At sight of the Citoyenne Vidal the faltering rabble came to a halt. The leader, a frowzy, bearded ruffian with a fur cap — such as gentlemen had been wont to wear when traveling — merged into his matted, unkempt brown hair, thrust an evil face into her own.
“Which way did he go?” he demanded fiercely, his blood-injected eyes intent upon her white face.
“Of whom do you speak, citizen?” she counter-questioned. “Whom are you seeking?”
“Of whom do I speak?” he echoed, mimicking her. “By St. Guillotine, here are pretty graces!”
But another, more impatient, shouldered him aside— “We are after an aristo who gave us the slip near the foire.”
“Aye,” shrieked a woman, flinging up a lean, bare arm to brandish a butcher’s knife, “a dog of an aristo with powdered hair — powdered hair!” she screamed. “The good-for-nothing scatters flour of wheat upon his filthy head, while good patriots go hungry upon peas bread!”
“We’ll give him flour of wheat, old mother,” promised the first patriot. “We’ll bake his wig for bread for the poor — dog of an aristo.”
“First catch him.” quoth the second, who was of a more practical mind. “Into what hole has he thrust himself?” And he swung again to Angèle, standing like a statue in her doorway. “Did you see him, or did you not?” he demanded. “He must have come this way. We saw him turn the corner, and he could not have gone out at the other end before we came round ourselves. You saw him, then?”
“I have but this moment arrived to see what was happening,” she answered. “If he passed, he must have passed before I came.”
There was a general growl of fury and disappointment. The maenad with the knife edged nearer to the doorway, and her fierce, hungry eyes considered the trim figure and white face of the Citoyenne Vidal with the hatred of her kind for any who preserved a trace of the grace and gentleness natural to her sex.
“You’ll not be shielding him by any chance?” she shrilled with unutterable malice, “You’ll not be an aristocrat yourself, perhaps, with your white face and white hands and mincing speech?” She turned to the others, and flung out the hand with the knife to point indictment to Angèle.
“She is lying to you, I say! Look at her! Does she look like a patriot? Does she look like a daughter of France — of this glorious new France that has risen upon the ashes of tyranny and vice?”
The crowd paused to obey her injunction, and the pause was ominous. Cheated of one prey, these sans culottes beheld here the chance to console themselves, to slake their awakened blood-lust upon another. And this woman looked soft and fair; she had the unpardonable, the anti-republican attributes of comeliness and cleanliness; and, failing the originally intended victim, it might be good to immolate her upon the altar of the nation.
Angèle, standing there, felt a cold, paralyzing fear creep over her at that ominous, pregnant silence, under the score of eyes that were turned to scan her at that fury’s bidding.
She would have turned and fled into the house but that she seemed bereft of strength. Surely, she thought, Vidal would hear and come to her assistance. Then, in the crowd, a hoarse voice laughed, It belonged to a patriot, who, being still young and of a nature susceptible to feminine appeal, was moved quite differently from his fellows by this woman’s beauty.
He thrust rudely forward, shouldering the maenad aside. “Bah!” he laughed contemptuously in her face. “Tu n’est qu’une femme! You are but a woman, and you have all a woman’s inconsequence. Or perhaps you want to save that dog of an aristocrat who dusts his head with flour robbed from the bread of the poor.”
“I?” she screamed at him. “I save an aristocrat? Do you say this to me? To me, who in September at La Force slit the throats of a round dozen of them? I say that she is a traitress, that she has given shelter to the dog we were pursuing, that she—”
“What is this?”
The voice that flung that question, sharp and metallic as a word of command, cut short the virago’s tirade and stilled the noisy surge about that threshold. A patriot standing too near Angèle was cuffed aside, another was flung back into the arms of those behind him, and Vidal stepped forward, his trailing saber clanking after him. He took his stand beside Angèle, who greeted his advent with no more than a little gasp of relief.
“What’s this?” he asked again, more sharply and truculently than before, eyes blazing upon the rabble.
