The weather changed brusquely during the day of the 7th April. Till now it had been lovely spring weather—indeed, save for the shorter days, comparable to our finest summers in England.
Then about noon came a thunderstorm—a sudden blackening and indigoing of the south horizon—a constant darting of lightning flashes very far off, this way and that—no thunder, only the inky storm advancing over the sea. Wild fire playing about it and a white froth of spring cloud-tufts tossing along its front.
By two the flashes were raging about us, the thunder continuous and deafening, and the hailstones hopping like crickets on the roof of Château Schneider. Then it rained a great rain, every gargoyle spouting, every gap and pipe gurgling full. The wind bent double the tall poplars and lashed the lithe willows till they fished the stream. At half-past two all was past, for the moment at least. The roofs were giving off a fine, visible steam under bright sunshine. The land reeked with rising moisture, and over the water the wet roofs of Aramon le Vieux and St. André winked like heliographs.
So it continued all day, the thunder passing off to this hand and the other—the mountains of Languedoc or among the dainty fringe of the dentelated Alpines behind Daudet's three windmills—which were not yet his. But it never quite left us alone. The Rhône Valley is the laid track and ready-made road for all thunderstorms. Even those from the west turn into it as from a side lane, glad of the space and the easy right of way.
I rose from my proper bed just in time to see the best of the thunderstorm. Rhoda Polly had been up "ages before," as she asserted. She had lunched with the family and confided to me that there had been less row than usual, for the Chief had not been able to take the meal with them.
She had, therefore, been deprived of the pleasure of crying to their father, "Hey, Dennis, hold hard there!" Or, plaintively, "Now, Dennis, youknowthat is not true!"
So they had solaced themselves by teasing Hannah, who had first threatened assault and battery and then retired in the sulks to her own room, the door of which they had heard locked and double locked. Mrs. Deventer had reproved them for their cruelty to their sister—which was grossly unfair, seeing that she had appeared to enjoy the performance itself, and even contributed a homily on Hannah's love of finery.
Altogether it had been a stupid lunch, and I had done well to keep out of it. Oh, certainly, Rhoda Polly would gladly get me something to eat. Indeed, she did not mind having a pauper's plateful of scraps herself. Lunch proper was such an accidental meal that oftentimes all that reached the mouth was the bare fork!
So on scraps and a glass of ale Rhoda Polly and I lunched together with great amity and content. We spoke of the coming (or at least expected) attack, and Rhoda Polly revealed to me her plans for seeing all she could and yet keeping clear of the eyes of her father. This was undutiful, but certainly not more so than shouting "You, Dennis!" at him down the whole length of an uproarious dinner-table.
Jack Jaikes looked in upon us in a search for the Chief. There was no privacy of any kind in Château Schneider in those days. You simply went from room to room and from floor to floor till you ran your quarry to earth.
Rhoda Polly and I were sitting with the width of the table between us, our two chins on our palms, the eyes of one never leaving those of the other, drowned in our high debate.
Jack Jaikes gazed at us a moment and then, with a grin which might have meant "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," if Jack Jaikes had read any poetry, he turned on his heel and went out again without speaking.
"I say," said Rhoda Polly, "he never told about catching us asleep up behind the chimney pots with the sun baking our noses brick-red——"
"Holding hands too, and my head——"
"Glory, I'm glad it wasn't Hugh who caught us—then we should never have heard the last of it. What sillies we must have looked. I say, Angus Cawdor, that Jack Jaikes is a very decent sort. Suppose he had brought the others up! Hanged if I could have kept from telling!"
"Oh, it was not to spare me, don't you deceive yourself. It was for your sake, Rhoda Polly. He would aid and abet you in forging the Governor's name to a cheque for a dressmaker's bill."
Rhoda Polly went to find her mother, after promising to lie down awhile and so be fresher for the night. Dennis Deventer had instituted four-hour watches for the same reason, and everyone not on duty was sent to turn in. But the restless Jack Jaikes refused obedience. He had a thousand things to do. Oh, yes, everything was in readiness, of course. Things always were "last gaiter button" and that sort of rubbish, but to look everything over from one end to the other of all the posts was by no means useless, and to this he, Jack Jaikes, meant to devote himself.
At any rate I slept, and I believe so also did Rhoda Polly. At least there was a period which otherwise could not be accounted for in that young lady's diurnal of her time. Supper was a snatch meal, and I don't think anyone thought much about eating, but Rhoda Polly was down in the kitchen seeing that the men's rations were sent out to the posts. At six I reported for duty to Jack Jaikes who had asked for me particularly. He gave me a powerful pair of night-glasses, presented to him for life-saving, as an inscription upon the instrument itself testified.
"You know the streets of Aramon as well as I do," he said, "you have only got to keep your eyes about you, and report all you see. There is a nice little Morse installed on the top of the gateway, and you will be fairly safe behind the parapet—at least as safe as anywhere."
The little tower he spoke of carried a clock and was placed not directly over the main gate, but to the side above the offices of the time-keepers and accountants.
"I suppose," he added, "Rhoda Polly is coming. If so, don't let her fire, and, of course, don't fire yourself. You are the watch, so keep all dark above. Not a light, not a cigarette. And when Rhoda Polly comes, make her stay behind those sand-bags in the corner. I hiked a few up on purpose for her."
"I know nothing about it," I asserted, "I never thought of it for an instant. If Rhoda Polly comes it will not be because I asked her."
He looked at me with a slight contemptuous grin.
"Do not worry yourself," he said; "if Rhoda Polly wants to come she will come, and neither you will entice her, nor her father forbid her."
And he went his way.
* * * * *
I watched the wide Cours of Aramon, white under the moon, with its plane trees casting inky shadows on the flat stones and trampled earth. A silence had fallen upon the streets that opened on it, and no lights showed from the houses. The anarchists knew the value of darkness as well as we. But for a while the moon continued to block them. The sky filled and as regularly emptied of great white clouds, charioting up from the Mediterranean like angelic harvest-wains.
I did not see anything worth reporting from the top of the clock-tower, nor hear anything except a distant hammering. An intense quiet reigned over the town of Aramon-les-Ateliers. I saw no new conflagrations. The old were extinct, and no yelling mobs poured out towards the well-to-do suburbs. The Extremists of the Commune had withdrawn their sentries and outposts—at least from within sight of the defences of the works.
Jack Jaikes argued that this alone showed that they were plotting mischief.
"These gutter scrapings of a hundred ports and a thousand prisons" was what he called "the new lot" who had supplanted Keller Bey.
I think he secretly rejoiced. For, so long as it was a matter of fighting the elected Commune with Keller Bey at its head, he knew that the Chief had been lukewarm about extreme measures. He had even negotiated in the early time, which Jack Jaikes called "a burning shame. The best way to negotiate wi' a rattlesnake is to break his back wi' a stick!" He recognised, however, it was no use holding back when the Chief said "March!"
"But noo, lad," he confided to me, "they are coming for what they will get. They are going to harry and burn and kill. There are four women yonder, and Dennis kens as well as me that if they win in on us, it will be death and hell following after. So he will let us turn on the fire-hose from the first, and let off no volleys in the air. That suits Jack Jaikes. This is no Sunday-school treat wi' tugs-o'-war and shying at Aunt Sally for coco-nits! Aye, a-richt, you below—haud a wee, I'm comin'!"
