“Your husband, Edmé,” I said, “were they shouting for him?”
She laughed in scorn. “He thought they were,” she answered. “That was why he stayed hidden there upstairs, and would not admit you. Thank heaven I found you, and forced him to come down and help me carry you inside. But this is his finish. I’ve done with him.”
“What do you mean, you’ve done with him?”
She rose from her knees and stood at the end of the bed, her arms folded, and I thought how suddenly she had grown from a young girl into a woman, and a woman who believed it right to judge her husband, some twenty-five years older than herself.
“I’ve had proof these many months that he made his fortune from the percentage he took from the tithes and taxes,” she said. “A year ago I might not have cared, but I do now. The whole world has changed in the last three months. I’m not going to go about being pointed at as the wife of a fermier général. That is why I joined the crowd outside. I was returning home and got caught up in it, and part of it, and I’m glad that I did. I belong with the people out there. Not here, in his grace-and-favor lodging.”
She looked about her in disgust, and I wondered how much of her revulsion was due in truth to a surge of patriotism, and how much was resentment at having married an old man.
“Suppose the crowd had broken down the door and forced an entry?” I asked her. “What would you have done then?”
She evaded the question just as Robert would have done.
“The crowd, and I among them, wanted to break into the Abbey, not into the house,” she answered. “Didn’t you hear us shout for Besnard?”
“Besnard?” I repeated.
“The curé from Nouans, the parish near Ballon, where those grain hoarders were hiding yesterday,” she said. “You heard how they were killed, I suppose, and a good riddance too. The curé, who defrauded the people just as they did, fled here to his friends the monks as soon as he had learned what happened to Cureau and Montesson. Well, the Dragons saved his life today, but we’ll get him in the end.”
A year ago Edmé, my frivolous if intellectual little sister, had been a bride like me, her head full of her own trousseau and the figure she would cut in bourgeois society. Now she was a revolutionary, more violent even than Pierre, talking of leaving her husband because she disapproved of his profession, and desiring the death of some parish priest she had never even met.
Suddenly her face clouded, and she looked at me suspiciously.
“I have not asked you yet what you are doing in Le Mans?” she enquired.
I told her briefly of Robert’s arrival with Jacques the Saturday before and of our journey to St. Christophe, and how we were now with Pierre, awaiting our chance to return to le Chesne-Bidault. Edmé’s face cleared.
“Since the 14th of July nobody has been able to tell for certain who is a patriot and who a spy,” she said. “Even members of the same family lie to one another. I’m glad to hear Robert is one of us; knowing what little I do of his life in Paris, I should have feared the contrary. That’s one good thing about your François and Michel. No one is likely to accuse either of them of being traitors to the nation after yesterday.”
I rested on the bed, aware now of my intense exhaustion, and barely listening to her talk. Presently there came a knock at the door. It was Robert and Pierre, warned by the frightened boys of the fate that might have befallen me. Edmé’s husband remained upstairs, and, although I heard his name several times in the murmured conversation between the three of them, neither of my brothers went up to talk to him.
They had a fiacre waiting outside the house, and when I felt well enough to move they helped me to it, for I preferred to be under Pierre’s roof, despite the uproar and disorder, rather than Edmé’s, in its present atmosphere of resentment and mistrust.
My brothers refrained from asking questions. They were too alarmed, I imagine, as to what might have happened in that crowd to fatigue me further, and as soon as we were safely inside the house I went to bed.
Lying awake, I went over in my mind the hideous events of the afternoon, and how nearly I had missed death. I longed for my home, and for my husband. I wondered if François and Michel were at le Chesne-Bidault or on patrol, and like a flash Edmé’s words came back to me: “No one is likely to accuse either of them of being traitors to the nation after yesterday.”
