(8)
". . . Does not that satisfy you?" asked Aymar after a moment. "I cannot do more."
De Fresne woke from what seemed a stupor. "You have done too much. Take it back—I never meant that! I have no right to demand your sword. Take it and put it into the General's hands."
His leader gave a little smile. "I had just as soon surrender it to you; and you have none yourself now.—But perhaps you would rather not wear mine."
De Fresne looked from the sheathed blade on the table to its owner, and abruptly held out his hand.
But Aymar shook his head. "No—not yet. Afterwards, if you like. . . . And now, how are you going to account to the men for my departure?"
"You will have to say something yourself, I think, L'Oiseleur.—My God, how I hate doing this!"
Aymar had sat down again. "Let me put you in possession of certain facts before I leave you," he said composedly. "First, about du Tremblay. Of course I—you—cannot support him now. I sent de Soulanges to him on Saturday morning with the news, but you must know nevertheless what his plans are. I believe I have not yet destroyed the cipher notes I made at our interview." He searched in a pocket. "No, here they are; and I can leave them with you as a memorandum. I put them into cipher because secrecy as to his real intention is all important. You see that on Friday next he proposes to move along the Aven in such a way as to deceive the Bonapartists into thinking that he means to cross. But he will not cross; his real objective is Chalais, which, having caused the enemy to concentrate, as he hopes, on the wrong side of the river, he calculates on carrying by a coup de main. Meanwhile—what's that?"
He sprang up, thrusting the paper back into his pocket, for there had come a sudden rush of feet and of excited voices outside, and—an unprecedented thing—the hut door was abruptly flung wide, revealing two or three of the Eperviers. For a second L'Oiseleur stood amazed; the next, he strode forward.
"What is the meaning of this? Who told you to come here?"
A confused babel from outside answered him. All his remaining men appeared to be there, and among them, of course, the towering form of Magloire Le Bihan. But he seemed to be trying to keep the crowd back.
"If you have a spokesman I will hear you," said Aymar, frowning. "Otherwise, leave my quarters at once!"
One of the foremost invaders, advancing a little over the threshold, thereupon threw out a hand towards de Fresne, and said meaningly, "Perhaps he can explain what happened at Pont-aux-Rochers!" And instantly other voices took him up. "He knows who the traitor was!" "L'Oiseleur, make him tell us!"
A swift glance passed between Aymar and his subordinate. It was seen and misunderstood. A roar went up.
"Comrades, it was M. de Fresne himself! And L'Oiseleur knows it!"
More Chouans began to crowd in, threateningly; the narrow doorway was blocked. Very angry, Aymar advanced on the invaders.
"Leave my quarters at once, men!" he said imperiously. "No, M. de Fresne is no traitor—far from it! There has been no treachery in this business, only a mistake."
The Eperviers retreated a little from before him, but the hut was not cleared. "Mistake . . . mistake!" the word was flung about. "A mistake that needs atoning for!" "M. de Fresne's then!" "Let M. de Fresne explain why he led us into an ambush!" "Aye, and let him explain why he moved us out of the wood here while L'Oiseleur was away!"
"M. de Fresne has nothing to account for," cried his leader hotly. "And if he had, he accounts for it to me, and not to you!"
"L'Oiseleur knows that it is M. de Fresne," repeated the originator of this idea stubbornly. "That was why he came riding all that way to warn us. Let M. de Fresne come out and answer for himself!"
They were horribly tenacious when once they had got an idea into their heads; Aymar knew that well. And this most fallacious notion must be dispelled at all costs. A little behind him, his arms folded, de Fresne was now facing the intruders with a slightly ironical expression. The men pushed forward once more.
"Give us up M. de Fresne, Monsieur de la Rocheterie! Let him come out and explain to us!" And all at once a perfect howl went up. "What is that paper he is putting into his coat?"
For the elder man, suddenly remembering the incriminating letter lying on the table behind him, had turned his back, and was now thrusting it into his breast.
"Go out of this place!" exclaimed L'Oiseleur. He laid a hand on his pistol. "I will shoot the first man who stirs another step. Go outside, all of you!"
They surged back a little.
"May I speak to you, sir?" enquired Magloire from his place in the rear. Aymar could not but motion him to come forward. After all, he was an officer, and had certainly not been inciting the rest . . . at this moment, anyhow.
The giant came, saluting. "I told you, Monsieur le Vicomte," he said in a low voice, "that they were crazy about this idea of treachery, and now, if there is going to be a mystery, there will be no holding them. Why is M. de Fresne hiding that paper? There'll be violence if you can't explain!"
Yes, de Fresne was hiding a paper—to save him! It was his doing that his lieutenant was in this utterly false position. What must he be thinking? Intolerably nettled, Aymar acted on the first impulse that came to him—a thing he was always too prone to do when the risk was his alone.
"You are right," he replied, "and there shall be no mystery. I will show you myself what is in that paper, and then you will know that M. de Fresne is perfectly innocent in the matter of Pont-aux-Rochers. Monsieur de Fresne, give me that letter! You shall have it back."
De Fresne turned round, appalled. "La Rocheterie, don't do it!" he whispered. "They will not touch me. Don't show it them, for God's sake!"
His words, for all that he had dropped his voice, were audible in the stillness which had now descended. And they produced, not unnaturally, a tenfold stronger impression of his own guilt than before. Something like an ugly rush would have taken place towards him but that the doorway was so narrow and that L'Oiseleur, springing between him and the assailants, drew a pistol and cocked it. The wave in consequence swayed back again.
"Give me the letter, de Fresne!" he repeated over his shoulder.
"No, no—it's too dangerous!"
"Dangerous! At least, then, it shall be dangerous to the right person! Give me the letter!"
And, the pistol in his right hand directed at his followers, Aymar held out his left.
"God forgive me!" said de Fresne. The letter changed hands. Aymar replaced the pistol and advanced to the door, and, seeing that he was really coming outside, the men huddled hastily into the sunshine. Aymar followed them.
"Which of you can read?" he asked, looking round.
"You, Goulven, and you, Hervé Le Bihan? Come here, then. You see this letter, which is from M. de Fresne himself—there is his name at the end—and that it is to tell me, as was his duty, of the move he was going to make over the bridge. You can read that, eh? Well, that is all—that is the paper which you foolishly think he was trying to hide."
He kept the letter in his own hands, while, bending over it on either side, with grunts and efforts, the two men laboriously went through its contents, repeating the words aloud, unperturbed by the deciphered passage. And Aymar looked over their heads at the rest and wondered what was going to happen next. To hold them in rein now needed a tight grip, and he was very tired, and more than heartsick. . . .
"Well, are you satisfied?" he asked patiently.
"Yes," said Goulven slowly, "that is what M. de Fresne did—he took us to this place, the bridge of Pont-aux-Rochers. But why did he write it down so that the Blues knew it?"
"I tell you," said the young man, not patiently this time, "that he wrote it to me, while I was away, so that I should know it." And as they bent their heads once more, and tried to peer at the address on the other side, he added, "You can see for yourselves that it was sent to me at Sessignes," and turned over the letter.
As he did so de Fresne, behind him, made, unseen, a gesture of desperation—and Aymar himself turned cold as he saw, on the top left-hand corner of the reverse, a bold endorsement in another hand than de Fresne's . . . "Sent to me by the Vicomte de la Rocheterie, called 'L'Oiseleur', on the night of April 27th, 1815.—A. RICHARD." He shifted his hold of the paper like lightning, so that his left hand covered that corner instead of the lower; but even so the signature was visible. Perhaps the slow minds of his followers would not grasp its meaning. . . .
"There, Hervé," he said carelessly, managing to master the swift impulse to snatch the whole thing quickly away, "you see this was really sent to me." And he was on the point of folding up the letter when a hand fell on his left wrist. It was Magloire's. He had been looking over the shoulder of his cousin Hervé.
"Wait a moment, L'Oiseleur," he said coolly. "What is Colonel Richard's name doing on the outside of this letter, then?"
Aymar's blood leapt up at the presumption of the grasp and the tone. He looked at Magloire with such fire that the giant, muttering, "I beg your pardon," recoiled. And Aymar, clutching at the first excuse that came into his head, said haughtily, as he folded up the letter, "M. de Fresne has been a prisoner; it is quite natural that Colonel Richard should have examined his papers."
As acting his composed demeanour was excellent, but the excuse he had given was, as he instantly recognized, not so happy. It was admitting that de Fresne had had the letter in his possession again. And as a result the man Goulven, evidently bewildered, remarked, "But that letter could not have been among his papers, Monsieur le Vicomte. He sent it to you; you said so. You had not sent it to him!"
"No, not to him!" broke in Magloire significantly. And, thrusting aside the man between them, he faced his young leader. "There was something else written in the corner, L'Oiseleur. Your hand was over it. Let us see that!"
He had thrown aside the scabbard. It was war. But before Aymar could say anything de Fresne, pushing forward, exclaimed quickly, "What Colonel Richard wrote on my papers only concerns me. Give me my letter back, please, La Rocheterie!"
Instantly the dull and tenacious suspicions of that crowd were rekindled. "No, no, M. de Fresne wants to hide it!" was shouted, and the words "ambush," "treachery" began once more to fly about.
But Magloire Le Bihan was unmoved by them, and simply repeated his request a little more threateningly. "Will you let us see what is written on that letter, Monsieur le Vicomte, or must we take it from you?"
"Take it from me!" exclaimed Aymar, at boiling pitch. "Take it!" Then he suddenly stopped.
There was a tense pause. Under the wide-brimmed hats with the pendent ribbons the eyes of all those eager, saturnine faces were fixed on him. Should he tear the letter up? No—they would seize the fragments, and the very action would be a confession of guilt. He stood on the edge of an unimagined precipice; better to leap in than be pushed.
"Very well," he said contemptuously, "you can see it . . . and make what you can of it!" He held out the letter to Magloire, half turned his back on him, and folded his arms. Almost instantly Magloire smote the letter and burst into a hoarse laugh.
"Listen, les gars, what is written on this letter—what L'Oiseleur was trying to hide!" And slowly, clearly, he read out the endorsement, read it twice, "Sent to me by the Vicomte de la Rocheterie, called 'L'Oiseleur', on the night of April 27th, 1815.—A. RICHARD."
But his hearers were so puzzled that they merely gaped in silence.
"You must be fools if you don't understand!" shouted Magloire, brandishing the letter. "It is not M. de Fresne at all—it is L'Oiseleur himself who has betrayed us—L'Oiseleur who sent this with his own hands to the Blues to tell them that we should be at Pont-aux-Rochers last Friday morning . . . and took care not to be there himself!"
Aymar leapt forward. "How dare you——" he began; but his words were drowned in uproar. "It's not true, Magloire, he came to warn us! L'Oiseleur, say it's not true!" That brief monosyllable was hurtling about like a missile, as he braced himself to meet the crucial moment with the knowledge that his hold was slipping, slipping. . . . But there was no hesitation in the way he faced the questioners.
"It is quite true, men," he said steadily, "that I sent the letter to Colonel Richard, but the doing so was part of a plan for——"
He got no further, for the simple reason that he could not make himself heard above Magloire's triumphant bellowing.—There was nothing for it but to shoot him out of hand. He drew his pistol, cocked it, and shouting, "I will give you three seconds to stop that noise!" levelled it at the mutineer. Almost immediately his pistol arm was seized. Furious, and as surprised as furious, Aymar turned on his assailant to find that it was Hervé, Magloire's cousin. "Let go my arm instantly!" he cried. He almost succeeded in freeing it, but in the struggle he lost his pistol; at the moment it was dragged from his hold the hammer fell and a man near clapped his hand to his arm with a scream. Next second Magloire himself had seized his leader's other arm and laid a powerful hand on his shoulder. "He will shoot us all if we are not careful!" he shouted.