He had hardly remained five minutes with me, but he had put some iron into my blood. We were no longer fighting against theorists like Keller Bey, or broad-beamed, first-class mechanicians like the Père Félix.
And then the women—they would not bear thinking about, and indeed I had not time, for prompt, as if answering to a call, Rhoda Polly plumped down beside me in the sand-bag niche.
"I met Jack Jaikes," she explained. "He said he knew I was coming and had made all snug for me. How did he know? You did not?"
"He must have guessed, Rhoda Polly—perhaps it was something you said."
"Nonsense, he is altogether too previous, that Jack Jaikes, but all the same these sand-bags are comfy, and I can see as from an upper box."
"There is not much to see." I was saying the very words when with a crash a wall on the opposite side of the Cours seemed to crumble in upon itself. There was a jet of flame, a rain of stones, which reached half-way to the defences of the works, and then a gap, dark and vague in the veiled moonlight.
"That was dynamite," said Rhoda Polly, "though the report was not loud. There is, quarrymen say, a silent zone in which the explosion is not heard. We must be just on the verge of that. I wonder if there is more to come."
We waited—I straining my eyes into the darkness and seeing nothing. The moon did not reach down into the gulf which the explosion had created. But I was vaguely conscious of shapes that moved and of a curious crushing noise like that of the steam-roller upon the fresh macadam of a roadway in the making.
But though Jack Jaikes came up to see for himself, none of us could make out anything—till Rhoda Polly, whose eyes were like those of a cat, made a telescope of her hands and after a long look whispered eagerly, "I see something they have got in there. It is like a bear on end—you know—when it is dancing."
"Try again, Rhoda Polly. Try the night-glass!"
"I can do better without it, Jack Jaikes—yes, I see better now—it is like a big boiler for washing clothes or boiling pig's-meat with the mouth tilted towards us. It looks as if it were mounted on a kind of cradle!"
The words were hardly out of her mouth when Jack Jaikes exclaimed, in a voice which might have been heard half across the wide oblong of the Cours, "A mortar—I never thought of that—they have got a mortar. They were clearing a way for using it—at short range too. They can plug us anywhere now."
He sprang towards the Morse telegraph, but he did not reach it. A concussion and a roar shook the tower to its base. I saw the flame shoot out a yard wide from the gap in the defence wall. Our main gate and part of the rampart to the right had been badly smashed, quite enough for a determined storming party to penetrate if the new gun made any more successes.
"They are firing solid shell at us," said Jack Jaikes, frantically manipulating the keys of the telegraph instrument.
"Now I must get a gun to play upon them. It will need something big, for though we can scourge their gun emplacement with mitraille fire, the merit of their plan is that the gunners lie hid in a ditch. Only one man, or two at most, are needed to slip round and drop in the charge and shell."
"I see them," said Rhoda Polly, pointing where we saw only blank darkness. "Give me a rifle, Jack Jaikes. I believe I can pick that man off!"
"You shall have number 27, Rhoda Polly, the best ever made. Oh, if only I had eyes like you!"
Jack Jaikes groaned aloud, and Rhoda Polly settled herself behind the sand-bags. But she glanced up almost instantly.
"He is gone!" she said.
"Then look out!" cried Jack Jaikes.
We both saw the broad stream of fire this time, and the wall on the other side of the gate came rattling down, while a big ball went skipping across the yard of the works, kicking the dust into clouds and bringing up with a dull smack against the wall of the foundry just opposite.
"No harm done this journey, just topped us and brought down a few stones. But this can't last. They will get the range and make hay of us."
He was already making off on his quest.
"Better get down out of that, Rhoda Polly," he called back, as his feet clattered among the fallen bricks and masonry. "Go to the cellar, Rhoda Polly!"
"Go to the cellar yourself, Jack Jaikes—I'm going to watch for the man who does the loading of that gun!"
And Jack Jaikes laughed, well pleased. I felt vaguely humiliated, for I was a far better shot than Rhoda Polly, only I could not see. Furthermore I wished her well out of the clock-tower, for the flash of a rifle from the top of it would almost certainly cause us to be bombarded, and with the lobbing action of the mortar shot the projectile might very well land right on top of us, in which case the sand-bags would prove no protection. All I could do, however, was to stick to the Morse machine and send down the reports that Rhoda Polly threw at me over her shoulder.
As soon as Jack Jaikes had made a tour of the posts, a hail of rifle fire broke from the wall of our defences, directed upon the gap in the wall and thedébriswhich sheltered the mortar.
"It's no use! Tell them to stop," called out Rhoda Polly; "they are only making the plaster fall." I transmitted the message, and the firing from our side slackened and ceased.
The smoke of the volleys drifted slowly along the wall, blinding and provoking the watcher. She waved it petulantly away with her hands.
"They will make me miss my chance," she mourned. "The gunners can do what they like behind that. I wish Jack Jaikes had had more sense. What is the use of shooting at sparrows' nests under the eaves when the men are down in a ditch?"
She was quite right, the next shell was a live one, and passed quite near us with a whistling sound. It exploded just under the big iron door, which was blown from its fastenings and fell backward into the yard with a heavy, jangling crash which went to all our hearts like a warning.
The square of the doorway, seen over the edge of the clock-tower, was now quite open. The mortar of the anarchists had done good work, and our carefully-thought-out positions were endangered. I could see Dennis Deventer walking about from post to post, where there was danger of an attack. The wall was not high, especially on the side of the Château, and it would not do to leave these posts denuded of men.
At the moment while I was looking at him, Jack Jaikes with a full gunners' team came galloping across the yard with a four-inch Deventer quick-firing field-gun lurching after them. If once they could get that up to the doorway they might be able to make some efficient reply to the enemy's mortar. But a gun of that size needs some sort of emplacement, and an approach to the doorway must be contrived.
Dennis was on the spot and I could hear him giving his orders in sharp, lapidary phrases. In the interest below me I had not been watching Rhoda Polly, and so the sharp report of her No. 27 startled me. Of course I could discern nothing in the huge black gash torn by the explosion. But Rhoda Polly was triumphant.
"I got him," she whispered; "I saw him coming out and before he could get the shell into the muzzle, I fired. He dropped the shell and fell on top of it. What a pity it did not go off!"
Such a bloodthirsty Rhoda Polly! But the truth was that, when it came to fighting and what she called "taking a hand," Rhoda Polly felt absolutely at one with the defence. She only strove to outdo those who were her comrades, and the matter of sex, never prominent in Rhoda Polly's mind, was altogether in abeyance.
I tapped the keys of the Morse viciously. It was all I was good for.
"Rhoda Polly has shot the gunner—now is your time!"
But still the embankment for the four-inch did not quite please Dennis. He preferred to take his chance and wait. It seemed a long, weariful time. Rhoda Polly peered into the blackness along the tube of No. 27. Rhoda Polly wriggled and settled herself.
"Bang!" said No. 27. "Winged him! But he made off!" said the marksman disgustedly. "He was quarrying under the other fellow for the shell, so they can't have many or he would have brought out a fresh one. I do wish father would hurry up. In a minute or two there will be such a beautiful chance—just before they are going to fire. They will send three or four men this next time so that I can't shoot them all. If our folk are not speedy, down will come this old clock-tower!"
