A breach has always a cause and a purpose. Here is the explanation of how the one which led from the tower called that of Mademoiselle and the stables came to be made. After his installation as Laurence’s guardian at Cinq-Cygne old d’Hauteserre converted a long ravine, through which the water of the forest flowed into the moat, into a roadway between two tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the chateau, by merely planting out in it about a hundred walnut trees which he found ready in the nursery. In eleven years these trees had grown and branched so as to nearly cover the road, hidden already by steep banks, which ran into a little wood of thirty acres recently purchased. When the chateau had its full complement of inhabitants they all preferred to take this covered way through the breach to the main road which skirted the park walls and led to the farm, rather than go round by the entrance. By dint of thus using it the breach in the sides of the moat had gradually been widened on both sides, with all the less scruple because in this nineteenth century of ours moats are no longer of the slightest use, and Laurence’s guardian had often talked of putting this one to some other purpose. The constant crumbling away of the earth and stones and gravel had ended by filling up the ditch, so that only after heavy rains was the causeway thus constructed covered. But the bank was still so steep that it was difficult to make a horse descend it, and even more difficult to get him up upon the main road. Horses, however, seem in times of peril to share their masters’ thought.
While the young countess was hesitating to follow Marthe, and asking explanations, Michu, from his vantage-ground watched the closing in of the gendarmes and understood their plan. He grew desperate as time went by and the countess did not come to him. A squad of gendarmes were marching along the park wall and stationing themselves as sentinels, each man being near enough to communicate with those on either side of them, by voice and eye. Michu, lying flat on his stomach, his ear to earth, gauged, like a red Indian, by the strength of the sounds the time that remained to him.
“I came too late!” he said to himself. “Violette shall pay dear for this! what a time it took to make him drunk! What can be done?”
He heard the detachment that was coming through the forest reach the iron gates and turn into the main road, where before long it would meet the squad coming up from the other direction.
“Still five or six minutes!” he said.
At that instant the countess appeared. Michu took her with a firm hand and pushed her into the covered way.
“Keep straight before you! Lead her to where my horse is,” he said to his wife, “and remember that gendarmes have ears.”
Seeing Catherine, who carried the hat and whip, and Gothard leading the mare, the man, keen-witted in presence of danger, bethought himself of playing the gendarmes a trick as useful as the one he had just played Violette. Gothard had forced the mare to mount the bank.
“Her feet muffled! I thank thee, boy,” exclaimed the bailiff.
Michu let the mare follow her mistress and took the hat, gloves, and whip from Catherine.
“You have sense, boy, you’ll understand me,” he said. “Force your own horse up here, jump on him, and draw the gendarmes after you across the fields towards the farm; get the whole squad to follow you—And you,” he added to Catherine, “there are other gendarmes coming up on the road from Cinq-Cygne to Gondreville; run in the opposite direction to the one Gothard takes, and draw them towards the forest. Manage so that we shall not be interfered with in the covered way.”
Catherine and the boy, who were destined to give in this affair such remarkable proofs of intelligence, executed the manoeuvre in a way to make both detachments of gendarmes believe that they held the game. The dim light of the moon prevented the pursuers from distinguishing the figure, clothing, sex, or number of those they followed. The pursuit was based on the maxim, “Always arrest those who are escaping,”—the folly of which saying was, as we have seen, energetically declared by Corentin to the corporal in command. Michu, counting on this instinct of the gendarmes, was able to reach the forest a few moments after the countess, whom Marthe had guided to the appointed place.
“Go home now,” he said to Marthe. “The forest is watched and it is dangerous to remain here. We need all our freedom.”
Michu unfastened his horse and asked the countess to follow him.
“I shall not go a step further,” said Laurence, “unless you give me some proof of the interest you seem to have in us—for, after all, you are Michu.”
“Mademoiselle,” he answered, in a gentle voice; “the part I am playing can be explained to you in two words. I am, unknown to the Marquis de Simeuse and his brother, the guardian of their property. On this subject I received the last instructions of their late father and their dear mother, my protectress. I have played the part of a virulent Jacobin to serve my dear young masters. Unhappily, I began this course too late; I could not save their parents.” Here, Michu’s voice broke down. “Since the young men emigrated I have sent them regularly the sums they needed to live upon.”
“Through the house of Breintmayer of Strasburg?” asked the countess.
“Yes, mademoiselle; the correspondents of Monsieur Girel of Troyes, a royalist who, like me, made himself for good reasons, a Jacobin. The paper which your farmer picked up one evening and which I forced him to surrender, related to the affair and would have compromised your cousins. My life no longer belongs to me, but to them, you understand. I could not buy in Gondreville. In my position, I should have lost my head had the authorities known I had the money. I preferred to wait and buy it later. But that scoundrel of a Marion was the slave of another scoundrel, Malin. All the same, Gondreville shall once more belong to its rightful masters. That’s my affair. Four hours ago I had Malin sighted by my gun; ha! he was almost gone then! Were he dead, the property would be sold and you could have bought it. In case of my death my wife would have brought you a letter which would have given you the means of buying it. But I overheard that villain telling his accomplice Grevin—another scoundrel like himself—that the Marquis and his brother were conspiring against the First Consul, that they were here in the neighborhood, and that he meant to give them up and get rid of them so as to keep Gondreville in peace. I myself saw the police spies; I laid aside my gun, and I have lost no time in coming here, thinking that you must be the one to know best how to warn the young men. That’s the whole of it.”
“You are worthy to be a noble,” said Laurence, offering her hand to Michu, who tried to kneel and kiss it. She saw his motion and prevented it, saying: “Stand up!” in a tone of voice and with a look which made him amends for all the scorn of the last twelve years.
“You reward me as though I had done all that remains for me to do,” he said. “But don’t you hear them, those huzzars of the guillotine? Let us go elsewhere.”
He took the mare’s bridle, and led her a little distance.
“Think only of sitting firm,” he said, “and of saving your head from the branches of the trees which might strike you in the face.”
Then he mounted his own horse and guided the young girl for half an hour at full gallop; making turns and half turns, and striking into wood-paths, so as to confuse their traces, until they reached a spot where he pulled up.
“I don’t know where I am,” said the countess looking about her,—“I, who know the forest as well as you do.”
“We are in the heart of it,” he replied. “Two gendarmes are after us, but we are quite safe.”
The picturesque spot to which the bailiff had guided Laurence was destined to be so fatal to the principal personages of this drama, and to Michu himself, that it becomes our duty, as an historian, to describe it. The scene became, as we shall see hereafter, one of noted interest in the judiciary annals of the Empire.
The forest of Nodesme belonged to the monastery of Notre-Dame. That monastery, seized, sacked, and demolished, had disappeared entirely, monks and property. The forest, an object of much cupidity, was taken into the domain of the Comtes de Champagne, who mortgaged it later and allowed it to be sold. In the course of six centuries nature covered its ruins with her rich and vigorous green mantle, and effaced them so thoroughly that the existence of one of the finest convents was no longer even indicated except by a slight eminence shaded by noble trees and circled by thick, impenetrable shrubbery, which, since 1794, Michu had taken great pains to make still more impenetrable by planting the thorny acacia in all the slight openings between the bushes. A pond was at the foot of the eminence and showed the existence of a hidden stream which no doubt determined in former days the site of the monastery. The late owner of the title to the forest of Nodesme was the first to recognize the etymology of the name, which dated back for eight centuries, and to discover that at one time a monastery had existed in the heart of the forest. When the first rumblings of the thunder of the Revolution were heard, the Marquis de Simeuse, who had been forced to look into his title by a lawsuit and so learned the above facts as it were by chance, began, with a secret intention not difficult to conceive, to search for some remains of the former monastery. The keeper, Michu, to whom the forest was well known, helped his master in the search, and it was his sagacity as a forester which led to the discovery of the site. Observing the trend of the five chief roads of the forest, some of which were now effaced, he saw that they all ended either at the little eminence or by the pond at the foot of it, to which points travellers from Troyes, from the valley of Arcis and that of Cinq-Cygne, and from Bar-sur-Aube doubtless came. The marquis wished to excavate the hillock but he dared not employ the people of the neighborhood. Pressed by circumstances, he abandoned the intention, leaving in Michu’s mind a strong conviction that the eminence had either the treasure or the foundations of the former abbey. He continued, all alone, this archaeological enterprise; he sounded the earth and discovered a hollowness on the level of the pond between two trees, at the foot of the only craggy part of the hillock.
One fine night he came to the place armed with a pickaxe, and by the sweat of his brow uncovered a succession of cellars, which were entered by a flight of stone steps. The pond, which was three feet deep in the middle, formed a sort of dipper, the handle of which seemed to come from the little eminence, and went far to prove that a spring had once issued from the crags, and was now lost by infiltration through the forest. The marshy shores of the pond, covered with aquatic trees, alders, willow, and ash, were the terminus of all the wood-paths, the remains of former roads and forest by-ways, now abandoned. The water, flowing from a spring, though apparently stagnant, was covered with large-leaved plants and cresses, which gave it a perfectly green surface almost indistinguishable from the shores, which were covered with fine close herbage. The place is too far from human habitations for any animal, unless a wild one, to come there. Convinced that no game was in the marsh and repelled by the craggy sides of the hills, keepers and hunters had never explored or visited this nook, which belonged to a part of the forest where the timber had not been cut for many years and which Michu meant to keep in its full growth when the time came round to fell it.
At the further end of the first cellar was a vaulted chamber, clean and dry, built with hewn stone, a sort of convent dungeon, such as they called in monastic days thein pace. The salubrity of the chamber and the preservation of this part of the staircase and of the vaults were explained by the presence of the spring, which had been enclosed at some time by a wall of extraordinary thickness built in brick and cement like those of the Romans, and received all the waters. Michu closed the entrance to this retreat with large stones; then, to keep the secret of it to himself and make it impenetrable to others, he made a rule never to enter it except from the wooded height above, by clambering down the crag instead of approaching it from the pond.
Just as the fugitives arrived, the moon was casting her beautiful silvery light on the aged tree-tops above the crag, and flickering on the splendid foliage at the corners of the several paths, all of which ended here, some with one tree, some with a group of trees. On all sides the eye was irresistibly led along their vanishing perspectives, following the curve of a wood-path or the solemn stretch of a forest glade flanked by a wall of verdure that was nearly black. The moonlight, filtering through the branches of the crossways, made the lonely, tranquil waters, where they peeped between the crosses and the lily-pads, sparkle like diamonds. The croaking of the frogs broke the deep silence of this beautiful forest-nook, the wild odors of which incited the soul to thoughts of liberty.
“Are we safe?” said the countess to Michu.
“Yes, mademoiselle. But we have each some work to do. Do you go and fasten our horses to the trees at the top of the little hill; tie a handkerchief round the mouth of each of them,” he said, giving her his cravat; “your beast and mine are both intelligent, they will understand they are not to neigh. When you have done that, come down the crag directly above the pond; but don’t let your habit catch anywhere. You will find me below.”
While the countess hid the horses and tied and gagged them, Michu removed the stones and opened the entrance to the caverns. The countess, who thought she knew the forest by heart, was amazed when she descended into the vaulted chambers. Michu replaced the stones above them with the dexterity of a mason. As he finished, the sound of horses’ feet and the voices of the gendarmes echoed in the darkness; but he quietly struck a match, lighted a resinous bit of wood and led the countess to thein pace, where there was still a piece of the candle with which he had first explored the caves. An iron door of some thickness, eaten in several places by rust, had been put in good order by the bailiff, and could be fastened securely by bars slipping into holes in the wall on either side of it. The countess, half dead with fatigue, sat down on a stone bench, above which there still remained an iron ring, the staple of which was embedded in the masonry.
“We have a salon to converse in,” said Michu. “The gendarmes may prowl as much as they like; the worst they could do would be to take our horses.”
“If they do that,” said Laurence, “it would be the death of my cousins and the Messieurs d’Hauteserre. Tell me now, what do you know?”
Michu related what he had overheard Malin say to Grevin.
“They are already on the road to Paris; they were to enter it to-morrow morning,” said the countess when he had finished.
“Lost!” exclaimed Michu. “All persons entering or leaving the barriers are examined. Malin has strong reasons to let my masters compromise themselves; he is seeking to get them killed out of his way.”
“And I, who don’t know anything of the general plan of the affair,” cried Laurence, “how can I warn Georges, Riviere, and Moreau? Where are they?—However, let us think only of my cousins and the d’Hauteserres; you must catch up with them, no matter what it costs.”
“The telegraph goes faster than the best horse,” said Michu; “and of all the nobles concerned in this conspiracy your cousins are the closest watched. If I can find them, they must be hidden here and kept here till the affair is over. Their poor father may have had a foreboding when he set me to search for this hiding-place; perhaps he felt that his sons would be saved here.”
“My mare is from the stables of the Comte d’Artois,—she is the daughter of his finest English horse,” said Laurence; “but she has already gone sixty miles, she would drop dead before you reached them.”
“Mine is in good condition,” replied Michu; “and if you did sixty miles I shall have only thirty to do.”
“Nearer forty,” she said, “they have been walking since dark. You will overtake them beyond Lagny, at Coupvrai, where they expected to be at daybreak. They are disguised as sailors, and will enter Paris by the river on some vessel. This,” she added, taking half of her mother’s wedding-ring from her finger, “is the only thing which will make them trust you; they have the other half. The keeper of Couvrai is the father of one of their soldiers; he has hidden them tonight in a hut in the forest deserted by charcoal-burners. They are eight in all, Messieurs d’Hauteserre and four others are with my cousins.”
“Mademoiselle, no one is looking for the others! let them save themselves as they can; we must think only of the Messieurs de Simeuse. It is enough just to warn the rest.”
“What! abandon the Hauteserres? never!” she said. “They must all perish or be saved together!”
“Only petty noblemen!” remarked Michu.
“They are only chevaliers, I know that,” she replied, “but they are related to the Cinq-Cygne and Simeuse blood. Save them all, and advise them how best to regain this forest.”
“The gendarmes are here,—don’t you hear them? they are holding a council of war.”
“Well, you have twice had luck to-night; go! bring my cousins here and hide them in these vaults; they’ll be safe from all pursuit—Alas! I am good for nothing!” she cried, with rage; “I should be only a beacon to light the enemy—but the police will never imagine that my cousins are in the forest if they see me at my ease. So the question resolves itself into this: how can we get five good horses to bring them in six hours from Lagny to the forest,—five horses to be killed and hidden in some thicket.”
“And the money?” said Michu, who was thinking deeply as he listened to the young countess.
“I gave my cousins a hundred louis this evening,” she replied.
“I’ll answer for them!” cried Michu. “But once hidden here you must not attempt to see them. My wife, or the little one, shall bring them food twice a week. But, as I can’t be sure of what may happen to me, remember, mademoiselle, in case of trouble, that the main beam in my hay-loft has been bored with an auger. In the hole, which is plugged with a bit of wood, you will find a plan showing how to reach this spot. The trees which you will find marked with a red dot on the plan have a black mark at their foot close to the earth. Each of these trees is a sign-post. At the foot of the third old oak which stands to the left of each sign-post, two feet in front of it and buried seven feet in the ground, you will find a large metal tube; in each tube are one hundred thousand francs in gold. These eleven trees—there are only eleven—contain the whole fortune of the Simeuse brothers, now that Gondreville has been taken from them.”
“It will take a hundred years for the nobility to recover from such blows,” said Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne, slowly.
“Is there a pass-word?” asked Michu.
“‘France and Charles’ for the soldiers, ‘Laurence and Louis’ for the Messieurs d’Hauteserre and Simeuse. Good God! to think that I saw them yesterday for the first time in eleven years, and that now they are in danger of death—and what a death! Michu,” she said, with a melancholy look, “be as prudent during the next fifteen hours as you have been grand and devoted during the last twelve years. If disaster were to overtake my cousins now I should die of it—No,” she added, quickly, “I would live long enough to kill Bonaparte.”
“There will be two of us to do that when all is lost,” said Michu.
Laurence took his rough hand and wrung it warmly, as the English do. Michu looked at his watch; it was midnight.
“We must leave here at any cost,” he said. “Death to the gendarme who attempts to stop me! And you, madame la comtesse, without presuming to dictate, ride back to Cinq-Cygne as fast as you can. The police are there by this time; fool them! delay them!”
The hole once opened, Michu flung himself down with his ear to the earth; then he rose precipitately. “The gendarmes are at the edge of the forest towards Troyes!” he said. “Ha, I’ll get the better of them yet!”
He helped the countess to come out, and replaced the stones. When this was done he heard her soft voice telling him she must see him mounted before mounting herself. Tears came to the eyes of the stern man as he exchanged a last look with his young mistress, whose own eyes were tearless.
“Fool them! yes, he is right!” she said when she heard him no longer. Then she darted towards Cinq-Cygne at full gallop.
Madame d’Hauteserre, roused by the danger of her sons, and not believing that the Revolution was over, but still fearing its summary justice, recovered her senses by the violence of the same distress which made her lose them. Led by an agonizing curiosity she returned to the salon, which presented a picture worthy of the brush of a genre painter. The abbe, still seated at the card-table and mechanically playing with the counters, was covertly observing Corentin and Peyrade, who were standing together at a corner of the fireplace and speaking in a low voice. Several times Corentin’s keen eye met the not less keen glance of the priest; but, like two adversaries who knew themselves equally strong, and who return to their guard after crossing their weapons, each averted his eyes the instant they met. The worthy old d’Hauteserre, poised on his long thin legs like a heron, was standing beside the stout form of the mayor, in an attitude expressive of utter stupefaction. The mayor, though dressed as a bourgeois, always looked like a servant. Each gazed with a bewildered eye at the gendarmes, in whose clutches Gothard was still sobbing, his hands purple and swollen from the tightness of the cord that bound them. Catherine maintained her attitude of artless simplicity, which was quite impenetrable. The corporal, who, according to Corentin, had committed a great blunder in arresting these smaller fry, did not know whether to stay where he was or to depart. He stood pensively in the middle of the salon, his hand on the hilt of his sabre, his eye on the two Parisians. The Durieus, also stupefied, and the other servants of the chateau made an admirable group of expressive uneasiness. If it had not been for Gothard’s convulsive snifflings those present could have heard the flies fly.
When Madame d’Hauteserre, pale and terrified, opened the door and entered the room, almost carried by Mademoiselle Goujet, whose red eyes had evidently been weeping, all faces turned to her at once. The two agents hoped as much as the household feared to see Laurence enter. This spontaneous movement of both masters and servants seemed produced by the sort of mechanism which makes a number of wooden figures perform the same gesture or wink the same eye.
Madame d’Hauteserre advanced by three rapid strides towards Corentin and said, in a broken voice but violently: “For pity’s sake, monsieur, tell me what my sons are accused of. Do you really think they have been here?”
The abbe, who seemed to be saying to himself when he saw the old lady, “She will certainly commit some folly,” lowered his eyes.
“My duty and the mission I am engaged in forbid me to tell you,” answered Corentin, with a gracious but rather mocking air.
This refusal, which the detestable politeness of the vulgar fop seemed to make all the more emphatic, petrified the poor mother, who fell into a chair beside the Abbe Goujet, clasped her hands and began to pray.
“Where did you arrest that blubber?” asked Corentin, addressing the corporal and pointing to Laurence’s little henchman.