Yesterday, the 23rd of July, had been the day on which Cureau the silversmith and his son-in-law Montesson had been butchered at Ballon; and those accused of the crime, according to the report current in the hôtel de ville, had been egged on by vagabonds from the forest. Which forest? It was then that I remembered the rumor, one of many heard on the evening of our arrival on Wednesday, that the brigands were dispersing, but bands of marauders from the forest of Montmirail were terrorizing the countryside from la Ferté-Bernard to Le Mans.
11
Robert took me home to le Chesne-Bidault on Sunday the 26th of July. We went by way of Coudrecieux and our old home of la Pierre, and then through the forest of Vibraye, but this time, though we stopped to talk to people on the way, no one had sighted brigands. They had dispersed, so we were told, they had scattered south to Tours, or westward to la Flèche and Angers, burning and pillaging as they went; yet no one could say for certain whose land had been laid waste, which property destroyed—all was hearsay, rumor, as it had been all along.
When we arrived at le Chesne-Bidault everything was quiet. The place had a deserted look, as though in our absence work had been abandoned. No smoke came from the furnace chimney, the sheds and storerooms were locked, and the master’s house itself was shuttered, with no sign of life within. We went round to the back, through the orchard, and hammered on the door there, and presently we heard the shutters open in the kitchen and Madame Verderlet, her face pale as a ghost, peered out at us from the chinks. She gave a gasp at sight of us, then came to the door and opened it, and immediately threw herself upon me, bursting into tears.
“They said you would not be back,” she wept, taking my hand and holding it fast. “They said you would remain with madame at St. Christophe until the trouble was over, many weeks perhaps, until the baby was born. Praise be to the Blessed Virgin and all the saints that you are safe.”
I went inside and looked about me. Save for her own kitchen the house had an empty feeling, stale and close, and by the look of the big living room—the master’s room—no one had occupied the chairs since we left.
“Who told you,” I asked, “that I should not be back?”
“Monsieur Michel and Monsieur François,” she answered. “The day you left they told me to keep the house barred and shuttered, for fear of brigands—luckily I had food enough, and could manage—and a few of the men were left to guard the foundry, but the women were given the same orders as myself, to stay within doors, or at most not to stir beyond the foundry gates.”
I glanced at Robert. He betrayed nothing in his face, but went about the room throwing open the shutters, letting light and air into the room.
“It’s over now,” he said. “The brigands have gone south. We shan’t be troubled again.”
I was far from reassured. Not that I any longer feared the brigands, but something worse, which I could not explain to Madame Verderlet.
“Where are Monsieur Michel and Monsieur François now?” I asked.
“I don’t know, mam’zelle Sophie,” she said. “They, and most of the men with them, have been on patrol in the forest the whole week. The guards here told me there had been much fighting at la Ferté-Bernard and further west at Bonnétable, and perhaps our men have been mixed up in it. Nobody knows.”
She was near to tears again, and I led her back into the kitchen to console her, and to start her in the preparation of a meal for us. Then with a heavy heart, remembering where duty lay and what my mother would have done, I went out across the foundry yard to the cottages to see the families.
One or two of them had witnessed our arrival, and now the
y came crowding out of their lodgings to greet me, most of them as bewildered and as fearful as Madame Verdelet had been. All I could do was to repeat Robert’s statement; the brigands had dispersed, the worst was over, and we had met with no trouble on the road from Le Mans.
“If the danger is over, why don’t our men return?” asked one of them. And this became the general cry. “Where are our men? What are they doing?” I could not answer them. I could only say they were still on patrol in the forest, or giving assistance, perhaps, to the Citizens’ Militia in la Ferté-Bernard, if there had indeed been fighting there.
Madame Delalande, wife of one of our top craftsmen, stood watching me with folded arms.
“Is it true,” she asked, “there have been two traitors killed by the people in Ballon?”
“I don’t know about traitors,” I answered carefully. “Two respectable citizens of Le Mans were murdered on Thursday. I can’t tell you more than that.”
