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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
D. K. Broster's "The Yellow Poppy" is a captivating exploration of the intricate interplay between love, loss, and the quest for identity set against the backdrop of World War I. This evocative novel weaves rich character studies with stunning prose, embodying a modernist literary style that reflects the disillusionment of the era. Through its vivid imagery and atmospheric setting, Broster immerses readers in a world where the fragility of human connections flourishes amidst the chaos of war, ultimately challenging perceptions of heroism and sacrifice. D. K. Broster, a notable figure in early 20th-century literature, often drew inspiration from her own experiences and the socio-political landscape of her time. Raised in a literary environment, she was acutely aware of the psychological scars left by conflict, which deeply influenced her narratives. Her keen interest in Scottish folklore and culture also resonates throughout the text, enriching the thematic depth and complexity of the characters' journeys as they navigate their turbulent realities. This novel is highly recommended for readers seeking a profound narrative that delves into the psychological dimensions of its characters. Broster's nuanced portrayal of human resilience and the haunting echoes of an unresolved past makes "The Yellow Poppy" an essential read for those interested in the intersection of historical events and personal struggles. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Yellow Poppy
Table of Contents
“I love you, loved you . . . loved you first and last, And love you on for ever . . . . . . I had known the same Except that I was prouder than I knew, And not so honest. Aye, and as I live I should have died so, crushing in my hand This rose of love, the wasp inside and all,— Ignoring ever to my soul and you Both rose and pain,—except for this great loss, This great despair . . .”
Aurora Leigh.
BOOK I THE WEDDING GIFT
“And so, self-girded with torn strips of hope, Took up his life, as if it were for death (Just capable of one heroic aim),
NOTE
Any reader familiar with the figure of the gallant and unfortunate Louis de Frotté will realise why neither he nor the Normandy which he led so well play any part in these pages—not indeed that he has served as prototype for any character in them, but because to have introduced him also would have been to overblacken the reputation of Bonaparte. Yet that which is here laid to the First Consul’s charge is no libel, for the deeds done at Alençon and Verneuil in mid-February, 1800, are written in history.
CHAPTER I “WHAT IS MIRABEL?”
“I wish I had been taught how to make a bed!” complained Roland de Céligny, as he wrestled with his blanket in the half-darkness of the attic.
“You may think yourself lucky to have a bed to make!” retorted a comrade who sat cross-legged on a neighbouring pile of sacking. “Mine cannot be ‘made,’ though a careless movement will reduce it to its component elements.”
“The devil! If I tuck in the blanket this side, it won’t reach to the other!” pursued the young grumbler, fiercely demonstrating the truth of his accusation, where he knelt by a mattress placed directly on the floor.
“From this, my paladin, learn that the gifts of Fate are evenly distributed,” returned he of the pile of sacking. Since one of his arms was in a sling, it is possible that he would not have been capable even of the Vicomte de Céligny’s unfruitful exertions, but he did not say so. On the contrary, he looked at his friend’s performance with the air of one who in a moment will say, “Let me do it!”
“If you would only take less——” he began.
“For Heaven’s sake be quiet, you two!” entreated a third voice. “One cannot count, much less think, in your chatter . . . Two tierce-majors. . . .”
The owner of this voice, a man of about forty-five or fifty, sat at a table in a corner playing piquet by candlelight with another. There is no reason why you should not play piquet, even if you are a Chouan officer in the late April of the year of grace 1799—or, if you prefer it, which in that case is unlikely, Floréal of the year VII of the Republic—and are concealed at the top of an old house at Hennebont in Brittany with a bandage on your head, and an ache within it which may well justify a little impatience to noise. When, in addition, your partner refuses to play for money, the game becomes so harmless as almost to be meritorious.
To the appeal of the piquet-player—his superior officer into the bargain—the wounded critic on the sacking made no reply save a grimace. The time selected for bedmaking by the very good-looking young man who was engaged in it was not, as might be guessed, a morning hour; it was, on the contrary, nine o’clock in the evening. Two candles stuck in the necks of bottles gave the card-players their requisite illumination; another, standing on a dilapidated chest of drawers, shone on the book which a third young man, sitting astride a chair, had propped on its back and in which he appeared to be immersed.
The attic thus meagrely lit was spacious, and full of odd corners, but crowded with tables and chairs and cupboards, for it was the top floor of a furniture dealer, where he stored his old or unfashionable goods, many of which had been piled up on the top of each other to make more room, and where two or three huge old wardrobes, jutting out like dark shadowy rocks from the walls, still further reduced the space available for occupation. Yet though it was, patently, a refuge, it was also a rendezvous.
In this spring of 1799 the Directory, the cruel and incapable, was still prolonging its dishonoured existence, and after ten years of torment the French people were still enslaved—to an oligarchy instead of to a monarchy. The liberty dangled so long before their eyes, the liberty in whose name so many terrible crimes had been committed, seemed further away than ever. Inert and exhausted, pining under a leprosy of political corruption, her credit and trade almost ruined, the mere ghost of what she had been, France was sighing for the master that she was impotent to give herself, the man who should overturn her new tyrants and raise her up once more to her full stature. And to most minds in the West, that home of loyalty, only one master was conceivable, and that was Louis XVIII., the King who had never reigned.
In the West, moreover, at this moment, the Chouannerie, that sporadic guerrilla warfare of profoundly Royalist and Catholic stamp, indigenous to Brittany, Anjou, and Maine since the overthrow of the great Vendean effort in 1793, was showing signs of reviving—under persecution. It had indeed been temporarily stamped out at the pacification of three years ago, but that pacification had left the Royalists of Brittany and the neighbouring departments in a position which gradually proved to be intolerable. They were not at war, yet they lived in continual peril, not one of them sure of his liberty or even of his life. After the scandalous coup d’état of Fructidor, ’97, the promised religious freedom was not even a name, and political freedom, especially in the western departments whose elections had been so cynically annulled, was a mere farce. It came, in fact, at last to this, that the Minister of Police could recommend that the Royalists of those regions should be “caused to disappear” if necessary; tyranny unashamed had replaced oppression.
