The Red Cockade

In such a case man acts on instinct. I heard the latch of the door tried, and then some one knocked peremptorily; and so long I hesitated. But a second knock followed on the first, and a voice I knew cried imperatively: "Open, open, Françoise!" and I moved towards the closet. The girl, distracted by the repeated summons and her terror, hung a moment between me and the door of the room; but in the end had to go to the latter, so that I drew the closet door upon myself.

Then in a moment it came upon me that if, hiding there, I was found, I should shame Denise; it darted through my brain that if, lurking there behind the closed doors among her woman's things, I was caught, I should harm her a hundred times more than if I stood out in the middle of the floor and faced the worst. And with my face on fire at the mere thought, I opened the door again, and stepped out; and was just in time. For as the door of the room flew open, and M. de St. Alais strode in and looked round, I was the first person he saw.

There were three or four men behind him; and among them the man whom I had cheated on the stairs. But M. St. Alais' eyes blazing with wrath caught mine, and held them; and the others were nothing to me.

CHAPTER XXII.

NOBLESSE OBLIGE

Yet he was not the first to speak. One of the men behind him took a step forward, and cried, "That is the man! See, he still has the gun-barrel."

"Seize him, then," M. de St. Alais replied. "And take him from here! Monsieur," he continued, addressing me grimly, and with a grim eye, "whoever you are, when you undertook to be a spy you counted the cost, I suppose? Take him away, my men!"

Two of the fellows strode forward, and in a moment seized my arms; and in the surprise of M. de St. Alais' appearance and the astonishment his words caused me, I made no resistance. But in such emergencies the mind works quickly, and in a trice I recovered myself. "This is nonsense, M. de St. Alais!" I said. "You know well that I am no spy. You know why I am here. And for the matter of that-"

"I know nothing!" he answered.

"But-"

"I know nothing, I say!" he repeated, with a mocking gesture. "Except, Monsieur, that we find you here in a monk's dress, when you are clearly no monk. You had better have tried to swim the Rhone at flood, than entered this house to-night-I tell you that! Now away with him! His case will be dealt with below."

But this was too much. I wrested my hands from the men who held me, and sprang back. "You lie!" I cried. "You know who I am, and why I am here!"

"I do not know you," he answered stubbornly. "Nor do I know why you are here. I once knew a man like you; that is true. But he was a gentleman, and would have died before he would have saved himself by a lie-by a trumped-up tale. Take him away. He has frightened Mademoiselle to death. I suppose he found the door open, and slipped in, and thought himself safe."

At last I understood what he meant, and that in his passion he would sacrifice one rather than bring in his sister's name. Nay, I saw more; that he viewed with a cruel exultation the dilemma in which he had placed me; and my brow grew damp, as I looked round wildly, trying to solve the question. I had the sounds of street fighting still in my ears; I knew that men staking all in such a strife owned few scruples and scant mercy. I could see that this man in particular was maddened by the losses and humiliations which he had suffered; and I stood in the way of his schemes. The risk existed, therefore, and was no mere threat; it seemed foolish quixotism to run it.

And yet-and yet I hesitated. I even let the men urge me half-way to the door; and then-heaven knows what I should have done or whether I could have seen my way plainly-the knot was cut for me. With a scream, Denise, who since her brother's entrance had leaned, half-fainting, against the wall, sprang forward, and seized him by the arm.

"No, no!" she cried in a choked voice. "No! You will not, you will not do this! Have pity, have mercy! I-"

"Mademoiselle!" he said, cutting her short quietly, but with a gleam of rage in his eyes. "You are overwrought, and forget yourself. The scene has been too much for you. Here!" he continued sharply to the maid, "take care of your mistress. The man is a spy, and not worthy of her pity."

But Denise clung to him. "He is no spy!" she cried, in a voice that went to my heart. "He is no spy, and you know it!"

"Hush, girl! Be silent!" he answered furiously.

But he had not counted on a change in her, beside which the change in him was petty. "I will not!" she answered, "I will not!" and to my astonishment, releasing the arm to which she had hitherto clung, and shaking back from her face the hair which her violent movements had loosened, she stood out and defied him. "I will not!" she cried. "He is no spy, and you know it, Monsieur! He is my lover," she continued, with a superb gesture, "and he came to see me. Do you understand? He was contracted to me, and he came to see me!"

"Girl, are you mad?" he snarled in the breathless hush of the room, the hush that followed as all looked at her.

"I am not mad," she answered, her eyes burning in her white face.

"Then if you feel no shame do you feel no fear?" he retorted in a terrible voice.

"No!" she cried. "For I love! And I love him."

I will not say what I felt when I heard that, myself helpless. For one thing, I was in so great a rage I scarcely knew what I felt; and for another, the words were barely spoken before M. le Marquis seized the girl roughly by the waist, and dragged her, screaming and resisting, to the other end of the room.

