Book I Chapter 12 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
DEPARTURE
Brigadier Humbert paced the terrace of Coëtlegon on the following morning before breakfast in company with Captain Champeaux of General Hoche's staff.
Looking up at one of the windows of the first floor, the Captain had indicated it by a jerk of the thumb, a laugh and a coarse jest. Humbert's angry rejoinder greeted Quentin, emerging at that moment from the château.
"God of God! It's no subject for jests. With Hoche playing Samson to Madame's Delilah, there's every chance of all our throats being cut. Ah, sacrébleu! Who will assure me that this talk of brigand activity is not a trick to keep us here whilst brigands are being assembled in strength to exterminate us? Before I'ld dally with a damned aristocrat, I'ld make sure that the door was safely barred. Those cursed woods on every side would mask an approach until the enemy is upon us. Post your pickets with care, and well advanced. At least let us provide against surprise. If we're attacked, we must entrench ourselves in the château and turn it into a fort."
The Captain went off to the stables, where the men were quartered and the horses stalled. Humbert turned, and came face to face with Quentin. He uttered a surly good morning, which was pleasantly returned.
"You are early abroad, sir," said Quentin.
"I lack the General's inducement to lie abed," was the ill-humoured answer. Then, with Republican directness, he brusquely questioned Quentin. "What exactly is your place in this household, citizen? Are you of the family?"
"Oh, no. A guest, like yourselves."
"But less richly entertained, perhaps, than some of us," grumbled the handsome brigadier.
"If it were not so I might quarrel with you for that sneer."
"I am fortunate," was the mocking rejoinder on which Humbert stalked away.
Quentin was left thoughtful. Persuaded that the story of the raided convoy was a fiction, he wondered whether Humbert's suspicions of treachery might be justified. But he dismissed the notion almost instantly. Not only did he call to mind the opinions the Vicomtesse had so freely expressed to him, but he accounted her the last woman in the world to invite the cruel vengeance that would fall upon Coëtlegon afterwards. If she desired to betray Hoche, there were safer ways of accomplishing it.
So he reached the settled conviction that the trap she had laid for Hoche was no more than a trap for his senses, so as to hold him there as a consoler of that loneliness of which she had made such bitter lament to Quentin.
For his past ungallant indifference he found himself punished now by a neglect that could scarcely have been more discourteous to a guest in his position. All those attentions she had lavished upon him were lavished now upon Hoche, and Quentin was left to solace himself by amusement at the jealous furies of Humbert.
There was a display of them on that first morning after breakfast, when the Vicomtesse was setting out with Hoche on one of those rides in which hitherto Quentin had been her companion. To Hoche, already mounted beside his lovely mistress, Humbert had come storming down the terrace steps with jingle of spurs and clatter of sabre.
"Whither do you ride, my General?"
"Why, through the lands of Coëtlegon, to take the morning air."
"You may take more than that. I'll beg you to remember, my General, that your life is of importance to the Republic."
"Oh, and to me." Hoche laughed. "Be tranquil. I am not likely to imperil it."
"It may be imperilled for you."
"By whom, sir?" the Vicomtesse demanded.
"What do I know by whom? On your own word the brigands infest the woods of the country-side, and you don't want for woods hereabouts. You'll take an escort, my General?"
"I think Madame la Vicomtesse will be my sufficient escort. I am sure that she will answer for my safety. Come, Madame." He touched his horse with the spur, and they were off, leaving a blasphemous Humbert to fume until their return. Nor thereafter, disgruntled though he remained, did he renew the scene on any of the abundant occasions they offered him for it. For in the succeeding days Hoche and the Vicomtesse became more and more inseparable, and their manner towards each other quite shamelessly proclaimed the relationship into which they had come. Whilst Humbert scowled and writhed, and Quentin was scornfully amused, Madame du Grégo appeared plaintively unconscious that a low-born Republican soldier had become the accepted lover of her noble daughter.
With Quentin's amusement, however, there was mingled a growing irritation at the delay in the fulfilment of his purpose, and four days after the coming of Hoche he ventured at last to break through the neglect to which the Vicomtesse had doomed him.
"Madame, my consciousness of this continued trespass upon your hospitality compels me to trouble you with a reminder of my object here."