Rhoda Polly was a good prophet, and when next she spoke she had to report that there was a little cloud of men on either side, hiding behind the wall and preparing to load the piece, when their comrades were ready, at any hazard.
The four-inch was now poking a lean snout out of the door which had been smashed open by the mortar, and stretched along, laying her on the centre of the darkness, was Jack Jaikes, cursing the Providence which had not given him eyes like Rhoda Polly's.
"Now," said my mentor hastily, "tell them now is the time. They can't miss if they fire into the brown! Right in the centre of the gap in the line of that white chimney."
The discharge of the big gun beneath us quite made us gasp. It shook Rhoda Polly's aim, and this time No. 27 went off pretty much at random. But what we saw within the gap opposite made up for everything. The shell burst under the mortar or perhaps within it—I could not distinguish which. At any rate, something black and huge rose in the air, poised as if for flight, and then, turning over, fell with a clangorous reverberation into the house behind, smashing down the white chimney and causing the blue-coated National Guards with which it was filled to swarm out. Some took to their heels and were no more heard of in the history of the revolt of Aramon. Others pulled off their coats and fought it through in their shirts.
Dennis Deventer waved his hat, and all except Jack Jaikes yelled. He was busy getting the gun ready for a second discharge. But Dennis stopped him.
"Jackie, my lad," he said, "no more from this good lady the day—get up the mitrailleuses. They had only that one big fellow and you have tumbled him in scrap through the house behind. I don't know how you sighted as you did."
"I did not," said Jack Jaikes grumpily—"only where Rhoda Polly told me."
"Well, never mind—that job's done," said the Chief soothingly; "hurry with the machine guns. They will take ten minutes to get over that little surprise and wash it down with absinthe. Then we shall have to look out. They will come, and if we have not their welcome ready, they will come to stay."
At this point I begged for permission to come down and join Jack Jaikes' gang.
I was no use up there, I said, Rhoda Polly could see all round me. She must call down the news, as there was no time to teach her the Morse.
"Well, come along then," said Dennis, and I did not stop even to say good-bye to Rhoda Polly. At last I was going to have a chance.
When I got to my gang Dennis Deventer was speaking.
"I will give you what help I can by sending men from the north wall and that next the river. I don't expect any assault there. But I cannot weaken the defence along the side of the Château orchard. That is where we are weakest, and where I must go myself. For they are sharp enough to know it. I leave you in charge here, Jack Jaikes. Keep the men steady and don't allow swearing in the ranks!"
There was strangely little exultation. Each man felt the tussle was yet to come and nerved himself for it. The big square lay out silent under the moon, splashed with the shadows of the pollarded poplars, the benches upturned, a tree or two uprooted, and beyond all the black gash knocked in the row of white houses. It had a strange look, sinister, threatening, all the more so because it had always been so peaceful and well-ordered—like a man's tranquil life till the day Fate's mortal-shell bursts and there is no more peace for ever and ever.
"Now mind, you fellows," said Jack Jaikes, "fire low and steady. They are ten times our numbers, but we will fight in shelter and we have these beauties!"
He patted the three mitrailleuses in turn. He had taken charge of the middle one himself, and set his friend Allerdyce and young Brown to command those on either side. We stood at attention, each man knowing that the time could not be long.
Far down towards the Château we heard the rush and jar of an attack. A similar noise came from farther up the wall towards the fitting shops.
"Jehoshaphat, they are flanking us!" exclaimed Jack Jaikes. And before anyone could interfere—supposing that any had so dared—Jack Jaikes had stepped outside the wall into the cumbered Cours of Aramon. I took the liberty of following. Away to the right we could see nothing, except the clouds of smoke drifting up or being tossed by the rough sudden swoop of the blast, stooping down out of the moonlit heavens and the night of stars.
Jack Jaikes must have been conscious of my presence, but he did not order me back. He was talking to himself and he wanted a listener. As Bacon says, he wanted a friend with whom to toss his ideas as a haymaker tosses hay.
"Down there by the Château doesn't matter," he said, looking that way long and earnestly, "Dennis Deventer is there—with MacIntyre and the whole Clydebank gang—little to fear there. Listen, young fellow, how the machine guns are barking—U-r-r-r-rh!I wish ours were talking too, but that mortar shot rather scared them—though it ought not—easy thing to rush a four-inch gun firing shell at that distance and with their numbers. One hole in the line, and then you are upon her. But—see, young un, there they go butting in at the corner of the wall yonder. We must give them a volley. Fellows, run out the mitrailleuses—my own one first. Easy there over the stones! Now the others!"
Presently with the three machine guns we were standing completely shelterless in the Cours of Aramon with half a dozen darksome streets and alleyways gaping at us truculently. "Turn them to the left," he shouted. "Farther out, Allerdyce! Keep your alignment, you Brown—swearing's forbidden, but think that ye hear Donald Iverach at it!"
The light little guns with the pepperpot snouts were swiftly swung round in the direction of the scaling ladders and the hurrying clouds of men.
Each man, Allerdyce, Brown, and Jack Jaikes himself, had his hand on the handle which was to grind death.
"Lie down, you sweeps!" he called to us. "Flat—not a head up."
We lay down, but I looked sideways between the wheels of the centre machine gun. The long legs of Jack Jaikes almost bestrode me.
"GO!"
And then all hell broke loose. The noise of the jarring explosions melted into one infernal whoop, and seemed to ride the storm which at this moment was mounting to the heavens from the south and shutting out the moon.
The attacking party was mown as with a clean-swept scythe. For an instant three swathes were clearly visible—Jack Jaikes, Brown, and Allerdyce had each made his share of the crop lie down.
There came an explosion of rage and anguish.
"Again!" shouted Jack Jaikes. "Keep down that head," he cried to me, and kicked savagely in my direction as he danced about. I obeyed. No account could be required of men at such moments. He might stamp on my head if he found it in his way.
"Sweep the wall and fire low!" was the next order. "Mind, Donald Iverach and the boys are on top. We must not shoot them, but wemusthelp those ladders down. It is a pity we dare not run out the four-inch—only we could never get her back."
Again the rending siren shriek divided the night. We lay on the ground seeing gigantic shapes twisted in seeming agony over guns high above us. Our chins were in the dust and the play of the lightning flashes made the thing somehow demoniacal and unearthly.
"Hell upside down!" as the man next to me pithily said—a parson's son like myself, but from Kent, Pembury in Kent, where young Battersby is still not forgotten.
The mitrailleuses flared red below and the skies flared blue above. The thunder roared continuously and the noise of the machine guns cut it like the thin notes in the treble corner of a piano. Heaven raged against earth, and earth in the person of Jack Jaikes ground out shrill defiance. But that night the bolts from the earthly artillery were the more deadly.
"Cleaned the beggars out!" shouted Jack Jaikes, or at least that is near enough to what he said. "Now then, up you fellows and we will get them back!"
It was easier said than done. For it was one thing to get the little guns down the rubble heaps beneath the battered gateway and quite another to fetch them back. We were compelled to put all our three gun crews into one, and even then we could not have succeeded without the help of the men with ropes pulling from within. I saw Rhoda Polly tugging like one possessed, though why she was not on her tower I do not know.
