The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty

She recalled that the room she slept in, in France, at Strasburg, represented the Massacre of the Innocents and so frightened her in the flickering lamplight that she had always retained a terrible memory of her first night on French soil.

She recalled how, stopping at Taverney House, she had been shown in the gardens by Baron Balsamo the image of an unknown instrument for decapitation: this was the man who, under the name of Cagliostro, had exercised a fatal influence on her destiny, as witness his hand in the Queen’s Necklace trial; though she was advised that he had perished in the papal dungeons as a magician and atheist, had she not seen him this day in the mob during the halt at Sevres?

She recalled that in Madam Lebrun’s portrait she had unwittingly made her pose as the unfortunate Henrietta Maria of England, in her portrait, as Wife of Charles I. the Beheaded.

She recalled how, when she got out of her coach for the first time at Versailles, in that Marble Court where so much blood lately flowed on her behalf, a lightning stroke had flashed so extraordinarily that Marshal Richelieu had said: “An evil omen!” albeit he was a cynic not easily startled by superstition.

She was recalling all this when a reddish cloud, from her eyes being strained, thickened around her, and one of the four candles in the candelabrum went out without evident cause.

While she was looking at it, still smoking, it seemed to her that the next taper to it paled sensibly, and turning red and then blue in the flame, faded away and lengthened upward, as if to quit the wick, from which it leaped altogether. It was extinguished, as though by an unseen breath from below.

She had watched the death of this with haggard eyes and panting bosom, and her hands went out towards the candlestick proportionable to the eclipse. When gone out, she closed her eyes, drew back in her armchair, and ran her hand over her forehead, streaming with perspiration.

When she opened them anew, after ten minutes, she perceived that the flame of the third candle was affected like the rest.

She believed it was a dream or that she was under some hallucination. She tried to rise but seemed nailed to her chair. She wanted to call her daughter, whom she would not have aroused a few minutes before for a second crown, but her voice died away in her throat. She tried to turn her head but it was rigid as if the third light expiring attracted her eyes and breath. Like the other pair, it changed hue and swaying to one side and the other, finally shot itself out.

Then fear had such mastery that speech returned to her and that made her feel restored in courage.

“I am not going to distress myself because three candles happened to go out,” she said; “but if the fourth suffers the same fate, then woe is me!”

Suddenly, without going through the transitions of the others, without lengthening or fluttering to left or right as if the death-angel wing had wafted it, the fourth flame went out.

She screamed with terror, rose, reeled and fell to the floor.

At this appeal the door opened and Andrea, white and silent in her night-wrapper appeared like a ghost on the sill. When she had revived her mistress with the mechanical action of one impelled by sheer duty, the Queen remembered all the presage, and aware that it was a woman beside her, flung her arms round her neck, and cried:

“Save me, defend me!”

“Your Majesty needs no defense among her friends,” said Andrea, “and you appear free of the swoon in which you fell.”

“Countess Charny,” gasped the other, letting go of her whom she had embraced, and almost repelling her in the first impulse.

Neither the feeling nor the expression had escaped the lady. But she remained motionless to impassibility.

“I shall undress alone,” faltered the Queen. “Return to your room, as you must require sleep.”

“I shall go back, not to sleep but to watch over your Majesty’s slumber,” returned Andrea, respectfully curtseying to the other and stalking away with the solemn step of a vitalized statue.

CHAPTER VI

THE REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRY

OUR intention being to temporarily abandon the fortunes of our high and mighty characters to follow those of more humble but perhaps no less engaging heroes, we take up with Sebastian Gilbert whom his father, immediately after his release from the Bastile, confided to a young peasant named Ange Pitou, foster-brother of the youth, and despatched them to the latter’s birthplace, Villers Cotterets.

It was eighteen leagues from the city, and Gilbert might have sent them down by stage-coach or his own carriage; but he feared isolation for the son of the mesmerists’ victim, and nothing so isolates a traveler as a closed carriage.

Ange Pitou had accepted the trust with pride at the choice of the King’s honorary physician. He travelled tranquilly, passing through villages trembling with the thrill from the shock of the events at Paris as it was the commencement of August when the pair left town.

