently from the distance sounds of the continuing horrible
activities of the populace, the aftermath of that bloody day.
Mme. de Plougastel lay there, listening to those sounds for upwards of
an hour, thanking Heaven that for the present at least the disturbances were
distant, dreading lest at any moment they should occur nearer at hand, lest
this Bondy section in which her hotel was situated should become the scene
of horrors similar to those whose echoes reached her ears from other
sections away to the south and west.
The couch occupied by the Countess lay in shadow; for all the lights in
that long salon had been extinguished with the exception of a cluster of
candles in a massive silver candle branch placed on a round marquetry table
in the middle of the room - an island of light in the surrounding gloom.
The timepiece on the overmantel chimed melodiously the hour of ten, and
then, startling in the suddenness with which it broke the immediate silence,
another sound vibrated through the house, and brought madame to her feet, in
a breathless mingling of hope and dread. Some one was knocking sharply on
the door below. Followed moments of agonized suspense, culminating in the
abrupt invasion of the room by the footman Jacques. He looked round, not
seeing his mistress at first.
"Madame! Madame!" he panted, out of breath.
"What is it, Jacques!" Her voice was steady now that the need for
self-control seemed thrust upon her. She advanced from the shadows into that
island of light about the table. "There is a man below. He is asking... he
is demanding to see you at once."
"A man?" she questioned.
"He... he seems to be an official; at least he wears the sash of
office. And he refuses to give any name; he says that his name would convey
nothing to you. He insists that he must see you in person and at once."
"An official?" said madame.
"An official," Jacques repeated. "I would not have admitted him, but
that he demanded it in the name of the Nation. Madame, it is for you to say
what shall be done. Robert is with me. If you wish it... whatever it may
be... "
"My good Jacques, no, no." She was perfectly composed. If this man
intended evil, surely he would not come alone. Conduct him to me, and then
beg Mlle. de Kercadiou to join me if she is awake."
Jacques departed, himself partly reassured. Madame seated herself in
the armchair by the table well within the light. She smoothed her dress with
a mechanical hand. If, as it would seem, her hopes had been futile, so had
her momentary fears. A man on any but an errand of peace would have brought
some following with him, as she had said.
The door opened again, and Jacques reappeared; after him, stepping
briskly past him, came a slight man in a wide-brimmed hat, adorned by a
tricolour cockade. About the waist of an olive-green riding-coat he wore a
broad tricolour sash; a sword hung at his side.
He swept off his hat, and the candlelight glinted on the steel buckle
in front of it. Madame found herself silently regarded by a pair of large,
dark eyes set in a lean, brown face, eyes that were most singularly intent
and searching.
She leaned forward, incredulity swept across her countenance. Then her
eyes kindled, and the colour came creeping back into her pale cheeks. She
rose suddenly. She was trembling.
"Andre-Louis!" she exclaimed.
That gift of laughter of his seemed utterly extinguished. For once
there was no gleam of humour in those dark eyes, as they continued to
consider her with that queer stare of scrutiny. And yet, though his gaze was
sombre, his thoughts were not. With his cruelly true mental vision which
pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation - which
properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed - he perceived the
grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment he
experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely
from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all things
considered, the more or less accidental fact that she had brought him into
the world could establish between them any real bond at this time of day!
The motherhood that bears and forsakes is less than animal. He had
considered this; he had been given ample leisure in which to consider it
during those long, turbulent hours in which he had been forced to wait,
because it would have been almost impossible to have won across that
seething city, and certainly unwise to have attempted so to do.
He had reached the conclusion that by consenting to go to her rescue at
such a time he stood committed to a piece of purely sentimental quixotry.
The quittances which the Mayor of Meudon had exacted from him before he
would issue the necessary safe-conducts placed the whole of his future,
perhaps his very life, in jeopardy. And he had consented to do this not for
the sake of a reality, but out of regard for an idea - he who all his life
had avoided the false lure of worthless and hollow sentimentality.
Thus thought Andre-Louis as he considered her now so searchingly,
finding it, naturally enough, a matter of extraordinary interest to look
consciously upon his mother for the first time at the age of
eight-and-twenty.
>From her he looked at last at Jacques, who remained at attention,
waiting by the open door.
"Could we be alone, madame?" he asked her.
She waved the footman away, and the door closed. In agitated silence,
unquestioning, she waited for him to account for his presence there at so
extraordinary a time.
"Rougane could not return," he informed her shortly. At M. de
Kercadiou's request, I come instead."
"You! You are sent to rescue us!" The note of amazement in her voice
was stronger than that of het relief.
"That, and to make your acquaintance, madame."
"To make my acquaintance? But what do you mean, Andre-Louis?"
