The Chouans

* * * * *

Towards midnight the cottage of Galope-Chopine, hitherto the scene of life without a care, was full of dread and horrible anxiety.  Barbette and her little boy returned at the supper-hour, one with her heavy burden of rushes, the other carrying fodder for the cattle.  Entering the hut, they looked about in vain for Galope-Chopine; the miserable chamber never looked to them as large, so empty was it.  The fire was out, and the darkness, the silence, seemed to tell of some disaster.  Barbette hastened to make a blaze, and to light two oribus, the name given to candles made of pitch in the region between the villages of Amorique and the Upper Loire, and still used beyond Amboise in the Vendomois districts.  Barbette did these things with the slowness of a person absorbed in one overpowering feeling.  She listened to every sound.  Deceived by the whistling of the wind she went often to the door of the hut, returning sadly.  She cleaned two beakers, filled them with cider, and placed them on the long table.  Now and again she looked at her boy, who watched the baking of the buckwheat cakes, but did not speak to him.  The lad’s eyes happened to rest on the nails which usually held his father’s duck-gun, and Barbette trembled as she noticed that the gun was gone.  The silence was broken only by the lowing of a cow or the splash of the cider as it dropped at regular intervals from the bung of the cask.  The poor woman sighed while she poured into three brown earthenware porringers a sort of soup made of milk, biscuit broken into bits, and boiled chestnuts.

“They must have fought in the field next to the Berandiere,” said the boy.

“Go and see,” replied his mother.

The child ran to the place where the fighting had, as he said, taken place.  In the moonlight he found the heap of bodies, but his father was not among them, and he came back whistling joyously, having picked up several five-franc pieces trampled in the mud and overlooked by the victors.  His mother was sitting on a stool beside the fire, employed in spinning flax.  He made a negative sign to her, and then, ten o’clock having struck from the tower of Saint-Leonard, he went to bed, muttering a prayer to the holy Virgin of Auray.  At dawn, Barbette, who had not closed her eyes, gave a cry of joy, as she heard in the distance a sound she knew well of hobnailed shoes, and soon after Galope-Chopine’s scowling face presented itself.

“Thanks to Saint-Labre,” he said, “to whom I owe a candle, the Gars is safe.  Don’t forget that we now owe three candles to the saint.”

He seized a beaker of cider and emptied it at a draught without drawing breath.  When his wife had served his soup and taken his gun and he himself was seated on the wooden bench, he said, looking at the fire:  “I can’t make out how the Blues got here.  The fighting was at Florigny.  Who the devil could have told them that the Gars was in our house; no one knew it but he and the handsome garce and we—­”

Barbette turned white.

“They made me believe they were the gars of Saint-Georges,” she said, trembling, “it was I who told them the Gars was here.”

Galope-Chopine turned pale himself and dropped his porringer on the table.

“I sent the boy to warn you,” said Barbette, frightened, “didn’t you meet him?”

The Chouan rose and struck his wife so violently that she dropped, pale as death, upon the bed.

“You cursed woman,” he said, “you have killed me!” Then seized with remorse, he took her in his arms.  “Barbette!” he cried, “Barbette!  —­Holy Virgin, my hand was too heavy!”

“Do you think,” she said, opening her eyes, “that Marche-a-Terre will hear of it?”

“The Gars will certainly inquire who betrayed him.”

“Will he tell it to Marche-a-Terre?”

“Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche were both at Florigny.”

Barbette breathed a little easier.

“If they touch a hair of your head,” she cried, “I’ll rinse their glasses with vinegar.”

“Ah!  I can’t eat,” said Galope-Chopine, anxiously.

His wife set another pitcher full of cider before him, but he paid no heed to it.  Two big tears rolled from the woman’s eyes and moistened the deep furrows of her withered face.

“Listen to me, wife; to-morrow morning you must gather fagots on the rocks of Saint-Sulpice, to the right and Saint-Leonard and set fire to them.  That is a signal agreed upon between the Gars and the old rector of Saint-Georges who is to come and say mass for him.”

