In his eagerness and greed he suspected nothing, but that on some pretext or other they were trying to filch from him his dues. "For what?
For the Girondin!" he answered rapidly. Then at last he did turn and found that half a dozen men had entered, that more were entering. But to his astonishment, they were all strangers--men with stern, gloomy faces, and armed to the teeth. There was something so formidable, indeed, in their appearance that he stepped back, and his voice faltered as he added: "But where is the mayor, gentlemen? I do not see him."
No one answered, but in silence the last of the men--they were eleven in all--entered and bolted the door behind him. Michel Tellier peered at them in the gloom with growing alarm, nay, with growing terror. In return the tallest of the strangers, he who had entered first and seemed to command the others, looked round him keenly. And it was he who at length broke the silence. "So you have a Girondin here, have you?" he said, his voice curiously sweet and sonorous.
"I was to have five crowns for him," Michel muttered dubiously.
"Oh!" and then, "Petion," the spokesman continued to one of his companions, "can you kindle a light? It strikes me that we have hit upon a dark place."
The man addressed took something from his pouch. For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sharp sound of the flint striking the steel.
Then a slow-growing glare lit up the dark interior, and disclosed the group of cloaked strangers standing about the door, the light gleaming back from their trailing sabres and great horse-pistols. Michel trembled. He had never seen such men as these. True, they were wet and travel-stained, and had the air of those who spend their nights in ditches and under haystacks. But their pale, stern faces were set in indomitable resolve. Their eyes glowed with a steady fire, and they trod the mud floor as kings tread. Their leader was a man of majestic height and stern beauty, and in his eyes alone there seemed to lurk a spark of lighter fire, as if his spirit still rose above the task which had sobered his companions. Michel noted all this in fear and bewilderment; noted the white head yet the vigorous bearing of the man who had struck the light; noted even the manner in which the light died away in the dim recesses of the barn.
"And this Girondin--is he in hiding here?" the tall man asked.
"That is so," Michel answered. "But I had nothing to do with hiding him, citizen. It was my wife hid him in the straw there."
"And you gave notice of his presence to the authorities?" the stranger continued, raising his hand to repress some movement among his followers.
"Certainly, or you would not be here," replied Michel, better satisfied with himself.
The answer struck him, prostrated him, with an awful terror. "That does not follow," the tall man rejoined coolly, "for we, we, also, are Girondins!"
"You are? You?"
"Without doubt," the other answered, with majestic simplicity; "or there are no such persons. This is Petion of Paris, and this citizen Buzot.
Have you heard of Louvet? There he stands. For me, I am Barbaroux."
Michel"s tongue remained glued to the roof of his mouth. He could not utter a word. But another could. On the far side of the barrier a rustling was heard, and while all turned to look--but with what different feelings--the pale face of the youth over whom Michel had bent in the afternoon appeared above the part.i.tion. A smile of joyful recognition effaced for the time the lines of exhaustion. The young man, clinging for support to the planks, uttered a cry of thankfulness. "It is you! It is really you! You are safe!" he exclaimed. Love beamed in his eyes.
"We are safe, all of us, Pierre," Barbaroux answered. "And now"--he turned to Michel Tellier with thunder in his voice--"know that this man whom you would have betrayed is our guide, whom we lost last night.
Speak, then, in your defence, if you can. Say what you have to say why justice should not be done upon you, miserable caitiff, who would have sold a man"s life, as you would sell a sheep"s, for a few pieces of silver!"
The wretched peasant"s knees trembled under him; the perspiration stood upon his brow. He heard the voice as the voice of a judge or an executioner. He looked in the stern eyes of the Girondins, and read only anger, doom, vengeance. Then he caught in the silence the sound of his wife weeping, for at Pierre"s appearance she had broken into wild sobbing; and on that he spoke out of the base instincts of his heart.
"He was her lover," he muttered. "I swear it, citizens."
"He lies!" the man at the barrier cried, his face transfigured with rage. "I loved her once, it is true, but it was before her old father sold her to this Judas. For what he would have you believe now, my friends, it is false. I, too, swear it."
A murmur of execration broke from the group of Girondins. Barbaroux repressed it by a gesture. "What do you say of this man?" he asked, turning to them, his tone deep and solemn.
"He is not fit to live!" they answered with one voice.
The poor coward screamed as he heard the words, and, flinging himself on the ground, he embraced Barbaroux"s knees in a paroxysm of terror. But the judge did not look at him. Barbaroux turned, instead, to Pierre Bounat. "What do you say of him?" he asked.
"He is not fit to live," the young man answered solemnly, his breath coming quick and fast.
"And you?" Barbaroux continued, turning and looking with eyes of fire at the wife. And his voice was still more solemn.
A moment before she had ceased to weep, and had stood up listening and gazing, awe and wonder in her face. Barbaroux had to repeat his question before she answered. Then she said, "He is not fit to die."
There was silence for a moment, broken only by the entreaties, the prayers, of the wretch on the floor. At last Barbaroux spoke. "She has said rightly," he p.r.o.nounced. "He shall live. They have put us out of the law and set a price on our heads; but we will keep the law. He shall live. Yet, hark you," the great orator continued, in tones which Michel never forgot, "if a whisper escape you as to our presence here, or as to our names, or if you wrong your wife from this time forth by word or deed, the life she has saved shall pay for it.
"Remember!" he added, shaking Michel to and fro with a finger, "the arm of Barbaroux of Ma.r.s.eilles is long, and though I be a hundred leagues away, I shall know and I shall punish. So, beware! Now rise, and live!"
The miserable man cowered back to the wall, frightened to the core of his heart. The Girondins conferred a while in whispers, two of their number a.s.sisting Pierre to cross the barrier. Suddenly on their talk there broke--and Michel trembled anew as he heard it--a loud knocking at the door. All started and stood listening and waiting. A voice cried: "Open! open! in the name of the law!"
"We have lingered too long," Barbaroux muttered. "I should have thought of this. It is the Mayor of Carhaix come to apprehend our friend."
Again the Girondins conferred together. At last, seeming to arrive at a conclusion, they ranged themselves on either side of the door, and one of their number opened it. A short, stout man, girt with a tricolour sash, and wearing a huge sword, entered with an air of authority.
Blinded by the gush of light he saw, at his first entrance, nothing out of the common; he was followed by four men armed with muskets.
Their appearance produced an extraordinary effect on Michel Tellier. As they crossed the threshold one by one, the peasant leaned forward, his face flushed, his eyes gleaming; and he counted them. They were only five. And the others were twelve. He fell back, and from that moment his belief in the Girondins" power was clinched.
"In the name of the law!" the mayor panted. He was a little out of breath. "Why did you not----" Then he stopped abruptly, his mouth remaining open. He found himself surrounded by a group of grim, silent mutes, with arms in their hands; and in a twinkling it flashed into his mind that these were the eleven chiefs of the Girondins, whom he had been warned to keep watch for, and to take. He had come to catch a pigeon and had caught a crow. He turned pale and his eyes dropped. "Who are--who are these gentlemen?" he stammered, in a tone suddenly and ludicrously fallen.
"Some volunteers of Quimper, returning home," replied Barbaroux, with ironical smoothness.
"You have your papers, citizens?" the mayor asked, mechanically; and he took a step backwards towards the door, and looked over his shoulder.
"Here they are!" said Petion rudely, thrusting a packet into his hands.
"They are in order."
The mayor took them, and longing only to see the outside of the door, pretended to look through them, his little heart going pit-a-pat within him. "They seem to be in order," he a.s.sented, feebly. "I need not trouble you further, citizens. I came here under a misapprehension, I find, and I wish you a good journey."
He knew, as he backed out, that he was cutting a poor figure. And he would fain have made a more dignified retreat. But before these men, fugitives and outlaws as they were, he felt, though he was Mayor of Carhaix, almost as small a man as did Michel Tellier. These were the men of the Revolution, nay, they were the Revolution. They had bearded Capet, they had shattered the regime of centuries, they had pulled down kings. There was Barbaroux, who had grappled with Marat; and Petion, the Mayor of the Bastille. The little Mayor of Carhaix knew greatness when he saw it. He turned tail, and hurried back to his fireside, his body-guard not a whit behind him in their desire to be gone.
Five minutes later the men he feared and envied came out also, and went their way, pa.s.sing in single file into the darkness which brooded over the great monolith; beginning, brave hearts, another of the few stages which still lay between them and the guillotine. Then in the cottage there remained only Michel and Jeanne. She sat by the dying embers, silent, and lost in thought. He leaned against the wall, his eyes roving ceaselessly, but always when his gaze met hers it fell. Barbaroux had conquered him. It was not until Jeanne had risen to close the door, and he was alone, that he wrung his hands, and muttered: "Five crowns! Five crowns gone and wasted!"
THE END
UNDER THE RED ROBE.
A ROMANCE.
BY STANLEY J. WEYMAN,
AUTHOR OF "A GENTLEMAN OF FRANCE," "THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF," ETC.
With 12 Full-page Ill.u.s.trations by R. Caton Woodville. 12mo, Linen Cloth, Ornamental, $1.25.
"Mr. Weyman is a brave writer, who imagines fine things and describes them splendidly. There is something to interest a healthy mind on every page of his new Story. Its interest never flags, for his resource is rich, and it is, moreover, the kind of a story that one cannot plainly see the end of from Chapter I.... the story reveals a knowledge of French character and French landscape that was surely never acquired at second hand. The beginning is wonderfully interesting."--NEW YORK TIMES.
"As perfect a novel of the new school of fiction as "Ivanhoe" or "Henry Esmond" was of theirs. Each later story has shown a marked advance in strength and treatment, and in the last Mr. Weyman ... demonstrates that he has no superior among living novelists.... There are but two characters in the story--his art makes all other but unnoticed shadows cast by them--and the attention is so keenly fixed upon one or both, from the first word to the last, that we live in their thoughts and see the drama unfolded through their eyes."--N. Y. WORLD.