CHAPTER XXXIV

MONSEIGNEUR'S GUEST

(1)

Up and down the Hard at Portsmouth, among rough sailors and rough language, but apparently unconscious of either, there walked in the last days of November 1795 a little old man in the dress of a French ecclesiastic, absorbed in a book. Such sights were not very infrequent now in the southern ports, and if they aroused occasional comment, it was not of a hostile nature. This old priest was small, frail, and a little shabby, but of a very unaffected dignity, and on one finger shone an amethyst ring.

"Monseigneur does choose such extraordinary places to say his office in!" thought a younger and taller priest, making his way through the throng to the old man. "One knows, of course, that it is all the same to him wherever he is."

He approached his compatriot and addressed him with deference. For the shabby little ecclesiastic was the exiled bishop of one of the most important dioceses in France.

"It is as Your Grandeur thought. The corvette is from Houat, and she has on board a dozen or so of our unfortunate fellow-countrymen from Quiberon. They are sending them ashore now."

The Bishop slipped the book he was reading into a bulged pocket. "Then we will go and meet them. Ah, pardon, my friend, I hope I have not hurt you?" he exclaimed, as, in turning, he collided with a gigantic man-o'-war's man in a shiny tarpaulin hat.

The sailor pulled his forelock. "Not very likely, sir, saving your presence," he returned, with a grin. "'Twould take a vessel of more tonnage than you has to sink Tom Richards!"

"I love these good mariners!" observed the Bishop, as the two priests made their way to the edge of the quay and looked down. The corvette's boat was already there, landing her cargo of battered and broken men. So the Bishop stationed himself at the top of the steps, and as they came up he spoke to each, asking his name, where he was going, if he had need of anything.

Last of all came a tall, gaunt man in English uniform who seemed rather dazed, and was helped by two sailors up the steps. When his supporters abandoned him he sat down on a bollard and put his right hand over his eyes. His left sleeve hung empty.

Perceiving his condition the Bishop did not address him directly, but applied for information about him to the lieutenant of the régiment de Rohan with whom he had last been conversing.

"No one at Houat knew exactly who he was, Monseigneur," replied the French officer, glancing over his shoulder. "He was found half-dead on the rocks there as long ago as August, and he was ill for months afterwards from wounds and exposure. Neither then nor since has he been able to give much account of himself--he seems to have lost his memory--though from the few rags remaining on him when he was discovered it was supposed that he had been one of the Chouan leaders."

"Thank you, Monsieur," said the Bishop. He went over, with compassion in his face, to the seated man, and touched him on the shoulder.

"My son," he said, "is there anything that I can do for you?"

"This is St. Helier, is it not?" answered the other in a dulled voice, without looking up. "If you could kindly take me to where my mother lives. I . . . I have been ill . . . and I do not think I could find the way."

The Bishop paused a moment, then he said, very gently, "This is not Jersey, my child; it is Portsmouth."

"Portsmouth," repeated the émigré, in the same uninterested tone. "Not Jersey--Portsmouth. But she is not at Portsmouth----" Then he looked up, and his eyes, full of fever though they were, knew the man who was speaking to him for a bishop of his own Church.

"But they shot you at Vannes, Monseigneur, with Sombreuil!"

The old man guessed to whom he was referring. "God rest his soul!" he said, signing himself. "But you mistake, my son; I am not the Bishop of Dol, and this is England. What are you going to do?"

The Frenchman got to his feet. "I?" he said, and laughed a little. "Why, I should have been shot at Auray, Monseigneur . . . or at Quiberon. . . . It would have been better. . . . But I am here. . . . God knows why." He sat down again on the bollard.

Monseigneur beckoned to his Grand Vicar. Then he turned again to the émigré. "My son," he said, "you will come home with me. It is not far. Come, take my arm!"

And the émigré obediently took that ridiculous support (the Grand Vicar, however, walking in readiness on the other side) and so came, with difficulty and without speech, to the little hired house where the Bishop lived.

In the parlour Monseigneur said to him, "And now perhaps you had better tell us your name?"

"Augustin," replied the guest, and, turning suddenly faint or giddy with the word, collapsed like a log against the Grand Vicar, who, being fortunately nearly as tall as he, and robust to boot, was not felled to the floor as the Bishop would undoubtedly have been.

(2)

The good Bishop sat all that night by the bedside of his guest, and all night long La Vireville tossed and talked, so that, being undeterred by his occasional lapses into language of a vigour which would have shocked the Grand Vicar, the Bishop learnt many things. The empty left sleeve indicated, as he had of course supposed, that the émigré had lost his arm--or most of it, for it had been amputated some way above the elbow. That wound was healed, but his whole body still bore the marks of what the sea and the rocks between them had done to it, and it was to one of these injuries, to the head, that the surgeon summoned next morning was inclined to attribute his sudden lapse into insensibility and his present state of semi-stupor.

"He was not really fit to have made the voyage from Houat," he said in conclusion; "but from what one hears of conditions in the Ile d'Yeu he is certainly better in England." He was thinking of the privations which, since the end of September, General Doyle's little force had been undergoing in the latter island.

When the surgeon had gone the old Bishop said to his Grand Vicar, with his customary gentle resolution, "We must try to find our guest's mother in Jersey, of whom he spoke on the quay yesterday."

"But we do not know his surname, Monseigneur," objected the younger priest, "unless by any chance 'Augustin' is his family and not his Christian name. And there are so many French exiles in Jersey."

"His mother evidently lives at St. Helier," replied the Bishop, "and that gives us something to start from. I shall write to the Prince de Bouillon and ask him to make inquiries. . . . Also I shall have M. Augustin moved into my bedroom. He will be more comfortable there, and if, as I suspect, he is going to be ill for some time, it is a sunny room, which is important."

As the Grand Vicar and the housekeeper alike knew that it was of no use arguing with Monseigneur, especially when his own discomfort was in question, they did not waste their energies in conflict, and La Vireville, still only half-conscious, was transferred to the modest episcopal apartment.

(3)

The volleys that rang out that August evening over the Bay of Quiberon had left one man out of the doomed thirty untouched by any bullet--preserved as by a miracle. The miracle was wrought by greed, and the man--as may be guessed--was Fortuné de la Vireville.

Fortuné had realised the incredible thing quickly enough. Dazed though he was by the ear-splitting general discharge at such close quarters, he had no sooner perceived that he was still on his feet, unharmed, than he had torn off the bandage round his eyes, taken one glance at the scene through the drifting smoke, and with a single bound had cleared the low stone wall behind him. Even as he jumped, however, came a report, and his left, his already injured, arm fell powerless to his side. He staggered a moment with the shock, recovered himself, plunged through the little thicket of dwarfed trees, and in another minute was running like a deer across the pale barley-field beyond. He was saved--for the time at least--by a chance the possibility of which had never entered his head. At the moment of the command to fire, his executioners had been stooping after the gold which he had just thrown to them. . . . One man only, he who had just winged him, was bringing his musket to the level as the émigré had snatched the handkerchief from his eyes and turned. Now, as he ran, the barley catching at his bare feet, the rest of the belated volley and some other shots came after him. But they went wide; the light, at that distance, was too uncertain. La Vireville tore on.

Yet that one marksman had scored heavily enough, as was soon only too obvious to the fugitive. His left elbow was shattered, and--what for the moment was worse--the injury was bleeding very copiously. La Vireville supported it with his other hand and arm as he raced through the barley, but he knew that between the severity of the pain, which the rapid motion was momentarily intensifying to agony, and the haemorrhage, he would not be able to run much farther. And indeed there was not much farther for him to run, since beyond the field was nothing but the shore. That solved the question, anyhow. With forty others to despatch, too, there was just a chance that they would not pursue him immediately.

So, where the edge of the barley-field curved gently over to the beach, he scrambled down, panting and dizzy, and fell to his knees on the soft sand. One thing he knew to be imperative--to stop the blood pouring from his arm, and in a kind of frenzy he tore off the bandage from his former, half-healed wound and tied it tightly above and around the new. This proceeding, necessary though it was, put the coping-stone on his endurance, and it was barely finished before he toppled forward on to his face and lay there motionless. Dimly, as consciousness left him, he heard the sound of the second series of volleys.

* * * * *

He came to--how much later he had small idea--with sand in his mouth and an almost intolerable aching in his fractured elbow. Whether the soldiers had searched for him or no he could not tell. He hardly realised that, except from the beach itself, he was invisible where he lay. But he did not conceive that there was any permanent shelter for him on Quiberon. Looking stupidly at his arm, he saw that the bleeding had stopped, but the arm was much worse than useless, for it was anguish to move it in any direction. . . . Really the simplest plan was to stay where he was. The soldiers would find him in time, and could finish their work; on the whole, it was foolishness not to have stayed up there by the wall to let them do it. . . . And Fortuné lay down again, with relief, on the fine and kindly sand that had already drunk his blood and now offered him oblivion.

For though he had said to himself a little while ago that if he had a chance he would take it, and though he had leapt the wall instinctively, and had run as never before in his life, yet now, after all, his will faltered. For one thing, he was sick with pain; for another, he was badly crippled. And what inducements had he, he asked himself, to wrestle further with destiny?--for a fight it would be, and most probably a losing one. Anne-Hilarion, to whom he now owed a duty; his mother, whom he loved; the cause he followed? Yes; but to none of these was he indispensable. That dark star of his, which for ten years had represented love to him, certainly offered him no light to live by; nor did revenge, since St. Four was dead. All he asked for was to yield, to contend no more.

But in a few moments he had struggled up again on to his elbow. The naturally unsubmissive bent of his mind worked automatically against such a surrender, and the remembrance of his promise to René came back even stronger than it had done last night. He had pledged himself to do his best to escape; René's last words to him--possibly the last he had ever spoken--had been on that matter. But how was he to fulfil that promise?