“Grain hoarders,” she retorted, “members of the aristocracy, and serve them right. These are the men who have been starving us all winter. They deserve to be torn to pieces, the whole lot of them.”
This won approval from the rest of the women, and there was much murmuring and nodding of heads, and another of them called out that her husband had told her, before he went off on patrol, that there was a great plot among the aristocracy in the country to murder all the poor people. The rumor had started in Paris, and now it had spread to our district, and Monsieur Busson-Challoir and Monsieur Duval had gone off from the foundry to fight the aristocrats because of it.
“That’s right,” said Madame Delalande, “my André told me the same. And the King is on our side, and the duc d’Orléans, and they have promised that everything shall belong to the people in future, and nothing to the aristocrats. We can take their châteaux from them if we wish.”
This last sounded to me as unlikely as the arrival of six thousand brigands in our homes, or a general massacre of all the poor people in France. “We shall learn the truth of what is happening in Paris before long,” I said. “Meanwhile, whether the men are with us or not, our first thought should be for the harvest. The foundry acres are ready to cut, and we might make a start with it tomorrow. The more we gather in, the less likely we are to starve next winter.”
This met with general approval, and I was able to get back to the master’s house without further talk of fighting aristocrats or seizing châteaux, which, though it might have won approval from Edmé, sounded to me as impracticable and useless as if we set forth there and then to Versailles demanding bread from the Queen herself.
I found Robert talking with the guard, which had shown up at last from within the furnace house, where, I imagine, they had all been asleep. There were not more than a dozen of them, yawning and sheepish: Mouchard and Beriet the stokers, Duclos, one of the engravers who had been sick for some months anyway, Cazar, assistant to the flux-burner, and the rest ordinary workmen and apprentices.
The fire had been out since Michel gave the order, and no work had been done at the foundry. They had no idea where the masters had gone with the rest of the workmen. To la Ferté-Bernard or Authon. Whether to fight the brigands or the aristocrats they could not say. It was all the same anyway. Robert and I went into the house and sat down to the supper Madame Verdelet had prepared for us.
“Perhaps,” I said to my brother, “you have some idea what has happened to François and Michel?”
Robert was too busy eating to answer at once. When he did so he wore the quizzical, half-mocking expression I knew so well.
“There is no reason to believe that anything has happened to them,” he replied. “If they followed instructions they will have been on patrol in the forest, and kept away from the towns.”
“Instructions? Whose instructions?”
He had made a slip, and realized it. He shrugged his shoulders and went on eating.
“Advice was the word I should have used,” he said after a moment or two. “It was all decided upon before you and I left for St. Christophe. Any brigands advancing south from Paris could more easily be turned and scattered from the forests, where they would lose themselves, than upon the roads.”
“If there were in truth any brigands to scatter,” I answered.
He poured himself some wine and looked at me over the rim of his glass. “You heard the rumors like the rest of us,” he said. “Brigands were seen in Dreux, in Bellême, in Chartres. The least anyone could do was to alert the people of the countryside.”
I pushed my plate aside, sickened suddenly by food and all I had been through, with a vivid memory, for no good reason, of that screaming woman who had fallen beneath the horse outside the Abbey of St. Vincent. “You brought the rumor in the diligence from Paris,” I said, “and no one else.”
He wiped his mouth and stared at me. “The diligence I traveled in with Jacques was one of several,” he said. “There must have been a dozen or more taking other routes out of the capital on the Saturday morning when we left. When we came away from the terminus in the rue du Boulay there was talk of little else but brigands, and what we might meet with on the road.”
“I believe you,” I said. “And were there in those other diligences agents like yourself, paid either by Laclos for the duc d’Orléans, or by some other source, for the very purpose of spreading rumor, and so causing fear and panic through the country?”
My brother smiled. He took up the knife and fork he had laid upon his plate. “My little sister,” he said gently, “your travels have exhausted you, and you don’t know what you are saying. I suggest you go to bed and sleep it off.”
