Book III Chapter 7 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
THE DUPES
Cool and trim, a muslin fichu above her aproned petticoat, Germaine came from her labours of mercy with the wounded who lay in rows upon the straw that had been carried into the handsome chambers of Coëtlegon.
Bruised in body and spirit, Quentin surveyed her, sad-eyed. "Can you minister to souls as well, Germaine?"
"To yours at need, I hope. I should not be the wife for you if I could not." Her glance was direct and frank, her tender, generous lips were gently smiling.
"I should not be the husband for you were I not conscious of my need of you." He sighed. "This is an evil hour." Briefly he told her of Bellanger's decision. "Begun by deliberate malice, this betrayal is now to be consummated by sheer, obstinate folly. Whether he's still deceived and deluded by that woman who is selling us, I don't know. But the fool is marching us away from the clear duty we were set when we left Quiberon."
"Quentin, this is all impossible. The appearances are deluding you. I can't, I'll not believe this of Louise." She was so warm in defence of her friend that once again he was driven to marshal his arguments.
Still they did not convince her. "But all is surmise. It must be. There can be no proof of any of it."
"Proof enough. She is Hoche's faithful ally."
"That is mad. Hoche? A sansculotte! The son of a groom!"
"And the lover of the Marquise du Grégo, Vicomtesse Bellanger. I am no evil tongue, Germaine, to stain a woman's fame for the nasty joy of it." He told her what he knew as a witness, and left her white and shaken.
"Mon Dieu! The shame of it. A groom's son; a champion of the canaille."
"Oh, but a pretty enough fellow to please a more fastidious woman than the Grégo. A noble-looking animal, and laurel crowned."
"Don't, Quentin! Don't. It is all too vile. You make me ashamed; for if this is true, then we have profited by this vileness. Oh yes. It explains a mystery. That is what has made it possible for Louise to offer us this secure shelter from pursuit." Persuaded by that glaring fact, so suddenly perceived, she marvelled that any could resist persuasion. "But isn't that enough to bring the Vicomte to reason?"
"Evidently not. I have been plain enough with him. In the interests of the cause I have spared him little. It has merely made me another enemy. Merely stiffened him in his mulish obstinacy. So, in spite of all, we march on this fool's errand; and God alone knows what will happen at Quiberon on Friday if we fail, as seems now inevitable, to be at our post."
To comfort his distress she argued that to miss a victory was not necessarily to sustain a defeat. She reminded him that once the men at Coëtlegon were reunited with those who had followed Constant, they would be in strength to make themselves felt wherever needed. These were but the arguments that had opposed him in the council. That he permitted himself to take heart from them now serves to show how the identity of an advocate may bear upon a plea.
"That, indeed," he admitted, "is all that can be said for what we do. Be it as it may, I have done all that was possible to a man in my place."
"More," she assured him. "Much more. But for you the Royalist hopes would have been wrecked at La Prevalaye. The King shall come to know that he has had no more faithful servant than you. You," she rallied him, "who profess yourself without sentimental attachment to his cause."
"That has been changed. Because I love you, I must love where you love."
"As I must; and, therefore, hate where you hate. The shelter of Coëtlegon begins to stifle me. We must go. I must persuade my aunt to leave at once."
This was to make him regret his frankness. "To go whither?" he asked her.
Her eyes widened in sudden misgiving. Then, "Back to Grands Chesnes, I suppose," she said, but without conviction.
"You know that cannot be. Here in Madame de Bellanger's protection you are safe. Will you cast yourself into danger because she is what she is? There is no reason in that. Remain here until this time of trouble ends."
"Knowing what I know? Despising her as I must? Practising a shameful opportunism?"
"There is no shame in using evil for purposes of good. Take advantage of that which it is beyond your power to mend or alter. Take advantage of it for my sake. I must know you safe. Do not add uncertainty and fear for you to what else my mind must bear."
The disdain in which she had spoken fell from her. Her lip trembled. "You'll never ask me to do anything more hateful Quentin."
"I shall never, I hope, ask you to do anything hateful once this nightmare is at an end."
Across the hall Madame de Chesnières charged down upon the corner which they occupied. Her pale eyes were magnified behind the lorgnettes through which she surveyed them; her lipless mouth was tight.
"Ah, Monsieur de Morlaix!" Whether this was greeting, comment or dismissal none could have told. "Germaine, I have been seeking you everywhere. I shall go mad, I think. After all that I have suffered, after all the terrors of this dreadful day, I am deprived of my room, asked to share a cupboard in the attic with Madame du Grégo and Madame du Parc. It will kill me. A woman of my years!"
"Your room will have been taken for the wounded," Germaine patiently explained. "There are so many of them. Poor unfortunates. And they suffer so."