Her countenance became overcast. "My friend, you can't imagine that I should wantonly detain you. Your affair has not been neglected. But, alas!--all Caradec's efforts have so far failed; and in the present state of things I see little chance of their succeeding. He has contrived to collect only a few hundred louis, which you may have if you will. But it is still less than half the sum required."
It was borne in upon him that she was not being sincere; that the will to serve him was no longer present. If his heart sank at this failure, his pride urged him to accept it stoically.
"Since you tell me that there is no chance of succeeding, nothing can justify my continuing here."
"Alas!" she sighed. "We have been honoured by your visit. We are desolated that it should prove fruitless to you."
He met these polite insincerities with insincerities equally polite, and passed to his preparations for departure on the morrow.
That evening the messenger sent out by Humbert returned, bringing an escort of two hundred and fifty dragoons. Thus Hoche, too, was deprived of all pretext for lingering another day in the seductive company of Louise du Grégo.
The only persons in good spirits at supper that night were the Marquise whose pride had been secretly outraged by her daughter's attachment to a sansculotte, however gallant of bearing, and Humbert, whose mixed disgust over the affair had been dominated by uneasiness lest, with or without the contrivance of the person he had come to call Madame la Sirène, Coëtlegon, in the very heart of the Chouan country, should come to prove their death-trap. He marked his relief by a noisy humour that jarred upon the silence of the others.
Next morning the last farewells were spoken on the terrace, whilst the troop paraded immediately below. The Marquise did not appear. She left to her daughter the task of speeding the guests.
For Quentin, who had begged Hoche's leave to ride with the troop as far as their ways lay together, the Vicomtesse had little to say in answer to his renewed thanks for the sterile hospitality dispensed him. All her thoughts were visibly for Hoche.
She wore upon her all the signs of a sleepless night, with dark stains about eyes that had manifestly wept. At the last moment, when Quentin was already in the saddle, she delayed the departing General, and drew him away along the terrace, out of earshot.
Side by side they paced to the terrace's end, and paused there a long while in earnest talk, during which she seemed to sway towards him. At last they came slowly back. At the head of the steps, Hoche, bare-headed, his plumed hat tucked under his arm, bowed down from his stately height over her hands, both of which he was grasping, and both of which he kissed. Then briskly he came down to the horse that a trooper held for him, mounted, and made a sign to the officer commanding the dragoons.
There were sharp orders, a wheeling movement of horses, with clink and clank of accoutrements and stamping hooves, and they were in march, which almost immediately quickened to a trot.
The General, in the rear with his staff about him, turned again and yet again to raise his hat and to receive the last waved salutation of the white figure that remained at the balustrade until distance made an end.
Quentin conceived this to be the definite close of a love story, not only because he remembered the Vicomte de Bellanger in London, but also because Hoche had lately married a young wife, to whom Humbert accounted him deeply attached. If the wanton aristocrat, so hungry for consolation in her semi-widowed loneliness, had seduced the young Republican from his married loyalty, at least, thought Quentin, it was an aberration no more than temporary, to which there could be no sequel.
He was to discover before a year was out how egregiously rash was this conclusion, and how unpredictably his own destiny was to be shaped by the sequel when it came.
Hoche rode in silence, aloof, sunk in thought from which he scarcely roused himself when somewhere about midway between Josselin and Ploermel there was an alarm.
Their road skirted a wood at the time, and a considerable body of men moving carelessly within it betrayed its presence to an experienced under-officer from Port Malo, who passed word of it to the commandant.
The troop was halted, and wheeled to face a possible attack. Carbines were unslung, and held at the ready. Thus they waited, whilst within the wood all became still again.
Humbert spurred forward, along the front of the line, indifferent to the fire that he might draw. He went to urge the commandant to send in half his troop to clear the wood. But the commandant, with experience of Chouan methods, urged sound reasons against any such blind adventure. Let the brigands, if they so choose, first betray their exact whereabouts by opening fire. Since to do so they must approach the wood's edge, they would then be at the mercy of a swift charge before they could retreat into the depths again. There it would be highly imprudent to follow them.
Hoche roused himself, and with contemptuous impatience gave the order to ride on, and thus, without incident, they came into Ploermel.
Here Quentin, with courteous words of leave-taking to Hoche and the members of his staff, detached himself from the troop, which rode on through the town without pausing.