"This letter from M. de Kercadiou will tell you." Intrigued by his odd
words and odder manner, she took the folded sheet. She broke the seal with
shaking hands, and with shaking hands approached the written page to the
light. Her eyes grew troubled as she read; the shaking of her hands
increased, and midway through that reading a moan escaped her. One glance
that was almost terror she darted at the slim, straight man standing so
incredibly impassive upon the edge of the light, and then she endeavoured to
read on. But the crabbed characters of M. de Kercadiou swam distortedly
under her eyes. She could not read. Besides, what could it matter what else
he said. She had read enough. The sheet fluttered from her hands to the
table, and out of a face that was like a face of wax, she looked now with a
wistfulness, a sadness indescribable, at Andre-Louis.
"And so you know, my child?" Her voice was stifled to a whisper.
"I know, madame my mother."
The grimness, the subtle blend of merciless derision and reproach in
which it was uttered completely escaped her. She cried out at the new name.
For her in that moment time and the world stood still. Her peril there in
Paris as the wife of an intriguer at Coblenz was blotted out, together with
every other consideration
- thrust out of a consciousness that could find room for nothing else
beside the fact that she stood acknowledged by her only son, this child
begotten in adultery, borne furtively and in shame in a remote Brittany
village eight-and-twenty years ago. Not even a thought for the betrayal of
that inviolable secret, or the con- sequences that might follow, could she
spare in this supreme moment.
She took one or two faltering steps towards him, hesitating. Then she
opened her arms. Sobs suffocated her voice.
"Won't you come to me, Andre-Louis?"
A moment yet he stood hesitating, startled by that appeal, angered
almost by his heart's response to it, reason and sentiment at grips in his
soul. This was not real, his reason postulated; this poignant emotion that
she displayed and that he experienced was fantastic. Yet he went. Her arms
enfolded him; her wet cheek was pressed hard against his own; her frame,
which the years had not yet succeeded in robbing of its grace, was shaken by
the passionate storm within her.
"Oh, Andre-Louis, my child, if you knew how I have hungered to hold you
so! If you knew how in denying myself this I have atoned and suffered!
Kercadiou should not have told you - not even now. It was wrong - most
wrong, perhaps, to you. It would have been better that he should have left
me here to my fate, whatever that may be. And yet - come what may of this -
to be able to hold you so, to be able to acknowledge you, to hear you call
me mother - oh! Andre-Louis, I cannot now regret it. I cannot... I cannot
wish it otherwise."
"Is there any need, madame?" he asked her, his stoicism deeply shaken.
"There is no occasion to take others into our confidence. This is for
to-night alone. To-night we are mother and son. To-morrow we resume our
former places, and, outwardly at least, forget."
"Forget? Have you no heart, Andre-Louis?"
The question recalled him curiously to his attitude towards life
- that histrionic attitude of his that he accounted true philosophy.
Also he remembered what lay before them; and he realized that he must master
not only himself but her; that to yield too far to sentiment at such a time
might be the ruin of them all.
"It is a question propounded to me so often that it must contain the
truth," said he. "My rearing is to blame for that."
She tightened her clutch about his neck even as he would have attempted
to disengage himself from her embrace.
"You do not blame me for your rearing? Knowing all, as you do,
Andre-Louis, you cannot altogether blame. You must be merciful to me. You
must forgive me. You must! I had no choice."
"When we know all of whatever it may be, we can never do anything but
forgive, madame. That is the profoundest religious truth that was ever
written. It contains, in fact, a whole religion - the noblest religion any
man could have to guide him. I say this for your comfort, madame my mother."
She sprang away from him with a startled cry. Beyond him in the shadows
by the door a pale figure shimmered ghostly. It advanced into the light, and
resolved itself into Aline. She had come in answer to that forgotten summons
madame had sent her by Jacques. Entering unperceived she had seen
Andre-Louis in the embrace of the woman whom he addressed as "mother." She
had recognized him instantly by his voice, and she could not have said what
bewildered her more: his presence there or the thing she overheard.
"You heard, Aline?" madame exclaimed.
"I could not help it, madame. You sent for me. I am sorry if... " She
broke off, and looked at Andre-Louis long and curiously. She was pale, but
quite composed. She held out her hand to him. "And so you have come at last,
Andre," said she. "You might have come before."
"I come when I am wanted," was his answer. "Which is the only time in
which one can be sure of being received." He said it without bitterness, and
having said it stooped to kiss her hand.
"You can forgive me what is past, I hope, since I failed of my
purpose," he said gently, half-pleading. "I could not have come to you
pretending that the failure was intentional - a compromise between the
necessities of the case and your own wishes. For it was not that. And yet,
you do not seem to have profited by my failure. You are still a maid."
She turned her shoulder to him.
"There are things," she said, "that you will never understand."
"Life, for one," he acknowledged. "I confess that I am finding it
bewildering. The very explanations calculated to simplify it seem but to
complicate it further." And he looked at Mme. de Plougastel.
