Kitabı oku: «The Red Cockade», sayfa 24
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE MILLENNIUM
With that word he thrust me towards the door that led to the inner hall and the postern; and, knowing, as I did, that every moment I delayed might stand for a life, and that within a minute or two at most the rear of the building would be beset, and my chance of egress lost, it was to be expected that I should not hesitate.
Yet I did. The main body of Froment's followers had flocked upstairs, whence they could be heard firing from the roof and windows. He stood almost alone in the middle of the floor; in the attitude of one listening and thinking, while a group of green ribbons, who seemed to be the most determined of his followers, hung growling about the barricaded door. Something in the gloomy brightness of the room, and the disorder of the barricaded windows, something in the loneliness of his figure as he stood there, appealed to me; I even took one step towards him. But at that moment he looked up, his face grown dark; and he waved me off with a gesture almost of rage. I knew then that I had but a small part of his thoughts; and that at this moment, while the edifice he had built up with so much care and so much risk was crumbling about him, he was thinking not of us, but of those who had promised and failed him; who had given good words, and left him to perish. And I went.
Yet even for that moment of delay it seemed that I might pay too dearly. A dozen steps brought me to the low-browed door he had indicated, in the thickness of the wall at the foot of the main staircase. But already a man was adjusting the last bar. I cried to him to open. "Open! I must go out!" I cried.
"Dieu! It is too late!" he said, with a dark glance at me.
My heart sank; I feared he was right. Still he began to unbar, though grudgingly, and in half a minute we had the door loose. With a pistol in his hand, he opened it on the chain and looked out. It opened on a narrow passage-which, God be thanked, was still empty. He dropped the chain, and almost thrust me out, cried, "To the left!" and then, as dazzled by the sunlight I turned that way, I heard the door slam behind me and the chain rattle as it was linked again.
The houses that rose on each side somewhat deadened the noise of the mob and the firing; but as I hurried down the alley, bareheaded and with the pistol which Froment had given me firmly clutched in my hand, I heard a fresh spirt of noise behind me, and knew that the assailants had entered the passage by the farther end; and that had I waited a moment longer I should have been too late.
As it was, my position was sufficiently forlorn, if it was not hopeless. Alone and a stranger, without hat or badge, knowing little of the streets, I might blunder at any corner into the arms of one of the parties-and be massacred. I had a notion that the church of the Capuchins was that which I had visited near Madame Catinot's; and my first thought was to gain the main street leading in that direction. This was not so easy, however; the alley in which I found myself led only into a second passage equally strait and gloomy. Entering this, I turned after a moment's hesitation to the left, but before I had gone a dozen paces I heard shouting in front of me; and I halted and retraced my steps. Hurrying in the other direction, I found myself in a minute in a little gloomy well-like court, with no second outlet that I could see, where I stood a moment panting and at a loss, rendered frantic and almost desperate by the thought that, while I hovered there uncertain, the die might be cast, and those whom I sought perish for lack of my aid.
I was about to return, resolved to face at all risks the party of rioters whom I heard behind me, when an open window in the lowest floor of one of the houses that stood round the court caught my eye. It was not far from the ground, and to see was to determine; the house must have an outlet on the street. In a dozen strides I crossed the court, and resting one hand on the sill of the window, vaulted into the room, alighted sideways on a stool, and fell heavily to the floor.
I was up in a moment unhurt, but with a woman's scream ringing in my ears, and a woman, a girl, cowering from me, white-faced, her back to the door. She had been kneeling, praying probably, by the bed; and I had almost fallen on her. When I looked she screamed again; I called to her in heaven's name to be silent.
"The door! Only the door!" I cried. "Show it me. I will hurt no one."
"Who are you?" she muttered. And still shrinking from me, she stared at me with distended eyes.
"Mon Dieu! What does it matter?" I answered fiercely. "The door, woman! The door into the street!"
I advanced upon her, and the same fear which had paralysed her gave her sense again. She opened the door beside her, and pointed dumbly down a passage. I hurried through the passage, rejoicing at my success, but before I could unbar the door that I found facing me a second woman came out of a room at the side, and saw me, and threw up her hands with a cry of terror.
"Which is the way to the church of the Capuchins?" I said.
She clapped one hand to her side, but she answered. "To the left!" she gasped. "And then to the right! Are they coming?"
I did not stay to ask whom she meant, but getting the door open at last I sprang through the doorway. One look up and down the street, however, and I was in again, and the door closed behind me. My eyes met the woman's, and without a word she snatched up the bar I had dropped and set it in the sockets. Then she turned and ran up the stairs, and I followed her, the girl into whose room I had leapt, and whose scared face showed for a second at the end of the passage, disappearing like a rabbit, as we passed her.
I followed the woman to the window of an upper room, and we looked out, standing back and peering fearfully over the sill. No need, now, to ask why I had returned so quickly. The roar of many voices seemed in a moment to fill all the street, while the casement shook with the tread of thousands and thousands of advancing feet, as, rank after rank, stretching from wall to wall, the mob, or one section of it, swept by, the foremost marching in order, shoulder to shoulder, armed with muskets, and in some kind of uniform, the rearmost a savage rabble with naked arms and pikes and axes, who looked up at the windows, and shook their fists and danced and leapt as they went by, with a great shout of "Aux Arènes! Aux Arènes!"
In themselves they were a sight to make a quiet man's blood run chill; but they had that in their midst, seeing which the woman beside me clutched my arm and screamed aloud. On six long pikes, raised high above the mob, moved six severed heads-one, the foremost, bald and large, and hideously leering. They lifted these to the windows, and shook their gory locks in sport; and so went by, and in a moment the street was quiet again.
The woman, trembling in a chair, muttered that they had sacked La Vierge, the red cabaret, and that the bald head was a town-councillor's, her neighbour's. But I did not stay to listen. I left her where she was, and, hurrying down again, unbarred the door and went out. All was strangely quiet again. The morning sun shone bright and warm on the long empty street, and seemed to give the lie to the thing I had seen. Not a living creature was visible this way or that; not a face at the window. I stood a moment in the middle of the road, disconcerted; puzzled by the bright stillness, and uncertain which way I had been going. At last I remembered the woman's directions, and set off on the heels of the mob, until I reached the first turning on the right. I took this, and had not gone a hundred yards before I recognised, a little in front of me, Madame Catinot's house.
It showed to the sunshine a wide blind front, long rows of shuttered windows, and not a sign of life. Nevertheless, here was something I knew, something which wore a semblance of familiarity, and I hailed it with hope; and, flinging myself on the door, knocked long and recklessly. The noise seemed fit to wake the dead; it boomed and echoed in every doorway of the empty street, that on the evening of my arrival had teemed with traffic; I shivered at the sound-I shivered standing conspicuous on the steps of the house, expecting a score of windows to be opened and heads thrust out.
But I had not yet learned how the extremity of panic benumbs; or how strong is the cowardly instinct that binds the peaceful man to his hearth when blood flows in the streets. Not a face showed at a casement, not a door opened; worse, though I knocked again and again, the house I would awaken remained dead and silent. I stood back and gazed at it, and returned, and hammered again, thinking this time nothing of myself.
But without result. Or not quite. Far away at the end of the street the echo of my knocking dwelt a little, then grew into a fuller, deeper sound-a sound I knew. The mob was returning.
I cursed my folly then for lingering; thought of the passage in the rear of the house that led to the church, found the entrance to it, and in a moment was speeding through it. The distant roar grew nearer and louder, but now I could see the low door of the church, and I slackened my pace a little. As I did so the door before me opened, and a man looked out. I saw his face before he saw me, and read it; saw terror, shame, and rage written on its mean features; and in some strange way I knew what he was going to do before he did it. A moment he glared abroad, blinking and shading his eyes in the sunshine, then he spied me, slid out, and with an indescribable Judas look at me, fled away.
He left the door ajar-I knew him in some way for the door-keeper, deserting his post; and in a moment I was in the church and face to face with a sight I shall remember while I live; for that which was passing outside, that which I had seen during the last few minutes, gave it a solemnity exceeding even that of the strange service I had witnessed there before.
The sun shut out, a few red altar lamps shed a sombre light on the pillars and the dim pictures and the vanishing spaces; above all, on a vast crowd of kneeling women, whose bowed heads and wailing voices as they chanted the Litany of the Virgin, filled the nave.
There were some, principally on the fringe of the assembly, who rocked themselves to and fro, weeping silently, or lay still as statues with their foreheads pressed to the cold stones; whilst others glanced this way and that with staring eyes, and started at the slightest sound, and moaned prayers with white lips. But more and more, the passionate utterance of the braver souls laid bonds on the others; louder and louder the measured rhythm of "Ora pro nobis! Ora pro nobis!" rose and swelled through the vaults of the roof; more and more fervent it grew, more and more importunate, wilder the abandonment of supplication, until-until I felt the tears rise in my throat, and my breast swell with pity and admiration-and then I saw Denise.
She knelt between her mother and Madame Catinot, nearly in the front row of those who faced the high altar. Whence I stood, I had a side view of her face as she looked upward in rapt adoration-that face which I had once deemed so childish. Now at the thought that she prayed, perhaps for me-at the thought that this woman so pure and brave, that though little more than a child, and soft, and gentle, and maidenly, she could bear herself with no shadow of quailing in this stress of death-at the thought that she loved me, and prayed for me, I felt myself more or less than a man. I felt tears rising, I felt my breast heaving, and then-and then as I went to drop on my knees, against the great doors on the farther side of the church, came a thunderous shock, followed by a shower of blows and loud cries for admittance.
A horrible kind of shudder ran through the kneeling crowd, and here and there a woman screamed and sprang up and looked wildly round. But for a few moments the chant still rose monotonously and filled the building; louder and louder the measured rhythm of "Ora pro nobis! Ora pro nobis!" still rose and fell and rose again with an intensity of supplication, a pathos of repetition that told of bursting hearts. At length, however, one of the leaves of the door flew open, and that proved too much; the sound sent three parts of the congregation shrieking to their feet-though a few still sang. By this time I was half way through the crowd, pressing to Denise's side; before I could reach her the other door gave way, and a dozen men flocked in tumultuously. I had a glimpse of a priest-afterwards I learnt that it was Father Benôit-standing to oppose them with a cross upraised; and then, by the dim light, which to them was darkness, I saw-unspeakable relief-that the intruders were not the leaders of the mob, but foremost the two St. Alais, blood-stained and black with powder, with drawn swords and clothes torn; and behind them a score of their followers.
In their relief women flung themselves on the men's necks, and those who stood farther away burst into loud sobbing and weeping. But the men themselves, after securing the doors behind them, began immediately to move across the church to the smaller exit on the alley; one crying that all was lost, and another that the east gate was open, while a third adjured the women to separate-adding that in the neighbouring houses they would be safe, but that the church would be sacked; and that even now the Calvinists were bursting in the gates of the monastery through which the fugitives had retreated, after being driven out of the Arènes.
All, on the instant, was panic and wailing and confusion. I have heard it said since that the worst thing the men could have done was to take the church in their flight, and that had they kept aloof the women would not have been disturbed; that, as a fact, and in the event, the church was not sacked. But in such a hell as was Nîmes that morning, with the kennels running blood, and men's souls surprised by sudden defeat, it was hard to decide what was best; and I blame no one.
A rush for the door followed the man's words. It drove me a little farther from Denise; but as she and the group round her held back and let the more timid or selfish go first, I had time to gain her side. She had drawn the hood of her cloak close round her face, and until I touched her arm did not see me. Then, without a word, she clung to me-she clung to me, looking up; I saw her face under the hood, and it was happy. God! It was happy, even in that scene of terror!
After that, Madame St. Alais, though she greeted me with a bitter smile, had no power to repel me. "You are quick, Monsieur, to profit by your victory," she said, in a scathing tone. And that was all. Unrebuked, I passed my arm round Denise, and followed close on Louis and Madame Catinot; while Monsieur le Marquis, after speaking with his mother, followed. As he did so his eye fell on me, but he only smiled, and to something Madame said, answered aloud, "Mon Dieu, Madame; what does it matter? We have thrown the last stake and lost. Let us leave the table!"
