Book III Chapter 9 The Marquis of Carabas by Rafael Sabatini
THE COURT MARTIAL
Quentin sought Constant de Chesnières that same evening with the news of Madame de Chesnières' safety. He was moved by an impulse of kindliness to allay anxieties which he conceived must exist, and to bear tidings that might offer some mitigation of the mourning into which news of his brother's death must have plunged Constant.
Constant was displaying both mentally and physically a steady deterioration since the return to Coëtlegon. Brooding upon the disaster to which his folly had so largely contributed, aimless, without plans for the future or the will to form any, he was drinking heavily, and as a consequence, grew daily more overbearing and quarrelsome.
He scowled upon Quentin's approach, and scowling, interrupted him at the very outset. "You have, then, the presumption to correspond with my cousin?"
"We can discuss my presumptions afterwards, if you wish. Let my news come first. It concerns Madame your mother."
They were alone together in that library which had already been the stage of some fateful scenes, a room now dusty and disordered from the neglect and carelessness of its inquilines of these past weeks. The shards of a marble, knocked from its pedestal some days ago, lay where they had fallen on the Aubusson carpet that was stained with muddy footprints. A broken chair, in brocade and gilded wood, of the days of the Fifteenth Louis, hung in drunken collapse bereft of a leg. Books taken from their shelves to beguile the tedium of the émigrés lay tumbled where they had been cast by their careless readers. It was a room that presented an epitome of the state of the party of those who had confectioned it. Its erstwhile gracious fastidious dignity had succumbed to the corruptive forces of misfortune.
Monsieur de Chesnières, himself, had undergone in his own person some similar dilapidations. Dishevelled, carelessly clad, his long, yellow, satin waistcoat unbuttoned and wine-stained, his neckcloth soiled and crumpled, the big swarthy man presented a coarse, debauched appearance.
He leaned against the heavy writing-table, his full, malevolent eyes considering the trim, spare figure before him.
"How does Madame my mother concern you?"
"She does not. But I conceive that she may be of some concern to you." And briskly, so as to be the sooner done, he conveyed his news.
The momentary relief on Constant's face was presently followed by a sneer.
"We are fallen so low, then, as to be in the debt of a harlot for our lives."
"Your mother's safety should be of more importance than the means by which she procures it."
"Oh! You are to instruct me?" There was an ominous lift of the thick, black brows. "You would not perceive the presumption. It's no matter. I am obliged to you, sir, for the tidings, although there may be much that does not commend them."
Quentin smiled. "There is also so much about me that does not commend itself, that you will be relieved to hear that I am leaving Coëtlegon to-night."
Constant's eyes opened in surprise, then gradually their expression became dark with malevolence. "By whose leave, sir?"
"Leave! Is leave still necessary?"
"Do you pretend to forget that I command here?"
There was in this no new note to take Quentin by surprise. For days past Constant had been ranting on the subject of his authority, and becoming the more insistent upon it in a measure as it dwindled by the natural processes of disruption.
"That," said Quentin, placidly, "is merely tiresome. What remains to command? A pack of fugitives?"
"You choose to be offensive. It will not serve. You do not help yourself."
Seeing no profit in pursuing the discussion, Quentin shrugged, turned, and walked out of the room. But Constant went after him, as if in pursuit of a prey about to escape, and overtaking him just beyond the door, laid an arresting hand upon his shoulder.
A group of officers lounged dismally in talk at the far end of the hall. Three or four convalescents made another group on a bench near the main doors.
"I will remind you," Constant was shouting, "that insubordination in a soldier is a serious offence."
But Quentin mocked him. "Faith! I did not suspect that you realized it. Shall we be sensible?" He shook the hand from his shoulder. "This wreckage of what was once an army is daily going to pieces. It is an army no longer, the sauve qui peut has sounded, and it is idle to pretend that any authority remains."
"You will not find it idle. I will tolerate neither desertion nor insubordination."
"Bah! You want to laugh."
"By God! Must I order your arrest to show you that I'm serious?"
Quentin looked at him for a silent moment, steadily meeting the malevolence of his glance. "Please be frank with me. What is the purpose of this comedy?"
"You'll find it no comedy, you impostor; you bastard!"
