"What can you fear while I am with you?" she answered, laughing."You are safer here than you would be at Mayenne."A woman answers for her lover in good faith.The two officers were reassured.The party now moved into the dining-room after some discussion about a guest, apparently of some importance, who had not appeared.Mademoiselle de Verneuil was able, thanks to the silence which always reigns at the beginning of a meal, to give some attention to the character of the assemblage, which was curious enough under existing circumstances.One thing struck her with surprise.The Republican officers seemed superior to the rest of the assembly by reason of their dignified appearance.Their long hair tied behind in a queue drew lines beside their foreheads which gave, in those days, an expression of great candor and nobleness to young heads.Their threadbare blue uniforms with the shabby red facings, even their epaulets flung back behind their shoulders (a sign throughout the army, even among the leaders, of a lack of overcoats),--all these things brought the two Republican officers into strong relief against the men who surrounded them.
"Oh, they are the Nation, and that means liberty!" thought Marie;then, with a glance at the royalists, she added, "on the other side is a man, a king, and privileges." She could not refrain from admiring Merle, so thoroughly did that gay soldier respond to the ideas she had formed of the French trooper who hums a tune when the balls are whistling, and jests when a comrade falls.Gerard was more imposing.
Grave and self-possessed, he seemed to have one of those truly Republican spirits which, in the days of which we write, crowded the French armies, and gave them, by means of these noble individual devotions, an energy which they had never before possessed."That is one of my men with great ideals," thought Mademoiselle de Verneuil.
"Relying on the present, which they rule, they destroy the past for the benefit of the future."The thought saddened her because she could not apply it to her lover;towards whom she now turned, to discard by a different admiration, these beliefs in the Republic she was already beginning to dislike.
Looking at the marquis, surrounded by men who were bold enough, fanatical enough, and sufficiently long-headed as to the future to give battle to a victorious Republic in the hope of restoring a dead monarchy, a proscribed religion, fugitive princes, and lost privileges, "He," thought she, "has no less an aim than the others;clinging to those fragments, he wants to make a future from the past."Her mind, thus grasped by conflicting images, hesitated between the new and the old wrecks.Her conscience told her that the one was fighting for a man, the other for a country; but she had now reached, through her feelings, the point to which reason will also bring us, namely: to a recognition that the king /is/ the Nation.
The steps of a man echoed in the adjoining room, and the marquis rose from the table to greet him.He proved to be the expected guest, and seeing the assembled company he was about to speak, when the Gars made him a hasty sign, which he concealed from the Republicans, to take his place and say nothing.The more the two officers analyzed the faces about them, the more their suspicions increased.The clerical dress of the Abbe Gudin and the singularity of the Chouan garments were so many warnings to them; they redoubled their watchfulness, and soon discovered many discrepancies between the manners of the guests and the topics of their conversation.The republicanism of some was quite as exaggerated as the aristocratic bearing of others was unmistakable.
Certain glances which they detected between the marquis and his guests, certain words of double meaning imprudently uttered, but above all the fringe of beard which was round the necks of several of the men and was very ill-concealed by their cravats, brought the officers at last to a full conviction of the truth, which flashed upon their minds at the same instant.They gave each other one look, for Madame du Gua had cleverly separated them and they could only impart their thoughts by their eyes.Such a situation demanded the utmost caution.
They did not know whether they and their men were masters of the situation, or whether they had been drawn into a trap, or whether Mademoiselle de Verneuil was the dupe or the accomplice of this inexplicable state of things.But an unforeseen event precipitated a crisis before they had fully recognized the gravity of their situation.
The new guest was one of those solid men who are square at the base and square at the shoulders, with ruddy skins; men who lean backward when they walk, seeming to displace much atmosphere about them, and who appear to think that more than one glance of the eye is needful to take them in.Notwithstanding his rank, he had taken life as a joke from which he was to get as much amusement as possible; and yet, although he knelt at his own shrine only, he was kind, polite, and witty, after the fashion of those noblemen who, having finished their training at court, return to live on their estates, and never suspect that they have, at the end of twenty years, grown rusty.Men of this type fail in tact with imperturbable coolness, talk folly wittily, distrust good with extreme shrewdness, and take incredible pains to fall into traps.