The Yellow Poppy. D. K. Broster

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

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