Chapter IV: The Château Des Pierrettes

“_Nous y voici!_”

The carriage pulled back with a jerk, so that the prisoner Michel, who sat opposite us, was almost thrown into our laps. One of our grimy escort appeared at the window.

“Dog of a thief!” he growled. “Is this the turning?”

The other _sacréd_ below his breath and nodded sullenly. A vast chestnut (the thick of its butt must have been thirty feet in circumference) stood at the entrance to a narrow lane. Turning, with a worrying of wheels, down the latter, we continued our journey.

Southwards from Coutras we had broken into a _plat_ of country very wild and sterile; but now we were amongst trees again--oak, chestnut, and walnut--that thronged the damp hollows and flung themselves over the low hills in irresistible battalions.

Suddenly Michel bent forward and touched my companion’s knee menacingly. The rascal was near restored to himself, and his lowering eyes were full of gloom.

“The treasure, monsieur,” he said; “is that the condition of my liberty?”

“I have said--discover it to me and thou shalt go free.”

“But I, monsieur, I also must make a condition.”

Crépin stared. The man bent still more earnestly forward.

“Mademoiselle Carinne----”

“The niece of De Lâge----?”

“She must be considered--respected. I will not have her insulted with a look.”

“What now, Michel?”

“Oh, monsieur! you may do as you will with the old, hard man; but her--her----”

“And is it for the lady’s sake thou hast forborne hitherto to appropriate this treasure, the hiding-place of which thou wilt buy thy life by revealing?”

“It is so. I have driven a desperate trade, starving often with this knowledge in my breast.”

“But why?”

“How can I tell? I have known her from a child. Once she struck me that I killed a cheeping wolf-cub she had brought from the snow; and then she was sorry and kissed the little stupid bruise; and I swore my arm should rot before it lost the will to protect her.”

“I will do my best.”

“But that is not enough. My God! if I were to sacrifice mademoiselle’s _dot_ without purpose.”

“The purpose is thy life.”

“That were nothing were she dishonoured.”

I put in a serene word--

“Yet it seems you would condemn her to poverty to save your skin?”

“That is different. I should have life; and life means many things--the power, possibly, to influence her fortunes; at least the wash of wine again in one’s dusty throat.”

“Michel,” I said, “I must applaud you for a capital rogue.”

He stared at me sombrely, muttered, “_Je suis ce que je suis_,” and sank back in his corner.

We were running between dark hedges at the time. Suddenly we came among farm-buildings, a thronging dilapidated group. The byres mouldered on their props; the flat stones of the roofs had flaked generations of rubbish upon the weedy ground beneath.

Crépin rubbed his hands.

“It is well,” he said. “This without doubt is a skinflint.”

We turned a corner and passed the entrance to a ruined drive. Here the tall iron gates, swinging upon massive posts of rubble-stone, had been recently, it seemed, torn from their moorings of grass and knotted bindweed, for the ground was scarred and the lower bars of metal hung with rags of drooping green. Crépin’s features underwent another change at the sight.

“But what is this?” he muttered. “Something unaccustomed--some scare--some panic?”

He looked with sudden fury at the prisoner.

“If he has got wind of our coming--has escaped with----”

He broke off, showing his teeth and grinding his hands together. At the moment we came in view of the château.

It was an old grey house--built of the same material as the gate-pillars--with a high-pitched roof and little corner _tourelles_. Once, presumably, a possession of importance, decay and neglect had now beggared it beyond description. Yet within and without were evidences of that vulgar miserly spirit that seeks by inadequate tinkering to deceive with half-measures. The tangled grass of the lawn was cut only where its untidiness would have been most in evidence, and its litter left where it fell. Triton blew his conch from a fine fountain basin near the middle of the plot; but the shell, threatening to break away, had been fastened to the sea-god’s lips with a ligament of twine that was knotted round the head. A crippled bench was propped with a stone; a shattered ball-capital at the entrance-door held together with a loop of wire. What restoration that was visible was all in this vein of ludicrous economy.

