"It occurs to me, M. le Marquis, in view of your readiness to assume
responsibility, that you must believe justification for the deed which is
not apparent to myself."
"That is better. That is distinctly better." The Marquis took snuff
delicately, dusting the fragments from the fine lace at his throat. "You
realize that with an imperfect understanding of these matters, not being
yourself a landowner, you may have rushed to unjustifiable conclusions. That
is indeed the case. May it be a warning to you, monsieur. When I tell you
that for months past I have been annoyed by similar depredations, you will
perhaps understand that it had become necessary to employ a deterrent
sufficiently strong to put an end to them. Now that the risk is known, I do
not think there will be any more prowling in my coverts. And there is more
in it than that, M. de Vilmorin. It is not the poaching that annoys me so
much as the contempt for my absolute and inviolable rights. There is,
monsieur, as you cannot fail to have observed, an evil spirit of
insubordination in the air, and there is one only way in which to meet it.
To tolerate it, in however slight a degree, to show leniency, however
leniently disposed, would entail having recourse to still harsher measures
to-morrow. You understand me, I am sure, and you will also, I am sure,
appreciate the condescension of what amounts to an explanation from me where
I cannot admit that any explanations were due. If anything in what I have
said is still obscure to you, I refer you to the game laws, which your
lawyer friend there will expound for you at need."
With that the gentleman swung round again to face the fire. It appeared
to convey the intimation that the interview was at an end. And yet this was
not by any means the intimation that it conveyed to the watchful, puzzled,
vaguely uneasy Andre-Louis. It was, thought he, a very curious, a very
suspicious oration. It affected to explain, with a politeness of terms and a
calculated insolence of tone; whilst in fact it could only serve to
stimulate and goad a man of M. de Vilmorin's opinions. And that is precisely
what it did. He rose.
"Are there in the world no laws but game laws?" he demanded, angrily.
"Have you never by any chance heard of the laws of humanity?"
The Marquis sighed wearily. "What have I to do with the laws of
humanity?" he wondered.
M. de Vilmorin looked at him a moment in speechless amazement.
"Nothing, M. le Marquis. That is - alas! - too obvious. I hope you will
remember it in the hour when you may wish to appeal to those laws which you
now deride."
M. de La Tour d'Azyr threw back his head sharply, his high-bred face
imperious.
"Now what precisely shall that mean? It is not the first time to-day
that you have made use of dark sayings that I could almost believe to veil
the presumption of a threat."
"Not a threat, M. le Marquis - a warning. A warning that such deeds as
these against God's creatures... Oh, you may sneer, monsieur, but they are
God's creatures, even as you or I - neither more nor less, deeply though the
reflection may wound your pride, In His eyes... "
"Of your charity, spare me a sermon, M. l'abbe!"
"You mock, monsieur. You laugh. Will you laugh, I wonder, when God
presents His reckoning to you for the blood and plunder with which your
hands are full?"
"Monsieur!" The word, sharp as the crack of a whip, was from M. de
Chabrillane, who bounded to his feet. But instantly the Marquis repressed
him.
"Sit down, Chevalier. You are interrupting M. l'abbe, and I should like
to hear him further. He interests me profoundly."
In the background Andre-Louis, too, had risen, brought to his feet by
alarm, by the evil that he saw written on the handsome face of M. de La Tour
d'Azyr. He approached, and touched his friend upon the arm.
"Better be going, Philippe," said he.
But M. de Vilmorin, caught in the relentless grip of passions long
repressed, was being hurried by them recklessly along.
"Oh, monsieur," said he, "consider what you are and what you will be.
Consider how you and your kind live by abuses, and consider the harvest that
abuses must ultimately bring."
"Revolutionist!" said M. le Marquis, contemptuously. "You have the
effrontery to stand before my face and offer me this stinking cant of your
modern so-called intellectuals!"
"Is it cant, monsieur? Do you think - do you believe in your soul
- that it is cant? Is it cant that the feudal grip is on all things
that live, crushing them like grapes in the press, to its own profit? Does
it not exercise its rights upon the waters of the river, the fire that bakes
the poor man's bread of grass and barley, on the wind that turns the mill?
The peasant cannot take a step upon the road, cross a crazy bridge over a
river, buy an ell of cloth in the village market, without meeting feudal
rapacity, without being taxed in feudal dues. Is not that enough, M. le
Marquis? Must you also demand his wretched life in payment for the least
infringement of your sacred privileges, careless of what widows or orphans
you dedicate to woe? Will naught content you but that your shadow must lie
like a curse upon the land? And do you think in your pride that France, this
Job among the nations, will suffer it forever?"
He paused as if for a reply. But none came. The Marquis considered him,
strangely silent, a half smile of disdain at the corners of his lips, an
ominous hardness in his eyes.
Again Andre-Louis tugged at his friend's sleeve.
"Philippe."
Philippe shook him off, and plunged on, fanatically.
"Do you see nothing of the gathering clouds that herald the coming of
the storm? You imagine, perhaps, that these States General summoned by M.
Necker, and promised for next year, are to do nothing but devise fresh means
of extortion to liquidate the bankruptcy of the State? You delude
yourselves, as you shall find. The Third Estate, which you despise, will
prove itself the preponderating force, and it will find a way to make an end
of this canker of privilege that is devouring the vitals of this unfortunate
country."
M. le Marquis shifted in his chair, and spoke at last.
"You have, monsieur," said he, "a very dangerous gift of eloquence. And
it is of yourself rather than of your subject. For after all, what do you
offer me? A rechauffe of the dishes served to out-at-elbow enthusiasts in
the provincial literary chambers, compounded of the effusions of your
Voltaires and Jean-Jacques and such dirty-fingered scribblers. You have not
among all your philosophers one with the wit to understand that we are an
order consecrated by antiquity, that for our rights and privileges we have
behind us the authority of centuries."
"Humanity, monsieur," Philippe replied, "is more ancient than nobility.
Human rights are contemporary with man."
The Marquis laughed and shrugged.
"That is the answer I might have expected. It has the right note of
cant that distinguishes the philosophers." And then M. de Chabrillane spoke.
"You go a long way round," he criticized his cousin, on a note of
impatience.
"But I am getting there," he was answered. "I desired to make quite
certain first."
"Faith, you should have no doubt by now."
"I have none." The Marquis rose, and turned again to M. de Vilmorin,
who had understood nothing of that brief exchange. "M. l'abbe," said he once
more, "you have a very dangerous gift of eloquence. I can conceive of men
being swayed by it. Had you been born a gentleman, you would not so easily
have acquired these false views that you express."
M. de Vilmorin stared blankly, uncomprehending.
"Had I been born a gentleman, do you say?" quoth he, in a slow,
bewildered voice. "But I was born a gentleman. My race is as old, my blood
as good as yours, monsieur."
>From M. le Marquis there was a slight play of eyebrows, a vague,
indulgent smile. His dark, liquid eyes looked squarely into the face of M.
de Vilmorin.
"You have been deceived in that, I fear."
"Deceived?"
"Your sentiments betray the indiscretion of which madame your mother
must have been guilty."
The brutally affronting words were sped beyond recall, and the lips
that had uttered them, coldly, as if they had been the merest commonplace,
remained calm and faintly sneering.
A dead silence followed. Andre-Louis' wits were numbed. He stood
aghast, all thought suspended in him, what time M. de Vilmorin's eyes
continued fixed upon M. de La Tour d'Azyr's, as if searching there for a
meaning that eluded him. Quite suddenly he understood the vile affront. The
blood leapt to his face, fire blazed in his gentle eyes. A convulsive quiver
shook him. Then, with an inarticulate cry, he leaned forward, and with his
open hand struck M. le Marquis full and hard upon his sneering face.
In a flash M. de Chabrillane was on his feet, between the two men.
Too late Andre-Louis had seen the trap. La Tour d'Azyr's words were but
as a move in a game of chess, calculated to exasperate his opponent into
some such counter-move as this - a counter-move that left him entirely at
the other's mercy.
M. le Marquis looked on, very white save where M. de Vilmorin's
finger-prints began slowly to colour his face; but he said nothing more.
Instead, it was M. de Chabrillane who now did the talking, taking up his
preconcerted part in this vile game.
"You realize, monsieur, what you have done," said he, coldly, to
Philippe. "And you realize, of course, what must inevitably follow."
M. de Vilmorin had realized nothing. The poor young man had acted upon
impulse, upon the instinct of decency and honour, never counting the
consequences. But he realized them now at the sinister invitation of M. de
Chabrillane, and if he desired to avoid these consequences, it was out of
respect for his priestly vocation, which strictly forbade such adjustments
of disputes as M. de Chabrillane was clearly thrusting upon him.
He drew back. "Let one affront wipe out the other," said he, in a dull
voice. "The balance is still in M. le Marquis's favour. Let that content
him."
"Impossible." The Chevalier's lips came together tightly. Thereafter he
was suavity itself, but very firm. "A blow has been struck, monsieur. I
think I am correct in saying that such a thing has never happened before to
M. le Marquis in all his life. If you felt yourself affronted, you had but
to ask the satisfaction due from one gentleman to another. Your action would
seem to confirm the assumption that you found so offensive. But it does not
on that account render you immune from the consequences."
It was, you see, M. de Chabrillane's part to heap coals upon this fire,
to make quite sure that their victim should not escape them.
"I desire no immunity," flashed back the young seminarist, stung by
this fresh goad. After all, he was nobly born, and the traditions of his
class were strong upon him - stronger far than the seminarist schooling in
humility. He owed it to himself, to his honour, to be killed rather than
avoid the consequences of the thing he had done.