“Is the Gars going to Fougeres?”

“Yes, to see his handsome garce.  I have been sent here and there all day about it.  I think he is going to marry her and carry her off; for he told me to hire horses and have them ready on the road to Saint-Malo.”

Thereupon Galope-Chopine, who was tired out, went to bed for an hour or two, at the end of which time he again departed.  Later, on the following morning, he returned, having carefully fulfilled all the commissions entrusted to him by the Gars.  Finding that Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche had not appeared at the cottage, he relieved the apprehensions of his wife, who went off, reassured, to the rocks of Saint-Sulpice, where she had collected the night before several piles of fagots, now covered with hoarfrost.  The boy went with her, carrying fire in a broken wooden shoe.

Hardly had his wife and son passed out of sight behind the shed when Galope-Chopine heard the noise of men jumping the successive barriers, and he could dimly see, through the fog which was growing thicker, the forms of two men like moving shadows.

“It is Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche,” he said, mentally; then he shuddered.  The two Chouans entered the courtyard and showed their gloomy faces under the broad-brimmed hats which made them look like the figures which engravers introduce into their landscapes.

“Good-morning, Galope-Chopine,” said Marche-a-Terre, gravely.

“Good-morning, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre,” replied the other, humbly.  “Will you come in and drink a drop?  I’ve some cold buckwheat cake and fresh-made butter.”

“That’s not to be refused, cousin,” said Pille-Miche.

The two Chouans entered the cottage.  So far there was nothing alarming for the master of the house, who hastened to fill three beakers from his huge cask of cider, while Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche, sitting on the polished benches on each side of the long table, cut the cake and spread it with the rich yellow butter from which the milk spurted as the knife smoothed it.  Galope-Chopine placed the beakers full of frothing cider before his guests, and the three Chouans began to eat; but from time to time the master of the house cast side-long glances at Marche-a-Terre as he drank his cider.

“Lend me your snuff-box,” said Marche-a-Terre to Pille-Miche.

Having shaken several pinches into the palm of his hand the Breton inhaled the tobacco like a man who is making ready for serious business.

“It is cold,” said Pille-Miche, rising to shut the upper half of the door.

The daylight, already dim with fog, now entered only through the little window, and feebly lighted the room and the two seats; the fire, however, gave out a ruddy glow.  Galope-Chopine refilled the beakers, but his guests refused to drink again, and throwing aside their large hats looked at him solemnly.  Their gestures and the look they gave him terrified Galope-Chopine, who fancied he saw blood in the red woollen caps they wore.

“Fetch your axe,” said Marche-a-Terre.

“But, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, what do you want it for?”

“Come, cousin, you know very well,” said Pille-Miche, pocketing his snuff-box which Marche-a-Terre returned to him; “you are condemned.”

The two Chouans rose together and took their guns.

“Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, I never said one word about the Gars—­”

“I told you to fetch your axe,” said Marche-a-Terre.

The hapless man knocked against the wooden bedstead of his son, and several five-franc pieces rolled on the floor.  Pille-Miche picked them up.

“Ho! ho! the Blues paid you in new money,” cried Marche-a-Terre.

“As true as that’s the image of Saint-Labre,” said Galope-Chopine, “I have told nothing.  Barbette mistook the Fougeres men for the gars of Saint-Georges, and that’s the whole of it.”

“Why do you tell things to your wife?” said Marche-a-Terre, roughly.

“Besides, cousin, we don’t want excuses, we want your axe.  You are condemned.”

At a sign from his companion, Pille-Miche helped Marche-a-Terre to seize the victim.  Finding himself in their grasp Galope-Chopine lost all power and fell on his knees holding up his hands to his slayers in desperation.

“My friends, my good friends, my cousin,” he said, “what will become of my little boy?”

“I will take charge of him,” said Marche-a-Terre.

