"I suppose not. I can wait. I have waited long. I regret the delay chiefly because in this city everything is known and talked about, and before we can end the matter it will be heard of here."
"Very probably; but no one will speak of it before your mother, and you may be sure that these good people will ask no questions, and only wonder and not realize what must come out of it."
"Perhaps, perhaps." He was not so sure and wished to end it at once.
It had been in his power to have made the social life of the better republicans impossible for his father's murderer; but this might have driven Carteaux away and was not what he desired. The constant thought of his mother had kept him as undecided as Hamlet, but now a sudden burst of anger had opened the way to what he longed for. He was glad.
When, that night, Jean Carteaux sat up in bed and read by dim candlelight De Courval's letter, he, too, saw again the great hall at Avignon and recalled the blood madness. His Jacobin alliances had closed to him in Philadelphia the houses of the English party and the Federalists, and in the society he frequented, at the official dinners of the cabinet officers, he had never seen De Courval, nor, indeed, heard of him, or, if at all casually, without his title and as one of the many émigrés nobles with whom he had no social acquaintance. It was the resurrection of a ghost of revenge. He had helped to send to the guillotine others as innocent as Jean de Courval, and then, at last, not without fear of his own fate, had welcomed the appointment of commissioner to San Domingo and, on his return to France, had secured the place of secretary to Genêt's legation. The mockery of French sentiment in the clubs of the American cities, the cockades, and red bonnets, amused him. It recoiled from personal violence, and saying wild things, did nothing of serious moment. The good sense and the trust of the great mass of the people throughout the country in one man promised little of value to France, as Carteaux saw full well when the recall of Genêt was demanded. He felt the chill of failure in this cooler air, but was of no mind to return to his own country. He was intelligent, and, having some means, meant that his handsome face should secure for him an American wife, and with her a comfortable dowry; for who knew of his obscure life in Paris? And now here was that affair at Avignon and the ruin of his plans. He would at least close one mouth and deny what it might have uttered. There was no other way, and for the rest—well, a French émigré had heard him speak rashly and had been brutal. The Jacobin clubs would believe and stand by him. De la Forêt must arrange the affair, and so far this insolent ci-devant could have said nothing else of moment.
De la Forêt called early the next day, and was referred to Schmidt as René left the room. No pacific settlement was discussed or even mentioned. The consul, well pleased, accepted the sword as the weapon, and this being Sunday, on Thursday at 7 A.M. there would be light enough, and they would cross on the ice to New Jersey; for this year one could sleigh from the city to the capes, and from New York to Cape Cod—or so it was said.
Meanwhile the Jacobin clubs rang with the insult to a French secretary, and soon it was the talk in the well-pleased coffee-houses and at the tables of the great merchants. René said nothing, refusing to gratify those who questioned him.
"A pity," said Mrs. Chew to Penn, the Governor, as men still called him. "And why was it? The young man is so serious and so quiet and, as I hear, religious. I have seen him often at Christ Church with his mother, or at Gloria Dei."
"One can get a good deal of religion into a blow," remarked Hamilton, "or history lies. The man insulted him, I am told, and the vicomte struck him." Even Hamilton knew no more than this.
"Still, there are milder ways of calling a man to account," said young Thomas Cadwalader, while Hamilton smiled, remembering that savage duel in which John Cadwalader, the father, had punished the slanderer, General Conway.