CHAPTER XXIII

DISPLEASURE OF "MONSIEUR AUGUSTIN"

In a little wood to the south of Auray, and in an exceedingly bad temper, the Chevalier de la Vireville sat on a fallen tree and surveyed his small band of Chouans, who, lying, seated or crouched round him on their heels, looked at him with the expression of dogs who know that they deserve a beating--though wearing, indeed, the appearance of dogs who have already received one.

It was the evening of the third of July, six days after the landing at Carnac. During those days Auray and Landévant had already been taken by the Chouans and abandoned again for lack of support. Last night had come peremptory orders from Carnac that they were to be retaken; so the Comte du Boisberthelot and La Vireville had set out at eleven that morning, without a single piece of artillery, to recapture Auray, which was garrisoned by a thousand men under the Republican adjutant-general Mermet. At the same time Tinténiac, although he knew the task to be impossible, had attacked Landévant.

Mermet's sentries were not on the alert, and so the Comte du Boisberthelot, who was a sailor, came charging in at the head of his men by the route de l'Eglise, and drove out the Republicans. But outside the town was Hoche himself, who ordered them to retake it at any price. Mermet, in obeying this order, fell into the neat ambush which La Vireville had prepared for him in a copse by the Faubourg St. Goustan, and his column was on the point of breaking up in disorder when Hoche came quickly up with his grenadiers and two pieces of artillery. To stop his advance--a hopeless attempt it was--La Vireville transferred himself and his Bretons to the bridge into the town, cast up a barricade with carts and casks and beams, and could probably have held this obstacle for a long time against hand-to-hand fighting, or if he had possessed the smallest piece of artillery. It was the want of that which had caused him to grind his teeth as his men fired and reloaded and fired behind the rapidly vanishing barricade, their own numbers dwindling in proportion. For it was Hoche who had the cannon.

So he and his Chouans were driven from their position, and, penned into the square by the church, were mown down by grapeshot till he got them out of the town, when, in order to cover the wounded du Boisberthelot's retreat to Locmaria, they returned to the guerrilla fighting to which they were most accustomed, lying hidden in the broom and picking off their men with the skill of poachers. Unfortunately the Republican artillery discovered them there also. . . . Nothing that La Vireville could say or do would stop them this time; their abandonment of the position became a rout, whose track was strewn with discarded sabots and knapsacks and even with muskets. The émigré himself, swearing and furious, was swept away on the flood, and finally, at dusk, fugitives and leader found themselves in this little wood, not much more than a coppice, but safe enough from pursuit, where the former had time to draw breath and to reflect, and the latter to get rid of some of the bitter anger and disgust which had prompted him, at first, to leave them to their own devices and return alone to sell his life at Auray.

He took another look round his dejected followers, and propped his head between his fists, his elbows on his knees, to think. He knew that he could get these fierce and childlike natures in hand again--that, ashamed and penitent, they were, in fact, already in the desired condition. He had no right, after all, to be hard on them for the shortcomings of others. It was not their fault that they had no artillery, and that help had not been sent from the émigré regiments at Carnac. Moreover, his men had done no worse than the rest, for a rumour was already afoot that Tinténiac, the reckless and irresistible, had been beaten back from Landévant, and that Vauban with his supporting force of Chouans had fared no better.

Seeing his chief's attitude, Grain d'Orge, looking more than ever ruffianly by reason of the filthy rag round his head, rose from the ground and softly approached him.

"Monsieur Augustin is not wounded?"

"Si," retorted La Vireville without moving. "In my pride."

An uncomfortable silence. Grain d'Orge rubbed his bristly chin.

"If only the general had helped us a little," he grumbled. "If some of those fine uniforms we saw at Carnac----"

"If only we had had a gun----" said another.

"Perhaps if we had prayed more to Ste. Anne," suggested a third, thinking of the famous shrine of that saint so dear to all Bretons, just outside Auray.

La Vireville heard the last remark. He lifted his head.

"On the contrary," he observed bitingly, "I should recommend a little less rosary and a little more attention to simple military duties. Where is the sentry I posted by that hedge a short time ago?--Tudieu, this is a shooting matter!"

Springing to his feet, he went over to the hedge in question, where indeed no sentry was visible. But he was there for all that . . . only the shooting seemed to have been done already.

"He was hit at the barricade," said the croaking voice of Grain d'Orge in La Vireville's ear as he stooped over the prostrate man.

"Then why the devil didn't he say so!" retorted his leader. "Give me a hand, someone, and let us find out what is the matter with him. Ah, I see; fortunately nothing very serious."

And having duly played the part of surgeon--a part to which he was not unaccustomed--set another man at the fallen sentry's post, and made some further dispositions, La Vireville stood a moment looking through the tree-trunks towards Carnac, a little south of the dying sunset, wondering what was happening in the peninsula of Quiberon.

"And what shall we do next, Monsieur Augustin?" asked a voice rather timidly, the voice of Le Goffic.

La Vireville turned round. "I suppose, my children," he said, more kindly, "that unless M. d'Allègre holds Locmaria we shall have to go back to Carnac and tell the general that we have not been able to do what we were told to do. For the present, we will wait here till morning."

"If Monsieur Augustin would sleep a little . . .?" One or two of them had spread an old cloak under a tree, and now with gestures invited him to repose. They were like children; it was impossible to be long angry with them. So he went and lay down on the cloak, to find that in spite of disgust and anxiety he was ready to sleep. His new sentinel by the hedge, his musket leaning against him, was telling his beads, and all his men, directly he lay down, lowered their voices. He was drowsy, and floated away on a half-dream to Jersey. . . . Why on earth were they talking of Anne-Hilarion?

"The little one, thou seest, when he was with us at Kerdronan, how he was like the little Jesus Himself!"

"Yes, one looked to see His Mother round every corner."

"And as for him," said the first speaker, indicating his recumbent leader, "he might have been St. Joseph!" But at this comparison La Vireville was shaken with irreverent mirth.

He began to be more drowsy. Grain d'Orge was saying something about Carhoët--he could not catch what. But the mention of the name brought back the swarm of little memories that clung round it, that had had their birth in so small a space of hours. His foot was healed, the business of leader of that division passed on, at his request, to someone else, but he had not forgotten Mme. de Guéfontaine. On the contrary, he had found himself often thinking of her during the few weeks that had elapsed since she had made her somewhat sensational entry into his experience. He was aware now of the sleepy conviction that she ought to have had some part in this adventure--not indeed in the present sorry episode of defeat, but in the landing the other night under the moon. Or she might have stood, at daybreak, holding aloft the banner with the lilies on the prow of one of those incoming boats. . . . She would, surely, have been in her element. . . .

Then, with the rattle of beads and the murmur of the Ave Maria in his ears, La Vireville went off into slumber, and dreamt that Mr. Tollemache, whom he believed to be in the English flotilla, was telling Mr. Elphinstone (the latter in a cocked hat and epaulettes) by the barricade at Auray, that it had been arranged for the English soldiers to land, and the Frenchmen to man the English ships. But, Anne-Hilarion appearing suddenly in a boat, and signifying that he wished to have Grain d'Orge for a nurse instead of Elspeth, the conversation became entirely occupied with this startling proposal--which did not, however, strike La Vireville in his dream as being anything out of the common.