But not a sign of life was about--no footstep in the grounds, no face at any window. To all appearance the place was desolate.

We drew up at the broken stone porch. The door was already flung wide, and we entered, with all the usual insolent clatter of “fraternity,” an echoing hall. Here, as elsewhere, were dust and decay--inconsequent patching and the same tawdry affectation of repair.

A shallow flight of stairs, broad and oaken, led straight up to a little low gallery that bisected the hall like a transom. Up these steps we scuttled, the escort driving the prisoner amongst them, and came to a corridor from which a number of closed doors shut off the living rooms of the house.

Suddenly Crépin put up his hand and motioned us to silence. From one of the invisible chambers, some distance down the corridor, rose and fell, like wind in a key-hole, a little blasphemous complaining voice.

“In the sober moonlight of my days!” we made it out to cry--“after scaling the rough peaks of self-denial, thus to be tilted over into the depths again by a lying Providence!”

There followed some shrill storming of nouns and epithets; then a pause, out of which the voice snapped once more--

“I hear you, you scum of ditches--you stinking offal of the Faubourgs--you publicans ennobled of a short-sighted Saviour!--Come back and finish your work, and I will spit poison on you that you shall follow me to the hell--to the hell, I say----”

The furious dragging of a chair mangled the sentence; then came a jarring thump and a further shrieking of oaths. With one impulse we made for the door, threw it open, and burst into the room. In the midst of a lofty chamber lay a little man struggling on the floor, a pretty heavy _prie-dieu_, to which he had been bound with his arms behind his back, jerking and bobbing above him with his every kick.

“_Mais c’est une tortue!_” cried one of the crew, with a howl of laughter.

The tortoise twisted up its face, disfigured with passion. It was the face, without doubt, of the little _fesse-Mathieu_ of Février’s restaurant.

The room in which he lay was of good proportions, but furnished meagrely, and informed with the same spirit of graceless economy as was apparent without. For the dark ancient panels of its walls had been smeared with some light-grey wash, and an attempt made to decorate them with plaster wreaths and festoons in the Louis Quinze style. The work, however, had been left unfinished, and, so far as it went, was crude and amateurish to a degree. Obviously, here was an example of that species of niggard that will try to cheat a dozen trades by wringing the gist of all out of one poor factotum.

But Crépin stood with corrugated forehead; for there were other signs in the room than those of parsimony--signs in plenty, in fact, that he had been forestalled in his quest. Chairs and tables were overturned, a bureau was smashed almost to pieces, great rents appeared in the panelling of the walls, where search had been instituted, one would judge, for secret depositories.

A savage oath exploded from _M. le Représentant’s_ lips.

“That spy--that swaggerer--that Lacombe!” he muttered, looking at me. “He was vanished this morning--he and his ragged tail--when we rose. He got scent, without doubt, and has played outrider to my mission of search. If it is so; if he has found and removed--my God! but for all his Tallien and the Committee of Bordeaux he shall dance--he shall dance!”

He turned furiously to his men.

“Put the rascal upright,” he bellowed.

A couple of them lifted and spun the chair to its legs, so that the old man’s skull jerked against the head-rail with a clack like that of a mill-hopper. He did not seem to notice the blow. His eyes, ever since they had alighted on this new influx of brigands, had been set like a fish’s--wondering and unwinking. Now they slowly travelled, taking in Crépin, Citizen Thibaut, the escort, until they stopped--actually, it appeared, with a click--at Michel. His mouth puckered, and, like a ring blown by a smoker, a wavering “O!” issued from it.

“Your _ci-devant_ servant?” said Crépin, grimly.

The old man nodded his head.

“Michel. But, yes--it is Michel.”

“Thou owest him compensation for that long tyranny of service.”

“I owe him nothing.”

“And me, citizen? Dost thou remember the Abbaye St Germain and the killings of September?”

I struck in with the question. I was willing, I think, for the girl’s sake, to identify myself with a past incident.

He looked at me bitterly, but with no recognition in his eyes.

