The Battle of the Strong. Gilbert Parker

window ran into the square, calling out: “Ro! Ro!” It was Guida Landresse.

      Among the French flying for refuge was the garish Turk, Rullecour’s ally. Suddenly the now frightened, crying child got into his path and tripped him up. Wild with rage he made a stroke at her, but at that instant his scimitar was struck aside by a youth covered with the smoke and grime of battle. He caught up the child to his arms, and hurried with her through the melee to the watchmaker’s doorway. There stood a terror-stricken woman—Madame Landresse, who had just made her way into the square. Placing the child, in her arms, Philip d’Avranche staggered inside the house, faint and bleeding from a wound in the shoulder. The battle of Jersey was over.

      “Ah bah!” said Dormy Jamais from the roof of the Cohue Royale; “now I’ll toll the bell for that achocre of a Frenchman. Then I’ll finish my supper.”

      Poising a half-loaf of bread on the ledge of the roof, he began to slowly toll the cracked bell at his hand for Rullecour the filibuster.

      The bell clanged out: Chicane-chicane! Chicane-chicane!

      Another bell answered from the church by the square, a deep, mournful note. It was tolling for Peirson and his dead comrades.

      Against the statue in the Vier Marchi leaned Ranulph Delagarde. An officer came up and held out a hand to him. “Your shot ended the business,” said he. “You’re a brave fellow. What is your name?”

      “Ranulph Delagarde, sir.”

      “Delagarde—eh? Then well done, Delagardes! They say your father was the first man killed. We won’t forget that, my lad.”

      Sinking down upon the base of the statue, Ranulph did not stir or reply, and the officer, thinking he was grieving for his father, left him alone.

ELEVEN YEARS AFTER

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

      The King of France was no longer sending adventurers to capture the outposts of England. He was rather, in despair, beginning to wind in again the coil of disaster which had spun out through the helpless fingers of Neckar, Calonne, Brienne and the rest, and was in the end to bind his own hands for the guillotine.

      The Isle of Jersey, like a scout upon the borders of a foeman’s country, looked out over St. Michael’s Basin to those provinces where the war of the Vendee was soon to strike France from within, while England, and presently all Europe, should strike her from without.

      War, or the apprehension of war, was in the air. The people of the little isle, living always within the influence of natural wonder and the power of the elements, were deeply superstitious; and as news of dark deeds done in Paris crept across from Carteret or St. Malo, as men-of-war anchored in the tide-way, and English troops, against the hour of trouble, came, transport after transport, into the harbour of St. Heliers, they began to see visions and dream dreams. One peasant heard the witches singing a chorus of carnage at Rocbert; another saw, towards the Minquiers, a great army like a mirage upon the sea; others declared that certain French refugees in the island had the evil eye and bewitched their cattle; and a woman, wild with grief because her child had died of a sudden sickness, meeting a little Frenchman, the Chevalier du Champsavoys, in the Rue des Tres Pigeons, thrust at his face with her knitting-needle, and then, Protestant though she was, made the sacred sign, as though to defeat the evil eye.

      This superstition and fanaticism so strong in the populace now and then burst forth in untamable fury and riot. So that when, on the sixteenth of December 1792, the gay morning was suddenly overcast, and a black curtain was drawn over the bright sun, the people of Jersey, working in the fields, vraicking among the rocks, or knitting in their doorways, stood aghast, and knew not what was upon them.

      Some began to say the Lord’s Prayer, some in superstitious terror ran to the secret hole in the wall, to the chimney, or to the bedstead, or dug up the earthen floor, to find the stocking full of notes and gold, which might, perchance, come with them safe through any cataclysm, or start them again in business in another world. Some began fearfully to sing hymns, and a few to swear freely. These latter were chiefly carters, whose salutations to each other were mainly oaths, because of the extreme narrowness of the island roads, and sailors to whom profanity was as daily bread.

      In St. Heliers, after the first stupefaction, people poured into the streets. They gathered most where met the Rue d’Driere and the Rue d’Egypte. Here stood the old prison, and the spot was called the Place du Vier Prison.

      Men and women with breakfast still in their mouths mumbled their terror to each other. A lobster-woman shrieking that the Day of Judgment was come, instinctively straightened her cap, smoothed out her dress of molleton, and put on her sabots. A carpenter, hearing her terrified exclamations, put on his sabots also, stooped whimpering to the stream running from the Rue d’Egypte, and began to wash his face. A dozen of his neighbours did the same. Some of the women, however, went on knitting hard, as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening sun. Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or tale-bearing, life itself. With their eyes closing upon earth they would have gone on knitting and dropped no stitches.

      A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price, simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying that she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the prison dungeons the night before. Thereupon a long-haired fanatic, once a barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des Brigands, and declaring that the Last Day was come, shrieked:

      “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! He hath sent me to proclaim

       liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that

       are bound!”

      Some one thrust into his hand a torch. He waved it to and fro in his wild harangue; he threw up his arms towards the ominous gloom, and with blatant fury ordered open the prison doors. Other torches and candles appeared, and the mob trembled to and fro in delirium.

      “The prison! Open the Vier Prison! Break down the doors! Gatd’en’ale—drive out the devils! Free the prisoners—the poor vauriens!” the crowd shouted, rushing forward with sticks and weapons.

      The prison arched the street as Temple Bar once spanned the Strand. They crowded under the archway, overpowered the terror-stricken jailer, and, battering open the door in frenzy, called the inmates forth.

      They looked to see issue some sailor seized for whistling of a Sabbath, some profane peasant who had presumed to wear pattens in church, some profaner peasant who had not doffed his hat to the Connetable, or some slip-shod militiaman who had gone to parade in his sabots, thereby offending the red-robed dignity of the Royal Court.

      Instead, there appeared a little Frenchman of the most refined and unusual appearance. The blue cloth of his coat set off the extreme paleness of a small but serene face and high round forehead. The hair, a beautiful silver grey which time only had powdered, was tied in a queue behind. The little gentleman’s hand was as thin and fine as a lady’s, his shoulders were narrow and slightly stooped, his eye was eloquent and benign. His dress was amazingly neat, but showed constant brushing and signs of the friendly repairing needle.

      The whole impression was that of a man whom a whiff of wind would blow away; with the body of an ascetic and the simplicity of a child. The face had some particular sort of