"Yes. Yes. But I? Do I not suffer? Is there to be no consideration ever for me?"
"It's an inconsiderate world, Madame," said Quentin, bowing, and so departed.
She stared after him through her levelled lorgnettes. "Do you suppose, Germaine, he meant to be impertinent? I often suspect it in that young man. I never like the friends you choose. At your age mine were chosen for me. Alas! This Revolution has destroyed all the decencies of life. Where will it all end? I warn you that I cannot endure much more. I say so frankly. I wish that we had never left England. Better its fogs and mud and crudities than the life that we lead here. France is not fit for gentlefolk. Constant must arrange for our return to London. And now I hear these soldiers will be leaving us to-morrow. We shall be defenceless then; at the mercy of the canaille. It is all intolerable." She was in tears.
"The Republicans did not trouble us before the Chouans came. Why should we be troubled when they're gone?" Germaine spoke with a tinge of bitterness that went unnoticed.
"But how can we stay here, in a house that has become a hospital?"
"We can tend those who remain, Madame, and pray for the safety of those who go to fight our battles."
Those prayers were to be needed by the weary men who set out at noon upon the morrow. Scarcely rested from the sad labours of the night, following upon their day of battle, it was demanded of them that they march. But for the spur of hunger and the knowledge that Coëtlegon was a platter they had licked clean already, it is unlikely that any power would have moved them. Their deceptively ready obedience was due to the urgency of finding food.
Over ten miles of empty moorland, in the torrid July heat, they dragged themselves to Josselin, leaving a trail of discarded red coats and stout English shoes to mark their passage.
Upon Josselin they came down late in the afternoon like a swarm of locusts. The place received them with apathy. It had undergone occupation, now by one, now by the other army in the course of this internecine war. It had learnt the dismal lesson that the line of least resistance was the line of least suffering.
The famished Chouans fed greedily, drank copiously, and relaxing in repletion and drunkenness, refused to budge another yard that day. Thus perished the last hope of those few who still remembered to what they were engaged.
And so the dawn of the 16th, which should have been so fateful to the Royalist fortunes, saw these men, whose post was on Hoche's rear, awakening from their drunken slumbers forty miles and more from the scene of action.
Quentin watching the daybreak from a window of the house in which he was lodged with Cadoudal, heard in imagination the guns that would be opening Puisaye's confident attack upon Ste. Barbe, beheld in imagination the ebbing of that high confidence, the angry increase of doubt, the despairing realization that Tinténiac's division was not at the post of duty, and, finally, the suspension of operations, and the mortified retreat. Or, it was possible that Puisaye persisted, especially if the expedition under Sombreuil had arrived and that thus reinforced he was able to defeat Hoche, and open the way into friendly Brittany. This, however, was too desperate a hope to mitigate his dejection.
The morning was well advanced before an orderly officer from Bellanger came to require Cadoudal to sound the assembly, and it was almost noon before they trailed out of Josselin, to resume the march upon Rédon, a march now purposeless and futile.
Progress was slow. The Chouans were sullen and depressed, as if sensing the uncertainty of their leaders, asking themselves to what purpose were they being trailed hither and thither in this fashion. Only the activity of their three chiefs, Cadoudal, St. Regent and Guillemot, prevented a mutiny that would probably have begun in a massacre of the Loyal Émigrant. Instead the Chouans avenged themselves by being in their turn derisory of their supercilious associates. Lacking the stout resilience of the peasants and the hardening which in these guerrilla years they had undergone, the émigrés began to show signs of exhaustion at the end of a few miles, and to retard the progress of the whole. The Chouans jeered at them for women who should have stayed at the spinning-wheel, and left soldiering to men.
Quentin and the other officers, who were now mounted, rode to and fro along the struggling ranks, labouring to prevent open strife from embittering further the misery of that march.
At Malestroit, where they paused to forage, La Marche declared roundly to Bellanger that the Loyal Émigrant could go no farther that day.
"What then is to be done? What is to be done?" Bellanger looked at those who were with him.
"It is of no consequence," Quentin sourly told him.
"How? Of no consequence?"
"Nothing that you may do now can be worse than what you've done."
"You are insolent. Insubordinate. I warn you that I will not suffer much more of it."
"That also is of no consequence."
"Very well, sir. It is very well. We shall see. Meanwhile, Captain de La Marche, if you are satisfied that the men of the Loyal Émigrant are too weary to go farther, you may quarter them here. I leave you in charge of the company. You will follow to Rédon by way of Peillac as soon as you are able. Cadoudal, you will appoint a half-dozen men you can trust to remain and act as guides."
Cadoudal gave an ill-humoured assent, and Bellanger disdained to return to the matter of Quentin's insubordination.
The remainder being refreshed, the march was resumed, and with a half-dozen officers of the Loyal Émigrant who refused to be left behind, they came in the summer dusk to the uncouth village of Peillac, where they devoured bread and meat and guzzled the wine and cider of the villagers with the careless vigour of famished men. There, within a dozen miles of Rédon, they sought news of Monsieur de Charette and his Vendeans; but sought it in vain. At first the villagers had spoken of an army moving in the district, which had passed through Peillac two days ago, but it soon became plain that this was the Chouan force under Constant de Chesnières. And so at long last, Bellanger's obstinate belief in the Vendeans began to break down.
"If you should prove to have been right, Monsieur de Morlaix?" he asked in his growing dismay.
"None will forgive you," Quentin assured him.
"But the information was so precise."
Quentin was in no mood for mercy. "So were the orders under which we should have been at Plouharnel this morning."
"Name of God! Why harp on that?"
"I understood you to ask my opinion."
"That is not an opinion. It is a reproach; an impertinence." His glance appealed for support to La Houssaye, who sat with them in the mean room of Peillac's best house. La Houssaye did not respond at all in the manner that was desired. He wagged his big head in sorrow. "It begins to appear that we have been grievously misled. It would certainly have been wiser to have kept to the orders. Then none could have blamed you, whatever happened."
This was too much for Bellanger. After an amazed pause he bounded up. "And that is all you have to say to me! God of God! After urging me--you and La Marche--to decide upon this step."
"By your leave, Vicomte. We did not urge it. We deferred to your plain wishes."
"Do you think that subtlety will excuse you?"
La Houssaye bridled. "I am not subtle, and I need no excuse. I was not in command."
"I see. I see." Bellanger strode furiously about the narrow room. "I am to be flung to the wolves, am I? The responsibility was all mine, only mine, was it?"
"So I understood you to say, Monsieur, at Coëtlegon."
Cadoudal got heavily to his feet. "This does not concern me. And I hate all quarrels but my own. Besides, I'm sick of the sound of your voices. I'll leave you, gentlemen, to your altercation."
He stamped out of the hovel.
"You do not want me either," said Quentin. "And I am much of his mind." And he, too, went out.
In the heat of his argument with La Houssaye, Bellanger scarcely heeded their departure.
So far, however, the Vicomte perceived only the shadow of the trouble that was in store for him. The substance of it overtook him on the following morning, whilst they were breaking their fast before taking the road again. He sat with La Houssaye and Quentin over a frugal meal that was being consumed in silence. They were not loving one another that morning.
To enliven their dullness the door was suddenly flung wide, and Constant de Chesnières stood on the threshold, looking in his swarthiness and wrath like an incarnation of the spirit of evil.
"Why are you here, you fools?" was his greeting.
Bellanger sprang up in amazement. "Constant!" he cried. "And the Vendeans?"
"The Vendeans?" Constant laughed unpleasantly. He came forward, leaving the door wide. "They're south of the Loire, I suppose. A hundred miles or more away."
"You mean that they retired from Rédon?"
"I mean that they were never there. Faith, Monsieur de Morlaix, you have been proved right." He made the acknowledgment in bitterness, with a curling lip. "We have been cheated by a foul piece of treachery. It aimed at dividing our forces, so that Grouchy might deal with us separately."
Bellanger perceived here a spirit whose arrogance demanded a curb. He mantled himself in his loftiest manner. "It is fortunate that your untimely heroics did not attract more men to join you in mutiny, or else we should have been in poor case to give Grouchy the warm welcome he received from us."
For a spell Constant glared, speechless. Then his words came in a foaming spate; and the first of them betrayed the panic that was at the root of his wrath. "God's Blood! I may be broke for this, or shot as Tinténiac threatened me. For I come back worse than if I had been defeated. My men have deserted. In disgust of the deceit that victimized us, they've just melted away: gone back to their harvests or to the devil. I have not three hundred left of the three thousand that followed me from Coëtlegon; and these are homeless bandit rogues who don't care where they go so long as they can plunder. That gives you the measure of my case. But, as I live, at least I had looked to you to stand by me now, as you stood by me when I proposed to go to the aid of those we were falsely told lay at Grouchy's mercy."
"I stood by you?" Bellanger was flushed. "Monsieur, I find myself with enough to answer for without that."
"Would you have the audacity to deny it? And before these gentlemen who heard you? Here's baseness."
"Monsieur!"
"Don't mouth at me, Bellanger." Constant's livid face was convulsed with passion. He flung about the room, his breathing noisy. "What the devil are you, then? Are you merely a fool? Noisy as a drum and just as empty of all but wind? Or are you the partner in treachery of your strumpet wife?"