We had left the other two machine guns unprotected and had to jump back to rescue them. Still there was no enemy in sight and we got Brown's fine No. 1 back into shelter. Remained Allerdyce, and as we rattled down to fetch her up, suddenly the whole of the square in front of us was swept by a storm of bullets. Somehow I found Hugh Deventer beside me.
"You gave us a good easement up at the corner," he said, "I was sure they would get back on you next. Give me a place. I can hoist a gun better than you!"
He was behind the wheel, but even as he set his weight to it Allerdyce—-eternally smiling Scot from Ayrshire, called Soda Bannocks—collapsed over the piece he had commanded and worked. Another man yelled with sudden pain, and I felt a sharp blow on the calf of my leg.
"Clear!" shouted Jack Jaikes, "I will fetch the men. Up with the gun." And he drew Allerdyce off the top of the mitrailleuse as one might gather a wet rag.
The storm passed and as we panted upwards the bullets still tore our ranks. It could not be done. We had not the force. We paused half-way and blocked the wheels with stones so that she would not slip back.
"Great God, what's that?" I turned at the anguish and surprise in the voice of Jack Jaikes, and I saw clear under the rain-washed splendours of the moon Keller Bey walking down the main Cours of Aramon. One hand held aloft a white flag, and on the other side clasping his arm was—Alida!
I dreamed—I was sure I dreamed. That bullet—those fellows knocked over—Allerdyce smiling and abominably limp on the top of his own gun—Jack Jaikes gathering him up—all these things had crazed me, and no wonder. I saw "cats in corners," as I used to do in old college days when I studied too much and too long.
But yet I looked and saw the vision continued. Moreover I heard. Keller Bey was calling out something as he waved the flag. Black cats did not speak. They keep an exact distance away—about four yards and always in the corner of a room or in a stairway—never in the open. What was he saying? One word recurred.
"Trêve!—Trêve!—Trêve!"
"I proclaim a truce in the name of the Internationale!"
Mocking laughter answered him. The Internationale! What did they care for the Internationale? They were out to kill and to take.
Little groups began to gather at the dark alley mouths. I could see the glitter of rifles and bayonets. Present fear was arrested when they saw us withdrawing our guns. Hope sprang into their minds that they might capture the mitrailleuse abandoned halfway up. Their losses stung them to a wild and reckless fury.
I do not know whence the first bullets came—I think from the north end of the Cours Nationale, where some men had been busy removing their dead and wounded. At any rate it was the signal for a general discharge. The streets and alley-ways vomited fire. The crackle of rifle shots sprang from the windows of houses. Somehow we found ourselves outside on the Cours. We had abandoned the gun. Jack Jaikes seemed to be giving some kind of instructions, but I could not make out what he was saying. What I saw was too terrible—Keller Bey on the ground, the white flag of truce stained with blood, and Alida kneeling beside him.
"Take them up!" yelled Jack Jaikes, "run for it!"
Before me strode Hugh Deventer, huge and blond like a Viking. He caught up Alida and would have marched off with her, but that Jack Jaikes barred the way.
"Idiot," he cried, "who can carry a man of Keller's size but you? Give the girl to Cawdor!"
I think at that moment Hugh could have killed him, but he gave me Alida as bidden, and bending he shouldered the dead weight of the wounded man. "Put him higher, then, you fool," he shouted to Jack Jaikes.
"I can't, they are coming at us with the white weapon. Heave him yourself," yelled back Jack Jaikes. I heard no more for Alida, waking suddenly to her position, fought desperately in my arms, escaped, and ran up the broken stones past the abandoned machine gun till I lost sight of her in the dusk of the broken gateway. Hugh Deventer, stumbling after with Keller Bey, cursed me for getting in his road. We did and said a number of things that night which can't well go in a log book, not even now.
I turned and in a moment was with the small band which Jack Jaikes had gathered about the gun. At any cost we must not lose that. There were too many men in Aramon who knew how to make ammunition for any purpose.
Yes, they were coming. They were so near that I had just time to snap in my bayonet and get beside Jack Jaikes. I saw him shake something wet from his hand.
"Are you wounded?" I asked anxiously, for that would have been the crown of our misfortunes.
"No, that's Allerdyce!" he answered, with ghastly brevity, but nevertheless the thing somehow nerved me. We all might be even as Allerdyce, but in the meantime we must stop that ugly black rush—the charge "with the white" as they called a bayonet charge. Behind was the gun—Allerdyce's gun—and beyond that the open defenceless port, the waiting men clewed there by their duty—and the girls!
Lord, how slow they were—these running men!
"Now then, one volley," said Jack Jaikes, "scourge them and then steady for the steel! Remember we are taller men and we have on an average a foot longer reach than they have. You, Gregory, keep behind and blow holes in anybody you can see running."
I cannot remember very clearly this part. How could I? I rather think we did not stand very firm. I seem to remember charging out to meet them—the others too—and Jack Jaikes laying about him in front of everybody with clubbed rifle, grunting like a man who fells bullocks. The lines met with a clash of steel. I remember the click and lunge perfectly. Then suddenly we seemed to be all back to back, and somehow or other the centre of a terrible mixed business, a sort of whirlpool of fighting. Men quite unknown to us had appeared mysteriously from the direction of the Mairie. They were attacking our assailants on the flank. It was warm there under the trees of the promenade for a few minutes. But after a volley or two, as if they had come to seek for Keller Bey, our new allies decided to retire without him. They sucked back firing as they went, and taking with them the red mayoral flag they had carried.
We were left with our own battle to fight. But they had done something. The solidity of the attack had been somewhat fused down. We were not now so closely surrounded.
"Glory, the tucker's out of them!" cried Jack Jaikes, "give them a volley—Henry rifles to the front. Scourge them!"
It was his word—"scourge them." And that to the best of our ability was what we did. The shooting was not very good, or we should have been rid of the enemy much more quickly.
"Stand clear, there!" commanded a voice from above our heads. Rhoda Polly had got a team of men together to lever up Allerdyce's machine gun. She was now bending over it, and those who remained of the dead man's crew bent themselves to the task of getting it in order.
"To right and left, and fire as they run. Now then——!" commanded Rhoda Polly.
"Re-r-r-r-rach-rach-rach!"
The mitrailleuse spat hate and revenge over our heads. The young "second-in-command," trained by Allerdyce, stood calmly to his post and swept the muzzle wherever he saw a cluster of assailants.
"Allerdyce! Allerdyce!" yelled the crew of No. 4. They did not mean him to hear. Allerdyce would never hear anything again—neither the voice of his native Doon, running free over the shallows, nor the raucous voice of his beloved gun, nor even the shouting of his men as they wrote their vengeance for a dead leader across the Cours of Aramon in letters of blood.
This happened almost at the end of the battle, but what I remember best of it all, in all that unknown and unknowable turmoil of death, is the half-wild, half-quixotic, altogether heroic figure of Jack Jaikes, dancing and vapouring under the splendours of the moonlight.
"Come back and fecht!" he yelled. "Come back and fecht for the sowl o' Allerdyce! On'y ten o' ye. I tell ye I'll slay ye for the sake o' Allerdyce! Ye made what's no human o' him. Come back and I will choke ye wi' my bare hands. We were chums, Allerdyce and me, at the Clydebank yaird. God curdle your blood for what ye did to Allerdyce. Come back and fecht, ye hounds o' hell, come back and fecht!"
