An Historical Mystery (The Gondreville Mystery)

“Yes, mademoiselle; the correspondents of Monsieur Girel of Troyes, a royalist who, like me, made himself for good reasons, a Jacobin. The paper which your farmer picked up one evening and which I forced him to surrender, related to the affair and would have compromised your cousins. My life no longer belongs to me, but to them, you understand. I could not buy in Gondreville. In my position, I should have lost my head had the authorities known I had the money. I preferred to wait and buy it later. But that scoundrel of a Marion was the slave of another scoundrel, Malin. All the same, Gondreville shall once more belong to its rightful masters. That’s my affair. Four hours ago I had Malin sighted by my gun; ha! he was almost gone then! Were he dead, the property would be sold and you could have bought it. In case of my death my wife would have brought you a letter which would have given you the means of buying it. But I overheard that villain telling his accomplice Grevin – another scoundrel like himself – that the Marquis and his brother were conspiring against the First Consul, that they were here in the neighborhood, and that he meant to give them up and get rid of them so as to keep Gondreville in peace. I myself saw the police spies; I laid aside my gun, and I have lost no time in coming here, thinking that you must be the one to know best how to warn the young men. That’s the whole of it.”

“You are worthy to be a noble,” said Laurence, offering her hand to Michu, who tried to kneel and kiss it. She saw his motion and prevented it, saying: “Stand up!” in a tone of voice and with a look which made him amends for all the scorn of the last twelve years.

“You reward me as though I had done all that remains for me to do,” he said. “But don’t you hear them, those huzzars of the guillotine? Let us go elsewhere.”

He took the mare’s bridle, and led her a little distance.

“Think only of sitting firm,” he said, “and of saving your head from the branches of the trees which might strike you in the face.”

Then he mounted his own horse and guided the young girl for half an hour at full gallop; making turns and half turns, and striking into wood-paths, so as to confuse their traces, until they reached a spot where he pulled up.

“I don’t know where I am,” said the countess looking about her, – “I, who know the forest as well as you do.”

“We are in the heart of it,” he replied. “Two gendarmes are after us, but we are quite safe.”

The picturesque spot to which the bailiff had guided Laurence was destined to be so fatal to the principal personages of this drama, and to Michu himself, that it becomes our duty, as an historian, to describe it. The scene became, as we shall see hereafter, one of noted interest in the judiciary annals of the Empire.

The forest of Nodesme belonged to the monastery of Notre-Dame. That monastery, seized, sacked, and demolished, had disappeared entirely, monks and property. The forest, an object of much cupidity, was taken into the domain of the Comtes de Champagne, who mortgaged it later and allowed it to be sold. In the course of six centuries nature covered its ruins with her rich and vigorous green mantle, and effaced them so thoroughly that the existence of one of the finest convents was no longer even indicated except by a slight eminence shaded by noble trees and circled by thick, impenetrable shrubbery, which, since 1794, Michu had taken great pains to make still more impenetrable by planting the thorny acacia in all the slight openings between the bushes. A pond was at the foot of the eminence and showed the existence of a hidden stream which no doubt determined in former days the site of the monastery. The late owner of the title to the forest of Nodesme was the first to recognize the etymology of the name, which dated back for eight centuries, and to discover that at one time a monastery had existed in the heart of the forest. When the first rumblings of the thunder of the Revolution were heard, the Marquis de Simeuse, who had been forced to look into his title by a lawsuit and so learned the above facts as it were by chance, began, with a secret intention not difficult to conceive, to search for some remains of the former monastery. The keeper, Michu, to whom the forest was well known, helped his master in the search, and it was his sagacity as a forester which led to the discovery of the site. Observing the trend of the five chief roads of the forest, some of which were now effaced, he saw that they all ended either at the little eminence or by the pond at the foot of it, to which points travellers from Troyes, from the valley of Arcis and that of Cinq-Cygne, and from Bar-sur-Aube doubtless came. The marquis wished to excavate the hillock but he dared not employ the people of the neighborhood. Pressed by circumstances, he abandoned the intention, leaving in Michu’s mind a strong conviction that the eminence had either the treasure or the foundations of the former abbey. He continued, all alone, this archaeological enterprise; he sounded the earth and discovered a hollowness on the level of the pond between two trees, at the foot of the only craggy part of the hillock.

One fine night he came to the place armed with a pickaxe, and by the sweat of his brow uncovered a succession of cellars, which were entered by a flight of stone steps. The pond, which was three feet deep in the middle, formed a sort of dipper, the handle of which seemed to come from the little eminence, and went far to prove that a spring had once issued from the crags, and was now lost by infiltration through the forest. The marshy shores of the pond, covered with aquatic trees, alders, willow, and ash, were the terminus of all the wood-paths, the remains of former roads and forest by-ways, now abandoned. The water, flowing from a spring, though apparently stagnant, was covered with large-leaved plants and cresses, which gave it a perfectly green surface almost indistinguishable from the shores, which were covered with fine close herbage. The place is too far from human habitations for any animal, unless a wild one, to come there. Convinced that no game was in the marsh and repelled by the craggy sides of the hills, keepers and hunters had never explored or visited this nook, which belonged to a part of the forest where the timber had not been cut for many years and which Michu meant to keep in its full growth when the time came round to fell it.

At the further end of the first cellar was a vaulted chamber, clean and dry, built with hewn stone, a sort of convent dungeon, such as they called in monastic days the in pace. The salubrity of the chamber and the preservation of this part of the staircase and of the vaults were explained by the presence of the spring, which had been enclosed at some time by a wall of extraordinary thickness built in brick and cement like those of the Romans, and received all the waters. Michu closed the entrance to this retreat with large stones; then, to keep the secret of it to himself and make it impenetrable to others, he made a rule never to enter it except from the wooded height above, by clambering down the crag instead of approaching it from the pond.

Just as the fugitives arrived, the moon was casting her beautiful silvery light on the aged tree-tops above the crag, and flickering on the splendid foliage at the corners of the several paths, all of which ended here, some with one tree, some with a group of trees. On all sides the eye was irresistibly led along their vanishing perspectives, following the curve of a wood-path or the solemn stretch of a forest glade flanked by a wall of verdure that was nearly black. The moonlight, filtering through the branches of the crossways, made the lonely, tranquil waters, where they peeped between the crosses and the lily-pads, sparkle like diamonds. The croaking of the frogs broke the deep silence of this beautiful forest-nook, the wild odors of which incited the soul to thoughts of liberty.

“Are we safe?” said the countess to Michu.

“Yes, mademoiselle. But we have each some work to do. Do you go and fasten our horses to the trees at the top of the little hill; tie a handkerchief round the mouth of each of them,” he said, giving her his cravat; “your beast and mine are both intelligent, they will understand they are not to neigh. When you have done that, come down the crag directly above the pond; but don’t let your habit catch anywhere. You will find me below.”

While the countess hid the horses and tied and gagged them, Michu removed the stones and opened the entrance to the caverns. The countess, who thought she knew the forest by heart, was amazed when she descended into the vaulted chambers. Michu replaced the stones above them with the dexterity of a mason. As he finished, the sound of horses’ feet and the voices of the gendarmes echoed in the darkness; but he quietly struck a match, lighted a resinous bit of wood and led the countess to the in pace, where there was still a piece of the candle with which he had first explored the caves. An iron door of some thickness, eaten in several places by rust, had been put in good order by the bailiff, and could be fastened securely by bars slipping into holes in the wall on either side of it. The countess, half dead with fatigue, sat down on a stone bench, above which there still remained an iron ring, the staple of which was embedded in the masonry.

“We have a salon to converse in,” said Michu. “The gendarmes may prowl as much as they like; the worst they could do would be to take our horses.”

“If they do that,” said Laurence, “it would be the death of my cousins and the Messieurs d’Hauteserre. Tell me now, what do you know?”

Michu related what he had overheard Malin say to Grevin.

“They are already on the road to Paris; they were to enter it to-morrow morning,” said the countess when he had finished.

“Lost!” exclaimed Michu. “All persons entering or leaving the barriers are examined. Malin has strong reasons to let my masters compromise themselves; he is seeking to get them killed out of his way.”

“And I, who don’t know anything of the general plan of the affair,” cried Laurence, “how can I warn Georges, Riviere, and Moreau? Where are they? – However, let us think only of my cousins and the d’Hauteserres; you must catch up with them, no matter what it costs.”

“The telegraph goes faster than the best horse,” said Michu; “and of all the nobles concerned in this conspiracy your cousins are the closest watched. If I can find them, they must be hidden here and kept here till the affair is over. Their poor father may have had a foreboding when he set me to search for this hiding-place; perhaps he felt that his sons would be saved here.”

“My mare is from the stables of the Comte d’Artois, – she is the daughter of his finest English horse,” said Laurence; “but she has already gone sixty miles, she would drop dead before you reached them.”

“Mine is in good condition,” replied Michu; “and if you did sixty miles I shall have only thirty to do.”

“Nearer forty,” she said, “they have been walking since dark. You will overtake them beyond Lagny, at Coupvrai, where they expected to be at daybreak. They are disguised as sailors, and will enter Paris by the river on some vessel. This,” she added, taking half of her mother’s wedding-ring from her finger, “is the only thing which will make them trust you; they have the other half. The keeper of Couvrai is the father of one of their soldiers; he has hidden them tonight in a hut in the forest deserted by charcoal-burners. They are eight in all, Messieurs d’Hauteserre and four others are with my cousins.”

“Mademoiselle, no one is looking for the others! let them save themselves as they can; we must think only of the Messieurs de Simeuse. It is enough just to warn the rest.”

“What! abandon the Hauteserres? never!” she said. “They must all perish or be saved together!”

“Only petty noblemen!” remarked Michu.

“They are only chevaliers, I know that,” she replied, “but they are related to the Cinq-Cygne and Simeuse blood. Save them all, and advise them how best to regain this forest.”

“The gendarmes are here, – don’t you hear them? they are holding a council of war.”