“Not until you tell me the truth,” I answered, “and by whose instructions François and Michel took the workmen into the forest.”
He did not answer. I watched him finish what he had on his plate, then we sat, the two of us, in silence, with no sound save the ticking of the old clock on the dresser, which took me back, as it always did, to childhood days at la Pierre, with my father at one end of the table, my mother at the other, my three brothers one side and Edmé and myself on the other, waiting for my father to give permission to speak.
“If I admitted to you, which I don’t,” he said at last, “that I had been paid to do just what you suggest—spread rumor to disrupt the countryside—you would never, for one moment, understand the reason for it. No woman would.”
“Go on,” I told him.
He got up and began to pace up and down the room, and it was as though something struggled within him for release that had been contained too long, since boyhood perhaps, and had never yet found freedom.
“All my life,” he said, “I have wanted to get out of here. Oh, not le Chesne-Bidault, not this particular glass-house—after all, I did as I pleased here for a time, when I ran the place for my father—but from the setting, from the confined space of the foundry, from any foundry. For one moment, in Rougemont, I thought I had succeeded—do you remember how you, and my father and mother, came to see us there? It was a proud day, nothing seemed beyond my grasp then; but the venture failed, as you know, and there have been other failures since. You will say, my father would have said, the fault is mine alone; but I’m not reconciled. Society failed me before I ever failed myself. Quévremont Delamotte at Villeneuve-St. Georges, Caumont, and others—the marquis de Vichy who promised me thirty thousand livres and withdrew his promise—those are the men who made success impossible, or have done so, until now.”
He paused in his stride, and stood facing me across the table.
“Now the moment to revenge myself has come,” he said. “No, revenge is too dramatic a word. Shall we say, meet life on equal terms at last? What has happened these past months, since May, and more especially these past two weeks, has overthrown society. I can’t tell you, nobody can tell you, what the future will bring, which way the wind will blow. But for an opportunist—and there are hundreds, thousands, like me—this is the hour. I don’t mind, none of us minds, what d
isruption may follow. If there is anything in this moment for us, then that is all that matters.”
Once again, as he had done before, during the drive to St. Christophe, he looked his forty years, yet something else besides; someone who was staking all on a final throw, with a total disregard for possible disaster. If he lost, he would take care that those about him lost as well.
“Did Cathie’s dying bring you down to this?” I asked him.
“Leave Cathie out of it,” he said. “Those memories are dead.”
Suddenly he looked lonely standing there, and vulnerable. My heart ached for him, and I was about to go to him, and put my arms about him, when he burst out laughing, resuming his old mask of gaiety.
“How serious we have become!” he exclaimed. “Instead of rejoicing that the world gets more exciting every day, which indeed it does, as the next few months will show. Go to bed, Sophie.”
It was a warning against emotion, and I understood. I kissed him and went upstairs to bed, and the next day we were both of us out early in the fields with the men and the families, Robert in his shirtsleeves like the rest, gleaning and stacking the wheat as though he had done nothing else his whole life long, laughing and joking, his usual airs and graces thrown aside. I found it hard to suit my mood to his, for there was still no sign of François or Michel, and the long day passed without a sight of a stranger, or any fresh rumor from beyond the forest.
I went early to bed that night, and Robert too, exhausted with his labors in the fields. I awoke in the small hours, between three and four, when a false dawn throws a pallid light into a room. Some sound must have stirred me, though what it was I could not tell, but instinct whispered “They are back.”
I got out of bed and went to Pierre’s old room, which looked out over the foundry yard by the furnace house, and they were all there, some thirty or forty of them, moving about like ghosts in that gray light, yet murmuring low, as if hushed on purpose, still mindful that they were a forest ambush on patrol. Now and again one laughed, above the rest, as boys would laugh who had played some hoax or other. They had the back door of the furnace house open and were passing in and out, bearing sacks on their shoulders.