Sons of the Soil Part 42

"Nothing! nothing!" she said. Then she went up again in despair. About a quarter past twelve, she cried out: "Here he is! I hear the horse!"

Again she went down, followed by the man who went to open the iron gate of the courtyard. "It is strange," she said, "that he should return by the Conches woods!"

As she spoke she stood still, horrorstruck, motionless, voiceless. The man shared her terror, for, in the furious gallop of the horse, the clang of the empty stirrups, the neigh of the frightened animal, there was something, they scarcely knew what, of unspeakable warning. Soon, too soon for the unhappy wife, the horse reached the gate, panting and sweating, but alone; he had broken the bridle, no doubt by entangling it. Olympe gazed with haggard eyes at the servant as he opened the gate; she saw the horse, and then, without a word, she ran to the chateau like a madwoman; when she reached it she fell to the ground beneath the general's windows crying out: "Monsieur, they have murdered him!"

The cry was so terrible it awoke the count; he rang violently, bringing the whole household to their feet; and the groans of Madame Michaud, who as she lay on the ground, gave birth to a child that died in being born, brought the general and all the servants about her. They raised the poor dying woman, who expired, saying to the general: "They have murdered him!"

"Joseph!" cried the count to his valet, "go for the doctor; there may yet be time to save her. No, better bring the curate; the poor woman is dead, and her child too. My G.o.d! my G.o.d! how thankful I am that my wife is not here. And you," he said to the gardener, "go and find out what has happened."

"I can tell you," said the pavilion servant, coming up, "Monsieur Michaud's horse has come back alone, the reins broke, his legs b.l.o.o.d.y; and there's a spot of blood on the saddle."

"What can be done at this time of night?" cried the count. "Call up Groison, send for the keepers, saddle the horses; we'll beat the country."

By daybreak, eight persons--the count, Groison, the three keepers, and two gendarmes sent from Soulanges with their sergeant--searched the country. It was not till the middle of the morning that they found the body of the bailiff in a copse between the mail-road and the smaller road leading to Ville-aux-Fayes, at the end of the park of Les Aigues, not far from Conches. Two gendarmes started, one to Ville-aux-Fayes for the prosecuting attorney, the other to Soulanges for the justice of the peace. Meantime the general, a.s.sisted by the sergeant, noted down the facts. They found on the road, just above the two pavilions, the print of the stamping of the horse's feet as he roared, and the traces of his frightened gallop from there to the first opening in the woods above the hedge. The horse, no longer guided, turned into the wood-path. Michaud's hat was found there. The animal evidently took the nearest way to reach his stable. The bailiff had a ball though his back which broke the spine.

Groison and the sergeant studied the ground around the spot where the horse reared (which might be called, in judicial language, the theatre of the crime) with remarkable sagacity, but without obtaining any clue.

The earth was too frozen to show the footprints of the murderer, and all they found was the paper of a cartridge. When the attorney and the judge and Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, arrived and raised the body to make the autopsy, it was found that the ball, which corresponded with the fragments of the wad, was an ammunition ball, evidently from a military musket; and no such musket existed in the district of Blangy. The judge and Monsieur Soudry the attorney, who came that evening to the chateau, thought it best to collect all the facts and await events. The same opinion was expressed by the sergeant and the lieutenant of the gendarmerie.

"It is impossible that it can be anything but a planned attack on the part of the peasants," said the sergeant; "but there are two districts, Conches and Blangy, in each of which there are five or six persons capable of being concerned in the murder. The one that I suspect most, Tonsard, pa.s.sed the night carousing in the Grand-I-Vert; but your a.s.sistant, general, the miller Langlume, was there, and he says that Tonsard did not leave the tavern. They were all so drunk they could not stand; they took the bride home at half-past one; and the return of the horse proves that Michaud was murdered between eleven o'clock and midnight. At a quarter past ten Groison saw the whole company a.s.sembled at table, and Monsieur Michaud pa.s.sed there on his way to Soulanges, which he reached at eleven. His horse reared between the two pavilions on the mail-road; but he may have been shot before reaching Blangy and yet have stayed in the saddle for some little time. We should have to issue warrants for at least twenty persons and arrest them; but I know these peasants, and so do these gentlemen; you might keep them a year in prison and you would get nothing out of them but denials. What could you do with all those who were at Tonsard's?"

They sent for Langlume, the miller, and the a.s.sistant of General Montcornet as mayor; he related what had taken place in the tavern, and gave the names of all present; none had gone out except for a minute or two into the courtyard. He had left the room for a moment with Tonsard about eleven o'clock; they had spoken of the moon and the weather, and heard nothing. At two o'clock the whole party had taken the bride and bridegroom to their own house.

The general arranged with the sergeant, the lieutenant, and the civil authorities to send to Paris for the cleverest detective in the service of the police, who should come to the chateau as a workman, and behave so ill as to be dismissed; he should then take to drinking and frequent the Grand-I-Vert and remain in the neighborhood in the character of an ill-wisher to the general. The best plan they could follow was to watch and wait for a momentary revelation, and then make the most of it.

"If I have to spend twenty thousand francs I'll discover the murderer of my poor Michaud," the general was never weary of saying.

He went off with that idea in his head, and returned from Paris in the month of January with one of the shrewdest satellites of the chief of the detective police, who was brought down ostensibly to do some work to the interior of the chateau. The man was discovered poaching. He was arrested, and turned off, and soon after--early in February--the general rejoined his wife in Paris.

