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A Tatter of Scarlet: Adventurous Episodes of the Commune in the Midi 1871

by S. R. Crockett · English · Gutenberg #36945 · 563,291 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Tatter of Scarlet: Adventurous Episodes of the Commune in the Midi 1871

Author: S. R. Crockett


        
Release date: August 2, 2011 [eBook #36945]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Clarke and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TATTER OF SCARLET: ADVENTUROUS EPISODES OF THE COMMUNE IN THE MIDI 1871 ***




Produced by David Clarke and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









  A TATTER OF SCARLET




  A TATTER OF
  SCARLET

  ADVENTUROUS EPISODES OF THE
  COMMUNE IN THE MIDI
  1871

  BY
  S. R. CROCKETT

  SECOND EDITION

  HODDER AND STOUGHTON
  LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

  _Printed in 1913_




  CONTENTS


                                            PAGE

          CHAPTER I

  HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN                 1

          CHAPTER II

  KITH AND KIN                                9

          CHAPTER III

  THE LAUNDRY DOOR                           13

          CHAPTER IV

  THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES                  21

          CHAPTER V

  THE DEVENTER GIRLS                         30

          CHAPTER VI

  AN OLD MAN MASTERFUL                       34

          CHAPTER VII

  OUR FIRST COMMUNARD                        44

          CHAPTER VIII

  I SEE THE SCARLET TATTER NEAR AT HAND      50

          CHAPTER IX

  A REUNION OF THE REDS                      57

          CHAPTER X

  JEANNE'S VELVET EYES                       65

          CHAPTER XI

  HOW MEN SEE RED                            73

          CHAPTER XII

  "GOOD-BYE, RHODA POLLY"                    78

          CHAPTER XIII

  WE SEEK GARIBALDI                          84

          CHAPTER XIV

  "THE CHILDREN"                             96

          CHAPTER XV

  FIRST BLOOD                               101

          CHAPTER XVI

  THE COMING OF ALIDA                       107

          CHAPTER XVII

  A DESERT PRINCESS                         117

          CHAPTER XVIII

  THE PRINCESS COMMANDS                     126

          CHAPTER XIX

  KELLER BEY COMES TO ARAMON                132

          CHAPTER XX

  I PLAY "THREE'S COMPANY"                  138

          CHAPTER XXI

  THE GOLDEN HEART OF RHODA POLLY           145

          CHAPTER XXII

  IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW               149

          CHAPTER XXIII

  THE MISGIVINGS OF ALIDA                   156

          CHAPTER XXIV

  PEACE BEFORE STORM                        169

          CHAPTER XXV

  THE PROCLAMATION                          175

          CHAPTER XXVI

  KELLER BEY, INSURGENT                     185

          CHAPTER XXVII

  UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN?               199

          CHAPTER XXVIII

  STORM GATHERING                           208

          CHAPTER XXIX

  WITHIN THE PALE                           216

          CHAPTER XXX

  DEVIL'S TALK                              226

          CHAPTER XXXI

  THE BLACK BAND                            233

          CHAPTER XXXII

  "READY!"                                  239

          CHAPTER XXXIII

  "HELL UPSIDE DOWN!"                       251

          CHAPTER XXXIV

  THE PASSING OF KELLER BEY                 259

          CHAPTER XXXV

  A CAPTAIN OF BRIGANDS                     266

          CHAPTER XXXVI

  LEFT-HANDED MATTHEW                       273

          CHAPTER XXXVII

  LOOT                                      284

          CHAPTER XXXVIII

  THE LAST ADVENTURE OF THE BLACK BAND      291

          CHAPTER XXXIX

  THE CONVERSION OF CHANOT                  306

          CHAPTER XL

  THE LAST OF THE "TATTER OF SCARLET"       312




A TATTER OF SCARLET




CHAPTER I

HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN


Deventer and I leaned on the parapet and watched the curious things
which were happening in Aramon across the river. We were the biggest
boys in the school and kept even the Seniors in awe, being "Les Anglais"
to them--and so familiar with the "boxe"--though Deventer was an
Irishman, and I, Angus Cawdor, a Scot of the Scots.

We had explained the difference to them many times by arguments which
may have temporarily persuaded some, but without in the least affecting
the fixed French notion that all English-speaking people are of English
race.

Behind us circulated the usual menagerie-promenade of the "Grands,"
gabbling and whispering tremendous secrets in files of two and three.

Hugh Deventer was a great hulk of a fellow who would take half a dozen
French Seniors and rub their heads together if I told him, laughing
loudly at their protestations as to loss of honour. He had been
challenged several times to fight duels with small swords, but the
Frenchmen had given that up now. For Deventer spat on his palms and
pursued the seconds who came with the challenge round and round the
playground till he caught and smacked them. Whereat he laughed again.
His father was chief of the Small Arms Factory, which of late years had
been added to the arsenal works of New Aramon opposite to us on the left
bank of the Rhone.

My own father was a clergyman, who for the sake of his health had
retired to the dry sunny Rhone valley, and had settled in a green and
white villa at Aramon because of the famous _lycee_ which was perched up
on the heights of Aramon le Vieux.

There was not much to distinguish Aramon the Old from Aramon the New,
that is, from a distance. Both glowed out startingly white and
delicately creamy between the burnished river and the flawless sapphire
of the Provencal sky. It was still winter time by the calendar, but the
sun beat on our bowed shoulders as we bent over the solid masonry of the
breastwork, and the stones were hotter than in English dog-days as we
plucked away our hands from it.

Deventer and I looked across at the greater New Aramon where his father
lived. It was the Aramon of shops and hotels and factories, while Aramon
le Vieux, over which our great _lycee_ throned it like a glorified
barracks, was a place of crumbling walls, ancient arcaded streets,
twelfth-century palaces let as tenements, and all the interesting
_debris_ of a historical city on the verges of Languedoc.

Our French _lyceens_ were too used to all this beauty and antiquity to
care anything about it, but we English did. We were left pretty much to
ourselves on our rare days of liberty, and as the professors, and
especially the _proviseur_, knew that we were to be trusted, we were
allowed to poke about the old Languedocian outpost much as we pleased.

It was the month of January, 1871. France was invaded, beaten, but not
conquered; but here in the far South, though tongues wagged fiercely, in
his heart the good bourgeois was glad to be out of it all.

At any rate, the _lycee_ was carried on just as usual. Punishments were
dealt out and tasks exacted. _Pions_ watched constantly over our
unstable morals, and occasionally reported misdemeanours of a milder
kind, not daring to make their position worse by revealing anything that
really mattered.

But, generally speaking, Aramon le Vieux dreamed away the hours,
blinking in the sunshine. The war did not touch it save in the fierce
clatter of _cafe_ dispute. Only in the forts that rose about the arsenal
of the newer city opposite to us a feeble guard of artillery and
linesmen lingered as a protection for the Small Arms Factory.

For the new Paris Government was still far from stable, and some feared
a renewal of the White Terror of 1815, and others the Red of the Commune
of 1848. The workmen of the arsenal, hastily gathered from all quarters,
were mostly sealed to the "Internationale," but it was supposed that the
field-pieces in Fort St. Andre could easily account for any number of
these hot-heads.

Besides Hugh Deventer and I there were several other English boys, but
they were still screeching like seagulls somewhere in the Lower School
and so did not count, except when an anxious mamma besought us with
tears in her voice to look after her darling, abandoned all day to his
fate among these horrid French.

To "look after" them Deventer and I could not do, but we gathered them
into a sort of fives team, and organised a poor feckless game in the
windowless angle of the refectory. We also got hockey sticks and
bastinadoed their legs for their souls' good to the great marvel of the
natives. Deventer had even been responsible for a trial of lacrosse, but
good missionaries though we were, we made no French converts.

The Juniors squealed like driven piglings when the ball came their way,
while the Seniors preferred walking up and down their paved cattle-pen,
interminably talking with linked arms and lips close to the ear of a
chosen friend.

Always one or two read as they walked alone, memorising fiercely against
next Saturday's examination.

The pariah _pion_ or outcast usher, a most unhappy out-at-elbows youth,
was expected to keep us all under his eye, but we saw to it early that
that eye passed leniently over Deventer and myself. Otherwise he counted
for nothing.

The War--the War--nothing but talk of the War came to our ears from the
murmuring throng behind us. How "France has been betrayed." "How the new
armies of the Third Republic would liberate Paris and sweep the
Prussians back to Berlin. From every side brave patriots were even now
closing in upon the beleaguered city. Ha, then the spiked helmets would
see!"

Still, a few facts grew more clear to us. At Lyons and Grenoble,
Bourbaki was organising the army of the South-East. There came a sound
from nowhere in particular that this army was to be joined and led by
Garibaldi himself with thirty thousand of his red jackets from Italy.

Deventer and I were immensely excited. We made plans for immediate
invasion. We would fight for France and wear a red cardigan in the
Foreign Legion. But the _Lycee_ St. Andre was well guarded, and so far
no one had succeeded in escaping. I do not know that they tried very
hard. They were French lads and brave--as many of them showed
afterwards--but they were of the Midi, and even then the Midi was
proverbially hard to budge. Not as in the North and East had the iron of
the invasion entered the soul.

The parapet upon which we leaned was of very ancient masonry, solid
blocks laid clean and Cyclopean with very little visible cement. It had
formed part of the defences of an ancient castle, long since overwhelmed
by the college buildings, the materials of which had mostly been
quarried from its imposing mass.

Beneath us ran the Rhone in a fine, broad, half-mile-wide sweep, five or
six miles an hour, yet save for the heaped hillocks of water about the
bridge piers, and the swirl where the far bank curved over, as smooth as
a mirror.

Hugh Deventer and I had been talking of the great '61 campaign of
Garibaldi in Sicily and through Naples--a thousand red-shirts and a
kingdom in the dust! Ah, the glory of that time!

But as we leaned and looked we fell silent. We saw Aramon the New
opposite to us, as it were at our feet, across only that span of water.
The factories were curiously silent, and from one fort after another
darted the white spurt of smoke which meant artillery practice.

We listened, knowing that in a little we should hear the report.

_Boom! Boom! Rattle-rattle-chirr!_

Fighting--they were fighting in Aramon! Deventer's father would be in
the thick of it. We looked and longed, but the way was closed. What
could it be?

Deventer knew that there were continually troubles between the
operatives and the "masters," or rather the representatives of the
masters of whom his father was the chief.

The great _Compagnie d'Armes de Guerre Aramoise_ was not distinguished
for generosity. The men were well lodged but poorly paid. In these war
times they had been over-driven. So many hundreds of rifles to turn out
daily--field artillery, too, and a new department to be set up for the
manufacture of mitrailleuses.

Outside, Dennis Deventer said little about the politics of the works,
nothing at all to his son Hugh.

We of the _lycee_ knew that France was already fairly evenly divided
between true Republicans and those others who looked upon Gambetta's
republic as a step to a monarchy or even the restoration of the
Napoleons. The sons of functionaries mostly held the latter opinion. The
scions of the aristocratic families of the neighbourhood, the old Whites
of the Midi, prayed for the Bourbon flag and the coming of Henry V to
his own again.

