He was afraid. Not only physically afraid of Vidal, but far more afraid of the incendiary effect which his words might have upon the crowd. St Just knew well — none better — that the rabble was just so much anarchical tinder ready to be set in a blaze by the first fiery tongue that preached revolt against any authority whatsoever.
“Be silent, you fool!” he snarled.
The doors at the far end of the hall were thrown open at that moment. An usher’s loud voice rang through the vast space.
“The Citizen-Colonel Vidal is awaited by the representatives of the august nation at the bar of the assembly.”
“I come!” he trumpeted back, and half turned from St. Just. Then he paused, and considered the foxy fellow over his shoulder. “And when I have told the representatives I shall tell the people — all of it, my friend. They shall hear from me that St. Just the thief is the friend of thieves, and they shall draw their own inference from my tale. That is what you have earned by your attempt to pervert soldier’s honesty. Much good may do you.”
And he clanked off up the hall, his steps ringing through the silence that had fallen upon the crowd, stared at by the scared eyes of every man and woman present.
Beyond those double portals Vidal was detained for a moment by the usher, and when at last the small baize door leading into the chamber was opened, and he advanced to the bar of the assembly he found that St. Just was before him. Even as he stepped forward at one end, he beheld the deputy advancing with his graceful sauntering walk at the other to take his seat at the foot of the rostrum.
Thence St. Just’s pale eyes met the soldier’s with an air of contemptuous challenge, which even now might have deterred a man less bold. Vidal, however, calmly sent his glance sweeping round the silent multitude of representatives as he drew forth the notes with which he came provided.
He began by speaking of the glorious achievements of their fellow countrymen and the luster shed upon French arms in Holland, and went on, to urge the need of reenforcements against the mercenaries of foreign tyrants if the campaign were to be brought to a speedy and victorious close.
His martial figure and the ringing voice, addressing them as it might have commanded a squadron, made a profoundly favorable impression. Unconsciously he seemed to symbolize French military valor. To look at him was to gather a sense of confidence in the inevitable, ultimate prevailing of French arms.
He concluded that portion of his address with the information that he was deputed by his general to lead to the field of glory such recruits as might have been raised in Paris during the past month. Applause broke forth from the assembly, and found an echo in the gallery above, which was thronged with patriots of both sexes, many of them attracted thither by news of the scene between St Just and the soldier, and fully expecting it to be now succeeded by a scene of still greater intensity.
Vidal paused a moment. Then, fixing St. Just, he passed to the second part of his errand.
“So far, citizen representatives, I have spoken of French valor and French heroism, in which all Frenchmen may justifiably take pride. Alas, that I must abandon so inspiring and inspiriting a theme! But necessity demands that I speak to you now of French dishonesty. French chicanery, and French treachery. If we cannot avoid taking shame in this, at least we can remove that shame by punishing the deed that has evoked it.”
He paused, and the expectant hush that followed was pierced by a short, thin laugh and the acid voice of St. Just, seeking to discredit the speaker by inviting contempt upon him.
“The citizen colonel is a maker of phrases!”
But no one heeded the sarcasm; not even Vidal, who now proceeded formally to lay his accusation against the contractor, Lemoine.
They heard him in utter silence to the end. When that was reached one or two deputies rose simultaneously in their places, each intending to make his way to the rostrum. But it was not for nothing that St. Just had taken his seat at the very foot of it. He anticipated the others, mounted the steps, claimed and was granted speech by the president.
But Vidal, clenching the bar with his great hand, threw back his head in rebellion at this interruption.
“Citizen president, I have not yet done,” he roared. “Before you hear the citizen deputy St. Just I have yet to inform you of a sequel to this affair of Lemoine, from which you will gather that you may have to hear the citizen St. Just in a different sense.”
“If the affair is to be discussed,” said St. Just, dominating the assembly from the height of the tribune, impressing it by his sardonic calm, “it were well to take one thing at a time. And already we have one very grave statement that requires to be dealt with.
“What else the citizen colonel may have to add touching a matter which he says himself is but a sequel to that upon which you have heard him, must wait until we can find it expedient and convenient to hear him. You will uphold me, citizen president, in my suggestion that we proceed in order with our debates, and deal with matters singly as they arise.”
“But—” began Vidal.
“Be silent, citizen colonel,” the president commanded him.
Vidal shrugged, and leaned against the bar, content to await his turn,
St. Just dabbed his lips daintily with a flimsy handkerchief, and cleared his throat.
“We have heard a formidable accusation launched—” he began. “It is an accusation which if established against the person it incriminates will inevitably bring his head into the national basket. In the dark days of tyranny now overpast the lives of true men were ruthlessly sacrificed upon slight evidence. But in the new age of reason that has dawned upon France, in these glorious days of liberty and fraternity in which all men are equal in the eyes of the law, it would ill become us to form hasty judgments, or to—”
“Words, words!” bawled Vidal, interrupting the orator’s harangue. And he flung back St. Just’s own ungarbled gibe. “The citizen representative is a maker of phrases. But phrases are not wanted here. What are wanted are sound boots for French soldiers and the head of the man who—”
The president rose in wrath. “Will you be silent, citizen colonel?”