CHAPTER X. THE TRIUMPH OF THE VANQUISHED

One evening in the month of May, when the fine weather had come and the Parisians had returned to Les Aigues, Monsieur de Troisville,--who had been persuaded to accompany his daughter,--Blondet, the Abbe Brossette, the general, and the sub-prefect of Ville-aux-Fayes, who was on a visit to the chateau, were all playing either whist or chess. It was about half-past eleven o'clock when Joseph entered and told his master that the worthless poaching workman who had been dismissed wanted to see him,--something about a bill which he said the general still owed him.

"He is very drunk," added Joseph.

"Very good, I'll go and speak to him."

The general went out upon the lawn to some distance from the house.

"Monsieur le comte," said the detective, "nothing will ever be got out of these people. All that I have been able to gather is that if you continue to stay in this place and try to make the peasants renounce the pilfering habits which Mademoiselle Laguerre allowed them to acquire, they will shoot you as well as your bailiff. There is no use in my staying here; for they distrust me even more than they do the keepers."

The count paid his spy, who left the place the next day, and his departure justified the suspicions entertained about him by the accomplices in the death of Michaud.

When the general returned to the salon there were such signs of emotion upon his face that his wife asked him, anxiously, what news he had just heard.

"Dear wife," he said, "I don't want to frighten you, and yet it is right you should know that Michaud's death was intended as a warning for us to leave this part of the country."

"If I were in your place," said Monsieur de Troisville, "I would not leave it. I myself have had just such difficulties in Normandy, only under another form; I persisted in my course, and now everything goes well."

"Monsieur le marquis," said the sub-prefect, "Normandy and Burgundy are two very different regions. The grape heats the blood far more than the apple. We know much less of law and legal proceedings; we live among the woods; the large industries are unknown among us; we are still savages.

If I might give my advice to Monsieur le comte it would be to sell this estate and put the money in the Funds; he would double his income and have no anxieties. If he likes living in the country he could buy a chateau near Paris with a park as beautiful as that of Les Aigues, surrounded by walls, where no one can annoy him, and where he can let all his farms and receive the money in good bank-bills, and have no law suits from one year's end to another. He could come and go in three or four hours, and Monsieur Blondet and Monsieur le marquis would not be so often away from you, Madame la comtesse."

"I, retreat before the peasantry when I did not recoil before the Danube!" cried the general.

"Yes, but what became of your cuira.s.siers?" asked Blondet.

"Such a fine estate!"

"It will sell to-day for over two millions."

"The chateau alone must have cost that," remarked Monsieur de Troisville.

"One of the best properties in a circ.u.mference of sixty miles," said the sub-prefect; "but you can find a better near Paris."

"How much income does one get from two millions?" asked the countess.

"Now-a-days, about eighty thousand francs," replied Blondet.

"Les Aigues does not bring in, all told, more than thirty thousand,"

said the countess; "and lately you have been at such immense expenses,--you have surrounded the woods this year with ditches."

"You could get," added Blondet, "a royal chateau for four hundred thousand francs near Paris. In these days people buy the follies of others."

"I thought you cared for Les Aigues!" said the count to his wife.

"Don't you feel that I care a thousand times more for your life?" she replied. "Besides, ever since the death of my poor Olympe and Michaud's murder the country is odious to me; all the faces I meet seem to wear a treacherous or threatening expression."

The next evening the sub-prefect, having ended his visit at the chateau, was welcomed in the salon of Monsieur Gaubertin at Ville-aux-Fayes in these words:--

"Well, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, so you have returned from Les Aigues?"

"Yes," answered the sub-prefect with a little air of triumph and a look of tender regard at Mademoiselle Elise, "and I am very much afraid to say we may lose the general; he talks of selling his property--"

"Monsieur Gaubertin, I speak for my pavilion. I can on longer endure the noise, the dust of Ville-aux-Fayes; like a poor imprisoned bird I gasp for the air of the fields, the woodland breezes," said Madame Isaure, in a lackadaisical voice, with her eyes half-closed and her head bending to her left shoulder as she played carelessly with the long curls of her blond hair.

"Pray be prudent, madame!" said her husband in a low voice; "your indiscretions will not help me to buy the pavilion." Then, turning to the sub-prefect, he added, "Haven't they yet discovered the men who were concerned in the murder of the bailiff?"

"It seems not," replied the sub-prefect.

"That will injure the sale of Les Aigues," said Gaubertin to the company generally, "I know very well that I would not buy the place. The peasantry over there are such a bad set of people; even in the days of Mademoiselle Laguerre I had trouble with them, and G.o.d knows she let them do as they liked."

At the end of the month of May the general still gave no sign that he intended to sell Les Aigues; in fact, he was undecided. One night, about ten o'clock, he was returning from the forest through one of the six avenues that led to the pavilion of the Rendezvous. He dismissed the keeper who accompanied him, as he was then so near the chateau. At a turn of the road a man armed with a gun came from behind a bush.

"General," he said, "this is the third time I have had you at the end of my barrel, and the third time that I give you your life."

"Why do you want to kill me, Bonnebault?" said the general, without showing the least emotion.

"Faith, if I don't, somebody else will; but I, you see, I like the men who served the Emperor, and I can't make up my mind to shoot you like a partridge. Don't question me, for I'll tell you nothing; but you've got enemies, powerful enemies, cleverer than you, and they'll end by crus.h.i.+ng you. I am to have a thousand crowns if I kill you, and then I can marry Marie Tonsard. Well, give me enough to buy a few acres of land and a bit of a cottage, and I'll keep on saying, as I have done, that I've found no chances. That will give you time to sell your property and get away; but make haste. I'm an honest lad still, scamp as I am; but another fellow won't spare you."