"You mean something, I suppose," said mademoiselle.
"Aline!" It was the Countess who spoke. She knew the danger of
half-discoveries. "I can trust you, child, I know, and Andre-Louis, I am
sure, will offer no objection." She had taken up the letter to show it to
Aline. Yet first her eyes questioned him.
"Oh, none, madame," he assured her. "It is entirely a matter for
yourself."
Aline looked from one to the other with troubled eyes, hesitating to
take the letter that was now proffered. When she had read it through, she
very thoughtfully replaced it on the table. A moment she stood there with
bowed head, the other two watching her. Then impulsively she ran to madame
and put her arms about her.
"Aline!" It was a cry of wonder, almost of joy. "You do not utterly
abhor me!"
"My dear," said Aline, and kissed the tear-stained face that seemed to
have grown years older in these last few hours.
In the background Andre-Louis, steeling himself against emotionalism,
spoke with the voice of Scaramouche.
"It would be well, mesdames, to postpone all transports until they can
be indulged at greater leisure and in more security. It is growing late. If
we are to get out of this shambles we should be wise to take the road
without more delay."
It was a tonic as effective as it was necessary. It startled them into
remembrance of their circumstances, and under the spur of it they went at
once to make their preparations.
They left him for perhaps a quarter of an hour, to pace that long room
alone, saved only from impatience by the turmoil of his mind. When at length
they returned, they were accompanied by a tall man in a full-skirted shaggy
greatcoat and a broad hat the brim of which was turned down all around. He
remained respectfully by the door in the shadows.
Between them the two women had concerted it thus, or rather the
Countess had so concerted it when Aline had warned her that Andre-Louis'
bitter hostility towards the Marquis made it unthinkable that he should move
a finger consciously to save him.
Now despite the close friendship uniting M. de Kercadiou and his niece
with Mme. de Plougastel, there were several matters concerning them of which
the Countess was in ignorance. One of these was the project at one time
existing of a marriage between Aline and M. de La Tour d'Azyr. It was a
matter that Aline - naturally enough in the state of her feelings - had
never mentioned, nor had M. de Kercadiou ever alluded to it since his coming
to Meudon, by when he had perceived how unlikely it was ever to be realized.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr's concern for Aline on that morning of the duel
when he had found her baif-swooning in Mme. de Plougastel's carriage had
been of a circumspection that betrayed nothing of his real interest in her,
and therefore had appeared no more than natural in one who must account
himself the cause of her distress. Similarly Mme. de Plougastel had never
realized nor did she realize now - for Aline did not trouble fully to
enlighten her - that the hostility between the two men was other than
political, the quarrel other than that which already had taken Andre-Louis
to the Bois on every day of the preceding week. But, at least, she realized
that even if Andre-Louis' rancour should have no other source, yet that
inconclusive duel was cause enough for Aline's fears.
And so she had proposed this obvious deception; and Aline had consented
to be a passive party to it. They had made the mistake of not fully
forewarning and persuading M. de La Tour d'Azyr. They had trusted entirely
to his anxiety to escape from Paris to keep him rigidly within the part
imposed upon him. They had reckoned without the queer sense of honour that
moved such men as M. le Marquis, nurtured upon a code of shams.
Andre-Louis, turning to scan that muffled figure, advanced from the
dark depths of the salon. As the light beat on his white, lean face the
pseudo-footman started. The next moment he too stepped forward into the
light, and swept his broad-brimmed hat from his brow. As he did so
Andre-Louis observed that his hand was fine and white and that a jewel
flashed from one of the fingers. Then he caught his breath, and stiffened in
every line as he recognized the face revealed to him.
"Monsieur," that stern, proud man was saying, "I cannot take advantage
of your ignorance. If these ladies can persuade you to save me, at least it
is due to you that you shall know whom you are saving."
He stood there by the table very erect and dignified, ready to perish
as he had lived - if perish he must - without fear and without deception.
Andre-Louis came slowly forward until he reached the table on the other
side, and then at last the muscles of his set face relaxed, and he laughed.
"You laugh?" said M. de La Tour dAzyr, frowning, offended.
"It is so damnably amusing," said Andre-Louis.
"You've an odd sense of humour, M. Moreau."
"Oh, admitted. The unexpected always moves me so. I have found you many
things in the course of our acquaintance. To-night you are the one thing I
never expected to find you: an honest man."
M. de La Tour d'Azyr quivered. But he attempted no reply.
"Because of that, monsieur, I am disposed to be clement. It is probably
a foolishness. But you have surprised me into it. I give you three minutes,
monsieur, in which to leave this house, and to take your own measures for
your safety. What afterwards happens to you shall be no concern of mine.
"Ah, no, Andre! Listen... " Madame began in anguish.