The virago was the first to recover. She bared her yellow fangs in a leer of malice.
“What is it to you? Are you some aristocratic squire of dames, citizen-soldier?” And she laughed on a horrible shrill note “St. Guillotine!”
“It is something to me that you insult my wife — the wife of a soldier of France. Be off, or the committee of the section shall deal with you.”
His firm air of authority, his uniform, the tricolor scarf about his waist, his height, and obvious strength imposed themselves upon the mob.
The maenad, however, was less easily daunted than her fellows. She brandished her knife under the colonel’s very nose, treating him to the revolutionary cant that was common alike to scavenger and deputy. She reminded him that all were equals, and that he must not suppose that his officer’s rank gave him any superiority other than a purely official one concerned solely with his regiment.
She poured out the tale of the aristocrat with the powdered head whom they had pursued and lost, and accused Angèle of having given him shelter.
“Bah!” he said. “A lie!”
“Ask her!” she screamed. “Ask her!”
But Vidal was as well stocked with revolutionary cant as any, and it was in that language that he chose to answer her.
“What need to ask her? — Was I not within? Do I not know for myself that no aristocrat has entered here? Besides, shall I insult my wife with such a question?”
His voice was fierce and impatient.
“Can any dream that while on the frontiers I am shedding my blood for liberty in battle against the tyrants, my wife could be capable of befriending enemies of liberty here in Paris? Then such a one knows neither Vidal nor Vidal’s wife — Vidal’s wife, who has more cause to hate aristocrats than any woman of you all. Were she capable of such a treason, these, my own hands, would crush the life from her; they would so, by the Goddess of Reason!”
That was the tone to take with them. Those were the well-worn phrases, ringing with a pseudo-classic nobility, in which the revolutionary doctrines had been preached to them. They were dominated at once, awed almost by this fervor of republicanism which dwarfed their own.
He turned to Angèle. “Go in,” he bade her. “I will follow you.”
Obediently she turned and left him there to give them their dismissal, none daring to protest at her departure.
At the foot of the stairs she leaned a moment against the wall to recover, shaken and trembling in the reaction from her late effort, her hands on her bosom, a sickness in her very soul. She peered into the gloom about her, looking for the fugitive, and then, crouching by the stairs, his face alone faintly discernible and gleaming ghostly white, she discovered him, and understood how Vidal, descending in haste, had overlooked him.
“Go up!” she whispered, and he came instantly forward and obeyed.
Beyond the half-closed door she could hear Vidal’s voice, but not the words he uttered. Then came a laugh from the rabble, and at the sound of it she shuddered, and, clutching the baluster, she followed the fugitive up the crazy staircase, groping her way, for here the darkness was now almost complete.
CHAPTER II — Chavalier de Seyrac
HE paused on the landing until she came up to usher him into the living-room, where the fire, burning brightly now, warmly irradiated the deepening twilight.
She waved him to a chair, and he sank to it exhausted, mopping his brow. Then she crossed to the window and closed the shutters as a measure of precaution before proceeding to kindle a light.
As she struck flint with steel he spoke
at last, sufficiently recovered.
“Mademoiselle, how shall I thank you?”
Though still breathing hard his voice was pleasantly modulated, and it reminded her of some one’s, but she could not at the moment think whose.
“There is not the need to attempt it, citizen. I did but what any woman must do who has remained a woman amid all this. And I am not a demoiselle, citizen.”
“Your pardon, madame.” He rose that he might pay her the deference of not remaining seated while she stood, now that he was sufficiently recovered.
“Nor yet a dame,” she corrected him again.
“Again your pardon, citoyenne,” he said, understanding at last. “I had conceived since you gave me shelter.”
“That I could not be a Republican, You were mistaken. I am the wife of a soldier of France.”
She saw his courtly bow in the half light. She disliked it, and disliked still more the courtly formal speech that jarred upon her by its insincerity.
“Your husband, citoyenne, is lo be envied and congratulated.”