“I deplore the cursed fortune,” he cried in grief, “that preserved me but for this!”

“How now, old fool!” said Crépin, with impatience. “Thou shalt go free when Michel has revealed to me thy secret place of hoarding.”

M. de Lâge gave the crying snarl of a wolf.

“Let him go--the ingrate and the traitor! What, Michel! dost thou mangle the hand that gave thee soft litter for thy couch and honest bread for thy belly? Look, Michel!--the white garlands on the walls there! Dost thou remember how thou wrought’st them to pleasure thy mistress--to win her from the depression she suffered in the sombre oak and its long history of gloom? There they cling unfinished,--thy solemn rebuke, Michel. Thy attachment to her was the one reality, thou wouldst say, in a world of shadows, and yet the blatant fanfare of those shadows was all that was needed to win thee from the reality. And what is the price of thy kiss, Judas?”

The man hung his head.

“Not your life, monsieur,” he muttered.

“Nay; but only that which makes my life endurable. And the forfeit--what is that?”

“_My_ life, monsieur.”

De Lâge drew in his breath with a cruel sound.

“_Hélas!_” he cried. “You will have to pay the penalty! the faithful servant will have to pay the penalty!”

Crépin uttered an exclamation and strode forward.

“You have been stripped?” said he.

“Of all, monsieur, of all. There have been others here before you this morning--fine _sans-culotte_ preachers of equality and the gospel of distribution, whose practice, nevertheless, is to enrich the poor at the expense of the wealthy. They were brave fellows by their own showing; yet they must truss me here before they dared brandish the fruits of their robbery before my eyes!”

Suddenly he was straining and screaming in his bonds, his face like a map of some inhuman territory of the passions, branched with veins for rivers of blood.

“Free me that I may kill some one!” he shrieked. “I am mad to groove my fingers in flesh! The time for concessions is past. I was as wax in their hands till they unearthed my plate, my coins, my riches. Now, now----”

He was indeed beyond himself, a better man--or devil--in his despair than the money-conscious craven who had palpitated over that little “_Vive le roi!_” once upon a time.

Crépin regarded the struggling creature with harsh contempt. This plebeian soul also was translated, but not to his moral promotion. It was evident he had enlarged the scope of his anticipations greatly in view of his prisoner’s promise; and his disappointment brought the spotted side of him uppermost.

“Take the dog,” he cried in a hoarse voice (signifying Michel by a gesture), “and whip him to the lair! At least we will look to see if the wolves have left a bone or two for our picking.”

“_M. le Représentant_,” I ventured to say, “be just to consider that the prisoner is by all rights my prisoner. Anyhow he has stuck to his side of the bargain. Let me hold you in fairness responsible for his safe-conduct.”

He turned upon me like a teased bullock.

“In fairness!” he cried--“in fairness! But you presume, citizen, on your position.”

He looked as if he could have struck me; all the beast in the man was prominent. Then he gave the order to march, and I found myself left alone with the little grotesque in the chair.

I was hot and indignant; but the passion of the other seemed to have exploded itself into a rain of emotion. His dry cheeks quivered; the tears ran down them like moisture on an old wall.

“Monsieur,” I said, softly, “I know not whether to applaud or upbraid you. And where is Mademoiselle Carinne?”

He seemed quite broken in a moment--neither to resent nor to be surprised at my mention of the girl’s name.

“She is fled,” he whimpered--“the little graceless cabbage is fled.”

“To safety, I hope?”

“To the devil, for all I care.”

“Monsieur, I hold your wretchedness an excuse, even if you have been careless of----”

He caught me up, staring at me woefully.

“Careless? but, my God! I have pampered and maintained her ever since her brown head was a crutch to my fingers; and this is how she repays me.”

“What has she done?”

“She has condemned me to beggary for a prudish sentiment--me, in my old forlorn age. From the first I saw that the test might come--that she might be called upon to employ the privileges of her sex on my behalf. Free-thought, free-love! Bah! What are they but a self-adaptation to the ever-changing conditions of life. The spirit need not subscribe to such mere necessities of being; and a little gratitude at least was due to me. She has none, and for that may God strike her dead!”