This was the signal for a scene indescribable. I sprang forward to protect her; in an instant the three men flung themselves upon me, and bore me by sheer weight towards the door. St. Alais, foaming with rage, shouted to them to remove me, while I called him coward, and cursed him and strove desperately to get at him. For a moment I made head against them all, though they were three to one; the maid's screaming added to the uproar. Then the odds prevailed; and in a minute they had me out, and had closed the door on her and her cries.

I was panting, breathless, furious. But the moment it was done and the door shut, a kind of calm fell upon us. The men relaxed their hold on me, and stood looking at me quietly; while I leaned against the wall, and glowered at them. Then, "There, Monsieur, have no more of that!" one of them said civilly enough. "Go peaceably, and we will be easy with you; otherwise-"

"He is a cowardly hound!" I cried with a sob.

"Softly, Monsieur, softly."

There were five of them, for two had remained at the door. The passage was dark, but they had a lantern, and we waited in silence two or three minutes. Then the door opened a few inches, and the man who seemed to be the leader went to it, and having received his orders, returned.

"Forward!" he said. "In No. 6. And do you, Petitot, fetch the key."

The man named went off quickly, and we followed more slowly along the corridor; the steady tramp of my guards, as they marched beside me, awaking sullen echoes that rolled away before us. The yellow light of the lantern showed a white-washed wall on either side, broken on the right hand by a dull line of doors, as of cells. We halted presently before one of these, and I thought that I was to be confined there; and my courage rose, for I should still be near Denise. But the door, when opened, disclosed only a little staircase which we descended in single file, and so reached a bare corridor similar to that above. Half-way along this we stopped again, beside an open window, through which the night wind came in so strongly as to stir the hair, and force the man who carried the lantern to shield the light under his skirts. And not the night wind only; with it entered all the noises of the night and the disturbed city; hoarse cries and cheers, and the shrill monotonous jangle of bells, and now and then a pistol-shot-noises that told only too eloquently what was passing under the black veil that hid the chaos of streets and houses below us. Nay, in one place the veil was rent, and through the gap a ruddy column poured up from the roofs, dispersing sparks-the hot glare of some great fire, that blazing in the heart of the city, seemed to make the sky sharer in the deeds and horrors that lay beneath it.

The men with me pressed to the window, and peered through it, and strained eyes and ears; and little wonder. Little wonder, too, that the man who was responsible for all, and had staked all, walked the roof above with tireless steps. For the struggle below was the one great struggle of the world, the struggle that never ceases between the old and the new: and it was being fought as it had been fought in Nîmes for centuries, savagely, ruthlessly, over kennels running with blood. Nor could the issue be told; only, that as it was here, it was likely to be through half of France. We who stood at that window, looked into the darkness with actual eyes; but across the border at Turin, and nearer at Sommières and Montpellier, thousands of Frenchmen bearing the greatest names of France, watched also-watched with faces turned to Nîmes, and hearts as anxious as ours.

I gathered from the talk of those round me, that M. Froment had seized the Arènes, and garrisoned it, and that the flames we saw were those of one of the Protestant churches; that as yet the patriots, taken by surprise, made little resistance, and that if the Reds could hold for twenty-four hours longer what they had seized, the arrival of the troops from Montpellier would then secure all, and at the same time stamp the movement with the approval of the highest parties.

"But it was a near thing," one of the men muttered. "If we had not been at their throats to-night, they would have been at ours to-morrow!"

"And now, not half the companies have turned out."

"But the villages will come in in the morning," a third cried eagerly. "They are to toll all the bells from here to the Rhone."

"Ay, but what if the Cevennols come in first? What then, man?"

No one had an answer to this, and all stood watching eagerly, until the sound of footsteps approaching along the passage caused the men to draw in their heads. "Here is the key," said the leader. "Now, Monsieur!"

But it was not the key that disturbed us, nor Petitot, who had been sent for it, but a very tall man, cloaked, and wearing his hat, who came hastily along the corridor with three or four behind him. As he approached he called out, "Is Buzeaud here?"

The man who had spoken before stood out respectfully. "Yes, Monsieur."

"Take half a dozen men, the stoutest you have downstairs," the new comer answered-it was Froment himself-"and get as many more from the Vierge, and barricade the street leading beside the barracks to the Arsenal. You will find plenty of helpers. And occupy some of the houses so as to command the street. And-But what is this?" he continued, breaking off sharply, as his eyes, passing over the group, stopped at me. "How does this gentleman come here? And in this dress?"

"M. le Marquis arrested him-upstairs."

"M. le Marquis?"

"Yes, Monsieur, and ordered him to be confined in No. 6 for the present."

"Ah!"

"As a spy."

M. Froment whistled softly, and for a moment we looked at one another. The wavering light of the lanterns, and perhaps the tension of the man's feelings, deepened the harsh lines of his massive features, and darkened the shadows about his eyes and mouth; but presently he drew a deep breath, and smiled, as if something whimsical in the situation struck him. "So we meet again, M. le Vicomte," he said with that. "I remember now that I have something of yours. You have come for it, I suppose?"

"Yes, Monsieur, I have come for it," I said defiantly, giving him back look for look; and I saw that he understood.

"And M. le Marquis found you upstairs?"