Without answering she lighted the candles, then crossed to the hearth and gave her attention to the stew-pot.
“They have not yet gone, citoyenne?” he said, and there was a note of interrogation in the question.
“They will,” she answered. “You have nothing more to fear.” Then with a change of subject: “I gave you a napkin with some things in it.”
“It is here upon the table, citoyenne.”
She turned to look, saw the package, and from that shifted her glance to the face of the fugitive. Thus she and her guest stood eye to eye a moment in the yellow candle-light, each staring wide-eyed at the other in utter silence. At last both spoke at once.
“You!” she exclaimed,
“Angèle!” he cried.
And upon that they continued to stand at gaze, silent once more in their mutual stupefaction. She knew now what it was that had seemed so oddly familiar in his languorous tones. The sight of him now turned back the wheel of time.
He was scarcely changed from the youth of twenty who had persecuted her ten years ago, when she was a child of seventeen. In memory, as she continued to stare at him, she was back again at Beauvaloir in Normandy where this Chevalier de Seyrac had been almost as lord of life and death, a wolf who would have devoured her remorselessly, had not Vidal intervened and fled thence with her beyond the reach of the vengeance provoked in the seigneur by the frustration of his will.
Ten years ago, and deep though its impression had been upon her mind, significant though the event had been beyond any other in her life, yet in the storm and stress of the last luster, with the gigantic upheaval it had brought — an upheaval in which Vidal and his wife had played their part — that affair of ten years ago which had altered the whole current of her life and of Vidal’s had faded into vaguest shadow, had lain almost forgotten until this poignant moment.
“You!” she said again after that long pause, and laughed to express her apprehension of the irony of fate which had contrived this meeting thus after all these years and under circumstances so grotesquely different from those which had marked their last parting.
In those departed days he had been the pursuer, the persecutor; she the fugitive who had fled for protection to the honest bourgeois she loved. Now it was he who was the fugitive, the persecuted, and it was to her of all living women that he was come for shelter and protection.
That laugh of hers, so discordant and sharp, touched by something of the mockery which she found in fate, grated upon senses that peril had rendered superacute. He moved uneasily, and his glance from one of amazement changed to one of a furtive watchfulness.
“You’ll — you’ll not betray me?” he faltered. “You’ll not take vengeance upon me for the sin of having loved you, Angèle — for it was love that drove me—”
“Another word of this,” she interrupted, her voice soaring in swift passion, “and I’ll throw back the shutters and call up your friends below.” She measured him with an eye of cold disdain. “I hold you in my power, Monsieur le Chevalier, as you sought to hold me once. If you would have me more generous, more merciful than you would have proved yourself, do not provoke my memory too far.”
He cowered a little for a moment before that royal anger; then he shrugged and let his arms fall heavily in a gesture of helplessness.
At that moment the door below closed with a bang. A rattle of clogs upon the cobbles came up from the street, and then they heard the rabble break into chorus once more, indicating that the hunt was resumed.
“Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrat’ on les pendra!”
The voices receded, and faded, or rather became merged and lost in the ceaseless roar of the Luxembourg forges.
He sighed in infinite relief. “They have gone at last.” he said. Then looked at her again, pausing an instant, “Since I am plainly unwelcome here, it but remains for me to thank you for what you have done for — an unknown man, and to depart in my turn.” Again he paused, but again she made him no answer. He inclined his head slightly, like one who bows to the inevitable.
“Citoyenne.” he said, “you know what may await me in the streets. I am not a coward. The mere instinct of self-preservation prompted my flight just now. But had flight failed me I could have died without bringing shame to the name I bear. I am as one in articulo mortis, perhaps. You’ll understand my desire to make my peace with those I may have wronged in deed or in intention, I should go more easily were I assured of your forgiveness for what is past.”
It touched her, of course. It melted all the hostility of her mood. And then before she could offer him any answer the door opened and Vidal stood at gaze upon the threshold.