"But he does not wear a sword, messieurs!" cried Andre Louis, aghast.
"That is easily amended. He may have the loan of mine."
"I mean, messieurs," Andre-Louis insisted, between fear for his friend
and indignation, "that it is not his habit to wear a sword, that he has
never worn one, that he is untutored in its uses. He is a seminarist - a
postulant for holy orders, already half a priest, and so forbidden from such
an engagement as you propose."
"All that he should have remembered before he struck a blow," said M.
de Chabrillane, politely.
"The blow was deliberately provoked," raged Andre-Louis. Then he
recovered himself, though the other's haughty stare had no part in that
recovery. "0 my God, I talk in vain! How is one to argue against a purpose
formed! Come away, Philippe. Don't you see the trap... "
M. de Vilmorin cut him short, and flung him off. "Be quiet, Andre. M.
le Marquis is entirely in the right."
"M. le Marquis is in the right?" Andre-Louis let his arms fall
helplessly. This man he loved above all other living men was caught in the
snare of the world's insanity. He was baring his breast to the knife for the
sake of a vague, distorted sense of the honour due to himself. It was not
that he did not see the trap. It was that his honour compelled him to
disdain consideration of it. To Andre-Louis in that moment he seemed a
singularly tragic figure. Noble, perhaps, but very pitiful.
It was M. de Vilmorin's desire that the matter should be settled out of
hand. In this he was at once objective and subjective. A prey to emotions
sadly at conflict with his priestly vocation, he was above all in haste to
have done, so that he might resume a frame of mind more proper to it. Also
he feared himself a little; by which I mean that his honour feared his
nature. The circumstances of his education, and the goal that for some years
now he had kept in view, had robbed him of much of that spirited brutality
that is the birthright of the male. He had grown timid and gentle as a
woman. Aware of it, he feared that once the heat of his passion was spent he
might betray a dishonouring weakness, in the ordeal.
M. le Marquis, on his side, was no less eager for an immediate
settlement; and since they had M. de Chabrillane to act for his cousin, and
Andre-Louis to serve as witness for M. de Vilmorin, there was nothing to
delay them.
And so, within a few minutes, all arrangements were concluded, and you
behold that sinisterly intentioned little group of four assembled in the
afternoon sunshine on the bowling-green behind the inn. They were entirely
private, screened more or less from the windows of the house by a ramage of
trees, which, if leafless now, was at least dense enough to provide an
effective lattice.
There were no formalities over measurements of blades or selection of
ground. M. le Marquis removed his sword-belt and scabbard, but declined not
considering it worth while for the sake of so negligible an opponent - to
divest himself either of his shoes or his coat. Tall, lithe, and athletic,
he stood to face the no less tall, but very delicate and frail, M. de
Vilmorin. The latter also disdained to make any of the usual preparations.
Since he recognized that it could avail him nothing to strip, he came on
guard fully dressed, two hectic spots above the cheek-bones burning on his
otherwise grey face.
M. de Chabrillane, leaning upon a cane - for he had relinquished his
sword to M. de Vilmorin - looked on with quiet interest. Facing him on the
other side of the combatants stood Andre-Louis, the palest of the four,
staring from fevered eyes, twisting and untwisting clammy hands.
His every instinct was to fling himself between the antagonists, to
protest against and frustrate this meeting. That sane impulse was curbed,
however, by the consciousness of its futility. To calm him, he clung to the
conviction that the issue could not really be very serious. If the
obligations of Philippe's honour compelled him to cross swords with the man
he had struck, M. de La Tour d'Azyr's birth compelled him no less to do no
serious hurt to the unfledged lad he had so grievously provoked. M. le
Marquis, after all, was a man of honour. He could intend no more than to
administer a lesson; sharp, perhaps, but one by which his opponent must live
to profit. Andre-Louis clung obstinately to that for comfort.
Steel beat on steel, and the men engaged. The Marquis presented to his
opponent the narrow edge of his upright body, his knees slightly flexed and
converted into living springs, whilst M. de Vilmorin stood squarely, a full
target, his knees wooden. Honour and the spirit of fair play alike cried out
against such a match.
The encounter was very short, of course. In youth, Philippe had
received the tutoring in sword-play that was given to every boy born into
his station of life. And so he knew at least the rudiments of what was now
expected of him. But what could rudiments avail him here? Three disengages
completed the exchanges, and then without any haste the Marquis slid his
right foot along the moist turf, his long, graceful body extending itself in
a lunge that went under M. de Vilmorin's clumsy guard, and with the utmost
deliberation he drove his blade through the young man's vitals.
Andre-Louis sprang forward just in time to catch his friend's body
under the armpits as it sank. Then, his own legs bending beneath the weight
of it, he went down with his burden until he was kneeling on the damp turf.
Philippe's limp head lay against Andre-Louis' left shoulder; Philippe's
relaxed arms trailed at his sides; the blood welled and bubbled from the
ghastly wound to saturate the poor lad's garments.
With white face and twitching lips, Andre-Louis looked up at M. de La
Tour d'Azyr, who stood surveying his work with a countenance of grave but
remorseless interest.
"You have killed him!" cried Andre-Louis.
"Of course."
The Marquis ran a lace handkerchief along his blade to wipe it. As he
let the dainty fabric fall, he explained himself. "He had, as I told him, a
too dangerous gift of eloquence."
And he turned away, leaving completest understanding with Andre-Louis.
Still supporting the limp, draining body, the young man called to him.
"Come back, you cowardly murderer, and make yourself quite safe by
killing me too!"
The Marquis half turned, his face dark with anger. Then M. de
Chabrillane set a restraining hand upon his arm. Although a party throughout
to the deed, the Chevalier was a little appalled now that it was done. He
had not the high stomach of M. de La Tour d'Azyr, and he was a good deal
younger.
"Come away," he said. "The lad is raving. They were friends."
"You heard what he said?" quoth the Marquis.
"Nor can he, or you, or any man deny it," flung back Andre-Louis.
"Yourself, monsieur, you made confession when you gave me now the reason why
you killed him. You did it because you feared him."
"If that were true - what, then?" asked the great gentleman.
"Do you ask? Do you understand of life and humanity nothing but how to
wear a coat and dress your hair - oh, yes, and to handle weapons against
boys and priests? Have you no mind to think, no soul into which you can turn
its vision? Must you be told that it is a coward's part to kill the thing he
fears, and doubly a coward's part to kill in this way? Had you stabbed him
in the back with a knife, you would have shown the courage of your vileness.
It would have been a vileness undisguised. But you feared the consequences
of that, powerful as you are; and so you shelter your cowardice under the
pretext of a duel."
The Marquis shook off his cousin's hand, and took a step forward,
holding now his sword like a whip. But again the Chevalier caught and held
him.
"No, no, Gervais! Let be, in God's name!"
"Let him come, monsieur," raved Andre-Louis, his voice thick and
concentrated. "Let him complete his coward's work on me, and thus make
himself safe from a coward's wages."
M. de Chabrillane let his cousin go. He came white to the lips, his
eyes glaring at the lad who so recklessly insulted him. And then he checked.
It may be that he remembered suddenly the relationship in which this young
man was popularly believed to stand to the Seigneur de Gavrillac, and the
well-known affection in which the Seigneur held him. And so he may have
realized that if he pushed this matter further, he might find himself upon
the horns of a dilemma. He would be confronted with the alternatives of
shedding more blood, and so embroiling himself with the Lord of Gavrillac at
a time when that gentleman's friendship was of the first importance to him,
or else of withdrawing with such hurt to his dignity as must impair his
authority in the countryside hereafter.
Be it so or otherwise, the fact remains that he stopped short; then,
with an incoherent ejaculation, between anger and contempt, he tossed his
arms, turned on his heel and strode off quickly with his cousin.
When the landlord and his people came, they found Andre-Louis, his arms
about the body of his dead friend, murmuring passionately into the deaf ear
that rested almost against his lips:
"Philippe! Speak to me, Philippe! Philippe... Don't you hear me? 0 God
of Heaven! Philippe!"
At a glance they saw that here neither priest nor doctor could avail.
The cheek that lay against Andre-Louis's was leaden-hued, the half-open eyes
were glazed, and there was a little froth of blood upon the vacuously parted
lips.
Half blinded by tears Andre-Louis stumbled after them when they bore
the body into the inn. Upstairs in the little room to which they conveyed
it, he knelt by the bed, and holding the dead man's hand in both his own, he
swore to him out of his impotent rage that M. de La Tour d'Azyr should pay a
bitter price for this.
"It was your eloquence he feared, Philippe," he said. Then if I can get
no justice for this deed, at least it shall be fruitless to him. The thing
he feared in you, he shall fear in me. He feared that men might be swayed by
your eloquence to the undoing of such things as himself. Men shall be swayed
by it still. For your eloquence and your arguments shall be my heritage from
you. I will make them my own. It matters nothing that I do not believe in
your gospel of freedom. I know it - every word of it; that is all that
matters to our purpose, yours and mine. If all else fails, your thoughts
shall find expression in my living tongue. Thus at least we shall have
frustrated his vile aim to still the voice he feared. It shall profit him
nothing to have your blood upon his soul. That voice in you would never half
so relentlessly have hounded him and his as it shall in me - if all else
fails."
