Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  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!

  CHAPTER XXV.

  BEYOND THE SHADOW.

  I thank Heaven that I saw little more than I have told. A score of feet trampled on me as the murderers stumbled this way and that, and bruised me and covered me with blood that was not my own. And I heard screams of men in the death-throe, ear-piercing shrieks of women — shrieks that chilled the blood and stopped the breath — mad laughter, sounds of the pit. But to rise was to court instant death, and, though I had no hope and no looking forward, my momentary passion had spent itself and I lay quiet. Resistance was useless.

  At last I thought the end had come. The body that pressed on me, and partly hid me, was abruptly dragged away; the light came to my eyes, and a voice cried, briskly: “Here is another! He is alive!”

  I staggered to my feet, stupidly willing to die with some sort of dignity. The speaker was a stranger, but by his side was Buton, and beyond him stood De Géol; and there were others, all staring at me, face beyond face. Still, I could not believe that I was saved. “If you are going to do it, do it quickly,” I muttered; and I opened my arms.

  “God forbid!” Buton answered hurriedly. “Enough has been done already, and too much! M. le Vicomte, lean on me! Lean on me, and come this way. Mon Dieu, I was only just in time. If they had killed you — —”

  “That is the fifth,” said De Géol.

  Buton did not answer, but taking my arm, gently urged me along, and De Géol taking the other side, I walked between them, through a lane of people who stared at me with a sort of brutish wonder — a lane of people with faces that looked strangely white in the sunshine. I was bareheaded, and the sun dazzled and confused me, but obeying the pressure of Buton’s hand I swerved and passed through a door that seemed to open in the wall. As I did so I dropped a kerchief which some one had given me to bind up my shoulder. A man standing beside the door, the last man on the right-hand side of the lane of people, picked it up and gave it to me with a kindly alacrity. He had a pike, and his hands were covered with blood, and I do not doubt that he was one of the murderers!

  Two men were carrying some one into the house before us, and at the sight of the helpless body and hanging head, sense and memory returned to me with a rush. I caught Buton by the breast of his coat and shook him — shook him savagely. “Mademoiselle de St. Alais!” I cried. “What have you done to her, wretch? If you have — —”

  “Hush, Monsieur, hush,” he answered reproachfully. “And be yourself. She is safe, and here, I give you my word. She was carried in among the first. I don’t think a hair of her head is injured.”

  “She was carried in here?” I said.

  “Yes, M. le Vicomte.”

  “And safe?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  I believe that at that I burst into tears not altogether unmanly; for they were tears of thankfulness and gratitude. I had gone through very much, and, though the wound in my arm was a trifle, I had lost some blood; and the tears may be forgiven me. Nor indeed was I alone in weeping that day. I learned afterwards that one of the very murderers, a man who had been foremost in the work, cried bitterly when he came to himself and saw what he had done.

  They killed in Nîmes on that day and the two next, about three hundred men, principally in the Capuchin convent — which Froment had used as a printing-office, and made the headquarters of his propaganda — in the Cabaret Rouge, and in Froment’s own house, which held out until they brought cannon to bear on it. Not more than one-half of these fell in actual conflict or hot blood; the remainder were hunted down in lanes and houses and hiding-places, and killed where they were found, or, surrendering at discretion, were led to the nearest wall, and there shot.

  Later, both in Paris and the provinces, this severity was commended, and held up to admiration as the truest mercy; on the ground that it stamped out the fire of revolt which was on the point of blazing up and prevented it spreading to the rest of France. But, looking back, I find in it another thing; I find in it not mercy, but the first, or nearly the first, instance of that strange contempt of human life which marked the Revolution in its later stages; of that extravagance of cruelty which three years afterwards paralysed society and astounded the world, and, by the horrible excesses into which it occasionally led men, proved to the philosophers of the Human Race that France in the last days of the eighteenth century could do in the daylight, at Arras and Nantes and Paris, deeds which the tyrants of old confined to the dark recesses of their torture-chambers: deeds — I blush to say it — that no other polite country has matched in this age.

  But with these crimes — and be it understood I do not refer here to the work of the guillotine — I thank God that I have at this time nothing to do. They left their traces on later pages of my life — as on the life of what Frenchman have they not? — and some day I may revert to them. But my task here barely touches them. It is enough for me to say that of eighteen men who shared with me the horrors of the alley by the Capuchins, four only lived to tell the tale, and look back on the walls of Nîmes; they and I owing our lives in part to the timely arrival of Buton and some foreign representatives, who did not share the Cevennols’ fanaticism, and partly to the late relenting of the murderers themselves.

  Of the four, Father Benôit and Louis St. Alais were two, and strange was the meeting, when we three, so wonderfully preserved, with clothes still torn and disordered, and faces splashed with blood, came together in the upstairs salon at Madame Catinot’s. The shutters of the room, with the exception of one high corner shutter, were still closed; dead ashes lay white and cold in the empty fire-place, that had blazed so cheerfully in my honour the night I supped with Madame Catinot. The whole room was gloomy and chill, the furniture cast long shadows, and up the stairs came the clamour of the mob, that having seen us into the house eddied curiously round the scene of the murder, and could not have enough of it.

  A strange meeting, for we three had all loved one another, and by stress of the times had been separated. Now we met as from the grave, ghostly figures, livid, trembling, with shaking hands and eyes burning with the light of fever; but with all differences purged away. “My Brother!” “Your Brother!” and Louis’ hands met mine, as if the dead man who had died with the courage of his race joined them; while Father Benôit wrung his hands in uncontrollable grief or walked the room, crying: “My poor children! Oh, my poor children! God have mercy on this land!”

  A low sound of women’s voices, and weeping, with the hurrying of feet going softly to and fro, came from the next room: and that it was, I think, that presently calmed us, so that except for an occasional burst of grief on Louis’ part we could talk quietly. I learned that Madame St. Alais lay there, sadly injured in the mêlée, either by her fall or a blow from a foot; and that Denise and Madame Catinot and a surgeon were with her. The very room in its gloom was funereal, and we talked in whispers — and then sank into silence; or again one or other would rise with a shudder of remembrance, and walk the room with heaving breast. Presently, the sound of guns coming to our ears, we forgot ourselves for a while and talked of Froment, and what chance of escape he had, and listened and heard the mob raving and howling as it surged by; and then talked again. But always as men who were no longer concerned; as men whom death had released from the common obligations.

  Presently they came and called Loui
s, who went to his mother; and then after another interval Father Benôit was summoned, and I walked the room alone. Silence after so great commotion, solitude, when an hour before I had dealt death and faced it in that inferno, safety after danger so imminent, all stirred the depths of my heart. When, in addition, I thought of St. Alais’ death, and recalled the brilliant promise, the daring, the brightness of that haughty spirit now for ever quenched, I felt the tears rise again. I paced the room in uncontrollable emotion, and was thankful for the gloom that allowed me to give it vent. Old times, old scenes, old affections rose up, and my boyhood; I remembered that we had played together, I forgot that we had gone different ways.

  After a long time, a long, long time, when evening had nearly come, Louis came in to me. “Will you come?” he said abruptly.

  “To Madame St. Alais?”

  “Yes, she wants to see you,” he replied, holding the door open, and speaking in the dull even tone of one who knows all.

  After such a scene as we had passed through comes reaction; I was worn out and I went with him mechanically, thinking rather of the past than the present. But no sooner was I over the threshold of the next room, which, unlike that I had left, was brilliantly lit by candles set in sconces, the shutters being closed, than I came to myself with a shock. Propped up with pillows on a bed opposite the door, so that I met her eyes and had a full view of her face as I entered, lay Madame St. Alais; and I stood. Her face was white with a red spot burning in each cheek; her eyes matched the colour in brilliance; but it was neither of these things that brought me up suddenly, nor — though I noticed it with foreboding — the way in which she plucked at the coverlet when she spoke. It was something in her expression; something so unfitting the occasion, so bizarre and light that I stood appalled.