An Historical Mystery - Honoré de Balzac (ebook reader for surface pro txt) 📗

their masters' thought.

While the young countess was hesitating to follow Marthe, and asking explanations, Michu, from his vantage-ground watched the closing in of the gendarmes and understood their plan. He grew desperate as time went by and the countess did not come to him. A squad of gendarmes were marching along the park wall and stationing themselves as sentinels, each man being near enough to communicate with those on either side of them, by voice and eye. Michu, lying flat on his stomach, his ear to earth, gauged, like a red Indian, by the strength of the sounds the time that remained to him.

"I came too late!" he said to himself. "Violette shall pay dear for this! what a time it took to make him drunk! What can be done?"

He heard the detachment that was coming through the forest reach the iron gates and turn into the main road, where before long it would meet the squad coming up from the other direction.

"Still five or six minutes!" he said.

At that instant the countess appeared. Michu took her with a firm hand and pushed her into the covered way.

"Keep straight before you! Lead her to where my horse is," he said to his wife, "and remember that gendarmes have ears."

Seeing Catherine, who carried the hat and whip, and Gothard leading the mare, the man, keen-witted in presence of danger, bethought himself of playing the gendarmes a trick as useful as the one he had just played Violette. Gothard had forced the mare to mount the bank.

"Her feet muffled! I thank thee, boy," exclaimed the bailiff.

Michu let the mare follow her mistress and took the hat, gloves, and whip from Catherine.

"You have sense, boy, you'll understand me," he said. "Force your own horse up here, jump on him, and draw the gendarmes after you across the fields towards the farm; get the whole squad to follow you--And you," he added to Catherine, "there are other gendarmes coming up on the road from Cinq-Cygne to Gondreville; run in the opposite direction to the one Gothard takes, and draw them towards the forest. Manage so that we shall not be interfered with in the covered way."

Catherine and the boy, who were destined to give in this affair such remarkable proofs of intelligence, executed the manoeuvre in a way to make both detachments of gendarmes believe that they held the game. The dim light of the moon prevented the pursuers from distinguishing the figure, clothing, sex, or number of those they followed. The pursuit was based on the maxim, "Always arrest those who are escaping,"--the folly of which saying was, as we have seen, energetically declared by Corentin to the corporal in command. Michu, counting on this instinct of the gendarmes, was able to reach the forest a few moments after the countess, whom Marthe had guided to the appointed place.

"Go home now," he said to Marthe. "The forest is watched and it is dangerous to remain here. We need all our freedom."

Michu unfastened his horse and asked the countess to follow him.

"I shall not go a step further," said Laurence, "unless you give me some proof of the interest you seem to have in us--for, after all, you are Michu."

"Mademoiselle," he answered, in a gentle voice; "the part I am playing can be explained to you in two words. I am, unknown to the Marquis de Simeuse and his brother, the guardian of their property. On this subject I received the last instructions of their late father and their dear mother, my protectress. I have played the part of a virulent Jacobin to serve my dear young masters. Unhappily, I began this course too late; I could not save their parents." Here, Michu's voice broke down. "Since the young men emigrated I have sent them regularly the sums they needed to live upon."

"Through the house of Breintmayer of Strasburg?" asked the countess.

"Yes, mademoiselle; the correspondents of Monsieur Girel of Troyes, a royalist who, like me, made himself for good reasons, a Jacobin. The paper which your farmer picked up one evening and which I forced him to surrender, related to the affair and would have compromised your cousins. My life no longer belongs to me, but to them, you understand. I could not buy in Gondreville. In my position, I should have lost my head had the authorities known I had the money. I preferred to wait and buy it later. But that scoundrel of a Marion was the slave of another scoundrel, Malin. All the same, Gondreville shall once more belong to its rightful masters. That's my affair. Four hours ago I had Malin sighted by my gun; ha! he was almost gone then! Were he dead, the property would be sold and you could have bought it. In case of my death my wife would have brought you a letter which would have given you the means of buying it. But I overheard that villain telling his accomplice Grevin--another scoundrel like himself--that the Marquis and his brother were conspiring against the First Consul, that they were here in the neighborhood, and that he meant to give them up and get rid of them so as to keep Gondreville in peace. I myself saw the police spies; I laid aside my gun, and I have lost no time in coming here, thinking that you must be the one to know best how to warn the young men. That's the whole of it."

"You are worthy to be a noble," said Laurence, offering her hand to Michu, who tried to kneel and kiss it. She saw his motion and prevented it, saying: "Stand up!" in a tone of voice and with a look which made him amends for all the scorn of the last twelve years.

"You reward me as though I had done all that remains for me to do," he said. "But don't you hear them, those huzzars of the guillotine? Let us go elsewhere."

He took the mare's bridle, and led her a little distance.

"Think only of sitting firm," he said, "and of saving your head from the branches of the trees which might strike you in the face."

Then he mounted his own horse and guided the young girl for half an hour at full gallop; making turns and half turns, and striking into wood-paths, so as to confuse their traces, until they reached a spot where he pulled up.

"I don't know where I am," said the countess looking about her,--"I, who know the forest as well as you do."

"We are in the heart of it," he replied. "Two gendarmes are after us, but we are quite safe."

The picturesque spot to which the bailiff had guided Laurence was destined to be so fatal to the principal personages of this drama, and to Michu himself, that it becomes our duty, as an historian, to describe it. The scene became, as we shall see hereafter, one of noted interest in the judiciary annals of the Empire.

The forest of Nodesme belonged to the monastery of Notre-Dame. That monastery, seized, sacked, and demolished, had disappeared entirely, monks and property. The forest, an object of much cupidity, was taken into the domain of the Comtes de Champagne, who mortgaged it later and allowed it to be sold. In the course of six centuries nature covered its ruins with her rich and vigorous green mantle, and effaced them so thoroughly that the existence of one of the finest convents was no longer even indicated except by a slight eminence shaded by noble trees and circled by thick, impenetrable shrubbery, which, since 1794, Michu had taken great pains to make still more impenetrable by planting the thorny acacia in all the slight openings between the bushes. A pond was at the foot of the eminence and showed the existence of a hidden stream which no doubt determined in former days the site of the monastery. The late owner of the title to the forest of Nodesme was the first to recognize the etymology of the name, which dated back for eight centuries, and to discover that at one time a monastery had existed in the heart of the forest. When the first rumblings of the thunder of the Revolution were heard, the Marquis de Simeuse, who had been forced to look into his title by a lawsuit and so learned the above facts as it were by chance, began, with a secret intention not difficult to conceive, to search for some remains of the former monastery. The keeper, Michu, to whom the forest was well known, helped his master in the search, and it was his sagacity as a forester which led to the discovery of the site. Observing the trend of the five chief roads of the forest, some of which were now effaced, he saw that they all ended either at the little eminence or by the pond at the foot of it, to which points travellers from Troyes, from the valley of Arcis and that of Cinq-Cygne, and from Bar-sur-Aube doubtless came. The marquis wished to excavate the hillock but he dared not employ the people of the neighborhood. Pressed by circumstances, he abandoned the intention, leaving in Michu's mind a strong conviction that the eminence had either the treasure or the foundations of the former abbey. He continued, all alone, this archaeological enterprise; he sounded the earth and discovered a hollowness on the level of the pond between two trees, at the foot of the only craggy part of the hillock.

One fine night he came to the place armed with a pickaxe, and by the sweat of his brow uncovered a succession of cellars, which were entered by a flight of stone steps. The pond, which was three feet deep in the middle, formed a sort of dipper, the handle of which seemed to come from the little eminence, and went far to prove that a spring had once issued from the crags, and was now lost by infiltration through the forest. The marshy shores of the pond, covered with aquatic trees, alders, willow, and ash, were the terminus of all the wood-paths, the remains of former roads and forest by-ways, now abandoned. The water, flowing from a spring, though apparently stagnant, was covered with large-leaved plants and cresses, which gave it a perfectly green surface almost indistinguishable from the shores, which were covered with fine close herbage. The place is too far from human habitations for any animal, unless a wild one, to come there. Convinced that no game was in the marsh and repelled by the craggy sides of the hills, keepers and hunters had never explored or visited this nook, which belonged to a part of the forest where the timber had not been cut for many years and which Michu meant to keep in its full growth when the time came round to fell it.

At the further end of the first cellar was a vaulted chamber, clean and dry, built with hewn stone, a sort of convent dungeon, such as they called in monastic days the _in pace_. The salubrity of the chamber and the preservation of this part of the staircase and of the vaults were explained by the presence of the spring, which had been enclosed at some time by a wall of extraordinary thickness built in brick and cement like those of the Romans, and received all the waters. Michu closed the entrance to this retreat with large stones; then, to keep the secret of it to himself and make it impenetrable to others, he made a rule never to enter it except from the wooded height above, by clambering down the crag instead