“My good comrades,” cried the victim, turning livid.  “I am not fit to die.  Don’t make me go without confession.  You have the right to take my life, but you’ve no right to make me lose a blessed eternity.”

“That is true,” said Marche-a-Terre, addressing Pille-Miche.

The two Chouans waited a moment in much uncertainty, unable to decide this case of conscience.  Galope-Chopine listened to the rustling of the wind as though he still had hope.  Suddenly Pille-Miche took him by the arm into a corner of the hut.

“Confess your sins to me,” he said, “and I will tell them to a priest of the true Church, and if there is any penance to do I will do it for you.”

Galope-Chopine obtained some respite by the way in which he confessed his sins; but in spite of their number and the circumstances of each crime, he came finally to the end of them.

“Cousin,” he said, imploringly, “since I am speaking to you as I would to my confessor, I do assure you, by the holy name of God, that I have nothing to reproach myself with except for having, now and then, buttered my bread on both sides; and I call on Saint-Labre, who is there over the chimney-piece, to witness that I have never said one word about the Gars.  No, my good friends, I have not betrayed him.”

“Very good, that will do, cousin; you can explain all that to God in course of time.”

“But let me say good-bye to Barbette.”

“Come,” said Marche-a-Terre, “if you don’t want us to think you worse than you are, behave like a Breton and be done with it.”

The two Chouans seized him again and threw him on the bench where he gave no other sign of resistance than the instinctive and convulsive motions of an animal, uttering a few smothered groans, which ceased when the axe fell.  The head was off at the first blow.  Marche-a-Terre took it by the hair, left the room, sought and found a large nail in the rough casing of the door, and wound the hair about it; leaving the bloody head, the eyes of which he did not even close, to hang there.

The two Chouans then washed their hands, without the least haste, in a pot full of water, picked up their hats and guns, and jumped the gate, whistling the “Ballad of the Captain.”  Pille-Miche began to sing in a hoarse voice as he reached the field the last verses of that rustic song, their melody floating on the breeze:—­

  “At the first town
  Her lover dressed her
  All in white satin;

  “At the next town
  Her lover dressed her
  In gold and silver.

  “So beautiful was she
  They gave her veils
  To wear in the regiment.”

The tune became gradually indistinguishable as the Chouans got further away; but the silence of the country was so great that several of the notes reached Barbette’s ear as she neared home, holding her boy by the hand.  A peasant-woman never listens coldly to that song, so popular is it in the West of France, and Barbette began, unconsciously, to sing the first verses:—­

  “Come, let us go, my girl,
  Let us go to the war;
  Let us go, it is time.

  “Brave captain,
  Let it not trouble you,
  But my daughter is not for you.

  “You shall not have her on earth,
  You shall not have her at sea,
  Unless by treachery.

  “The father took his daughter,
  He unclothed her
  And flung her out to sea.

  “The captain, wiser still,
  Into the waves he jumped
  And to the shore he brought her.

  “Come, let us go, my girl,
  Let us go to the war;
  Let us go, it is time.

  “At the first town
  Her lover dressed her,”
  Etc., etc.

As Barbette reached this verse of the song, where Pille-Miche had begun it, she was entering the courtyard of her home; her tongue suddenly stiffened, she stood still, and a great cry, quickly repressed, came from her gaping lips.

“What is it, mother?” said the child.

“Walk alone,” she cried, pulling her hand away and pushing him roughly; “you have neither father nor mother.”

The child, who was rubbing his shoulder and weeping, suddenly caught sight of the thing on the nail; his childlike face kept the nervous convulsion his crying had caused, but he was silent.  He opened his eyes wide, and gazed at the head of his father with a stupid look which betrayed no emotion; then his face, brutalized by ignorance, showed savage curiosity.  Barbette again took his hand, grasped it violently, and dragged him into the house.  When Pille-Miche and Marche-a-Terre threw their victim on the bench one of his shoes, dropping off, fell on the floor beneath his neck and was afterward filled with blood.  It was the first thing that met the widow’s eye.

