IV
Meanwhile what of Léon, and what had happened to him since he left Moscow? I shall try to tell you in a few words, that you may understand both his situation and ours, and the meaning of what was to come after.
The letter he had received was such as a soldier of the Guard is well acquainted with, and he discovered in it nothing out of the ordinary.
A pretty woman had fallen in love with him and desired to see him again. There must have been two hundred who had done that since he quitted Paris, yet few who drew from him so swift a response.
Was not Mademoiselle Valerie a fellow-countrywoman, and had not these two looked into each other's eyes as lovers are wont to do?
I remembered the impression she had made upon him in the prince's palace, and how he had sworn to hunt her out at Moscow; and I for one could not wonder that his heart leapt when she wrote to him and named a rendezvous to his liking.
He was to dine with her, the letter said, and her carriage would carry him to the barracks afterwards. He little knew the kind of journey that it was meant to be, nor what would lie under the tarpaulin which the assassins had made ready for him.
So off goes our gay cavalier, dressed in his best and as cock-a-hoop as a page-boy who has been kissed by a duchess.
The warnings he received fell on deaf ears. He knew that the regiment had lost good officers who went out upon just such a foolish errand as this; but they had gone to Russian houses, while Valerie was a Frenchwoman who bore an honoured name. There could be nothing to fear in such society. He would dine with her and tell her what she most desired to hear. This was a Guardsman's proper employment, and he would not be doing his duty if he shirked it. To give him his due, Léon was rarely remiss in these matters.
So you will understand why he did not suspect anything—even when they drove through the wood and came to the drawbridge. She would desire secrecy, of course, and this place appeared to be a very citadel of love. Léon merely remarked that aspect of it when he crossed the bridge and the great gate which Ivan the Terrible had built was shut upon him.
She would be alone, and he would find her complacent. The words were hardly said when he found himself face to face with Nicholas, the princely assassin, whose name had struck terror to the heart of many a French prisoner. Now a man trained to the surprises of war has some command of himself whatever the circumstances.
Léon was such a man, and you may be sure he did not betray himself.
Though the peril of the situation was now fully revealed, and he understood the trap into which he had fallen, what should he do but bow in a grand manner to his Highness, and declare his pleasure at that rencontre? The prince in his turn affected to be as agreeably surprised. He apologised for the absence of Mademoiselle Valerie, whom he declared to be confined to her room with an indisposition; and upon that he led the way immediately to the great apartment in which the supper was to be served.
This was nothing else than the round tower which Ivan had built, and a strange place it was, surely, for the entertainment of a man's friends. Léon observed that the walls of the apartment were hung entirely in black velvet, while at the northern arch there was a platform similarly draped in black, but with its plain boards strewn with rushes, as they strew a scaffold in my own country. So ominous was this that even my nephew's sang-froid was hard put to it to forbear a remark; but the prince smiled affably all the time, and appeared to be quite unaware that there was anything extraordinary about this habitation. Léon admitted that he spoke French like a fellow-countryman, and his first act was to introduce my nephew to some dozen officers of the Russian Guard who had come to the house to make merry with him.
These were fine fellows, clad, as he, in the splendid white and gold uniform of the Tsar's cuirassiers. They welcomed a brother officer with professed cordiality, and the prince commanding that supper should be served, they turned with one accord to the table and began to fall upon the viands as though ravenous with hunger. Will you be surprised to hear that Léon did not imitate them in this? I shall tell you why in a word: he had seen a dead body in the straw upon the platform, and, looking at it a second time, he perceived that it was a trunk without a head.
You may imagine what this discovery meant—even to a man of Léon's disposition. At first he would have it that the whole thing was one of Nicholas's jokes—the draping of the room, the straw upon the mock scaffold, and the ghastly figure which the rushes tried to hide. Then he remembered the prince's evil reputation and the stories of his savagery, which had been told at many a bivouac. Here was one of those fanatics who believed that Moscow was the holy city, and that we, the French, were so many barbarians who had profaned the sacred shrine of Russia. No trick was too treacherous to be employed against us, no trap was not justified which had Frenchmen for its object. Again and again, as we had marched across Russia, the throats of our fellows had been cut in many a lonely farmhouse, and many a courtesan had lured honest men to their destruction.
So Léon sat there with his eyes fixed upon the body and the secret words of warning drumming in his ears. What hope had he of escape from such a place? He remembered the moat and the drawbridge, the lonely wood and the dark groves about it, and despair fell upon him. It remained but to die as the Guards know how; and, believing that his death was imminent, he refused no longer the goblets of wine which were offered to him, and affected a merriment as loud as that of the noble assassins who had entrapped him.
A remarkable feast, truly, as you shall: judge by his own account of it. The meats! were served on dishes of solid gold; the goblets were of the same precious metal. They drank champagne from our own kingdom of France; the rich red wines of Italy, while the joyous fruits of the Rhineland vineyards were not lacking. The food itself had an Eastern flavour, and many of the dishes were highly spiced and Eastern. For music there were fiddles in a gallery above, and even the distant voices of women singing a light chanson at the back of the stage.
Léon raised his eyes to the musicians' gallery from time to time, and fell to wondering if Valerie were among the singers. Surely she had never written the letter which brought him to this house—she, a Frenchwoman! He could not believe it; and yet the note had been in a woman's handwriting. Possibly the writer was one of those who now sang disreputable songs behind the curtains of the gallery. Léon pitied rather than condemned the poor wretch who had been the prince's instrument. When he remembered that Valerie loved this man he could have taken a knife from the table and killed him where he sat.
His Highness may have guessed what was in the young man's mind, but if he did so, a courtly art concealed it. Never was there a gayer companion. He told stories of all the cities to which peace or war had carried him—of our own Paris and gloomy Petersburg, of gay Vienna and that monstrously dull town of London, of which the English boast. Nearly all concerned the women of these places and the successes he had had among them.
His companions meanwhile listened with a deference which so high a personage commanded. Their jokes were often sotto voce, and when the prince laughed they laughed in sycophantine imitation. With all this Léon plainly perceived that the feast was but a preparation for some greater scene to come. His eyes went often now to the curtain above the gallery, as though he would read a secret there. I do not think he was astonished when for one brief instant the same curtain trembled and was drawn a little way back, to disclose the face of Valerie. She was in the house, then, after all! He began to believe that she had written the letter, and for that he would have strangled her willingly. Then he heard the prince speaking to him, and, the curtain being dropped back, he turned to listen to a disquisition upon French politics.
"Your Revolution," said his Highness, "was the greatest event in history. I have just been telling my friend, Count Rafalovitch here, that my father was in Paris in the year 1794, and that his dearest friend, the Chevalier Constantini, was executed by the miscreants on the Place de la Grève. He brought with him to Russia a model of the guillotine, by which so many of your great men perished. I have it here in this house, if you are curious