“Forty-four thousand?” somebody exclaims.
“And twenty-three,” Godet replies, gloating over his knowledge of this trifling detail.
“Forty-four thousand and twenty-three,” he reiterates and claps the table with the palm of his hand.
“One in Sisteron?” someone murmurs.
“Three!” the lieutenant replies.
“And the Frontenacs are suspect, you say?”
“I shall know that tomorrow,” rejoins the other, “and so will you.”
The way he said those three last words caused everyone to shudder. Over at the far end of the room, the charcoal burner, or whatever he was, had a tearing fit of coughing.
“ ’Tis little Fleurette who will weep her eyes out,” good old Baptiste said with a doleful shake of the head, “if anything happens to Mad—to the citizens up at the château.”
“Fleurette?” the lieutenant asked.
“She is Armand’s daughter—Citizen Armand you know—why—?”
He might well stare, for the officer, for some unaccountable reason, had burst into a loud guffaw.
“Citizen Armand’s daughter did you say?” he queried at last, his eyes still streaming with the effort of laughing.
“Yes, of course. As pretty a wench as you can see in Dauphiné. Why shouldn’t Armand have a daughter, I’d like to know.”
“Do tigers have daughters?” the lieutenant retorted significantly.
Somehow the conversation languished after that. The fate which so obviously awaited the Frontenacs who were known and loved, cast a gloom over the most buoyant spirits. Not even the salacious stories of barrack-life, on which the men now embarked with much gusto, found responsive laughter.
It was getting late too. Past eight o’clock, and tallow was dear these days. There was a cart-shed at the back of the house, with plenty of clean straw: some of the soldiers declared themselves ready for a stretch there: even the voluble officer was yawning. The regular customers of Les Amandiers took the hint. They emptied their mugs, paid over their sous, and trooped out one by one.
The wind had gone down. There was not a cloud in the sky, which was a deep, an intense sapphire blue, studded with stars. The waning moon was not yet up, and the atmosphere was redolent of the perfume of almond blossom. Altogether a lovely night. Nature in her kindest, most gentle mood. Spring in the air and life stirring in the entrails of the earth in travail. Some of the soldiers made their way to the shed, whilst others stretched out on the floor, or the benches of the room, there to dream perhaps of the perquisition to be made tomorrow and of the tragedy which would enter like a sudden devastating gust of wind into the peaceful home of the Frontenacs.
Nature was kind and gentle: and men were cruel and evil and vengeful. The Law of the Suspect! No more cruel, more tyrannical law was ever enacted within the memory of civilization. Forty-four thousand and twenty-three Committees to mow down the flower of the children of France. A harvest of innocents! And lest the harvesters prove slack, the National Convention has just decreed that a perambulating army shall march up and down the country, to ferret out the Suspect and to feed the guillotine. Lest the harvesters prove slack, men like Lieutenant Godet with a score of out-at-elbows, down-at-heels brigands, are ordered to scour the country, to seize and strike. To feed the guillotine in fact, and to purge the Soil of Liberty.
Is this not the most glorious revolution the world has ever known? Is it not the era of Liberty and of the Brotherhood of Man?
II
The perambulating army had now gone to rest: some in the cart-shed, some along the benches and tables or floor of the inn. The lieutenant in a bed. Is he not the officer commanding this score of ardent patriots? Therefore must he lie in a bed—old Portal’s bed—whilst old Portal himself and his wife, older and more decrepit than he, can lie on the floor, or in the dog’s kennel for aught Lieutenant Godet cares.
The two woodcutters—or shall we call them charcoal-burners?—were among the last to leave. They had petitioned for work among the worthies here present: but money was very scarce these days and each man did what work he could for himself, and did not pay another to do it for him. But Papa Tronchet, who was a carpenter by trade and owned a little bit of woodland just by the bridge, close to Armand’s cottage, he promised one of the men—not both—a couple of hours’ work tomorrow: wood-cutting at the rate of two sous an hour, and then he thought it dear.
And so the company had dispersed: each man to his home. The two vagabonds—woodcutters or charcoal-burners, they were anyhow vagabonds—found their way into the town. Wearily they trudged, for one of them was very old and the other lame, till they reached a narrow lane at right angles to the riverbank. The lane was made up of stone houses that had overhanging eaves, between which the sun could never penetrate. It was invariably either as damp as the bottom of a well, or as dry and windswept as an iron stovepipe. Tonight it was dry and hot: broken-down shutters, innocent of paint, creaked upon rusty hinges. A smell of boiled cabbage, of stale water and garlic hung beneath the eaves; it came in great gusts down pitch-dark stairways, under narrow doors, oozing with sticky moisture.
The two vagabonds turned into one of these doors and by instinct seemingly, for it was pitch dark, they mounted the stone stairs that squelched with grease and dirt underneath their feet. They did not speak a word until they came to the top of the house, when one of them with a kick of his boot threw open a door; it groaned and creaked under the blow. It gave on an attic-room with sloping ceiling, black with the dirt of ages, and with dormer window masked by a tattered rag that had once
