The Wounded Name

by D. K. Broster

"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.

(6)

On June 9th, more than five weeks after he had been brought to the château, Aymar was at last allowed to leave his bed, and sat in an armchair looking, so Laurent privately thought, ten times as gaunt and hollow-eyed as he had done between the sheets. Indeed his quite natural state of weakness was a considerable disappointment to L'Oiseleur as well as to his nurse, since at first his legs would not support him for an instant. However, on the second day he managed to walk round the room between M. Perrelet and Laurent, and shortly afterwards was clad in a suit of clothes belonging to the absent owner of Arbelles, for every garment of his own, except his boots, had had to be destroyed. Though this did not fit him, in cut and texture it was well enough, and to Laurent it was a great thing to see his charge clothed. He cherished visions of taking him before long for a walk on the terrace.

But on the whole L'Oiseleur was even more depressed than he had been while in bed, and Laurent wondered whether this was due to the disappointment of finding himself so unexpectedly weak. He had hoped that his friend was getting the better of these periods of gloom, and now the haunted look was more apparent than ever.

"I wish to goodness that he would tell me the whole story and have done with it!" he thought, almost in despair, after a few days of this, as he went down one afternoon for his constitutional. "He half promised that he would, some day; it would be so much better if he talked about it instead of eternally brooding over it. Two heads might perhaps see a way out."

Personal matters apart, Laurent himself had really more cause for depression at the moment than La Rocheterie. For only this morning had M. Perrelet brought them the news of the death of the Marquis de la Rochejaquelein in a skirmish—a calamitous loss to the Vendean Royalists. It had indeed greatly shocked the late Vendean aide-de-camp. On the other hand, the good doctor reported a victory of Sol de Grisolles, the Breton general-in-chief, on June 10th, which had opened for him the way to the sea, and to the reception of much-needed arms from England. But this had not cheered L'Oiseleur.

Rigault and another young officer were already strolling on the terrace when his guard deposited Laurent there. The former hailed him; the latter he had met once or twice, and the three took a turn up and down together.