She dropped her hood over her face; and even in that moment of fear and excitement I found something tragic in the act, and on a sudden pitied her. But it was no time for sentiment or pity; the pursuers were not far behind the pursued. We were still in the church and some paces from the threshold giving on the alley, when a rush of footsteps outside the great door behind us made itself heard, and the next instant the doors creaked under the blows hailed upon them. It was a question whether they would stand until we were out, and I felt the slender figure within my arm quiver and press more closely to me. But they held-they held, and an instant later the crowd before us gave way, and we were outside in the daylight, in the alley, hurrying quickly down it towards Madame Catinot's house.
It seemed to me that we were safe then, or nearly safe; so glad was I to find myself in the open air and out of the church. The ground fell away a little towards Madame Catinot's, and I could see the line of hastening heads bobbing along before us, and here and there white faces turned to look back. The high walls on either hand softened the noise of the riot. Behind me were M. le Marquis and Madame; and again behind them three or four of M. le Marquis' followers brought up the rear. I looked back beyond these and saw that the alley opposite the church was still clear, and that the pursuers had not yet passed through the church; and I stooped to whisper a word of comfort to Denise. I stooped perhaps longer than was necessary, for before I was aware of it I found myself stumbling over Louis' heels. A backward wave sweeping up the alley had brought him up short and flung him against me. With the movement, as we all jostled one another, there arose far in front and rolled up the passage between the high walls a sound of misery; a mingling of groans and screams and wailing such as I hope I may never hear again. Some strove furiously to push their way back towards the church, and some, not understanding what was amiss, to go forwards, and some fell, and were trodden under foot; and for a few seconds the long narrow alley heaved and seethed in an agony of panic.
Engaged in saving Denise from the crush and keeping her on her feet, I did not, for a moment, understand. The first thought I had was that the women-three out of four were women-had gone mad or given way to a shameful, selfish terror. Then, as our company staggering and screaming rolled back upon us, until it filled but half the length of the passage, I heard in front a roar of cruel laughter, and saw over the intervening heads a serried mass of pike-points filling the end of the passage opposite Madame Catinot's house. Then I understood. The Calvinists had cut us off; and my heart stood still.
For there was no retreat. I looked behind me, and saw the alley by the church-porch choked with men who had reached it through the church; alive with harsh mocking faces, and scowling eyes, and cruel thirsty pikes. We were hemmed in; in the long high walls, which it was impossible to scale, was no door or outlet short of Madame Catinot's house-and that was guarded. And before and behind us were the pikes.
I dream of that scene sometimes; of the sunshine, hot and bright, that lay ghastly on white faces distorted with fear; of women fallen on their knees and lifting hands this way and that; of others screaming and uttering frenzied prayers, or hanging on men's necks; of the long writhing line of humanity, wherein fear, showing itself in every shape, had its way; above all of the fiendish jeers and laughter of the victors, as they cried to the men to step out, or hurled vile words at the women.
Even Nîmes, mother of factions, parent of a hundred quarterless brawls, never saw a worse scene, or one more devilish. For a few seconds in the surprise of this trap, in the sudden horror of finding ourselves, when all seemed well, at grips with death, I could only clutch Denise to me tighter and tighter, and hide her eyes on my breast, as I leaned against the wall and groaned with white lips. O God, I thought, the women! The women! At such a time a man would give all the world that there might be none, or that he had never loved one.
St. Alais was the first to recover his presence of mind and act-if that could be called action which was no more than speech, since we were hopelessly enmeshed and outnumbered. Putting Madame behind him he waved a white kerchief to the men by the door of the church-who stood about thirty paces from us-and adjured them to let the women pass; even taunting them when they refused, and gibing at them as cowards, who dared not face the men unencumbered.
But they only answered with jeers and threats, and savage laughter. "No, no, M. le Prêtre!" they cried. "No, no! Come out and taste steel! Then, perhaps, we will let the women go! Or perhaps not!"
"You cowards!" he cried.
But they only brandished their arms and laughed, shrieking: "A bas les traîtres! A bas les prêtres! Stand out! Stand out, Messieurs!" they continued, "or we will come and pluck you from the women's skirts!"
He glowered at them in unspeakable rage. Then a man on their side stepped out and stilled the tumult. "Now listen!" said this fellow, a giant, with long black hair falling over a tallowy face. "We will give you three minutes to come out and be piked. Then the women shall go. Skulk there behind them, and we fire on all, and their blood be on your heads."
St. Alais stood speechless. At last, "You are fiends!" he cried in a voice of horror. "Would you kill us before their eyes?"
"Ay, or in their laps!" the man retorted, amid a roar of laughter. "So decide, decide!" he continued, dancing a clumsy step and tossing a half-pike round his head. "Three minutes by the clock there! Come out, or we fire on all! It will be a dainty pie! A dainty Catholic pie, Messieurs!"
St. Alais turned to me, his face white, his eyes staring; and he tried to speak. But his voice failed.
And then, of what happened next I cannot tell; for, for a minute, all was blurred. I remember only how the sun lay hot on the wall beyond his face, and how black the lines of mortar showed between the old thin Roman bricks. We were about twenty men and perhaps fifty women, huddled together in a space some forty yards long. Groans burst from the men's lips, and such as had women in their arms-and they were many-leaned against the wall and tried to comfort them, and tried to put them from them. One man cried curses on the dogs who would murder us, and shook his fists at them; and some rained kisses on the pale senseless faces that lay on their breasts-for, thank God, many of the women had fainted; while others, like St. Alais, looked mute agony into eyes that told it again, or clasped a neighbour's hand, and looked up into a sky piteously blue and bright. And I-I do not know what I did, save look into Denise's eyes and look and look! There was no senselessness in them.
Remember that the sun shone on all this, and the birds twittered and chirped in the gardens beyond the walls; that it wanted an hour or two of high noon, a southern noon; that in the crease of the valley the Rhone sparkled between its banks, and not far off the sea broke rippling and creaming on the shore of Les Bouches; that all nature rejoiced, and only we-we, pent between those dreadful walls, those scowling faces, saw death imminent-black death shutting out all things.
A hand touched me; it was St. Alais' hand. I think, nay, I know, for I read it in his face, that he meant to be reconciled to me. But when I turned to him-or it may be it was the sight of his sister's speechless misery moved him-he had another thought. As the black-haired giant called "One minute gone!" and his following howled, M. le Marquis threw up his hand.
"Stay!" he cried, with the old gesture of command. "Stay! There is one man here who is not of us! Let him pass first, and go!" And he pointed to me. "He has no part with us. I swear it!"
A roar of cruel laughter was the answer. Then, "He that is not with me is against me!" the giant quoted impiously. And they jeered again.
On that, I take no credit for what I did. In such moments of exaltation men are not accountable, and, for another thing, I knew that they would not listen, that I risked nothing. And trembling with rage I flung back their words. "I am against you!" I cried. "I would rather die here with these, than live with you! You stain the earth! You pollute the air! You are fiends-"
No more, for with a shrill laugh the man next me, a mere lad, half-witted, I think, and the same who had cursed them, sprang by me and rushed on the pike-points. Half a dozen met in his breast before our eyes-before our eyes-and with a wild scream he flung up his arms and was borne back against the side-wall dead and gushing blood.
Instinctively I had covered Denise's face that she might not see. And it was well; for at that-there was a kind of mercy in it, and let me tell it quickly-the wretches tasting blood broke loose, and rushed on us. I saw St. Alais thrust his mother behind him, and almost with the same movement fling himself on the pikes; and I, pushing Denise down into the angle of the wall-though she clung to me and prayed to me-killed the first that came at me with Froment's pistol, and the next also, with the other barrel at point blank distance-feeling no fear, but only passion and rage. The third bore me down with his pike fixed in my shoulder, and for a moment I saw only the sky, and his scowling face black against it; and shut my eyes, expecting the blow that must follow.
But none did follow. Instead a weight fell on me, and I began to struggle, and a whole battle, it seemed to me, was fought over me-in that horrible slaughterhouse alley, where they dragged men from women's arms, and forced them, screaming, to the wall, and stabbed them to death without pity; and things were done of which I dare not tell!