We were hard put to it before we got the madman in, and then it was worse than ever. For he, our master, the bravest man that I ever saw or think to see, sat down beside his friend and wept like a child. He did not even look at us when we took up Allerdyce and buried him in a long trench with the others who had fallen—five in all, a heavy loss for us who were so few.
"I never want to see Greenock again!" wailed Jack Jaikes, "we were that pack, Allerdyce and me——"
"Go and fetch your father, Rhoda Polly," said I, "this will never do. It would be no use to telegraph. He would never believe the like of Jack Jaikes."
"May God grant he can come!" said Rhoda Polly, and darted off. I went into the outhouse where Keller Bey lay. Harold Wilson was bending over him, a steel probe in his hand. He stood up as I came in, looking narrowly at the point.
"I think we shall pull him through, but so long as we have that young lady"—he pointed at Alida, who was exhausting herself in a long outburst of Oriental sorrow—"I fear we can do nothing radical."
"Wait till Rhoda Polly comes back," I said, "she will get her friend away."
"I do not think so," he said, "she has been trying for some time."
"Could he be moved?"
"Far?" queried the doctor.
"Well, across the river in a boat, and up the hill to my father's house."
Wilson winced. "That is rather a responsibility," he said dubiously; "still, the man is unconscious and will probably remain so for many hours. It certainly would be a good thing if we could be rid of him and of that young woman—though in ordinary circumstances we should not be in such a hurry to send her off."
He grinned pleasantly, and asked how I proposed to set about the business. I told him it would be easy to get Keller Bey down to the nursery gardens by the waterside. Here I would rout out my friend the patron Arcadius, who would do as much for three or four of his gardeners—Italians all, and not touched with local politics. My boat was there, and the gardener lads would carry the stretcher up the hill. They did harder tasks every day of their lives.
"Well, but you see I can't leave all these—where's your doctor?"
I told him I could bring down the resident from the college hospital.
"Oh, I know him, Vallier, a very decent fellow for aninterne. He'll do. Well, off with you. I will give you a note for him."
"We must wait till we get this stopped." I pointed to Jack Jaikes. "You can't do anything I suppose?"
He shook his head. "No, it needs moral authority for that. He would care as little for me as for you—less perhaps. But here comes Mr. Deventer!"
"Thank God!" I gasped.
"Jaikes," commanded Dennis Deventer, "bring the guns forward."
Jack Jaikes staggered to his feet and looked irresolutely about him. Was he going to obey? Did he even understand? For a moment it seemed doubtful. But whether his mind grasped the situation or not he answered the voice of Dennis Deventer.
"What guns, sir?"
"Allerdyce's, Brown's, and your own!" said Dennis firmly. "Take command. Forward with them into the breach," and the machine guns moved forward, the remnant of their crews being reinforced by men from other posts.
"Hold yourself ready there, Jack Jaikes," said Dennis, "this is your business. So far you have done well. We had to fight hard all along our wall, but you have beaten us!"
"But you scourged them too?" demanded Jack Jaikes, lowering and truculent.
Dennis drew a sigh of relief. His lieutenant was himself again.
"Yes, Jack Jaikes, we scourged them!"
For answer Jack Jaikes swept his index finger round the half-circle of the Cours of Aramon, dotted with black bodies lying still.
"It's a pity ye can't see them all," he said, "they are lying in heaps up in the corner yonder, where we cut the scaling ladders from beneath them!"
* * * * *
Though our gallant little Dr. Wilson permitted the removal of Keller Bey, the task before me was one to tax me to the utmost. I think I should have given it up and let Keller Bey lie, but for Rhoda Polly. She came out from a long consultation with Alida, and at once took charge of the situation, much as her father might have done.
I don't know in the least what the girls said to one another, or what reason Alida gave Rhoda Polly for her presence in Aramon or for her dislike of me, but whatever these might have been, they must at least have been sufficient.
As I say, Rhoda Polly took hold. She commandeered an improvised carrying stretcher, which had been prepared at the orchard end of the Château policies. She prevailed on her father to lend her a carrying party as far as the river.
The thought of letting any fraction of his few defenders go outside even for such a purpose made Dennis Deventer frown.
"It will not take ten poor minutes," pleaded Rhoda Polly. "I will see that they get safe back. Let me, Dennis!"
It was not often that she called him by his Christian name save in the heat of wordy strife, and perhaps the very unexpectedness of it touched him.
"Have it your own way then, but be quick—don't forget I am risking the whole defence. I do not see in the least why Wilson could not have attended to him here."
She stepped up and whispered in his ear. He looked first doubtful, then incredulous, and a smile flickered a moment on his face.
"Ah, so!" he exclaimed, "I did not know you were so fanciful, my lady."
But he made no further objection, and we lifted up Keller Bey and put him in the stretcher, where he lay without speech or knowledge. Wilson tried his pulse and listened to his respiration.
"Get him away," he commanded, "the quicker the better!"
Rhoda Polly, Hugh and I helped the men over the wall with him, and held thebrancardin place till they could get over to our assistance. We did not try to go straight to the landing place through the bull ring, but instead cast a wide circuit about the town, and finally came out upon the little house of gardener Arcadius buried among its trees.
Him I awakened with care, first a hail of pebbles on his window panes, followed the scratching teeth of a garden rake to indicate a friend, and lastly my own voice calling softly his name. He looked sleepily out, for he cared nothing about the town and its ongoings, if the early blossoms were not frosted and his young trees were not eaten by predatory goats.
He made me a sign that he would be down immediately, and he was buckling an equatorial waistbelt even as he opened the door.
He started back at the sight of thebrancard. "What! A dead man?"
I explained the desperate need of Keller Bey and his daughter—how they must cross the river and how we counted on him to give us porters. For the boat Rhoda Polly and I would be sufficient, but for the carrying of the stretcher up the hill we had need of four stout fellows.
"I have my Italians," he said, "that is, if none of them have decamped; I locked them in, but the lads from the Peninsula are very handy with a crooked nail."
As we went, Arcadius, lurching in front like a huge sea-lion doing tricks, waved a lantern and spoke of the prospects of his garden. The hard winter had done no harm. It had broken the clods and killed the grubs. The war, the Commune, the black terror of Aramon did not exist for Arcadius. Barrès would not come to expropriate his cauliflowers and early potatoes. He asked no questions about Keller Bey and genially cut short any offer of explanation. His business was the soil, the fruit trees, planting and transplanting, and the sale of young vegetables. Beyond these he desired to know nothing.
His four Italians were there, big, good-looking lads from the north, who found gardening more to their taste than making roads or piling up railway embankments. Arcadius addressed them in a kind oflingua francawhich included much gesticulation and even foot-stamping.
The men appeared to understand, and I put in a few words as to remuneration in their own tongue. For the son of the historian of Italian Art had, of course, been bred to the language. They started and turned upon me eager eyes, and then broke into a torrent of Tuscan which took me instantly to the scented bean-fields and beautiful hills about Siena. Of course they would be proud to carry my friend up the hill. I was the son of the Wise Man of the Many Books. I had been with Garibaldi. Ah, then, that said all. One had a brother who had died following the Little Father. Another had even been told to get out of the way by hasty Menotti. He laughed at the oath which accompanied the command. Of course they were all ready. They could find the boat. It was quite safe. They knew where. They had emptied it once when a squall had overturned it, so that it lay on its side facing the rain.