It was an exulting thought. It calmed him; it soothed his grief, and he
began very softly to pray. And then his heart trembled as he considered that
Philippe, a man of peace, almost a priest, an apostle of Christianity, had
gone to his Maker with the sin of anger on his soul. It was horrible. Yet
God would see the righteousness of that anger. And in no case - be man's
interpretation of Divinity what it might - could that one sin outweigh the
loving good that Philippe had ever practised, the noble purity of his great
heart. God after all, reflected Andre-Louis, was not a grand-seigneur.
M. de Kercadiou stared at him blankly out of his pale
For the second time that day Andre-Louis set out for the chateau,
walking briskly, and heeding not at all the curious eyes that followed him
through the village, and the whisperings that marked his passage through the
people, all agog by now with that day's event in which he had been an actor.
He was ushered by Benoit, the elderly body-servant, rather
grandiloquently called the seneschal, into the ground-floor room known
traditionally as the library. It still contained several shelves of
neglected volumes, from which it derived its title, but implements of the
chase - fowling-pieces, powder-horns, hunting-bags, sheath-knives - obtruded
far more prominently than those of study. The furniture was massive, of oak
richly carved, and belonging to another age. Great massive oak beams crossed
the rather lofty whitewashed ceiling.
Here the squat Seigneur de Gavrillac was restlessly pacing when
Andre-Louis was introduced. He was already informed, as he announced at
once, of what had taken place at the Breton arme. M. de Chabrillane had just
left him, and he confessed himself deeply grieved and deeply perplexed.
"The pity of it!" he said. "The pity of it!" He bowed his enormous
head. "So estimable a young man, and so full of promise. Ah, this La Tour
d'Azyr is a hard man, and he feels very strongly in these matters. He may be
right. I don't know. I have never killed a man for holding different views
from mine. In fact, I have never killed a man at all. It isn't in my nature.
I shouldn't sleep of nights if I did. But men are differently made."
"The question, monsieur my godfather," said Andre-Louis, "is what is to
be done." He was quite calm and self-possessed, but very white.
M. de Kercadiou stared at him blankly out of his pale eyes.
"Why, what the devil is there to do? From what I am told, Vilmorin went
so far as to strike M. le Marquis."
"Under the very grossest provocation."
"Which he himself provoked by his revolutionary language. The poor
lad's head was full of this encyclopaedist trash. It comes of too much
reading. I have never set much store by books, Andre; and I have never known
anything but trouble to come out of learning. It unsettles a man. It
complicates his views of life, destroys the simplicity which makes for peace
of mind and happiness. Let this miserable affair be a warning to you, Andre.
You are, yourself, too prone to these new-fashioned speculations upon a
different constitution of the social order. You see what comes of it. A
fine, estimable young man, the only prop of his widowed mother too, forgets
himself, his position, his duty to that mother - everything; and goes and
gets himself killed like this. It is infernally sad. On my soul it is sad."
He produced a handkerchief, and blew his nose with vehemence.
Andre-Louis felt a tightening of his heart, a lessening of the hopes,
never too sanguine, which he had founded upon his godfather.
"Your criticisms," he said, "are all for the conduct of the dead, and
none for that of the murderer. It does not seem possible that you should be
in sympathy with such a crime.
"Crime?" shrilled M. de Kercadiou. "My God, boy, you are speaking of M.
de La Tour d'Azyr."
"I am, and of the abominable murder he has committed... "
"Stop!" M. de Kercadiou was very emphatic. "I cannot permit that you
apply such terms to him. I cannot permit it. M. le Marquis is my friend, and
is likely very soon to stand in a still closer relationship."
"Notwithstanding this?" asked Andre-Louis.
M. de Kercadiou was frankly impatient.
"Why, what has this to do with it? I may deplore it. But I have no
right to condemn it. It is a common way of adjusting differences between
gentlemen."
"You really believe that?"
"What the devil do you imply, Andre? Should I say a thing that I don't
believe? You begin to make me angry."
"'Thou shalt not kill,' is the King's law as well as God's."
"You are determined to quarrel with me, I think. It was a duel... "
Andre-Louis interrupted him. "It is no more a duel than if it had been
fought with pistols of which only M. le Marquis 's was loaded. He invited
Philippe to discuss the matter further, with the deliberate intent of
forcing a quarrel upon him and killing him. Be patient with me, monsieur my
god-father. I am not telling you of what I imagine but what M. le Marquis
himself admitted to me."
Dominated a little by the young man's earnestness, M. de Kercadiou's
pale eyes fell away. He turned with a shrug, and sauntered over to the
window.
"It would need a court of honour to decide such an issue. And we have
no courts of honour," he said.
"But we have courts of justice."
With returning testiness the seigneur swung round to face him again.
"And what court of justice, do you think, would listen to such a plea as you
appear to have in mind?"
"There is the court of the King's Lieutenant at Rennes."
"And do you think the King's Lieutenant would listen to you?"
"Not to me, perhaps, Monsieur. But if you were to bring the plaint... "
"I bring the plaint?" M. de Kercadiou's pale eyes were wide with horror
of the suggestion.
"The thing happened here on your domain."
"I bring a plaint against M. de La Tour d'Azyr! You are out of your
senses, I think. Oh, you are mad; as mad as that poor friend of yours who
has come to this end through meddling in what did not concern him. The
language he used here to M. le Marquis on the score of Mabey was of the most
offensive. Perhaps you didn't know that. It does not at all surprise me that
the Marquis should have desired satisfaction."
"I see," said Andre-Louis, on a note of hopelessness.
"You see? What the devil do you see?"
"That I shall have to depend upon myself alone."
"And what the devil do you propose to do, if you please?"
"I shall go to Rennes, and lay the facts before the King's Lieutenant."
"He'll be too busy to see you." And M. de Kercadiou's mind swung a
trifle inconsequently, as weak minds will. "There is trouble enough in
Rennes already on the score of these crazy States General, with which the
wonderful M. Necker is to repair the finances of the kingdom. As if a
peddling Swiss bank-clerk, who is also a damned Protestant, could succeed
where such men as Calonne and Brienne have failed."
"Good-afternoon, monsieur my godfather," said Andre-Louis.
"Where are you going?" was the querulous demand.
"Home at present. To Rennes in the morning."
"Wait, boy, wait!" The squat little man rolled forward, affectionate
concern on his great ugly face, and he set one of his podgy hands on his
godson's shoulder. "Now listen to me, Andre," he reasoned. "This is sheer
knight-errantry - moonshine, lunacy. You'11 come to no good by it if you
persist. You've read 'Don Quixote,' and what happened to him when he went
tilting against windmills. It's what will happen to you, neither more nor
less. Leave things as they are, my boy. I wouldn't have a mischief happen to
you."
Andre-Louis looked at him, smiling wanly.
"I swore an oath to-day which it would damn my soul to break."
"You mean that you'll go in spite of anything that I may say?"
Impetuous as he was inconsequent, M. de Kercadiou was bristling again. "Very
well, then, go... Go to the devil!"
"I will begin with the King's Lieutenant."
"And if you get into the trouble you are seeking, don't come whimpering
to me for assistance," the seigneur stormed. He was very angry now. "Since
you choose to disobey me, you can break your empty head against the
windmill, and be damned to you."
Andre-Louis bowed with a touch of irony, and reached the door.
"If the windmill should prove too formidable," said he, from the
threshold, "I may see what can be done with the wind. Good-bye, monsieur my
godfather."
He was gone, and M. de Kercadiou was alone, purple in the face,
puzzling out that last cryptic utterance, and not at all happy in his mind,
either on the score of his godson or of M. de La Tour d'Azyr. He was
disposed to be angry with them both. He found these headstrong, wilful men
who relentlessly followed their own impulses very disturbing and irritating.
Himself he loved his ease, and to be at peace with his neighbours; and that
seemed to him so obviously the supreme good of life that he was disposed to
brand them as fools who troubled to seek other things.
There was between Nantes and Rennes an established service of three
stage-coaches weekly in each direction, which for a sum of twenty-four
livres - roughly, the equivalent of an English guinea
- would carry you the seventy and odd miles of the journey in some
fourteen hours. Once a week one of the diligences going in each direction
would swerve aside from the highroad to call at Gavrillac, to bring and take
letters, newspapers, and sometimes passengers. It was usually by this coach
that Andre-Louis came and went when the occasion offered. At present,
however, he was too much in haste to lose a day awaiting the passing of that
diligence. So it was on a horse hired from the Breton arme that he set out
next morning; and an hour's brisk ride under a grey wintry sky, by a
half-ruined road through ten miles of flat, uninteresting country, brought
him to the city of Rennes.
He rode across the main bridge over the Vilaine, and so into the upper
and principal part of that important city of some thirty thousand souls,
most of whom, he opined from the seething, clamant crowds that everywhere
blocked his way, must on this day have taken to the streets. Clearly
Philippe had not overstated the excitement prevailing there.
He pushed on as best he could, and so came at last to the Place Royale,
where he found the crowd to be most dense. From the plinth of the equestrian
statue of Louis XV, a white-faced young man was excitedly addressing the
multitude. His youth and dress proclaimed the student, and a group of his
fellows, acting as a guard of honour to him, kept the immediate precincts of
the statue.
Over the heads of the crowd Andre-Louis caught a few of the phrases
flung forth by that eager voice.