Naturally enough, in 1798 the Chouan began to make his appearance once more. At first he merely robbed couriers and diligences of public money. But this not very creditable activity was on the surface; underneath, in the hands usually of gentlemen, the work went secretly forward of organising that indomitable and tenacious peasantry, at once pious and cruel, and of transforming brigandage into real war; and so, throughout the West, might be found wandering Royalist leaders with their little staffs, striving to keep effective the Chouans who had once fought, and to enrol and arm fresh volunteers. To such a band, commanded by the Marquis de Kersaint, an émigré distinguished in Austrian service who had not long come over from England, belonged these five men in the furniture-dealer’s attic.
They were not, at this moment, in very enviable case, for besides that two of them were wounded, they and their handful of peasants—since scattered—had yesterday come off second best in an unexpected collision with Government troops in the neighbouring department of Finistère, and they were now beginning, moreover, to be anxious about the safety of their leader, who, with a guide, had taken a more circuitous route to Hennebont in order to gather certain information. And his presence here was urgent because it had long been arranged that he and his two elder subordinates should meet and confer in Hennebont with Georges Cadoudal, the famous peasant leader of the Morbihan, concerning the better organisation of the wilder and more westerly region of Finistère, which, it was whispered, M. de Kersaint was eventually to command in its entirety. Yesterday’s misfortune had made such a meeting more, not less, necessary; and so here, half-fugitive, M. de Kersaint’s officers were, having had the luck to slip unobserved into the little town in the dusk. But now there were rumours of a colonne mobile on the road which their leader would probably take; and in any case there was always danger—danger which the three young men who formed a sort of bodyguard of aides-de-camp to him considered would have been lessened for him had they shared his odyssey. But M. de Kersaint had apparently thought otherwise.
* * * * *
The game of cards in the corner came at last to an end, and the opponents added up their scores.
“You have won, Comte,” said the bandaged player’s adversary, leaning back in his chair. The candle-light which threw up his companion’s somewhat harsh features shone in his case on a nondescript round face with no salient characteristics. By this and by his peasant’s attire he might well have been a small farmer; but on the other, him addressed as “Comte,” the gaily embroidered Breton vest and short coat sat less naturally.
“Yes, I suppose I have,” returned the latter. He drew out his watch and frowned. “They ought really to be here by now,” he observed.
“I doubt if it is quite dark enough outside,” replied his late adversary. “Le Blé-aux-Champs would hardly risk bringing M. de Kersaint into Hennebont while light remained.”
“I wish he had not gone to Scaër,” muttered the other.
“You do not think that anything has happened to M. le Marquis, do you, sir?” asked Roland de Céligny.
“No,” replied M. de Kersaint’s second-in-command. “I will not believe in misfortune; it is the way to bring it about.”
“Perhaps this is they,” suggested Artamène de la Vergne, the youth with his arm in a sling, as a step was heard on the echoing stairs. And even the silent reader lifted his head from his book to listen.
But the moment of suspense which followed was not lightened when the door opened and old M. Charlot, the furniture-dealer, himself appeared on the threshold, candle in hand, tinted spectacles on nose. In a silence of expectancy he came in and shut the door carefully behind him, while five pairs of eyes stared at him uneasily.
“Gentlemen,” he began in a cautious voice, looking round on the forms ensconced among his shadowy furniture, “is not one of you a priest?”
The second piquet-player bent forward. “Yes, I am,” he surprisingly admitted. “Do you want me?”
“There is an old lady very ill next door, Monsieur l’Abbé, an old Mlle Magny, who has been a respected inhabitant of this town for many years. It is not that she wants a confessor or the Last Sacraments, because she had them two or three days ago; it is that to-night she is wandering so much that her niece, who looks after her, came in to me about it just now in great distress. The old lady seems to have something on her mind, and Mme Leclerc thought that if she could get a priest, an insermenté, of course——”
The Abbé who looked so little of an Abbé interrupted. “I am quite ready to go to her, Monsieur Charlot, if it is necessary, but I should have thought that, rather than summon a stranger, the poor lady’s relatives would have had recourse to the priest who confessed her the other day.”
“Yes, mon père,” replied the old man, “but you see he lives very retired outside the town since Fructidor, and there is always a certain risk for him in coming, and seeing that you were on the spot, and not known here for a priest . . .”
The word “risk” appeared to have decided the question, for at it the Abbé in the peasant’s dress had risen.
“I will come at once,” he said without more ado, and walked round an intervening barrier of upturned chairs.
“That is very good of your reverence,” said M. Charlot in a tone of relief, moving towards the door. “She has been an excellent Christian in her time, that poor lady, and shrewd enough too, but now she lies there, so her niece says, talking continually of some place—or person, maybe—called Mirabel, and of a wedding. And nothing——”
“Mirabel!” ejaculated the Abbé, stopping short.
“O, Monsieur l’Abbé!” exclaimed M. Charlot, struck by his tone, “if you know something about this Mirabel, then surely the good God has sent you to the poor soul! I will take you there at once.”
He opened the door for the priest, who went through it without another word. None of the three young men, all watching these two protagonists, noticed that the wounded piquet-player also had risen abruptly from his seat at the mention of the name which had so affected his companion, had stared after them a second or two, and that he now let himself fall into his chair again with a despondent gesture, and took his bandaged head between his hands.
“Now the Abbé’s got a job to occupy him,” said Artamène de la Vergne in a sleepy voice. “I wish I had; or that M. de Kersaint and Le Blé-aux-Champs would arrive quickly, so that I could go to sleep without the prospect of being waked up again immediately.”
“The true campaigner can sleep at any time, and for any length of time,” remarked Roland complacently. “It is early yet, at least I think so. My watch has stopped.”
“And mine is lost,” responded the Chevalier de la Vergne. “Lucien is sure to have his, and it is sure to be correct. Ask him the time.”
“Lucien!” said Roland. No answer from the reader.
“Lucien, deaf adder!” supplemented Artamène.
“I believe he is asleep,” muttered the Vicomte de Céligny, and by a snake-like elongation of body and arm he contrived to reach a leg of the student’s chair and to shake the same.
“I wish you were asleep!” exclaimed his victim, lifting a mildly exasperated face. “What in Heaven’s name do you want?”
“The time, dear friend.”
Lucien du Boisfossé pulled the watch from his fob. “A quarter—no, seventeen minutes past nine.”
“What are you reading?” demanded Artamène.
“The Æneid of Virgil,” replied Lucien, his eyes on the page again.
The questioner gave an exclamation, almost of horror. “Ye gods! He is reading Latin—for amusement!”
“A quarter past nine,” remarked Roland reflectively. “This time yesterday I was——”
“Don’t chatter so, Roland le preux! You disturb our Latinist . . . and also,” added Artamène in a lower tone, “run the risk of breaking into M. de Brencourt’s meditations. Look at him!”
The bandaged piquet-player, who still sat by the table, seemed indeed sunk in a profound abstraction, letting the idle cards fall one by one from his fingers. It was plain that he did not know what he was doing.
“I wager he is thinking of a woman,” whispered Artamène, bringing himself nearer to his friend. “It seems a quieting occupation; suppose we think of one too! But on whom shall I fix my thoughts . . . and you, Roland?”
A slight flush, invisible in the poor light, dyed young de Céligny’s cheek as he answered, with a suspicion of embarrassment, “I will think of that poor old lady next door. Will the Abbé exorcise her, do you think, from the spell of . . . what was it—Mirabel? And, by the way, what is Mirabel?”
“The name of a kind of plum, ignoramus,” replied Lucien du Boisfossé unexpectedly. He yawned as he spoke.
“Plainly our Lucien has been studying the Georgics also,” commented Artamène.
“An encyclopaedia would be more to the point!” retorted Roland. And raising his voice, he said, “Comte, what is Mirabel?”
The older man heard, even with a little start. He laid down the cards and came out of his reverie.
“Mirabel, gentlemen, is the name of a property and château near Paris, the château that was begun for François I. You may have heard of it. It belongs, or belonged, to the Duc de Trélan.”
“Trélan,” observed the young Chevalier de la Vergne reflectively. “I seem to remember the name in connection with the prison massacres in September, ’92. He was killed in them, I think?”
“No,” replied the Comte de Brencourt sombrely. “He was never in prison. He had emigrated. It was his wife who was butchered—with Mme de Lamballe.”
“Morbleu!” exclaimed Artamène. “And the Duc is still alive, then?”
“I believe so,” replied M. de Brencourt, even more sombrely.
“Where is he now?” asked Roland.
“Somewhere abroad—in England or Germany.”
“Worse than being dead!” observed Artamène, lying down and pulling the covering over him.
CHAPTER II THE GIFT IS OFFERED
And next door, in a tidy but overcrowded bedroom, the Abbé Chassin, without any of the marks of his office, sat and listened to the babbling of an old spinster lady who was to terminate an uneventful and singularly respectable life as the messenger of destiny to not a few people.
The heavy curtains were pulled back from the side of the small fourposter by which the priest sat, and the candlelight fell soft and steady on the old, old blanched face within the neat capfrill, itself scarcely whiter than the visage it surrounded. On the waxlike countenance, amid all the signs of nearing death, was the imprint of that masterfulness which sometimes descends with age upon a certain type of old lady. And Mlle Magny was talking, talking continuously and pitifully, her eyes fixed, her shrivelled fingers pleating and plucking the edge of the sheet in the last fatal restlessness. Those hands were the only things that moved.
“I ought to have had it ready . . . but I did not know in time, I did not know! All these years to have had it in the family, and not to have known that it was there! But perhaps I shall be in time after all—they cannot have come back from the chapel yet, surely. But I must be quick, I must be quick! . . . and when the bride gives round the sword-knots and the fans to all the fine company I shall offer my gift to the young Duc. But I must be quick . . .”
And the withered hands, abandoning the sheet, began to fumble over the bed as if searching for something.
The Abbé bent forward and laid one of his own gently on the nearer.
“Cannot I help you, my daughter—cannot I do something for you?”
The eyes turned a moment; the brain, deeply absorbed in the past though it was, seemed to grasp this intrusion from the present, even to the pastoral mode of address.
“You are a priest, Monsieur? That is good—that is good! Yes, you can open this casket for me,” and she made as if she held it. “And inside you will find the wedding gift for the young Duc de Trélan—but you must be quick, quick! They will be back from the chapel! . . . Ah, I cannot find the key—I cannot turn the lock! My God, if I should be too late after all! Mon père, mon père, help me! . . . But, mon père, you are doing nothing!”
The Abbé looked round in desperation. He could see nothing that at all resembled a locked casket among the little treasures of the old lady’s room, the pincushions, the images of devotion, all the prim collection of a blameless lifetime. But in a moment the struggle with the imaginary lock came to an end, and as the tired hands relaxed a smile crept about Mlle Magny’s indrawn mouth.
“How handsome he is, Monseigneur Gaston!” she said in a tone of admiration. “My dear lady will be proud of him to-day! They will dance to-night after the wedding, and I shall see it all, as my lady wishes. But none of the fine ladies there will have given the bride such a gift as I shall give the bridegroom, though I am only his dear mother’s maid. . . . But why does the Abbé not bring it to me? When the bride gives round the swordknots and the fans——”
“Madame,” gently interrupted the priest, “if you will tell me where your gift is, I will bring it to you instantly.”
A look of cunning swept over the dying old woman’s face, and a faint sound that was like a chuckle came from her lips.
“Ah, no, I have hidden it well!” she replied unexpectedly, “hidden it nearly as securely as the treasure of Mirabel itself. You will not find it in a hurry, Clotilde!”
Who was Clotilde, wondered the priest? The niece with whom she lived, probably. But what was this about a ‘treasure’ in Mirabel?
“To think,” went on the old voice musingly, “that the precious paper was all these years in Cousin François’ dining-room, and all those scores of years before that, since the time it was stolen. And all the dead and gone Duchesses might have had the rubies to wear. I might have clasped the necklace round my sainted lady’s own neck. Now the new Duchesse will be the first to put it round her pretty throat.”