So when we heard the ripple of musketry fire and the sullen boom of the
artillery, Deventer and I supposed that a mutiny of sorts had broken out
at the works, or that news had come from Paris of some sudden change of
government.

We were not far from the mark. There had been news from Paris and a
mutiny had broken out. At any rate, they were fighting over in Aramon,
and we must find out what it was all about.

For the moment this was impossible for us. The cliff was too sheer on
the side of our recreation ground. There were over many eyes upon us. We
must wait for the night, and in the meantime Deventer could only sniff
the battle from afar, and hold in the desire to set off and help his
father.

"The Dad doesn't want me," he said. "Of course, I know that. He would
most likely tan me well for breaking bounds, but I can't bear being
cooped up here doing silly mathematics when over yonder----But listen to
them!"

A patter of what might have been heavy rain on a tin roof came faintly
to our ears. A little white cloud hung over the statue in the market
square, and presently flung down devilish fingers earthward. We did not
then know the signs of the explosion of shrapnel.

By this time the school was crowding about us, as curious as ourselves.
The bell clanged for classes to resume, but no one moved. The _pion_
screamed impotently in the rear. None took any notice, and the windows
above were black with the gowns of the professors.

Some thought that the noise was only the letting off of blasts in the
Pierre de Montagne quarries, but it was pointed out that such explosions
took place only at eight, one, and four, the hours when the men would be
out of the quarries at their meals. Besides, the crackle of small fire
was unaccounted for, and each moment it became more lively.

Practice at the Chassepot factories? Very likely--but at human targets.

Finally the college authorities caused discipline to prevail, and
Deventer and I watched alone by the parapet. We had both passed our
_bachot_, and were an honour to the college. So the strictness of rule
and line was relaxed in our case.

Our hearts beat, and in the instancy of our watch we would not have
turned our heads if the _proviseur_ himself had been at our side.

Presently we could see soldiers marching, the flash of bayonets, and
groups of a dozen, as if pushed beyond their patience, turning and
firing with rapid irregularity. All this in flashes of vision, mostly at
the bridge-end, or at the intersection of two streets. Through the
northern gate a kind of uncertain retreat began to dribble--the red
breeches of the linesmen, the canter of the artillery horses attacking
the hill, with stragglers here and there looking about for their
regiments.

Neither Deventer nor I knew enough to explain these things.

"There are no Germans nearer than Toul or Besancon," he said, with a
puzzled anxiety.

The field guns answered him smartly. From all the houses about the
northern gate a storm of rifle fire broke out. The soldiers on foot
hastened their retreat. The artillerymen, better led or of firmer
courage, faced about, and with one volley pitted the facades of the
houses from which the attack had come. They withdrew regularly, covering
the retreat of the infantry, and spat out their little devils' claws of
shrapnel over every group which showed itself outside the wall. Slowly
the soldiers passed out of sight. The artillery bucketed over the knolls
of the Montagne of Aramon among the evergreen odoriferous plants and the
faint traces of the last snow wreaths.

There was nothing left for us to see now except the town of Aramon, its
green and white houses sleeping in the sun, the tall chimney of the
Small Arms Factory, now smokeless--and the broad Rhone sweeping grave
and placid between them and us.

Nevertheless we waited alone on the recreation ground, our heads a
little dizzy. The swooning hum of the class-rooms awoke behind us, but
we heeded not at all.

We saw the tricolour of the Republic come down with a run from the tall
flagstaff on Fort St. Andre, and presently, irregularly tugged, rising a
few feet at a time, a red flag fluttered out, probably an improvised
table-cover or bedspread. It flapped out bravely in the brisk breeze off
the water.

We had had our first glimpse of "The Tatter of Scarlet."




CHAPTER II

KITH AND KIN


I don't think I troubled much about my father when I resolved to run
away from the _Lycee_ St. Andre. He had, as I thought, never troubled
much about me.

Afterwards I found that I had been mistaken, but perhaps not more than
most. For it is the rarest thing in the world to find a son entering
upon life, able to do justice to his father's ideas and motives.

Yet it was for my sake that he had given up the society of his fellow
savants and had exiled himself to Aramon le Vieux, with only his books
for company. At Nice, Mentone, or Cap Martin, the author of "The History
and Growth of Italian Art" could have lived a great part of the year
among kindred spirits, but because of me and St. Andre, he had shut
himself up with his books and collections in the Villa Gobelet on the
piney southern slopes of the long convent ridge, the summit of which was
crowned by the immense acreage of rambling white masonry which
constituted our _lycee_.

My father, Gordon Cawdor, mixed freely enough with the engineers in New
Aramon. But I knew very well that he endured rather than enjoyed their
society.

They talked of springs and hoppers, of pauls and recoil tampons, and my
father sat with his gentle wise head nodding as if taking in each point.
But he never spoke to them of his own work, and, excepting Deventer's
father, there was not one who knew more about Italian art than a dim
memory of a bad lithograph of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" could recall to
him.

Dennis Deventer, a tall dark grey man with the most mobile eyebrows I
ever saw in my life, lives much in my early memories of my father's
house. He seems now to have been always there, though of course he could
really have come but seldom--a massive, slow-moving, swiftly
scrutinising man, who bent shaggy eyebrows upon his son and myself, and
in whose presence it was not good to make the easily forged excuses
which served so well for my scholarly father.

Hugh said that it was because he listened all day to excuses and
explanations over at the Arms Factory, without believing any one of
them.

He had succeeded a manager who had been driven from Aramon because he
was afraid of his men. But now the men, though they hated him as the
representative of the Company, freely acknowledged his courage and
austere justice.

His house was the largest in New Aramon, and he had within it three
daughters all verging on, or just overlapping early womanhood, besides a
comfortable wife who purred her way contented and motherly through all
domestic storms. She alone could tame her husband's furies. They sank
before her eye, her husband changing obviously to all men's sight, his
factory oaths silenced, his bullying temper visibly crumbling, and the
man growing sweet and wholesome as newly ground meal.

These were the two houses best known to me as a boy, and indeed to the
edge of manhood. Judge ye which I liked the best?

My father was a beautifully profiled Scottish minister of the old
school, whom an unexpected fortune had enabled to follow his impulses in
the matter of work. He had long ago retired from his parish, indeed
before I could remember, and as I learned from his steadfast retainer,
old Saunders McKie, immediately after the death of my mother.

"Irongray Parish was no more for him, oh no," Saunders would say,
sententiously pausing in the polishing of my father's silver
shoe-buckles. "He laid down his wark as if he had been stricken. He
never preached again, and his pulpit was silent for three whole weeks
after her death. Assistants and siccan cattle werena sae common to come
at then as now--when ye send a telegram in the morning, and the laddie
is down on the six train wi' his baggie. So the elders juist read a
portion, and sent down to the Cameronian meeting-house for a man fit to
put up a prayer. We were Established, ye see, so the like was no to be
expected o' _us_!

"Eh, a broken man was your farther in thae days. He would wander from
room to room, tak' down a book here, look at it a while and then put it
up again with a muttered 'Tush' as if he could make nothing of it. I
doubt if he so much as saw the print line by line, but all
troubled-like, as one might through a green whorl of skylight glass.
Then he would dawner into the room where you were lying, or maybe being
fed, and at sight o' ye, the state that man would be in!

"He could not get out o' the nursery quick enough, yet for all that he
would be back within the hour."

Saunders was a great standby. His humour jumped with mine far more
nearly than my father's. This, too, in spite of the fact that I rarely
saw him without calling down the vials of his wrath. My father seldom
reproved me, never in anger, but Saunders, with the care of my young
soul heavy on his Calvinistic conscience, laboured faithfully with me in
season and out of season.

One good he did me. He kept me from forgetting my Scottish tongue, and
there was never a day that he did not supply me with some phrase sappy
with mother wit and drowned in Scotland.

"Aaengus," he would say, "I kenna wha it is ye favour--nane o' your
faither's folk at any rate--all chestnut-brown and quick as an eel. No
wonder ye can tie knots in yoursel' at the parallel bars that were
siccan a trouble to set up for ye to caper on, and your e'en like sloes
after the first frosts. It's a gipsy ye are and no real Cawdor of all.
Though they do say that the Cawdors have gipsy blood on the distaff
side. At ony rate ye will never be the 'sponsible sober man your faither
is."

In spite of all this I stood high in the good graces of Saunders, and he
would sometimes ask my father for the additional pocket-money which I
dared not hint at myself. Saunders often wandered back into reminiscence
of the time when he had been a jobbing stonemason on the Cromarty Firth,
a companion of Hugh Miller's, and "the very deevil for raking the
country."

He had tramped scores of miles with Hugh Miller only for the sake of
hearing him talk, yet I gathered that he had not believed a single word
he had been told about the great fishes and curious monsters that once
swam in the lakes of the Old Red Sandstone.

"But I never telled him sae," he would conclude; "oh, no, Saunders
kenned better. Hugh Miller was no doubt a wonderful genius, but at that
time he was a man easily angered, and when roused, violent of his
hands."

So now I have sketched the school, and the several domestic surroundings
which we proposed to leave behind us. I do not think that we thought
much about these. I know that I did not, and I don't believe that
Deventer did either--not, that is, till we saw the soldiers retreating
from the barracks and forts of Aramon, and that little oblong blot of
red in the sky which meant insurrection, and God only knew what of
terror and destruction, fluttering in the brisk mistral wind from the
tower on which we had so long seen the tricolour.

At that time we had only the vaguest idea of what the Commune was, and
none whatsoever of the new ideas of justice and equality which underlay
that cumbrously ill-managed business.




CHAPTER III

THE LAUNDRY DOOR


After a while Deventer and I went back to our joint study, where we
essayed to do some work. But mostly we spoke apart, with lips that
hardly moved, of our plans and all that lay in liberty-land beyond the
walls. Deventer would go nowhere but to his father's house, and though I
meant to end up with the red blouse of Garibaldi on my chest, I did not
see how I could fail him at such a time.

We had to wait till night, and the time was almost unendurably long. The
lines in our text-books which our eyes followed did not bite upon our
minds. We were thinking so hard of other things that philosophies slid
aside impotent and discomfited.

We began immediately to plan our escape, or at least I planned and
Deventer, his great shaggy head on his hands and his eyes tight shut to
concentrate thought, gave himself to the task of spotting the weak
points.

At the bottom of the junior promenade was a door which opened upon the
river, and on the opposite side dwelt a man who owned a skiff. The
elders of the upper school used to employ this man, Jules Rameau by
name, to ferry them across as often as they had enough money for a
secret supper at a cabaret in some shy street. But some ill-paid _pion_
must be bribed to allow the key to be "lifted" from the inside of his
door. He must also take care to be in the deepest of sleep when it was
returned. But this would not do for us. We were not coming back at all,
and we could not allow any wretched usher to be sent about his business
on our account.

In our leisure time we had studied the whole of the ground plan of St.
Andre. The school buildings occupied an enormous amount of space, far
more than was needed for educational purposes. By sticking to it we made
some astonishing discoveries. For instance, after passing through the
kitchen, by descending a flight of steps which led to an unoccupied
wing, where all sorts of educational rubbish had been
accumulated--globes, wall-maps, ancient copy-books with headlines set by
hand, and a good bust of the first Napoleon--we reached a
clean-smelling, brightly lighted range of offices all set out with tubs,
soap, boiling vats, and blue stains which ran over smooth boards.