"Pardon, madame. It is the utmost that I will do, and already I am
violating what I conceive to be my duty. If M. de La Tour d'Azyr remains he
not only ruins himself, but he imperils you. For unless he departs at once,
he goes with me to the headquarters of the section, and the section will
have his head on a pike inside the hour. He is a notorious
counter-revolutionary, a knight of the dagger, one of those whom an
exasperated populace is determined to exterminate. Now, monsieur, you know
what awaits you. Resolve yourself and at once, for these ladies' sake."
"But you don't know, Andre-Louis!" Mme. de Plougastel's condition was
one of anguish indescribable. She came to him and clutched his arm. "For the
love of Heaven, Andre-Louis, be merciful with him! You must!"
"But that is what I am being, madame - merciful; more merciful than he
deserves. And he knows it. Fate has meddled most oddly in our concerns to
bring us together to-night. Almost it is as if Fate were forcing retribution
at last upon him. Yet, for your sakes, I take no advantage of it, provided
that he does at once as I have desired him."
And now from beyond the table the Marquis spoke icily, and as he spoke
his right hand stirred under the ample folds of his greatcoat.
"I am glad, M. Moreau, that you take that tone with me. You relieve me
of the last scruple. You spoke of Fate just now, and I must agree with you
that Fate has meddled oddly, though perhaps not to the end that you discern.
For years now you have chosen to stand in my path and thwart me at every
turn, holding over me a perpetual menace. Persistently you have sought my
life in various ways, first indirectly and at last directly. Your
intervention in my affairs has ruined my highest hopes - more effectively,
perhaps, than you suppose. Throughout you have been my evil genius. And you
are even one of the agents of this climax of despair that has been reached
by me to-night."
"Wait! Listen!" Madame was panting. She flung away from Andre-Louis, as
if moved by some premonition of what was coming. "Gervais! This is
horrible!"
"Horrible, perhaps, but inevitable. Himself he has invited it. I am a
man in despair, the fugitive of a lost cause. That man holds the keys of
escape. And, besides, between him and me there is a reckoning to be paid."
His hand came from beneath the coat at last, and it came armed with a
pistol.
Mme. de Plougastel screamed, and flung herself upon him. On her knees
now, she clung to his arm with all her strength and might.
Vainly he sought to shake himself free of that desperate clutch.
"Therese!" he cried. "Are you mad? Will you destroy me and yourself?
This creature has the safe-conducts that mean our salvation. Himself, he is
nothing."
>From the background Aline, a breathless, horror-stricken spectator of
that scene, spoke sharply, her quick mind pointing out the line of
checkmate.
"Burn the safe-conducts, Andre-Louis. Burn them at once - in the
candles there."
But Andre-Louis had taken advantage of that moment of M. de La Tour
d'Azyr's impotence to draw a pistol in his turn. "T think it will be better
to burn his brains instead," he said. "Stand away from him, madame."
Far from obeying that imperious command, Mme. de Plougastel rose to her
feet to cover the Marquis with her body. But she still clung to his arm,
clung to it with unsuspected strength that continued to prevent him from
attempting to use the pistol.
"Andre! For God's sake, Andre!" she panted hoarsely over her shoulder.
"Stand away, madame," he commanded her again, more sternly, "and let
this murderer take his due. He is jeopardizing all our lives, and his own
has been forfeit these years. Stand away!" He sprang forward with intent now
to fire at his enemy over her shoulder, and Aline moved too late to hinder
him.
"Andre! Andre!"
Panting, gasping, haggard of face, on the verge almost of hysteria, the
distracted Countess flung at last an effective, a terrible barrier between
the hatred of those men, each intent upon taking the other's life.
"He is your father, Andre! Gervais, he is your son - our son! The
letter there... on the table... 0 my God!" And she slipped nervelessly to
the ground, and crouched there sobbing at the feet of M. de La Tour d'Azyr.
Across the body of that convulsively sobbing woman, the mother of one
and the mistress of the other, the eyes of those mortal enemies met,
invested with a startled, appalled interest that admitted of no words.
Beyond the table, as if turned to stone by this culminating horror of
revelation, stood Aline.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr was the first to stir. Into his bewildered mind
came the memory of something that Mme. de Plougastel had said of a letter
that was on the table. He came forward, unhindered. The announcement made,
Mme. de Plougastel no longer feared the sequel, and so she let him go. He
walked unsteadily past this new-found son of his, and took up the sheet that
lay beside the candlebranch. A long moment he stood reading it, none heeding
him. Aline's eyes were all on Andre-Louis, full of wonder and commiseration,
whilst Andre-Louis was staring down, in stupefied fascination, at his
mother.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr read the letter slowly through. Then very quietly
he replaced it. His next concern, being the product of an artificial age
sternly schooled in the suppression of emotion, was to compose himself. Then
he stepped back to Mme. de Plougastel's side and stooped to raise her.
"Therese," he said.
