Andre-Louis looked at him, smiling wanly.
“I swore an oath to-day which it would damn
my soul to break.”
“You mean that you’ll go in spite of anything
that I may say?” Impetuous as he was inconsequent,
M. de Kercadiou was bristling again. “Very
well, then, go... Go to the devil!”
“I will begin with the King’s Lieutenant.”
“And if you get into the trouble you are seeking,
don’t come whimpering to me for assistance,”
the seigneur stormed. He was very angry now.
“Since you choose to disobey me, you can break
your empty head against the windmill, and be damned
to you.”
Andre-Louis bowed with a touch of irony, and reached
the door.
“If the windmill should prove too formidable,”
said he, from the threshold, “I may see what
can be done with the wind. Good-bye, monsieur
my godfather.”
He was gone, and M. de Kercadiou was alone, purple
in the face, puzzling out that last cryptic utterance,
and not at all happy in his mind, either on the score
of his godson or of M. de La Tour d’Azyr.
He was disposed to be angry with them both.
He found these headstrong, wilful men who relentlessly
followed their own impulses very disturbing and irritating.
Himself he loved his ease, and to be at peace with
his neighbours; and that seemed to him so obviously
the supreme good of life that he was disposed to brand
them as fools who troubled to seek other things.
THE WINDMILL
There was between Nantes and Rennes an established
service of three stage-coaches weekly in each direction,
which for a sum of twenty-four livres — roughly,
the equivalent of an English guinea — would
carry you the seventy and odd miles of the journey
in some fourteen hours. Once a week one of the
diligences going in each direction would swerve aside
from the highroad to call at Gavrillac, to bring and
take letters, newspapers, and sometimes passengers.
It was usually by this coach that Andre-Louis came
and went when the occasion offered. At present,
however, he was too much in haste to lose a day awaiting
the passing of that diligence. So it was on a
horse hired from the Breton arme that he set out next
morning; and an hour’s brisk ride under a grey
wintry sky, by a half-ruined road through ten miles
of flat, uninteresting country, brought him to the
city of Rennes.
He rode across the main bridge over the Vilaine, and
so into the upper and principal part of that important
city of some thirty thousand souls, most of whom,
he opined from the seething, clamant crowds that everywhere
blocked his way, must on this day have taken to the
streets. Clearly Philippe had not overstated
the excitement prevailing there.
He pushed on as best he could, and so came at last
to the Place Royale, where he found the crowd to be
most dense. From the plinth of the equestrian
statue of Louis XV, a white-faced young man was excitedly
addressing the multitude. His youth and dress
proclaimed the student, and a group of his fellows,
acting as a guard of honour to him, kept the immediate
precincts of the statue.
