Margaret and Mr. Hamel, on the contrary, all attention, and quite vibrating with anxiety, recognised in him the same superhuman exaltation that he had brought back from that strange walk to La Vigie the night before. He began his remarks in a voice that was rather low, a fact which inspired Mr. Battard, not without some satisfaction, it must be confessed, to remark that: “His fine organ isn’t what it was.”
Then, abruptly, as a curtain is drawn apart, his voice opened up clearly, sounded the rallying call, the summons to the dead, who last evening on the icy shadowed slopes of the hills had made up his phantom army. There was a living silence in the room, heavy and storm-laden, and he plowed through it like a vessel through the sea.
To pass judgment on the prisoner, he said, it was incumbent on the jurors to know him, and to know him they must go back to what he came from. For it was the uncertain destiny of man, born in such and such a corner of the earth, of such and such a race, to follow a predestined course, and by his own force of will to work his way through to efficiency and his destined end.
“You who come from lines of honest forefathers, and yourselves have founded families, must listen to this history of a family that I shall tell you, before you decide upon your verdict....”
To the peasants from the plains and mountains, of whom the jury was composed, who, by nature and reflection, could not but be sensible to this actual human chronicle, the truthfulness and example of it striking true to their honest minds, he then told the long story of successive Roquevillards: the first ancestor of them all, who had laid the first stone of the old house, planting the roots of his tree of life in his native soil, the struggle of successive generations adding their efforts, one to another, clearing the ground by the sweat of their brows, showing their doggedness with the stubborn soil, or in the face of intemperate or hurtful seasons, the chance destruction of crops by hail or frost, their sobriety and content with a few things, their thrift, which, at the expense of their personal enjoyment, made provision for the future—a thrift at once disinterested and in itself an act of faith in the coming generations. Thus the beautiful estate of La Vigie, whose vines and woods and fields and orchards produced so abundantly, laughing in the sunlight, in the time of harvest, represented the economy and endurance of a whole race, straight as a line of tall and growing poplars. For land that is cultivated by man assumes a human face, and when we behold our properties we are gazing on the countenances of our ancestors. And yet to what end had all this collective labour of the Roquevillards been reduced? To-day their domain belonged to the plaintiff, their adversary, who had gotten it for nothing. Had the Roquevillards laboured for five hundred years to make this present to him? No, but with their patrimony which they had patiently and painfully built up they were ransoming this last Roquevillard of them all. Who, then, had been despoiled, and which was the thief? For one hundred thousand francs paid down Mr. Frasne was receiving, accepting, a property worth almost twice that sum. Who was getting rich, then? Who was being ruined? In the name of the dead who paid this ransom, the accused must be acquitted.
But was not a family just a great material force, visibly expressed in the continuity of its patrimony, by its mutual obligations permitting the payment of the debts of some by the fruits of others’ toil? Was it not indeed something else, too, less palpable but more sacred—a solid chain of traditions, a common heritage of honour, probity and courage? What use was it to transmit life if you were not to supply it with a worthy setting, support and comfort from the past, opportunity for a well-stored future? For to transmit life was to admit life’s immortality.
And he recited the public services of the Roquevillards, all the outward ways of existence, useful and sometimes illustrious even, that their forefathers had followed. This one, the county magistrate, had died at his post during an epidemic in the town, which he had been the foremost in resisting. Another, later, in a period of troubles and disorders, had administered the finances of Chambéry and restored order in its involved affairs. Whole-hearted magistrates of the Savoyan Senate, soldiers killed by the enemy in the great wars, they had worn, beneath toga or uniform alike, the same bold, brave hearts that had beat beneath the peasant blouses of the first forefathers of them all. The last of them all, Hubert, dying for his country, alone in a strange land, far from all who were dear to him, under a fierce and hostile sun, had given voice to the final vow of his race when he had written: “I offer my life as a sacrifice for the honour of our name and my brother’s safety.”
Could the gentlemen of the jury reject this offering? As well forget all the victims for centuries past that had signalised the constantly renewing virtues of this family, like the fires which cleansed their fields at evening of the withered herbage. He threw the weight of accumulated merits in the balance and made the scales tip.
The entire army of the dead, who had come down from La Vigie the evening before, to leap across the valley in the dark and join their chief as he stood erect at the foot of the old tree on the Saint Cassin plain, filed by in a long parade.
To the merits of the dead he added the virtues of the living. This was not a time to be modest and defer to reticence. He would give all honour to Felicie in the hospital at Hanoi, and again to his sisters, who had made themselves poor in order to suppress even the suspicion of fraud on their brother’s part. For the payment delivered into Mr. Frasne’s hands had not, and could not be, in the eyes of the culprit’s family or of the jurors, either a restitution or an admission, but a definite rejection of all complicity in the theft, even an unknowing or involuntary one.