The Red Cockade

"Madame, Madame, you will see him presently," he answered with a half-stifled sob; and he turned away with a gesture of horror, which, but for one of the curtains of the alcove, she must have seen.

She did not, though there was enough in this to arouse a sane person's suspicions. As he spoke, however, Madame's eyes fell on me, and the piteous anxiety which had for the moment darkened her face, passed away as quickly as the shadow of a cloud passes on an April morning. She took up her fan again, and looked at me gaily. "Do you know," she said, "I had the strangest dream last night, M. le Vicomte-or was it when I was ill, Denise? Never mind. But I dreamed all sorts of horrors; that our house here was burned, and the house at Cahors, and that we had to fly and take refuge at Montauban, and then-I think it was at Nîmes. And that M. de Gontaut was murdered, and all the canaille were up in arms! As if-as if," she continued, with a little laugh, cut short by a gasp of pain, "the King would permit such things, or they were possible. And there was something-something still more absurd about the Church." She paused, knitting her brows; and then with a touch of her fan dismissing the subject: "But I forget-I forget. And just when it was most horrible I awoke. It was all absurd. So extravagant you would all be ill with laughing if I could remember it. I fancied that a pair of red-heeled shoes were as good as a death warrant, and powder and patches condemned you at once."

She paused. The fan dropped from her hand, and she looked round uneasily. "I think-I think I am not quite well yet," she said in a different tone, and a spasm crossed her face-it was plain that she was in pain. "Louis!" she continued petulantly, "where is the notary? He might read the contract. Doubtless Victor and M. de Gontaut will be here before long. Where is he?" she continued sharply.

It is easy to say that we might have played our parts; but the pity and the horror of it, falling on hearts already tortured by the scenes of the day, fairly unmanned us. Denise hid her face, and trembled so that the chair on which she sat shook; and Louis turned away shuddering, while I stood near the foot of the bed, frozen into silence. This time it was the surgeon, a thin young man of dark complexion, who put himself forward.

"The papers are in the next room, Madame," he said gravely.

"But you are not M. Pettifer?" she answered querulously.

"No, Madame, he was so unwell as to be unable to leave the house."

"He has no right to be unwell," Madame retorted severely. "Pettifer unwell, and Mademoiselle St. Alais' contract to be signed! But you have the papers?"

"In the next room, Madame."

"Fetch them! Fetch them!" she answered, her eyes wandering uneasily from one to another. And she moved in the bed and sighed as one in pain. Then, "Where is Victor? Why does he not come?" she asked impatiently.

"I think I hear him," Louis said suddenly. It was the first time he had spoken of his own free will, and I caught a new sound in his voice. "I will see," he went on, and moving to the door he gave me a sign, as he passed, to follow him.

I muttered something, and did so. In the room in which I had waited, the half-shuttered room of gloom and shadows, from which Louis had fetched me, we found the surgeon groping hastily about. "Some paper, Monsieur," he said, looking up impatiently as we entered. "Some paper! Almost anything should do."

"Stay!" Louis said, his voice harsh with pain. "We have had too much of this-this mockery. I will have no more."

"Monsieur?"

"I say I will have no more!" Louis answered fiercely, a sob in his throat. "Tell her the truth."

"She would not believe it."

"At any rate, anything is better than this."

"Do you mean it, Monsieur?" the surgeon asked slowly, and he looked at him.

"I do."

"Then I will have no part in it," the man answered with gravity. "I acquit myself of all responsibility. Nor shall you do it, Monsieur, until you have heard what the inevitable result will be."

"My mother cannot recover," Louis said stubbornly.

"No, Monsieur, nor will she live, in my opinion, more than a few hours. When the fever that now supports her begins to wane she will collapse, and die. It depends on you whether she closes her eyes, knowing none of the evil that has happened, or her son's death; or dies-"

"It is horrible!"

"It is for you to choose," the surgeon answered inexorably.

Louis looked round. "There is paper there," he said suddenly.

I suppose that we had been absent from the room no more than a couple of minutes, but when we returned we found Madame St. Alais calling impatiently for us and for Victor. "Where is he? Where is he?" she repeated feverishly. "Why is he late to-day of all days? There is no-no quarrel between you?" And she looked jealously at me.

"None, Madame," I said, with tears in my voice. "That I swear!"

"Then why is he not here? And M. de Gontaut?" Her eyes were still bright; the red spot burned still in her cheeks; but her features had taken a pinched look, she was changed, and her fingers were never still. Her voice had grown harsh and unnatural, and from time to time she looked round with a piteous expression as if something puzzled her. "I am not well to-day," she muttered presently, with a painful effort to be herself. "And I forget to be as gay as I should be. Mademoiselle, go to M. le Vicomte, and say something pretty to amuse us while we wait. And you, M. le Vicomte! In my young days it was usual for the fiancé to salute his mistress on these occasions. Fie on you! For shame, Monsieur! I am afraid that you are a laggard in love."

