D. Broster: A Fire of Driftwood: A Collection of Short Stories (D. K. Broster) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

The lantern lifted above the supposed sleeper revealed nothing but the top of a fair head. There was, however, a curious tension about the upper folds of the blanket – a phenomenon which unhappily invited scrutiny.

“I wonder why he sleeps like that,” observed the loquacious subordinate, and he gave a little tug to the blanket. It remained fixed in its place even more firmly than before.

“Pull it down!” suddenly thundered the sergeant. “Off with it! By God – – !”

The oath coincided with Adèle’s scream as the covering was wrenched from her clutch.

V

M. de Beaumanoir did not often go to Paris. Possibly he found Restoration Paris not much to his taste. Once in two or three years, however, he would come up from Anjou to visit a relative (being especially dear to the younger generation), to transact an hour or so’s business, and to bring back a new silk dress for his housekeeper to the rather grim and tidy dwelling where years of her excellent precision had something effaced the traces of that little Eustacie de Soleure who had once ruled it so happily and so carelessly. That all too brief episode seemed now as far away as the other which had made it possible; but it lived ineffaceably, like the other, in the memory of Madame de Seignelay’s hero. It was too sacred and too poignant to be often looked at. . . . The other, too, had the salt of pain to keep it alive. For strange reports had got afloat in the countryside about the consequences of Adèle’s exploit. Some said that her father had turned her out of doors, others that he had beaten her within an inch of her life, others that she had been sent to the prisons of Nantes as a favourer of aristocrats. A still more dramatic version had it that she had only escaped shooting, in the place of the man she had saved, by the intercession of a Republican officer. In time, and by indirect routes, these rumours came, strangely intertwined, to the ears of Charles de Beaumanoir, painfully dragging out a long convalescence in the Bocage. He was wild with self-reproach; but there was nothing that he could do – nothing except to remember all his life, not so much that he owed that life itself to a woman’s compassion, as that in his debt to the little peasant girl of Cezay-la-Fontaine lay those short and radiant years of his married happiness. And he had always remembered.

However, when the Vicomte did happen to be in Paris he would pay a species of state visit to the Opéra, accompanied thereto usually by a niece or two, but going sometimes by himself, and feeling, on such occasions, very much alone in the midst of a new and somewhat alien type of society. It was on some such thought as this that he glanced round the house one evening in the spring of 1824 between the acts of Gluck’s “Armida.” It was something of a gala night; the latest star was singing, and the effect of so many brilliant toilettes and sparkling orders was quite dazzling to a provincial. Yet, looking up at a box above him, the Vicomte saw with amazement a smiling young face that he knew. It was that of the little Vendéenne to whom he used to tell stories, eight years agone and more, in an old house at Angers. And from her box Madame de Seignelay, the bride of a few months, saw and recognised her old friend, too.

“There is my dear Monsieur de Beaumanoir!” she cried to her husband. “How delightful to see him again! Make him come up, Georges – I positively must speak to him.” And, all sparkling with youth and excitement, she signalled to Charles de Beaumanoir with her fan.

The Vicomte came, with his well-remembered little limp, as handsome as ever, but a little greyer and older. The sight of her charming and irregular young face, displaying so plainly its pleasure at seeing him again, warmed his heart as he bent and kissed Madame de Seignelay’s hand. And she, as he sat by her, began on the instant to ply him with a hundred questions, contriving between a score of “Don’t you remembers?” to interpolate a quantity of vivacious information about her neighbours.

“You say you know nobody, Vicomte? I do not believe it. You must know Monsieur de Chateaubriand by sight; and that is the great Duchesse de Carentan down in the box a little to the left of you. You know she tries to keep a salon à la Rambouillet under his present Majesty. Oh, and do you see the stout lady with the diamonds and the pink satin à faire frémir, almost opposite, on the other side of the house? Is she not terrible?”

