The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty
“Count Cagliostro,” exclaimed Beausire and the lady at the same time.
“That is a winning little boy, and I think you ought to be happy at
being a parent, Captain Beausire,” said the intruder.
He advanced and with one scrutinizing glance saw that the couple were
reduced to the last penny.
The child was the first to break the silence because he had nothing on
his conscience.
“Oh, kind sir, I have lost the shining piece,” said he.
Nicole opened her mouth to state the case but she reflected that silence
might lead to a repetition of the godsend and she would inherit it; her
expectation was not erroneous.
“Lost your louis, have you, my poor boy?” said Cagliostro, “well, here
are two; try not to lose them.”
Pulling out a purse of which the plumpness kindled Beausire’s greedy
glances, he dropped two coins into Toussaint’s little sticky paw.
“Look, mamma,” said he, running to Nicole; “here’s one for you and one
for me.”
While the child shared his windfall with his mother, the new-comer
remarked the tenacity with which the former-soldier watched his purse
and tried to estimate the contents before it was pocketted again. On
seeing it disappear, he sighed.
“Still glum, captain?” said the visitor.
“And you, count, always rich?”
“Pooh! you are one of the finest philosophers I have ever known, as well
at the present as in antiquity, and you are bound to know the axiom to
which man does honor in all ages. ‘Riches are not contentment.’ I have
known you to be rich, relatively.”
“That’s so: I have owned as much as a hundred thousand francs.”
“It is possible; only when I met you again, you had spent nearly forty
thousand of it so as to have but sixty, but that is a round sum for a
corporal in the army.”
“What is that to the sums you dispose of?” he sighed.
“I am only the banker, the trustee, Captain Beausire, and if I were
obliged to settle up I daresay you could play St. Martin and I the
beggar who would be glad to have half your cloak. But, my dear Beausire,
do you not remember the circumstances of our last meeting? As I said,
just now, you had sixty thousand left of the hundred thousand: were you
happier than now?”
The ex-corporal heaved a retrospective sigh which might pass for a moan.
“Would you exchange your present position though you possessed nothing
but one poor louis you ‘nicked’ from young Toussaint?”
“My lord!”
“Do not let us get warm, sir: we quarrelled once and you were obliged to
go out and pick up your sword which I threw out of the window. You will
remember?” went on the count, seeing that the man made no reply: “it is
a good thing to have a memory. I ask you again would you change your
actual position, though down to the solitary louis you ‘extracted’ from
young Toussaint”--this time the allegation passed without protest--“for
the precarious scrape from which I relieved you?”
“No, my lord, you are right--I should not change. At that epoch, alas! I
was parted from my darling Nicole.”
“To say nothing of being hunted by the police, on account of your
robbing the Portuguese Embassy. What the mischief has become of that
case, a villainous one, as I remember it, Captain B.?”
“It has been dropped, my lord,” was the reply.
“So much the better: though I would not reckon on its not being picked
up again. The police are awful for raking up past grievances, and the
ruling powers might want to be on good terms with Portugal. However,
that apart, in spite of the hard lines to which you are reduced, you are
happy. If you had a thousand louis, your felicity would be complete,
eh?”
Nicole’s eyes glittered and her partner’s flashed flames.
“Lord be good to us,” cried the latter: “with half I would buy a lot in
the country and live a rural life on the rest like a country squire!”
“Like Cincinnatus!”
“While Nicole would educate the boy.”
“Like Cornelia! Death of my life, Captain Beausire! not only would this
be exemplary but touching: do you hope to earn as much as that in the
piece of business you have in hand?”
“What business?” queried the other, starting.
“That you are carrying on as sergeant of the Guards; for which you are
to meet a man, this evening, under the Palais Royal arcades.”
“Oh, my lord,” moaned Beausire, turning pale as a corpse and wringing
his hands. “Do not destroy me!”
“Why, you are going distracted now? Am I the Chief of Police to ruin
you?”
“There, I told you, you are getting into a pretty pickle,” exclaimed
Nicole. “I know nothing about it, my lord, but whenever he hides any
game from me, I know it is a bad one.”
“But you are wrong, my dear lady, for this is an excellent speculation.”
“Is it not?” cried the gambler. “The count, as a nobleman, understands
that all the nobility are in this scheme----“
“For it to succeed. It must be allowed though, that the people are
interested in its failure. If you will believe me, captain--you
understand that a friend is giving advice--you will take no part in it
for the peers or the people. Better act for yourself.”
“Certainly, for yourself,” said Nicole. “Blest if you have not toiled
long enough for others: so that it is high time you looked after Number
One.”
“You hear the lady, who speaks like a born orator. Bear this in mind,
Friend Beausire, all spec’s have a good and a bad side, one for the
winners, one for the losers: no affair however good, can benefit
everybody; the whole trouble is to hit on the right side.”
“And you do not think I am there, eh?”
“Not at all; I would even add, if you are willful--for you know I dabble
in telling fortunes--that you will not only risk your honor, and the
fortune you seek--but your life. You will most likely be hanged!”
“They do not hang noblemen,” objected Beausire, wiping the perspiration
streaming from his brow.
“That is so: but to avoid the gallows-tree and have your head cut off,
you would have to prove your family-tree; it would take so long that the
court would lose patience, and string you up for the time being--leaving
your widow to demand compensation if you turned out to have deserved
decapitation. Still you may say that it does not matter, as it is the
crime that casts shame and not the scaffold, to quote a poet. Still
again, I dare say you are not so attached to your opinions that you
would lay down your life for them; I understand this. Deuse take us, but
we have only one life, as another poet says, not so great as the other,
but as truthful.”
“My lord,” faltered the ex-guardsman, “I have remarked in my too brief
acquaintance with your lordship, that you have a way of speaking of
some things which would make the hair of a more timid man than me
bristle on his head.”
“Hang me if that is my intention,” responded Cagliostro; “Besides you
are not a timid man.”
“No: yet there are circumstances,” began Beausire.
“I understand; such as when one has the jail for theft behind one and
the gallows for high treason before one--for I suppose they give that
name to the crime of kidnapping the King.”
“My lord,” cried Beausire, terrified.
“Wretch, is it on kidnapping that you build your fortune?” demanded
Oliva.
“Oh, he was not wrong to dwell in golden dreams, my dear lady; only, as
I have already said, each affair has a dark side and a bright one and
Beausire has the misfortune to take the dark one; all he has to do is to
shift.”
“If there is time, what must I do?” asked the bully.
“Suppose one thing,” said the gentleman; “that your conspiracy fails.
Suppose that the accomplices of the masked man and the one in the brown
cloak are arrested; we may suppose anything in these times--suppose they
are doomed to death! Suppose--for Augeard and Bezenval have been
acquitted, so that anything unlikely may come round nowadays--suppose
that you are one of these accomplices; you have the halter round your
neck, when--say what they like--a man always shows a little of the white
feather about then----“
“Do have done, my lord! I entreat you, for I seem to feel the rope
throttling me!”
“That is not astonishing as I am supposing it is round your neck!
Suppose, then, that they say to you: ‘Poor old Beausire, this is your
own fault. Not only might you have dodged this Old Bony who clutches you
in his claws, but gain a thousand louis to buy the pretty cottage under
the green trees where you long to live with ever-lovely Oliva and merry
little Toussaint, with the balance of what was partly spent for the
purchase of your homestead. You might live, as you said, like a squire,
in high boots in the winter and easy shoes the rest of the year; while,
instead of this delicious lookout, you have the Execution-place,
planted with two or three one or two-armed trees, of which the highest
holds out its ugly branch unto you. Faugh! my poor Captain Beausire,
what a hideous prospect!'”
“But how am I to elude it--how make the thousand to ensure my peace and
that of dear Nicole and little Toussaint?”
“Your good angel would say: ‘Why not apply to the Count of Cagliostro, a
rich nobleman who is in town for his pleasure and who is weary of
nothing to do. Go to him and tell him----“
“But I do not know where he lives! I did not even know he is in town; I
did not know he was still alive!” protested Beausire.
“He lives ever. It is because you would not know these facts that he
comes to you, my dear Beausire, so that you will have no excuse. You
have merely to say to him: ‘Count, I know how fond you are of hearing
the news. I have some fresh for you. The King’s brother is conspiring
with Marquis Favras. I speak from full knowledge as I am the right-hand
man of the marquis. The aim of the plot is to take the King away to
Peronne. If your lordship likes to be amused, I will tell him step by
step how the moves are played.’ Thereupon the count, who is a generous
lord, would reply: ‘If you will really do this, Captain Beausire, as all
laborers are worthy of their hire, I put aside twenty-four thousand
livres for a charitable act; but I will balk myself in this whim, and
you shall have them on the day when you come and tell me either that the
King shall be taken off or Marquis Favras captured--in the same way as
you are given these ten louis--not as hand-money or as an advance, or a
loan, but as a pure gift.”
Like an actor rehearsing with the “properties,” Cagliostro pulled out
the weighty purse, stuck in finger and thumb and with a dexterity
bearing witness to his experience in such actions, whipped out just ten
pieces, neither more nor less, which Beausire--we must do him
justice--thrust out his hand with alacrity to receive.
“Excuse me, captain,” said the other, gently fencing off the hand, “we
are only playing at Supposes.”
“Yes, but through suppositions one arrives at the fact,” responded the
cardplayer, whose eyes glowed like burning coals.
“Have we reached this point?”
Beausire hesitated; let us hasten to say that it was not honor, fidelity
to plighted word, or a pricked conscience which caused the wavering. Did
our readers know Beausire, they would not want this denial. It was the
simple fear that the count would not keep his word.
“I see what you are passing through,” said the tempter.
“Ay, my lord, I shrink from betraying the trust a gentleman puts in me,”
replied the adventurer. “It is very hard,” he seemed to say as he raised
his eyes heavenward.
“Nay, it is not that, and this is another proof of the old saw that ‘No
man knows himself',” said the count. “You are afraid that I will not pay
you the sum stated. The objection is quite natural; but I shall give
security.”
“My lord certainly need not.”
“Personal security, Madam Legay.”
“Oh, if the count promises, it is as good as done,” said the lady.
“You see, sir, what one gains by scrupulously keeping one’s promises.