Scaramouche (10 page)

CHAPTER XI

THE SPLENDID FAILURE

That Monsieur de Batz was certainly not lacking in effrontery his carriage showed. He came in with a swagger.

Although he had arrived in Hamm within the hour, he displayed no stains of travel. A person of neat, tidy habits, he had carefully restored himself to order at the inn. He wore an apricot velvet coat and black satin smalls, stockings of black silk and red-heeled shoes with silver buckles. He carried a three-cornered hat adorned by a white cockade His brown hair was carefully clubbed.

He came forward briskly, his keen lively eyes throwing passing glances of recognition at the attendant gentlemen. He halted, waited a moment for the Regent to extend his hand; but he was nowise abashed when this did not happen. He bowed, his face set in lines of utmost gravity, and waited as the etiquette prescribed for his highness to address him.

The Regent, half twisted in his chair, considered him without friendliness.

"So you have returned, Monsieur de Batz. We were not expecting you." He paused, and added coldly t "We are not pleased with you, Monsieur de Batz."

"Faith, I'm not pleased with myself," said the Baron whom nothing could put out of countenance.

"We wonder that you should have troubled to return."

"I come to render my accounts, monseigneur."

"They are rendered. The events have rendered them. They have very fully reported your failure."

The Gascon knit his brows. "With submission, monseigneur, I cannot control Fate. I cannot say to Destiny 'Halte-là! It is de Batz who passes.'"

"Ah! You lay the blame on Destiny? She is the scapegoat of every incompetent."

"I am not of those, monseigneur. If I were not extremely competent, I should not be here. By now I should have put my head through the little window of the guillotine in Paris.

"Your failure leaves you unabashed, sir."

"Failure must be measured by the attempt. I attempted a miracle with no more than ordinary human powers."

"You were very confident of being able to perform it when you induced us to entrust you with the task."

"Will your highness suffer a question? Was there amongst all the twenty thousand French exiles who followed you at the time any other who begged to be entrusted with it?"

"Another might have been found. I should have sought him, no doubt, but for your overweening confidence in your own powers to save the King."

Still de Batz kept his countenance in the face of this monstrous obstinacy in ingratitude. But he could not quite exclude asperity from his reply.

"Your highness would have sought him had it occurred to you that such an attempt was possible. It does not follow that your highness would have found him. But it does follow that had you found him he must have failed."

"Must have failed? And why, if you please?"

"Because I failed. And where I failed, I'll take leave to inform your highness that no man could have succeeded."

In the group by the table behind him someone laughed. De Batz quivered as if he had been struck. But it was scarcely perceptible, and beyond this he gave no sign. Monsieur was regarding him in cold incredulity.

"Still, and in spite of all, the boastful Gascon!"

This was too much even for de Batz's self-control. He permitted his tone to express an infinite bitterness. "Your highness is pleased to rebuke me."

His highness was annoyed by the imputation of injustice. "Have you not deserved it, monsieur? Did you not win our trust by your emphatic assertions, your boastful promises? Did you not pledge me your word that you would bring the King safely out of Paris if I would entrust you with the means? I gave liberally all that you demanded out of a treasury from which we could ill spare the gold; gold which to-day might be used to nourish French gentlemen who are starving in exile. What have you done with this gold?"

The Baron audibly caught his breath. His intrepid countenance had turned pale under its healthy tan. "I can assure your highness that I have not used a louis of it to my own advantage."

"I do not ask you what you have not done with it. But what you have done."

"Your highness requires accounts of me?"

"Is not that the purpose of your return? To render your accounts?"

The Baron shifted his position, so that by a half-turn of his head he could survey every man in the room. His glittering eyes looked at the pallid d'Avaray, still leaning on the window-sill. The favourite's lace was a mask. The Gascon's glance travelled on. Flachslanden and Plougastel were rigidly glum. Kercadiou showed a countenance of gentle sympathy. D'Entragues was sneering, and de Batz remembered how from the outset d'Entragues—jealous of any secret-agent work of which he was not himself the instigator and guide—had opposed the undertaking had stigmatized it as crackbrained and impossible, and had argued against the supply of means for it.

At the end of that moment's utter silence the Baron spoke very quietly.

"I have kept no accounts in detail. I had not thought that it would be required of me. I am not a trader to keep ledgers, monseigneur; and this is not an affair of trade. But from memory I will do my best to prepare a statement. Meanwhile I can assure you, monseigneur that the sums expended amount to more than twice those which I had from your highness."

"What do you tell me, sir? Is this another Gasconnade! Whence could you have procured the money?"

"If I say that I procured it, it must follow that I did. For, although a Gascon, I have found no one yet of a temerity to doubt my honour or to assume that I might soil myself by falsehood. I spent the gold in corrupting some of the easily corruptible canaille that has charge of the administration in France to-day. Every man who could be of service to me, who could assist me in my design, I bribed to neglect his duty.

"For the rest, monseigneur, my failure is to be attributed to two factors which I did not take into account when I entered upon this difficult and hazardous undertaking. The first of these is the fact that the King was already a closely-guarded prisoner when I reached Paris. I arrived some few days too late for the plan which I had in mind. And for that delay, if you will do me the justice, monseigneur, to carry your mind back to Coblentz, when first I laid my plans before you, the blame attaches to Monsieur d'Entragues."

D'Entragues started in surprise to exclaim angrily "To me, sir? To me?"

"To you, sir," snapped de Batz, glad at last to fasten his teeth in someone who was not shielded by rank. "Had you not contemned my design, argued against it with his highness, described it as a reckless gamble of means that could not be spared, I should have started three weeks earlier. I should have been in Paris while the King was still at large in the Luxembourg, a full fortnight before he was conveyed a prisoner to the Temple; and my task would have been easy."

"We have your word for that," said d'Entragues, with a curling lip and a sidelong glance at Monsieur.

"You have, and you will be wise not to doubt it," said the Baron sharply, so sharply that the Regent rapped the table to remind them of his presence and the deference due to him.

"The second cause of your failure, Monsieur de Batz?" he asked, to keep him to the point.

"This lay in a danger of which I was always aware, but the risk of which I must accept. Finding my original intentions frustrated by his majesty's captivity, I was under the necessity of formulating another plan of campaign. A choice of alternatives presented itself. Rightly or wrongly, I decided that an eleventh-hour rescue was the one that offered the best chances. I am still persuaded that I made a wise choice and that but for betrayal I should have succeeded. The organization of this attempt called for infinite labour, infinite caution, infinite patience. All these I was able to supply. I got together a little band of royalists, entrusting to each of them the enlisting of others. Soon we were five hundred strong, and in constant touch with one another. These five hundred I instructed, equipped and armed there in Paris under the nose of the Convention and its Office of Surveillance. I spent money freely to accomplish it.

"When it was clear that his Majesty would be brought to trial and that the sentence was foregone, I completed my plan of action. It was plain to all that whilst the more abandoned of the rabble would look with satisfaction upon the execution of the King, the main body of the people would regard it with fear and horror. This main body was dominated by the noisy aggressiveness of a minority; but a bold call at the right moment would arouse it from its paralysis. There is a glamour about the person of a consecrated king. He is less a human being than a symbol, the incarnation of an idea; and to all men of any imagination or sensibility there is a repugnance to see violence done to him. I founded my hopes upon this. I would post my five hundred at a convenient point, which the King must pass on his way to execution. When he reached it I would give the signal. My five hundred would raise the try of 'Live the King!' and hurl themselves upon the guards."

He paused for a moment. The seven men in the room, caught in the spell of his exposition, seemed scarcely to breathe. All eyes were upon him.

"Can your highness doubt—can anyone doubt—what must have followed? My five hundred would have supplied the nucleus for a massed rising to rescue his Majesty. They would have supplied the cutting edge to an axe that would have derived its weight of metal from those who would instantly have flocked to join them. The paralysis of the majority would have been broken." He sighed. "Haas! Could any of you have been there as I was, at the appointed place, at the corner of the Rue de la Lime, under the bastion of the Bonne Nouvelle, could you have seen as I saw, the awe in the ranks of those who waited to see the royal carriage pass on its way to the Place de la Revolution as they now call the Place Louis XV, could you have observed the scared silence of those thousands, you would not have doubted what must follow upon my rallying cry and the dash of my five hundred.

"Standing there, waiting in the crowd, I was not only confident of success for the immediate design, but I had more than a hope to start a conflagration in which the revolution would have been consumed. Given such a rallying-point as we should have provided for the thousands who mistrust the new régime and view with horror the spread of anarchy and confusion, but who stand spellbound for lack of resolute leadership we might have brought about such a rising as would have carried the King back to his throne and swept away for ever the Convention and its supporting rabble."

He paused again, and smiled wryly upon their intentness.

"But I was Gasconnading, as you would say, monseigneur. Of what use to continue? I failed. Let that alone be remembered. The intelligence to plot, the skill to combine, the energy and courage that were ready to execute, of what account are these when the goal is missed? When the narrow line that sometimes lies between success and failure has not been crossed?"

His sarcasm stung them. Yet his highness overlooked it in the breathless interest de Batz had aroused.

"But how came you to fail? How?"

A shadow crossed the Baron's face. "I have already told you. The plan was betrayed by one of those—I know not which—in whom I was compelled to trust."

"That was inevitable with so many in the secret," rasped d'Entragues. "It should have been foreseen."

"It was foreseen. I am not quite a fool, Monsieur d'Entragues. But to foresee is not always to be able to forestall, A man caught in a burning house will foresee that if he jumps from a window he may break his neck. But that should not prevent him from jumping since, if he remains, he will be burned alive. I perceived the risk, and I did what was humanly possible to guard against it. I had no choice but to accept it. There was no other way."

"What happened, then?" his highness demanded. "You have not told us that."

"The details?" De Batz shrugged again. "Oh, if they interest you, monseigneur..." And he resumed: "I repeat that Paris as a body did not desire the death of the King; that the Parisians were appalled, awe-stricken in the face of a deed which savoured of sacrilege, and from which they instinctively feared terrible consequences to themselves. As I have said, no man who saw the crowd in the streets on that January morning could have a doubt on this. And the Convention was aware of it, the Committees of the Sections were aware of it. From the Temple to the Place de la Revolution, a double file of soldiers held the route in which all traffic was that day forbidden.

"The King had for escort not merely a mounted regiment of National Gendarmerie and a regiment of grenadiers of the National Guard, but a battery of cannon that rolled thundering through the streets immediately ahead of the royal carriage. This was densely surrounded by guards. Its closed windows were smeared with lather, so that not so much as a glimpse of the royal countenance should act as an incitement to the spirit which the authorities knew to be abroad. The tramp of marching feet, the rumble and rattle of the gun-carriages and the rolling of the drums were the only sounds. A silence such as that in which those thousands stood to see his Majesty pass to execution must have been witnessed to be credited, must have been experienced to realize its impressiveness, its unnatural, uncanny solemnity.