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Jack London - "The Cruise of the Snark"

Richard Harding Davis - "The Nature Faker"

Dr. Martin Luther, 1537 - "The Smalcald Articles"

Edward Bulwer Lytton - "The Lady of Lyons"

Scaramouche

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> Scaramouche




The thought was in the minds of both as they scanned each other,
each noting in the other the marked change that a few months had
wrought. In Le Chapelier, Andre-Louis observed certain heightened
refinements of dress that went with certain subtler refinements of
countenance. He was thinner than of old, his face was pale and
there was a weariness in the eyes that considered his visitor
through a gold-rimmed spy-glass. In Andre-Louis those jaded but
quick-moving eyes of the Breton deputy noted changes even more
marked. The almost constant swordmanship of these last months had
given Andre-Louis a grace of movement, a poise, and a curious,
indefinable air of dignity, of command. He seemed taller by virtue
of this, and he was dressed with an elegance which if quiet was
none the less rich. He wore a small silver-hilted sword, and wore
it as if used to it, and his black hair that Le Chapelier had never
seen other than fluttering lank about his bony cheeks was glossy
now and gathered into a club. Almost he had the air of a
petit-maitre.

In both, however, the changes were purely superficial, as each was
soon to reveal to the other. Le Chapelier was ever the same direct
and downright Breton, abrupt of manner and of speech. He stood
smiling a moment in mingled surprise and pleasure; then opened wide
his arms. They embraced under the awe-stricken gaze of the waiter,
who at once effaced himself.

"Andre-Louis, my friend! Whence do you drop?"

"We drop from above. I come from below to survey at close quarters
one who is on the heights."

"On the heights! But that you willed it so, it is yourself might
now be standing in my place."

"I have a poor head for heights, and I find the atmosphere too
rarefied. Indeed, you look none too well on it yourself, Isaac.
You are pale."

"The Assembly was in session all last night. That is all. These
damned Privileged multiply our difficulties. They will do so until
we decree their abolition."

They sat down. "Abolition! You contemplate so much? Not that you
surprise me. You have always been an extremist."

"I contemplate it that I may save them. I seek to abolish them
officially, so as to save them from abolition of another kind at
the hands of a people they exasperate."

"I see. And the King?"

"The King is the incarnation of the Nation. We shall deliver him
together with the Nation from the bondage of Privilege. Our
constitution will accomplish it. You agree?"

Andre-Louis shrugged. "Does it matter? I am a dreamer in politics,
not a man of action. Until lately I have been very moderate; more
moderate than you think. But now almost I am a republican. I have
been watching, and I have perceived that this King is - just nothing,
a puppet who dances according to the hand that pulls the string."

"This King, you say? What other king is possible? You are surely
not of those who weave dreams about Orleans? He has a sort of
party, a following largely recruited by the popular hatred of the
Queen and the known fact that she hates him. There are some who
have thought of making him regent, some even more; Robespierre is
of the number."

"Who?" asked Andre-Louis, to whom the name was unknown.

"Robespierre - a preposterous little lawyer who represents Arras,
a shabby, clumsy, timid dullard, who will make speeches through
his nose to which nobody listens - an ultra-royalist whom the
royalists and the Orleanists are using for their own ends. He
has pertinacity, and he insists upon being heard. He may be
listened to some day. But that he, or the others, will ever make
anything of Orleans... pish! Orleans himself may desire it, but
the man is a eunuch in crime; he would, but he can't. The phrase
is Mirabeau's."

He broke off to demand Andre-Louis' news of himself.

"You did not treat me as a friend when you wrote to me," he
complained. "You gave me no clue to your whereabouts; you
represented yourself as on the verge of destitution and withheld
from me the means to come to your assistance. I have been troubled
in mind about you, Andre. Yet to judge by your appearance I might
have spared myself that. You seem prosperous, assured. Tell me
of it."

Andre-Louis told him frankly all that there was to tell. "Do you
know that you are an amazement to me?" said the deputy. "From the
robe to the buskin, and now from the buskin to the sword! What
will be the end of you, I wonder?"

"The gallows, probably."

"Pish! Be serious. Why not the toga of the senator in senatorial
France? It might be yours now if you had willed it so."

"The surest way to the gallows of all," laughed Andre-Louis.

At the moment Le Chapelier manifested impatience. I wonder did the
phrase cross his mind that day four years later when himself he rode
in the death-cart to the Greve.

"We are sixty-six Breton deputies in the Assembly. Should a vacancy
occur, will you act as suppleant? A word from me together with the
influence of your name in Rennes and Nantes, and the thing is done."

Andre-Louis laughed outright. "Do you know, Isaac, that I never
meet you but you seek to thrust me into politics?"

"Because you have a gift for politics. You were born for politics."

"Ah, yes - Scaramouche in real life. I've played it on the stage.
Let that suffice. Tell me, Isaac, what news of my old friend, La
Tour d'Azyr?"

"He is here in Versailles, damn him - a thorn in the flesh of
the Assembly. They've burnt his chateau at La Tour d'Azyr.
Unfortunately he wasn't in it at the time. The flames haven't even
singed his insolence. He dreams that when this philosophic
aberration is at an end, there will be serfs to rebuild it for him."

"So there has been trouble in Brittany?" Andre-Louis had become
suddenly grave, his thoughts swinging to Gavrillac.

"An abundance of it, and elsewhere too. Can you wonder? These
delays at such a time, with famine in the land? Chateaux have been
going up in smoke during the last fortnight. The peasants took
their cue from the Parisians, and treated every castle as a Bastille.
Order is being restored, there as here, and they are quieter now."

"What of Gavrillac? Do you know?"

"I believe all to be well. M. de Kercadiou was not a Marquis de La
Tour d'Azyr. He was in sympathy with his people. It is not likely
that they would injure Gavrillac. But don't you correspond with
your godfather?"

"In the circumstances - no. What you tell me would make it now more
difficult than ever, for he must account me one of those who helped
to light the torch that has set fire to so much belonging to his
class. Ascertain for me that all is well, and let me know."

"I will, at once."

At parting, when Andre-Louis was on the point of stepping into his
cabriolet to return to Paris, he sought information on another
matter.

"Do you happen to know if M. de La Tour d'Azyr has married?" he
asked.

"I don't; which really means that he hasn't. One would have heard
of it in the case of that exalted Privileged."

"To be sure." Andre-Louis spoke indifferently. "Au revoir, Isaac!
You'll come and see me - 13 Rue du Hasard. Come soon."

"As soon and as often as my duties will allow. They keep me chained
here at present."

"Poor slave of duty with your gospel of liberty!"

"True! And because of that I will come. I have a duty to Brittany:
to make Omnes Omnibus one of her representatives in the National
Assembly."

"That is a duty you will oblige me by neglecting," laughed
Andre-Louis, and drove away.



CHAPTER IV

AT MEUDON


Later in the week he received a visit from Le Chapelier just before
noon.

"I have news for you, Andre. Your godfather is at Meudon. He
arrived there two days ago. Had you heard?"

"But no. How should I hear? Why is he at Meudon?" He was conscious
of a faint excitement, which he could hardly have explained.

"I don't know. There have been fresh disturbances in Brittany. It
may be due to that."

"And so he has come for shelter to his brother?" asked Andre-Louis.

"To his brother's house, yes; but not to his brother. Where do you
live at all, Andre? Do you never hear any of the news? Etienne de
Gavrillac emigrated years ago. He was of the household of M.
d'Artois, and he crossed the frontier with him. By now, no doubt,
he is in Germany with him, conspiring against France. For that is
what the emigres are doing. That Austrian woman at the Tuileries
will end by destroying the monarchy."

"Yes, yes," said Andre-Louis impatiently. Politics interested him
not at all this morning. "But about Gavrillac?"

"Why, haven't I told you that Gavrillac is at Meudon, installed in
the house his brother has left? Dieu de Dieu! Don't I speak French
or don't you understand the language? I believe that Rabouillet,
his intendant, is in charge of Gavrillac. I have brought you the
news the moment I received it. I thought you would probably wish to
go out to Meudon."

"Of course. I will go at once - that is, as soon as I can. I can't
to-day, nor yet to-morrow. I am too busy here." He waved a hand
towards the inner room, whence proceeded the click-click of blades,
the quick moving of feet, and the voice of the instructor, Le Duc.

"Well, well, that is your own affair. You are busy. I leave you now.
Let us dine this evening at the Café de Foy. Kersain will be of the
party."

"A moment!" Andre-Louis' voice arrested him on the threshold. "Is
Mlle. de Kercadiou with her uncle?"

"How the devil should I know? Go and find out."

He was gone, and Andre-Louis stood there a moment deep in thought.
Then he turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte
de Villeniort, the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of
Danet, illustrating with a small-sword the advantages to be derived
from its adoption.

Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest
of his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on
the heights of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to
give that afternoon and on the morrow, and wondering which of these
he might postpone without deranging the academy. When having touched
the Vicomte three times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself
back to the present, it was to marvel at the precision to be gained
by purely mechanical action. Without bestowing a thought upon what
he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had automatically performed
their work, like the accurate fighting engine into which constant
practice for a year and more had combined them.

Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the
impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning.
Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed
- by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many
were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration
which was now flowing freely - Andre-Louis mounted his hired
carriage, and drove out to Meudon.

The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the
head of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where
his brother was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the
household of M. le Comte d'Artois, he had built for himself and his
family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature
park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and
Paris, and easily accessible from either. M. d'Artois - the royal
tennis-player - had been amongst the very first to emigrate.
Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of
the Queen's intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince
de Lambesc, who realized that their very names had become odious to
the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the
Bastille. He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier - and
there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which
he and those others had been engaged in France. With him, amongst
several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou, and with
Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children.
Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a
province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany - where the
nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France
- had come to occupy in his brother's absence the courtier's
handsome villa at Meudon.

That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed. A man of his
almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was
a little uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets,
profusion of gilding, and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants
- for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind.
Time, which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian
concerns, here hung heavily upon his hands. In self-defence he
slept a great deal, and but for Aline, who made no attempt to
conceal her delight at this proximity to Paris and the heart of
things, it is possible that he would have beat a retreat almost at
once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later
on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this
luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted
him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent
M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of
the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had
ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de
Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur upon this
soft adventure, and was installed - to the ceaseless and but
half-concealed hilarity of the impertinent valetaille that M.
Etienne had left - as his maitre d'hotel here at Meudon.

Benoit had welcomed M. Andre with incoherencies of delight; almost
had he gambolled about him like some faithful dog, whilst conducting
him to the salon and the presence of the Lord of Gavrillac, who
would - in the words of Benoit - be ravished to see M. Andre again.

"Monseigneur! Monseigneur!" he cried in a quavering voice, entering
a pace or two in advance of the visitor. "It is M. Andre... M.
Andre, your godson, who comes to kiss your hand. He is here... and
so fine that you would hardly know him. Here he is, monseigneur! Is
he not beautiful?"

And the old servant rubbed his hands in conviction of the delight
that he believed he was conveying to his master.

Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, soft-carpeted
to the foot, dazzling to the eye. It was immensely lofty, and its
festooned ceiling was carried on fluted pillars with gilded capitals.
The door by which he entered, and the windows that opened upon the
garden, were of an enormous height - almost, indeed, the full height
of the room itself. It was a room overwhelmingly gilded, with an
abundance of ormolu encrustations on the furniture, in which it
nowise differed from what was customary in the dwellings of people
of birth and wealth. Never, indeed, was there a time in which so
much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold
was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into
circulation to supply the lack. It was a saying of Andre-Louis'
that if these people could only have been induced to put the paper
on their walls and the gold into their pockets, the finances of the
kingdom might soon have been in better case.

The Seigneur - furbished and beruffled to harmonize with his
surroundings - had risen, startled by this exuberant invasion on
the part of Benoit, who had been almost as forlorn as himself since
their coming to Meudon.

"What is it? Eh?" His pale, short-sighted eyes peered at the
visitor. "Andre!" said he, between surprise and sternness; and the
colour deepened in his great pink face.

Benoit, with his back to his master, deliberately winked and grinned
at Andre-Louis to encourage him not to be put off by any apparent
hostility on the part of his godfather. That done, the intelligent
old fellow discreetly effaced himself.

"What do you want here?" growled M. de Kercadiou.

"No more than to kiss your hand, as Benoit has told you, monsieur my
godfather," said Andre-Louis submissively, bowing his sleek black head.

"You have contrived without kissing it for two years."

"Do not, monsieur, reproach me with my misfortune."

The little man stood very stiffly erect, his disproportionately large
head thrown back, his pale prominent eyes very stern.

"Did you think to make your outrageous offence any better by vanishing
in that heartless manner, by leaving us without knowledge of whether
you were alive or dead?"

"At first it was dangerous - dangerous to my life - to disclose my
whereabouts. Then for a time I was in need, almost destitute, and
my pride forbade me, after what I had done and the view you must
take of it, to appeal to you for help. Later... "

"Destitute?" The Seigneur interrupted. For a moment his lip
trembled. Then he steadied himself, and the frown deepened as he
surveyed this very changed and elegant godson of his, noted the
quiet richness of his apparel, the paste buckles and red heels to
his shoes, the sword hilted in mother-o'-pearl and silver, and the
carefully dressed hair that he had always seen hanging in wisps
about his face. "At least you do not look destitute now," he
sneered.

"I am not. I have prospered since. In that, monsieur, I differ
from the ordinary prodigal, who returns only when he needs
assistance. I return solely because I love you, monsieur - to tell
you so. I have come at the very first moment after hearing of your
presence here." He advanced. "Monsieur my godfather!" he said,
and held out his hand.

But M. de Kercadiou remained unbending, wrapped in his cold dignity
and resentment.

"Whatever tribulations you may have suffered or consider that you
may have suffered, they are far less than your disgraceful conduct
deserved, and I observe that they have nothing abated your impudence.
You think that you have but to come here and say, 'Monsieur my
godfather!' and everything is to be forgiven and forgotten. That
is your error. You have committed too great a wrong; you have
offended against everything by which I hold, and against myself
personally, by your betrayal of my trust in you. You are one of
those unspeakable scoundrels who are responsible for this revolution."

"Alas, monsieur, I see that you share the common delusion. These
unspeakable scoundrels but demanded a constitution, as was promised
them from the throne. They were not to know that the promise was
insincere, or that its fulfilment would be baulked by the privileged
orders. The men who have precipitated this revolution, monsieur,
are the nobles and the prelates."

"You dare - and at such a time as this - stand there and tell me
such abominable lies! You dare to say that the nobles have made
the revolution, when scores of them, following the example of M. le
Duc d'Aiguillon, have flung their privileges, even their title-deeds,
into the lap of the people! Or perhaps you deny it?"

"Oh, no. Having wantonly set fire to their house, they now try to
put it out by throwing water on it; and where they fail they put the
entire blame on the flames."

"I see that you have come here to talk politics."

"Far from it. I have come, if possible, to explain myself. To
understand is always to forgive. That is a great saying of
Montaigne's. If I could make you understand... "

"You can't. You'll never make me understand how you came to render
yourself so odiously notorious in Brittany."

"Ah, not odiously, monsieur!"

"Certainly, odiously - among those that matter. It is said even
that you were Omnes Omnibus, though that I cannot, will not believe."

"Yet it is true."

M. de Kercadiou choked. "And you confess it? You dare to confess
it?"

"What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess - unless he is
a coward."

"Oh, and to be sure you were very brave, running away each time
after you had done the mischief, turning comedian to hide yourself,
doing more mischief as a comedian, provoking a riot in Nantes, and
then running away again, to become God knows what - something
dishonest by the affluent look of you. My God, man, I tell you that
in these past two years I have hoped that you were dead, and you
profoundly disappoint me that you are not!" He beat his hands
together, and raised his shrill voice to call - "Benoit!" He strode
away towards the fireplace, scarlet in the face, shaking with the
passion into which he had worked himself. "Dead, I might have
forgiven you, as one who had paid for his evil, and his folly.
Living, I never can forgive you. You have gone too far. God alone
knows where it will end.

"Benoit, the door. M. Andre-Louis Moreau to the door!" The tone
argued an irrevocable determination. Pale and self-contained, but
with a queer pain at his heart, Andre-Louis heard that dismissal,
saw Benoit's white, scared face and shaking hands half-raised as
if he were about to expostulate with his master. And then another
voice, a crisp, boyish voice, cut in.

"Uncle!" it cried, a world of indignation and surprise in its pitch,
and then: "Andre!" And this time a note almost of gladness,
certainly of welcome, was blended with the surprise that still
remained.

Both turned, half the room between them at the moment, and beheld
Aline in one of the long, open windows, arrested there in the act
of entering from the garden, Aline in a milk-maid bonnet of the
latest mode, though without any of the tricolour embellishments
that were so commonly to be seen upon them.

The thin lips of Andre's long mouth twisted into a queer smile.
Into his mind had flashed the memory of their last parting. He
saw himself again, standing burning with indignation upon the
pavement of Nantes, looking after her carriage as it receded down
the Avenue de Gigan.

She was coming towards him now with outstretched hands, a heightened
colour in her cheeks, a smile of welcome on her lips. He bowed low
and kissed her hand in silence.

Then with a glance and a gesture she dismissed Benoit, and in her
imperious fashion constituted herself Andre's advocate against that
harsh dismissal which she had overheard.

"Uncle," she said, leaving Andre and crossing to M. de Kercadiou,
"you make me ashamed of you! To allow a feeling of peevishness to
overwhelm all your affection for Andre!"

"I have no affection for him. I had once. He chose to extinguish
it. He can go to the devil; and please observe that I don't permit
you to interfere."

"But if he confesses that he has done wrong... "

"He confesses nothing of the kind. He comes here to argue with me
about these infernal Rights of Man. He proclaims himself
unrepentant. He announces himself with pride to have been, as all
Brittany says, the scoundrel who hid himself under the sobriquet
of Omnes Omnibus. Is that to be condoned?"

She turned to look at Andre across the wide space that now separated
them.

"But is this really so? Don't you repent, Andre - now that you see
all the harm that has come?"

It was a clear invitation to him, a pleading to him to say that he
repented, to make his peace with his godfather. For a moment it
almost moved him. Then, considering the subterfuge unworthy, he
answered truthfully, though the pain he was suffering rang in his
voice.

"To confess repentance," he said slowly, "would be to confess to a
monstrous crime. Don't you see that? Oh, monsieur, have patience
with me; let me explain myself a little. You say that I am in part
responsible for something of all this that has happened. My
exhortations of the people at Rennes and twice afterwards at Nantes
are said to have had their share in what followed there. It may be
so. It would be beyond my power positively to deny it. Revolution
followed and bloodshed. More may yet come. To repent implies a
recognition that I have done wrong. How shall I say that I have
done wrong, and thus take a share of the responsibility for all
that blood upon my soul? I will be quite frank with you to show
you how far, indeed, I am from repentance. What I did, I actually
did against all my convictions at the time. Because there was no
justice in France to move against the murderer of Philippe de
Vilmorin, I moved in the only way that I imagined could make the
evil done recoil upon the hand that did it, and those other hands
that had the power but not the spirit to punish. Since then I
have come to see that I was wrong, and that Philippe de Vilmorin
and those who thought with him were in the right.

"You must realize, monsieur, that it is with sincerest thankfulness
that I find I have done nothing calling for repentance; that, on
the contrary, when France is given the inestimable boon of a
constitution, as will shortly happen, I may take pride in having
played my part in bringing about the conditions that have made this
possible."

There was a pause. M. de Kercadiou's face turned from pink to
purple.

"You have quite finished?" he said harshly.

"If you have understood me, monsieur."

"Oh, I have understood you, and... and I beg that you will go."

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