“On the road that leads to the farm along the park walls; the little scamp had nearly reached the Closeaux woods,” replied the corporal.
“And that girl?”
“She? oh, it was Oliver who caught her.”
“Where was she going?”
“Towards Gondreville.”
“They were going in opposite directions?” said Corentin.
“Yes,” replied the gendarme.
“Is that boy the groom, and the girl the maid of the citizeness Cinq-Cygne?” said Corentin to the mayor.
“Yes,” replied Goulard.
After Corentin had exchanged a few words with Peyrade in a whisper, the latter left the room, taking the corporal of gendarmes with him.
Just then the corporal of Arcis made his appearance. He went up to Corentin and spoke to him in a low voice: “I know these premises well,” he said; “I have searched everywhere; unless those young fellows are buried, they are not here. We have sounded all the floors and walls with the butt end of our muskets.”
Peyrade, who presently returned, signed to Corentin to come out, and then took him to the breach in the moat and showed him the sunken way.
“We have guessed the trick,” said Peyrade.
“And I’ll tell you how it was done,” added Corentin. “That little scamp and the girl decoyed those idiots of gendarmes and thus made time for the game to escape.”
“We can’t know the truth till daylight,” said Peyrade. “The road is damp; I have ordered two gendarmes to barricade it top and bottom. We’ll examine it after daylight, and find out by the footsteps who went that way.”
“I see a hoof-mark,” said Corentin; “let us go to the stables.”
“How many horses do you keep?” said Peyrade, returning to the salon with Corentin, and addressing Monsieur d’Hauteserre and Goulard.
“Come, monsieur le maire, you know, answer,” cried Corentin, seeing that that functionary hesitated.
“Why, there’s the countess’s mare, Gothard’s horse, and Monsieur d’Hauteserre’s.”
“There is only one in the stable,” said Peyrade.
“Mademoiselle is out riding,” said Durieu.
“Does she often ride about at this time of night?” said the libertine Peyrade, addressing Monsieur d’Hauteserre.
“Often,” said the good man, simply. “Monsieur le maire can tell you that.”
“Everybody knows she has her freaks,” remarked Catherine; “she looked at the sky before she went to bed, and I think the glitter of your bayonets in the moonlight puzzled her. She told me she wanted to know if there was going to be another revolution.”
“When did she go?” asked Peyrade.
“When she saw your guns.”
“Which road did she take?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s another horse missing,” said Corentin.
“The gendarmes—took it—away from me,” said Gothard.
“Where were you going?” said one of them.
“I was—following—my mistress to the farm,” sobbed the boy.
The gendarme looked towards Corentin as if expecting an order. But Gothard’s speech was evidently so true and yet so false, so perfectly innocent and so artful that the two Parisians again looked at each other as if to echo Peyrade’s former words: “They are not ninnies.”
Monsieur d’Hauteserre seemed incapable of a word; the mayor was bewildered; the mother, imbecile from maternal fears, was putting questions to the police agents that were idiotically innocent; the servants had been roused from their sleep. Judging by these trifling signs, and these diverse characters, Corentin came to the conclusion that his only real adversary was Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne. Shrewd and dexterous as the police may be, they are always under certain disadvantages. Not only are they forced to discover all that is known to a conspirator, but they must also suppose and test a great number of things before they hit upon the right one. The conspirator is always thinking of his own safety, whereas the police is only on duty at certain hours. Were it not for treachery and betrayals, nothing would be easier than to conspire successfully. The conspirator has more mind concentrated upon himself than the police can bring to bear with all its vast facilities of action. Finding themselves stopped short morally, as they might be physically by a door which they expected to find open being shut in their faces, Corentin and Peyrade saw they were tricked and misled, without knowing by whom.
“I assert,” said the corporal of Arcis, in their ear, “that if the four young men slept here last night it must have been in the beds of their father and mother, and Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne, or those of the servants; or they must have spent the night in the park. There is not a trace of their presence.”
“Who could have warned them?” said Corentin, to Peyrade. “No one but the First Consul, Fouche, the ministers, the prefect of police, and Malin knew anything about it.”
“We must set spies in the neighborhood,” whispered Peyrade.
“And watch the spies,” said the abbe, who smiled as he overheard the word and guessed all.
“Good God!” thought Corentin, replying to the abbe’s smile with one of his own; “there is but one intelligent being here,—he’s the one to come to an understanding with; I’ll try him.”
“Gentlemen—” said the mayor, anxious to give some proof of devotion to the First Consul and addressing the two agents.
“Say ‘citizens’; the Republic still exists,” interrupted Corentin, looking at the priest with a quizzical air.
“Citizens,” resumed the mayor, “just as I entered this salon and before I had opened my mouth Catherine rushed in and took her mistress’s hat, gloves, and whip.”
A low murmur of horror came from the breasts of all the household except Gothard. All eyes but those of the agent and the gendarmes were turned threateningly on Goulard, the informer, seeming to dart flames at him.
“Very good, citizen mayor,” said Peyrade. “We see it all plainly. Some one” (this with a glance of evident distrust at Corentin) “warned the citizeness Cinq-Cygne in time.”
“Corporal, handcuff that boy,” said Corentin, to the gendarme, “and take him away by himself. And shut up that girl, too,” pointing to Catherine. “As for you, Peyrade, search for papers,” adding in his ear, “Ransack everything, spare nothing.—Monsieur l’abbe,” he said, confidentially, “I have an important communication to make to you”; and he took him into the garden.
“Listen to me attentively, monsieur,” he went on; “you seem to have the mind of a bishop, and (no one can hear us) you will understand me. I have no longer any hope except through you of saving these families, who, with the greatest folly, are letting themselves roll down a precipice where no one can save them. The Messieurs Simeuse and d’Hauteserre have been betrayed by one of those infamous spies whom governments introduce into all conspiracies to learn their objects, means, and members. Don’t confound me, I beg of you, with the wretch who is with me. He belongs to the police; but I am honorably attached to the Consular cabinet, I am therefore behind the scenes. The ruin of the Simeuse brothers is not desired. Though Malin would like to see them shot, the First Consul, if they are here and have come without evil intentions, wishes them to be warned out of danger, for he likes good soldiers. The agent who accompanies me has all the powers, I, apparently, am nothing. But I see plainly what is hatching. The agent is pledged to Malin, who has doubtless promised him his influence, an office, and perhaps money if he finds the Simeuse brothers and delivers them up. The First Consul, who is a really great man, never favors selfish schemes—I don’t want to know if those young men are here,” he added, quickly, observing the abbe’s gesture, “but I wish to tell you that there is only one way to save them. You know the law of the 6th Floreal, year X., which amnestied all theemigreswho were still in foreign countries on condition that they returned home before the 1st Vendemiaire of the year XI., that is to say, in September of last year. But the Messieurs Simeuse having, like the Messieurs d’Hauteserre, served in the army of Conde, they come into the category of exceptions to this law. Their presence in France is therefore criminal, and suffices, under the circumstances in which we are, to make them suspected of collusion in a horrible plot. The First Consul saw the error of this exception which has made enemies for his government, and he wishes the Messieurs Simeuse to know that no steps will be taken against them, if they will send him a petition saying that they have re-entered France intending to submit to the laws, and agreeing to take oath to the Constitution. You can understand that the document ought to be in my hands before they are arrested, and be dated some days earlier. I would then be the bearer of it—I do not ask you where those young men are,” he said again, seeing another gesture of denial from the priest. “We are, unfortunately, sure of finding them; the forest is guarded, the entrances to Paris and the frontiers are all watched. Pray listen to me; if these gentlemen are between the forest and Paris they must be taken; if they are in Paris they will be found; if they retreat to the frontier they will still be arrested. The First Consul likes theci-devants, and cannot endure the republicans—simple enough; if he wants a throne he must needs strangle Liberty. Keep the matter a secret between us. This is what I will do; I will stay here till to-morrow andbe blind; but beware of the agent; that cursed Provencal is the devil’s own valet; he has the ear of Fouche just as I have that of the First Consul.”
“If the Messieurs Simeuse are here,” said the abbe, “I would give ten pints of my blood and my right arm to save them; but if Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne is in the secret she has not—and this I swear on my eternal salvation—betrayed it in any way, neither has she done me the honor to consult me. I am now very glad of her discretion, if discretion there be. We played cards last night as usual, at boston, in almost complete silence, until half-past ten o’clock, and we neither saw nor heard anything. Not a child can pass through this solitary valley without the whole community knowing it, and for the last two weeks no one has come from other places. Now the d’Hauteserre and the Simeuse brothers would make a party of four. Old d’Hauteserre and his wife have submitted to the present government, and they have made all imaginable efforts to persuade their sons to return to France; they wrote to them again yesterday. I can only say, upon my soul and conscience, that your visit has alone shaken my firm belief that these young men are living in Germany. Between ourselves, there is no one here, except the young countess, who does not do justice to the eminent qualities of the First Consul.”
“Fox!” thought Corentin. “Well, if those young men are shot,” he said, aloud; “it is because their friends have willed it—I wash my hands of the affair.”
He had led the abbe to a part of the garden which lay in the moonlight, and as he said the last words he looked at him suddenly. The priest was greatly distressed, but his manner was that of a man surprised and wholly ignorant.
“Understand this, monsieur l’abbe,” resumed Corentin; “the right of these young men to the estate of Gondreville will render them doubly criminal in the eyes of the middle class. I’d like to see them put faith in God and not in his saints—”
“Is there really a plot?” asked the abbe, simply.
“Base, odious, cowardly, and so contrary to the generous spirit of the nation,” replied Corentin, “that it will meet with universal opprobrium.”
“Well! Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne is incapable of baseness,” cried the abbe.