So with Hugh, Rhoda Polly, one of the Tuscans and myself at the oars we were soon letting ourselves slip away from the shore on which stood Arcadius and his lantern, urging us to bring the lads safe back, because there was a big job with the sweet peas on the morrow.
We went slantingly, not fighting the current too hard, but gliding easily, and avoiding the shallows where we could hear the current roar over the sand and pebbles.
Presently we grounded in the shadow of woods. I knew the place well. The path led almost directly up past Rameau's hut to the little door of the Lycée St. André. We could not have fallen better. We would escape the town altogether, and along aclairièreor open vista of cleared forest land we could easily gain the garden gate of Gobelet.
Keller Bey lay still, the wound on his head keeping him in a state of unconsciousness, which was very helpful to our project. The bullet had glanced from the bone and was now imbedded in the muscles of the neck.
During the transit Alida clove to Rhoda Polly when she could, and when she could not (because of that young person's surprising activity), she fell back on Hugh Deventer. Not once did she look at me, and if I approached she would slip away to the other side.
The four Italians lifted the stretcher and began the ascent. Morn was just beginning to break, so there was not much time. The Tuscans marched to a kind of grunting chorus, as if they were counting numbers slowly. They arranged their own work and rested when they had enough. Once the cleared alley-way of the forest was reached the work became easy. Now the march was on the level. We found the garden gate locked on the inside, but Hugh gave me a hoist up, and in a moment I had it open.
My father, ever a light sleeper, was easily awakened, indeed his student's lamp still burned in his room, and he took it up when he went to warn Linn. She came out sternly composed, listened silently to my report of what Dr. Wilson had said, and what still remained to be done. Then she nodded, still without words, and with a decided air she moved towards their bedroom.
At first sight of Linn, Alida had sprung forward and caught her foster-mother in her arms. Linn gently kissed her, but immediately released herself, that she might be able to give all her attention to her husband.
The leave-takings were of the scantiest. The Italians were on fire to be off before the morning broke. I repeated the directions about theinterneVallier up at the hospital to my father. Then we struck riverward through the pines, racing the sun. Rhoda Polly arrived far in front, and in a few minutes we were on the water again.
It was not till we landed on the little greensward above the backwater where I hid the boat that we asked one another, "Where is Hugh?"
As we did so the sun rose and lighted up the world and all its problems with the terrible clarity of morn, and by it we saw clearly that Hugh Deventer had stayed behind.
Rhoda Polly and I looked at one another till we could look no longer, and then, in spite of the danger, we burst into a peal of the gayest laughter.
The beaten wolves had slunk back to their lairs, but the fierceness of their hate may be guessed from the fact that they would neither bury their dead nor permit us to do it. Thrice was a burying party fired upon, and it was only in the dead of night that Jack Jaikes and Brown succeeded in cleaning the wide square in front of the main gate of the factory.
Dennis Deventer had the iron gate new clamped and strengthened. On the second night it was swung into place by the aid of an improvised crane, which Dennis made, if not like the Creator "out of nothing," yet out of the first things which came handy.
Our messes were now rather smaller. Between the Orchard and the Main Gate attacks we had lost so many that the posts had to be strung out wider to cover the long mileage of wall which had to be guarded.
The elated feeling of the earlier siege had departed. But in its place we were conscious of a kind of proven and almost apathetic courage. We might be called upon by any peril, and we knew now that we could do what should be required of us.
I lived altogether with the gang now, only occasionally (by Jack Jaikes' permission) running in to take a meal with the Deventers and to sun myself in the approval of Rhoda Polly. Of course, I saw her often. She had taken strongly to Allerdyce's gang, and, I think, cherished a hope that Jack Jaikes might one day allow her to command it.
But, fond of Rhoda Polly as he was, Jack Jaikes had no idea of the equality of the sexes when it came to a battery of machine guns. So he gave the captaincy to Penman, a tall, thoughtful fellow of a dusky skin, from the south, a good mechanician and a man dependable on all occasions.
Rhoda Polly sulked a little and confided in me.
I pointed out to her that nothing more delicate than a mitrailleuse had yet been invented. They jammed. They jibbed. They refused to fire when they ought, but let go a shot or two without the least excuse, when they might place those who served them in the greatest danger. What could she, Rhoda Polly, do to remedy these ills? Nothing—whereas Penman had been reared in the factory where they were made, and had long been a foreman "assembler."
"Yes, but," she said, "I could tell him to do all that, and I am sure that I could direct the fighting better. I have been a lot with my father and I have kept my eyes open."
I told her to take her complaints to Jack Jaikes, but she knew better than that. This is how she explained the apparent contempt of the second in command.
"He has seen us sitting sleeping on the roof, hand in hand, when the sunlight was two hours old, and you will see that neither you nor I will ever get farther than we are at present under the consulship of Jack Jaikes. He considers us in the light of a good joke, all because of that unhappy rencontre!"
I was not ambitious like Rhoda Polly, and my position as confidential lieutenant to Jack Jaikes suited me exactly. I do not mean that he ever consulted me, or asked for my opinion on matters of business. But he liked a listener and he loved to thresh out every question immediately and to put down the contradictor. I must have been an immense comfort to him, for I contradicted regularly, with or without conviction, and as regularly allowed myself to be beaten down. That was what I was therefor!
Dennis Deventer had placed Jack Jaikes over the whole of the Works, as distinct from the defences of the Château—which, as the less defensible and the more likely to be attacked, he kept in his own hand. He strengthened the wall of the orchard with palisades, and established posts at either end with a machine gun to sweep its length. In spite of all, the Old Orchard remained the weak spot in our defences, and the sight of it with the enemy's posts so near put an idea into my head.
I went directly to Dennis Deventer. He was sitting placidly watching the "assembling" of a new machine gun, the parts of which had been all ready before the stoppage of the Works. He looked on critically, but without needing to put in a word. Penman, Brown, and the rest were far too good engineers to need even a suggestion. All the same they doubtless knew themselves to be under the eye of the master.
"Chief," said I, "we took Keller Bey and Alida across the water for safety, and I saw them into my father's care at Gobelet, where Hugh remains as a guard. Now the real weakness of our position here is the presence in our midst of Mrs. Deventer and your two daughters!"
"Two daughters—I have three!" said he, but I thought somewhat quizzically and as if comprehending very well.
"Oh, I do not include Rhoda Polly," I answered, "she is as good a soldier as any of us, and could be trusted in all circumstances, even if she were rushed——"
"Rushed?" he said sharply. "How that? How trusted?" I spoke and I saw him wince. Then, in a moment, he answered me, "You are quite right—ten times right. And you mean that the others—could not!"
"I am speaking of what I pray God may never happen, but yet—the odds against us are great. If it were as I suggested—with the other three women—that would be your duty!"
He drew in his breath, hissing, between his teeth, like one who feels the first sharp incision of the knife. His hands clenched and something like a groan came from the strong man. I pursued my advantage.
"You might not be there, Mr. Deventer—you might be lying as I saw Allerdyce along the top of your gun. So might I—so might anyone you dared delegate."
"God forgive you—you put water into my veins. How could any man 'delegate' such a thing!"
"No," said I, "I feel as you do, and for that reason I beg of you to let me escort your wife and daughters to the care of my father."
"And suppose," he said, "that our friends the enemy, finding us a hard nut to crack and probably with little kernel when cracked, should take it into their heads to cross the bridge and plunder the houses on the hill of St. André?"
"I think not, sir," I answered steadily. "There are Government troops in Aramon le Vieux. The National Guard there is all against the revolutionists. In the old town the tricolour has never been in the least danger. The whole department would move upon them if they attempted such a thing."
"Well argued, my Cicero," said he, "you are your father's son. But these black-a-vised rogues of ours defy reasoning. They may do the very thing all wisdom shows that they ought not to do. And a visit to Gobelet on the hill is one of these temptations which may prove too much for the gaol birds who shelter themselves under the black flag of anarchy. I do not see that the danger would be much lessened, considering the devil's crew with whom we have to deal. A raid across the water, made by night, would be an exploit worthy of them."
So my proposition was for the time rejected, but I did not despair. For I knew, or thought I knew, that the absence of the women would relieve us who were fighting the lines of the Château and Factory from an almost intolerable fear. In this respect I now think I was wrong. For the idea of the girls and their mother being entrusted to them to defend, made every man behind the defences hate the enemy with a deep steady hatred. Each became in his own eyes charged with the care of Liz or Hannah, of Rhoda Polly or their mother, according to where, or in what relation of life—sweetheart, sister, or mother—their hearts were tenderest.
Outside the situation changed but slowly. The Committee of Public Safety had taken possession of the Mairie after Keller Bey had been abandoned by his colleagues—and when with Alida he had come forth to make a last effort at conciliation. Except the desperate Chanot, none of the leaders of the Revolt-against-the-Revolt had taken any part in the fighting. Barrès, Chardon, even Bonnot had sat and directed operations from the safe shelter of the Hôtel de Ville.
It was not cowardice, the scoundrels were brave enough, as they showed afterwards—but they had reached what seemed a haven of peace, and the share of the plunder which had been claimed by the "administration" assured them of good restaurant meals and such joyous company as was to be found in Aramon.
Speaking to Chardon, his lieutenant Chanot treated the whole business lightly.
"Why should we not take the best of life we can? It may not be for long," he said, referring to this period. "You people of the Château had taken toll of our numbers. Well, I do not complain. There was the more left for the rest. We had appropriated, and who had a better right to spend? There was no more cant of liberty and individualism among us, and each man being a law and a religion to himself, we stole from one another when we could. That is, if we found a friend's cash-box in a place where a hand might grasp it, we thought how much good it would do him to drink of his own brewing. So we 'individually expropriated' him. That is why Lasalle of St. Gilles was killed by Auroy. Auroy found him mixed up with a roll of bank-notes he had hidden in his mattress. There had been a new election for the Quartier St. Marthe, and as nobody thought of voting, we nominated Eusèbe le Plan who had lost an arm in the fighting and would be a long time in hospital. This made the plums go still farther round."
"The old 'reds'? Oh, they were in the town mostly, hidden in garrets, passing their time like Troppman in reading 'The Picturesque Magazine'" (here he laughed), "and listening for our footsteps and the grounding of our rifle-butts before their doors. They thought we wanted them. What in the devil's name should we want with such feeble, broken, bellowing cattle? They had brought nothing to the office. They had been content with their fifteen pence a day. Not one of them had a sou to rub against another, and their wives hardly knew where the next day's soup was to come from. Oh, yes, I know now, that which had I known then, some blood would have splashed the garden walls—that Dennis Deventer had his own folk among them who distributed money and food. They were his best workmen and it was an agreed thing that when all this had blown over and when we who had turned them out were all shot or beheaded, he should enlist them again, and they would go back in the 'shops' to speak with deference and sobriety as becomes an inferior to his superior!"
* * * * *
I do not mean that there was any regular truce—rather a kind of inaction and exhaustion. The first ardours of the political brigands had been cooled by machine gun practice—Napoleon's old prescription of "the whiff of grapeshot." A good many of this miscellaneous collection of rascals, especially those who had done well in the earlier work of incendiarism among the villas along the riverside, tailed off without crying a warning. They made their way, some to Marseilles, where the troops were just putting down the rule of Gaston Cremieux, some to Narbonne, which was still in the wildest revolt, while others scattered over the country, committing crimes in lonely places, hiding in the forests by day and tramping by night, till for the most part they managed to get themselves out of the country into Germany, Switzerland, or Spain—wherever, indeed, they were least known.
But those who were left behind at Aramon waxed all the more deadly and desperate because of these desertions. If only they had guessed how severe our losses had been, they would have attacked with more vigour than they did, but I think they judged that the "scourging" inflicted upon them by Jack Jaikes had been almost without loss to ourselves. Alas, besides the mound in the Orchard, the double row of graves in the beaten earth of the courtyard told another tale! I do not think anyone ever passed the spot without lifting his hat to Allerdyce and his troop of gallant men, to whom the noble May days and the starry nights of the last days of our siege mattered so little.
It was about this time that Matteo le Gaucher—Matteo the Left-handed—began to interest himself in our concerns. At first sight nothing was more unlikely than that Matteo could ever make the slightest difference to the fate of any human soul. Yet great and even final events hung upon Matteo le Gaucher. He was an Italian from Arquà, and, as was said by his comrades, a "spiteful toad." He was deformed in body, and of course carried with him the repute of ajettatore. The evil eye certainly looked out from under his low brows, but it was with his evil tongue that he could actually do the most mischief.
He had been employed by Arcadius in his garden. He was not a bad workman. "The ground," as he said, "was not too far off for him." He could work when he chose, better than anyone at the task of the day. But he was a born fault-finder, a born idler, insolent and quarrelsome. The four who were his room-mates and who worked with him bore longer with him because of his bodily infirmity and also because of the Evil Eye, which they mocked at but devoutly believed in. At last he aroused Arcadius, across whose path he had always been loath to come.
Arcadius found a fault. Matteo found a knife. All men knew the light gardening hoe which seldom left the hand of Arcadius. Well, the master's eye was accurate, and Matteo went to the town hospital with a broken wrist and a right hand almost hagged off. Let no one for a moment be sorry for Matteo. In that comprehensive interval he began to plot many things rendered natural by years of vendetta practice.
Directly, he could not hurt Arcadius. He had tried that and Chanot had only laughed at him. No, even to please him, the Committee of Public Safety would not shoot the man who sent them their finest, indeed their only, early fruits. Arcadius had no store of gold hid in his chimney. He had spent it all with Chanot's uncle the notary, buying new land, ever more and more—and some still not paid for—but all regularly being covered instalment and interest. This Chanot knew, because in his days of (oh, so dull) respectability, Chanot had had to make out the receipts. And how he hated the thought of the long days of deskwork.
Matteo mourned over his broken wrist, which hurt the more abominably whenever he hated anyone and could in no wise wreck his hatred. He must think out something else. He retired into his pillows, turned his face to the wall, and for a day and a night thought by what means he could best hurt Arcadius or the friends of the master-gardener.
