“Well, what did he say besides?”
“Why, I hardly like to say now, Mademoiselle;
it will look like asking a favour when I thought you
could not well refuse it; and perhaps Jacques was
wrong to say anything at all about it.”
Marie, however, was not long in inducing Annot to
reveal to her Chapeau’s little plan of taking
his own wife over to Durbelliere to wait upon his
master’s wife, and she, moreover, promised that,
as far as she herself was concerned, she would consent
to the arrangement, if, which she expressly inserted,
she should ever marry M. Larochejaquelin.
“But an’t you engaged to him, Mademoiselle?”
“Well, Annot,” answered she, “as
you have told me so much, I don’t mind telling
you that I am. But it will be long, probably,
before I am married, if ever I am. Men have other
things to think of now than marriage, and, alas! women
too. We must wait till the wars are over, Annot.”
“But I thought the wars were over now, Mademoiselle.
Haven’t they got that Santerre prisoner up at
Durbelliere?”
“There’s much, very much, I fear to do
yet, and to suffer, before the wars will be really
over,” said Madame de Lescure. “Heaven
help us, and guide us, and protect us! Come,
Marie, let us go to rest, for I trust Charles will
send for us early in the morning.”
Annot gave such assistance to her two guests as they
required, and was within her power, and then seating
herself in her father’s large arm chair in the
kitchen, pondered over the misery of living in times
when men were so busy fighting with their enemies,
that they had not even leisure to get married.
“And what, after all, is the use of these wars?”
said she to herself “What do they get by taking
so many towns, and getting so many guns, and killing
so many men? I don’t know who’s the
better for it, but I know very well who’s the
worse. Why can’t they let the blues alone;
and the blues let them alone? I worked my poor
fingers to the bone making a white flag before they
went to Saumur, and all they did was to leave it in
the streets of Nantes. There’s not so much
as a bottle of beer, and hardly a bushel of flour
left in Echanbroignes. There’s the poor
dear lovely Cathelineau dead and gone. There’s
M. Henri engaged to the girl of his heart, and he
can’t so much as stay a day from fighting to
get himself married; and there’s Jacques just
as bad. If Jacques cares a bit for me, he must
take himself off, and me with him, to some place where
there’s not quite so much fighting, or else I’ll
be quit of him and go without him. I’ve
no idea of living in a place where girls are not, to
be married till the wars are over. Wars, wars,
wars; I’m sick of the wars with all my heart.”
Sentence of death.
After parting with their companion, de Lescure and
Henri were not long in reaching Durbelliere; and on
the road thither they also learnt that Santerre, and
upwards of a hundred blue horsemen, were prisoners
in the chateau, or in the barns, out-houses, or stables
belonging to it; and that the whole place was crowded
with peasants, guarding their captives. As they
entered the chateau gates, they met Chapeau, who was
at the bottom of the steps, waiting for them; and
Henri immediately asked after his father.
