CHAPTER XLI
SURRENDER
“And there the sunset skies unseal’d
Like lands he never knew,
Beyond tomorrow’s battle-field
Lay open out of view
To ride into.”
—D. G. Rossetti, The Staff and Scrip.
Inside the little church it was beginning to grow dusk, and the May twilight, as if in pity, shrouded the devastation which had recently been wrought there. Chalbos’ soldiers had passed not long ago through the village, and the traces of their passing were scored on the hacked woodwork of the choir, in the rents and fresh splintered wounds of the painted oak. The statue of Our Lady was headless; of the Child in her arms she held only half the body, and the image of Saint Roch lay its length on the pavement. Under one or two of the windows rested a splash of shattered glass. The door of the tabernacle had been wrenched off, and on the front of the bare stripped altar, whose stone had resisted all efforts at destruction, a wanton hand had begun, with a brushful of tar, to paint the words, “Liberté, Ega . . .” and had got no further. To all these spoliations was added Nature’s too, for half way up the pillars of the church ran the significant green stain of persistent damp, beautiful in itself, and doubly so in contrast with the faded blue of the roof, where there still glimmered a score or so of tarnished stars.
In front of the violated altar, just inside the rails, sat a priest, and before the rails knelt a Vendean. His musket lay on the steps beside him. Further down the church knelt two or three others, with their weapons and their rosaries. The priest was Sébastien des Graves, and he was hearing confessions at the altar because the confessionals had all been hacked to pieces.
That outrage, and the rest, would presently be avenged—so, at least, hoped every man in the great host now gathering to march on Fontenay—a host of which Gilbert de Château-Foix’ contingent, quartered in this village, formed but a small part. For since the end of April the whole country had been in arms; Cathelineau, Stofflet, Bonchamps, joined latterly by Lescure and La Rochejaquelein, had swept along on a tide of victory which had met its first check at Fontenay a week ago. To wipe out that defeat some thirty-five thousand Vendeans were on foot, and to these the little army of the centre had contributed four thousand men under its ablest lieutenant. To-night they rested here after their long march from the Four Roads; to-morrow they should effect their junction with the other chiefs.