XIX
At sight of Fleurette, Chauvelin had stared as if he had seen a ghost. He did not trust his eyes: they were obviously playing him a trick. It was only a second or two later that he realized it was indeed the child, come, heaven only knew why and how, but here in this awful city where treachery, hatred and cruelty were holding sway under his own command.
Half-dazed, he yielded to the caresses of this one being in the whole wide world whom his tigerish heart had ever loved. His arms closed round her beloved form, whose sweet breath as of thyme and violets filled his soul with joy. Then, looking up he saw Louise standing there: silent, stolid, mutely accusing, and he asked roughly:
“How the hell did you both get here?”
Louise shrugged her shoulders.
“By the coche,” she said, “from Sisteron.”
“I know,” he rejoined. “But why did you come?”
“Ask her,” Louise replied curtly. “She would come. I could not let her travel alone.”
Bibi’s two hands were clasped round Fleurette’s head, his fingers were buried in her hair: he pressed that dearly beloved head closer and closer to his breast; joy at sight of her had already given place to terror. What was the child doing here? How and why had she come? He had kept her so completely aloof from his real life, that it seemed to him that some awful cataclysm must have occurred over in that peaceful home in Dauphiné, else she were not here.
His pale, restless eyes searched Louise’s impassive face:
“Who brought you here?” he reiterated roughly.
“An officer in a draggle-tailed uniform,” Louise replied, still speaking curtly, whilst with a glance that was distinctly hostile her eyes swept round the room. “I thought,” she added, “that he followed us into the room.”
“What was he like?”
She described him as closely as she could, and then added: “I don’t remember his name.”
She too had heard the name “Chauvelin” spoken by the soldier and for a moment had pondered. Marvelled. In her downright peasant mind, vague doubts, doubts that were eighteen years old now, turned to more definite suspicions. She knew well enough that some kind of mystery hung around the personality of Fleurette’s father; she knew for instance that he was really a wealthy and highborn gentleman; but eighteen years ago, in the days of the old regime, the fact that a highborn gentleman chose to hide a love-romance from the eyes of his equally highborn friends was not an infrequent occurrence. If at any time during the past eighteen years she had learned that M’sieu’ Armand was really a great Duke or Prince or Ambassador, she would have been neither surprised nor suspicious. But Chauvelin!!! For the past three years whenever rumours of cruelty or ruthless persecution of innocent men and women had penetrated to these distant corners of Dauphiné or Provence, the name of Armand Chauvelin had stood out as the protagonist of these terrible tragedies; people spoke of Danton the lion of the revolution, and also of Marat its tiger, of Robespierre and of Chauvelin.
Chauvelin!!!
And he, meeting her glance, understood what went on in her mind. As to this he was indifferent. What Louise thought of him was less than nothing. It was the child that mattered now: the child who clung to him quivering with excitement. The terror in his heart grew in intensity: it gripped him till he felt physically sick. The mad dogs of hatred and cruelty, which he himself had helped to unchain, seemed to be snarling at him and threatening his Fleurette. With a hand that trembled visibly, he stroked the pretty golden hair.
“Now, little one,” he said, steadying his voice as much as he could, “are you going to tell me why you’ve come?”
Fleurette struggled to her feet. Self-possessed she stood before her father and said firmly:
“Chéri Bibi, I came in order to right a great wrong. I believe that you are strong and powerful and that you will help me to see justice done. That is why I came to you.”
He frowned, more puzzled then before, angered with himself for being so dull-witted, for not making a guess at what had brought the child along. His mind just before she came had been so completely absorbed in the latest adventure of his arch-enemy the Scarlet Pimpernel, that the presence of Fleurette, here and now, had been for him like a sudden stunning blow on the head. He felt dazed and stupid: unable to turn his thoughts into this fresh channel.
“Fleurette, my darling,” he pleaded, “try and tell me more clearly. I don’t understand. What do you mean by righting a wrong? What wrong?”
“Why,” she replied simply, “the arrest of M’sieu’ Amédé for a crime which he did not commit.”
“You knew M’sieu’ Amédé had been arrested?” she insisted.
Yes, he knew that. The mock arrest of young Colombe was one of the tricks played on that fool Godet by those impudent English spies. But what had Fleurette’s presence here to do with that?
She was trying to explain.
“Then you know, chéri Bibi,” she was saying in that sweet eager way of hers, “that some valuables belonging to Madame over at the château were found in the shed behind M’sieu’ Colombe’s shop?”
Yes, he knew that too. But what had she … ?
“And that the soldiers accused M’sieu’ Amédé of having stolen them?”
A sigh of relief escaped him. He was beginning to understand. Nothing to worry about apparently. Indeed he might have guessed. The child had come to plead for that young fool Amédé, and—
“And what I had come to tell you, chéri Bibi,” she went on glibly, “is that it is not Amédé who stole the things belonging to Madame.”
She paused for a second or two. What she was about to say required courage: and how Bibi would take it she did not know. But Fleurette had come all the way from Lou Mas, had journeyed three days, so that Bibi might right a great wrong, as only he could do, and, once more sinking on her knees beside her father’s chair, she added in a clear voice, rendered somewhat shrill with excitement:
“I stole the valuables out of Madame’s room, chéri Bibi.”
With a hoarse cry he clapped his hand against her mouth. My God, if someone had heard! The guard outside, or one of these innumerable spies whom he himself had set in motion, and whose ears were trained to penetrate through the most solid walls.
His pale eyes in which now lurked a kind of vague terror, wandered furtively round the room, whilst Louise, equally horrified and frightened, exclaimed almost involuntarily:
“The child is mad, M’sieu’, do not listen to her.”
Fleurette alone remained self-possessed: she was still on her knees, but at Bibi’s rough gesture she had fallen back steadying herself with one hand against the floor. Slowly, noiselessly, Chauvelin had risen and tiptoed across the room, Louise, wide-eyed and scared, following his every movement. They were furtive like those of a cat on the prowl, and his face was the colour of ashes. He went to the door and abruptly pulled it open. Outside the soldier on guard was quietly chatting with Lieutenant Godet; at sight of Citizen Chauvelin they stood at attention and saluted.
“Go and tell Captain Moisson over at the barracks,” Chauvelin said curtly, addressing Godet, “that I shall want to see him here at two o’clock.”
“Very good, citizen.”
Godet saluted again and turned on his heel. Chauvelin looked at him closely, but his face was expressionless. He watched him for a moment or two as he, Godet, strode along the corridor. Then he closed the door and went back to his seat behind the table.
He had made an almost superhuman effort to regain his composure. He wanted to hear more, and did not want to scare the child. The sight of Godet standing outside the door talking to the man on guard, had made him physically sick, raised that same terror in his heart which his presence and his glance were wont to raise in others. The expression of his face must at one moment have been absolutely terrifying, for Fleurette could hardly bear to look at him; but when he sat down again his face was just like a mask, waxen and grey. He turned to her, and rested his elbow on the table, shading his eyes with his long, thin hand. And Fleurette felt how dreadful it must be for him to think that his daughter was a thief.
So before he had time to ask her any questions she embarked on glib explanations.
“You must not think, chéri Bibi,” she said, “that I stole those things for a bad motive. I did it because—”
She checked herself, and went on after a second or two:
“You remember, chéri Bibi, that evening at the château when we met, you and I, by the stable door?”
Yes, he remembered. “But speak softly, child! these walls have ears!”
“I had taken the things out of Madame’s room then,” Fleurette continued speaking in an agitated whisper, “and hidden them under my shawl.” She gave a nervous little laugh: “Oh! I was terrified I can tell you,” she said, “that you would notice.”
He had his nerves under control by now. His mind keen, active, was concentrated on her story, his indomitable will was slowly mastering his terror. What had he to fear? Godet was out of the way, and the child’s whispers could not be heard outside these four walls. If only that fool Louise did not look so scared: the sight of her face, open-mouthed and with big, round eyes, got on his nerves. He tried not to look her way. While his glance was fixed on Fleurette he felt that he could think of her, scheme for her and above all protect her—he, so important in the councils of State. So powerful. He could shield her even against the consequences of her own folly.
Of course, he must make light of the whole affair. Oh! above all make light of it. The child was silly, wilful and ignorant, but he would know how to protect her, and how to make her hold her tongue. Louise was a fool, but she was safe and these walls were solid, there was really no cause for this insane terror which had turned him giddy and faint, and at first paralysed his brain.
So he forced his quaking voice into tones of gentle banter, forced himself to smile, to tweak her cheek and to look gaily, almost incredulously into her eyes.
“Allons, allons,” he said lightly, “what story is this? My little Fleurette taking things that belong to others? I won’t believe it.”
“Only pour le bon motif, chéri Bibi,” she insisted; “because you see the soldiers were at the château, and they were ruining and stealing everything they could lay their hands on. … And also because—”
Once more she checked herself, loath to give away that one cherished little secret: The mysterious voice at which perhaps Bibi would scoff. But she did tell Bibi how with the precious burden under her shawl she had hurried homewards until, fearing that she would be overtaken by the soldiers on the road, she had sought refuge in the widow Tronchet’s cottage. She told him how she had watched him riding past, heading towards Lou Mas, and how she had become scared lest, if he spent the night at home, he would find out what it was that she was keeping so carefully hidden underneath her shawl.
And then she told him how she had thought of M’sieu’ Amédé and had asked Adèle to tell him to meet her outside the widow’s cottage, and how she had entrusted him with the precious treasure and he had undertaken to hide it in the shed outside his father’s shop. But how it came to pass that those other soldiers, who were as magnificently dressed as anything Fleurette had seen in all her life, how they had come to suspect M’sieu’ Amédé of the theft, she could not conjecture. All she knew was that M’sieu’ Amédé was innocent and that he must be proclaimed innocent at once. At once.
“I stole the things, Bibi,” she concluded, “not for a bad motive, I swear, but I did steal them and gave them to M’sieu’ Amédé to keep. If anyone is to be punished, then it must be I, not he.”
She was sitting on her heels, and looking up boldly, and with a little wilful air at her father. Her dear little hands were resting on her knees. She looked adorable. Chauvelin mutely put out his arms and she snuggled into them, pressing her cheek against his breast with a nervous little gesture, twiddling one of the buttons of his coat.
Old Louise sitting at the far end of the room had listened, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, to the tale. Her furrowed face was a mirror of all the different expressions with which Chauvelin regarded her from time to time. Terror and slow reassurance. “If that is all, then I can deal with it!” he seemed to be telling her now, when it was all over, and he knew the worst. He held the child very close to him, and there was a certain nervous terror still lurking in his eyes as he buried his face in the soft waves of her hair.
“Bibi chéri,” Fleurette insisted, “I must find those who are going to sit in judgment on M’sieu’ Amédé. And you will help me find them, won’t you? I must tell them the truth. Mustn’t I?”
“You shall, child, you shall,” he babbled incoherently. He was trying to steady his voice, so as not to let her know how scared he had been.
“When Adèle told us the next morning about the soldiers having found Madame’s valuables and arrested M’sieu’ Amédé, I knew at once that you would help me to put everything right. So Louise and I just started then and there, as I thought we would find you in Sisteron.”
“The child told me nothing,” Louise protested in answer to a mute challenge from Chauvelin. “I only thought she wanted to see you in order to plead for young Colombe.”
“There is no need,” he said steadily, “for me or anyone else to plead for him. Amédé Colombe is a free man at this hour.”
Fleurette’s little cry of rapture gave him a short, sharp pang of jealousy.
“Do you love him so much as all that, little one?” he asked almost involuntarily.
She blushed, and without replying, hung her head. For a second or two he debated within himself whether he would tell her the whole truth, then came to the conclusion that on the whole it would be best that she should know. Doubtless she would hear the story, anyhow, from others, and so he told it her just as he had had it the day before from Lieutenant Godet. The magnificent soldiers who had come that morning into Laragne were not real soldiers of the revolutionary army, they were a band of English spies, whose chief was known throughout France as the Scarlet Pimpernel: a cynical, impudent adventurer whose business it was to incite French men and women to desert their country in the hour of her greatest need, and who doubtless would incite Amédé Colombe to treachery and desertion. It was that chief, no doubt, who had spied on Fleurette and seen her that night hand over Madame’s valuables to Amédé Colombe. He had taken this means of obtaining possession of the valuables, as well as of the persons of the ci-devant Frontenac and Amédé. Both men and money he would use against France, for the English were great enemies of this glorious revolution, the friends of all the aristos and tyrants whom the people were determined to wipe off the face of the earth.
Wide-eyed and dumb, Fleurette listened to him. After the first moment of intense joy, when she heard that Amédé was safe, there had come a sense of exultation that the mysterious voice which had urged her to find Madame’s valuables had spoken with a purpose and that that purpose was now accomplished. Monsieur, Madame and Mademoiselle had all been saved by what she believed was a supernatural agency—whatever Bibi might say. No man who was a mere spy and an enemy of France could have accomplished all that this mysterious being had done, from the moment when disguised as a faggot-carrier he had commanded her to look after Madame’s valuables, until the hour when clad in a magnificent uniform, daring and fearless, he had found such glorious means of saving Amédé and M’sieu’ de Frontenac too, from prison and perhaps death.
And after the joy and the exultation there had crept into Fleurette’s heart a feeling of awe and dread for the father who apparently she had never really known until this hour. She had only known him as kind, indulgent, loving—loving in a kind of fierce way at times, snarling like a wild cat if she thwarted him—but always indulgent and always secretive. Now he seemed to lay his soul bare before her. His love of France, of that revolution which apparently he had helped to make. His hatred of those whom he called traitors and enemies of France, the aristocrats, the men who owned land and property, who had ancestors and family pride, and then the English who were the real enemies, who worked against the people, against democracy, and against liberty, who had harboured every traitor that plotted against France. Bibi hated them all and Fleurette felt awed and chilled thus to hear him speak. He, who was so gentle with her always, now spoke as if he approved of all the cruelty perpetrated against those who did not think as he did, and whom he hated with such passionate intensity.
Instinctively, and she hoped imperceptibly, she recoiled from him when he once more tried to clasp her in his arms. This man with the pale eyes and the cruel sneer was not the Bibi she loved. He was just a man whom she feared. All she wanted now was to get away, to get back to Lou Mas. Since Amédé was safe, why should she stay any more in this awful place where even Bibi seemed like a stranger?
Louise now was standing near her, and Bibi was giving Louise some peremptory orders:
“You will go back now to the Chat Noir,” he said, “the inn where you were this morning. There you will wait quietly until I come to fetch you. We will get on the way as early as we can, so as to get to Vaison before dark.”
“Vaison?” Louise asked perplexed. “But the coche …”
“We are not travelling by the public coche,” Bibi broke in impatiently. “My private calèche will take us as far as Lou Mas, and I’ll not leave you till I’ve seen you safely home.”
“A calèche!” Louise exclaimed. “Holy Virgin!”
“Silence, woman,” Bibi cried with an oath. “There is no Holy Virgin now.”
Well! of course, Bibi had said that sort of thing before now, but never in such a rough, almost savage tone. Slowly Fleurette struggled to her feet. All of a sudden she was feeling very, very tired. For four whole days excitement and anxiety had kept her up; but now excitement had died down and dull reaction had set in. A sense of unreality came over her: the voice of Bibi giving all sorts of instructions to Louise came to her muffled as if through a thick veil. All that she knew—and this was comforting—was that soon they would all be starting for home: not in a crowded, jostling old coche, but in a calèche. What a wonderful man Bibi was: so grand and powerful and rich, that he had a calèche of his own and could come and go as he pleased. She remembered how deferential the soldiers had been to him that night at the château, and even now her eyes fastened on the beautiful tricolour sash which he wore, the visible sign of his influence and power.
When Bibi finally took her in his arms and kissed her as affectionately, as tenderly as was his wont, she swayed a little when he released her and the things in the room started to go round and round before her eyes. Louise put her strong arm round her and Fleurette heard her say: “Leave her to me, she’ll be all right!” She felt herself being led out of the room, past the sentry at the door, and then along a corridor.
When she felt the soft, spring air strike her in the face, she felt revived, and walked steadily beside Louise as far as the inn.