"It was the promise of the King... It is the King's authority they
flout... They arrogate to themselves the whole sovereignty in Brittany. The
King has dissolved them... These insolent nobles defying their sovereign and
the people... "
Had he not known already, from what Philippe had told him, of the
events which had brought the Third Estate to the point of active revolt,
those few phrases would fully have informed him. This popular display of
temper was most opportune to his need, he thought. And in the hope that it
might serve his turn by disposing to reasonableness the mind of the King's
Lieutenant, he pushed on up the wide and well-paved Rue Royale, where the
concourse of people began to diminish. He put up his hired horse at the Come
de Cerf, and set out again, on foot, to the Palais de Justice.
There was a brawling mob by the framework of poles and scaffoldings
about the building cathedral, upon which work had been commenced a year ago.
But he did not pause to ascertain the particular cause of that gathering. He
strode on, and thus came presently to the handsome Italianate palace that
was one of the few public edifices hat had survived the devastating fire of
sixty years ago.
He won through with difficulty to the great hall, known as the Salle
des Pas Perdus, where he was left to cool his heels for a full half-hour
after he had found an usher so condescending as to inform the god who
presided over that shrine of Justice that a lawyer from Gavrillac humbly
begged an audience on an affair of gravity.
That the god condescended to see him at all was probably due to the
grave complexion of the hour. At long length he was escorted up the broad
stone staircase, and ushered into a spacious, meagrely furnished anteroom,
to make one of a waiting crowd of clients, mostly men.
There he spent another half-hour, and employed the time in considering
exactly what he should say. This consideration made him realize the weakness
of the case he proposed to set before a man whose views of law and morality
were coloured by his social rank.
At last he was ushered through a narrow but very massive and richly
decorated door into a fine, well-lighted room furnished with enough gilt and
satin to have supplied the boudoir of a lady of fashion.
It was a trivial setting for a King's Lieutenant, but about the King's
Lieutenant there was - at least to ordinary eyes - nothing trivial. At the
far end of the chamber, to the right of one of the tall windows that looked
out over the inner court, before a goat-legged writing-table with Watteau
panels, heavily encrusted with ormolu, sat that exalted being. Above a
scarlet coat with an order flaming on its breast, and a billow of lace in
which diamonds sparkled like drops of water, sprouted the massive powdered
head of M. de Lesdiguieres. It was thrown back to scowl upon this visitor
with an expectant arrogance that made Andre-Louis wonder almost was a
genuflexion awaited from him.
Perceiving a lean, lantern-jawed young man, with straight, lank black
hair, in a caped riding-coat of brown cloth, and yellow buckskin breeches,
his knee-boots splashed with mud, the scowl upon that August visage deepened
until it brought together the thick black eyebrows above the great hooked
nose.
"You announce yourself as a lawyer of Gavrillac with an important
communication," he growled. It was a peremptory command to make this
communication without wasting the valuable time of a King's Lieutenant, of
whose immense importance it conveyed something more than a hint. M. de
Lesdiguieres accounted himself an imposing personality, and he had every
reason to do so, for in his time he had seen many a poor devil scared out of
all his senses by the thunder of his voice.
He waited now to see the same thing happen to this youthful lawyer from
Gavrillac. But he waited in vain.
Andre-Louis found him ridiculous. He knew pretentiousness for the mask
of worthlessness and weakness. And here he beheld pretentiousness incarnate.
It was to be read in that arrogant poise of the head, that scowling brow,
the inflexion of that reverberating voice. Even more difficult than it is
for a man to be a hero to his valet - who has witnessed the dispersal of the
parts that make up the imposing whole - is it for a man to be a hero to the
student of Man who has witnessed the same in a different sense.
Andre-Louis stood forward boldly - impudently, thought M. de
Lesdiguieres.
"You are His Majesty's Lieutenant here in Brittany," he said - and it
almost seemed to the August lord of life and death that this fellow had the
incredible effrontery to address him as one man speaking to another. "You
are the dispenser of the King's high justice in this province."
Surprise spread on that handsome, sallow face under the heavily
powdered wig.
"Is your business concerned with this infernal insubordination of the
canaille?" he asked.
"It is not, monsieur."
The black eyebrows rose. "Then what the devil do you mean by intruding
upon me at a time when all my attention is being claimed by the obvious
urgency of this disgraceful affair?"
"The affair that brings me is no less disgraceful and no less urgent."
"It will have to wait!" thundered the great man in a passion, and
tossing back a cloud of lace from his hand, he reached for the little silver
bell upon his table.
"A moment, monsieur!" Andre-Louis' tone was peremptory. M. de
Lesdiguieres checked in sheer amazement at its impudence. "I can state it
very briefly... "
"Haven't I said already... "
"And when you have heard it," Andre-Louis went on, relentlessly,
interrupting the interruption, "you will agree with me as to its character."
M. de Lesdiguieres considered him very sternly.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Andre-Louis Moreau."
"Well, Andre-Louis Moreau, if you can state your plea briefly, I will
hear you. But I warn you that I shall be very angry if you fail to justify
the impertinence of this insistence at so inopportune a moment."
"You shall be the judge of that, monsieur," said Andre-Louis, and he
proceeded at once to state his case, beginning with the shooting of Mabey,
and passing thence to the killing of M. de Vilmorin. But he withheld until
the end the name of the great gentleman against whom he demanded justice,
persuaded that did he introduce it earlier he would not be allowed to
proceed.
He had a gift of oratory of whose full powers he was himself hardly
conscious yet, though destined very soon to become so.. He told his story
well, without exaggeration, yet with a force of simple appeal that was
irresistible. Gradually the great man's face relaxed from its forbidding
severity. Interest, warming almost to sympathy, came to be reflected on it.
"And who, sir, is the man you charge with this?"
"The Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr."
The effect of that formidable name was immediate. Dismayed anger, and
an arrogance more utter than before, took the place of the sympathy he had
been betrayed into displaying.
"Who?" he shouted, and without waiting for an answer, "Why, here's
impudence," he stormed on, "to come before me with such a charge against a
gentleman of M. de La Tour d'Azyr's eminence! How dare you speak of him as a
coward."
"I speak of him as a murderer," the young man corrected. "And I demand
justice against him."
"You demand it, do you? My God, what next?"
"That is for you to say, monsieur."
It surprised the great gentleman into a more or less successful effort
of self-control.
"Let me warn you," said he, acidly, "that it is not wise to make wild
accusations against a nobleman. That, in itself, is a punishable offence, as
you may learn. Now listen to me. In this matter of Mabey - assuming your
statement of it to be exact - the gamekeeper may have exceeded his duty; but
by so little that it is hardly worth comment. Consider, however, that in any
case it is not a matter for the King's Lieutenant, or for any court but the
seigneurial court of M. de La Tour d'Azyr himself. It is before the
magistrates of his own appointing that such a matter must be laid, since it
is matter strictly concerning his own seigneurial jurisdiction. As a lawyer
you should not need to be told so much."
"As a lawyer, I am prepared to argue the point. But, as a lawyer I also
realize that if that case were prosecuted, it could only end in the unjust
punishment of a wretched gamekeeper, who did no more than carry out his
orders, but who none the less would now be made a scapegoat, if scapegoat
were necessary. I am not concerned to hang Benet on the gallows earned by M.
de La Tour d'Azyr."
M. de Lesdiguieres smote the table violently. "My God!" he cried out,
to add more quietly, on a note of menace, "You are singularly insolent, my
man."
"That is not my intention, sir, I assure you. I am a lawyer, pleading a
case - the case of M. de Vilmorin. It is for his assassination that I have
come to beg the King's justice."
"But you yourself have said that it was a duel!" cried the Lieutenant,
between anger and bewilderment.
"I have said that it was made to appear a duel. There is a distinction,
as I shall show, if you will condescend to hear me out."
"Take your own time, sir!" said the ironical M. de Lesdiguieres, whose
tenure of office had never yet held anything that remotely resembled this
experience.
Andre-Louis took him literally. "I thank you, sir," he answered,
solemnly, and submitted his argument. "It can be shown that M. de Vilmorin
never practised fencing in all his life, and it is notorious that M. de La
Tour d'Azyr is an exceptional swordsman. Is it a duel, monsieur, where one
of the combatants alone is armed? For it amounts to that on a comparison of
their measures of respective skill."
"There has scarcely been a duel fought on which the same trumpery
argument might not be advanced."
"But not always with equal justice. And in one case, at least, it was
advanced successfully."
"Successfully? When was that?"
"Ten years ago, in Dauphiny. I refer to the case of M. de Gesvres, a
gentleman of that province, who forced a duel upon M. de la Roche Jeannine,
and killed him. M. de Jeannine was a member of a powerful family, which
exerted itself to obtain justice. It put forward just such arguments as now
obtain against M. de La Tour d'Azyr. As you will remember, the judges held
that the provocation had proceeded of intent from M. de Gesvres; they found
him guilty of premeditated murder, and he was hanged."
M. de Lesdiguieres exploded yet again. "Death of my life!" he cried.
"Have you the effrontery to suggest that M. de La Tour d'Azyr should be
hanged? Have you?"
"But why not, monsieur, if it is the law, and there is precedent for
it, as I have shown you, and if it can be established that what I state is
the truth - as established it can be without difficulty?"
"Do you ask me, why not? Have you temerity to ask me that?"
"I have, monsieur. Can you answer me? If you cannot, monsieur, I shall
understand that whilst it is possible for a powerful family like that of La
Roche Jeannine to set the law in motion, the law must remain inert for the
obscure and uninfluential, however brutally wronged by a great nobleman."
M. de Lesdiguieres perceived that in argument he would accomplish
nothing against this impassive, resolute young man. The menace of him grew
more fierce.