Denise rose, and came slowly to me before them all, but no word passed her pale lips, and she did not raise her eyes to mine. She remained passive when in accordance with Madame's permission I stooped and kissed her cold cheek; it grew no warmer, her eyes did not kindle. Yet I was satisfied, more than satisfied; for as I leant over her I felt her little hands-little hands I longed to take in mine and shelter and protect-I felt them clutch and hold the front of my coat, as the child clings to its mother's neck. I passed my arm round her before them all, and so we stood at the foot of Madame's bed, and she looked at us.

She laughed gaily. "Poor little mouse!" she said. "She is shy yet. Be good to her, mon cher, she is a tender morsel, and-I don't feel well! I don't feel well," Madame repeated, abruptly breaking off, and lifting herself in bed, while one hand went with difficulty to her head. "I don't-what is it?" she continued, the colour visibly fading from her face and leaving it white and drawn, while fear leapt into her staring eyes. "What is it? Fetch-fetch some one, will you? The-the doctor! And Victor."

Denise slipped from my arm, and flew to her side. I stood a moment, then the surgeon touched my arm. "Go!" he muttered. "Go. Leave her to the women. It will be quickly over."

And so Madame St. Alais gave Mademoiselle to me at last; and the compact for our marriage, into which she had entered so many years before with my dead father, was fulfilled.

* * * * *

Madame died next morning, being taken not only from the evil to come, but from that which was then present, and roared and eddied through the streets of Nîmes round the unburied body of her son; for she died without awaking from the delirium which followed her hurt. I went in to see her lying dead and little changed; and in the quiet decorum of the lighted chamber I thought reverently of the change which one year-one brief year had made, coming at the end of fifty years of prosperity. It seemed pitiful to me then, as I stooped and kissed the waxen hand-very pitiful; now, knowing what the future had in store, remembering the twenty years of exile and poverty and tedium and hope deferred, that were to be the lot of so many of her friends, of so many of those who had graced her salons at St. Alais and Cahors, I think her happy. Possessed of energy as well as pride, a rare combination in our order, she and hers dared greatly and greatly lost; staked all and lost all. Yet better that, than the prison or the guillotine; or growing old and decrepit in a strange land, to return to a patrie that had long forgotten them; that stood in the roads and jeered at the old berlins and petticoats and headgear that were the fashion in the days of the Polignacs.

I have said that the riots in Nîmes lasted three days. On the last Buton came to me and told us we must go; that to avoid worse things we must leave the city without delay, or he and the more moderate party who had saved us would no longer be responsible. On this, Louis was for retiring to Montpellier, and thence to the émigrés at Turin; and for a few hours I was of the same mind, desiring most of all to place the women in safety.

I owe it to Buton that I did not take a step hard to recall, and of which I am sure that I should have repented later. He asked me bluntly whither I was going, and when I told him, set his back against the door. "God forbid!" he said. "Who go, go. Few will return."

I answered him with heat. "Nonsense!" I cried. "I tell you, within a year you will be on your knees to us to come back."

"Why?" he said.

"You cannot keep order without us!"

"With ease," he answered coolly.

"Look at the state of things here!"

"It will pass."

"But who will govern?"

"The fittest," he replied doggedly. "For do you still think, M. le Vicomte-after all that has happened-that a man to make laws must have a title-saving your presence? Do you still think that the wheat will not grow, nor the hens lay eggs, unless the Seigneur's shadow falls on them? Do you think that to fight, a man must have powder on his head as well as in his musket?"

"I think," I retorted, "that when a man who does not know the sea turns pilot it is time to leave the vessel!"

"The pilot will learn," he answered. "And for quitting the vessel, let those go who have no business on board. Be guided, Monseigneur," he continued in a different tone. "Be guided. They have killed in Nîmes three hundred in three days."

"And you say, stay?"

"Ay, for there is blood between us," he answered grimly. "That has been done now which will not easily be forgiven; that has been done which will abide. Go abroad after this-and stay abroad! Or rather do not-do not, but be guided," he continued, with rough emotion in his voice. "Go home to the Château, and be quiet, Monsieur, and no one will harm you."

There was much in what he said. At any rate, I thought the advice so good that, after some hesitation, I not only determined to follow it, but I gave it to the others. But Louis would not change his mind. A horror of the country had seized him since his escape; and he would go. He raised no opposition, however, when I asked him to give me Denise; and within twenty-four hours of her mother's death she became my wife, in that dark-shuttered house by the Capuchins' alley, Father Benôit performing the service. Louis was at the same time married to Madame Catinot, who was to share his exile. Needless to say there were no rejoicings at these weddings; no fête and no joy-bells, and no bride-clothes, but sobs and wailings, and cold lips and passive hands.

But a bright day has sometimes a weeping dawn, and though for three years or more our life knew perils enough and some sorrows-the story of which I may one day tell-and we shared the lot of all Frenchmen in those times of shame and stress, I had never, no, not for a day or an hour, cause to repent the deed done so hurriedly at Nîmes. Clinging hands and warm lips, eyes that shone as brightly in a prison as a palace, cheered me, when things were worst; and when better days came, and with them grey hairs and a new France, my wife found means still to grace, and ever more and more to share my life.