“How can I be silent while that fellow—”
Uproar followed to drown the remainder of his answer. The president clanged his bell and waved frantic arms to| restore order.
A thin man in black, with a very carefully tied wig and the face of a weasel rose in his seat, removing as he did so a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, through which he had been reading some notes. Order was instantly restored, and the assembly fell silent.
It was the citizen Robespierre, and Vidal, who knew the great deputy’s reputation for incorruptibility, and in his innocence of politics nothing of Robespierre’s attachment to St Just, conceived that now at last he would be heard upon the matter of the attempt to suborn him. But he was grievously disappointed.
“Now that the assembly has had an opportunity of hearing the citizen colonel, may not his attendance be dispensed with, citizen president, particularly as it tends to produce disorder?” And he sat down again.
The president — his puppet — instantly converted his suggestion into an order. A couple of men of the national guard who had been lounging by the baize door approached Vidal.
One of them touched him upon the shoulder. He raised his voice in protest. He would be heard. He had something to say that was of vital interest to all true patriots.
The disorder became general.
A section of the assembly — the Dantonists, the fearless, men of the mountain — clamored that the colonel should be heard; but the majority, faithful to the expressed will of Robespierre, demanded that the authority of the president should be respected. The people in the gallery joined in the dispute, some taking this side, some the other. In an instant the place was pandemonium.
But above the general din rang the trumpet voice of Vidal, who saw himself threatened with forcible eviction.
“Very well,” he shouted. “I go! What I have to say c
an wait — But if you keep me waiting too long I shall go and say it to all Paris. If the representatives of the people will not hear me, the people themselves remain, and the people shall hear me.”
He was gone at last, leaving that ringing threat behind him, and St. Just in the rostrum, waiting for silence to be restored and the gallery to be cleared, looked paler than his pale habit.
The debate that followed upon St. Just’s speech when it was made proved a protracted one.
Vidal paced the hall outside for a full hour and more, heedless of the curiosity of which he was naturally enough the object. He burned with resentment and impatience, and he prepared the terrible phrases with which he would fulminate St. Just when at last he should be recalled to the bar of the assembly.
At long length a tap on the shoulder came to arouse him from his fierce absorption. A big man with a leonine head, plainly dressed to the extent of having discarded the fashionable cravat, slipped an arm through his own, and drew him down the hall toward the door that led to the open.
“My friend,” he said, “you are too honest for this rascally world of ours in Paris. Will you be advised by me?”
Vidal scowled at him.
“What? Do you too offer me advice, Danton?” he asked.
The great man smiled tolerantly at this anticipatory resentment.
“You know that you can trust me, and I hope that you also know that I am the last man to urge a coward course upon any. But there is a point at which courage becomes madness, and whilst profiting none destroys him who displays it. That point you are reaching. You must avoid it, Vidal.”
“Avoid it?” the soldier rebelled. “Let that dog St. Just dip his hands into the pockets of the people as he dipped them into his father’s moneybox. Do you know that he came to me here to advise me, to attempt to suborn me into holding my tongue about the peculations of Lemoine?”
“I did not know. But the knowledge does not surprise he. He is all that, you say, and the truth shall be dragged into full daylight ere all is over. But you are not the man to do it. Not only will you fail in any attempt, but you will destroy yourself — irrevocably if you make it. St. Just is more formidable than a panther in its native jungle, and he had something of a panther’s soft, sly ways.”
“Maybe, But how can he hurt me?” quoth Vidal, more in scorn than question. “What accusation dare he lodge against me, how can he ever call me to account for what I may have said to him without submitting himself—”
But Danton interrupted, his great, solemn eyes upon the hot soldier’s rugged face.
“Don’t wait to ascertain what St Just can do. Accept my word for it that he can destroy you if he pleases, as easily as he would crack a flea.”
He laughed shortly.
“My friend, if he finds that your speech can be hurtful to him he’ll know how to procure your silence. You have threatened him. You have shown him that you can be dangerous to him, and men who are dangerous to St. Just usually ride down the Rue St. Honoré in a tumbrel to receive the attentions of the national barber.”
“But I must first be tried,” protested the trusting Vidal, “and I ask no better opportunity to be heard.”
“You will be afforded no such opportunity. Tinville knows how to silence men whom it is not convenient to hear.”
Stricken, Vidal stared at Danton, incredulous that such turpitude should have crept into a system which was to have been the purest the world had ever known. Had another than Danton told him these things he would not have believed them for a moment. But Danton’s honesty he knew to be above suspicion.
“Leave this to me,” the deputy pursued. “Leave it to me to obtain justice upon Lemoine. You can trust me. I have no interests to serve but the interests of France. And I shall not serve them thoroughly until I have pulled down this rascal St. Just, as pull him down I shall. You have put a weapon into my hand to-day, Vidal. Leave me to wield it.”
“But my duty?” Vidal protested.
“You have discharged it honorably. The rest you can well leave to me, You will have to do so whether you choose or not, for from the temper into which St. Just’s infernal tongue has molded the assembly you will not be given another occasion of addressing it.