“What has she done?”

“Done!” (His voice rose to a shriek again.) “But, what has she not?--That scoundrel Lacombe would have exchanged me my riches--my pitiful show of tankards that he had unearthed--for her favour. She would not; she refused to go with him; she reviled and cursed me--me that had been her bulwark against poverty.”

“You would have sold her honour for your brazen pots?”

“Gold and silver, monsieur; and it was only a question of temporary accommodation. In a few months she might have returned, and all would have been well again. But honour--bah! it will survive a chin-chuck better than loss of wealth. But she would not. She escaped from us by a lying ruse, and they sought her far and near without avail. At the last they robbed and maltreated me, and for that may hell seize them and fester in their bones!”

“And in thine, thou pestilence!”

My fury and my contempt joined with a clap, like detonating acids.

“Lie there and rot!” I shouted, and so flung out of the room.

My heart blazed. That white girl--that Carinne. I could recall her face, could picture her in her loneliness arraigned before Lacombe and his _sans-culottes_ and his reptile prisoner--defying them all. With some vague instinct of search directing my fury, I hurried through room after room of the empty house. Each was like its neighbour, vulgarised, scantily furnished, disfigured by the search that had been conducted therein. Once I broke into the girl’s own bed-chamber (it was hers, I will swear, by token of little feminine fancies consistent with the character I had gifted her withal), and cursed the beasts who had evidently made it the rallying-point of their brutal jesting. But this, obviously, must be the last place in which to seek her, and I quickly left it.

Not a soul did I happen upon. Of whomsoever the household had consisted, no single individual but the old villain in the chair was remained to brazen out the situation.

At last I made my way into the grounds once more, issuing from the rear of the building into a patch of dense woodland that flowed up to within fifty yards of the walls. I heard voices, and, plunging down a moist track amongst the trees, came immediately in view of my party returning to the house. Then I saw there were two women conducted in its midst, and my throat jumped, and I ran forward.

At least my sudden apprehension was comforted. These crying wenches were of the working class--comely domestics by their appearance.

Crépin stayed them all when he came up to me. The ugly look had not left his face--was intensified on it, in fact. He stared at me, haughty and lowering at once, and was altogether a very offensive creature.

“Has Citizen Thibaut any further exception to take to my methods of procedure?” he said, ironically.

I looked at him, but did not reply.

“Because,” he went on, “perhaps his permission should be asked that these pretty citizenesses accompany me in my carriage?”

“_Mais non, monsieur--par pitié, mais non!_” cried one of the wenches in a sobbing voice.

He bent down to her--a sicklily self-revealed animal.

“Hush, _ma petite_!” he said. “We of the Republic do not ask--we take. Thou shalt have a brighter gown than ever De Lâge furnished for thy shapely limbs.”

She stopped crying, and seemed to listen at that. He came erect again, with a smile on his face and his lips licking together, and regarded me defiantly.

“The Citizen Representative can please himself,” I said, coldly, and pushed past them all and walked on. Crépin turned to look after me, gave a peculiar cynical laugh, and cried “_En avant!_” to his party.

I was to read the significance of his attitude in a moment--to read it in the dead form of Michel hanging from a tree.

I rushed back along the path, and caught the others as they issued from the wood. Crépin heard me coming, bade his men on to the house, and returned a pace or two to meet me. His mood asserted, he was something inclined, I suppose, to a resumption of the better terms between us. At any rate, his expression now was a mixture of embarrassment and a little apprehension. But I spoke to him very staidly and quietly--

“M. Crépin, it dawns upon me that I am slow to learn the methods of the new morality, and that I shall never justify your choice of a secretary.”

“You are going to leave me.”

“There will be the more room in the coach for monsieur’s harem.”

I made him a low bow and went off amongst the trees. He called after me--there was some real regret in his voice--“But you will come to harm! be wise!--monsieur!”

I paid no heed; and the thickets received and buried me.