We had come upon the laundry of the college. On pegs, which ran all
round, overalls were hung. There was even a shawl here and there, or a
bonnet or two, as it were, flaunting their sex in this temple of the
masculine virtues.

Not Crusoe on his island was more astonished when he came on the
footprint. For it was not known to any of us, not even to the _pions_,
that a single feminine foot profaned any part of the _lycee_.

But, whatever our surprise, it did not prevent us from locking the door
and extracting the key of one of the range of exits which led out from
the fixed washtubs upon the narrow drying ground, a terrace wholly
invisible and unsuspected from our quarters on the opposite waterfront
of the building.

Of course, Deventer and I said nothing about our discovery. We did not
want the whole upper school playing leap-frog through the kitchens, or
telling lies as to their conquests among the laundry maids.

It was possible that the lock of the door might be changed immediately,
but we considered it more likely that the forewoman or caretaker in
charge would say nothing at all about the loss, and trust to the key
turning up.

We thought the whole matter well over, and considered it probable that a
gate in the wall would be left permanently open to facilitate the
comings and goings of the workwomen in the early morning. Such an
opening in the wall must lead immediately out upon the main road that
wound circuitously up the hill, and by which all stores and provisions
were brought to the porter's lodge.

Then we made ready for the trip, laying out our most comfortable and
inconspicuous town-going suits to take the place of the brass-buttoned
_lycee_ uniform.

With our door carefully locked, we raised a piece of the skirting board
of our study and examined our store of arms, a couple of revolvers
procured by Deventer in some vague inexplicable way at the works, three
packets of ammunition apiece, and a couple of "surins," or long Apache
knives--the use of which we had learned from the sous-prefet's son, a
youth precondemned to the gallows, who before expulsion had sojourned an
eventful and long-remembered three months at St. Andre.

We profited by his instructions as to guards and undercuts by practising
with models whittled in wood. This we were enabled to do in open
playground by the simple expedient of calling the exercise legerdemain.

Except what we could carry in our pockets, and the warlike accoutrement
mentioned above, we left the whole of our property at the college. At
the last minute Deventer packed away a Globe Shakespeare, and I found
room for a limp Bagster Bible of small size, which my father had given
me.

The clatter of the bedward-driven flocks began to tramp past our study
door. The hum of lesson preparation in the schoolrooms ceased. We
carefully set our house in order, for it was time for our evening visit
from Professor Renard. But he was called "Renard by Name and Renard by
Nature" among the Juniors whose small deceits he had the knack of seeing
through, even before the explanation was well under way. He was a Jesuit
of the newer school, of an educated candour, which seemed natural to our
young eyes, and a ready sympathy for our misdemeanours, which made him
the most popular professor in the _lycee_ of St. Andre.

He always tapped at our door before entering. He never listened nor made
use of the information of the common school spy. These things counted
for much.

"Well, gentlemen," he said, as he came in and sat down in our one
arm-chair, "you were too long on the terrace to-day to have a good
report of your studies!"

We convinced him to the contrary. For we had always gone on the
principle that who does his work early and well has his way made plain
for him, and in him a thousand things are overlooked for which a
"slacker" would get himself jumped upon.

After he had examined our exercises and approved of them, he looked up
at us suddenly from under his overhanging brows.

"You understood what the disturbance was about over there?" he demanded.

"I knew," said Deventer, before I could stop him, "that if my father was
left behind with his factories to look after, he would find himself
mightily short-handed. He would have only the English staff to support
him."

"Ah," said Professor Renard, "you look at it from a personal point of
view, as is natural. Your father----"

"I have also a mother and sisters over there----"

"I think I can promise that they will be safe whatever happens to your
father. And you can trust to my judgment. By custom and training my
class, the clergy of France, parochial and regular, are royalists. The
fight over yonder was only tiger eating leopard. The reds of Gambetta's
hue were chased out by the deeper scarlet of the Commune. Did you see
that flag of theirs to-night, just before sunset? It glowed with the
true hell-fire light."

I had been in the habit of arguing in favour of the working men who were
to constitute the brain and brawn of the Commune, but to-night I said
nothing. Renard did not notice my silence, however, but continued his
diatribe.

"We have had Napoleons of victory and Napoleons of disaster--republics
of guillotine and republics of veiled Caesarism. And now we have a third
which is a house divided against itself. Listen well, young men--the
Bible speaks the truth--it cannot stand. Even now the time for its fall
is almost come. The little financier Thiers will pay off the Germans
from the chimney-corner hoards of the peasants. Oh, make no mistake,
lads, we are beaten as a nation, because we have not obeyed God and His
anointed king. The atheist Garibaldi, spoiler of churches and enemy of
the Pope, will do nothing for France, except to widen the area over
which the German flood will spread. Their armies of Rouen, of the Loire,
and of the South-East are condemned in advance. It is as if the Lord of
Hosts had said, 'I am against thee, O France! Thou wast once the eldest
daughter of the Church. Now thou hast defiled thyself with the
unbeliever, with the captains of Assyria, and art become a castaway.'"

He seemed to recall himself. He was speaking as he did in the pulpit.
The glow faded from his features. He smiled a little contemptuously at
himself.

"I am gabbling like a novice of the first year, and withal to a couple
of Protestants," he said, getting up and extending his hands, one to
each, as was his habit. "Forgive me!"

Cramming our special themes into his pocket for after-consideration, he
went downstairs with a heavy regular tread, and the noisy dormitories
hushed at the sound. The Renard could not be taken in with the usual
explanation that they had been reciting their prayers. Not till he was
safe in his own room did the hum and clatter begin all over again.

It was past midnight before we judged it prudent to begin our descent.
Safe of course it was not, nor could ever be. In a school directed by
clerical influences, supervision is personal and unceasing. The two of
us owed our comparative immunity to our having passed our recent
_baccalaureat_, and to having done honour to the college in the national
examinations, but still more to the fact that we were English heretics,
whose eternal damnation was assured beforehand, and whose lesser
transgressions, therefore, mattered little, so long as they did not
flaunt themselves before the pupils, devout, Catholic, and Roman.

There was a faint sufficient light from the southern windows, for the
moon was nearly full. The empty class-rooms smelt heavy and sour, and
their doors stood open like the portholes of a battery, setting our
hearts fluttering. We did not mean to let anything stand in the way of
our purpose, but as we had been on good terms with the heads of the
_lycee_ of St. Andre, we did not want any trouble now at the eleventh
hour, or rather when for us the time was close on the stroke of twelve.

We passed through the schoolrooms unchallenged. The dormitories were
hushed and silent. We could see the dim light of the _pions'_
watch-candles under the doors. We considered that we had passed the zone
of danger, and were hurrying forward with less precaution, when a light
in the open door of the kitchen pulled us up all standing.

I was lighter than Deventer, so I slipped my shoes and went forward on
my stocking-soles to spy out the land.

A "mitron," or cook-boy, was writing a letter to his sweetheart with
incredible pains. He wrote with his hands, with his body, with the
wrinkles on his brow, and the tongue which stuck out of his mouth,
responsively vibrant as a compass-needle to the spirit of his
composition.

Here was a pretty pass. We must wait on this white-capped, dirty-aproned
rascal who seemed in no hurry to finish his task. He had a file of
feuilletons bound in brown paper before him, and he turned over the
leaves of these in search of expressions which had pleased him, and
which he now desired to appropriate. There seemed no end to his literary
zeal, and if he was not hurried morning might come before we could get
clear.

Then I remembered that among Deventer's accomplishments was that of
being able to imitate the wheezy asthmatic breathing and hollow cough of
the _proviseur_. So I sent him back with instructions to carry out his
imitation at the foot of the kitchen stairs.

At the first wheeze and accompanying shuffle of a hand on the smooth
wooden stair-rail, out went the "mitron's" candle. I could hear him
gathering up his home-bound books of feuilletons, and whisking away his
letter paper. I drew back as close to the wall as possible, for I
suspected he would pass my way in order to reach his bedroom. I was no
more than in time, for he stumbled over my foot, which had been
carelessly thrust forward into the passage way. He did not stop to
inquire into this, probably thinking that someone had put out their
shoes to be cleaned in the morning. It was a narrow escape, for if it
had chanced to be the boot-boy instead of an amorous 'prentice-cook we
might not have escaped so easily.

Deventer and I crossed the kitchen quickly. The wick of the "mitron's"
candle was still smoking red, as we stole down the corkscrew stair which
led to the laundry. Everything here smelt strongly of damp clothes and
lye, but somewhere a window was open, for the current of air was
pronounced, and suggested possible alternative if the lock of our door
had been changed.

But in this we were fortunate. The key which I had carried so long in
the inner pocket of my jacket turned easily. The door swung noiselessly
inwards, and the clean breath of the salt breeze from the Camargue
marshes made our faces pleasantly chill and our lips sticky. We locked
the door on the outside, and in another minute stood in the roadway,
looking back at the great ghostly pile of the Palace of the Monks--as
Louis the XIV had called it, when he cut down the plans so that it
should not rival in dimensions that "abyss of expenditure" which was
Versailles.

But it was no time to stand sentimentalising upon architecture. We
turned and went down the vacant white road as fast as our legs would
serve us.




CHAPTER IV

THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES


"Halt there!" cried Deventer suddenly to me. We were passing a pleasant
white and green villa with a light in one ground-floor window.

I stopped, and Deventer took me by the arm, with forceful compulsion.

"I am going to help _my_ father," he whispered. "Don't you run off
without telling yours what you mean to do. He can't prevent you, if you
have made your mind up."

"He won't try--he will only be glad to get back to his books."

"Perhaps, but at any rate tell him yourself. He will like it better than
when the hue and cry gets up to-morrow over yonder. You take my word for
it, Angus Cawdor."

I did not want to go, for at that time I did not understand nor much
like my father. But Deventer said that if I would not walk he would
carry me, a threat which at any other time would have made me smile.
However, to please him I walked carefully to the window. With his
habitual thoughtlessness about external things, the sash swung a little
open and the light air blew the curtains back. My father was sitting
like a student, with a shawl over his knees, a quite necessary fire of
olive roots smouldering on the andirons, and his head, shining and
silvery, bent over a book in which he was making notes.

I did not wish to startle him, so I spoke in English, and in as
commonplace a tone as I could muster.

"Father," I said, as if my calling hours were the most ordinary in the
world, "will you come across to the window for a moment?"

He rose instantly and came over to the open window, one half of which I
had pushed wide. The note-book was still in his hand, and the breeze
ruffled its leaves so that he shut and clasped it.

"Why, Angus, where do you come from?" he said. "Is it late? Won't you
come in? Are you on your way back to college?"

"No, father," I said; "I ought to be, but I have made up my mind to go
to the war. I have had enough of learning, and examinations disgust me
even when I come out first."

He looked at me long and quietly, and then nodded his head.

"I know--I know," he said, "it is the riot in the blood. I do not say
that you do wrong to go, but you will need some money. I have a few
hundred francs by me for which I have no use. They will not come amiss.
Let me see--six, seven, eight hundred and fifty. Does Deventer go with
you?"