For just one second, Quentin, who took such pride in his ability to maintain calm under any provocation, completely lost control of himself. With the next heart-beat he recovered it. But by then the mischief was done. In that one blind, volcanic second, he had struck so hard a blow across Constant's face that, taken unawares and perhaps off his balance, Constant had gone over backwards, and lay stretched upon the floor.
Quentin stood over him, a smile on his white face. "It was overdue," he said. "I have been curbing myself ever since I met you, Monsieur de Chesnières. But now that it has happened, I think that we shall have to go through with it."
He had not heeded the quick approaching steps behind him, bringing the startled officers at speed from the far side of the hall.
"Yes." Constant was gathering himself together. His tone was a snarl. "You will certainly have to go through with it." He stood up, displaying in a bruised countenance eyes of evil, mocking exultation that alone might have warned Quentin of what was about to follow. He addressed the officers. "Messieurs, you arrive most opportunely. Monsieur de La Marche, be good enough to place Monsieur de Morlaix under arrest."
La Marche, who held Quentin in no affection, was promptly obedient.
"Your sword, sir."
Quentin stepped back, his face momentarily blank. "Arrest me?" Then he laughed. "This is fantastic. My quarrel with Monsieur de Chesnières is not only a personal affair, it is an old one."
"A personal affair?" Above the eyes, whose exultation was maintained, the heavy brows were raised. "I should be happy so to regard it. But that would make an end to all discipline. You'll not be ignorant of the consequences of striking a superior officer. There is no lack of witnesses. So the matter need not keep us long."
Quentin's hand went by instinct to his sword. Instantly La Marche and another officer, named du Cressol, laid hands upon him. Feeling himself firmly held, he wasted no strength in a futile struggle. Whilst these two retained their grasp, a third came to unbuckle his belt, and remove it with his sword.
Constant spoke softly. "You have long curbed yourself, you say. So have I, with the patience of one who knew that sooner or later your insolence would overreach itself."
"And," added Quentin, "with the guile of the coward who pursues through agents the gratification of his private rancour."
Constant ignored the taunt. "If you will come with me, messieurs, we will deal with this at once."
He turned, re-entered the library, and went slowly to take his stand beside the writing-table, whilst the others followed with Quentin in their hostile midst. There were six of them in all, besides Constant, himself: La Marche, La Houssaye, Dumanoir, that elderly warrior, Major de Maisonfort, Guernissac and a youngster of subaltern rank.
"There are enough of us for a court martial," Constant announced, at which Quentin laughed. "And since all of you were witnesses of the assault with which I have to charge the prisoner, the matter is simple. If you will preside, Monsieur de La Houssaye, we will dispose of it without waste of time."
Quentin's air remained one of scornful amusement, although he had by now no illusions on the score of the trap into which he had stepped. Himself, he had supplied Constant with the means to settle the old account between them. He realized, too, his danger from the general hostility of these officers who were to form this mock court martial, and do the will of this man who had pursued him with an enmity as relentless as it had been sly. Yet, having broken out of other snares as deadly that Constant had laid for him, he could not yet believe that he would not break out of this one.
Looking keenly about him in the silence that followed Constant's invitation to La Houssaye, he perceived that, saving perhaps La Marche and Guernissac, these men were actually startled by the service required of them. Whatever their hostility to Quentin, the code by which they governed their lives made them regard this primarily as an affair between gentlemen, for the settlement of which a gentleman should scorn to make use of his position, especially when that position was as indefinite as Constant's had been rendered by the events.
La Houssaye expressed more than his own stiff mind when after a pause he asked: "Do I understand, Monsieur de Chesnières, that you make the blow that was struck a matter for a court martial?"
Constant frowned upon him. "I thought I made it clear."
The little man's big face had lengthened. He still hesitated. "Permit me to ask, Monsieur, the nature of the quarrel in which he struck you."
"What has that to do with it?"
"Something, I think. If the blow was struck in the course of a quarrel on personal grounds . . ."
He was harshly interrupted. "I do not quarrel with my subordinates, sir. But since you ask, I must tell you that the matter was nowise personal. Monsieur de Morlaix was insubordinate. He had announced to me his intention to depart from Coëtlegon. When I refused him leave, and warned him that if he dared to do without it, I should hold him guilty of desertion, he aggravated his mutinous conduct by striking me as you all saw."