"I should advise you to take yourself off at once, and to be thankful
responsibility, that you must believe justification for the deed which is
not apparent to myself."
"That is better. That is distinctly better." The Marquis took snuff
delicately, dusting the fragments from the fine lace at his throat. "You
realize that with an imperfect understanding of these matters, not being
yourself a landowner, you may have rushed to unjustifiable conclusions. That
is indeed the case. May it be a warning to you, monsieur. When I tell you
that for months past I have been annoyed by similar depredations, you will
perhaps understand that it had become necessary to employ a deterrent
sufficiently strong to put an end to them. Now that the risk is known, I do
not think there will be any more prowling in my coverts. And there is more
in it than that, M. de Vilmorin. It is not the poaching that annoys me so
much as the contempt for my absolute and inviolable rights. There is,
monsieur, as you cannot fail to have observed, an evil spirit of
insubordination in the air, and there is one only way in which to meet it.
To tolerate it, in however slight a degree, to show leniency, however
leniently disposed, would entail having recourse to still harsher measures
to-morrow. You understand me, I am sure, and you will also, I am sure,
appreciate the condescension of what amounts to an explanation from me where
I cannot admit that any explanations were due. If anything in what I have
said is still obscure to you, I refer you to the game laws, which your
lawyer friend there will expound for you at need."
With that the gentleman swung round again to face the fire. It appeared
to convey the intimation that the interview was at an end. And yet this was
not by any means the intimation that it conveyed to the watchful, puzzled,
vaguely uneasy Andre-Louis. It was, thought he, a very curious, a very
suspicious oration. It affected to explain, with a politeness of terms and a
calculated insolence of tone; whilst in fact it could only serve to
stimulate and goad a man of M. de Vilmorin's opinions. And that is precisely
what it did. He rose.
"Are there in the world no laws but game laws?" he demanded, angrily.
"Have you never by any chance heard of the laws of humanity?"
The Marquis sighed wearily. "What have I to do with the laws of
humanity?" he wondered.
M. de Vilmorin looked at him a moment in speechless amazement.
"Nothing, M. le Marquis. That is - alas! - too obvious. I hope you will
remember it in the hour when you may wish to appeal to those laws which you
now deride."
M. de La Tour d'Azyr threw back his head sharply, his high-bred face
imperious.
"Now what precisely shall that mean? It is not the first time to-day
that you have made use of dark sayings that I could almost believe to veil
the presumption of a threat."
"Not a threat, M. le Marquis - a warning. A warning that such deeds as
these against God's creatures... Oh, you may sneer, monsieur, but they are
God's creatures, even as you or I - neither more nor less, deeply though the
reflection may wound your pride, In His eyes... "
"Of your charity, spare me a sermon, M. l'abbe!"
"You mock, monsieur. You laugh. Will you laugh, I wonder, when God
presents His reckoning to you for the blood and plunder with which your
hands are full?"
"Monsieur!" The word, sharp as the crack of a whip, was from M. de
Chabrillane, who bounded to his feet. But instantly the Marquis repressed
him.
"Sit down, Chevalier. You are interrupting M. l'abbe, and I should like
to hear him further. He interests me profoundly."
In the background Andre-Louis, too, had risen, brought to his feet by
alarm, by the evil that he saw written on the handsome face of M. de La Tour
d'Azyr. He approached, and touched his friend upon the arm.
"Better be going, Philippe," said he.
But M. de Vilmorin, caught in the relentless grip of passions long
repressed, was being hurried by them recklessly along.
"Oh, monsieur," said he, "consider what you are and what you will be.
Consider how you and your kind live by abuses, and consider the harvest that
abuses must ultimately bring."
"Revolutionist!" said M. le Marquis, contemptuously. "You have the
effrontery to stand before my face and offer me this stinking cant of your
modern so-called intellectuals!"
"Is it cant, monsieur? Do you think - do you believe in your soul
- that it is cant? Is it cant that the feudal grip is on all things
that live, crushing them like grapes in the press, to its own profit? Does
it not exercise its rights upon the waters of the river, the fire that bakes
the poor man's bread of grass and barley, on the wind that turns the mill?
The peasant cannot take a step upon the road, cross a crazy bridge over a
river, buy an ell of cloth in the village market, without meeting feudal
rapacity, without being taxed in feudal dues. Is not that enough, M. le
Marquis? Must you also demand his wretched life in payment for the least
infringement of your sacred privileges, careless of what widows or orphans
you dedicate to woe? Will naught content you but that your shadow must lie
like a curse upon the land? And do you think in your pride that France, this
Job among the nations, will suffer it forever?"
He paused as if for a reply. But none came. The Marquis considered him,
strangely silent, a half smile of disdain at the corners of his lips, an
ominous hardness in his eyes.
Again Andre-Louis tugged at his friend's sleeve.
"Philippe."
Philippe shook him off, and plunged on, fanatically.
"Do you see nothing of the gathering clouds that herald the coming of
the storm? You imagine, perhaps, that these States General summoned by M.
Necker, and promised for next year, are to do nothing but devise fresh means
of extortion to liquidate the bankruptcy of the State? You delude
yourselves, as you shall find. The Third Estate, which you despise, will
prove itself the preponderating force, and it will find a way to make an end
of this canker of privilege that is devouring the vitals of this unfortunate
country."
M. le Marquis shifted in his chair, and spoke at last.
"You have, monsieur," said he, "a very dangerous gift of eloquence. And
it is of yourself rather than of your subject. For after all, what do you
offer me? A rechauffe of the dishes served to out-at-elbow enthusiasts in
the provincial literary chambers, compounded of the effusions of your
Voltaires and Jean-Jacques and such dirty-fingered scribblers. You have not
among all your philosophers one with the wit to understand that we are an
order consecrated by antiquity, that for our rights and privileges we have
behind us the authority of centuries."
"Humanity, monsieur," Philippe replied, "is more ancient than nobility.
Human rights are contemporary with man."
The Marquis laughed and shrugged.
"That is the answer I might have expected. It has the right note of
cant that distinguishes the philosophers." And then M. de Chabrillane spoke.
"You go a long way round," he criticized his cousin, on a note of
impatience.
"But I am getting there," he was answered. "I desired to make quite
certain first."
"Faith, you should have no doubt by now."
"I have none." The Marquis rose, and turned again to M. de Vilmorin,
who had understood nothing of that brief exchange. "M. l'abbe," said he once
more, "you have a very dangerous gift of eloquence. I can conceive of men
being swayed by it. Had you been born a gentleman, you would not so easily
have acquired these false views that you express."
M. de Vilmorin stared blankly, uncomprehending.
"Had I been born a gentleman, do you say?" quoth he, in a slow,
bewildered voice. "But I was born a gentleman. My race is as old, my blood
as good as yours, monsieur."
>From M. le Marquis there was a slight play of eyebrows, a vague,
indulgent smile. His dark, liquid eyes looked squarely into the face of M.
de Vilmorin.
"You have been deceived in that, I fear."
"Deceived?"
"Your sentiments betray the indiscretion of which madame your mother
must have been guilty."
The brutally affronting words were sped beyond recall, and the lips
that had uttered them, coldly, as if they had been the merest commonplace,
remained calm and faintly sneering.
A dead silence followed. Andre-Louis' wits were numbed. He stood
aghast, all thought suspended in him, what time M. de Vilmorin's eyes
continued fixed upon M. de La Tour d'Azyr's, as if searching there for a
meaning that eluded him. Quite suddenly he understood the vile affront. The
blood leapt to his face, fire blazed in his gentle eyes. A convulsive quiver
shook him. Then, with an inarticulate cry, he leaned forward, and with his
open hand struck M. le Marquis full and hard upon his sneering face.
In a flash M. de Chabrillane was on his feet, between the two men.
Too late Andre-Louis had seen the trap. La Tour d'Azyr's words were but
as a move in a game of chess, calculated to exasperate his opponent into
some such counter-move as this - a counter-move that left him entirely at
the other's mercy.
M. le Marquis looked on, very white save where M. de Vilmorin's
finger-prints began slowly to colour his face; but he said nothing more.
Instead, it was M. de Chabrillane who now did the talking, taking up his
preconcerted part in this vile game.
"You realize, monsieur, what you have done," said he, coldly, to
Philippe. "And you realize, of course, what must inevitably follow."
M. de Vilmorin had realized nothing. The poor young man had acted upon
impulse, upon the instinct of decency and honour, never counting the
consequences. But he realized them now at the sinister invitation of M. de
Chabrillane, and if he desired to avoid these consequences, it was out of
respect for his priestly vocation, which strictly forbade such adjustments
of disputes as M. de Chabrillane was clearly thrusting upon him.
He drew back. "Let one affront wipe out the other," said he, in a dull
voice. "The balance is still in M. le Marquis's favour. Let that content
him."
"Impossible." The Chevalier's lips came together tightly. Thereafter he
was suavity itself, but very firm. "A blow has been struck, monsieur. I
think I am correct in saying that such a thing has never happened before to
M. le Marquis in all his life. If you felt yourself affronted, you had but
to ask the satisfaction due from one gentleman to another. Your action would
seem to confirm the assumption that you found so offensive. But it does not
on that account render you immune from the consequences."
It was, you see, M. de Chabrillane's part to heap coals upon this fire,
to make quite sure that their victim should not escape them.
"I desire no immunity," flashed back the young seminarist, stung by
this fresh goad. After all, he was nobly born, and the traditions of his
class were strong upon him - stronger far than the seminarist schooling in
humility. He owed it to himself, to his honour, to be killed rather than
avoid the consequences of the thing he had done.
