The Golden Dog/Chapter XLV
Chapter XLV: "I Will Feed Fat the Ancient Grudge I Bear Him"[edit]
The Treaty of Aix La Chapelle, so long tossed about on the waves of war, was finally signed in the beginning of October. A swift- sailing goelette of Dieppe brought the tidings to New France, and in the early nights of November, from Quebec to Montreal. Bonfires on every headland blazed over the broad river; churches were decorated with evergreens, and Te Deums sung in gratitude for the return of peace and security to the Colony.
New France came out of the struggle scathed and scorched as by fire, but unshorn of territory or territorial rights; and the glad colonists forgot and forgave the terrible sacrifices they had made in the universal joy that their country, their religion, language, and laws were still safe under the Crown of France, with the white banner still floating over the Castle of St. Louis.
On the day after the arrival of the Dieppe goelette bringing the news of peace, Bigot sat before his desk reading his despatches and letters from France, when the Chevalier de Pean entered the room with a bundle of papers in his hand, brought to the Palace by the chief clerk of the Bourgeois Philibert, for the Intendant's signature.
The Bourgeois, in the course of his great commercial dealings, got possession of innumerable orders upon the royal treasury, which in due course had to be presented to the Intendant for his official signature. The signing of these treasury orders in favor of the Bourgeois never failed to throw Bigot into a fit of ill humor.
On the present occasion he sat down muttering ten thousand curses upon the Bourgeois, as he glanced over the papers with knitted eyebrows and teeth set hard together. He signed the mass of orders and drafts made payable to Nicolas Philibert, and when done, threw into the fire the pen which had performed so unwelcome an office. Bigot sent for the chief clerk who had brought the bills and orders, and who waited for them in the antechamber. "Tell your master, the Bourgeois," said he, "that for this time, and only to prevent loss to the foolish officers, the Intendant has signed these army bills; but that if he purchase more, in defiance of the sole right of the Grand Company, I shall not sign them. This shall be the last time, tell him!"
The chief clerk, a sturdy, gray-haired Malouin, was nothing daunted by the angry look of the Intendant. "I shall inform the Bourgeois of your Excellency's wishes," said he, "and--"
"Inform him of my commands!" exclaimed Bigot, sharply. "What! have you more to say? But you would not be the chief clerk of the Bourgeois without possessing a good stock of his insolence!"
"Pardon me, your Excellency!" replied the chief clerk, "I was only going to observe that His Excellency the Governor and the Commander of the Forces both have decided that the officers may transfer their warrants to whomsoever they will."
"You are a bold fellow, with your Breton speech; but by all the saints in Saintonge, I will see whether the Royal Intendant or the Bourgeois Philibert shall control this matter! And as for you--"
"Tut! cave canem! let this cur go back to his master," interrupted Cadet, amused at the coolness of the chief clerk. "Hark you, fellow!" said he, "present my compliments--the Sieur Cadet's compliments--to your master, and tell him I hope he will bring his next batch of army bills himself, and remind him that it is soft falling at low tide out of the windows of the Friponne."
"I shall certainly advise my master not to come himself, Sieur Cadet," replied the chief clerk; "and I am very certain of returning in three days with more army bills for the signature of his Excellency the Intendant."
"Get out, you fool!" shouted Cadet, laughing at what he regarded the insolence of the clerk. "You are worthy of your master!" And Cadet pushed him forcibly out of the door, and shut it after him with a bang that resounded through the Palace.
"Don't be angry at him, Bigot, he is not worth it," said Cadet. "'Like master like man,' as the proverb says. And, after all, I doubt whether the furred law-cats of the Parliament of Paris would not uphold the Bourgeois in an appeal to them from the Golden Dog."
Bigot was excessively irritated, for he was lawyer enough to know that Cadet's fear was well founded. He walked up and down his cabinet, venting curses upon the heads of the whole party of the Honnetes Gens, the Governor and Commander of the Forces included. The Marquise de Pompadour, too, came in for a full share of his maledictions, for Bigot knew that she had forced the signing of the treaty of Aix la Chapelle,--influenced less by the exhaustion of France than by a feminine dislike to camp life, which she had shared with the King, and a resolution to withdraw him back to the gaieties of the capital, where he would be wholly under her own eye and influence.
"She prefers love to honor, as all women do!" remarked Bigot; "and likes money better than either." The Grand Company pays the fiddler for the royal fetes at Versailles, while the Bourgeois Philibert skims the cream off the trade of the Colony. This peace will increase his power and make his influence double what it is already!"