"He is waiting on the road below."

"I thought as much--well, bid him good luck from me, and now good night,
and God be with you, boy! Get your wild-oat sowing done as soon as
possible and come back. You will find me waiting for you. You and I will
do something yet."

My father coughed a little in the draught through the open window,
whereupon I made haste to be gone. The movement was purely unconscious,
yet it was just such slight things that kept me such a long while from
understanding my father. He seemed to be so careful for himself in
little matters of health, that he had no care to spare for me, his only
son, and this thought, I am ashamed to say, I carried away with me, even
while my fingers caressed the eight hundred and fifty francs nestling
safely in my breeches pocket.

On the road I found Deventer waiting for me.

"Well," he said, "I see you are glad you went?"

"Yes," I answered, "eight hundred and fifty francs glad, but the old man
hurried up my going, because the open window made a draught that
irritated his cough."

Deventer did not answer directly.

"My governor thinks a lot of yours!" he said, and left the reproach to
sink in. The which it did, all the more because _I_ thought a lot of
Deventer's father, and was presently to think more and better.

We took our road between the rows of sleeping houses, alternately black
in shadow and mildly radiant under the moon. Not a light showed
anywhere, not even in the _auberge_, with the huge branch stuck over the
door in token of the excellence of the wine served out within.

A vagrant cat or two, a baying dog spasmodically darting in and out of
an alley-way, alone took note of our bygoing.

The crowning buildings of the _lycee_ on the Convent Ridge showed up
massive and almost martial among the dark pines. Then, after a sprinkle
of villas, we struck the close-packed town with the clean water from the
Gardon river prattling in the sewers at either side of every street.
Aramon was one of the towns of the Midi (now rare) where they had not
forgotten ancient Roman lessons as to the value of running water.

As we descended the flat plain the river-meadow came up to meet us. We
crossed the market-place among the splotched trunks of the plane trees,
and turned along the quay of the great canal of the Little Rhone. Barges
in long lines and solid tiers occupied it from end to end, and on each
of these was a dog. So that we passed through a chorus of yelping curs,
till the massive pillars of the great suspension bridge rose stark and
marble-white in the moonlight. On the Old Aramon side the _douanier_ was
asleep in his little creeper-covered cabin. We saw his head pillowed on
his crossed arms as he bent over the table, and a smoking tallow candle
guttered low at his elbow.

Along the wide quadruple track of the bridge, stretched like the taut
string of a bow for half a mile ahead of us, we saw nothing except the
glistening planks underfoot, and overhead the mighty webbing of chains.

But as we were stepping down the little descent which leads into the
newer town of Aramon-les-Ateliers, we found our way suddenly barred. A
couple of fellows, not much older than ourselves, suddenly sprang out of
the shadows, and set shining bayonets to our breasts, demanding at the
same time where we came from and whither we were going. It had been
arranged between us previously that in any difficulty Deventer was to
let me do the talking. Somehow he did not tell his lies with conviction,
at least not yet.

I gave our names, and said that we were runaway Seniors from the _lycee_
on the hill, on our way to enlist with the red-shirts of Garibaldi. I
think that on hearing this one of the youths would have let us go on our
way, but the younger, a cautious lad, spoke out in favour of taking us
to head-quarters.

"What! And leave the bridge unguarded!" cried his companion. "Either
shoot them out of hand, say I, or let them go on to seek their
Garibaldi. They wear the red as well as we. We have heard of his army at
Dijon, but his son is recruiting at Orange, so your tramp will be so
much the shorter."

Finally they permitted us to pass after a whispered consultation, but
the younger put several questions to us to prove whether we really came
from the college or not--what days certain meats were served, the names
of the lay brothers, the woodman, the _ramoneur_ or sweep, with personal
details of several others. These we answered promptly, and to his
apparent satisfaction. He knew much about the _lycee_, but we could not
place him. His smooth face was hidden under a great Biscayan bonnet with
red tassel, and his common speech was probably assumed.

They directed us to follow the outer boulevard which skirted the town,
and which should bring us to the Avignon gate without our needing to
enter Aramon at all. The younger drew out a small box filled with
inkpads and brass _tampons_, with which he stamped an order that would
permit us to pass the opposite gate without annoyance.

Naturally we took the road between the scant white poplars, as it had
been indicated to us, and stuck to it faithfully so long as we were in
sight of the post at the bridge-end.

Then, at a particularly dark corner where the blank gable of a workshop
loomed up to meet the overhanging flange of a fitting-shed, Deventer,
who was now on his own ground, slid suddenly aside, and was lost in a
devious track along which I had hard work to follow him. I could see his
big figure, black against the glimmer of white-washed walls. I stumbled
over anvils and heavy gearing scattered about, among which Deventer
steered his way with the crafty experience and dainty serenity of a
night-raking cat.

From this labyrinth we emerged on innumerable tiny little gardens, with
the stubs of cabbages and a few trenches of early vegetables for sole
contents. Rickety cane hedges leaning over at every angle surrounded
these, and Deventer pushed his way through them with the silent
expertness of an Indian on the trail.

Soon we came out on a wide park which was surrounded by a high wall.
Deventer made directly for this. He struck it at a spot where a tree had
thrust a sturdy limb through a fissure. The crack had been mended with
plaster, but perhaps from curiosity, perhaps owing to carelessness, the
branch of the tree had been allowed to go on growing. It was easy to
swing oneself upon it and so gain the top of the wall.

Deventer and I had made a good straight rush from cover, and flattered
ourselves that we should be able to mount unnoticed, but a patter of
bullets went buzzing like bees over our heads, while others buried
themselves with a sullen "spat" which threw up little fountains of black
leaf-mould in the ground at the foot of the wall.

None, however, came our way, and the next moment Deventer and I were
crouching among the lean spiky laurels and green-bedripped statues of
his father's garden.

"They are besieged," he whispered; "we must be careful. We are not
inside yet, and you may be sure they will shoot quite as readily as the
insurgent jacks behind there, and with better aim too. Dad kept the
English and Americans on the ranges every evening all last summer."

It was I who had the idea this time.

"Lend me your lantern and I will Morse them a message."

"The sentinel may not be able to read it off."

"No, but he will bring someone who can. At any rate let us try."

We established ourselves in an old summer-house at the edge of a pond,
with a foolishly rustic door which opened straight upon the front of the
house. Our light would be seen only by someone on the balconies, or at
the windows of the upper floors. It was entirely dark, of course, but
Deventer had no doubt that his father was there with all his faithful
forces, "keeping his end up like a good old fighting Derryman," as his
son expressed it.

"Hugh--Deventer--and--his--friend--Cawdor-are--down--here.
Answer--by--Morse--by--which--door--they--can--enter--the--house."

I had Morsed this message three times before any notice was taken from
within, and I had begun to give up hope. There must be nobody inside
Chateau Schneider, as the place was called. But Deventer was far more
hopeful.

"They have gone to waken my father," he whispered. "You see, they
daren't do anything in these parts without the old bird. He is quite a
different man from the one you saw poking about among your father's
books, or drinking in his wisdom. Here he makes people do things. Try
her again."

It was tedious work, but I flashed the whole message over again,
according to the Morse code. This time the reply came back short and
sweet.

"What--the--devil--are--you--doing--there?"

"That's Dad," said Hugh Deventer triumphantly. "Now we shall catch it."

I answered that having seen the soldiers retreat, we had come to help.

"Did--anybody--send--word--that--you--were--wanted?" twinkled the point
of fire somewhere high among the chimney-stacks on the roof. These were
a rarity in a district where one chimney for a house is counted a good
average, but after one winter's experience of the windy Rhone valley,
Dennis Deventer had refused to be done out of an open fireplace in every
room.

Now he reaped the fruit of his labours, for in summer he had sat behind
his low wall and taken the air of an evening, and now it needed little
to convert the chimney-stacks on the flat roof of his house into
reliable defences.

It was difficult to say in slow Morse alphabetage what we were doing
down in the old summer-house, but at least I managed to convey that we
had run the insurgent pickets and were in danger of being captured.

We got our reply quickly enough.

"Hugh--knows--the--door--under--the--main-outer--staircase."

"Of course," said Hugh, "I always went in that way when my feet were
dirty. Come on!"

And we hurried across the sward, keeping between a sundial and
fountain-basin railed about, into which half a dozen copper frogs sent
each a thin thrill of water, with a sound quite unexpectedly cheerful
and domestic thus heard in the darkness of the night.

This time there was no clatter of firing behind us. The sharpshooters of
the insurrectionaries had learned a lesson of caution near the house of
the manager of the Small Arms Factory. Dennis Deventer had been training
his assistants and lieutenants the whole year at movable butts. He had
rigged up a defile of six men-shaped figures which passed in front of a
firing party, or, bent forward in the attitude of men running, dashed
one by one across the men's field of vision as they lay at the firing
line.

Hugh Deventer and I took for our goal the great double flight of steps,
broad as a couple of carriage ways, which in the style of the Adams
architecture united in front of a debased Corinthian portico at the
height of the first floor windows of the Chateau.

"What, Jack Jaikes!" cried Hugh to the grinning young man who opened the
door for us.

"Aye, just Jack Jaikes same as yesterday, and eh, but the chief is going
to leather ye properly afore he sends ye back to school."

"But we are not going to school any more!"

"Maybe not--maybe not, but in this house we mostly go by what the master
says. 'Tis more comfortable like all round. Eh, but ye have come in time
to be leathered proper. If the lads of the Internationale yonder had
been brisk at the firing ye might have gotten off, but as it is the auld
man has nothing better to do than attend to ye on the spot!"

This made me a little uncomfortable as to our reception, but Deventer
did not seem greatly disturbed.

"You tell me where my sisters are, and then go and find somebody else
who will believe your lies, Jack Jaikes!"

The dark young man with the large hands grinned still more.

"Where should the three young ladies be at this time of night but in
their beds? Go and take your dose, young gentlemen. No use stopping to
think it over. In an hour, maybe, the worst of the sting will be by
with--and at any rate there are sofas in the parlour!"

"Get out, Jack Jaikes! Hannah and Liz may be in bed, but I warrant that
Rhoda Polly is somewhere on the look-out with a gun ready."

"Correct!" admitted Jaikes, with a chuckle. "I saw her at the window
just over this old stone staircase a minute before t'owd man shouted the
order for me to let you in."

"Come on then, Cawdor," Hugh cried; "let's find Rhoda Polly!" He ran
upstairs as fast as he could, anxious to find his sister before having
the first interview with his father. For though he knew that Jack Jaikes
had been lying, he could not be sure on what basis of fact so much
imagination reposed.

And then there was the message flashed from behind the chimney-pots,
"Did anyone send you word that you were to come?"

"You did not want to go and see your father," he whispered, as we stood
close together, panting in the dark of the second landing. "You came
away with well on a thousand francs in your pocket--got without asking,
too. I run a thousand dangers to see my father, and all I am likely to
get is a hiding."

The moon was lighting up one side of the landing, and showing where
mattresses and corn-sacks had been used to block the windows damaged by
rifle fire. The house was wonderfully still, astonishingly so when one
thought how many people were in it on the alert. But we must have made
more noise than we had supposed in coming up the stairs, for as we stood
here out of breath with the speed of our rush, a voice came calmly from
the shadows by the window curtains.