“Take off your shoe,” said the mother to her son.  “Put your foot in that.  Good.  Remember,” she cried, in a solemn voice, “your father’s shoe; never put on your own without remembering how the Chouans filled it with his blood, and kill the Chouans!”

She swayed her head with so convulsive an action that the meshes of her black hair fell upon her neck and gave a sinister expression to her face.

“I call Saint-Labre to witness,” she said, “that I vow you to the Blues.  You shall be a soldier to avenge your father.  Kill, kill the Chouans, and do as I do.  Ha! they’ve taken the head of my man, and I am going to give that of the Gars to the Blues.”

She sprang at a bound on the bed, seized a little bag of money from a hiding-place, took the hand of the astonished little boy, and dragged him after her without giving him time to put on his shoe, and was on her way to Fougeres rapidly, without once turning her head to look at the home she abandoned.  When they reached the summit of the rocks of Saint-Sulpice Barbette set fire to the pile of fagots, and the boy helped her to pile on the green gorse, damp with hoarfrost, to make the smoke more dense.

“That fire will last longer than your father, longer than I, longer than the Gars,” said Barbette, in a savage voice.

While the widow of Galope-Chopine and her son with his bloody foot stood watching, the one, with a gloomy expression of revenge, the other with curiosity, the curling of the smoke, Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s eyes were fastened on the same rock, trying, but in vain, to see her lover’s signal.  The fog, which had thickened, buried the whole region under a veil, its gray tints obscuring even the outlines of the scenery that was nearest the town.  She examined with tender anxiety the rocks, the castle, the buildings, which loomed like shadows through the mist.  Near her window several trees stood out against this blue-gray background; the sun gave a dull tone as of tarnished silver to the sky; its rays colored the bare branches of the trees, where a few last leaves were fluttering, with a dingy red.  But too many dear and delightful sentiments filled Marie’s soul to let her notice the ill-omens of a scene so out of harmony with the joys she was tasting in advance.  For the last two days her ideas had undergone a change.  The fierce, undisciplined vehemence of her passions had yielded under the influence of the equable atmosphere which a true love gives to life.  The certainty of being loved, sought through so many perils, had given birth to a desire to re-enter those social conditions which sanction love, and which despair alone had made her leave.  To love for a moment only now seemed to her a species of weakness.  She saw herself lifted from the dregs of society, where misfortune had driven her, to the high rank in which her father had meant to place her.  Her vanity, repressed for a time by the cruel alternations of hope and misconception, was awakened and showed her all the benefits of a great position.  Born in a certain way to rank, marriage to a marquis meant, to her mind, living and acting in the sphere that belonged to her.  Having known the chances and changes of an adventurous life, she could appreciate, better than other women, the grandeur of the feelings which make the Family.  Marriage and motherhood with all their cares seemed to her less a task than a rest.  She loved the calm and virtuous life she saw through the clouds of this last storm as a woman weary of virtue may sometimes covet an illicit passion.  Virtue was to her a new seduction.

“Perhaps,” she thought, leaving the window without seeing the signal on the rocks of Saint-Sulpice, “I have been too coquettish with him —­but I knew he loved me!  Francine, it is not a dream; to-night I shall be Marquise de Montauran.  What have I done to deserve such perfect happiness?  Oh!  I love him, and love alone is love’s reward.  And yet, I think God means to recompense me for taking heart through all my misery; he means me to forget my sufferings—­for you know, Francine, I have suffered.”

“To-night, Marquise de Montauran, you, Marie?  Ah! until it is done I cannot believe it!  Who has told him your true goodness?”

“Dear child! he has more than his handsome eyes to see me with, he has a soul.  If you had seen him, as I have, in danger!  Oh! he knows how to love—­he is so brave!”

“If you really love him why do you let him come to Fougeres?”

“We had no time to say one word to each other when the Blues surprised us.  Besides, his coming is a proof of love.  Can I ever have proofs enough?  And now, Francine, do my hair.”

But she pulled it down a score of times with motions that seemed electric, as though some stormy thoughts were mingling still with the arts of her coquetry.  As she rolled a curl or smoothed the shining plaits she asked herself, with a remnant of distrust, whether the marquis were deceiving her; but treachery seemed to her impossible, for did he not expose himself to instant vengeance by entering Fougeres?  While studying in her mirror the effects of a sidelong glance, a smile, a gentle frown, an attitude of anger, or of love, or disdain, she was seeking some woman’s wile by which to probe to the last instant the heart of the young leader.

“You are right, Francine,” she said; “I wish with you that the marriage were over.  This is the last of my cloudy days—­it is big with death or happiness.  Oh! that fog is dreadful,” she went on, again looking towards the heights of Saint-Sulpice, which were still veiled in mist.

She began to arrange the silk and muslin curtains which draped the window, making them intercept the light and produce in the room a voluptuous chiaro-scuro.

“Francine,” she said, “take away those knick-knacks on the mantelpiece; leave only the clock and the two Dresden vases.  I’ll fill those vases myself with the flowers Corentin brought me.  Take out the chairs, I want only this sofa and a fauteuil.  Then sweep the carpet, so as to bring out the colors, and put wax candles in the sconces and on the mantel.”

Marie looked long and carefully at the old tapestry on the walls.  Guided by her innate taste she found among the brilliant tints of these hangings the shades by which to connect their antique beauty with the furniture and accessories of the boudoir, either by the harmony of color or the charm of contrast.  The same thought guided the arrangement of the flowers with which she filled the twisted vases which decorated her chamber.  The sofa was placed beside the fire.  On either side of the bed, which filled the space parallel to that of the chimney, she placed on gilded tables tall Dresden vases filled with foliage and flowers that were sweetly fragrant.  She quivered more than once as she arranged the folds of the green damask above the bed, and studied the fall of the drapery which concealed it.  Such preparations have a secret, ineffable happiness about them; they cause so many delightful emotions that a woman as she makes them forgets her doubts; and Mademoiselle de Verneuil forgot hers.  There is in truth a religious sentiment in the multiplicity of cares taken for one beloved who is not there to see them and reward them, but who will reward them later with the approving smile these tender preparations (always so fully understood) obtain.  Women, as they make them, love in advance; and there are few indeed who would not say to themselves, as Mademoiselle de Verneuil now thought:  “To-night I shall be happy!” That soft hope lies in every fold of silk or muslin; insensibly, the harmony the woman makes about her gives an atmosphere of love in which she breathes; to her these things are beings, witnesses; she has made them the sharers of her coming joy.  Every movement, every thought brings that joy within her grasp.  But presently she expects no longer, she hopes no more, she questions silence; the slightest sound is to her an omen; doubt hooks its claws once more into her heart; she burns, she trembles, she is grasped by a thought which holds her like a physical force; she alternates from triumph to agony, and without the hope of coming happiness she could not endure the torture.  A score of times did Mademoiselle de Verneuil raise the window-curtain, hoping to see the smoke rising above the rocks; but the fog only took a grayer tone, which her excited imagination turned into a warning.  At last she let fall the curtain, impatiently resolving not to raise it again.  She looked gloomily around the charming room to which she had given a soul and a voice, asking herself if it were done in vain, and this thought brought her back to her preparations.

“Francine,” she said, drawing her into a little dressing-room which adjoined her chamber and was lighted through a small round window opening on a dark corner of the fortifications where they joined the rock terrace of the Promenade, “put everything in order.  As for the salon, you can leave that as it is,” she added, with a smile which women reserve for their nearest friends, the delicate sentiment of which men seldom understand.

“Ah! how sweet you are!” exclaimed the little maid.

“A lover is our beauty—­foolish women that we are!” she replied gaily.

Francine left her lying on the ottoman and went away convinced that, whether her mistress were loved or not, she would never betray Montauran.