“Monsieur l’abbe,” replied Corentin, “let me tell you this; there is for us (meaning you and me) proof positive of her guilt; but there is not enough for the law. You see she took flight when we came; I sent the mayor to warn her.”
“Yes, but for one who is so anxious to save them, you followed rather closely on his heels,” said the abbe.
At those words the two men looked at each other, and all was said. Each belonged to those profound anatomists of thought to whom a mere inflexion of the voice, a look, a word suffices to reveal a soul, just as the Indians track their enemies by signs invisible to European eyes.
“I expected to draw something out of him, and I have only betrayed myself,” thought Corentin.
“Ha! the sly rogue!” thought the priest.
Midnight rang from the old church clock just as Corentin and the abbe re-entered the salon. The opening and shutting of doors and closets could be heard from the bedrooms above. The gendarmes pulled open the beds; Peyrade, with the quick perception of a spy, handled and sounded everything. Such desecration excited both fear and indignation among the faithful servants of the house, who still stood motionless about the salon. Monsieur d’Hauteserre exchanged looks of commiseration with his wife and Mademoiselle Goujet. A species of horrible curiosity kept every one on the qui vive. Peyrade at length came down, holding in his hand a sandal-wood box which had probably been brought from China by Admiral de Simeuse. This pretty casket was flat and about the size of a quarto volume.
Peyrade made a sign to Corentin and took him into the embrasure of a window.
“I’ve an idea!” he said, “that Michu, who was ready to pay Marion eight hundred thousand francs in gold for Gondreville, and who evidently meant to shoot Malin yesterday, is the man who is helping the Simeuse brothers. His motive in threatening Marion and aiming at Malin must be the same. I thought when I saw him that he was capable of ideas; evidently he has but one; he discovered what was going on and he must have come here to warn them.”
“Probably Malin talked about the conspiracy to his friend the notary, and Michu from his ambush overheard what was said,” remarked Corentin, continuing the inductions of his colleague. “No doubt he has only postponed his shot to prevent an evil he thinks worse than the loss of Gondreville.”
“He knew what we were the moment he laid eyes on us,” said Peyrade. “I thought then that he was amazingly intelligent for a peasant.”
“That proves that he is always on his guard,” replied Corentin. “But, mind you, my old man, don’t let us make a mistake. Treachery stinks in the nostrils, and primitive folks do scent it from afar.”
“But that’s our strength,” said the Provencal.
“Call the corporal of Arcis,” cried Corentin to one of the gendarmes. “I shall send him at once to Michu’s house,” he added to Peyrade.
“Our ear, Violette, is there,” said Peyrade.
“We started without getting news from him. Two of us are not enough; we ought to have had Sabatier with us—Corporal,” he said, when the gendarme appeared, taking him aside with Peyrade, “don’t let them fool you as they did the Troyes corporal just now. We think Michu is in this business. Go to his house, put your eye on everything, and bring word of the result.”
“One of my men heard horses in the forest just as they arrested the little groom; I’ve four fine fellows now on the track of whoever is hiding there,” replied the gendarme.
He left the room, and the gallop of his horse which echoed on the paved courtyard died rapidly away.
“One thing is certain,” said Corentin to himself, “either they have gone to Paris or they are retreating to Germany.”
He sat down, pulled a note-book from the pocket of his spencer, wrote two orders in pencil, sealed them, and made a sign to one of the gendarmes to come to him.
“Be off at full gallop to Troyes, wake up the prefect, and tell him to start the telegraph as soon as there’s light enough.”
The gendarme departed. The meaning of this movement and Corentin’s intentions were so evident that the hearts of the household sank within them; but this new anxiety was additional to another that was now martyrizing them; their eyes were fixed on the sandal-wood box! All the while the two agents were talking together they were each taking note of those eager looks. A sort of cold anger stirred the unfeeling hearts of these men who relished the power of inspiring terror. The police man has the instincts and emotions of a hunter: but where the one employs his powers of mind and body in killing a hare, a partridge, or a deer, the other is thinking of saving the State, or a king, and of winning a large reward. So the hunt for men is superior to the other class of hunting by all the distance that there is between animals and human beings. Moreover, a spy is forced to lift the part he plays to the level and the importance of the interests to which he is bound. Without looking further into this calling, it is easy to see that the man who follows it puts as much passionate ardor into his chase as another man does into the pursuit of game. Therefore the further these men advanced in their investigations the more eager they became; but the expression of their faces and their eyes continued calm and cold, just as their ideas, their suspicions, and their plans remained impenetrable. To any one who watched the effects of the moral scent, if we may so call it, of these bloodhounds on the track of hidden facts, and who noted and understood the movements of canine agility which led them to strike the truth in their rapid examination of probabilities, there was in it all something actually horrifying. How and why should men of genius fall so low when it was in their power to be so high? What imperfection, what vice, what passion debases them? Does a man become a police-agent as he becomes a thinker, writer, statesmen, painter, general, on the condition of knowing nothing but how to spy, as the others speak, write, govern, paint, and fight? The inhabitants of the chateau had but one wish,—that the thunderbolts of heaven might fall upon these miscreants; they were athirst for vengeance; and had it not been for the presence, up to this time, of the gendarmes there would undoubtedly have been an outbreak.