Quentin sucked in his breath. Constant had discovered more, it seemed, at Rédon than the absence of Charette.
"My God, Chesnières, you are out of yourself," La Houssaye protested, shocked. "These words!"
"Let that silly cuckold answer them."
"Oh, I shall answer you." Even in that dreadful moment, Bellanger contrived to retain something of his histrionic manner. His face might be the colour of clay, but with head thrown back, his dark, velvety eyes under frowning brows were steady. "You will realize, gentlemen, that for abuse so foul there is no answer in words. Monsieur de La Houssaye, have the complacency to perceive that I need a friend."
Quentin rose and stood suddenly forward. "Messieurs, it is not right, indeed most wrong, that you should engage in such a quarrel."
Constant turned the blast of his wrath upon him. "Ha! And now we're to have Monsieur de Carabas upon the code of honour. It's natural you should stand by this antlered imbecile. Birds of a feather. Impostors both. In his need of a friend I wonder he should not have called upon you."
Quentin added to that madman's fury by a look of commiseration. "For so poor a swordsman, sir, you have too rich a tongue."
"I'm swordsman enough to meet a man who cannot answer me save with the sword."
"Rant your fill," said Bellanger. "Rant your fill. The reckoning follows."
"Bah! You shelter your villainy and your cuckoldhood in that. You cannot even deny it."
"Deny what, sir, in God's name?"
"That your wife, the mistress of this Hoche, a stableman turned general, spread this snare for us so as to wreck the purpose for which we were sent from Quiberon. If you deny it I shall have the charity to believe that at least you are not her partner, but her victim like the rest of us."
"There are things, sir, that dignity does not permit one to deny."
"A cuckold's dignity! God save us!"
"Sortons," said Bellanger. "Let us go."
But Quentin intervened again. "Before you do this, Monsieur de Bellanger, you must know the quarrel you engage in. You are both dupes of this woman's treachery, and of the two it is you, Monsieur de Bellanger, who are doubly betrayed. How, then, can this be a cause of quarrel between you?"
The three of them were staring at him in different degrees of appalled surprise. "It seems, then," said Bellanger, at last, "that I am to have two of you on my hands."
Quentin shook his head. "There are several things for which I could kill you, Monsieur de Bellanger. But because your wife betrays you is not one of them. I will not meet you on such grounds."
"On what grounds, then?"
"On none. I am in no need to prove my courage, and I should prove it as little by killing you as you will prove your wife's chastity by meeting Monsieur de Chesnières. Let us be serious."
"You conceive that hitherto we have jested?"
"Carry your minds back to the council we held at Coëtlegon. I gave you then every hint I could that we were being betrayed. You derided me when I said that you would find the proof at Rédon, when I insisted that the Vendeans did not exist. You have found the proof, I think."
"Proof of what?" Bellanger retorted. "That my wife, herself, was duped if you will; but no proof that she duped us."
"You forget the groom who brought the appeal for help. When I told you what I knew, you refused to investigate."
"Of course he would," sneered Constant, "and the motive's plain." Thus in his blind rage he smote at reason as it began feebly to raise its head.
Bellanger vowed that he would hear no more, and Quentin abandoned the effort to stem the evil course of things.
Outside they found the little square thronged and noisy. The three hundred who had come back with Constant were hemmed in by a seething, questioning mob.
Cadoudal, sweating profusely in the heat, and mopping himself, met them almost on the doorstep.
"A fine consummation, sirs," he mocked. "To hold my men together after this will be like holding water in my two hands. Devil take me! It would have been better for all of us had you remained in England."
Quentin drew him aside, and in a dozen words told him what was afoot. He was not sympathetic.
"Excellent," he said. "Let them cut each other's throat by all means. A pity they did not begin sooner."
Constant had found a friend in a Monsieur de Lantivy, of the Loyal Émigrant, and with Cadoudal clinging to Quentin, so as to see the sport, as he expressed it, the little group slipped out of the village unobserved. They found a quiet spot in a meadow watered by a brook that flowed to join the Arz. There in shirt and breeches, in blazing sunshine under the summer sky that was a dome of polished steel, the two men, whose folly was chiefly responsible for the miscarriage of the expedition, faced each other sword in hand.
It was a short engagement, surprising to Quentin in its result. Men of equal height and reach and vigour, Constant was cramped by natural clumsiness, and Bellanger incomparably the better swordsman. Yet whether his rage--a rage that may have been mingled with tormenting doubts--obscured his mind and wove a trammel for his limbs, or whether a streak of cowardice under all his bombast now made him falter, his blundering opponent ran him through within a few moments of engaging.
Thus, in the flower of his age, that rash, foolish man perished in defence of the honour of a faithless woman whose name was destined soon to become a bywordfor harlotry.