Leaning thus on his right elbow, La Vireville studied the sand, that strangely white sand of Quiberon. How _could_ he save himself--it was practically impossible now! Under his gaze, covered with half-dried blood from the shattered arm which it had supported in his flight, lay his right hand, and that was all he had to depend on. Slowly and awkwardly enough (and even then at the cost of what made him set his teeth) he raised himself a little higher. And as he propped himself on this sound but bloodstained hand, he was suddenly aware of a minor pang in that. Glancing down again he saw that in changing his position he had brushed it against a plant of sea-holly, of which there were many on the shore and the dunes of Quiberon.

And La Vireville stared at that sturdy thistle, with its sharp, glaucous leaves and its beautiful dream-blue flower, both misty now in the dim light, almost as if he saw it in a dream, for its harsh touch had carried him back in a flash to the little bay in the Côtes-du-Nord where all this, surely, had happened before--where, when he was crippled, that same hand had known the scratch of the sea-holly, even to blood, and Mme. de Guéfontaine's kiss.

"She would not like to kiss that hand now!" he reflected, rather grimly. Yet suddenly he had the impression, as vivid as if she were there now, kneeling by him, near the sea-holly, as she had knelt that evening in the northern bay, that she, with her high courage and her ideals of devotion, would never counsel him to lie here like a coward till he was found and shot. She would have counselled him--did indeed seem to be counselling him now--to bestir himself, for the child's sake, for his own self-respect. But how was he to obey her?

There was only one way--the way she had gone that evening. The waves to-night broke not much less gently on this shore of tragedy than they had done on that placid strand. Yes, there lay, as always of late in Fortuné's life, the call. But it had never been so hard to follow. Nevertheless he believed the English squadron to be cruising somewhere off the little isles of Houat and Hoedic, and the former of these could not be more than ten miles away. If Providence would but complete the miracle and put him in the way of coming by a boat--a possible but an unlikely occurrence--he would take it for an omen, and make an attempt to reach the fleet.

And so, supporting his mangled arm again with the other, he began to get with difficulty to his feet, reflecting as he did so that even if there were a boat on the shore he could not launch it, injured as he was, and that in any case, if he showed himself near it, he would probably be fired on by some unseen sentry. Luckily the moon was near her setting. He must therefore look for this problematical boat before she set, but not attempt to embark till afterwards, when it would be much darker.

Directly he was on his feet, La Vireville became aware of a black blotch on the waters of the bay, a little to his left, and a few yards from shore. He stood there staring at it, utterly unbelieving. Was this the answer of Providence? Two fantastic thoughts immediately visited him: the first, that she, with whom he had almost seemed, a moment ago, to hold converse, had known that the boat was there; the second, that Anne-Hilarion must really need him. It was quite a small boat, yet, as far as he could see by straining his eyes in the moonlight, it had a mast ready stepped--a vital point, since he must have a sail. Then he tried to calculate the distance of the boat from the edge of the water, because he thought it very unlikely that in his present condition he could swim out to her. If the tide were ebbing, however, he might possibly reach her by wading.

"I shall be taking the deuce of a deal of trouble for you, Anne," he said out loud, "and I expect it will come to the same thing in the end--a volley at ten paces." But he sat down again to wait for the moon's setting, his back against the bank of sand that was the edge of the barley-field, trying to keep his hot thoughts off the great pain that he was suffering, wishing that he had not made away with his sling, and facing the more than probability that the fresh injury would in the end be his undoing.

* * * * *

Twelve hours later, shivering with fever under a hot noon sun, he was lying becalmed somewhere to the east of Houat. He had almost lost his sense of direction, and in any case there was no wind. The oars he naturally could not use. He had eaten nothing since the day before, he was very thirsty, he had been soaked to the skin in getting to the boat, and his wounded arm was causing him such a martyrdom that if he could have cut it off and thrown it overboard he would willingly have done so. Half the time Anne-Hilarion seemed to be sitting beside him, asking why they did not sail faster, and once, at least, he answered him very seriously, "Because, mon petit, your uncle has such extraordinary bad luck,"--to which Anne had contended that it was good luck, not bad, or that it might at least be regarded as mixed. And then the fugitive found himself saying something about the devil's own luck, and a voice replied, "André had that kind of luck too, but it failed him in the end." Who was André? Was he in the boat too? If he were, then perhaps his sister was with him, and perhaps she could do something for this terrible pain which was driving him crazy--as once she had with her cool fingers eased his foot. . . .

And Fortuné raised his throbbing head from the gunwale to look for her--but he was quite alone in the boat, and the boat was alone, motionless, in the midst of a shining sea. How the sun stared at him--and yet he was so cold! His head fell back again inert, and he returned once more to the vision of that tragic line of fallen, writhing figures, an ineffaceable glimpse of which his senses had caught and recorded as he leapt the wall.

Later still, as daylight faded, the little boat, lifting sideways with every long shoreward wave, her sails racketing madly about, drifted nearer and nearer to the iron rocks of Houat, where the surf was always pounding. The wished-for wind had sprung up just at sunset, but the helmsman, lying face upwards in the sternsheets, much as François the fisherman had once lain, was in no condition to utilise it, or even to avert the disaster to which it was hurrying him.

* * * * *

Author's Note.--It is a matter of historical fact that one émigré did escape shooting at Quiberon by throwing his gold to the firing-party, exactly as described.