The Greatest Historical Novels. Rafael Sabatini
that these assignats will be employed only in France?'
'Freely, Monseigneur. I have still enough gold for our journey across the Rhine.'
'Very well, then. You must do what is necessary. But you realize the danger?'
De Batz smiled confidently. 'As for danger, it is the least of those we shall confront, and I employ very skilful hands, Monseigneur.'
Upon that his Highness closed the audience with a few words of valediction, and graciously proffered his hand to be kissed by those two adventurers.
Outside in the sunshine, as they squelched their way through the thawing snow, the Gascon loosed at last his annoyance in a volley of profanity.
'If it were not that I rate the game above the stakes, I should have told their Highnesses in round terms to go to the devil together with that infernal pimp d'Entragues. God of my life! To have to go on one's knees to beg the honour of being permitted to get one's self killed in their service!'
André-Louis smiled upon his fury. 'You do not realize the honour of dying in their cause. Have patience with them. They are merely players of parts. And Destiny has given them parts too big for their puny wits. Fortunately for our self-respect, Monsieur turned gracious at the end.'
'Which provides the morning's most surprising event. Hitherto he has been the more intransigent, the more self-sufficient of the twain.'
André-Louis brushed the mystery aside. 'Ah, well! I am content that my dismissal was not confirmed. I have my own interests to serve in the adventure. For I am Scaramouche, remember. Not a knight-errant.'
But it was as a knight-errant that Monsieur de Kercadiou and Aline regarded him when they heard to what desperate adventure he was pledged. Aline perceived only the dangers, and that evening after supper, when for a little while she was alone with André-Louis, she gave expression to her fears.
He glowed at this fresh proof of her tenderness even whilst distressed by her distress. He set himself to tranquillize her. He dwelt upon the immunity which circumspection ensured, freely quoting de Batz on the subject. But the mention of the Baron's name was an incitement to her.
'That man!' she cried, a world of condemnation in her voice.
'Oh, but a very gallant gentleman,' André-Louis defended him.
'A reckless harebrain, dangerous to all who are associated with him. He makes me afraid, André. He will not be lucky to you. I feel it. I know it.'
'Intuitions?' He said tolerantly, smiling down upon her where she stood against him, her face upturned to his.
'Ah, do not sneer, André.' Agitation had brought her, who rarely wept, to the verge of tears. 'If you love me, André, you will not go.'
'I go because I love you. I go so that at last I may win you for my wife. Honours there will be, no doubt, and material gains to crown success. But these stand for nothing in my calculations. It is you I go to win.'
'Where is the need, since I am won already? For the rest, we could wait.'
It was anguish to deny the intercession in those dear eyes. He could but remind her that his word was pledged, doubly pledged: to the Regent as well as to de Batz. He urged her to be brave and to have in him some of the confidence which he had in himself.
She promised at last that she would try, and then to her promise added: 'Yet if you go, my André, I know that I shall never see you again. I have a premonition of evil.'
'Dear child! That is but a fancy born of your distress.'
'It is not. I need you. I need you near me. To guard me.'
'To guard you? But from what?'
'I do not know. There is some danger. I sense it about me—about us if we are apart. It is instinctive.'
'And yet, dear love, you had no such instinct when I proposed to go to Dresden.'
'Ah, but Dresden is near at hand. At need a message could bring you to me, or I could go to you. But once you are in France, you are as one trapped in a cage, cut off from the remainder of the world. André! André! Is it, indeed, too late?'
'Too late for what?' said Monsieur de Kercadiou, who entered at that moment.
She told him bluntly. He was shocked, outraged. Had she so little loyalty, so little sense of every loyal man's duty in this dreadful time, that she could weaken André's heroic resolve by a maudlin opposition? For once Monsieur de Kercadiou was really angry, and he stormed upon her as he had never yet stormed in all the years that she had been under his tutelage.
Limp, shamed, defeated, she withdrew; and next morning André-Louis rode out of Hamm to take the road to France.
With him rode Monsieur de Batz and a Monsieur Armand de Langéac, a young gentleman of a Languédoc family attached to them by Monsieur d'Entragues.
They were disposed to be light-hearted. But in the ears of André-Louis rang ever Aline's cry: 'If you go, my André, I know that I shall never see you again.'
CHAPTER XIV
MOLOCH
Moloch stood before the Palace of the Tuileries in the brilliant sunshine of a June morning, and raised his hideous voice in a cry for blood. The sprawling incarnation of him that filled to overflowing the Place du Carrousel was made up of some eighty thousand men under arms: sectionary National Guards, battalions of the new army about to set out for the Vendée, and ragged patriots brandishing musket, pike, or sabre, the bloodthirsty scourings of the streets. It was just such a mob as André-Louis had seen in this very place on the memorable and terrible 10th of August of the previous year.
On that occasion they had come to storm a palace housing a king, so that they might impose upon him their mutinous will, shaped and directed by the incendiaries who employed them as a weapon. Today, once more in an insurrection that had been craftily engineered, they came in their thousands to storm this same palace which now housed the National Convention elected by the people themselves to replace the departed monarch.
Then it had been Danton, the great tribune, massive and overwhelming in body, brain, and voice, the cyclops of Madame Roland's detestation, who had inspired and led the populace. Today its leader was a poor creature of weakly frame, shabbily dressed, his head swathed like a buccaneer's in a red kerchief, from which black, greasy rags of hair hung about a livid, Semitic countenance. He laboured in his walk, setting his feet wide. He was the Citizen Jean-Paul Marat, President of the powerful Jacobin Club, surgeon, philanthropist, and reformer, commonly styled the People's Friend, from the title of the scurrilous journal with which he poisoned the popular mind. And Danton was amongst those against whom today he led this mob, which ten months ago Danton had led in this same place.
The situation was not without a terrible humour; and Monsieur de Batz, standing prominently on a horse-block by the courtyard wall with André-Louis beside him, smiled grimly as he looked on, well pleased with the climax for which these two had striven and intrigued.
This is not to say that the ruin of the Girondin party, which was now as good as encompassed—the only alternative being the ruin of the entire Convention—was the work of de Batz and André-Louis. But it is beyond doubt that their part in it had been important. Without the grains of sand which they had flung at moments into the scales when these were too nicely balanced between victory and defeat, it is not impossible that the Girondins, who combined intelligence with courage, would have overthrown their opponents and established, by the rule of moderation for which they stood, the law and order necessary to save the State. But from the moment when they first rendered themselves vulnerable by procuring the arrest of the rabble's idol Marat, de Batz with the assistance of André-Louis had worked diligently through his agents to fan the resentment into a fury in the face of which no jury dared to convict the offending journalist.
Marat's acquittal