“You cannot expect an old man to have as good eyes as you, madame,” responded M. de Beaumanoir. “I can see a quantity of pink satin, it is true, but I can hardly distinguish features from here. Who is the lady, then, since she is fortunate enough to interest you?”

Madame de Seignelay laughed. “I don’t know who she was originally – some shopkeeper’s daughter, I fancy – but they say she has already changed her name three times, so that her natal one is quite securely buried by now. She is the wife of Brunner – the Brunner, you know, who made his fortune out of commissariat contracts under the Corsican. Now he has more money than he knows what to do with; but I daresay he manages to get rid of a good deal on his wife’s diamonds. . . . But here is the curtain going up; I must not talk any more.”

A little later the brilliant and laughing throng was emptying itself down the staircases into the foyer. Not the least merry there was the little Vendéenne as she came down on the arm of her childhood’s hero.

“Come home and sup with us, Vicomte,” she whispered as they got to the bottom. “You will not? But I cannot lose you again so soon. – Ah, there is the pink lady again. . . . Georges, do try and persuade M. de Beaumanoir to return with us to supper.”

In the crush at the foot of the staircase Madame Brunner, penned with her spouse into an angle, was fanning herself with great violence. As she jerked her head about, a magnificent diamond ornament scintillated on the hard golden hair above her vulgar, red, not ill-tempered face, and myriads of points of light shot out from a similar collar round her fat throat. Her loud voice, the gleam of her jewels, and the overpowering hue of her gown drew the eye in spite of itself, and Charles de Beaumanoir, wedged at a little distance, looked, like the rest.

Suddenly Madame de Seignelay felt the arm on which her hand was resting tremble violently. She had been speaking over her shoulder to her husband, and turned round to her escort in concern.

“Are you ill? What is it?” she asked in a low voice, frightened by the face at which she looked up.

The genuine alarm in her voice steadied M. de Beaumanoir as scarcely anything else could have done.

“It was the heat – for a moment,” he replied, wrenching his gaze away and bringing it down to her. “Ah, they are moving in front. Shall we go on too?”

And with the little bride on his arm he made his way out in the wake of Adèle Brunner and her diamonds.

As he put her into her carriage – “Are you recovered?” whispered Madame de Seignelay. “You frightened me; I declare I thought you had seen a ghost!”

The Vicomte smiled a very melancholy little smile. “My dear,” he said gently, “perhaps I have. . . .”

But it was scarcely a ghost which Fate had shown him in that cruel glimpse; for a ghost is linked with the past, and Charles de Beaumanoir had seen little enough in that prosperous and unlovely vision to connect it with the memory of her whom for more than thirty years he had idealised as Our Lady of Succour.

I

Ramparts fence about the fields of Brittany – banks of six feet high, crowned not with a hedge, but with a serried wall of forest trees, impassable to an enemy when defenders use it for cover. And on an evening in the early June of 1795, just after the snapping of the uneasy truce of La Mabilais, a score of Chouans stood, scrambled, climbed, and knelt upon a stockade of this description, firing at an unseen foe whose bullets sang through the leaves or thudded into the bank. Bretons all, in loose breeches and gaiters, in the short jackets – black, blue and yellow, or white – each with its double rank of buttons and the Sacred Heart, with long hair and stern harsh features, they gave to the business in hand nothing, indeed, of the mechanical regularity of veteran troops, but all of their sangfroid. One alone, on his knees at the top of the bank, who wore a white scarf round his waist, paused occasionally between firing and reloading and, peering through the tree-trunks, shouted a direction or two; while, a few steps away from the bank, an old man of gigantic stature, kneeling on one knee, wrestled with the lock of his damaged musket. A grim smile was on his face, for a sudden gush of bright chestnut leaves, trickling from aloft, had just shown him how high the slackening Republican fire was becoming. The hot three-quarters of an hour was approaching its end. He ceased for a moment to struggle with his weapon and ran his eye along the row of absorbed backs in front of him. The smoke of their own last volley was lifting; would it be answered? . . .