The Yellow Poppy. D. K. Broster

And not so honest. Aye, and as I live

       I should have died so, crushing in my hand

       This rose of love, the wasp inside and all,—

       Ignoring ever to my soul and you

       Both rose and pain,—except for this great loss,

       This great despair . . .”

      Aurora Leigh.

      BOOK I

       THE WEDDING GIFT

       Table of Contents

      “And so, self-girded with torn strips of hope,

       Took up his life, as if it were for death

       (Just capable of one heroic aim),

       And threw it in the thickest of the world.”

      Aurora Leigh.

      NOTE

      Any reader familiar with the figure of the gallant and unfortunate Louis de Frotté will realise why neither he nor the Normandy which he led so well play any part in these pages—not indeed that he has served as prototype for any character in them, but because to have introduced him also would have been to overblacken the reputation of Bonaparte. Yet that which is here laid to the First Consul’s charge is no libel, for the deeds done at Alençon and Verneuil in mid-February, 1800, are written in history.

      CHAPTER I

       “WHAT IS MIRABEL?”

       Table of Contents

      “I wish I had been taught how to make a bed!” complained Roland de Céligny, as he wrestled with his blanket in the half-darkness of the attic.

      “You may think yourself lucky to have a bed to make!” retorted a comrade who sat cross-legged on a neighbouring pile of sacking. “Mine cannot be ‘made,’ though a careless movement will reduce it to its component elements.”

      “The devil! If I tuck in the blanket this side, it won’t reach to the other!” pursued the young grumbler, fiercely demonstrating the truth of his accusation, where he knelt by a mattress placed directly on the floor.

      “From this, my paladin, learn that the gifts of Fate are evenly distributed,” returned he of the pile of sacking. Since one of his arms was in a sling, it is possible that he would not have been capable even of the Vicomte de Céligny’s unfruitful exertions, but he did not say so. On the contrary, he looked at his friend’s performance with the air of one who in a moment will say, “Let me do it!”

      “If you would only take less——” he began.

      “For Heaven’s sake be quiet, you two!” entreated a third voice. “One cannot count, much less think, in your chatter . . . Two tierce-majors. . . .”

      The owner of this voice, a man of about forty-five or fifty, sat at a table in a corner playing piquet by candlelight with another. There is no reason why you should not play piquet, even if you are a Chouan officer in the late April of the year of grace 1799—or, if you prefer it, which in that case is unlikely, Floréal of the year VII of the Republic—and are concealed at the top of an old house at Hennebont in Brittany with a bandage on your head, and an ache within it which may well justify a little impatience to noise. When, in addition, your partner refuses to play for money, the game becomes so harmless as almost to be meritorious.

      To the appeal of the piquet-player—his superior officer into the bargain—the wounded critic on the sacking made no reply save a grimace. The time selected for bedmaking by the very good-looking young man who was engaged in it was not, as might be guessed, a morning hour; it was, on the contrary, nine o’clock in the evening. Two candles stuck in the necks of bottles gave the card-players their requisite illumination; another, standing on a dilapidated chest of drawers, shone on the book which a third young man, sitting astride a chair, had propped on its back and in which he appeared to be immersed.

      The attic thus meagrely lit was spacious, and full of odd corners, but crowded with tables and chairs and cupboards, for it was the top floor of a furniture dealer, where he stored his old or unfashionable goods, many of which had been piled up on the top of each other to make more room, and where two or three huge old wardrobes, jutting out like dark shadowy rocks from the walls, still further reduced the space available for occupation. Yet though it was, patently, a refuge, it was also a rendezvous.

      In this spring of 1799 the Directory, the cruel and incapable, was still prolonging its dishonoured existence, and after ten years of torment the French people were still enslaved—to an oligarchy instead of to a monarchy. The liberty dangled so long before their eyes, the liberty in whose name so many terrible crimes had been committed, seemed further away than ever. Inert and exhausted, pining under a leprosy of political corruption, her credit and trade almost ruined, the mere ghost of what she had been, France was sighing for the master that she was impotent to give herself, the man who should overturn her new tyrants and raise her up once more to her full stature. And to most minds in the West, that home of loyalty, only one master was conceivable, and that was Louis XVIII., the King who had never reigned.

      In the West, moreover, at this moment, the Chouannerie, that sporadic guerrilla warfare of profoundly Royalist and Catholic stamp, indigenous to Brittany, Anjou, and Maine since the overthrow of the great Vendean effort in 1793, was showing signs of reviving—under persecution. It had indeed been temporarily stamped out at the pacification of three years ago, but that pacification had left the Royalists of Brittany and the neighbouring departments in a position which gradually proved to be intolerable. They were not at war, yet they lived in continual peril, not one of them sure of his liberty or even of his life. After the scandalous coup d’état of Fructidor, ’97, the promised religious freedom was not even a name, and political freedom, especially in the western departments whose elections had been so cynically annulled, was a mere farce. It came, in fact, at last to this, that the Minister of Police could recommend that the Royalists of those regions should be “caused to disappear” if necessary; tyranny unashamed had replaced oppression.

      Naturally enough, in 1798 the Chouan began to make his appearance once more. At first he merely robbed couriers and diligences of public money. But this not very creditable activity was on the surface; underneath, in the hands usually of gentlemen, the work went secretly forward of organising that indomitable and tenacious peasantry, at once pious and cruel, and of transforming brigandage into real war; and so, throughout the West, might be found wandering Royalist leaders with their little staffs, striving to keep effective the Chouans who had once fought, and to enrol and arm fresh volunteers. To such a band, commanded by the Marquis de Kersaint, an émigré distinguished in Austrian service who had not long come over from England, belonged these five men in the furniture-dealer’s attic.

      They were not, at this moment, in very enviable case, for besides that two of them were wounded, they and their handful of peasants—since scattered—had yesterday come off second best in an unexpected collision with Government troops in the neighbouring department of Finistère, and they were now beginning, moreover, to be anxious about the safety of their leader, who, with a guide, had taken a more circuitous route to Hennebont in order to gather certain information. And his presence here was urgent because it had long been arranged that he and his two elder subordinates should meet and confer in Hennebont with Georges Cadoudal, the famous peasant leader of the Morbihan, concerning the better organisation of the wilder and more westerly region of Finistère, which, it was whispered, M. de Kersaint was eventually to command in its entirety. Yesterday’s misfortune had made such a meeting more, not less, necessary; and so here, half-fugitive, M. de Kersaint’s officers were, having had the luck to slip unobserved into the little town in the dusk. But now there were rumours of a colonne mobile on the road which their leader would probably take; and in any case there was always danger—danger which the three young men who