CHAPTER XXXI

THE PAYING OF THE SCORE

(1)

Quiberon once more, place of intolerable memories, that Fortuné had thought never to see again, and the sea, blue and sparkling, breaking idly on the white sand that a few days had sufficed to wash clean of blood and tears.

It was thus that it had greeted La Vireville's eyes this afternoon, at the end of the long and dusty march back along that _via dolorosa_ from Auray. For when he left Mme. de Chaulnes' presence he was included in a draft that was being taken back to Quiberon to be tried by a commission there. It was in vain that La Vireville had protested that he had already been judged and condemned--that he had, in fact, a right to be shot at Auray. It was useless, and he had to go.

He found himself this evening herded for the night, with these fresh comrades marked for death, in a stone-walled field, with a sentry at every ten paces outside. They were to appear before the commission next morning. Most of them had in their pockets a hunch of bread, but the long hot march had made them very thirsty, and water was hard to come by. La Vireville contrived to procure some, and shared it with a grey-haired émigré of Loyal-Emigrant from Poitou.

"To our last night on earth!" said the old man tranquilly as he took it, and thanked him.

"I have already had one 'last night,'" replied the Chouan, with rather a wry smile. "I did not expect another. But at least it is under the stars this time."

He settled himself under the lee of a wall to sleep. The stars indeed were very bright, save just near the moon. In the silence he could hear the surf breaking on the rocks of the western shore. He was tired, but he did not sleep as he had slept last night at Auray, after his condemnation. This place was too bitterly full of memories. One in particular, that of his lost friend, haunted him, and he recalled his promise to him here, where it was made--the promise he could not have kept, the promise he did not even want to keep, for he had no wish to live now. But for Mme. de Chaulnes he would be sleeping at this moment with the others, in the meadow at Auray. And yet his fury at her cruelty had died already into ashes, for she had given him this night under the stars, a night like many he had passed among the broom with his men . . . a whole lifetime ago. . . .

That he should have recognised this for a boon, and felt thankful for it, might have told Fortuné de la Vireville that the unquenchable instinct of life was not really dead in him, though he thought it was. But he was not given to self-analysis. This only he was aware of, as he lay there, that whereas at Auray he had been genuinely resigned to his fate, and would hardly have looked at the chance of escape if it had been offered to him (save perhaps for Anne's sake), now some obscure process of the mind, in stirring up a profound annoyance at the way in which he had been treated by Mme. de Chaulnes, had also stirred up the desire to live, and cheat her of her vengeance. Only now there appeared no means of putting that desire into practice.

And had Providence been as merciful as he had thought? Ah, if after all he had had a son--if he were not going down into the dust, leaving no trace and no memorial behind him! But that thought brought him face to face with the tragedy of his life. He flung his arm over his eyes, and so lay, motionless, a long time. . . . The stars moved on; the sea-wind swept, sighing, over the prone figures which would lie yet more still to-morrow, and at last La Vireville, rousing himself, came back to the present.

Should he try to save himself, this time, at his trial? There was just a chance of doing so if, as was probable, the tribunal had not the minutes of the court at Auray. Could he gull his judges with some story of his being just a Breton peasant, as his dress, or at least the chief part of it, proclaimed him? They were showing more mercy to the Chouans than to their leaders. He could take off his high boots and go barefoot, leave here in the field his sling which, though no longer white, had obviously once been a leader's scarf, untie his hair once more and wear it loose on his shoulders. Among so many, his guards would hardly notice the transformation, and his judges would not have seen him before. Was it worth trying?

Yes, for the sake of the promise to the dead, for Anne-Hilarion's sake, and because, at thirty-five, it is not easy to be twice resigned.

(2)

The military commission began its work at eight next morning. La Vireville, appearing before it at about half-past eleven, found it to consist of a captain of artillery, a sous-lieutenant and a corporal of sharp-shooters, and a sergeant, under the presidency of a chef de bataillon.

It was very soon evident that this commission, as he had hoped, had no record of the proceedings of its fellow at Auray. La Vireville's statement that he was a peasant of the Morbihan passed practically unchallenged, helped by the changes he had made in his appearance and by the Bas-Breton with which he interlarded his replies. How then had he come to be taken at Quiberon? Why, because when Hoche had driven in the Chouans from their positions on the mainland, quantities of the peaceable peasants there, as his interrogators knew, had fled to the peninsula with their families. Indeed, warming to his work as he went on, as once before on a less serious occasion at St. Valéry, here in the little bare room in Quiberon village, with his life at stake, Fortuné began in his own mind to invest his supposed family with many likely attributes, and went so far as to tell the commission that one of his brothers had been drowned in trying, most foolishly, to escape to the English fleet.

So he had not borne arms against the Republic? Ma Doué, certainly not! Nothing was further from his thoughts; he was a peaceable cultivator, and only wanted to be left alone to cultivate. He had never emigrated? Dame, no! Why should he leave his family, his parish, and his recteur?

The commission conferred together. The chef de bataillon seemed to be studying some paper in front of him, glancing off now and again to look at La Vireville very keenly from under his grey eyebrows.