He had been in the corner of the hangar-dormitory that night when the four Tuscans had been called up to follow the lantern of Arcadius. The Toad, with the venom attributed to him for centuries, had risen quietly and from behind the great arbutus, had seen the boat with Keller Bey lying stark on his stretcher, and the beautiful girl watching over him, push out into the night.
On their return the Tuscans had exhibited their newly earned gold, and all innocently had striven to set his cupidity wild by tales of the wonderful paradise of fertility and riches under the brow of the hill of Mont St. André.
Matteo le Gaucher snarled at them, denying that the coins were good, or, if good, that they had been won (as they asserted) by merely carrying a sick man up a hill.
Not for such service did men give gold Napoleons. They lied, Carlo, Beppo, Lorenzo, and the oaf from San Ghomigniano of the Seven Towers. They all lied, and Matteo, who was certainly in most evil humour that day, tried to knock up the hand in which the Tuscan was jingling them. He of the City of the Seven Towers felled Matteo, who would never have forgiven him, if the bone-splintering blow of the mattock in the hand of Arcadius had not come to fill the hater with the hope of a greater vengeance.
Nevertheless the thought of the rich man who dwelt on the slopes of Mont St. André, with sacks of golden Napoleons on either side of every room, kept haunting him. Matteo could neither eat nor sleep till he had seen. So he took a half-holiday without asking permission (the beginning of his quarrel with the huge Arcadius) and, stealing a skiff from a neighbouring landing, scrambled up the steep face of Mont St. André.
Fortune willed that he should meet the juniorlycéensout for a walk, two and two, with only a weakpionto restrain them. Naturally Matteo was mocked and mobbed. Matteo drew a knife, and grinned like a wild cat, but recognised his error in time, accepted the situation, and with the hate of hell in his heart, began to show the juniors knife tricks—how to let it fall always with the point down, how to send it whizzing like a gleam of light deep into the heart of a tree, which might just as well have been the heart of a man.
At last he got clear of them, smiling and bowing, till the sober-coated little rascals were lost to sight on the high path. Then he brandished his knife in fury, and vowed that if he could he would cut the throat of every wretched imp among them.
But at the sound of voices he subdued his anger, and, humbly asking his way from this passer-by and that other, he at last made his way to Gobelet. He knocked long for admission at the porter's lodge, but the porteress seeing such a calumny on God's handiwork outside, and scenting appeals for charity, eyed him disfavourably through the little cross-barred spy-window and let him knock.
A little farther down the road, he was quite as unsuccessful at the tower port of the Garden Cottage, over which the Tessiers had been wont to sleep.
There was no one in the house at all, yet Matteo le Gaucher quickly running to the top of the bank opposite, imagined he saw faces mocking him at every window.
It chanced that for his sins (whatever they may have been) my father was at that moment coming leisurely down the hill, his hands behind his back. He had been up to call upon his friend Renard before his siesta, and they two had argued over-long as to the purport of the fourteenth chapter of the Koran.
Suddenly full in his path he found Matteo grovelling before him, his hands and knees covered with blood, foam from his lips, and to all appearance in a state of extreme exhaustion. Now my father, Gordon Cawdor, was a man of very simple and direct mind, so far as the actions of those about him went. He believed that what he saw was the reality. Indeed, so transparent was his honesty that men took fright at it, counting it as the last achievement of duplicity, so that on an average he was as seldom deceived as any other man in the country.
Now he cried out for help, and after one or two shouts Saunders McKie and Hugh Deventer came through the gate and took up the seeming epileptic.
Saunders was wholly sceptical and when ordered by his master to wash the froth from the sufferer's mouth prospected with such good will for soap within that Matteo, had he dared, would gladly have bitten the finger off. He was compelled to swallow what might have served him another time.
"Dowse him wi' a bucket o' water, and let him gang his ways. I like not the look o' the speldron. He is like the Brownie that my Uncle Jock yince saw on the Lang Hill o' Lowden—a fearsome taed it was, juist like this Eytalian."
"Hold your peace, Saunders," commented my father. "You, he, and I are as God made us, and little that matters. What is written of us in the Book,thatalone shall praise or condemn us!"
"Lord's sake, Maister Cawdor," said Saunders, who always wilted before my father in his moments of spiritual reproof, "I was sayin' and thinkin' no different. The Book and What is Written Therein! That's the rub, an' no to be spoken o' lichtly. And after a' the craitur's a craitur, though I will say——"
"Say nothing, Saunders, till you have given the unfortunate to eat and drink. Then when he is recovered I shall speak with him a moment."
"Weel, Maister Cawdor, let your speech be silver, and no gowden."
"You mean, Saunders?"
"I juist mean that the buckie has a gallow's look aboot him, and if ye are so ill-advised and—aye, I will say it—sae wicked as to gie him gold, we shall a' hae our throats cuttit in our beds yin o' thae nichts!"
Whereupon my father reproved his old servant for narrow-mindedness and evil thinking, but Saunders held his own.
"Narrow-mindedness here and ill-thinkin' there," he said, "blessed are they that think no evil, I ken, and that blessing ye are sure o', Maister Cawdor. But ye pay me a wage to keep watch and ward for ye over all evil-doers, and may I never taste porridge mair if this lad doesna smell the reek o' the deil's peats a mile away."
Saunders prevailed in the matter of the gold, and it was only a five-franc piece that Matteo carried away from the gate of Gobelet. Hugh Deventer and Alida came out to see off the man who had caused such a disturbance in the peace of the quiet villa. Matteo gazed at Alida with the look of a wild beast before whose cage passes a fine-skinned plump gazelle.
He was full to the lips with rage, bitterness, and all uncharitableness. Gobelet he had seen, but owing to the machinations of that enemy of mankind, Saunders, only the great paved kitchen in which the menservants and maidservants passed to and fro, all gazing at him with inquisitive and contemptuous eyes. Ah, if only he could make them smart for that, those full-fed minions whose broken meats had been set down to him, Matteo of Arquà. Not but that these were good, yes, and the wine was excellent. It might be worth while, when he should decide to turn honest, to find some such place, perhaps as porter or lodge-keeper against his old age.
So after ringing the piece of a hundred sous on a stone, Matteo gave himself to meditation as he descended to his boat. The house was rich. There were many servants, and access to the money-bags along the wall would be impossible to him.
But there were others who would think but little of the task. If only he were at Arquà, he knew of as pretty a gang as ever donned masks—honest, too, in their way, men who would not cheat the indicator of good business out of his lawful share.
But here Matteo le Gaucher must think things over. It was vain for him to give away a valuable secret without some guarantee of gain. So Matteo crept back and took to his bed, where he turned the matter over and turned it over, till he began to despair of ever finding a way of bettering his condition without having to work. The touch of the five-franc piece in his pocket, gained by a little dissimulation, had disgusted him with the culture of cauliflower and early potato.
Next morning he scamped his work, fell athwart the bluff bows of Arcadius, and so found himself with a broken bone and a wounded wrist in the hospital of La Grâce at Aramon.
Here he fell in the way of ex-notary's clerk Chanot, whose practice in his uncle's office soon wormed Matteo's whole confidence from him—that is, save on one point which he kept obstinately to himself.