Obeying, by instinct, the implied command, she made an effort to rise
and to control herself in her turn. The Marquis half conducted, half carried
her to the armchair by the table.
Andre-Louis looked on. Still numbed and bewildered, he made no attempt
to assist. He saw as in a dream the Marquis bending over Mme. de Plougastel.
As in a dream he heard him ask:
"How long have you known this, Therese?"
"I... I have always known it... always. I confided him to Kercadiou. I
saw him once as a child... Oh, but what of that?"
"Why was I never told? Why did you deceive me? Why did you tell me that
this child had died a few days after birth? Why, Therese? Why?"
"I was afraid. I... I thought it better so - that nobody, nobody, not
even you, should know. And nobody has known save Quintin until last night,
when to induce him to come here and save me he was forced to tell him."
"But I, Therese?" the Marquis insisted. "It was my right to know."
"Your right? What could you have done? Acknowledge him? And then? Ha!"
It was a queer, desperate note of laughter. "There was Plougastel; there was
my family. And there was you... you, yourself, who had ceased to care, in
whom the fear of discovery had stifled love. Why should I have told you,
then? Why? I should not have told you now had there been any other way to...
to save you both. Once before I suffered just such dreadful apprehensions
when you and he fought in the Bois. I was on my way to prevent it when you
met me. I would have divulged the truth, as a last resource, to avert that
horror. But mercifully God spared me the necessity then."
It had not occurred to any of them to doubt her statement, incredible
though it might seem. Had any done so her present words must have resolved
all doubt, explaining as they did much that to each of her listeners had
been obscure until this moment.
M. de La Tour d'Azyr, overcome; reeled away to a chair and sat down
heavily. Losing command of himself for a moment, he took his haggard face in
his hands.
Through the windows open to the garden came from the distance the faint
throbbing of a drum to remind them of what was happening around them. But
the sound went unheeded. To each it must have seemed that here they were
face to face with a horror greater than any that might be tormenting Paris.
At last Andre-Louis began to speak, his voice level and unutterably cold.
"M. de La Tour d'Azyr," he said, "I trust that you'll agree that this
disclosure, which can hardly be more distasteful and horrible to you than it
is to me, alters nothing, - since it effaces nothing of all that lies
between us. Or, if it alters anything, it is merely to add something to that
score. And yet... Oh, but what can it avail to talk! Here, monsieur, take
this safe-conduct which is made out for Mme. de Plougastel's footman, and
with it make your escape as best you can. In return I will beg of you the
favour never to allow me to see you or hear of you again."
"Andre!" His mother swung upon him with that cry. And yet again that
question. "Have you no heart? What has he ever done to you that you should
nurse so bitter a hatred of him?"
"You shall hear, madame. Once, two years ago in this very room I told
you of a man who had brutally killed my dearest friend and debauched the
girl I was to have married. M. de La Tour d'Azyr is that man."
A moan was her only answer. She covered her face with her hands.
The Marquis rose slowly to his feet again. He came slowly forward, his
smouldering eyes scanning his son's face.
"You are hard," he said grimly. "But I recognize the hardness. It
derives from the blood you bear."
"Spare me that," said Andre-Louis.
The Marquis inclined his head. "I will not mention it again. But I
desire that you should at least understand me, and you too, Therese. You
accuse me, sir, of murdering your dearest friend. I will admit that the
means employed were perhaps unworthy. But what other means were at my
command to meet an urgency that every day since then proves to have existed?
M. de Vilmorin was a revolutionary, a man of new ideas that should overthrow
society and rebuild it more akin to the desires of such as himself. I
belonged to the order that quite as justifiably desired society to remain as
it was. Not only was it better so for me and mine, but I also contend, and
you have yet to prove me wrong, that it is better so for all the world;
that, indeed, no other conceivable society is possible. Every human society
must of necessity be composed of several strata. You may disturb it
temporarily into an amorphous whole by a revolution such as this; but only
temporarily. Soon out of the chaos which is all that you and your kind can
ever produce, order must be restored or life will perish; and with the
restoration of order comes the restoration of the various strata necessary
to organized society. Those that were yesterday at the top may in the new
order of things find themselves dispossessed without any benefit to the
whole. That change I resisted. The spirit of it I fought with whatever
weapons were available, whenever and wherever I encountered it. M. de
Vilmorin was an incendiary of the worst type, a man of eloquence full of
false ideals that misled poor ignorant men into believing that the change
proposed could make the world a better place for them. You are an
intelligent man, and I defy you to answer me from your heart and conscience
that such a thing was true or possible. You know that it is untrue; you know
that it is a pernicious doctrine; and what made it worse on the lips of M.
de Vilmorin was that he was sincere and eloquent. His voice was a danger
that must be removed - silenced. So much was necessary in self-defence. In
self-defence I did it. I had no grudge against M. de Vilmorin. He was a man
of my own class; a gentleman of pleasant ways, amiable, estimable, and able.