"But he does not wear a sword, messieurs!" cried Andre Louis, aghast.
"That is easily amended. He may have the loan of mine."
"I mean, messieurs," Andre-Louis insisted, between fear for his friend
and indignation, "that it is not his habit to wear a sword, that he has
never worn one, that he is untutored in its uses. He is a seminarist - a
postulant for holy orders, already half a priest, and so forbidden from such
an engagement as you propose."
"All that he should have remembered before he struck a blow," said M.
de Chabrillane, politely.
"The blow was deliberately provoked," raged Andre-Louis. Then he
recovered himself, though the other's haughty stare had no part in that
recovery. "0 my God, I talk in vain! How is one to argue against a purpose
formed! Come away, Philippe. Don't you see the trap... "
M. de Vilmorin cut him short, and flung him off. "Be quiet, Andre. M.
le Marquis is entirely in the right."
"M. le Marquis is in the right?" Andre-Louis let his arms fall
helplessly. This man he loved above all other living men was caught in the
snare of the world's insanity. He was baring his breast to the knife for the
sake of a vague, distorted sense of the honour due to himself. It was not
that he did not see the trap. It was that his honour compelled him to
disdain consideration of it. To Andre-Louis in that moment he seemed a
singularly tragic figure. Noble, perhaps, but very pitiful.
It was M. de Vilmorin's desire that the matter should be settled out of
hand. In this he was at once objective and subjective. A prey to emotions
sadly at conflict with his priestly vocation, he was above all in haste to
have done, so that he might resume a frame of mind more proper to it. Also
he feared himself a little; by which I mean that his honour feared his
nature. The circumstances of his education, and the goal that for some years
now he had kept in view, had robbed him of much of that spirited brutality
that is the birthright of the male. He had grown timid and gentle as a
woman. Aware of it, he feared that once the heat of his passion was spent he
might betray a dishonouring weakness, in the ordeal.
M. le Marquis, on his side, was no less eager for an immediate
settlement; and since they had M. de Chabrillane to act for his cousin, and
Andre-Louis to serve as witness for M. de Vilmorin, there was nothing to
delay them.
And so, within a few minutes, all arrangements were concluded, and you
behold that sinisterly intentioned little group of four assembled in the
afternoon sunshine on the bowling-green behind the inn. They were entirely
private, screened more or less from the windows of the house by a ramage of
trees, which, if leafless now, was at least dense enough to provide an
effective lattice.
There were no formalities over measurements of blades or selection of
ground. M. le Marquis removed his sword-belt and scabbard, but declined not
considering it worth while for the sake of so negligible an opponent - to
divest himself either of his shoes or his coat. Tall, lithe, and athletic,
he stood to face the no less tall, but very delicate and frail, M. de
Vilmorin. The latter also disdained to make any of the usual preparations.
Since he recognized that it could avail him nothing to strip, he came on
guard fully dressed, two hectic spots above the cheek-bones burning on his
otherwise grey face.
M. de Chabrillane, leaning upon a cane - for he had relinquished his
sword to M. de Vilmorin - looked on with quiet interest. Facing him on the
other side of the combatants stood Andre-Louis, the palest of the four,
staring from fevered eyes, twisting and untwisting clammy hands.
His every instinct was to fling himself between the antagonists, to
protest against and frustrate this meeting. That sane impulse was curbed,
however, by the consciousness of its futility. To calm him, he clung to the
conviction that the issue could not really be very serious. If the
obligations of Philippe's honour compelled him to cross swords with the man
he had struck, M. de La Tour d'Azyr's birth compelled him no less to do no
serious hurt to the unfledged lad he had so grievously provoked. M. le
Marquis, after all, was a man of honour. He could intend no more than to
administer a lesson; sharp, perhaps, but one by which his opponent must live
to profit. Andre-Louis clung obstinately to that for comfort.
Steel beat on steel, and the men engaged. The Marquis presented to his
opponent the narrow edge of his upright body, his knees slightly flexed and
converted into living springs, whilst M. de Vilmorin stood squarely, a full
target, his knees wooden. Honour and the spirit of fair play alike cried out
against such a match.
The encounter was very short, of course. In youth, Philippe had
received the tutoring in sword-play that was given to every boy born into
his station of life. And so he knew at least the rudiments of what was now
expected of him. But what could rudiments avail him here? Three disengages
completed the exchanges, and then without any haste the Marquis slid his
right foot along the moist turf, his long, graceful body extending itself in
a lunge that went under M. de Vilmorin's clumsy guard, and with the utmost
deliberation he drove his blade through the young man's vitals.
Andre-Louis sprang forward just in time to catch his friend's body
under the armpits as it sank. Then, his own legs bending beneath the weight
of it, he went down with his burden until he was kneeling on the damp turf.
Philippe's limp head lay against Andre-Louis' left shoulder; Philippe's
relaxed arms trailed at his sides; the blood welled and bubbled from the
ghastly wound to saturate the poor lad's garments.
With white face and twitching lips, Andre-Louis looked up at M. de La
Tour d'Azyr, who stood surveying his work with a countenance of grave but
remorseless interest.
"You have killed him!" cried Andre-Louis.
"Of course."
The Marquis ran a lace handkerchief along his blade to wipe it. As he
let the dainty fabric fall, he explained himself. "He had, as I told him, a
too dangerous gift of eloquence."
And he turned away, leaving completest understanding with Andre-Louis.
Still supporting the limp, draining body, the young man called to him.
"Come back, you cowardly murderer, and make yourself quite safe by
killing me too!"
The Marquis half turned, his face dark with anger. Then M. de
Chabrillane set a restraining hand upon his arm. Although a party throughout
to the deed, the Chevalier was a little appalled now that it was done. He
had not the high stomach of M. de La Tour d'Azyr, and he was a good deal
younger.
"Come away," he said. "The lad is raving. They were friends."
"You heard what he said?" quoth the Marquis.
"Nor can he, or you, or any man deny it," flung back Andre-Louis.
"Yourself, monsieur, you made confession when you gave me now the reason why
you killed him. You did it because you feared him."
"If that were true - what, then?" asked the great gentleman.
"Do you ask? Do you understand of life and humanity nothing but how to
wear a coat and dress your hair - oh, yes, and to handle weapons against
boys and priests? Have you no mind to think, no soul into which you can turn
its vision? Must you be told that it is a coward's part to kill the thing he
fears, and doubly a coward's part to kill in this way? Had you stabbed him
in the back with a knife, you would have shown the courage of your vileness.
It would have been a vileness undisguised. But you feared the consequences
of that, powerful as you are; and so you shelter your cowardice under the
pretext of a duel."
The Marquis shook off his cousin's hand, and took a step forward,
holding now his sword like a whip. But again the Chevalier caught and held
him.
"No, no, Gervais! Let be, in God's name!"
"Let him come, monsieur," raved Andre-Louis, his voice thick and
concentrated. "Let him complete his coward's work on me, and thus make
himself safe from a coward's wages."
M. de Chabrillane let his cousin go. He came white to the lips, his
eyes glaring at the lad who so recklessly insulted him. And then he checked.
It may be that he remembered suddenly the relationship in which this young
man was popularly believed to stand to the Seigneur de Gavrillac, and the
well-known affection in which the Seigneur held him. And so he may have
realized that if he pushed this matter further, he might find himself upon
the horns of a dilemma. He would be confronted with the alternatives of
shedding more blood, and so embroiling himself with the Lord of Gavrillac at
a time when that gentleman's friendship was of the first importance to him,
or else of withdrawing with such hurt to his dignity as must impair his
authority in the countryside hereafter.
Be it so or otherwise, the fact remains that he stopped short; then,
with an incoherent ejaculation, between anger and contempt, he tossed his
arms, turned on his heel and strode off quickly with his cousin.
When the landlord and his people came, they found Andre-Louis, his arms
about the body of his dead friend, murmuring passionately into the deaf ear
that rested almost against his lips:
"Philippe! Speak to me, Philippe! Philippe... Don't you hear me? 0 God
of Heaven! Philippe!"
At a glance they saw that here neither priest nor doctor could avail.
The cheek that lay against Andre-Louis's was leaden-hued, the half-open eyes
were glazed, and there was a little froth of blood upon the vacuously parted
lips.
Half blinded by tears Andre-Louis stumbled after them when they bore
the body into the inn. Upstairs in the little room to which they conveyed
it, he knelt by the bed, and holding the dead man's hand in both his own, he
swore to him out of his impotent rage that M. de La Tour d'Azyr should pay a
bitter price for this.
"It was your eloquence he feared, Philippe," he said. Then if I can get
no justice for this deed, at least it shall be fruitless to him. The thing
he feared in you, he shall fear in me. He feared that men might be swayed by
your eloquence to the undoing of such things as himself. Men shall be swayed
by it still. For your eloquence and your arguments shall be my heritage from
you. I will make them my own. It matters nothing that I do not believe in
your gospel of freedom. I know it - every word of it; that is all that
matters to our purpose, yours and mine. If all else fails, your thoughts
shall find expression in my living tongue. Thus at least we shall have
frustrated his vile aim to still the voice he feared. It shall profit him
nothing to have your blood upon his soul. That voice in you would never half
so relentlessly have hounded him and his as it shall in me - if all else
fails."