The priest gave a little shiver. Still that wedding eight-and-twenty years ago! . . . Since then the pretty throat of which she spoke had known a very different necklace . . . but of the same colour . . .
“But if you have hidden the rubies, Madame,” he hazarded, bewildered between the ‘treasure’ and the ‘paper,’ the ‘gift’ and what was concealed, “you will not be able to give them to the bride.”
“It was not I who hid them!” responded Mlle Magny impatiently. “It was the first Duc, in the days of Mazarin, who hid a great store of money and jewels at Mirabel. And no one was ever able to find them again. Stolen . . . hidden . . . hidden . . . stolen . . . they make a beautiful couple, and when Monseigneur de Paris has married them and the nuptial mass is finished. . . .”
A long pause. Then the old lady whispering, “Sainte Vierge, how tired I am!” clasped her hands on her breast. The Abbé got up and bent over her. Her eyes were closed, and he heard her murmur indistinctly, “Mater amabilis, virgo prudentissima, grant me soon to see my sainted lady!”
To be on the brink of so important, so long-lost a secret—too late for it to be of use . . . yet, after all, perhaps, not too late—and to be baffled at the very moment of discovery! When such an extraordinary coincidence had brought him, of all men in the world, to this bedside, for its possessor to take the secret unrevealed out of life with her! It was hard!
Yet, as M. Chassin was a priest, he put away regret, and tried to think only of the needs of this soul about to pass through the great door. Mlle Magny had had the last rites, that he knew. Was the moment come for the commendatory prayer? He slipped his fingers round her wrist. But the pulse, though feeble and irregular, was not at the last flutter. And slowly, as if his touch had roused her, the old lady opened her eyes again. The look in them was different; meeting it, the priest knew that she was no longer wandering in the mists of nearly thirty years ago. She was back in the present; so much so, indeed, that she was capable of astonishment at seeing this unknown man in peasant’s dress bending over her—more, of resenting it.
“Who are you, Monsieur, and . . . what . . . what are you doing here?” she demanded, in a tone which, if scarcely more than the frailest of whispers, yet conveyed some of that masterfulness which was written on her face.
“I am a priest, Madame, an insermenté, and M. Charlot, your neighbour, brought me here, at your niece’s desire.”
“Clotilde always . . . takes too much upon herself,” said the thread of a voice in a tone of displeasure. “I have already had . . . the Last Sacraments.”
“Yes, Madame,” assented M. Chassin, realising that Mlle Magny’s recovery of her senses was not advancing him much. “It was not for the purpose of administering you that I came.”
Her look asked him what his purpose was.
“Because, my daughter, you were speaking of—Mirabel.”
“Nonsense!” retorted Mlle Magny quite sharply. “I am not in . . . in the habit of . . . discussing my past life with strangers!”
“You have been ill, Madame,” said the priest gently. “And has not Mirabel something to do with your present life too?” Then, being a man who knew how to wait, he took his seat beside her again, and exercised this power.
“Have I been wandering?” asked the dying woman, suddenly turning her eyes upon him.
“A little, yes.”
“I have been very ill . . . and they tell me I shall not get better. . . . Is that so, Father?”
“It is what I have been given to understand, my daughter. But you have made your peace with God.”
“Yes,” said she. “But there is something else that I desire to do . . . before I die . . . yet God knows how I am to do it.”
The priest bent forward. “God does indeed know, my daughter, and it was doubtless He Who sent me here to-day. You wish, do you not, to give into the hands of the Duc de Trélan a paper now in your possession concerning a treasure which has been for many years hidden in his château of Mirabel.”
A flush rose in the ivory face. “I talked of that?”
“Of that—and of a wedding at Mirabel.”
Mlle Magny put a trembling hand over her eyes. “Indeed, you must forgive me! . . . All these years I cannot forget it—the lights, the jewels, the beauty of that couple, my lady’s happiness. For I was tirewoman, mon père, during many years, to the Duchesse Eléonore, the Dowager Duchess, a saint on earth. God rest her soul! She only lived for a short time after her son’s marriage.”
The priest nodded, as one who knows already. “I, too, have cause to say ‘God rest her!’—And the paper you spoke of?”
“What paper?” demanded the old voice, suddenly suspicious again.
“The paper containing the secret of the hoard hidden at Mirabel in Mazarin’s time, which has come into your hands, Madame, and which you were wishing that you could have given to the Duc de Trélan on his wedding day so many years ago.”
There was silence from the bed. “Well,” said the old lady at last, with more animation, “if I told you . . . all that . . . I may as well tell you the rest.”
And slowly, with pauses for breath, she told him how the Duc de Trélan of Mazarin’s day, implicated in the rebellion of the Fronde, and not knowing which party would finally triumph in that kaleidoscope of civil conflict, buried gold and jewels in his once-royal château of Mirabel and made a memorandum of the hiding-place for his son, then away fighting with Condé. The Duc himself had to flee before Mazarin’s vengeance and died in exile; Mirabel was for a space confiscated, and when the next Duc was reinstated the treasure could not be found. The memorandum of its hiding-place had been stolen by the late Duc’s steward, who offered to sell it for a large sum to the successor to the title. Suspecting a hoax the latter refused; yet, as was not difficult for a great noble in those days, he procured a lettre de cachet against the offender, who dragged out the rest of his life in prison. Before his arrest, however, he had placed the memorandum in the hands of a friend; but the friend never took any steps to utilise it, and merely preserved it in such a manner that it was to all intents and purposes lost—for he pasted the parchment, face downwards, against the back of his wife’s portrait. Probably, said the old lady, he was waiting till the man who had confided it to him came out of prison; but this the steward never did, and a short time before his death in captivity his friend, Mlle Magny’s great-great-grandfather, died too. And there, gummed against the picture of the flourishing bourgeoise dame of Louis XIII.’s day, the parchment had remained for nearly a hundred and fifty years, till, some two years ago, on Cousin François’ death, the portrait had come into Mlle Magny’s possession, and the old lady herself, in examining it, had lighted on the parchment, and realised of what irony Fate was capable.
“Ah, if only I had had it earlier!” she concluded wistfully. “What a gift to have made my sainted lady, who was sometimes pressed for money for her charities, since, like all the Saint-Chamans, both her husband and her son spent their means royally. And now these two years that I have had it it is useless! Where is the Duc de Trélan now? Alas, we know where his wife, the Duchesse Valentine, went! . . . And what is Mirabel to-day?”
“No, Madame,” said the priest, as the voice ceased exhausted, “two years ago you could have done nothing. But to-day, as Heaven has so ordered it, you can give that paper to the Duc de Trélan, if you wish.”
She turned her sunken eyes on him again. The lustre was already fading.
“And how is that, if you please?”
“Because I am . . . in close touch with the Duc. If you commit the paper to me he shall have it before—before I am many days older.”
“But—if he is still alive—he is an émigré . . . has been an émigré for many years!” objected Mlle Magny incredulously.
“Nevertheless I am in close touch with him.”
The failing eyes of the sick woman searched his face—that commonplace visage out of which looked neither good nor evil. It was difficult to read.
“I have nothing but your word for that,” she said, while suspicion and a wistful desire to trust him strove together in look and tone.
The priest put his hand into a pocket of his embroidered vest and pulled out an ornate rosary of ebony and silver. Taking one of the silver paternoster beads between his finger and thumb; he bent over Mlle Magny and held it near her eyes. “Can you see what is engraved on that bead, Madame? It is not a sacred emblem.”
The old lady put up her feeble hand and tried to push his a little further off. “You are holding it too near, mon père,” she said irritably. “I am not so blind as that. . . . It looks like . . . it is very worn . . . yet it looks like a bird of some kind, with wings outspread. What is that doing on a chaplet? Is it on the rest of the beads?”
He showed her. “Victor, Cardinal de Trélan, in the early days of the century, seems to have had a strange fancy for his family crest on his rosary. There is his monogram on one bead. That bird, Madame, is the Trélan phoenix, and the present Duc gave me this old rosary at my ordination.”
Instantly she seized his hand. “The Trélan phoenix! Let me look again! Yes, it is, it is! Ah, to see it once more after all these years!” And as the priest relinquished the chaplet, the Duchesse Eléonore’s tirewoman, almost sobbing, put it to her lips.
The Abbé waited, and after a moment she turned on him moist eyes and said, puzzled, “But . . . but . . . I seem to remember . . . ordination . . . the Cardinal’s rosary . . . it was surely to the young Duc’s foster-brother, a Breton peasant, whom I never saw . . . that it was given . . . when he took orders?”
“You remember quite rightly, Madame. And I am that foster-brother, that Breton peasant, Pierre Chassin.”
Had he suddenly revealed himself as Louis XVIII. or the Comte d’Artois the devoted old spinster could scarcely have shown more emotion.
“God be praised! God be praised for this mercy!” she quavered. “His foster-brother! Yes, I remember hearing from my lady all about your mother. Six years before I entered her service it was . . .”
“—Remembering then, Madame, what I too owe to your lady of blessed memory, and to the Duc, who, as you probably know, had me educated and gave me a cure on his estates in the south, you may trust me, may you not, with the document?”
“Yes, indeed!” returned the old lady, and there was no shadow of doubt in her tone now. But the shock of joy, her devotion to the great family with whom her life had been bound up, and the advent of this man who, if he were not himself the rose, was almost a graft from the tree—all these seemed to have benumbed her faculties, for she lay quiet, tears of weakness and happiness stealing from under the closed lids. Presently she said,
“He is in France again then, the Duc?”
“I am afraid I cannot tell you that, my daughter. But, on the faith of a Christian and a priest he shall have the secret in his hands very shortly.”
“He will not be able to make use of it now.”
“Who knows? And if not now, when happier days come, perhaps. If he can make use of it, it will be of immeasurably greater service to him to-day than it would ever have been a quarter of a century ago. For this much I can tell you, Madame, that, wherever he is, he is fighting for the King.”
“As a Trélan should!” she murmured with a smile. But the smile had gone when she added, “And the terrible fate of his wife, the Duchesse Valentine?”
“It broke his heart,” said the priest briefly.
“My lady was spared much,” murmured Mlle Magny. She passed a shaking hand over her eyes. “So much blood . . . and Mirabel deserted. . . . Are the candles going out, mon père, or is it my eyes? N’importe—you can still find the parchment . . . that little closed frame by the mirror yonder. If you open it you will know the face.”
He did. It was a little pastel drawing of the Duchesse Eléonore, his patroness, wearing the widow’s weeds in which he best recalled her. He came back to the bed holding it.
“It was to have been buried with me, that little picture . . . it still shall be. Clotilde knew how fond I was of it—but she would never have guessed anything else, poor fool . . . I took a lesson from my forbear . . . Tear off the paper at the back, mon père.”
M. Chassin obeyed, and as he peeled off the pinkish, speckly paper recently pasted there, a piece of yellow parchment doubled up against the real back of the picture was disclosed. It was folded in four, and on it was written in brownish ink the single word, “Mirabel.”
“Open it!” said the voice from the bed, grown very weak now.
The priest obeyed. As he unfolded the parchment with no very steady hands, his eyes were greeted with a sort of rough sketch-map of some complexity, underneath which was written, in a crabbed seventeenth century hand:
“Plan de l’endroit dans mon chasteau de Mirabel où j’ay fait enterrer plusieurs milliers de pistoles et divers parements de pierreries de feu ma femme, à cause des troubles sévissant en ce royaume.” And he caught sight of “Item, 10 sacs contenant chascun 2,500 pistoles . . . Item, un collier de rubis des Indes fort bien travaillé . . . Item, une coupe en or ciselé dite de la reyne Margueritte” . . .