“Well, you have twice had luck to-night; go! bring my cousins here and hide them in these vaults; they’ll be safe from all pursuit – Alas! I am good for nothing!” she cried, with rage; “I should be only a beacon to light the enemy – but the police will never imagine that my cousins are in the forest if they see me at my ease. So the question resolves itself into this: how can we get five good horses to bring them in six hours from Lagny to the forest, – five horses to be killed and hidden in some thicket.”

“And the money?” said Michu, who was thinking deeply as he listened to the young countess.

“I gave my cousins a hundred louis this evening,” she replied.

“I’ll answer for them!” cried Michu. “But once hidden here you must not attempt to see them. My wife, or the little one, shall bring them food twice a week. But, as I can’t be sure of what may happen to me, remember, mademoiselle, in case of trouble, that the main beam in my hay-loft has been bored with an auger. In the hole, which is plugged with a bit of wood, you will find a plan showing how to reach this spot. The trees which you will find marked with a red dot on the plan have a black mark at their foot close to the earth. Each of these trees is a sign-post. At the foot of the third old oak which stands to the left of each sign-post, two feet in front of it and buried seven feet in the ground, you will find a large metal tube; in each tube are one hundred thousand francs in gold. These eleven trees – there are only eleven – contain the whole fortune of the Simeuse brothers, now that Gondreville has been taken from them.”

“It will take a hundred years for the nobility to recover from such blows,” said Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne, slowly.

“Is there a pass-word?” asked Michu.

“‘France and Charles’ for the soldiers, ‘Laurence and Louis’ for the Messieurs d’Hauteserre and Simeuse. Good God! to think that I saw them yesterday for the first time in eleven years, and that now they are in danger of death – and what a death! Michu,” she said, with a melancholy look, “be as prudent during the next fifteen hours as you have been grand and devoted during the last twelve years. If disaster were to overtake my cousins now I should die of it – No,” she added, quickly, “I would live long enough to kill Bonaparte.”

“There will be two of us to do that when all is lost,” said Michu.

Laurence took his rough hand and wrung it warmly, as the English do. Michu looked at his watch; it was midnight.

“We must leave here at any cost,” he said. “Death to the gendarme who attempts to stop me! And you, madame la comtesse, without presuming to dictate, ride back to Cinq-Cygne as fast as you can. The police are there by this time; fool them! delay them!”

The hole once opened, Michu flung himself down with his ear to the earth; then he rose precipitately. “The gendarmes are at the edge of the forest towards Troyes!” he said. “Ha, I’ll get the better of them yet!”

He helped the countess to come out, and replaced the stones. When this was done he heard her soft voice telling him she must see him mounted before mounting herself. Tears came to the eyes of the stern man as he exchanged a last look with his young mistress, whose own eyes were tearless.

“Fool them! yes, he is right!” she said when she heard him no longer. Then she darted towards Cinq-Cygne at full gallop.

CHAPTER VIII. TRIALS OF THE POLICE

Madame d’Hauteserre, roused by the danger of her sons, and not believing that the Revolution was over, but still fearing its summary justice, recovered her senses by the violence of the same distress which made her lose them. Led by an agonizing curiosity she returned to the salon, which presented a picture worthy of the brush of a genre painter. The abbe, still seated at the card-table and mechanically playing with the counters, was covertly observing Corentin and Peyrade, who were standing together at a corner of the fireplace and speaking in a low voice. Several times Corentin’s keen eye met the not less keen glance of the priest; but, like two adversaries who knew themselves equally strong, and who return to their guard after crossing their weapons, each averted his eyes the instant they met. The worthy old d’Hauteserre, poised on his long thin legs like a heron, was standing beside the stout form of the mayor, in an attitude expressive of utter stupefaction. The mayor, though dressed as a bourgeois, always looked like a servant. Each gazed with a bewildered eye at the gendarmes, in whose clutches Gothard was still sobbing, his hands purple and swollen from the tightness of the cord that bound them. Catherine maintained her attitude of artless simplicity, which was quite impenetrable. The corporal, who, according to Corentin, had committed a great blunder in arresting these smaller fry, did not know whether to stay where he was or to depart. He stood pensively in the middle of the salon, his hand on the hilt of his sabre, his eye on the two Parisians. The Durieus, also stupefied, and the other servants of the chateau made an admirable group of expressive uneasiness. If it had not been for Gothard’s convulsive snifflings those present could have heard the flies fly.

When Madame d’Hauteserre, pale and terrified, opened the door and entered the room, almost carried by Mademoiselle Goujet, whose red eyes had evidently been weeping, all faces turned to her at once. The two agents hoped as much as the household feared to see Laurence enter. This spontaneous movement of both masters and servants seemed produced by the sort of mechanism which makes a number of wooden figures perform the same gesture or wink the same eye.

Madame d’Hauteserre advanced by three rapid strides towards Corentin and said, in a broken voice but violently: “For pity’s sake, monsieur, tell me what my sons are accused of. Do you really think they have been here?”

The abbe, who seemed to be saying to himself when he saw the old lady, “She will certainly commit some folly,” lowered his eyes.

“My duty and the mission I am engaged in forbid me to tell you,” answered Corentin, with a gracious but rather mocking air.