“And since you have threatened that in such a case you will address the people themselves, I warn you plainly that if you linger now in Paris you may expect the worst. To that warning let me add a piece of advice — the advice of a sincere friend who wishes you well. Depart at once, this very day. Get back to Holland and the shelter of your bayonets, and stay there until St. Just has been disposed of, otherwise he will dispose of you.”
But Vidal’s stout heart was impermeable to fear. He resisted. He would remain. He would not be driven away with lambent tail by a red-headed fox like St Just. He was not to be browbeaten or intimidated. St. Just should reckon with him.
Dalton, however, was insistent, and gradually the wisdom of his words took effect upon the soldier, who knew and trusted him. But it was only the mention of Vidal’s wife that finally conquered his reluctance to beating a retreat before so contemptible an enemy as he accounted St. Just.
“What of Angèle?” Danton asked him gloomily. “Would you leave her a widow?”
Vidal gasped. The picture of his sweet Angèle a widow, unprotected in this revolutionary welter proved irresistible.
“She wants to go with me when I return to Holland,” he said slowly. “She is weary of Paris and her loneliness amid all the violence that is forever being wrought here.”
“Set out with her to-day,” said Danton solemnly. “Do it for her sake, if not for your own. And trust to me to see that vengeance overtakes St. Just and his thieving friend Lemoine.”
Thus was Vidal gradually, reluctantly persuaded. “But my papers?” was his last protest. “They must be in order before I can set out, and if St. Just’s attitude toward me is such as you represent, he will see to it that I—”
“Pish! I will provide you with a passport before St. Just can dream of your intentions to depart. And I can get the necessary signatures — Desmoulin’s, Billaud’s, and another’s beside my own. Come, you shall have the thing at once, provided I have your promise that you will set out this very evening.”
And to this in the end Vidal grudgingly consented.
CHAPTER IV — A Note from Citizen Danton
THE Chevalier de Seyrac had spent the day pleasantly in Angèle’s company.
It is the pessimist Schopenhauer who assures us that only pain is positive; that pleasure is an entirely negative condition consequent upon the absence of physical or mental affliction; that well-being is merely the absence of bodily ailments, and that happiness is no more that the freedom from mental distress. Whether there may be exceptions which the pessimist overlooked in his philosophy, Seyrac’s case would come well within the rule, for never was there a happiness at once more complete and more negative.
He sat by the window throughout most of the forenoon, utterly idle, physically and mentally. And it was this secure idleness — which must in happier times have fretted him — that was in itself a source of supreme well-being to this man, who for days and nights had been hunted and afraid to sleep or rest.
The reaction from the horrors that had encompassed him was all his present happiness, and it was complete.
He was content to sit there, watching Angèle as she plied her needle. He talked a little, and in between his talks he would hum snatches of long-forgotten songs. The shadow of death in which so long he had moved, chilled and furtive, had been lifted from him.
Angèle had turned out the contents of Vidal’s haversack. Among them she discovered a spare military coat, torn in the sleeve and the back, and she had set about repairing it at once.
Seyrac watched and admired the deftness of her fingers as they sent the needle flashing to and fro.
He observed the delicate whiteness of the hand, and he admired that, too, marveling at its fineness in one so humbly born. And from admiration of that
member he passed on slowly to admiration of her whole person. He considered the almost austere beauty of her pale face with its dark, lustrous eyes shaded by long, curving lashes, and he sighed for the lost opportunity of years ago.
Fatuity had ever been Seyrac’s besetting sin, and fatuity set him wondering now whether her pleading for him last night had been entirely dictated by womanly compassion.
He wondered whether a man of less compelling and pleasing personality than his own would, in like case, have evoked from her the prayers by which she stayed Vidal when he would have thrust him out and those by which she had prevailed upon Vidal to exert himself to save him. His vanity answered that question in the negative.
Thence he went on to wonder if she were really happy with Vidal. He found it inconceivable that so coarse a brute — it was in such terms that he thought of the republican soldier — could hold the affection of one so full of grace.
He contrasted himself with Vidal, and found that it was like comparing a mettlesome Arab jennet with one of those lumbering Flemish horses that daily dragged the tumbrels through the streets of Paris.
Last night, under the stress of his emotions, Seyrac had wept at once in gratitude for the present and in repentance for the past.
This morning he could almost find it in his heart to weep at the thought that he should not have made better use of his opportunities in that same past. He wasted the day in vain speculation and idle talk; hut toward evening he at last determined to plumb the depth of her feelings for Vidal.
“No doubt, citoyenne,” he said, “you will be thankful to leave this city of nightmares and the republican Lent that prevails here.”
“I shall, indeed,” she agreed with him, without looking up.
“Ah! And yet, when all is said, the exchange, Heaven knows, is none so delectable! To follow an army, and in Holland — a damp, uncouth country, by all I hear — br-r!” He shivered as if, in imagination at least, he felt the chill of it.
“I shall be with my husband, citizen,” she answered.
“Faith, yes! And if you consider that an adequate compensation, there is no more to be said.”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 563