CHAPTER XXVIII

HOW GENERAL RATONEAU MET HIS MATCH

Within and without Les Chouettes the men all listened till those sounds died away. Then Simon turned to the little group of gendarmes and said: "Come along, fellows, make a rush for that window. If there are any Chouan gentlemen here, we must not let them escape."

Then the oldest of the gendarmes, a man well accustomed to hunting this sort of game, hung back and looked at him queerly.

"There are none--I'll answer for that," he said. "Certainly not Monsieur Ange de la Mariniere, or he would have been out long ago--and none of us ever felt sure that he was mixed up in Chouannerie--"

"What are you talking about?" cried Simon. "Hold your tongue, and do your duty. The General ordered us to break into the house and search it.

Why, you know yourself that it is the headquarters of this plot."

"If so, if I hear rightly, the master of it has paid for his Chouannerie with his life," said the man gravely, still holding back, and watching Simon with a dogged steadiness. "Our mates have caught the other gentlemen--they could not fail--and as for me, Monsieur Simon, I don't feel inclined to take any more orders from that General of yours. To me, he seems like a madman. There's private malice behind all this. It is not the sort of justice that suits me--to kill a gentleman and shoot his servants and burn his house down. I tell you, fellows, I don't like it--there are limits to what the police ought to do, and we shall find ourselves in the wrong box, if we go further without the Prefect's warrant."

"Obey your orders, or you'll pay for it!" shouted Simon. "Come on, men!"

and he ran towards the house.

"Be off, or we fire!" cried a voice from the window above.

"All right, Maitre Joubard, don't fire; we know you are a loyal man,"

said the spokesman of the gendarmes. "I am going straight back to Sonnay, to see what Monsieur le Prefet says to all this. Do you agree?"

he turned to his comrades, who had drawn up behind him, and who answered, even the man who had been tied to the tree, by a quick murmur of a.s.sent. "Come, Monsieur Simon, I advise you to cast in your lot with us; you have had too much to do with that madman. Everybody hates him.

They sent him down here because they could not stand him in the army."

As Simon turned his back and walked sulkily away, the gendarme added: "Come down, some of you, and look for your master. He may be still alive."

The men in the room above looked at each other. They could not and did not believe that Monsieur Joseph was dead. To his old servants, it was one of those shocks too heavy for the brain to bear; the thought stunned them. Large tears were rolling down old Joubard's cheeks, but his brain and Martin's were active enough.

"What do you think?" he said to his son. "Are they safe at La Mariniere?"

"I'll wager my wooden leg they are," Martin said cheerfully. "They had a good start, and that lumbering brute with his big horse would not know the shortest path. And once with Monsieur Urbain--"

"Ah, poor man! Well, let us go down and look for him, the little uncle.

Ah, Martin, all the pretty girls in the world will take long to comfort Monsieur Angelot--and as to Mademoiselle Henriette!"

"The gendarme said he might be still alive," said Martin. "See, they are gone round to him."

"He is dead," said Joubard. "Come, Gigot, you and I must carry him in.

As to you, Tobie, just keep watch on this side with your gun--that poisonous snake of a Simon is prowling about there. Don't shoot, of course, but keep him off; don't let him get into the house."

Martin lingered a moment behind his father. "Tobie," he said, "that Simon has been Monsieur Angelot's enemy all through. I thought I had finished him with my stick, two or three hours ago, but--"

"I know--I have my master's orders," said Tobie. He smiled, and lifted his gun to his shoulder.

The sun was rising when they found Monsieur Joseph on his bed of soft gra.s.s and leaves, at the foot of his own old oak just bronzed by the sun of August and September. Up above the squirrels were playing; they did not disturb his sleep, though they scampered along the boughs and squeaked and peeped down curiously. The birds cried and chirped about him in the opening day; and one long ray of yellow sunshine pierced the eastern screen of trees, creeping all along up the broad slope where the autumn crocuses grew, till it laid itself softly and caressingly on the smiling face turned to meet it once more. The sportsman had gone out for the last time into his loved fields and woods; and perhaps he would have chosen to die there, rather than in a curtained room with fresh air and daylight shut out. No doubt the manner of his death had been terrible; but the pain was momentary, and he had gone to meet it in his highest mood, all one flame of indignation against evil, and ready, generous self-sacrifice. He had died for Angelot, fighting his enemy; he had carried out his little daughter's words, and the last drop of that good heart's blood was for Angelot, though indeed his dear boy's enemy was also the enemy of the cause he loved, to which his life had been given.

No more conspiracies now for the little Royalist gentleman.

They all came and stood about him, Joubard, Martin, Gigot, and the party of gendarmes. At first they hardly liked to touch him; he lay so peacefully asleep under the tree, his thin right hand pressed over his heart, where the sword had wounded him, such a look of perfect content on the face that death had marked for its own. His sword lay on the gra.s.s beside him, where it had fallen from his dying hand. Martin picked it up, saying in a low voice, "This will be for Monsieur Angelot."

St.u.r.dy Gigot, choking with sobs, turned upon him fiercely.

"It belongs to mademoiselle."

They lifted Monsieur Joseph--old Joubard at his head, Gigot at his feet--and carried their light burden down to his house, in at his own bedroom window. They laid him on his bed in the alcove, and then were afraid to touch him any more. All the group of strong men stood and looked at him, Gigot weeping loudly, Joubard silently; even the eyes of the gendarmes were wet.

"We must have women here," said Joubard.

Turning round, he saw Monsieur Joseph's letter to his brother lying on the table; he took it up and gave it to Gigot.

"Take this letter to La Mariniere," he said, "and tell Monsieur Urbain what has happened. And you," to the gendarmes, "be off to Sonnay, and make your report at once to Monsieur le Prefet. I doubt if he will justify all that is done in his name."

"We will do as you say, Maitre Joubard," said the gendarme.

A few minutes later the only one of the General's party left at Les Chouettes was Simon. He skulked round behind the buildings, but could not persuade himself to go away. It seemed to him that there was a good deal of danger in escaping on foot; that the country people, enraged by Monsieur Joseph's death, delighted, as they probably would be, by Monsieur Angelot's marriage, would all be his enemies. He was half terrified by General Ratoneau's desperation. Suppose he had overtaken Angelot's young bride and her companions! suppose he had swung her up on his horse and carried her away, forgetting that he was not campaigning in a foreign country, but living peaceably in France, where the law protected people from such violent doings. It might be very inconvenient, in such a case, to appear at Sonnay as a friend and follower of General Ratoneau. Any credit he still had with the Prefect, for instance, would be lost for ever. And yet, if he deserted the General entirely, washed his hands, as far as possible, of him and his doings, what chance was there of receiving the large sums of money so grudgingly promised him!

"A hard master, the devil!" Simon muttered to himself.

He peeped cautiously round the corner of the kitchen wall, where the silver birches had scattered their golden leaves in the wind of the night. He watched the little band of gendarmes as they started down the road towards Sonnay. It struck him that his best plan would be to slip away across the _landes_ towards the etang des Morts, and to put himself right with the authorities by helping to capture a few Chouan gentlemen and conveying them to prison.

But first--how still all the place was! The men were busy, he supposed, with their dead master. Surely those windows were not so firmly fastened but that he could make his way in, and perhaps find some evidence to prove Monsieur Joseph's complicity in the plots of the moment. He walked lightly across the sand. A dog barked in the house, and Martin Joubard looked out from an upper window.

All the evil pa.s.sions of his nature rose in Simon then. That was the man who knew he had arrested Angelot; that was the man who had knocked him down in the park and lost him half an hour of valuable time. As Angelot himself, in some mysterious way, was out of reach, here was this man on whom he might revenge himself. Both for his own sake and the General's, this man would be better out of the way; Simon raised his loaded carbine and fired.

Martin stepped back at the instant, and he missed him. The shot grazed Tobie's cheek as he knelt inside the room, resting his long gun-barrel on the low window-sill.

"Ah, Chouan-catcher, your time is come!" muttered Tobie, and his gun went off almost of itself.

Simon flung up his arms in the air, and dropped upon the sand.

While these things were happening at Les Chouettes, Angelot was hurrying back from his mission to the etang des Morts. He was full of wild happiness, a joy that could not be believed in, till he saw and touched Helene again. His heart was as light as the air of that glorious morning, so keen, clear, and still on the high moorlands as he crossed them.

He had done all and more than the little uncle expected of him. In the darkness before dawn, as he rode through the deep lanes beyond La Joubardiere, he had met a friendly peasant who warned him that a party of police and gendarmes was watching the country a little farther south, towards the etang des Morts. He therefore left his horse in a shed, took to the fields and woods, and intercepted Cesar d'Ombre on his way to the rendezvous. Explanations were not altogether easy, for Cesar cared little for the private affairs of young La Mariniere. He had never expected much from the son of Urbain. He took his warning, and gave up his companionship easily enough. Striking off across country, avoiding all roads likely to be patrolled by the police, he made his way alone to Brittany and the coast, while Angelot returned by the way he had come.

For the sake of taking the very shortest cut across the _landes_, he brought his horse up to La Joubardiere and left him there. For no horse could carry him through the lanes, rocky as they were, at the pace that he could run and walk across country, and it was only because Uncle Joseph insisted on it that he had taken a horse at all.

The golden light of sunrise spread over the moor as he ran. He took long leaps through the heather, and coveys of birds scuttled out of his way; but their lives were safe that morning, though his eyes followed them eagerly. Far beyond the purple _landes_, the woods of Lancilly lay heaped against the western sky, a billowy dark green sea of velvet touched with the bright gold of autumn and of sunrise; and the chateau itself shone out broad in its glittering whiteness. The guests were all gone now; the music was still; and for Angelot the place was empty, a mere sh.e.l.l, a pile of stones. Other roofs covered the joy of his life now.

This shortest cut from La Joubardiere did not bring him to Les Chouettes by the usual road, but by a sharp slope of moorland, all stones and bushes and no path at all, and then across one or two small fields into a narrow lane, a bridle-path between high straggling hedges, one way from Les Chouettes to La Mariniere. The poplars by the manor gate, a shining row, lifted their tall heads, always softly rustling, a quarter of a mile farther on.

Angelot ran across the fields, jumped a ditch, reached the lane at a sharp corner, and was turning to the right towards Les Chouettes, thinking in his joyful gladness that he would be back before even Helene expected him, when something struck his ear and brought him to a sudden stand. It was a woman's scream.

"Help, help!" a voice cried; and then again there was a piteous shriek of pain or extreme terror.