The whole was inscribed “Pour mon fils hault et puissant seigneur Gui de Saint-Chamans, Marquis de la Ganache, Vicomte de Saint-Chamans,” and signed, “Fait par moy a mon dit chasteau de Mirabel ce six avril de l’an mil six cent cinquante-deux, Antoine-Louis de Saint-Chamans, Duc de Treslan.”
“This is indeed——” began the priest as soon as he could find voice, when, glancing off the parchment, he saw the change which, in the brief space of his study of the document, had come over the face on the pillow. Mlle Magny had used her last reserve of strength over this matter; it was gone now, and she was going too.
“Promise me, Father!” she gasped out as he bent over her.
“I promise you, my daughter, as I hope myself for salvation!”
The drawn lips smiled. “I can say my Nunc Dimittis . . . Bless me, Pierre Chassin!”
He raised his hand. “Benedicat te . . .” and passed straight on to the “Go forth, O Christian soul . . .”
By the end she was unconscious, and a quarter of an hour later, the weeping Clotilde on one side of the bed and the proscribed priest praying on the other, Mlle Magny, her last thoughts on earth occupied with the house of Trélan, went through the great door to meet her sainted lady, leaving on its hither side the secret of Mirabel to bring about results undreamt of.
CHAPTER III THE GIFT IS RECEIVED
All this while the occupants of M. Charlot’s attic, which the Abbé had so abruptly quitted, were taken up with their own anxieties, and though they had at last fallen silent, the chiaroscuro of their abode was fairly throbbing with uneasiness. What made their leader, with a guide above suspicion, so late in finding his way from Scaër?
At last, just about the moment that M. Chassin, next door, had finished the Proficiscere and was calling for “Clotilde,” the Vicomte de Céligny exclaimed, not for the first time, “This must be they!” The four men strained their ears, for a noise could certainly be heard on the staircase.
“Dame! it sounds as though Le Blé-aux-Champs were drunk!” observed Artamène.
“Or hurt!” added the Comte de Brencourt, listening uneasily.
The heavy, shuffling footsteps which they had heard ascending the stairs paused outside the door. Roland sprang up and opened it, drawing back instantly with a little cry. Two men, both in Breton costume, stood on the threshold, the elder and taller supporting the other, a young saturnine-looking peasant, whose face was sulky with pain, and whose unshod left foot was enveloped in a stained and muddy handkerchief.
“Monsieur le Marquis!” cried Roland and Artamène together, “What has happened?”
“Nothing very serious,” replied the elder newcomer cheerfully. “We startled a colonne mobile in the dusk, that is all, and our poor Blé-aux-Champs has a ball through his foot.”
“But you yourself are unhurt, de Kersaint, I hope?” asked the Comte de Brencourt, not without anxiety, as he came forward from his corner. “We were getting very uneasy about you.”
“I am untouched, thank you. But this lad of mine——”
“Let him lie down on my mattress, sir,” suggested the Vicomte de Céligny, and, as it happened to be the nearest to the door, the young Chouan, after vain protests, hobbled towards it, his arm still round his leader’s neck.
“Yes, lie down, mon gars,” said M. de Kersaint, lowering him to the pallet, “and we will see what can be done for this foot.” He looked round. “Where is our surgeon-in-chief, the Abbé?”
“Confessing or otherwise ministering to a dying woman next door,” replied M. de Brencourt. “M. Charlot came in for him.”
The Marquis de Kersaint raised his eyebrows a trifle, but made no comment. “I am afraid that we are somewhat of an infirmary here altogether,” he remarked. “What of your injuries, Comte—and yours, La Vergne?”
“I do not deny that I have a headache,” returned M. de Brencourt. “But, as for the cause, the Abbé dressed the scratch this afternoon, and reported that it was doing excellently. My wrist” he showed a bandage “will, he says, take a little longer to heal.”
“And your safe arrival, Monsieur le Marquis, has done even more for my arm than the Abbé’s ministrations,” said Artamène.
M. de Kersaint smiled at him and shook his head, as he knelt down by the prostrate guide and began to take the handkerchief off his foot. He would have been more or less than human if he had not known that he was idolised, as well as feared, by these well-born young followers of his.
“Let me do that, Monsieur le Marquis!” now begged Roland, while the thoughtful Lucien produced from the recesses of the attic a bowl of water and some torn linen.
But the Marquis de Kersaint, asking Roland when he had ever dressed a gunshot wound, went through the process with a deftness which suggested that he himself had dressed not a few. The young peasant, who had lain with his face hidden in the pillow, caught his hand as he finished and carried it dumbly to his lips.
“There, mon gars,” said his leader kindly, as he withdrew it. “Lie there and be as comfortable as you can under the circumstances. The ball has gone clean through, which is a great mercy. Roland, put a covering of some kind over him.—Thank you, Lucien; yes, I should like some fresh water. You can put it on that convenient chest of drawers yonder.”
As he stood there, washing the blood off his hands, it was not difficult to understand the attraction that the Marquis de Kersaint might possess for either sex or any age. As a young man he must have been superlatively handsome, and now the grey at his temples only served to emphasize his appearance of extreme distinction. Just as his dark, slightly rippling hair gained by contrast with that touch of Time’s powder, so the peasant’s dress which he wore merely set off the natural air of command that hung about him—an air of which it was plainly impossible for him to divest himself, even for purposes of disguise. It was innate in the whole poise of his tall figure, in the aquiline nose with its delicate nostrils, in the imperious glance of the fine grey eyes. Yet there was a measure of geniality about the mouth—of the kind that it is not wise to presume upon. Everybody in the attic knew that.
“Well, my children, and what have you been doing since you arrived?” he asked, looking round as he dried his hands. “Lucien, I see, has got hold of a book as usual. What have you been reading, Lucien?”
“This is what he has been reading, Monsieur le Marquis!” cried the young Chevalier de la Vergne, snatching up du Boisfossé’s Virgil whence he had laid it, face downwards, on his chair. And holding the book with the hand which rested in the sling, of which he still had the use, he flourished his other arm at Roland, who was standing near, and began to declaim at him the famous lament out of the sixth book for the untimely dead Marcellus—
“Heu miserande puer! si qua fata aspera rumpas,Tu Marcellus eris. Manibus date lilia plenisPurpureos——”
He had got no further when, to his enormous surprise, the book was gently but firmly taken out of his hand.