"Ah!" La Houssaye inclined his head. "In that case I am at your orders." He went to take his seat at the writing-table, and signed to the officers present to dispose themselves about him.
Dumanoir alone remained in charge of the prisoner.
Then Quentin, who remained outwardly composed, put a question to the President. "In this farcical trial that you propose to hold, am I to have a friend? It is usual, I think."
"Certainly. You may name any one of these gentlemen to act for you."
"I should prefer the choice to be less circumscribed. I am within my rights, I believe. I do not recall that I have found any of these gentlemen too friendly."
"You may name anyone you choose," La Houssaye conceded.
"I thank you, sir. Perhaps some gentleman will do me the kindness to find St. Regent and bring him here."
Constant reared his head as if he had been struck. "St. Regent? A peasant! That is inadmissible. You will confine yourself to your brother-officers of the Loyal Émigrant."
"I mistrust their brotherliness," said Quentin placidly. "By what rule of procedure must I confine my choice to them?"
Under his calm, hard eyes the President shifted uncomfortably. He looked at Constant, standing massively beside him.
"If the prisoner insists, we can hardly refuse. But I trust that he will not. He should have the grace to recognize that the Sieur St. Regent, a Chouan, a peasant, is hardly . . . ah . . . fitted to represent a gentleman born before a tribunal of his peers."
"Of course not," said Constant.
"A gentleman born, Monsieur Le President. I thank you for the description. But it was precisely for denying me that estate that I knocked Monsieur de Chesnières down, as any of you would have done in my place."
"Ah, bah!" Constant exclaimed in angry impatience. "What need for a friend at all, in so plain a case? What advocacy can possibly avail against that blow, witnessed and now admitted? This comedian merely wastes our time. Let us get on."
"Here's an indecent haste to get me before a firing-party."
Under the dominance of Constant, La Houssaye gravely shook his head. "Indeed, sir, there is little to be tried, unless you should deny the remainder of the charge as formulated by our commander: that you proposed to depart, and were insubordinate when denied your leave."
"If," said Quentin, "we are not to observe the ordinary forms of procedure, then this ceases to be a trial, and becomes a mere discussion. Speaking, then, not as an accused, but as one officer to another, Monsieur de La Houssaye, it is the fact that I did Monsieur de Chesnières the civility to inform him of my intention to leave Coëtlegon to-night with St. Regent's contingent."
"St. Regent's contingent?" cried Constant. "You said nothing of that."
"True. I left it for St. Regent himself, to tell you or not, as he chose. I confined myself to my own affairs."
"You admit that when Monsieur de Chesnières refused you leave, you struck him?" asked La Houssaye.
"When he refused. But not because he refused. Because of the offensive terms in which he uttered the refusal."
Now this gathering, as was to be seen, had been oddly and unpleasantly stirred by the intimation that St. Regent was about to withdraw a body of men which the émigrés had come to regard as their main shield and protection. The two hundred men remaining them would feel helpless indeed if deprived of the support of the hundred Chouans with St. Regent. Moreover, the peculiar tactics of the Chouans and their peculiar knowledge of the country and its fastnesses were things upon which the émigrés must count in a last extremity. The general indignation aroused by that threat of desertion was voiced by Guernissac.
"No terms, sir, could be too offensive. You and St. Regent are creatures both of that traitor Puisaye, and worthy of him." With mounting fury the Gascon raged on: "Rats that desert a doomed ship. Like Puisaye at Quiberon, so you and your brigand associate here make off to safety, leaving those you have betrayed to shift for themselves."
It was a speech to whip up the passions of these men, and as Quentin looked round, his lip curving in scorn, he perceived the effect it took.
"Those we betrayed? Do you even know what you are saying? How have we betrayed them?"
Guernissac replied with violence. "You betrayed them into following you, you and Cadoudal and this St. Regent and the rest of Puisaye's jackals." La Marche took up that infamous perversion of the facts, the more eagerly perhaps because he perceived in it a shield for himself and his associates.
"We were removed from Quiberon, so that the Royalist forces might be weakened by being divided. That is the betrayal of which we are the victims, we and those others who remained to fall at Quiberon or were massacred in Vannes, whilst Puisaye has fled to England to receive his Judas fee, his price for all the rich French blood that has been spilled."