Seyrac recoiled before that sudden and unexpected apparition, recognizing the man on the instant inevitably by association. Then he recovered and stood, faintly smiling, faintly scornful, a deadly weariness in his handsome eves.
“From Charybdis into Scylla,” he said, almost cynically. “What matter? I am tired of it all, tired of the perpetual effort to keep a distracted head upon my shoulders.”
Vidal advanced. He looked at Angèle with eyes of faint astonishment.
“So it was true, then?” he said, and laughed shortly at the memory of his vaporings to the rabble.
“As you see,” she answered quietly. “But I did not then know who it was that I was sheltering.”
“Who it was that you were sheltering?” Vidal echoed, clearly intrigued.
With puzzled eyes he looked again at the fugitive; looked at him more closely now, and at last recognition dawned upon his rugged face. He took up a candle from the table, and held it aloft so that its light might strike the other’s features more directly. Then he made an odd grunting sound in his throat, and set the candle down again.
“Ha! God does not sleep. Chevalier de Seyrac,” he said grimly.
The chevalier shrugged. All doors of escape being, as he conceived, now closed to him, he faced his doom with the proud indifference of his class.
“I imagined that the republic had contradicted that rumor,” said he, sneering.
“But you afford me proof, I think, that it is none the less true,” returned Vidal. “Do you know of any reason why I should not discharge the debt between us?”
“None, indeed,” replied Seyrac, his tone indifferent to the point of being contemptuous.
“It but remains then, Angèle, to fling this pretty Christian to the lions.”
“Jerome!” She clutched his arm, her face white.
“What now? Name of a name! You are not going to suggest that I should show him mercy?”
“The past is past. After all, he did no real harm. He was thwarted in the evil he intended. Let us show ourselves more merciful, Jerome, Let him go his ways in peace.”
He glared at her. “Let him go?” he echoed, mocking. “Let him escape that he may play the wolf again! Surely that was never intended by the destiny that brought
him to this of all houses in Paris.” He flung her off, almost roughly. “He was guided hither that he might meet the reckoning long due. The will of fate is all too plain.”
He considered Seyrac.
“What memories you revive in me!” he said, smiling bitterly. “I mind me of a stormy day in March — in Germinal, by the calendar of Liberty — ten years ago, when she and I fled from Beauvaloir pursued by your bullies. How would it have fared had they overtaken me? How would it have fared with her? Would you have spared us? Yet she bids me spare you!”
He laughed short and bitterly.
“That was in Germinal — Germinal, the month of the sowing. And this is Fructidor — the month of fruition and of the garnering. There is a humor in the Jacobin calendar most apt to your situation. As you sowed them, so shall you garner now.”
“Anything to save me from your speechmaking,” was the dry answer, and Seyrac bowed ironically.
Vidal swung round toward the window, but Angèle again barred his way.
“Ah no, Jerome! Reflect!” Her voice trembled with something akin to terror. “I have a superstition. Such pitilessness will bring us ill-fortune, Let him go, in Heaven’s name! It is the nobler vengeance! What is he to us? Less than nothing. Spare him, Jerome! If you love me, do my will in this.”
He looked at her, obviously shaken in his purpose.
“If I love you,” he said softly, tenderly. “Why, since you ask it, so be it. After all, as you say, he is less than nothing.” He turned to Seyrac “Citizen, your way is clear. You may depart.”
“I thank you for the clemency,” he said, but it was at Angèle that he looked. He bowed, advanced a step in the direction of the door, and on that step he suddenly faltered, staggered, and collapsed upon the floor.
Taken by surprise, Vidal stared at his wife. “What is to do now?” he asked.
She knelt beside the unconscious man, and set an arm about his shoulders so as to raise his head. Feeling a moisture upon her hand, she withdrew it suddenly.
“He is wounded!” she cried.
The access of weakness that had flung the chevalier into that swoon was no more than momentary. Even as Angèle spoke, he opened his eyes again — black pools in the ghastly pallor of his face.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 561