"What have you done with your sword?"
Laurent, whose teeth were still clenched, glanced down at his side. Why was Aymar so observant! "Ass that I am, I must have forgotten it! But it is of no consequence; I am not here on duty."
"Forgotten it—when you had it on five minutes before we started!" The grasp tightened. "Laurent, who but you would have thought of such a thing!" He gave him a long look, removed his hand with a rather shaken little laugh, and they went in.
(4)
The hall of the Hôtel de Ville at Aurannes was a good deal too large for the purpose to which it was now being put, for the proceedings were not really public, only the military being admitted. Yet at first there seemed to Laurent to be a crowd of faces; afterwards they resolved themselves into those of about thirty or forty officers, ranged fanwise on either side of the dais on which, at a long table, sat the Court itself.
But, after the first slight shock of dismay on finding that the audience was not directly behind Aymar but facing him, the young man had eyes for the Court only. There were nine of them, all of superior rank. In the middle sat Sol de Grisolles, the General-in-Chief of Brittany, the man who had been Cadoudal's lieutenant sixteen years before, and who, being implicated in his subsequent conspiracy, had suffered an imprisonment of ten years in surroundings so horrible that his health and vigour were gone, his eyesight almost ruined, and that he was an old man at fifty-four. There was his major-general, the Marquis de la Boëssière, on whom the King had actually bestowed full powers of leadership for the province, but who, on finding Sol de Grisolles already in command, had voluntarily subordinated himself to him, the abler to the less able; and there were the Chevaliers de Sécillon and de Margadel. The others Laurent could not identify . . . save one, indeed, the man who owed so much to his disgraced comrade, and who probably did not know it—M. du Tremblay, seen previously in such different surroundings.
An orderly showed them their places. In front of the dais, but at some distance from it, a table and a chair had been set for Aymar. Behind him, seats were to accommodate his witnesses, but they were apparently to give their evidence from another table, placed in a line with his. Laurent wondered if he would ever succeed in standing at it. But no one challenged his right to sit with de Fresne and Colonel Richard and an unknown man whom he guessed to be the landlord of the Abeille d'Or.
Then, after a pause which seemed interminable, after some consultation among the nine officers enthroned there, whispered comments from the onlookers and a steady fire of glances directed at the pale, uniformed, swordless young man seated alone at the little table, the General rose in his place.
"I wish to remind you, gentlemen," he said, as emphatically as his broken voice would permit, "that this is not a court-martial. Though the Vicomte de la Rocheterie's sword lies before us on the table (having originally been surrendered in circumstances about which we shall shortly hear) he is in no sense under arrest. He is here of his own free will, having asked for an investigation into his recent conduct, about which, as you are doubtless aware, very damaging rumours are in circulation, although no formal charge has been preferred against him. You, his fellow officers, are accordingly met here to give him an opportunity of clearing himself from the very grave imputation under which he rests of having betrayed his own men to the enemy on the night of the 27th of April last." He paused a moment and cleared his throat. "The procedure which we shall follow is that M. de la Rocheterie will first give us in outline his account of what occurred, and will then go over it in detail, producing his witnesses and answering any question which the Court may put to him. And, since there is no accuser, we are ready for him to begin at once."
So the lists were fairly set for what Aymar had said last night was a hopeless fight. He got to his feet, and, after a few words of thanks to the General-in-Chief and the Court for consenting to hear him, electrified everybody—and Laurent not least—by saying, firmly and quietly: