(5)
But Vert-Vert, who was to have enlivened their captivity, stayed with them only three days. On the third he sprang through the open window by Aymar's bed and was no more seen. Aymar blamed Laurent for letting him loose on the counterpane, Laurent retorted that the person under the counterpane was in charge. He was always in hopes of finding another on the terrace, but he did not succeed.
The days went on. It was June now. Aymar was slowly gaining strength, but he had not yet left his bed. Almost every day Laurent would read to him a little, but though he always had a courteous appearance of attention, the reader sometimes wondered whether he were really listening. He would occasionally read himself, but never for long; if one turned round after a while the book had invariably slipped from his hands, and he was lying absorbed in thought . . . and looking haunted.
It was impossible to pretend that L'Oiseleur was an exhilarating comrade of captivity. And though he made efforts, as was plain—rather pathetic efforts—to be cheerful, the gaiety which is pumped up from the depths of a heavy heart lacks sparkle. In fact, even ordinary conversation was often extremely difficult, for with a man under such a cloud and so sensitive, there was scarcely a subject in the past, present, or future which was not capable of wounding. Laurent's own short and uneventful history had always seemed an innocuous topic, but one day he wished he had not dilated even on that.
He had been describing an incident in his childhood, when he thought he had lost his mother during a game of hide-and-seek in the garden, when Aymar suddenly began, "My last recollection of my mother is of looking for her in a garden—at least I suppose you would call it a garden, though it had high walls round, and no flowers. But I did not find her . . . ever."
Laurent looked over at him with a kind of catch at the heart. Aymar had taken out a spray of wallflower from the glass by his bed, and was holding it in his bloodless fingers.
"I was in the prison Port Libre, you know," he went on, his eyes fixed on the flower, "with my mother and father—and my uncle—in '94. I was five years old then. My mother could not bear to leave me behind in our house in Paris when my father and she were arrested. She must have thought that they would not be detained long. . . . My father was just my age when he was guillotined. Yes, I used to play in that flowerless garden when it was fine—and the summer of '94, I have been told since, was very fine. . . . But the day they left me it was too hot to play; I think I must have had a headache, for I remember my mother dipping her handkerchief in water and putting it round my head, and kissing me a great many times. She was only a girl. I have the handkerchief still. . . . And I looked for her that day in the garden, all round the great acacia tree that was there—I can see its rough, channelled bark now—I looked every day . . . and I asked everybody. . . . A week's delay would have saved them; they were executed on the second of Thermidor."
"And you . . . afterwards?" asked Laurent with some difficulty.
"After Robespierre's fall I was taken to my uncle's widow, who had not been arrested. She had one little girl, my cousin, now Mme de Villecresne. I was with my young aunt till she died—of grief, as I know now—two years later, and then my cousin and I went to our grandmother at Sessignes.—So you can imagine that a man with memories like mine——" And there he stopped and relapsed into silence, his hand closing convulsively over the wallflower, which Laurent found, later, on the floor, a mere crushed ball of petals.
All the rest of the day he was haunted by a picture of a forlorn little auburn-haired boy in a prison, ceaselessly asking and looking for the mother who had left it for a narrower. And now he who had been that little boy was once more a captive, and once more robbed of the most precious thing he had.
But Laurent was a captive, too, and often found it far from amusing to be cooped up summer day after summer day, when history was being made and battles fought without him. For that, as he gathered from M. Perrelet, was precisely what was happening in Vendée, where, since mid-May, when the Marquis Louis de la Rochejaquelein had arrived from England and assumed the leadership, things had really been moving. And Brittany, L'Oiseleur's Brittany, where they were held fast, was full of activity, too. Even if, as seemed likely, the decisive conflict would take place on the northeastern frontier, it was very bitter to be debarred from playing any part in this local struggle which, after all, was occupying many thousands of troops which Napoleon could well have utilized elsewhere for that great decision.
—But not so bitter for him, Laurent recognized, as for his fellow-captive. At times, for Aymar's sake, he really dreaded M. Perrelet's jovial, "Well, so your brigands have taken Redon!" or, "I hear that your general-in-chief is in straits for want of ammunition," since both good and bad tidings had almost equal power to stab the leader whose men had already been so uselessly sacrificed.