"Egad, Bigot!" replied Cadet, who sat near him smoking a large pipe of tobacco, "you speak like a preacher in Lent. We have hitherto buttered our bread on both sides, but the Company will soon, I fear, have no bread to butter! I doubt we shall have to eat your decrees, which will be the only things left in the possession of the Friponne."
"My decrees have been hard to digest for some people who think they will now eat us. Look at that pile of orders, Cadet, in favor of the Golden Dog!"
The Intendant had long regarded with indignation the ever increasing trade and influence of the Bourgeois Philibert, who had become the great banker as well as the great merchant of the Colony, able to meet the Grand Company itself upon its own ground, and fairly divide with it the interior as well as the exterior commerce of the Colony.
"Where is this thing going to end?" exclaimed Bigot, sweeping from him the pile of bills of exchange that lay upon the table. "That Philibert is gaining ground upon us every day! He is now buying up army bills, and even the King's officers are flocking to him with their certificates of pay and drafts on France, which he cashes at half the discount charged by the Company!"
"Give the cursed papers to the clerk and send him off, De Pean!" said Bigot.
De Pean obeyed with a grimace, and returned.
"This thing must be stopped, and shall!" continued the Intendant, savagely.
"That is true, your Excellency," said De Pean. "And we have tried vigorously to stop the evil, but so far in vain. The Governor and the Honnetes Gens, and too many of the officers themselves, countenance his opposition to the Company. The Bourgeois draws a good bill upon Paris and Bordeaux, and they are fast finding it out."
"The Golden Dog is drawing half the money of the Colony into his coffers, and he will blow up the credit of the Friponne some fine day when we least expect it, unless he be chained up," replied Bigot.
"'A mechant chien court lien,' says the proverb, and so say I," replied Cadet. "The Golden Dog has barked at us for a long time; par Dieu! he bites now!--ere long he will gnaw our bones in reality, as he does in effigy upon that cursed tablet in the Rue Buade."
"Every dog has his day, and the Golden Dog has nearly had his, Cadet. But what do you advise?" asked Bigot.
"Hang him up with a short rope and a shorter shrift, Bigot! You have warrant enough if your Court friends are worth half a handful of chaff."
"But they are not worth half a handful of chaff, Cadet. If I hung the Bourgeois there would be such a cry raised among the Honnetes Gens in the Colony, and the whole tribe of Jansenists in France, that I doubt whether even the power of the Marquise could sustain me."
Cadet looked quietly truculent. He drew Bigot aside. "There are more ways than one to choke a dog, Bigot," said he. "You may put a tight collar outside his throat, or a sweetened roll inside of it. Some course must be found, and that promptly. We shall, before many days, have La Corne St. Luc and young Philibert like a couple of staghounds in full cry at our heels about that business at the Chateau. They must be thrown off that scent, come what will, Bigot!"
The pressure of time and circumstance was drawing a narrower circle around the Intendant. The advent of peace would, he believed, inaugurate a personal war against himself. The murder of Caroline was a hard blow, and the necessity of concealing it irritated him with a sense of fear foreign to his character.
His suspicion of Angelique tormented him day and night. He had loved Angelique in a sensual, admiring way, without one grain of real respect. He worshipped her one moment as the Aphrodite of his fancy; he was ready to strip and scourge her the next as the possible murderess of Caroline. But Bigot had fettered himself with a lie, and had to hide his thoughts under degrading concealments. He knew the Marquise de Pompadour was jealously watching him from afar. The sharpest intellects and most untiring men in the Colony were commissioned to find out the truth regarding the fate of Caroline. Bigot was like a stag brought to bay. An ordinary man would have succumbed in despair, but the very desperation of his position stirred up the Intendant to a greater effort to free himself.
He walked gloomily up and down the room, absorbed in deep thought. Cadet, who guessed what was brooding in his mind, made a sign to De Pean to wait and see what would be the result of his cogitations.
Bigot, gesticulating with his right hand and his left, went on balancing, as in a pair of scales, the chances of success or failure in the blow he meditated against the Golden Dog. A blow which would scatter to the winds the inquisition set on foot to discover the hiding-place of Caroline.
He stopped suddenly in his walk, striking both hands together, as if in sign of some resolution arrived at in his thoughts.
"De Pean!" said he, "has Le Gardeur de Repentigny shown any desire yet to break out of the Palace?"
"None, your Excellency. He is fixed as a bridge to fortune. You can no more break him down than the Pont Neuf at Paris. He lost, last night, a thousand at cards and five hundred at dice; then drank himself dead drunk until three o'clock this afternoon. He has just risen; his valet was washing his head and feet in brandy when I came here."
"You are a friend that sticks closer than a brother, De Pean. Le Gardeur believes in you as his guardian angel, does he not?" asked Bigot with a sneer.
"When he is drunk he does," replied De Pean; "when he is sober I care not to approach him too nearly! He is a wild colt that will kick his groom when rubbed the wrong way; and every way is wrong when the wine is out of him."
"Keep him full then!" exclaimed Bigot; "you have groomed him well, De Pean! but he must now be saddled and ridden to hunt down the biggest stag in New France!"
De Pean looked hard at the Intendant, only half comprehending his allusion.
"You once tried your hand with Mademoiselle de Repentigny, did you not?" continued Bigot.
"I did, your Excellency; but that bunch of grapes was too high for me. They are very sour now."
"Sly fox that you were! Well, do not call them sour yet, De Pean. Another jump at the vine and you may reach that bunch of perfection!" said Bigot, looking hard at him.
"Your Excellency overrates my ability in that quarter, and if I were permitted to choose--"
"Another and a fairer maid would be your choice. I see, De Pean, you are a connoisseur in women. Be it as you wish! Manage this business of Philibert discreetly, and I will coin the Golden Dog into doubloons for a marriage portion for Angelique des Meloises. You understand me now?"
De Pean started. He hardly guessed yet what was required of him, but he cared not in the dazzling prospect of such a wife and fortune as were thus held out to him.
"Your Excellency will really support my suit with Angelique?" De Pean seemed to mistrust the possibility of such a piece of disinterestedness on the part of the Intendant.
"I will not only commend your suit, but I will give away the bride, and Madame de Pean shall not miss any favor from me which she has deserved as Angelique des Meloises," was Bigot's reply, without changing a muscle of his face.
"And your Excellency will give her to me?" De Pean could hardly believe his ears.
"Assuredly you shall have her if you like," cried Bigot, "and with a dowry such as has not been seen in New France!"
"But who would like to have her at any price?" muttered Cadet to himself, with a quiet smile of contempt,--Cadet thought De Pean a fool for jumping at a hook baited with a woman; but he knew what the Intendant was driving at, and admired the skill with which he angled for De Pean.
"But Angelique may not consent to this disposal of her hand," replied De Pean with an uneasy look; "I should be afraid of your gift unless she believed that she took me, and not I her."
"Hark you, De Pean! you do not know what women like her are made of, or you would be at no loss how to bait your hook! You have made four millions, they say, out of this war, if not more."
"I never counted it, your Excellency; but, much or little, I owe it all to your friendship," replied De Pean with a touch of mock humility.
"My friendship! Well, so be it. It is enough to make Angelique des Meloises Madame de Pean when she finds she cannot be Madame Intendant. Do you see your way now, De Pean?"
"Yes, your Excellency, and I cannot be sufficiently grateful for such a proof of your goodness."
Bigot laughed a dry, meaning laugh. "I truly hope you will always think so of my friendship, De Pean. If you do not, you are not the man I take you to be. Now for our scheme of deliverance!
"Hearken, De Pean," continued the Intendant, fixing his dark, fiery eyes upon his secretary; "you have craft and cunning to work out this design and good will to hasten it on. Cadet and I, considering the necessities of the Grand Company, have resolved to put an end to the rivalry and arrogance of the Golden Dog. We will treat the Bourgeois," Bigot smiled meaningly, "not as a trader with a baton, but as a gentleman with a sword; for, although a merchant, the Bourgeois is noble and wears a sword, which under proper provocation he will draw, and remember he can use it too! He can be tolerated no longer by the gentlemen of the Company. They have often pressed me in vain to take this step, but now I yield. Hark, De Pean! The Bourgeois must be INSULTED, CHALLENGED, and KILLED by some gentleman of the Company with courage and skill enough to champion its rights. But mind you! it must be done fairly and in open day, and without my knowledge or approval! Do you understand?"
Bigot winked at De Pean and smiled furtively, as much as to say, "You know how to interpret my words."
"I understand your Excellency, and it shall be no fault of mine if your wishes, which chime with my own, be not carried out before many days. A dozen partners of the Company will be proud to fight with the Bourgeois if he will only fight with them."
"No fear of that, De Pean! give the devil his due. Insult the Bourgeois and he will fight with the seven champions of Christendom! so mind you get a man able for him, for I tell you, De Pean, I doubt if there be over three gentlemen in the Colony who could cross swords fairly and successfully with the Bourgeois."
"It will be easier to insult and kill him in a chance medley than to risk a duel!" interrupted Cadet, who listened with intense eagerness. "I tell you, Bigot, young Philibert will pink any man of our party. If there be a duel he will insist on fighting it for his father. The old Bourgeois will not be caught, but we shall catch a Tartar instead, in the young one."
"Well, duel or chance medley be it! I dare not have him assassinated," replied the Intendant. "He must be fought with in open day, and not killed in a corner. Eh, Cadet, am I not right?"
Bigot looked for approval from Cadet, who saw that he was thinking of the secret chamber at Beaumanoir.
"You are right, Bigot! He must be killed in open day and not in a corner. But who have we among us capable of making sure work of the Bourgeois?"
"Leave it to me," replied De Pean. "I know one partner of the Company who, if I can get him in harness, will run our chariot wheels in triumph over the Golden Dog."
"And who is that?" asked Bigot eagerly.
"Le Gardeur de Repentigny!" exclaimed De Pean, with a look of exultation.
"Pshaw! he would draw upon us more readily! Why, he is bewitched with the Philiberts!" replied Bigot.
"I shall find means to break the spell long enough to answer our purpose, your Excellency!" replied De Pean. "Permit me only to take my own way with him."
"Assuredly, take your own way, De Pean! A bloody scuffle between De Repentigny and the Bourgeois would not only be a victory for the Company, but would breakup the whole party of the Honnetes Gens!"
The Intendant slapped De Pean on the shoulder and shook him by the hand. "You are more clever than I believed you to be, De Pean. You have hit on a mode of riddance which will entitle you to the best reward in the power of the Company to bestow."
"My best reward will be the fulfilment of your promise, your Excellency," answered De Pean.
"I will keep my word, De Pean. By God you shall have Angelique, with such a dowry as the Company can alone give! Or, if you do not want the girl, you shall have the dowry without the wife!"
"I shall claim both, your Excellency! But--"
"But what? Confess all your doubts, De Pean."
"Le Gardeur may claim her as his own reward!" De Pean guessed correctly enough the true bent of Angelique's fancy.
"No fear! Le Gardeur de Repentigny, drunk or sober, is a gentleman. He would reject the Princess d'Elide were she offered on such conditions as you take her on. He is a romantic fool; he believes in woman's virtue and all that stuff!"
"Besides, if he kill the Bourgeois, he will have to fight Pierre Philibert before his sword is dry!" interjected Cadet. "I would not give a Dutch stiver for Le Gardeur's bones five hours after he has pinked the Bourgeois!"
An open duel in form was not to be thought of, because in that they would have to fight the son and not the father, and the great object would be frustrated. But the Bourgeois might be killed in a sudden fray, when blood was up and swords drawn, when no one, as De Pean remarked, would be able to find an i undotted or a t uncrossed in a fair record of the transaction, which would impose upon the most critical judge as an honorable and justifiable act of self-defence.
This was Cadet's real intent, and perhaps Bigot's, but the Intendant's thoughts lay at unfathomable depths, and were not to be discovered by any traces upon the surface. No divining-rod could tell where the secret spring lay hid which ran under Bigot's motives.
Not so De Pean. He meditated treachery, and it were hard to say whether it was unnoted by the penetrating eye of Bigot. The Intendant, however, did not interfere farther, either by word or sign, but left De Pean to accomplish in his own way the bloody object they all had in view, namely, the death of the Bourgeois and the break-up of the Honnetes Gens. De Pean, while resolving to make Le Gardeur the tool of his wickedness, did not dare to take him into his confidence. He had to be kept in absolute ignorance of the part he was to play in the bloody tragedy until the moment of its denouement arrived. Meantime he must be plied with drink, maddened with jealousy, made desperate with losses, and at war with himself and all the world, and then the whole fury of his rage should, by the artful contrivance of De Pean, be turned, without a minute's time for reflection, upon the head of the unsuspecting Bourgeois.
To accomplish this successfully, a woman's aid was required, at once to blind Le Gardeur and to sharpen his sword.
In the interests of the Company Angelique des Meloises was at all times a violent partisan. The Golden Dog and all its belongings were objects of her open aversion. But De Pean feared to impart to her his intention to push Le Gardeur blindly into the affair. She might fear for the life of one she loved. De Pean reflected angrily on this, but he determined she should be on the spot. The sight of her and a word from her, which De Pean would prompt at the critical moment, should decide Le Gardeur to attack the Bourgeois and kill him; and then, what would follow? De Pean rubbed his hands with ecstasy at the thought that Le Gardeur would inevitably bite the dust under the avenging hand of Pierre Philibert, and Angelique would be his beyond all fear of rivals.