Besides Pitou had kept a helmet and a sabre picked up on the battlefield where he had shown himself more brave than he had expected. One does not help in the taking of a Bastile without preserving some heroic touch in his bearing subsequently.

Moreover he had become something of an orator; he had studied the Classics and he had heard the many speeches of the period, scattered out of the City Hall, in the mobs, during lulls in the street fights.

Furnished with these powerful forces, added to by a pair of ponderous fists, plenty of broad grins, and a most interesting appetite for loiters-on who did not have to pay the bill, Pitou journeyed most pleasantly. For those inquisitive in political matters, he told the news, inventing what he had not heard, Paris having a knack that way which he had picked up.

As Sebastian ate little and spoke hardly at all, everybody admired Pitou’s vigorous paternal care.

They went through Haramont, the little village where the mother of one and the nurse of the other had died and was laid in earth.

Her living home, sold by Pitou’s Aunt Angelique, her sister-in-law, had been razed by the new owner, and a black cat snarled at the young men from the wall built round the garden.

But nothing was changed at the burying-ground; the grass had so grown that the chances were that the young peasant could not find his mother’s grave. Luckily he knew it by a slip of weeping willow, which he had planted; while the grass was growing it had grown also and had become in a few years a tolerable tree.

Ange walked directly to it, and the pair said their prayers under the lithe branches which Pitou took in his arms as they were his mother’s tresses.

Nobody noticed them as all the country folk were in the field and none seeing Pitou would have recognized him in his dragoon’s helmet and with the sword and belt.

At five in the afternoon they reached their destination.

While Pitou had been away from Haramont three years, it was only as many weeks since he quitted Villers Cotterets, so that it was simple enough that he should be recognized at the latter place.

The two visitors were reported to have gone to the back door of Father Fortier’s academy for young gentlemen where Pitou had been educated with Sebastian, and where the latter was to resume his studies.

A crowd collected at the front door where they thought Pitou would come forth, as they wanted to see him in the soldier’s appurtenances.

After giving the doctor’s letter and money for the schooling to Abbé Fortier’s sister, the priest being out for a walk with the pupils, Pitou left the house, cocking his helmet quite dashingly on the side of his head.

Sebastian’s chagrin at parting was softened by Ange Pitou’s promise to see him often. Pitou was like those big, lubberly Newfoundland dogs who sometimes weary you with their fawning, but usually disarm you by their jolly good humor.

The score of people outside the door thought that as Pitou was in battle array he had seen the fights in Paris and they wanted to have news.

He gave it with majesty; telling how he and Farmer Billet, their neighbor, had taken the Bastile and set Dr. Gilbert free. They had learnt something in the Gazettes but no newspaper can equal an eye-witness who can be questioned and will reply. And the obliging fellow did reply and explain and at such length that in an hour, one of the listeners suddenly remarked that he was flagging and said:

“But our dear Pitou is tired, and here we are keeping him on his legs, when he ought to go home, to his Aunt Angelique’s. The poor old girl will be delighted to see him again.”

“I am not tired but hungry,” returned the other. “I am never tired but I am always sharpset.”

Before this plain way of putting it, the throng broke up to let Pitou go through. Followed by some more curious than the rest, he proceeded to his father’s sister’s house.

It was a cottage where he would have been starved to death by the pious old humbug of an old maid, but for his poaching in the woods for something that they could eat while the superfluity was sold by her to have the cash in augmentation of a very pretty hoard the miser kept in a chair cushion.

As the door was fastened, from the old lady being out gossiping, and Pitou declared that an aunt should never shut out a loving nephew, he drew his great sabre and opened the lock with it as it were an oyster, to the admiration of the boys.

Pitou entered the familiar cottage with a bland smile, and went straight up to the cupboard where the food was kept. He used in his boyish days to ogle the crust and the hunk of cheese with the wish to have magical powers to conjure them out into his mouth.

Now he was a man: he went up to the safe, opened it, opened also his pocket-knife, and taking out a loaf, cut off a slice which might weigh a fair two pounds.

He seemed to hear Aunt Angelique snarl at him, but it was only the creak of the door hinges.