For an instant longer Aymar threw every ounce of his strength into the endeavour to throw off the double grasp. But Magloire only laughed; even L'Oiseleur, no weakling, was but a child in his hold. Aymar ceased struggling. If it was useless, it was a mistake.
But Le Bihan was going too fast for the majority. Out of the clamour came cries, almost terrified cries, of "Don't touch him! Let him go, Magloire—it will be the worse for you! He has the jartier! The jartier, Magloire! Let him go!"
And the rebel was obviously taken aback for a moment; he had forgotten to reckon with a superstition which he did not share. For one instant hope flared up in his captive's brain—and died as quickly. Deliverance would never come on that score!
"Has he got it?" yelled Magloire, his eyes on the young man's face. "Has he got it? The luck would never stay with a traitor!"
A quiver went through L'Oiseleur from head to foot.
"No, he must have it!" cried the bewildered voices. "He always wears it. Show it us, L'Oiseleur!"
Aymar, white to the lips, retorted, "I shall show you nothing of the sort till Magloire Le Bihan is shot for insubordination!"
"We need not wait for any conditions of that kind!" sneered Magloire. "I will show you, since L'Oiseleur is so reluctant." And before Aymar guessed what he was about he had drawn his hunting knife and inserted it under his left sleeve.
Less because of what that action must inevitably bring to light, than because it was so intolerable to him to be held as he was and subjected to search, Aymar did once more try violently for a second or two to withdraw his arm from the iron grip. It was scarcely, therefore, Le Bihan's fault that the two-edged hunting knife cut rather more than it was intended to do. An instant later Magloire's powerful hands had made short work of the seams of coat and shirt alike; these were ripped asunder to the shoulder, and he was gazing delightedly at the bare arm he held captive.
He laughed. To him, as to L'Oiseleur himself, the amulet was a farce to overawe children, but the life of him who once wore it might be hanging, for all that, on the absence of that frail circlet of rushes. Aymar had never given the jartier a thought since it had broken in that blossomladen place which had witnessed alike his brief moments of happiness and the beginning of this black hour, but now . . . Was that going to undo him in the end—the foolish, half-fraudulent charm he had thought he need wear no longer?
He was for a moment barely conscious that Magloire was holding his naked arm upwards at full stretch so that all could see the talisman was gone. Moreover, down that arm was now running a thread of crimson—blood like any other man's. L'Oiseleur, of the charmed life, was no longer invulnerable . . . and naturally, since he no longer wore the charm.
The effect of the double revelation on those superstitious minds was paralyzing. The Eperviers began to huddle away in silence from the leader who had been so lucky because he wore the amulet—and who, by the same reasoning, was a definite source of ill-luck because he wore it no longer. The jartier had left him; therefore anything was possible. And it was May Day . . . when much magic was abroad. . . . Magloire read all this in the fierce, frightened faces; he nodded across to Hervé, made a sign, and his own immediate partisans closed round, so that the giant was able to let another man take his place, and be free to direct the course of what he had at last accomplished.
Aymar suffered the change of guardianship without protest. What was the use of fighting the situation any longer? If his men, his own men, could turn against him like this. . . . Yet Eveno would have been dead at his feet before a finger could have been laid on his leader . . . but he himself had sent Eveno to death. . . . Out of the bad dream that it had all become now he heard only de Fresne's voice, hot and incisive:
"M. de la Rocheterie is my prisoner, men! He has already given up his sword to me, and he will answer for any mistake that he has made to——"
"No!" broke in Magloire still more incisively, "he is ours! And he will answer to us, Monsieur de Fresne! Take him down to the clearing, gars; we can go into this matter better there."