It was an exulting thought. It calmed him; it soothed his grief, and he
began very softly to pray. And then his heart trembled as he considered that
Philippe, a man of peace, almost a priest, an apostle of Christianity, had
gone to his Maker with the sin of anger on his soul. It was horrible. Yet
God would see the righteousness of that anger. And in no case - be man's
interpretation of Divinity what it might - could that one sin outweigh the
loving good that Philippe had ever practised, the noble purity of his great
heart. God after all, reflected Andre-Louis, was not a grand-seigneur.
M. de Kercadiou stared at him blankly out of his pale
For the second time that day Andre-Louis set out for the chateau,
walking briskly, and heeding not at all the curious eyes that followed him
through the village, and the whisperings that marked his passage through the
people, all agog by now with that day's event in which he had been an actor.
He was ushered by Benoit, the elderly body-servant, rather
grandiloquently called the seneschal, into the ground-floor room known
traditionally as the library. It still contained several shelves of
neglected volumes, from which it derived its title, but implements of the
chase - fowling-pieces, powder-horns, hunting-bags, sheath-knives - obtruded
far more prominently than those of study. The furniture was massive, of oak
richly carved, and belonging to another age. Great massive oak beams crossed
the rather lofty whitewashed ceiling.
Here the squat Seigneur de Gavrillac was restlessly pacing when
Andre-Louis was introduced. He was already informed, as he announced at
once, of what had taken place at the Breton arme. M. de Chabrillane had just
left him, and he confessed himself deeply grieved and deeply perplexed.
"The pity of it!" he said. "The pity of it!" He bowed his enormous
head. "So estimable a young man, and so full of promise. Ah, this La Tour
d'Azyr is a hard man, and he feels very strongly in these matters. He may be
right. I don't know. I have never killed a man for holding different views
from mine. In fact, I have never killed a man at all. It isn't in my nature.
I shouldn't sleep of nights if I did. But men are differently made."
"The question, monsieur my godfather," said Andre-Louis, "is what is to
be done." He was quite calm and self-possessed, but very white.
M. de Kercadiou stared at him blankly out of his pale eyes.
"Why, what the devil is there to do? From what I am told, Vilmorin went
so far as to strike M. le Marquis."
"Under the very grossest provocation."
"Which he himself provoked by his revolutionary language. The poor
lad's head was full of this encyclopaedist trash. It comes of too much
reading. I have never set much store by books, Andre; and I have never known
anything but trouble to come out of learning. It unsettles a man. It
complicates his views of life, destroys the simplicity which makes for peace
of mind and happiness. Let this miserable affair be a warning to you, Andre.
You are, yourself, too prone to these new-fashioned speculations upon a
different constitution of the social order. You see what comes of it. A
fine, estimable young man, the only prop of his widowed mother too, forgets
himself, his position, his duty to that mother - everything; and goes and
gets himself killed like this. It is infernally sad. On my soul it is sad."
He produced a handkerchief, and blew his nose with vehemence.
Andre-Louis felt a tightening of his heart, a lessening of the hopes,
never too sanguine, which he had founded upon his godfather.
"Your criticisms," he said, "are all for the conduct of the dead, and
none for that of the murderer. It does not seem possible that you should be
in sympathy with such a crime.
"Crime?" shrilled M. de Kercadiou. "My God, boy, you are speaking of M.
de La Tour d'Azyr."
"I am, and of the abominable murder he has committed... "
"Stop!" M. de Kercadiou was very emphatic. "I cannot permit that you
apply such terms to him. I cannot permit it. M. le Marquis is my friend, and
is likely very soon to stand in a still closer relationship."
"Notwithstanding this?" asked Andre-Louis.
M. de Kercadiou was frankly impatient.
"Why, what has this to do with it? I may deplore it. But I have no
right to condemn it. It is a common way of adjusting differences between
gentlemen."
"You really believe that?"
"What the devil do you imply, Andre? Should I say a thing that I don't
believe? You begin to make me angry."
"'Thou shalt not kill,' is the King's law as well as God's."
"You are determined to quarrel with me, I think. It was a duel... "
Andre-Louis interrupted him. "It is no more a duel than if it had been
fought with pistols of which only M. le Marquis 's was loaded. He invited
Philippe to discuss the matter further, with the deliberate intent of
forcing a quarrel upon him and killing him. Be patient with me, monsieur my
god-father. I am not telling you of what I imagine but what M. le Marquis
himself admitted to me."
Dominated a little by the young man's earnestness, M. de Kercadiou's
pale eyes fell away. He turned with a shrug, and sauntered over to the
window.
"It would need a court of honour to decide such an issue. And we have
no courts of honour," he said.
"But we have courts of justice."
With returning testiness the seigneur swung round to face him again.
"And what court of justice, do you think, would listen to such a plea as you
appear to have in mind?"
"There is the court of the King's Lieutenant at Rennes."
"And do you think the King's Lieutenant would listen to you?"
"Not to me, perhaps, Monsieur. But if you were to bring the plaint... "
"I bring the plaint?" M. de Kercadiou's pale eyes were wide with horror
of the suggestion.
"The thing happened here on your domain."
"I bring a plaint against M. de La Tour d'Azyr! You are out of your
senses, I think. Oh, you are mad; as mad as that poor friend of yours who
has come to this end through meddling in what did not concern him. The
language he used here to M. le Marquis on the score of Mabey was of the most
offensive. Perhaps you didn't know that. It does not at all surprise me that
the Marquis should have desired satisfaction."
"I see," said Andre-Louis, on a note of hopelessness.
"You see? What the devil do you see?"
"That I shall have to depend upon myself alone."
"And what the devil do you propose to do, if you please?"
"I shall go to Rennes, and lay the facts before the King's Lieutenant."
"He'll be too busy to see you." And M. de Kercadiou's mind swung a
trifle inconsequently, as weak minds will. "There is trouble enough in
Rennes already on the score of these crazy States General, with which the
wonderful M. Necker is to repair the finances of the kingdom. As if a
peddling Swiss bank-clerk, who is also a damned Protestant, could succeed
where such men as Calonne and Brienne have failed."
"Good-afternoon, monsieur my godfather," said Andre-Louis.
"Where are you going?" was the querulous demand.
"Home at present. To Rennes in the morning."
"Wait, boy, wait!" The squat little man rolled forward, affectionate
concern on his great ugly face, and he set one of his podgy hands on his
godson's shoulder. "Now listen to me, Andre," he reasoned. "This is sheer
knight-errantry - moonshine, lunacy. You'11 come to no good by it if you
persist. You've read 'Don Quixote,' and what happened to him when he went
tilting against windmills. It's what will happen to you, neither more nor
less. Leave things as they are, my boy. I wouldn't have a mischief happen to
you."
Andre-Louis looked at him, smiling wanly.
"I swore an oath to-day which it would damn my soul to break."
"You mean that you'll go in spite of anything that I may say?"
Impetuous as he was inconsequent, M. de Kercadiou was bristling again. "Very
well, then, go... Go to the devil!"
"I will begin with the King's Lieutenant."
"And if you get into the trouble you are seeking, don't come whimpering
to me for assistance," the seigneur stormed. He was very angry now. "Since
you choose to disobey me, you can break your empty head against the
windmill, and be damned to you."
Andre-Louis bowed with a touch of irony, and reached the door.
"If the windmill should prove too formidable," said he, from the
threshold, "I may see what can be done with the wind. Good-bye, monsieur my
godfather."
He was gone, and M. de Kercadiou was alone, purple in the face,
puzzling out that last cryptic utterance, and not at all happy in his mind,
either on the score of his godson or of M. de La Tour d'Azyr. He was
disposed to be angry with them both. He found these headstrong, wilful men
who relentlessly followed their own impulses very disturbing and irritating.
Himself he loved his ease, and to be at peace with his neighbours; and that
seemed to him so obviously the supreme good of life that he was disposed to
brand them as fools who troubled to seek other things.
There was between Nantes and Rennes an established service of three
stage-coaches weekly in each direction, which for a sum of twenty-four
livres - roughly, the equivalent of an English guinea
- would carry you the seventy and odd miles of the journey in some
fourteen hours. Once a week one of the diligences going in each direction
would swerve aside from the highroad to call at Gavrillac, to bring and take
letters, newspapers, and sometimes passengers. It was usually by this coach
that Andre-Louis came and went when the occasion offered. At present,
however, he was too much in haste to lose a day awaiting the passing of that
diligence. So it was on a horse hired from the Breton arme that he set out
next morning; and an hour's brisk ride under a grey wintry sky, by a
half-ruined road through ten miles of flat, uninteresting country, brought
him to the city of Rennes.
He rode across the main bridge over the Vilaine, and so into the upper
and principal part of that important city of some thirty thousand souls,
most of whom, he opined from the seething, clamant crowds that everywhere
blocked his way, must on this day have taken to the streets. Clearly
Philippe had not overstated the excitement prevailing there.
He pushed on as best he could, and so came at last to the Place Royale,
where he found the crowd to be most dense. From the plinth of the equestrian
statue of Louis XV, a white-faced young man was excitedly addressing the
multitude. His youth and dress proclaimed the student, and a group of his
fellows, acting as a guard of honour to him, kept the immediate precincts of
the statue.
Over the heads of the crowd Andre-Louis caught a few of the phrases
flung forth by that eager voice.
