CHAPTER LXXII.
SPYING AND WATCHING.
A woman followed Count Mirabeau when he went to St. Cloud—a young woman, some three or four-and-twenty years of age, but looking older from the stormy passions that had swept across her youth, and the corroding jealousy that consumed her now. Louison Brisot had ridden behind him all the way from Paris, but took good care not to come near enough to that imposing figure to give him a glimpse of her person, or allow him to hear the tread of her horse. When he halted in the grove, and tied his horse to a sapling, she drew behind a clump of beech-trees, and watched him as he passed through the gate; then she dismounted, fastened her own horse, and taking a circuit among the undergrowth, came out by the gate, which she tried cautiously and found unlocked.
By this time Mirabeau had disappeared, and the young woman was at a loss to guess which way he had taken. At her left, she saw the roof of St. Cloud rising in irregular glimpses among the embosoming trees. If his business was with the king or queen, she argued, he would take that direction. If he came to seek some meaner object, there was not a tree in the vast Park which might not shelter him and the rival she came to discover.
Which way should she go? Not toward the palace; Mirabeau, the orator and friend of the people, would never venture there unless he was, indeed, a traitor to his party, and led on by some passion which in her arrogance she considered as treachery to her. More likely he had sought a building, or covert place in the grounds, where some person connected with the royal household would meet him. Nothing but political or social treason could have brought him there.
As the young woman wandered slowly on, meditating in this fashion, a sound of quick footsteps and the rustle of shrubbery startled her. She drew back of a huge tree that stood near and watched for the cause. It was a lady passing swiftly forward, through the purple twilight, her head enveloped in the shadowy blackness of a lace shawl, her dress half uplifted by her right hand, half trailing on the grass—a rich dress that glistened in the light which trembled over it.
The lady turned her head and stood still a moment, listening—a slight disturbance in the shrubbery near by seemed to have aroused her apprehension. Louison, concealed behind the tree saw a lovely face and a splendid figure stooping a little, as if arrested in some unlawful or dangerous step. It was but a momentary glance, but she recognized the queen, and the sight threw every passion of her most passionate nature into revolt.
“Traitor!” came hissing through her shut teeth; “double-dyed traitor! For that face he will sell us all!”
The queen passed on swiftly, moving through the green foliage and the purple atmosphere of the Park like a beautiful spirit. After her, creeping forward like a panther, stole the other woman, her eyes gleaming, her lips in motion. She came in sight of a little temple built on high ground, sheltered under drooping elms; from its windows the last golden light of the day was falling back like a sheaf of broken arrows, and a soft luminous haze quivered among the branches that swept over it.
There was too much light for the woman to venture forward, even when she saw the door open, and the person she had followed pass into the temple. Then through the still blazing windows she saw the shadows of two persons standing together. As she looked, they sunk away and disappeared from her eyes; but she was in a position to hear the murmur of voices.—One, deep, sonorous and impressive, the other, clear, low and sweet; but no words uttered by these voices reached her. She could only guess at their meaning, and a vivid imagination lent poison to her conjectures.
Panting with rage, burning with curiosity, this woman stood in her covert, afraid to pass the stretch of open sward that lay between her and the temple. It seemed to her hours on hours before the two persons in that little building darkened the windows again; but at last two black shadows rose up in the gathering darkness; for, by this time, all the purple and gold of the sunset had merged into the light of a silvery moon, and through the opposite windows came its pale radiance, in which the man and woman stood between darkness and light. She saw him bend and sink downward as if kneeling. She saw the lady stoop her beautiful head. The sight maddened her. She leaped forward with the spring of a tigress to glare through the window, and see Mirabeau’s lips pressed upon the hand of Marie Antoinette.
The two persons in the temple separated then, and the watcher saw that they were about to depart. She had seen enough. He must not find her there! If Mirabeau could prove secret and deceptive, so could she. If the fatal charms of the queen had ensnared him, they had set her whole being in opposition.
As the door of the temple opened, Louison sprang away; and while Mirabeau lingered to cast one more look on the queen, who had fascinated him as no other woman on earth could have done, she went swiftly toward the park gate.
Louison Brisot left the park in a state of fierce exasperation. She was absolutely afraid of herself. She panted to stop then and there on the highway, and in the fury of her jealous passion, rebuke that proud demagogue for his double treason.
The women of France, who first entered upon the revolution, possessed two powerful qualities, violent passions and a wonderful power of self-restraint. It was seldom that any of these women plunged into the awful scenes that have revolted the whole world without being led there by the hand of some fierce demagogue, who called himself a patriot. Such men had no use for weak or vacillating women; but mated themselves, legally or illegally, with creatures of their own calibre, using them as political instruments, and casting them aside by mere force of will, or the mockery of a divorce, as the wild beast forsakes his mate in the jungles of a forest.
Louison Brisot was one of these women; born in the middle classes, gifted by nature with strong animal beauty, thirsting for knowledge, full of that keen vitality which demands action, and must have excitement, she had followed Mirabeau into the very heart of the revolution. Haughty and imperious to others, she had always been subservient to him. In her idolatry of the man, and her vanity as a woman, she believed herself to be his sole confidant, and the supreme object of his love. She knew that the queen had, over and over again, refused even to see this man, who was to her a demi-god, and hated her for thus scorning him. In her heart she rejoiced, perhaps unconsciously, that royal pride kept the man she loved away from a court, where so many had been won over to the king, by the beauty and eloquence of his wife.
The two great passions of Louison Brisot’s life were thrown into a wild tumult by the scene she had just witnessed; still she found power to control herself. Plunging into the thicket where her horse was tied, she attempted to unknot his bridle from the sapling; but her hands shook with passion, and were so long in doing it, that she fairly stamped down the earth with impatience before she could mount to the saddle, and ride away toward Paris.
The young woman was but just in time. She heard the tread of Mirabeau’s horse following close upon her as she dashed by the palace, and on toward Paris with increasing speed. She must reach home before him. It was possible that the count would call upon her that night, for he was a man who paid no respect to time, and cared nothing for the received usages of society. At her house much of his leisure time had been formerly spent, and she believed herself the depository of all his secrets. But he had been deceiving her. This thought wounded the woman through her hard heart, and leveled her evil pride to the dust. She had hated the queen before, now that hatred settled into bitter detestation.
These two persons traveled home so near together, that the beat of hoofs sent back by her horse more than once struck the ear of Mirabeau, as he approached the rising ground which she was passing. Of this he took no heed. Though a demagogue and a profligate, this man had pledged his support in good faith to the queen, and his quick brain was even then forming plans, by which he hoped to unite her cause with that of France, and harmonize all contending elements into a constitutional monarchy. There was enough in all this to tax even his great brain to the utmost, and he had no time to observe the fall of those hoofs in the distance, which, perhaps, carried his destiny with them.