"You conceive me slaying him for the very lust of slaying, like some
beast of the jungle flinging itself upon its natural prey. That has been
your error from the first. I did what I did with the very heaviest heart -
oh, spare me your sneer! - I do not lie, I have never lied. And I swear to
you here and now, by my every hope of Heaven, that what I say is true. I
loathed the thing I did. Yet for my own sake and the sake of my order I must
do it. Ask yourself whether M. de Vilmorin would have hesitated for a moment
if by procuring my death he could have brought the Utopia of his dreams a
moment nearer realization.
"After that. You determined that the sweetest vengeance would be to
frustrate my ends by reviving in yourself the voice that I had silenced, by
yourself carrying forward the fantastic apostleship of equality that was M.
de Vilmorin's. You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did
not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us
was right, which rong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the
foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion.
Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must
follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there
will rise up an ideal form of society? Don't you understand that society
must re-order itself presently out of all this?
"But why say more? I must have said enough to make you understand the
only thing that really matters - that I killed M. de Vilmorin as a matter of
duty to my order. And the truth - which though it may offend you should also
convince you - is that to-night I can ook back on the deed with equanimity,
without a single regret, apart from what lies between you and me.
"When, kneeling beside the body of your friend that day at Gavrillac,
you insulted and provoked me, had I been the tiger you conceived me I must
have killed you too. I am, as you may know, a man of quick passions. Yet I
curbed the natural anger you aroused in me, because I could forgive an
affront to myself where I could not overlook a calculated attack upon my
order."
He paused a moment. Andre-Louis stood rigid listening and wondering.
So, too, the others. Then M. le Marquis resumed, on a note of less
assurance. "In the matter of Mlle. Binet I was unfortunate. I wronged you
through inadvertence. I had no knowledge of the relations between you."
Andre-Louis interrupted him 'sharply at last with a question: "Would it
have made a difference if you had?"
"No," he was answered frankly. "I have the faults of my kind. I cannot
pretend that any such scruple as you suggest would have weighed with me. But
can you - if you are capable of any detached judgment - blame me very much
for that?"
"All things considered, monsieur, I am rapidly being forced to the
conclusion that it is impossible to blame any man for anything in this
world; that we are all of us the sport of destiny. Consider, monsieur, this
gathering - this family gathering - here to-night, whilst out there... 0 my
God, let us make an end! Let us go our ways and write 'finis' to this
horrible chapter of our lives."
M. le La Tour considered him gravely, sadly, in silence for a moment.
"Perhaps it is best," he said, at length, in a small voice. He turned
to Mme. de Plougastel. "If a wrong I have to admit in my life, a wrong that
I must bitterly regret, it is the wrong that I have done to you, my dear...
"
"Not now, Gervais! Not now!" she faltered, interrupting him.
"Now - for the first and the last time. I am going. It is not likely
that we shall ever meet again - that I shall ever see any of you again - you
who should have been the nearest and dearest to me. We are all, he says, the
sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving
with purpose. In life we pay for the evil that in life we do. That is the
lesson that I have learnt to-night. By an act of betrayal I begot unknown to
me a son who, whilst as ignorant as myself of our relationship, has come to
be the evil genius of my life, to cross and thwart me, and finally to help
to pull me down in ruin. It is just - poetically just. My full and resigned
acceptance of that fact is the only atonement I can offer you."
He stooped and took one of madame's hands that lay limply in her lap.
"Good-bye, Therese!" His voice broke. He had reached the end of his
iron self-control.
She rose and clung to him a moment, unashamed before them. The ashes of
that dead romance had been deeply stirred this night, and deep down some
lingering embers had been found that glowed brightly now before their final
extinction. Yet she made no attempt to detain him. She understood that their
son had pointed out the only wise, the only possible course, and was
thankful that M. de La Tour d'Azyr accepted it.
"God keep you, Gervais," she murmured. "You will take the safe-conduct,
and... and you will let me know when you are safe?"
He held her face between his hands an instant; then very gently kissed
her and put her from him. Standing erect, and outwardly calm again, he
looked across at Andre-Louis who was proffering him a sheet of paper.
"It is the safe-conduct. Take it, monsieur. It is my first and last
gift to you, and certainly the last gift I should ever have thought of
making you - the gift of life. In a sense it makes us quits. The irony, sir,
is not mine, but Fate's. Take it, monsieur, and go in peace."
M. de La Tour d'Azyr took it. His eyes looked hungrily into the lean
face confronting him, so sternly set. He thrust the paper into his bosom,
and then abruptly, convulsively, held out his hand. His son's eyes asked a
question.
"Let there be peace between us, in God's name," said the Marquis
thickly.
Pity stirred at last in Andre-Louis. Some of the sternness left his
face. He sighed. "Good-bye, monsieur," he said.
