CHAPTER XXVII
BETRAYAL
In the early days of April the wind-swept, ice-tormented Pyrenees had been exchanged for the Spanish lowlands, vexed by the drought and heat of those spring days. If the army had suffered from frostbite and pneumonia before, it groaned now under a plague of dysentery, but it was still, and increasingly, victorious. An approving Convention sent congratulatory messages to Dugommier, who enjoyed the distinction—somewhat unusual for a general in those days—of having been neither superseded nor recalled to suffer an insulting trial and an ignoble death.
France had a short way with her public servants just then. Was an army in retreat? To Paris with the traitor who commanded it. Was an advantage insufficiently followed up? To the guillotine with the officer responsible. Dumouriez saved his head by going to Austria with young Égalité at his heels, but many and many a general who had led the troops of France looked out of the little window, and was flung into the common trench, to be dust in dust with nobles, great ladies, common murderers, and the poor Queen herself. Closer and closer shaved the national razor, heavier and heavier fell the pall upon blood-soaked Paris. Marat, long since assassinated, and canonised as first Saint of the New Calendar, with rites of an impiety quite indescribable, would, had he lived, have seen his prophecy fulfilled. Paris had drunk and was athirst again, and always with that drunkard's craving which cannot be allayed—no, not by all the floods of the infernal lake. Men were no longer men, but victims of a horrible dementia. Listen to Hébert demanding the Queen's blood.
"Do you think that any of us will be able to save ourselves?" he cries. "I tell you we are all damned already, but if my blood must flow, it shall not flow alone. I tell you that if we pass, our passing shall devastate France, and leave her ruined and bloody, a spectacle for the nations!" And this at the beginning of the Terror!
A curious thought comes to one. Are these words, instinct with pure, fate-driven tragedy, the fruit of Hébert's mind—Hébert gross with Paris slime, sensual, self-seeking, flushed with evil living? or is he, too, unwillingly amongst the prophets, mouthpiece only of an immutable law, which, outraged by him and his like, pronounces thus an irrevocable doom?
Well might Danton write—"This is chaos, and the worlds are a-shaping. One cannot see one's way for the red vapour. I am sick of it—sick. There is nothing but blood, blood, blood. Camille says that the infernal gods are athirst. If they are not glutted soon there will be no blood left to flow. They may have mine before long. Maximilian eyes my head as if it irked him to see it higher than his own. If it were off he would seem the taller. I am going home to Arles—with my wife. The spring is beautiful there, and the Aube runs clean from blood. It were better to fish its waters than to meddle with the governing of men."
Dangeau sighed heavily as he destroyed the letter. Surely the strong hand would be able to steer the ship to calmer waters, and yet there was a deep sense of approaching fatality upon him.
His fellow-Commissioner was of Robespierre's party,—a tall man, wonderfully thin, with grizzled hair, and a nose where the bony ridge showed yellow under the tight skin. He had a cold, suspicious eye, light grey, with a green under-tinge, and was, as Dangeau knew beyond a doubt, a spy both on himself and on Dugommier. There came an April day full of heat, and sullen with brooding thunder. Dangeau in his tent, writing his report, found the pen heavy in his hand, and for once was glad of the interruption, when Vibert's shadow fell across the entrance, and his long form bent to enter at the low door.
"Ah, come in," he said, pushing his inkstand away; and Vibert, who had not waited for the invitation, sat down and looked at him curiously for a moment. Then he said: