The Red Cockade

I looked at him for the first and only time in my life with contempt-with rage. "God help you?" I cried-I was beside myself. "God helps those who help themselves! You have brought this about! You! You! You have preached this! Now mend it!"

He trembled, and was silent. Unsupported by the passion which animated me, in face of the brute rage of the people, his courage sank.

"Now mend it!" I repeated furiously.

"I cannot get to them," he muttered.

"Then I will make a way for you!" I answered madly, recklessly. "Follow me! Do you hear that noise? Well, we will play a part in it!"

A dozen guns had gone off, almost in a volley. We could not see the result, nor what was passing; but the hoarse roar of the mob intoxicated me. I cried to him to follow, and rushed into the press.

Again he caught and stayed me, clinging to me with a stubbornness which would not be denied. "If you will go, go through the houses! Go through the opposite houses!" he muttered in my ear.

I had sense enough, when he had spoken twice, to understand him and comply. I let him lead me aside, and in a moment we were out of the press, and hurrying through an alley at the back of the houses that faced the St. Alais' mansion. We were not the first to go that way; some of the more active of the rioters had caught the idea before us, and gone by this path to the windows, whence they were firing. We found two or three of the doors open, therefore, and heard the excited cries and curses of the men who had taken possession. However, we did not go far. I chose the first door, and, passing quickly by a huddled, panic-stricken group of women and children-probably the occupants of the house-who were clustered about it, I went straight through to the street door.

Two or three ruffianly men with smoke-grimed faces were firing through a window on the ground floor, and one of these, looking behind him as I passed, saw me. He called to me to stop, adding with an oath that if I went into the street I should be shot by the aristocrats. But in my excitement I took no heed; in a second I had the door open, and was standing in the street-alone in the sunny, cleared space. On either side of me, fifty paces distant, were the close ranks of the mob; in front of me rose the white blind face of the St. Alais' house, from which, even as I appeared, there came a little spit of smoke and the bang of a musket.

The crowd, astonished to see me there alone and standing still, fell silent, and I held up my hand. A gun went off above my head, and another; and a splinter flew from one of the green shutters opposite. Then a voice from the crowd cried out to cease firing; and for a moment all was still. I stood in the midst of a hot breathless hush, my hand raised. It was my opportunity-I had got it by a miracle; but for a moment I was silent, I could find no words.

At last, as a low murmur began to make itself heard, I spoke.

"Men of Cahors!" I cried. "In the name of the Tricolour, stand!" And trembling with agitation, acting on the impulse of the instant, I walked slowly across the street to the door of the besieged house, and under the eyes of all I took the Tricolour from my bosom, and hung it on the knocker of the door. Then I turned. "I take possession," I cried hoarsely, at the top of my voice, that all might hear, "I take possession of this house and all that are in it in the name of the Tricolour, and the Nation, and the Committee of Cahors. Those within shall be tried, and justice done upon them. But for you, I call upon you to depart, and go to your homes in peace, and the Committee-"

I got no farther. With the word a shot whizzed by my ear, and struck the plaster from the wall; and then, as if the sound released all the passions of the people, a roar of indignation shook the air. They hissed and swore at me, yelled "A la lanterne!" and "A bas le traître!" and in an instant burst their bounds. As if invisible floodgates gave way, the mob on either side rushed suddenly forward, and, rolling towards the door in a solid mass, were in an instant upon me.

I expected that I should be torn to pieces, but instead I was only buffeted and flung aside and forgotten, and in a moment was lost in the struggling, writhing mass of men, who flung themselves pell-mell upon the door, and fell over one another, and wounded one another in the fury with which they attacked it. Men, injured earlier, were trodden under foot now; but no one stayed for their cries. Twice a gun was fired from the house, and each shot took effect; but the press was so great, and the fury of the assailants, as they swarmed about the door, so blind, that those who were hit sank down unobserved, and perished under their comrades' feet.

Thrust against the iron railings that flanked the door, I clung to them, and protected from the pressure by a pillar of the porch, managed with some difficulty to keep my place. I could not move, however; I had to stand there while the crowd swayed round me, and I waited in dizzy, sickening horror for the crisis. It came at last. The panels of the door, riven and shattered, gave way; the foremost assailants sprang at the gap. Yet still the frame, held by one hinge, stood, and kept them out. As that yielded at length under their blows, and the door fell inward with a crash, I flung myself into the stream, and was carried into the house among the foremost, fortunately-for several fell-on my feet.

I had the thought that I might outpace the others, and, getting first to the rooms upstairs, might at least fight for Mademoiselle if I could not save her. For I had caught the infection of the mob, my blood was on fire. There was no one in all the crowd more set to kill than I was. I raced in, therefore, with the rest; but when I reached the foot of the stairs I saw, and they saw, that which stopped us all.

It was M. de Gontaut, lifted, in that moment of extreme danger, above himself. He stood alone on the stairs, looking down on the invaders, and smiling-smiling, with everything of senility and frivolity gone from his face, and only the courage of his caste left. He saw his world tottering, the scum and rabble overwhelming it, everything which he had loved, and in which he had lived, passing; he saw death waiting for him seven steps below, and he smiled. With his slender sword hanging at his wrist, he tapped his snuff-box and looked down at us; no longer garrulous, feeble, almost-with his stories of stale intrigues and his pagan creed-contemptible; but steady and proud, with eyes that gleamed with defiance.

"Well, dogs," he said, "will you earn the gallows?"

For a second no one moved. For a second the old noble's presence and fearlessness imposed on the vilest; and they stared at him, cowed by his eye. Then he stirred. With a quiet gesture, as of a man saluting before a duel, he caught up the hilt of his sword, and presented the lower point. "Well," he said with bitter scorn in his tone, "you have come to do it. Which of you will go to hell for the rest? For I shall take one."

That broke the spell. With a howl, a dozen ruffians sprang up the stairs. I saw the bright steel flash once, twice; and one reeled back, and rolled down under his fellows' feet. Then a great bar swept up and fell on the smiling face, and the old noble dropped without a cry or a groan, under a storm of blows that in a moment beat the life out of his body.

It was over in a moment, and before I could interfere. The next, a score of men leaped over the corpse and up the stairs, with horrid cries-I after them. To the right and left were locked doors, with panels Wätteau-painted; they dashed these in with brutal shouts, and, in a twinkling, flooded the splendid rooms, sweeping away, and breaking, and flinging down in wanton mischief, everything that came to hand-vases, statues, glasses, miniatures. With shrieks of triumph, they filled the salon that had known for generations only the graces and beauty of life; and clattered over the shining parquets that had been swept so long by the skirts of fair women. Everything they could not understand was snatched up and dashed down; in a moment the great Venetian mirrors were shattered, the pictures pierced and torn, the books flung through the windows into the street.

I had a glimpse of the scene as I paused on the landing. But a glance sufficed to convince me that the fugitives were not in these rooms, and I sprang on, and up the next flight. Here, short as had been my delay, I found others before me. As I turned the corner of the stairs I came on three men, listening at a door; before I could reach them one rose. "Here they are!" he cried. "That is a woman's voice! Stand back!" And he lifted a crowbar to beat in the door.

"Hold!" I cried in a voice that shook him, and made him lower his weapon. "Hold! In the name of the Committee, I command you to leave that door. The rest of the house is yours. Go and plunder it."

The men glared at me. "Sacré ventre!" one of them hissed. "Who are you?"

"The Committee!" I answered.

He cursed me, and raised his hand. "Stand back!" I cried furiously, "or you shall hang!"

"Ho! ho! An aristocrat!" he retorted; and he raised his voice. "This way, friends-this way! An aristocrat! An aristocrat!" he cried.

At the word a score of his fellows came swarming up the stairs. I saw myself in an instant surrounded by grimy, pocked faces and scowling eyes, – by haggard creatures sprung from the sewers of the town. Another second and they would have laid hands on me; but desperate and full of rage I rushed instead on the man with the bar, and, snatching it from him before he guessed my intention, in a twinkling laid him at my feet.

In the act, however, I lost my balance, and stumbled. Before I could recover myself one of his comrades struck me on the head with his wooden shoe. The blow partially stunned me; still I got to my feet again and hit out wildly, and drove them back, and for a moment cleared the landing round me. But I was dizzy; I saw all now through a red haze, the figures danced before me; I could no longer think or aim, but only hear taunts and jeers on every side. Some one plucked my coat. I turned blindly. In a moment another struck me a crushing blow-how, or with what, I never knew-and I fell senseless and as good as dead.

CHAPTER XIV.

IT GOES ILL

It was August, and the leaves of the chestnuts were still green, when they sacked the St. Alais' house at Cahors, and I fell senseless on the stairs. The ash trees were bare, and the oaks clad only in russet, when I began to know things again; and, looking sideways from my pillow into the grey autumnal world, took up afresh the task of living. Even then many days had to elapse before I ceased to be merely an animal-content to eat, and drink, and sleep, and take Father Benôit kneeling by my bed for one of the permanent facts of life. But the time did come at last, in late November, when the mind awoke, as those who watched by me had never thought to see it awake; and, meeting the good Curé's eyes with my eyes, I saw him turn away and break into joyful weeping.

A week from that time I knew all-the story, public and private, of that wonderful autumn, during which I had lain like a log in my bed. At first, avoiding topics that touched me too nearly, Father Benôit told me of Paris; of the ten weeks of suspicion and suspense which followed the Bastille riots-weeks during which the Fauxbourgs, scantly checked by Lafayette and his National Guards, kept jealous watch on Versailles, where the Assembly sat in attendance on the King; of the scarcity which prevailed through this trying time, and the constant rumours of an attack by the Court; of the Queen's unfortunate banquet, which proved to be the spark that fired the mine; last of all, of the great march of the women to Versailles, on the 5th of October, which, by forcing the King and the Assembly to Paris, and making the King a prisoner in his own palace, put an end to this period of uncertainty.

"And since then?" I said in feeble amazement. "This is the 20th of November, you tell me?"

"Nothing has happened," he answered, "except signs and symptoms."

"And those?"

He shook his head gravely. "Every one is enrolled in the National Guards-that, for one. Here in Quercy, the corps which M. Hugues took it in hand to form numbers some thousands. Every one is armed, therefore. Then, the game laws being abolished, every one is a sportsman. And so many nobles have emigrated, that either there are no nobles or all are nobles."

"But who governs?"

"The Municipalities. Or, where there are none, Committees."

I could not help smiling. "And your Committee, M. le Curé?" I said.

"I do not attend it," he answered, wincing visibly. "To be plain, they go too fast for me. But I have worse yet to tell you!"

"What?"

"On the Fourth of August the Assembly abolished the tithes of the Church; early in this month they proposed to confiscate the estates of the Church! By this time it is probably done."

"What! And the clergy are to starve?" I cried in indignation.

"Not quite," he answered, smiling sadly. "They are to be paid by the State-as long as they please the State!"

He went soon after he had told me that; and I lay in amazement, looking through the window, and striving to picture the changed world that existed round me. Presently André came in with my broth. I thought it weak, and said so; the strong gust of outside life, which the news had brought into my chamber, had roused my appetite, and given me a distaste for tisanes and slops.

But the old fellow took the complaint very ill. "Well," he grumbled, "and what else is to be expected, Monsieur? With little rent paid, and half the pigeons in the cot slaughtered, and scarcely a hare left in the country side? With all the world shooting and snaring, and smiths and tailors cocked up on horses-ay, and with swords by their sides-and the gentry gone, or hiding their heads in beds, it is a small thing if the broth is weak! If M. le Vicomte liked strong broth, he should have been wise enough to keep the cow himself, and not-"

"Tut, tut, man!" I said, wincing in my turn. "What of Buton?"

"Monsieur means M. le Capitaine Buton?" the old man answered with a sneer. "He is at Cahors."

"And was any one punished for-for the affair at St. Alais?"