"You are hard," his father told him, speaking wistfully. "But perhaps
you are in the right so to be. In other circumstances I should have been
proud to have owned you as my son. As it is... " He broke off abruptly, and
as abruptly added, "Good-bye."
He loosed his son's hand and stepped back. They bowed formally to each
other. And then M. de La Tour d'Azyr bowed to Mlle. de Kercadiou in utter
silence, a bow that contained something of utter renunciation, of finality.
That done he turned and walked stiffly out of the room, and so out of
all their lives. Months later they were to hear if him in the service of the
Emperor of Austria.
Andre-Louis took the air next morning on the terrace at Meudon. The
hour was very early, and the newly risen sun was transmuting into diamonds
the dewdrops that still lingered on the lawn. Down in the valley, five miles
away, the morning mists were rising over Paris. Yet early as it was that
house on the hill was astir already, in a bustle of preparation for the
departure that was imminent.
Andre-Louis had won safely out of Paris last night with his mother and
Aline, and to-day they were to set out all of them for Coblenz.
To Andre-Louis, sauntering there with hands clasped behind him and head
hunched between his shoulders - for life had never been richer in material
for reflection - came presently Aline through one of the glass doors from
the library.
"You're early astir," she greeted him.
"Faith, yes. I haven't been to bed. No," he assured her, in answer to
her exclamation. "I spent the night or what was left of it sitting at the
window thinking."
"My poor Andre!"
"You describe me perfectly. I am very poor - for I know nothing,
understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.
Then... " He threw out his arms, and let them fall again. His face she
observed was very drawn and haggard.
She paced with him along the old granite balustrade over which the
geraniums flung their mantle of green and scarlet.
"Have you decided what you are going to do?" she asked him.
"I have decided that I have no choice. I, too, must emigrate. I am
lucky to be able to do so, lucky to have found no one amid yesterday's chaos
in Paris to whom I could report myself as I foolishly desired, else I might
no longer be armed with these." He drew from his pocket the powerful
passport of the Commission of Twelve, enjoining upon all Frenchmen to lend
him such assistance as he might require, and warning those who might think
of hindering him that they did so at their own peril. He spread it before
her. "With this I conduct you all safely to the frontier. Over the frontier
M. de Kercadiou and Mme. de Plougastel will have to conduct me; and then we
shall be quits."
"Quits?" quoth she. "But you will be unable to return!"
"You conceive, of course, my eagerness to do so. My child, in a day or
two there will be enquiries. It will be asked what has become of me. Things
will transpire. Then the hunt will start. But by then we shall be well upon
our way, well ahead of any possible pursuit. You don't imagine that I could
ever give the government any satisfactory explanation of my absence -
assuming that any government remains to which to explain it?"
"You mean... that you will sacrifice your future, this career upon
which you have embarked?" It took her breath away.
"In the pass to which things have come there is no career for me down
there - at least no honest one. And I hope you do not think that I could be
dishonest. It is the day of the Dantons, and the Marats, the day of the
rabble. The reins of government will be tossed to the populace, or else the
populace, drunk with the conceit with which the Dantons and the Marats have
filled it, will seize the reins by force. Chaos must follow, and a despotism
of brutes and apes, a government of the whole by its lowest parts. It cannot
endure, because unless a nation is ruled by its best elements it must wither
and decay."
"I thought you were a republican," said she.
"Why, so I am. I am talking like one. I desire a society which selects
its rulers, from the best elements of every class and denies the right of
any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself - whether it be
the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government
by any one class is fatal to the welfare of the whole. Two years ago our
ideal seemed to have been realized. The monopoly of power had been taken
from the class that had held it too long and too unjustly by the hollow
right of heredity. It had been distributed as evenly as might be throughout
the State, and if men had only paused there, all would have been well. But
our impetus carried us too far, the privileged orders goaded us on by their
very opposition, and the result is the horror of which yesterday you saw no
more than the beginnings. No, no," he ended. "Careers there may be for venal
place-seekers, for opportunists; but none for a man who desires to respect
himself. It is time to go. I make no sacrifice in going."
"But where will you go? What will you do?"
"Oh, something. Consider that in four years I have been lawyer,
politician, swordsman, and buffoon - especially the latter. There is always
a place in the world for Scaramouche. Besides, do you know that unlike
Scaramouche I have been oddly provident? I am the owner of a little farm in
Saxony. I think that agriculture might suit me. It is a meditative
occupation; and when all is said, I am not a man of action. I haven't the
qualities for the part."
She looked up into his face, and there was a wistful smile in her deep
blue eyes.
"Is there any part for which you have not the qualities, I wonder?"
"Do you really? Yet you cannot say that I have made a success of any of
those which I have played. I have always ended by running away. I am running
away now from a thriving fencing-academy, which is likely to become the
property of Le Duc. That comes of having gone into politics, from which I am
also running away. It is the one thing in which I really excel. That, too,
is an attribute of Scaramouche."