"Come over here, Hugh--and you, Angus Cawdor--I am Rhoda Polly."




CHAPTER V

THE DEVENTER GIRLS


I suppose this is as good a place as any to bring in and explain the
daughters of the house of Deventer. I had known them ever since I could
remember. First as "kids" to be properly despised, then as long-legged,
short-skirted, undistinguishable entities, useful at fielding, but
remarkably bad at throwing in to the wicket.

During our long stay at the _lycee_ these creatures had been at schools
of their own. Their hair had gradually darkened and lengthened, so that
it could be more easily tugged. It had been gathered up and arranged
about their heads at a period which synchronised with the lengthening of
their skirts, and the complete retirement of the ankles which had once
been so freely whacked with hockey sticks and even (I regret to say)
kicked at football practice.

There was no great difference in age between the girls. They might have
been triplets, but denied the accusation fiercely and unanimously, with
more of personal feeling than seemed necessary. Often as court of last
appeal the arbitration of their mother had to be referred to. In her
gentle cooing voice she would give the names of the various medical men
who had ushered them into the world. These were settled in various
mineralogical centres.

"There was Doctor Laidlaw of Coatbridge. He was Rhoda Polly's. A fine
sharp man was Doctor Laidlaw, sandy-whiskered, but given to profane
swearing. Not that he ever swore in _my_ presence, but he had the name
for it among the colliers and ironworkers."

"It's from him," insinuated Hugh, "that Rhoda Polly gets her
vocabulary."

"That's as it may be," his mother would reply patiently, her thoughts
travelling before her to pick out number two.

"Let me see. For Hannah I had Doctor Butterworth--Tom Butterworth of
Barrow-in-Furness--and of all the upsetting conceited creatures on this
earth, commend me to Tom. Tom-Show-a-Leg he was called, because he came
to the balls in knee-breeches and silk stockings. But for all that I
will never deny that he did his duty by Hannah, though at times I had my
own adoes to keep Dennis from heaving him out of the window.

"And there was Liz, poor thing. She had to put up with a 'locum' at
Herbestal, in Belgium, before your father came here. There was not an
English doctor in the place, but it made no great difference, for Madame
Batyer was wiser than a whole college of doctors, and I will always
think that beginning to be used to the language so soon has improved
Liz's French accent!"

Obviously it was impossible for me during my salad days to escape from
falling in love with one or other of these three pretty girls. I solved
the question by falling in love with all three in turns, the rotation of
crops being determined chiefly by whose vacations coincided with mine.

This bred no jealousies, for the girls were large-minded, and at that
time a sweetheart more or less had no particular significance for them.

Rhoda Polly was the learned one; she had been to college at Selborne,
and still retained in speech and manner something Oxonian and aloof. But
really she was gentle and humble-minded, eager with sympathy, and only
shy because afraid of proffering it where it was not wanted. Rhoda Polly
was a creamy blonde with abundant rippling hair, clearly cut small
features, and the most sensitive of mouths. Yet she was full of the most
unselfish courage, ready for long smiling endurances, and with that
unusual feminine silence which enables a woman to keep her griefs to
herself and even to deceive others into thinking she has none.

Did anyone want anything, Rhoda Polly would find it. Had two tickets
only been sent for the theatre, Rhoda Polly would not mind staying at
home. Rhoda Polly never minded anything. She did not cry half the
afternoon like Hannah over a spoilt dress, nor fall into any of Liz's
miniature rages. She was Rhoda Polly, and everybody depended upon her.
The girls confided in her largely, and never expected her to have any
secrets of her own for truck, barter, or exchange.

Hannah had been delicate always--or at least had been so considered by
her mother.

Her character had been formed between her mother's favour and her elder
sister's habit of giving way rather than face an argument. She was dark
and slender, placidly sure of being always right, and of looking best in
a large picture hat with a raven plume.

Hannah had been sent to school near Lausanne, which was kept by the
daughter of the famous Froebel, assisted by a relative of the still more
famous Pestalozzi. An English lady was in residence at the
Pestalozzi-Froebel Institute, to teach the pupils the aristocratic
manners, so rare and necessary an accomplishment in a country where the
President of the Republic returns from his high office to put on his
grocer's apron, and goes on weighing out pounds of tea at the counter of
the old shop which had been his father's before him.

Liz was all dimples and easy manners, the plaything of the house. She
knew she could do no wrong, so long as she went on opening wide her eyes
of myosotis blue, now purring and now scratching like a kitten; she
would often dart away for no reason whatever, only to come back a minute
after, having apparently forgotten the cause of her brusque
disappearance. She was accordingly a good deal spoilt, not only by the
young engineers who frequented the Chateau Schneider, but by her parents
and sisters as well.

One of the former, asked the reason of a decided preference for Liz,
declared that it was because she could never be mistaken for a French
convent-bred girl. It was pointed out to him that the same might be said
for the other two, but he stuck to his point. Rhoda Polly with her
Oxford manner of condescending to undergraduates, and Hannah with the
Pestalozzi Institute refinements, might speak and look as if they had a
duenna hidden in the background, but Liz--never! She was more likely to
box somebody's ears.




CHAPTER VI

AN OLD MAN MASTERFUL


Deventer and I came upon Rhoda Polly while we were getting our breath
after the rush upstairs. We were old friends, and Rhoda Polly did not
even put aside her rifle to greet us.

"Come from school without leave--run away--good!" she exclaimed. "Have
you made it all right with father?"

"Not yet--that is--the fact is---we thought you might as well come along
with us, Rhoda Polly."

"You think there will be a storm, Hugh?"

"Sure of it, but at least you can tell the Pater that Cawdor here is no
prodigal. He comes with his father's blessing and a whole pile of paper
money."

"Father is among his entrenchments on the roof," said the girl; "better
wait till he comes down. He is never quite himself when he is up there
and the wind is blowing. Now tell me what made you run away?"

"We are going to enlist among Garibaldi's volunteers, and fight for
France--at least that's what Cawdor says. But I mean to stay here till
all is safe for mother and you."

At this moment Rhoda Polly nudged us. There was a sound of heavy decided
footsteps grating on the steel ladder which led to the roof, then a
thump and the noise of feet stamping on the floor above us.

"He has been lying behind the chimney till he is stiff," whispered Rhoda
Polly. "Give him time to limber himself."

For a minute all was quiet along the Potomac, and then a mighty voice
was heard demanding "those two young rascals."

Deventer's smile was somewhat forced, and it might only have been the
moonlight, but he certainly looked both sick and white about the gills.
I was not greatly affected, but then I had not had his discipline. My
case and credit were clear. All the same, it was obvious that the Dennis
Deventer who captained his forces against the insurgents within the
walls of Chateau Schneider, and the seeker after knowledge who prowled
about my father's library or listened modestly to his interminable
expositions, were very different persons.

"Better not keep him waiting," said Rhoda Polly. "I will take you. He
has a room for himself fitted up on the third floor."

At the opening of the door we saw a long table covered with guns and
revolvers, each ready to the hand, while behind the centre ran a
continuous mountain range of ammunition in packets of gay-coloured
green, red, and yellow.

"What's all this, boys?" said Dennis Deventer gruffly, as soon as he
caught sight of us. "Now, you Rhoda Polly, hold your tongue! You are not
put up to tell their story. Come--out with it. What is it?"

He thrust his hands through his crisping mane of hair with quick,
nervous movements.

"Come, get it into word, Master Hugh Deventer. You were put to do your
duty at school. Why didn't you stay put?"

Hugh Deventer had a difficulty about articulation. He was bold and brave
really, besides being extraordinarily strong of body, but something in
the tones of his father's voice seemed to make all these qualities,
which I had seen proved so often, of no use to him. I looked at Rhoda
Polly, and, to my amazement, even she appeared a little anxious. I began
vaguely to understand the difference among parents, and to realise that
with a father of the calibre of the Old Man Masterful I might have
turned out a very different sort of son.

Finally Deventer managed to stammer out his account of the retreat of
the troops and the hoisting of the Red Flag.

"I knew that they would be besieging you," he said, "so I came. I could
not stop there doing mathematics, hearing the shots go off, and thinking
what might be happening to my mother and the girls!"

I could see in a moment that he had taken good ground with his father.
The strong muscular hands were laid flat on the table, with a loud clap
which made the pistols spring.

"You did pretty well in your examinations--they tell me?"

"Second--Cawdor was first. He coached me, or I should never have got
within smelling distance. As it was we halved the honours, and were
asked to dine with the _proviseur_ and professors when we got back."

"You look a perfect ox for strength. Let me see if you can lift this
table without disturbing anything."

Deventer smiled for the first time, and after trying about for a little
time so as to find the proper centre of gravity, he lifted the table,
guns, ammunition and all, holding them with flexible arm on the level of
his father's eyes. I think he was perfectly happy at that moment.

Old Dennis did not smile like his son. He only nodded, and said, "Yes,
you may be useful. Can you shoot?"

"Fairly," Deventer admitted, "but not so well as Cawdor; and you should
just see him send the Frenchmen's foils twirling to the roof of the
gymnasium. He has fought three duels, Pater, and won every time. Even
the Frenchmen could not deny it!"

"Gilt-edged nonsense--duelling," old Dennis broke out, "though your
grandfather was out a score of times in County Down in his day. But what
do you do when the Frenchmen challenge you?"

"Oh," cried Hugh gleefully, "I just chase them or their seconds till I
catch them, and then I spank them till they agree that honour is
satisfied. Generally by that time they are crying with rage, but that
does not matter. However, they mostly let me alone now."

"Well done, Hugh," said his father; "have something to eat, and then
come up and find me on the roof. We ought to have something lively to
amuse you before the morning. By the way, Cawdor, what does your father
say to all this?"

Deventer forestalled me, for he was anxious that I should say nothing
about the draught from the window or my father's sending me off.

"His father sent him along with his blessing, and eight hundred and
fifty francs."

"Well," rapped out the old man with the mane of grey hair, "you can keep
the blessing, but I will take care of the money for you."

And with that he held out his hand. Quite instinctively I gave it to
him, without thinking what I was doing. Then, the next moment, I
regretted the act and strove to undo it. I remembered muttering
something about fighting for France and joining the levies of Garibaldi,
when I should need all the money I could get.

But old Dennis calmly locked my banknotes away in his safe, and assured
me that I might 'list if I liked, but that it would be a downright
fool's trick to carry about so much money among a parcel of Italians. He
would send it on to me as I wanted it--twenty francs at a time. I could
pick it up as I went, either at a bank, or from a correspondent of the
Small Arms firm.

Once left to ourselves, Rhoda Polly seemed to think that we had come
rather well out of the scrape.

"But it was Cawdor being there that saved you," said Rhoda Polly.
"Father got so keen about Angus not spending his father's money, that he
forgot about you. Now, you have only to run straight and do as you are
bid----"

"Do you think I shall be able to go with Cawdor when this simmers down?
I want to wear the red blouse as much as he does."

"As to that I don't know," said Rhoda Polly. "I don't believe he took it
that you wanted to go soldiering as well. He means to put you into the
works--fair field--no favour--up at five in the morning, breakfast in a
tin can--that sort of thing--and as for Garibaldi's red jackets, he will
sell them guns, but I rather fancy he will keep his son at home."

"Well," said Deventer, "I shall be ready for the works all in good time,
but if Cawdor goes off with Garibaldi, I go. I could not stay behind.
Nor could even the Pater keep me. He would not chain me to a wall,
and----"

"At any rate," broke in the watchful Rhoda Polly, "here you are now, and
the better you please the commander-in-chief the better chance there
will be for you afterwards when the time comes. I shall do what I can
for you, Hugh."

"Thanks, old girl," said Deventer. "Where are Hannah and Liz?"

"Where should they be but in bed, where, of course, I ought to be also.
Only I have a dispensation to get what sleep I can in the daytime. I can
see in the dark better than anyone in the house. I saw them gathering
for the attack under the shadow of the pines on Thursday night, an hour
after the moon had gone down. The Pater said it was a near shave, and
spoke about my 'high-power vision' as if it were an attachment he had
had fitted before I was born."

The defence of the Chateau was undertaken by the entire English-speaking
colony of Aramon. The wives and children of the overseers and foremen
were lodged in the rooms looking on the inner quadrangle, but took their
meals in the great hall floored with many-coloured marbles. Their
husbands and the younger unmarried men looked in occasionally when they
could get off, ate what snacks stood handy on the sideboard and
disappeared.

It was their duty to keep a watch over the workshops of the Company, and
on the roof of the stables were half a dozen mitrailleuses ready to
sweep the open square which lay out flat as a billiard-board beneath the
windows of the Chateau Schneider, surrounded by workshops and
storehouses on every side.

But a far more dangerous task was the raid through the ateliers
themselves, which Dennis Deventer ordered to be made at irregular
intervals.

"The divils would be breaking up the Company's machinery if I did not
keep all their little plans in the back of my head. And that's none so
easy, young Cawdor, for mark me this, 'tis easy to keep track of what a
clever man will imagine to do. You have only to think what you would do
yourself in his place. But you never know where ignorant stupid fools
will break out, and that's the danger of it, Angus me lad!"

"But," I said, "they cannot all be such fools, for with my own eyes I
saw them send the regular soldiers to the rightabout."

"The regular soldiers--raw levies mostly, I tell you," burst out old
Dennis fiercely. "I should know, for I armed them man by man out of my
own gun-sheds and rifle-racks. And I tell ye that beyond a few
instruction sergeants from the artillery, there was divil a man among
them who could point a chassepot or lay a piece. Our noisy
revolutionaries simply frightened them out of the town, and if it had
not been for our little stock company here, the biggest manufacturing
arsenal in France would have been in their hands. Even as it is they
have found enough rifles to arm themselves, but so far we have saved the
mitrailleuses and the field artillery. The deputation which came from
Marseilles did not go away very much the richer."

"But what is it that they want, sir?" I asked.

Dennis Deventer looked at me straight between the eyes.

"They want what they ought to have, Angus me boy, and what they should
have, if I were not a servant of the Small Arms Company."

I was taken aback at his answer, though I had heard something like it
from my father. But in his case I had taken it for mere poetry or
philosophy, and so thought no more about it. But a man like Dennis
Deventer, who was fighting these very insurgents--why, I tell you it was
a curious thing to listen to, and made me wonder if I had heard aright.
The old man continued, his bold blue eyes looking straight over my
shoulder as if he saw something beyond me.

"You ask me why in that case I am fighting men who are in the right?
Right is right, and wrong is wrong, you say. But bide a moment, Master
Angus. I agree that these poor devils should have better wages, shorter
hours, and a chance to lead the lives of human beings. I agree that at
least half of the net profits we make ought to go to the men who made
every penny. The proportion would not be too large. I should be willing
that my own share should be cut down to help this along. But, also,
Angus me lad, I know that murder and arson are not the best way for men
to get their rights. General insurrection is still worse. They have
tried to kill me, who am their best friend. That is nothing. It belongs
to the business of manager. It is one of our risks. But they have also
tried to break the machinery and to set fire to the buildings. They
would burn Aramon if they could--they are so ill-advised. And what for?
Only to find themselves left stranded without work or wages.

"This is a flea-bite," he went on. "I defend the Chateau because of my
wife and daughters. But the business began when the men saw the masters
flaunting their riches, entertaining the Emperor and Empress at the cost
of millions on the very day when processes were being served from door
to door of the rows of cottages belonging to the Company. A man may burn
his hand or hurt his foot, but he must by no means get behind with his
rent. If we had not laid a dozen firebrands by the heels without
troubling the police, blood would have been shed in Aramon that day of
the Imperial reception."

Dennis Deventer had spoken with such determination and cold anger, that
it took me with a new surprise to see him spring like a boy up the steel
ladder on to the roof in answer to some call unheard by me.

Rhoda Polly followed, and Hugh and I did not stay behind. Rhoda Polly
gave us both a hand.

"Mind your feet," she whispered, "there are all sorts of things
scattered about."

I could hear the voice of Dennis Deventer somewhere in the darkness. The
stars were still keen and bright, though the morning of the Midi was
nigh to the breaking.

"Clear machine-guns three, four, and six," he ordered. "Train them on
the doors of the fitting-shed. There are lights over yonder I don't
like, and I can sniff the paraffin in the air!"

Deventer and I stood quite still with Rhoda Polly between us. Neither of
us knew what to do. We had received no word of command, and what we had
just heard had somehow dislocated our simple world of duty. We had
imagined all the right to be on one side, all the wrong on the other.
Now quite unexpectedly we saw the "tatter of scarlet" from a new angle.
Its colour heightened till it glowed like a ruby. After all it stood for
an idea--the ideal even which had brought us from school, and sent us on
our wild-goose chase for Garibaldi.

The weak were to be supported against the strong. Perhaps, after all,
those who had been long driven to the wall were at last to hold the
crown of the causeway.

Meanwhile, peering into the night we could see the dark masses of men
clustering about the street corners of Aramon. The stars were paling a
little when we saw them suddenly bunch together and run towards the long
tiled roofs of the fitting-sheds, filled with valuable new machinery.
Lanterns winked and tossed as they went, torches flamed high, and there
came to our ears a kind of smothered cheer.

"Are you there, Jack Jaikes?"

"Here, sir."

"Aim well in front of them, and let them have it as soon as they get
close to the buildings. The ricochet from the walls will scare them as
well as anything else."

There was no hesitation in the Old Man's fighting dispositions, whatever
he might think privately of the men's cause. He would protect his
master's property, and point out in the most practical way to the men
that they were going the wrong way about to get their wrongs redressed.

"B-r-r-r! B-r-r-r!" whirred and spluttered the mitrailleuses. These
first machine-guns made a curious noise like the explosion of many
sulphur matches held one after the other over a lamp chimney. The
effect, however, was wonderful. The black rush of men checked itself a
score of paces from the fitting-sheds. Several fell to the ground, with
a clatter of spilt petroleum cans, but the most turned tail and ran as
hard as possible for the shelter of the streets and the trees along the
boulevards.

One man only, very broad in the shoulders, bareheaded and belted with a
red sash, kept on. He was carrying a torch dipped with tar, and this he
thrust repeatedly under the doorway of the atelier.

"Give me Number 27, quick!" commanded Dennis Deventer. "I know who that
man is, and I am sorry, but he must be stopped."

Jack Jaikes placed the rifle in the old man's hand, and everybody held
their breaths. The lintel of the fitting-shed protected the fire-raiser
a little. We could see him thrusting with his torch till the sparks and
smoke almost enveloped him. Then he threw down the torch and ran heavily
back. He took hold of the first jar of petroleum which had been
abandoned in the flight, and was hastening back with it when Number 27
spoke. The man appeared to gather himself up. Then he made a spring
forwards, spilling the oil in a gush in the direction of the smouldering
torch.

But there came no answering burst of flame. The distance was too great.
Dennis watched a moment after reloading, then shook his head gloomily.

"He was a good workman too--yet that does not help a man when once the
maggot begins to gnaw underneath the brain pan."

The next day broke fresh and bright, with only that faint touch of
Camargue mist which the sun dissolves in his first quarter of an hour.

From the roof and northern balcony we could hear a curious thudding
sound in the direction of the moulding-works.

"The steam hammer," said Jack Jaikes; "pity we did not think to put her
out of gear."

When he came down the chief listened a moment with his better ear turned
towards the sound. Then he smiled ironically.

"They are trying to get a big field-gun ready for us. Luckily we have
sent off the last we had in store. But they can't do it. At least they
can't do it in time. There are good workmen and capital fitters among
them, but who is to do their calculations?"

"No matter," grumbled Jack Jaikes, half to himself, "they will go by
rule of thumb, and though their gun would not pass army tests, they will
make it big enough and strong enough to drive a solid shell in at one
side of this house and out at the other."

At that moment the girls came down for breakfast, and there was no more
talk about the insurgents, or the state of siege at Chateau Schneider.




CHAPTER VII

OUR FIRST COMMUNARD


Hannah and Liz Deventer came in arm and arm. Hannah grave and sweet,
with her air of taking admiration for granted and being rather bored by
it; Liz dimpled and glancing from one to the other, deciding which of
the young men would best serve her for cavalier that day. As for Rhoda
Polly she had been in and out of the room for an hour, enforcing
authority in the kitchen, rousing new courage in frightened servants
whom only her example and abounding vitality shamed into remaining at
their duty.

Dennis Deventer did not appear. Jack Jaikes came down presently and
carried him up a pot of strong coffee and some rolls. Most of us hardly
made even a pretence of sitting down, so eager were we to get back to
our posts, but Hugh Deventer and a young apprentice, Laurent, the son of
an English mother and a French father, stayed to keep the two younger
girls company. As for me, I followed Rhoda Polly out upon the roof.

There I cleaned her rifle for her carefully, while she sat and watched
me, her chin upon her palms. We were both quite comfortably hidden
behind the stack of north-looking chimneys.

Rhoda Polly had always been a friend of mine, and there was no false
shame between us, any more than between two college comrades of the same
age and standing.

In quickly lapsing phrases she told me how the trouble had begun.

"It was," she said, "altogether a political matter at first. It had to
do with the position of Procureur of the Republic, held by young Gaston
Cremieux of Marseilles. He had been appointed by Gambetta in September,
in the war year. But he was a 'red' and belonged to the Internationale,
so that the solid people of the department, royalists for the most part,
set about to try and dislodge him. He used to come often to our house,
and he and father sat long arguing. I think we all liked him. He had
great influence with the men up at the works, and so long as he was
permitted to speak to them and go to their reunions, we had no trouble.

"But when Gambetta lost his power, and Thiers became dictator, or
president, or something, Gaston Cremieux could not long remain
Procureur. They stripped him of his office, and gave it to a dry-as-dust
lawyer who did as the military tribunals bade him."

I put a question here.

"No," continued Rhoda Polly, with a flash of indignation, "if you knew
my father better, you would know that he does not shelter himself behind
anyone. Still, Cremieux was undoubtedly a help. My father can explain
better than I can, but the men down here wanted to make our department a
sovereign state like the American ones--New York, Massachusetts, Ohio,
and so on."

"But," said I, "over there they have just fought a long and bloody war
for the purpose of proving that no state is sovereign, but each must be
subordinate to the central authority at Washington."

"Well, I don't know," said Rhoda Polly, "at least, that was the idea of
these people down here, and I suppose all over France wherever there are
many workmen. The peasants and agriculturists are different. They want
only two things: low taxes and high prices."

Rhoda Polly was swinging herself back and forward on the low parapet
which ran round the roof in so careless a fashion, that I begged her to
take care that she did not lose her balance. At my words she stopped,
cast a glance behind her, was instantly brought to her feet by what she
saw, and ran towards the steel ladder crying, "It is Gaston Cremieux. I
must let him in."

I went to the parapet holding the cleaned gun idly in my hand. A tall
young man, with dark hair and a slight pointed beard, was coming
straight across from the head-quarters of the insurgents. He walked
easily and with a confident swing up the wide Stair of Honour which led
to the front door.

Before he had reached the top the bolts were already shooting from
within, and the door soon stood open; for Rhoda Polly had gathered in
Jack Jaikes on her way, to help in undoing the intricate barrage and
strengthening of the defence.

I am not sure that Jack Jaikes looked with much favour upon the welcome
which Rhoda Polly gave to the young ex-Procureur of the Republic, but
the lady knew well what she was about. In losing his office he had
neither lost in influence nor authority, and she knew that if anyone
could help to end the strife, it was this polite and deferential young
man.

"I have been over at Nimes seeing the family of my friend Rossel," he
explained. "I heard there was some trouble at the works, so I took
Aramon-les-Ateliers on my way back to Marseilles."

"That was good of you," said Rhoda Polly, "if anyone can set things
right, you can. You know what my father thinks, and what he has done for
the men, but he will not have the firm's machinery tampered with if he
can help it."

Gaston Cremieux nodded his head of crisp black curls.

"_I_ understand," he said; "but there are men over yonder who cannot
understand the uprightness of a man like your father. Worse still, they
cannot believe that he wishes them well, just because he is a manager in
the pay of the Company. He must on that very account be their enemy,
they say, and they remain blind to the fact that he alone can put their
needs and demands before the masters."

"Come up and see my father," said the girl, and without waiting for any
word of consent, she turned and led the way, flitting before him with
the lithe grace learned in the gymnasia of Selborne College.

Some minutes afterwards I encountered Jack Jaikes who had returned from
re-bolting and restrengthening the door.

"If I could break that young scoundrel's neck I would be doing some
good. He is at the bottom of all this trouble. I went to one of his
speechifyings to see what he was after, and he led them like a flock of
lambs. He was preaching revolt and red revolution, so far as I could
make out--the works to belong to the workers and such-like clotted
nonsense--and now Rhoda Polly receives him like an angel from heaven,
and up they go to throw dust in the eyes of the old man. If I had my way
of it--_augh_!"

And here Jack Jaikes turned away snorting to express the suddenness and
certainty with which he would regulate the case of ex-Procureur Gaston
Cremieux, if the matter were left in his hands.

On the roof another view was being taken. I heard the details from Hugh
Deventer, who at this time was constantly with his father, now that he
had been forgiven and, as it were, taken back into the general scheme of
things as conceived by Dennis Deventer.

"Rhoda Polly brought him up" (so ran his narrative), "and it was like
watching a hen with a new brood of chickens to see the pair of them.
Rhoda Polly is like that. She was quite sure that she had found the
specific remedy for all our woes, so she could hardly let the man speak
at first, so anxious was she that he should say the right thing.

"She kept at it interrupting so long, that at last the Pater, who was
not specially patient just then, told her to go away and let them talk
it out in peace. And that is pretty strong from the Pater to Rhoda
Polly, for mostly he encourages her to say and do just what she likes.
She is not like the others. There is nothing of the
mother's-apron-string-girl about Rhoda Polly. She likes running about
the works in a dirty blouse much better than sitting all day, with
embroidery on her knee, listening to mother purring.

"As for Cremieux and my father, they understood each other from the
first. It was wonderful to find how much they had in common. And he will
help to stop the rioting. He says he will not go away from Aramon till
the men are back at work. Cremieux's opinion is that these sporadic
risings do no good, even when run on the best lines, without personal
violence or destruction of property. To succeed, the thing must be a
national movement, concerted and directed from each one of the great
towns, otherwise the bourgeois government merely waits till its feet are
free elsewhere, and then tramples out one by one all the little
revolts."

At that moment Deventer caught me by the arm.

"Hold hard," he whispered, "here he comes with the Chief. I declare they
are as thick as thieves, and yet in an hour he may be leading the
rascals over yonder to burn down the Chateau."

The restless eyes of Dennis Deventer spied me out.

"Ah, Angus me boy," he hailed, "come this way. You two ought to know one
another. This is our philosopher's son from Gobelet, who has run away
from college to take service under Garibaldi."

"If he casts his eyes in that direction," said the dark young man,
smiling, "I can find him more profitable work nearer home."

"Come, none of your proselytising on my ground!" said Dennis Deventer,
laying a heavy hand on his companion's shoulder. "If he chooses to go
and get a bullet in him for the sake of France, that is his own affair.
But I will not have him mixed up in your little revolutions about which
he knows nothing at all."

"But I will teach him. He is intelligent--of a fine race--it is such
men we need. Let me speak to him, I beg."

But Dennis Deventer would listen to nothing. He pushed his visitor out
of the hall, laughing and shaking his head good-humouredly.

"Take anyone you like from my rank and file," he said, "but leave my
staff officers alone."

But I did not forget that tall, grave young man, who talked so earnestly
and pleaded so strongly for a chance to teach me the wisdom of
insurrection.




CHAPTER VIII

I SEE THE SCARLET TATTER NEAR AT HAND


I might have thought much more about Gaston Cremieux and the dark
fatality of his eyes, if other things had not immediately distracted my
attention. The garrison had had its noon dinner in the great hall, and
at one o'clock the family were served in the fine red and gold
dining-room, the furnishings of which had been the gift of the Emperor.
Dennis Deventer sat at the top of the table with the gleeful air of
having dispatched the business of the day.

There was a feeling of picnic unceremoniousness about the feast. The
servants were somewhat thinned by flight, and as there was no
hard-and-fast etiquette in Dennis Deventer's house on any occasion,
several of the younger apprentice engineers assisted in the service,
partly from a general feeling of loyalty, and partly because they liked
to steal glances at the three Deventer girls--glances of which only Liz
appeared conscious and or in any way prompt with a return fire.

Even Jack Jaikes, a dark figure of a Spanish hidalgo, in engineer's blue
serge and pockets continually bulging with spanners, looked in and said
with brusque courtesy:

"Anything I can do for you, Chief?"

"Nothing," said Dennis Deventer, over his shoulder, "except to come in
and sit down with us."

"Thank you, Chief," answered Jaikes, "but I have dined already. I am
watching the rascals from the roof. They have gone away for a while to
their 'speak-house,' where doubtless they are talking over the matter.
But it will not do to trust to appearances. I wish you would let me run
that live wire from the big dynamo in the power-house. That would curl
them up by the score if they tried any more of their rushes."

Dennis Deventer turned on him savagely, the carving-knife in hand and
upheld threateningly.

"You pirate," he cried, "do as I tell you, and if I hear of your
meddling with the wires I will blow your brains out. Don't you see that
we have got to go on living here, and the men we have to work the
factory with are the fellows out in the brush yonder? They will try to
kill us now, but they will not bear any lasting malice if a few of them
are bowled over while we are defending ourselves. But electrocution by a
live wire is a different thing. They can't fight us with those weapons,
and I am not going to have our lives made impossible by any wholesale
scientific butchery."

Jack Jaikes held his ground in the doorway, his thin body flattened
against the panels to let the hurrying servants and apprentices pass.

"I don't know about 'scientific butchery,'" he said, "but I do know that
some one of them is pretty handy with the trick of short-circuiting our
new Gramme armature. It wasn't any garlic-smelling 'Gugusse' who worked
that out. I have put it right three times, so I know it was no accident.
But at any rate I am going to watch, if I have to slink about the
dynamo-sheds all night. I shall carry the new Henry thirteen repeater I
had from Edinburgh yesterday, and if I don't touch up that other gang of
scientific ruffians my name is not Jack Jaikes, and I never smelt the
good Clyde water from the Broomielaw."

Having thus had the last word, he shouldered his notable new Henry rifle
and strode off with his head in the air.

"Bit of buccaneer blood in that fellow," said Dennis Deventer, "a hard
horse to hold in sober times, but deuced dependable in an emergency.
Hates the Frenchmen, however, and does not get on with them. Mostly I
have to keep him on special duty, or in the office, though he is a
capital engineer, and a capital 'driver' with Englishmen or Scots of his
own breed who understand him. But if he is not careful he will get
something for himself one of these days--a knife between the
shoulder-blades as like as not."

Gentle Mrs. Dennis had her lament to make.

"I wish you would give him to me to look after. He can do almost
anything. He mended my spare sewing-machine which has not worked for
years, and made the missing parts himself. I believe some of them were
given to Liz to play with when she was a little girl, and I have never
seen them since."

"By all means have Jack Jaikes to tinker at your embroidery frames--that
is, if you can tame him. For myself I do not see him in the role of
family emergency man. But you must wait till we get the things all fixed
here and the shops running handily. Then I dare say it may be just as
well for Jaikes to eclipse himself for a day or two. If you can persuade
him to spend his time in the Chateau without coming into the works till
things cool off a bit, it will be best for all of us. He will not find
himself exactly popular for a while."

"Of course I can, Dennis," said his wife, who never doubted her powers
of persuasion. "There are hundreds of things that need to be done, and
the girls and I can easily find him work for a year. The place is going
to rack and ruin. High or low hardly a bolt will slide. Not a door will
lock except the outer ones which you yourself have had looked to
recently. What do you say, girls?"

"It is quite true, father," said Rhoda Polly. "I was trying to get Hugh
to do some little things down in the kitchen yesterday, but whatever
they teach him up at St. Andre, to make himself useful is certainly not
among them. He was as dense as a French plum-pudding, and I had far more
idea of how to handle a tool, for all he is older and twice my size."

Both Hannah and Liz agreed that there was a decided missionary call for
the assistance of Jack Jaikes in the Chateau as soon as possible.
Something in the tone of his youngest daughter touched Dennis Deventer's
educated ear.

He looked up sharply from his plate.

"Now, Liz," he said, "I will have no nonsense of _that_ kind!"

Liz blushed and dimpled, but kept her eyes well on her knife and fork
without a word. But there was a smile which lurked about the corners of
her mouth which said that her father, though a wise and masterful man in
his own house, could not control what was in the mind of a young girl.

It was a family tradition that at table Dennis Deventer should not be
argued with. Their mother might say inconsequent things in her purring
fashion, but only Rhoda Polly was allowed to stand up to their Old Man.
Even she rarely interfered, except in case of flagrant injustice or
misunderstanding, or when the subject matter under discussion had been
agreed upon beforehand in the family conclave. In Liz's case Rhoda Polly
judged there was no cause to interfere. It had become too much Liz's
habit to count all males coming to the house as "her meat," hardly
excluding the halt, the maimed, and the blind. If her father had noticed
this growing peculiarity, he had done so "off his own bat," and on the
whole it was a good thing. The knowledge that she was under suspicion at
head-quarters might do something to keep Liz within bounds. At least if
she did get tangled up in her own snares, she would not have the face to
go to their father for pity or demands for disentanglement. Rhoda Polly
hoped that this would put some of the iron which was in her own blood
into that of her more temperamental and impulsive younger sister.