"It was the promise of the King... It is the King's authority they
flout... They arrogate to themselves the whole sovereignty in Brittany. The
King has dissolved them... These insolent nobles defying their sovereign and
the people... "
Had he not known already, from what Philippe had told him, of the
events which had brought the Third Estate to the point of active revolt,
those few phrases would fully have informed him. This popular display of
temper was most opportune to his need, he thought. And in the hope that it
might serve his turn by disposing to reasonableness the mind of the King's
Lieutenant, he pushed on up the wide and well-paved Rue Royale, where the
concourse of people began to diminish. He put up his hired horse at the Come
de Cerf, and set out again, on foot, to the Palais de Justice.
There was a brawling mob by the framework of poles and scaffoldings
about the building cathedral, upon which work had been commenced a year ago.
But he did not pause to ascertain the particular cause of that gathering. He
strode on, and thus came presently to the handsome Italianate palace that
was one of the few public edifices hat had survived the devastating fire of
sixty years ago.
He won through with difficulty to the great hall, known as the Salle
des Pas Perdus, where he was left to cool his heels for a full half-hour
after he had found an usher so condescending as to inform the god who
presided over that shrine of Justice that a lawyer from Gavrillac humbly
begged an audience on an affair of gravity.
That the god condescended to see him at all was probably due to the
grave complexion of the hour. At long length he was escorted up the broad
stone staircase, and ushered into a spacious, meagrely furnished anteroom,
to make one of a waiting crowd of clients, mostly men.
There he spent another half-hour, and employed the time in considering
exactly what he should say. This consideration made him realize the weakness
of the case he proposed to set before a man whose views of law and morality
were coloured by his social rank.
At last he was ushered through a narrow but very massive and richly
decorated door into a fine, well-lighted room furnished with enough gilt and
satin to have supplied the boudoir of a lady of fashion.
It was a trivial setting for a King's Lieutenant, but about the King's
Lieutenant there was - at least to ordinary eyes - nothing trivial. At the
far end of the chamber, to the right of one of the tall windows that looked
out over the inner court, before a goat-legged writing-table with Watteau
panels, heavily encrusted with ormolu, sat that exalted being. Above a
scarlet coat with an order flaming on its breast, and a billow of lace in
which diamonds sparkled like drops of water, sprouted the massive powdered
head of M. de Lesdiguieres. It was thrown back to scowl upon this visitor
with an expectant arrogance that made Andre-Louis wonder almost was a
genuflexion awaited from him.
Perceiving a lean, lantern-jawed young man, with straight, lank black
hair, in a caped riding-coat of brown cloth, and yellow buckskin breeches,
his knee-boots splashed with mud, the scowl upon that August visage deepened
until it brought together the thick black eyebrows above the great hooked
nose.
"You announce yourself as a lawyer of Gavrillac with an important
communication," he growled. It was a peremptory command to make this
communication without wasting the valuable time of a King's Lieutenant, of
whose immense importance it conveyed something more than a hint. M. de
Lesdiguieres accounted himself an imposing personality, and he had every
reason to do so, for in his time he had seen many a poor devil scared out of
all his senses by the thunder of his voice.
He waited now to see the same thing happen to this youthful lawyer from
Gavrillac. But he waited in vain.
Andre-Louis found him ridiculous. He knew pretentiousness for the mask
of worthlessness and weakness. And here he beheld pretentiousness incarnate.
It was to be read in that arrogant poise of the head, that scowling brow,
the inflexion of that reverberating voice. Even more difficult than it is
for a man to be a hero to his valet - who has witnessed the dispersal of the
parts that make up the imposing whole - is it for a man to be a hero to the
student of Man who has witnessed the same in a different sense.
Andre-Louis stood forward boldly - impudently, thought M. de
Lesdiguieres.
"You are His Majesty's Lieutenant here in Brittany," he said - and it
almost seemed to the August lord of life and death that this fellow had the
incredible effrontery to address him as one man speaking to another. "You
are the dispenser of the King's high justice in this province."
Surprise spread on that handsome, sallow face under the heavily
powdered wig.
"Is your business concerned with this infernal insubordination of the
canaille?" he asked.
"It is not, monsieur."
The black eyebrows rose. "Then what the devil do you mean by intruding
upon me at a time when all my attention is being claimed by the obvious
urgency of this disgraceful affair?"
"The affair that brings me is no less disgraceful and no less urgent."
"It will have to wait!" thundered the great man in a passion, and
tossing back a cloud of lace from his hand, he reached for the little silver
bell upon his table.
"A moment, monsieur!" Andre-Louis' tone was peremptory. M. de
Lesdiguieres checked in sheer amazement at its impudence. "I can state it
very briefly... "
"Haven't I said already... "
"And when you have heard it," Andre-Louis went on, relentlessly,
interrupting the interruption, "you will agree with me as to its character."
M. de Lesdiguieres considered him very sternly.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Andre-Louis Moreau."
"Well, Andre-Louis Moreau, if you can state your plea briefly, I will
hear you. But I warn you that I shall be very angry if you fail to justify
the impertinence of this insistence at so inopportune a moment."
"You shall be the judge of that, monsieur," said Andre-Louis, and he
proceeded at once to state his case, beginning with the shooting of Mabey,
and passing thence to the killing of M. de Vilmorin. But he withheld until
the end the name of the great gentleman against whom he demanded justice,
persuaded that did he introduce it earlier he would not be allowed to
proceed.
He had a gift of oratory of whose full powers he was himself hardly
conscious yet, though destined very soon to become so.. He told his story
well, without exaggeration, yet with a force of simple appeal that was
irresistible. Gradually the great man's face relaxed from its forbidding
severity. Interest, warming almost to sympathy, came to be reflected on it.
"And who, sir, is the man you charge with this?"
"The Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr."
The effect of that formidable name was immediate. Dismayed anger, and
an arrogance more utter than before, took the place of the sympathy he had
been betrayed into displaying.
"Who?" he shouted, and without waiting for an answer, "Why, here's
impudence," he stormed on, "to come before me with such a charge against a
gentleman of M. de La Tour d'Azyr's eminence! How dare you speak of him as a
coward."
"I speak of him as a murderer," the young man corrected. "And I demand
justice against him."
"You demand it, do you? My God, what next?"
"That is for you to say, monsieur."
It surprised the great gentleman into a more or less successful effort
of self-control.
"Let me warn you," said he, acidly, "that it is not wise to make wild
accusations against a nobleman. That, in itself, is a punishable offence, as
you may learn. Now listen to me. In this matter of Mabey - assuming your
statement of it to be exact - the gamekeeper may have exceeded his duty; but
by so little that it is hardly worth comment. Consider, however, that in any
case it is not a matter for the King's Lieutenant, or for any court but the
seigneurial court of M. de La Tour d'Azyr himself. It is before the
magistrates of his own appointing that such a matter must be laid, since it
is matter strictly concerning his own seigneurial jurisdiction. As a lawyer
you should not need to be told so much."
"As a lawyer, I am prepared to argue the point. But, as a lawyer I also
realize that if that case were prosecuted, it could only end in the unjust
punishment of a wretched gamekeeper, who did no more than carry out his
orders, but who none the less would now be made a scapegoat, if scapegoat
were necessary. I am not concerned to hang Benet on the gallows earned by M.
de La Tour d'Azyr."
M. de Lesdiguieres smote the table violently. "My God!" he cried out,
to add more quietly, on a note of menace, "You are singularly insolent, my
man."
"That is not my intention, sir, I assure you. I am a lawyer, pleading a
case - the case of M. de Vilmorin. It is for his assassination that I have
come to beg the King's justice."
"But you yourself have said that it was a duel!" cried the Lieutenant,
between anger and bewilderment.
"I have said that it was made to appear a duel. There is a distinction,
as I shall show, if you will condescend to hear me out."
"Take your own time, sir!" said the ironical M. de Lesdiguieres, whose
tenure of office had never yet held anything that remotely resembled this
experience.
Andre-Louis took him literally. "I thank you, sir," he answered,
solemnly, and submitted his argument. "It can be shown that M. de Vilmorin
never practised fencing in all his life, and it is notorious that M. de La
Tour d'Azyr is an exceptional swordsman. Is it a duel, monsieur, where one
of the combatants alone is armed? For it amounts to that on a comparison of
their measures of respective skill."
"There has scarcely been a duel fought on which the same trumpery
argument might not be advanced."
"But not always with equal justice. And in one case, at least, it was
advanced successfully."
"Successfully? When was that?"
"Ten years ago, in Dauphiny. I refer to the case of M. de Gesvres, a
gentleman of that province, who forced a duel upon M. de la Roche Jeannine,
and killed him. M. de Jeannine was a member of a powerful family, which
exerted itself to obtain justice. It put forward just such arguments as now
obtain against M. de La Tour d'Azyr. As you will remember, the judges held
that the provocation had proceeded of intent from M. de Gesvres; they found
him guilty of premeditated murder, and he was hanged."
M. de Lesdiguieres exploded yet again. "Death of my life!" he cried.
"Have you the effrontery to suggest that M. de La Tour d'Azyr should be
hanged? Have you?"
"But why not, monsieur, if it is the law, and there is precedent for
it, as I have shown you, and if it can be established that what I state is
the truth - as established it can be without difficulty?"
"Do you ask me, why not? Have you temerity to ask me that?"
"I have, monsieur. Can you answer me? If you cannot, monsieur, I shall
understand that whilst it is possible for a powerful family like that of La
Roche Jeannine to set the law in motion, the law must remain inert for the
obscure and uninfluential, however brutally wronged by a great nobleman."
M. de Lesdiguieres perceived that in argument he would accomplish
nothing against this impassive, resolute young man. The menace of him grew
more fierce.
"I should advise you to take yourself off at once, and to be thankful