"Why will you always be deriding yourself?" she wondered.
"Because I recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You
wouldn't have me take it seriously? I should lose my reason utterly if I
did; especially since discovering my parents."
"Don't, Andre!" she begged him. "You are insincere, you know."
"Of course I am. Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the
very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it,
we live by it; and we rarely realize it. You have seen it rampant and out of
hand in France during the past four years - cant and hypocrisy on the lips
of the revolutionaries, cant and hypocrisy on the lips of the upholders of
the old regime; a riot of hypocrisy out of which in the end is begotten
chaos. And I who criticize it all on this beautiful God-given morning am the
rankest and most contemptible hypocrite of all. It was this - the
realization of this truth kept me awake all night. For two years I have
persecuted by every means in my power... M. de La Tour d'Azyr."
He paused before uttering the name, paused as if hesitating how to
speak of him.
"And in those two years I have deceived myself as to the motive that
was spurring me. He spoke of me last night as the evil genius of his life,
and himself he recognized the justice of this. It may be that he was right,
and because of that it is probable that even had he not killed Philippe de
Vilmorin, things would still have been the same. Indeed, to-day I know that
they must have been. That is why I call myself a hypocrite, a poor,
self-duping hypocrite."
"But why, Andre?"
He stood still and looked at her. "Because he sought you, Aline.
Because in that alone he must have found me ranged against him, utterly
intransigeant. Because of that I must have strained every nerve to bring him
down - so as to save you from becoming the prey of your own ambition.
"I wish to speak of him no more than I must. After this, I trust never
to speak of him again. Before the lines of our lives crossed, I knew him for
what he was, I knew the report of him that ran the countryside. Even then I
found him detestable. You heard him allude last night to the unfortunate La
Binet. You heard him plead, in extenuation of his fault, his mode of life,
his rearing. To that there is no answer, I suppose. He conforms to type.
Enough! But to me, he was the embodiment of evil, just as you have always
been the embodiment of good; he was the embodiment of sin, just as you are
the embodiment of purity. I had enthroned you so high, Aline, so high, and
yet no higher than your place. Could I, then, suffer that you should be
dragged down by ambition, could I suffer the evil I detested to mate with
the good I loved? What could have come of it but your own damnation, as I
told you that day at Gavrillac? Because of that my detestation of him became
a personal, active thing. I resolved to save you at all costs from a fate so
horrible. Had you been able to tell me that you loved him it would have been
different. I should have hoped that in a union sanctified by love you would
have raised him to your own pure heights. But that out of considerations of
worldly advancement you should lovelessly consent to mate with him... Oh, it
was vile and hopeless. And so I fought him - a rat fighting a lion - fought
him relentlessly until I saw that love had come to take in your heart the
place of ambition. Then I desisted."
"Until you saw that love had taken the place of ambition!" Tears had
been gathering in her eyes whilst he was speaking. Now amazement eliminated
her emotion. "But when did you see that? When?"
"I - I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time... surely, Aline,
that morning when you came to beg me not to keep my engagement with him in
the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?"
"For him! It was concern for you," she cried, without thinking what she
said.
But it did not convince him. "For me? When you knew - when all the
world knew what I had been doing daily for a week!"
"Ah, but he, he was different from the others you had met. His
reputation stood high. My uncle accounted him invincible; he persuaded me
that if you met nothing could save you."
He looked at her frowning.
"Why this, Aline?" he asked her with some sternness. "I can understand
that, having changed since then, you should now wish to disown those
sentiments. It is a woman's way, I suppose."
"Oh, what are you saying, Andre? How wrong you are! It is the truth I
have told you!"
"And was it concern for me," he asked her, "that laid you swooning when
you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my eyes."
"Wounded? I had not seen his wound. I saw him sitting alive and
apparently unhurt in his caleche, and I concluded that he had killed you as
he had said he would. What else could I conclude?"
He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him. He fell back, a
hand to his brow. "And that was why you fainted?" he asked incredulously.
She looked at him without answering. As she began to realize how much
she had been swept into saying by her eagerness to make him realize his
error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.
He held out both hands to her.
"Aline! Aline!" His voice broke on the name. "It was I... "
"0 blind Andre, it was always you - always! Never, never did I think of
him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when...
when that theatre girl came into your life, and then... " She broke off,
shrugged, and turned her head away. "I thought of following ambition, since
there was nothing left to follow."
He shook himself. "I am dreaming, of course, or else I am mad," he
said.
"Blind, Andre; just blind," she assured him.
"Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen."
"And yet," she answered him with a flash of the Aline he had known of
old, "I have never found you lack presumption."
M. de Kercadiou, emerging a moment later from the library window,
beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if
each saw Paradise in the other's face.