“Do not repeat those lines, boy, over anyone young, as you are doing at this moment,” said M. de Kersaint quietly looking, not at him, but at Roland. “I always think they are unlucky. . . .”
And before the two young men had time to recover from their astonishment he had walked over to the other side of the attic, and joined his second in command at the little table to which the latter had returned.
“I have some papers here, de Brencourt,” he said, sitting down, “which we could look at till the Abbé returns. Undoubtedly our attempt was premature . . . but unless we can get money it always will be premature. I have seen ‘Sincère’; he could join us with at least two hundred and fifty men if we could only provide arms for them.”
“Always the same cry—insufficient arms and ammunition,” remarked his lieutenant rather bitterly. “How is anything considerable going to be done in Finistère if there is always this lack? And we could get both in plenty from England if we only had the money to buy them with.”
“Exactly,” said the Marquis. “But where the money is to come from I do not know—beyond the not very generous subsidy which the British Government has promised me for the summer.—Well, we must take counsel with Georges when he comes. Now, look at these figures.”
And he and the Comte de Brencourt were still bending over the papers which he had spread out on the table when the three young men, who had withdrawn themselves as far as possible from the conclave of their superiors, became aware that the priest was once more in their midst. He had entered among the shadows very quietly.
“A la bonne heure, Monsieur l’Abbé!” said Roland de Céligny. “Monsieur le Marquis has arrived.” And he indicated the other side of the attic.
“And have you been to the wedding at Mirabel?” enquired Artamène mischievously.
The Abbé Chassin quickly turned on him with a frown, putting his finger to his lips. But he was too late; the words were out, and, though the culprit had moderated his voice, they had been heard. And Artamène, roused at once to interest and alertness by the priest’s gesture, was somehow aware of a sudden stiffening of M. de Kersaint’s whole figure, ere he said, turning round from the table, “What is this about . . . Mirabel?”
The Abbé seeming in no great haste to answer, it was M. de Brencourt who replied, “The old lady whom the Abbé has been visiting next door is, apparently, suffering from delusions about Mirabel—that château of the Duc de Trélan’s near Paris. That is what M. de la Vergne means.”
“This is interesting,” observed the Marquis de Kersaint, turning further round to look at the little priest, who had not advanced a step since Artamène’s jest. “And did you learn anything fresh about Mirabel, Abbé?”
“Yes, I did, Monsieur le Marquis,” answered the priest rather shortly.
“May we hear it?”
M. Chassin was silent, and seemed to be considering this request. Artamène saw his face, and it was oddly perturbed.
“We are not, I hope, inviting you to reveal the secrets of the confessional?”
“No.”
“Why may we not hear it, then?”
“Because,” said the Abbé gravely, “it is more suited for your private ear, Monsieur le Marquis.”
“Why?” asked M. de Brencourt, instantly, looking from one to the other, “why for M. de Kersaint’s private ear?”
This question the Abbé seemed totally unable to answer, and after a second or two the Marquis de Kersaint said carelessly to his subordinate, “Because M. Chassin knows that I am a kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s, I suppose.”
“A kinsman of the Duc de Trélan’s—you!” exclaimed the Comte de Brencourt in obvious surprise. “A near kinsman?”
“No, no, very distant,” replied his leader quickly. “And that is why I cannot conceive how a disclosure affecting his property can possibly be destined for my ear alone. So let us all hear it, if you please, Monsieur l’Abbé.”
M. de Brencourt, still under the empire of surprise or some other emotion, continued to look at this kinsman of M. de Trélan’s very fixedly; so, from where he still stood near the door, did the priest. A better light would have revealed entreaty in his eyes.
“Well, Monsieur l’Abbé, I am waiting!” said the Marquis de Kersaint rather haughtily, and in the fashion of a man who has never been used to that discipline.
The Abbé set his lips obstinately. “It will keep well enough till to-morrow, Monsieur le Marquis.”
“What, a communication from the dying? And who knows whether we shall all see to-morrow? Come, Abbé, I command you!—Roland, a chair here for M. Chassin.”
Whether the priest could have stood out, had he willed, against that masterful voice and gesture, at any rate he did not.
“Very well, Marquis,” said he, and Artamène, thrilled to the core, thought, “ ‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!’ That’s what he would really like to say, our Abbé!” And since their leader had intimated that the matter was not private after all, he applied himself to listen with all his ears. Roland, looking rather troubled, set a chair at the table for the priest and stood back.
“You must know then, Monsieur le Marquis,” began the Abbé in a low voice, “that the old lady whom I have been visiting had been present at the festivities in 1771, when the . . . the young Duc de Trélan married his bride.”
“That beautiful and most unfortunate lady!” commented M. de Brencourt under his breath.
The Marquis glanced at him for the fraction of a second, and the priest went on, nervously rubbing his hands together, and rather pale:
“It seems that there is a legend of a treasure hidden in Mirabel since the days of the Fronde, a treasure whose whereabouts no one has ever been able to discover. Since you are a kinsman of M. de Trélan’s, Monsieur le Marquis, it is possible that you have heard of the legend?”
M. de Kersaint nodded thoughtfully. “I believe I have heard of it. Yes?”
“The story appears to be true. The document describing the hiding-place of the treasure was stolen at the time—nearly a hundred and fifty years ago—and came into the possession of this old lady’s family, but in such a way that it was only recently rediscovered by the old lady herself.”
“What an extraordinary tale! Well?”
“Since then she had desired to give it to the Duc, but could not, as he was not in France. And in her delirium just now, fancying herself back at the wedding, she was talking so persistently of offering to the . . . the young couple, as a wedding gift, this paper, which would help them to what was after all their own, that M. Charlot——”
“A wedding gift for de Trélan and his wife!” interposed the Comte de Brencourt with a laugh. “Bon Dieu, what irony, considering how their wedded life ended!”