“No one, I suppose, has the key of this box?” said the cynical Peyrade, questioning the family as much by the movement of his huge red nose as by his words.
The Provencal noticed, not without fear, that the guards were no longer present; he and Corentin were alone with the family. The younger man drew a small dagger from his pocket, and began to force the lock of the box. Just then the desperate galloping of a horse was heard upon the road and then upon the pavement by the lawn; but most horrible of all was the fall and sighing of the animal, which seemed to drop all at once at the door of the middle tower. A convulsion like that which a thunderbolt might produce shook the spectators when Laurence, the trailing of whose riding-habit announced her coming, entered the room. The servants hastily formed into two lines to let her pass.
In spite of her rapid ride, the girl had felt the full anguish the discovery of the conspiracy must needs cause her. All her hopes were overthrown! she had galloped through ruins as her thoughts turned to the necessity of submission to the Consular government. Were it not for the danger which threatened the four gentlemen, and which served as a tonic to conquer her weariness and her despair, she would have dropped asleep on the way. The mare was almost killed in her haste to reach the chateau, and stand between her cousins and death. As all present looked at the heroic girl, pale, her features drawn, her veil aside, her whip in her hand, standing on the threshold of the door, whence her burning glance grasped the whole scene and comprehended it, each knew from the almost imperceptible motion which crossed the soured and bittered face of Corentin, that the real adversaries had met. A terrible duel was about to begin.
Noticing the box, now in the hands of Corentin, the countess raised her whip and sprang rapidly towards him. Striking his hands with so violent a blow that the casket fell to the ground, she seized it, flung it into the middle of the fire, and stood with her back to the chimney in a threatening attitude before either of the agents recovered from their surprise. The scorn which flamed from her eyes, her pale brow, her disdainful lips, were even more insulting than the haughty action which treated Corentin as though he were a venomous reptile. Old d’Hauteserre felt himself once more a cavalier; all his blood rushed to his face, and he grieved that he had no sword. The servants trembled for an instant with joy. The vengeance they had called down upon these men had come. But their joy was driven back within their souls by a terrible fear; the gendarmes were still heard coming and going in the garrets.
Thespy—noun of strength, under which all shades of the police are confounded, for the public has never chosen to specify in language the varieties of those who compose this dispensary of social remedies so essential to all governments—the spy has this curious and magnificent quality: he never becomes angry; he possesses the Christian humility of a priest; his eyes are stolid with an indifference which he holds as a barrier against the world of fools who do not understand him; his forehead is adamant under insult; he pursues his ends like a reptile whose carapace is fractured only by a cannonball; but (like that reptile) he is all the more furious when the blow does reach him, because he believed his armor invulnerable. The lash of the whip upon his fingers was to Corentin, pain apart, the cannonball that cracked the shell. Coming from that magnificent and noble girl, this action, emblematic of her disgust, humiliated him, not only in the eyes of the people about him, but in his own.
Peyrade sprang to the hearth, caught Laurence’s foot, raised it, and compelled her, out of modesty, to throw herself on the sofa, where she had lately lain asleep. The scene, like other contrasts in human things, was burlesque in the midst of terror. Peyrade scorched his hand as he dashed it into the fire to seize the box; but he got it, threw it on the floor and sat down upon it. These little actions were done with great rapidity and without a word being uttered. Corentin, recovering from the pain of the blow, caught Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne by both hands, and held her.
“Do not compel me to use force against you,” he said, with withering politeness.
Peyrade’s action had extinguished the fire by the natural process of suppressing the air.
“Gendarmes! here!” he cried, still occupying his ridiculous position.
“Will you promise to behave yourself?” said Corentin, insolently, addressing Laurence, and picking up his dagger, but not committing the great fault of threatening her with it.
“The secrets of that box do not concern the government,” she answered, with a tinge of melancholy in her tone and manner. “When you have read the letters it contains you will, in spite of your infamy, feel ashamed of having read them—that is, if you can still feel shame at anything,” she added, after a pause.
The abbe looked at her as if to say, “For God’s sake, be calm!”
Peyrade rose. The bottom of the box, which had been nearly burned through, left a mark upon the floor; the lid was scorched and the sides gave way. The grotesque Scaevola, who had offered to the god of the Police and Terror the seat of his apricot breeches, opened the two sides of the box as if it had been a book, and slid three letters and two locks of hair upon the card-table. He was about to smile at Corentin when he perceived that the locks were of two shades of gray. Corentin released Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne’s hands and went up to the table to read the letter from which the hair had fallen.
Laurence rose, moved to the table beside the spies, and said:—“Read it aloud; that shall be your punishment.”
As the two men continued to read to themselves, she herself read out the following words:—