"You have never been in North Brittany then?"

No; he had never in his life left the Morbihan.

"Then you do not know Erquy and Pléneuf?"

Not if those places were in North Brittany. For his part, he did not know where they were.

"Then," inquired the president suavely, "you have never met or even heard of the North Breton Chouan leader called Augustin?"

And in that moment, as La Vireville realised that he was lost, he realised also what Mme. de Chaulnes had meant when she said that the score was yet to pay. This was her real vengeance.

But he made a fight for it. "How could I possibly say that, mon commandant?" he asked, with an air of puzzled innocence. "I do not wish to tell a lie. I may have seen him here at Quiberon. Is that what you mean?"

The president laughed, not unappreciatively. "I suggest to the prisoner that he can indeed see Augustin at Quiberon this very moment, if he will be at the trouble of looking in a mirror."

La Vireville assumed the most bovine air of stupidity at his command, and shook his head. "I do not understand," he answered.

"I think you understand only too well, Monsieur Augustin, otherwise La Vireville," said the chef de bataillon sternly. "Courtois, oblige me by reading out the description of the Chouan Augustin."

The sous-lieutenant read it out slowly and clearly--a damning document enough, not the old incorrect Government 'signalement,' but the one, drawn from the life, which Mlle. Angèle had penned that evening at Canterbury.

"The scar on the left cheek--put back that long hair of his!"

The wheel had come full circle. What he had had to submit to, in order to save Anne-Hilarion, months ago, had proved fatal to him himself now, as he had always known it would some day. Well, Anne could live without him.

"I do not think," observed the president, folding up the paper in front of him, "that there is anything more to say. Take him away. The next, sergeant!"

So La Vireville lost the throw, for the dice were loaded against him. He had no doubt that Mme. de Chaulnes had sent the 'signalement' down with him to Quiberon, and that the president had been ordered to keep it back till the last moment, as he had done, so that he could delude himself that after all he was going to escape. She had a pretty taste in vengeance, that old woman!

(3)

At half-past nine that night seventy of them were marched out to die. It was a beautiful and serene evening, light enough to slay by. Over the quiet waves the just risen moon made a wide golden highway. They went four abreast along the sandy track till they came, among the barley-fields at the edge of the sea, to a stony, uncultivated meadow with a fringe of wind-sloped and stunted trees behind one of its encircling stone walls. There they were halted and their sentences read to them, and after that stationed, thirty at a time, a few paces apart, against this low barrier. To each was told off a firing-party of four. La Vireville had been speculating how it would be done; at Auray he had heard that they had arranged otherwise. He himself was placed among the first thirty, the last but one of the line.

He had shaken hands with his right-hand neighbour, the Poitevin from Loyal-Emigrant, and was turning to the one remaining victim on his left, when his own four soldiers closed upon him. One of them drew out a handkerchief to bandage his eyes. Fortuné did not think it worth protesting that he should prefer not to be blindfolded, and submitted without a word to the operation. Another man held his unbound wrists, but La Vireville had no intention of struggling, though all the time he was thinking, "If I had a chance, even now, I would take it--were it only to spite that she-devil!" The handkerchief smelt strongly of brandy.

"Citizen," suddenly said a husky voice in his ear, and he felt the rough hands still fumbling behind his head with the knot of the handkerchief, which he was sure was already tied--"Citizen, we are very sorry, but it is the law. So if you have any money about you, give it to me now!"

La Vireville gave a laugh. Could they not be at the trouble of searching him afterwards?

"I have several louis left, as it happens," he said, "but it would not be fair to give them all to you, my friend. If I am to pay for the privilege of being shot . . .! Shall I throw them to you all?"

"_No!_" said the first applicant, with emphasis. "No, divide them now!" cried two of the others; but this altercation on the brink of the grave was broken into by an angry order from the officer commanding the party: "You there at the end, get to your places instantly!" And the hands, unwillingly, left Fortuné alone in the darkness, on the bank of the same river whose fording he had tried to make easier for that unfortunate young man at Auray yesterday morning. For himself, he had always known and expected that he would end like this, with his back to a wall and a firing-party in front of him; the only feeling which remained, now that the moment had actually come, was a hope for accurate aim.

Down the line in front of him he heard the click of cocking hammers. The voice of the old Poitevin a little way off on his right began, firm and clear, to repeat a response from the Burial Mass: "_Libera me, Domine, de morte eterna, in die illa. . . ._" The man on his left was murmuring over and over again a woman's name. . . . All that Fortuné himself thought was, "They might as well have it, the rascals, if I can get it out in time!" He thrust his right hand into his breeches pocket.

"_Apprêtez armes!_" shouted the officer.

And La Vireville, drawing out his hand full of gold pieces, threw the money from him with a gesture half-tolerant, half-contemptuous.

But all that he had played for and lost, much that he remembered, much that he had forgotten, surged like a tumultuous mist before him, in those two or three seconds that he folded his arms on his breast and waited for the final order. . . .

"_Feu!_"

* * * * *

In Quiberon village the peasants crossed themselves at the sound of the volley.