Thus the passion stirred by Guernissac spread like a contagion through those present. One after another in varying terms of invective they repeated the substance of that accusation, which originally had been the Gascon's, so that in a moment the very ground of the trial seemed to have shifted. Only La Houssaye held judicially aloof. He let the storm rage on, waiting patiently until it should have spent itself.
Constant sat tight-lipped, content that the venom of the men who formed this haphazard court should ask nothing better than to do his will.
At last, a pause enabled Quentin to make some answer.
"Faith, sirs, this travesty of a tribunal leaves me wondering whether it claims to sit in judgment upon me, or upon the gentlemen who supplied you with the very coats you are wearing."
That earned him a fresh onslaught, dominated by the elderly Maisonfort.
"Do you rally us with that? Is it because you are so much in that scoundrel Puisaye's secrets that you know the price he has had from that perfidious assassin Pitt to lead us to destruction?"
"The man is half an Englishman himself," said someone with the air of advancing a final proof against him.
"Of your charity, sirs," Quentin protested. "One charge at a time. At least make up your minds for what offence you are trying me. Is it for being half English, for having been associated with Monsieur de Puisaye, or for having struck the foul-mouthed poltroon who commands you?"
"You are to answer for all," raged the truculent Guernissac.
La Houssaye beat upon the table in a belated attempt to restore some decency. "Messieurs! Messieurs! We cannot now concern ourselves with matters on which there is no evidence before us."
But Guernissac was not so easily silenced on the subject of his obsession. "Do we lack evidence that Puisaye has sold us or that he was in the pay of England?"
"But, sir, we are not in judgment upon Puisaye. Whatever evidence we possess against him, is not evidence against the prisoner."
"Does this man's close connection with Puisaye count for nothing, his and his Chouan associates, this fellow St. Regent who now proposes to desert us?"
La Houssaye began to show signs of distraction. "This way, we shall never reach conclusion. We are here to deal with a charge of insubordination and violence."
"Then why the devil don't you?" cried La Marche. "What need to waste more time? Send him before a platoon, and have done."
With political passions at boiling-point, the assent to this was stormily general.
"If you value your own skins, sirs," said Quentin gently, "you'll commit no such rashness. My fellow-traitor St. Regent and his Chouans might ask an unpleasant account of you for my assassination."
"Do you reckon upon that?" Constant asked him, coldly.
La Houssaye took it up. "Are you threatening a wholesale mutiny so as to deter us? This, sir, is an aggravation of your offence. We are not to be intimidated in the execution of a clear duty."
"Bear with him," mocked Constant. "It is the only defence he can offer."
Under Quentin's cool appearance, alarm was stirring. His sense of being trapped increased. He began seriously to fear not merely sentence, but a swift execution before the Chouans could intervene. He assumed--and no doubt correctly--that Constant's aim would be to present St. Regent with an accomplished fact, secure in the support of the Loyal Émigrant and in the conviction that whilst St. Regent might possibly be reckless of bloodshed to rescue Quentin, he would hardly risk a pitched battle so as to avenge him.
La Houssaye was sternly addressing him. "You can hardly realize the gravity of your position, or you would not treat the court with levity. If you have anything to say that will mitigate the charge which you do not deny, I offer you a last opportunity of doing so."
Quentin, still with every appearance of ease, stood supporting himself with both hands on the back of a light chair. He smiled a little as he answered. "What can I say that would prevail against passions so blind, against malice so determined? I should but waste the breath that I may need for something else. For this, for instance."
On the word he swung the chair aloft, span round and hurled it through the window, with a resounding crash of shattered glass. After it he sent a shout delivered with all the strength of his lungs. "To me! St. Regent! To me!"
Then he was struggling in the grip of Dumanoir and La Marche, and a roar of voices filled the room. The young subaltern went to the assistance of the two who strove with him, and amongst them they bore him to the ground.
As he went down under their weight, he was cheered by the reflection that these fools by the noise they made could not fail to draw the attention he desired. Over the shoulder of La Marche, who knelt upon him, he saw that the door was opening. Then on a sudden hush that fell, he heard a voice asking, with a marked Breton accent: "In the name of God, what is happening here?"