“Surely that need not concern us now, Monsieur de Brencourt!” said his leader coldly. “Go on please, Abbé.”
“By the most curious coincidence,” pursued M. Chassin, his eyes fixed on the Marquis, “M. Charlot asked me, as a priest, to see if I could not set the old lady’s mind at rest by some means. She did at last regain control of her senses, and I was able in the end to assure her that I could and would despatch the document, if she entrusted me with it, to the proper quarter.”
“And she gave it you?” asked the Marquis, bending forward with some eagerness.
“I have it here now,” answered the priest, touching his breast.
M. de Kersaint drew back again, and Artamène was struck with his resemblance to a chess player who is meditating the next move. But only the Marquis de Kersaint himself and the man whom he had forced into playing out this gambit with him, fully realised the awkward position into which his insistence had got them.
“So I must make it my business to despatch it, somehow, to M. le Duc,” finished the Abbé. “It was of course my knowledge that you were kin to him, Monsieur le Marquis, which made me accept the trust, as I knew I could rely on your assistance.”
But the Marquis was looking down at the table and said nothing.
“The document will hardly be of much use to M. de Trélan when he does get it,” remarked the Comte de Brencourt. “Mirabel, I have heard, is now a museum or something of the sort; at any rate it is in government hands. And M. de Trélan—where is M. de Trélan? In England still? No, hardly. One never hears of him. Perhaps he is dead.”
“No, he is alive,” replied his kinsman briefly, lifting his eyes for a second.
“Ah! But how is he going to profit by this treasure, even if it is still there?”
“Nevertheless, I must fulfil my trust,” observed M. Chassin, looking across the table at M. de Kersaint’s lowered head.
“Oh, undoubtedly, Abbé, though I do not know how you are going to do it even with M. de Kersaint’s cousinly . . . is it cousinly? . . . assistance. What do you yourself think of the problem, Marquis?”
The Marquis de Kersaint raised his head. “I think,” he said slowly, looking hard at M. Chassin, “that the Abbé is right. M. de Trélan must be informed, somehow. But at the same time, since it is practically out of the question for him, in exile, to take any steps in the matter—and would be difficult and dangerous even were he in France—and since our need for money is so pressing at this moment, I would propose——”
“What?” asked the Comte.
“To ask, as his kinsman, for his authorisation to use the treasure, if we can come at it, for the needs of Finistère—that is to say, for the King’s service.”
“O sir, do you think we could!” cried Roland eagerly, starting forward.
“O, Monsieur le Marquis, send us to Mirabel!” cried Artamène.
“You are going too fast, gentlemen. We must first get the Duc’s leave to pillage his property, even though it be confiscated.”
“Do you think you will have difficulty in getting it?” asked the Comte de Brencourt, narrowing his eyes.
“No, I do not think so. As you have yourself pointed out, Comte, how is M. de Trélan going to profit, in any case, by this suddenly revealed hoard?”
“Well, when the King comes into his own again, it would be of no small service to the Duc, a fund in his own château! I expect his financial resources, great as they once were, are much embarrassed. He could hardly have been accused of husbanding them!”
“You seem to know a great deal about the private affairs of M. de Trélan, Comte!” observed M. de Kersaint drily, turning and looking at him. “I might observe that no honest man has gained by the Revolution, and that those with much to lose have lost proportionately. However, if my kinsman takes the view that you suggest—which I do not think he will—he must be induced to look upon our present proposed use of the money as a loan to His Majesty. After all, it was never of any advantage to him as long as he was unaware of its existence or of its whereabouts, and of these, apparently, he never would have known but for the extraordinary coincidence of which the Abbé has just told us.”
“But,” suggested M. de Brencourt, “before approaching him on the subject—through you—might it not be as well to get a sight of this precious document, so that we may form some idea as to whether the amount will repay the risking a man’s neck to find, and whether it will prove easy to come at?”
The priest and M. de Kersaint looked at one another. “Yes. I think we might do that without indiscretion,” said the latter, after a moment’s hesitation. “Do not you, Abbé?”
M. Chassin made no reply in words, but drew out from his coat the parchment received from the dying woman and gave it into the hands of his leader. The Marquis de Kersaint spread out the ancient memorandum on the table, moved the candles in their bottles nearer, and the three men studied in silence the rough diagram and its legend. Nor were Roland and Artamène, in the background, innocent of craning their necks to see likewise.
“Ten bags—two thousand five hundred pistoles in each,” murmured the Comte reflectively. “How much is that, I wonder, in modern money? And there are jewels too, apparently.”
The Marquis de Kersaint’s lips were compressed, his face an enigma. “It certainly appears to be worth taking risks for,” he said at last. “Money is what we most need in the world now for Finistère. We can get the men; the last few months have shown me that clearly, but of what use are unarmed men?”
“Less than none,” observed his second in command. “This document, therefore, seems singularly like a gift from heaven.”
“I shall certainly communicate with M. de Trélan without delay,” said the Marquis. “May I keep this parchment, Abbé?”
“I had hoped that you would charge yourself with its despatch, Monsieur le Marquis,” replied the priest, and M. de Kersaint without more ado folded it up and put it in his breast.
“It seems to me, de Kersaint,” said the Comte de Brencourt reflectively, playing with the cards which still strewed the table, “that, considering all things, the exceptional circumstances, our pressing needs, the possibility that you may never succeed in communicating with the Duc—wherever he may be—that we could hardly be blamed if we took the law into our own hands, and did not wait for his authorisation. After all, the risk would be ours.”
“That solution had already occurred to me, I admit,” said the Marquis, with the ghost of a smile, while mute applause from MM. de Céligny and de la Vergne greeted the Comte’s suggestion. “But the affair is in a sense the Abbé’s, and entrusted to him.”
“I am quite content to abide by your decision, Monsieur le Marquis,” replied the priest sedately.
“But, de Kersaint,” objected the Comte, evidently struck by a sudden idea, “have you not some reversionary interest in the treasure yourself, if you are kin to M. de Trélan? Should we not ultimately be robbing you, perhaps?”