The turmoil, the constant clatter of knives, forks, and plates, the
discussion which swayed from one side of the table to the other, the
well-worn family jests, which, because I held no key to their origin,
shut me out from the shouts of merriment they provoked--all produced on
me a feeling of dazed isolation. I liked the Deventers singly,
especially Rhoda Polly and her father. I could talk to each with ease
and an honest eye to my own profit or amusement. But I will not hide it
from you that I found the entire Deventer family, taken together, too
much for me.

I think I inherit my father's feeling for a "twa-handed crack" as the
only genuine method of intercourse among reasoning beings. More than
three in a conversation only serves to darken counsel by words without
knowledge. In a company of four my father is reduced to complete
silence, unless, indeed, he assumes his gown professorial and simply
prelects. In this way alone, and on condition that nobody says a word,
my father could be induced to give forth of his wisdom in company.

But a sympathetic touch on the shoulder from Rhoda Polly, one of whose
peculiarities was that she understood things without being told,
delivered me from my awkwardness.

"I don't think you have been here since we all grew up," she said, with
a smile. "We _are_ rather _assommant_, I admit. We stun people with our
trick of throwing ourselves at each other's heads. But you will soon get
used to the clamour. Meantime, if I were you, I should go out and walk
in the acacia avenue. It is a good place to be quiet in, and I have it
in my mind that you may learn something there"--she paused a
moment--"something that will take the taste of Jack Jaikes' threatenings
and slaughters out of your mouth."

She had moved back her chair a little so as to let me slip out, and then
with a nod and half-smile she launched herself into the fiercest of the
fray. So keen was challenge and _replique_ just at that moment that I
was outside the fine old tapestried dining-room without being perceived
by anyone.

I ran downstairs and reported to the sentinel on duty at the front door.
I told him that I did not feel well and was going to take the air. He
asked if I had my revolvers with me, and was only pacified at sight of
them. He had gone often with messages from the Chief to my father at
Gobelet, and so took an interest in me.

I skirted the house, and was just plunging into a belt of woodland
through which I could gain the acacia walk without being seen, when I
was hailed from the roof by Jack Jaikes. He wanted to know where I was
going, and what I was going to do when I got there.

Instead of being rude and obvious I made him the reply which I knew
would baffle him.

"Ask Rhoda Polly!" I said, and he swore aloud. If he had not been safe
on the roof he would have come after me at once. As it was I advised him
that he had as much responsibility as one man could safely shoulder, and
that he would do wisely not to fret about me.

With that I waved my hand and stepped into the thickest of the bushes.
The little wood ran round an artificial lake, and was prolonged right to
the great wall of the Chateau policies half a mile away. It was the part
of the grounds most distant from the works, and from what might be
called the centre of disturbance.

I climbed a young but good-sized plane which overtopped the wall. It had
been pollarded, and the step from the tree to the top of the wall was
rather a long one. I managed it, however, without difficulty, thanks to
the bough of an acacia which came swaying and trembling over from the
highway beyond. The next moment I had dropped like a cat out of the
acacia boughs into the road. A young man was sitting on a fallen tree
trunk, pensively smoking a cigarette, his hat pulled low on his brow,
and his eyes on the road.

I had no chance to escape his notice, for the sound of my feet attracted
him and he looked up at once. He rose smilingly and held out his hand.
It was Gaston Cremieux.




CHAPTER IX

A REUNION OF THE REDS


"Did Rhoda Polly send you?" Cremieux asked, though I am sure he knew.

"She bade me come here, saying that perhaps I might learn something to
my advantage."

He looked at me queerly, and with a shade of suspicion which I quite
misunderstood.

"Then I may take it that she does not mean to come herself?"

"I am sure she has not the least idea of that. She was in the very thick
of a discussion upon the possibility of factories and ateliers being run
entirely by working men. The whole family had taken sides, and when I
came away I expected every moment to see them leap at each other's
throats."

"They are extraordinary, but quite admirable," he said, throwing away
his cigarette and rising. "We cannot breed anything of the kind in
France. Our spirit of family discipline forbids it. We have the cult of
ancestor worship as in China, only we do not get farther back than
father and mother. It is mainly the mother who leads the young men of
France. We have them among us too, these good mothers, women who teach
their sons to fight to the death for the great Day of Freedom. But they
are scarce. Our women are still under the heel of the priesthood, and
the young men, though they may follow us, still keep the inmost corner
of their hearts for their mothers; and one day when we most want them,
we may find them missing at roll-call. His mother cannot bear that her
son should be outcast and accursed. He need not go to Mass, but if he
will only see her favourite priest a moment in secret, she is sure that
he will stay at home with her. Like you, Rossel is a Protestant and has
not this to put up with. He is now in Metz with Bazaine, but he will
return, and then you and the world will see a man."

I asked him what the men meant to do, and if he thought he could not
prevent further fighting and burning.

Before he had time to answer a bell began clanging furiously in the
town.

"That is the signal," he said; "the Commune of Aramon is to meet in
general assembly. Will you come? You will be quite safe with me, even
though I am going to make them very angry. And besides, as Rhoda Polly
says, you will learn something to your advantage."

"Do you think she meant that?" I asked.

"Ah, you may go far and look long before you find out all that is in
Rhoda Polly's mind, but at any rate I suppose she meant that you would
be safe with me, and might hear a few things that are not included in
the curriculum of the _Lycee_ St. Andre."

We took our way towards the clanging bell, and it had the weirdest
effect as we topped a knoll, where the noise came so fierce and angry as
to put a stop to our conversation. Anon descending into deep dells out
of which the pines shot straight upwards like darts, sheer trunks for a
hundred feet before the first branch was poised delicately outwards as
if to grasp the light, we lost the sound of the rebellious tocsin, or it
came to our ears soft as the Angelus floated over the fields to a
worshipping peasantry in days that were yet of faith.

But Gaston Cremieux kept on his way without paying much notice to the
woodland sights about him. His colour rose, and his shoulders were bent
forward with a certain eagerness. The bell seemed to be calling him, and
I doubt not he was thinking of the responsibility of guiding aright
these darkened souls. His convictions, his aspirations were theirs. But
their volcanic outbursts of destructive energy, sudden, spiteful, and
inexplicable, vexed and troubled him.

Yet the reason plainly was that they had been hurt by those in authority
over them, and they struck back as naturally and instinctively as bees
fly out to sting when their hive is overturned. That the affair is
partly an accident does not matter either to bee or workman.

Presently we began to pass little villas--"Mon Plaisir," "Mont Dore,"
and "Chateau des Roses." The mountain path among the pines began to
widen into a made road, and to carry traces of wheelmarks. My leader
quickened his pace, and after a few minutes of threading our way among
the houses of New Aramon, we turned aside and entered a wide space in
the centre of which was a hall roofed with corrugated iron. Doors wide
and high as those of a barn stood open, and in the interior we could see
many people, men and women, already seated on rude benches.

There were also groups outside, but these were mostly younger men,
sullen-faced and furtive of eye. To me it seemed as if they regarded my
companion with no favourable looks. Several had been wounded in the
fighting, and now carried bandaged arms or white-wrapped heads. Somehow
I knew at once that this was the dangerous element, and I knew that the
whirring machine guns behind which glanced the pitiless eye of Jack
Jaikes, had had something to say to them.

Outwardly the Reunion of the Reds had nothing to distinguish it from
other political gatherings in the Midi. Indeed the type had been struck
out in the earlier pre-Robespierre period of the great Revolution,
improved upon in 1830 and 1848, and had now imposed itself even upon the
anarchists.

A president was appointed, who had his pair of vice-presidents and a
couple of secretaries to prepare a report of the proceedings exactly as
you may find described in Mirabeau's _Courier de Provence_.

The Hall of the People at Aramon had been an old riding-school in the
days before Solferino, when the scheming Emperor was hotly preparing for
his campaign across the Milanese plains. It was now a rather dimly
lighted, well-ventilated meeting-place, with a clean light-varnished
platform in front for speakers, and behind a broader space on which cane
chairs had been set out for the "assessors"--as we would say "members of
committee." These were being filled as we entered the hall. Names were
called out, and sturdy fathers of families rose from beside their
spouses to tramp up to the "assessors" chairs, not without a certain
conscious dignity as citizens whose worth was unexpectedly made apparent
to all men. I have seen the same expression since on the faces of men
pressed to become members of a municipality, or even a village council,
and I suppose Cabinet Ministers look like that when the new Prime
Minister hints at the object of his visit.

The entrance of Gaston Cremieux called forth a kind of shrill cheer, but
the Latin races had not at that time learned the full-bodied roar which
greets and encourages a favourite orator in England or America.

I was seated at the right of the speaker's platform, and a little behind
in shadow--which was as well, for there I could see without being seen.
And what I saw astonished me. There were nearly a couple of thousand
people in the riding-school by the time that Gaston Cremieux had shaken
hands with the President and taken his seat. The iron galleries which
ran round contained the younger people, many girls and their
sweethearts, while at the far end were a score or two of long-limbed
fellows clustered together--probably day labourers whose dusky tints and
clustering black curls indicated their Italian origin.

So long as the great doors remained open, I could see outside the
restless hither and thither of the young men who had scowled at us as we
came into the court.

It was not long before the President and Bureau of Workmen of the
Ateliers des Armes at Aramon declared that this properly called and
constituted general meeting was open.

It was evident that some of the elder men were ready enough to speak,
and a grave-faced grey-headed man rose to make his way towards the
speaker's platform. But long before he reached the _estrade_, it had
already been taken possession of by a young man with a shaggy head and
wild beady eyes. This was Georges Barres, a moulder in the new big gun
factory. He had but recently arrived from St. Etienne, and had instantly
become a notable firebrand.

The speech into which he plunged was a fierce denunciation of the
masters and managers, through which ran the assertion that all property
was theft. The workers, therefore, were justified in redressing their
wrongs with the strong hand, and he and his companions would see to it
that they did not die of starvation with so many rich and fine houses
all about them. As for Monsieur Deventer and his English vermin of
overseers, they must be killed out like rats. Only so would the town be
purified. Only so would their dead comrades be avenged, and a solid
foundation be laid for the Free Commune in which the works and all
within them, the profits and everything included in the year's trading,
should belong absolutely to the workers.

There was some applause from the groups that had gathered in, ceasing
their rapid caged-wolf sentry-go to hear their leader. But for the most
part the meeting sat silent and unresponsive.

At a nod from the chairman a sturdy mechanician rose. He was an
"assembler," or skilled workman, who takes the parts of the gun as they
are sent in from the various departments, and then with file, saw, and
sandpaper, but especially by the wisdom of the eye, "assembles" them
into one complete weapon such as can be issued to fill the orders of the
Government. Pere Felix was a man much regarded in Aramon les Ateliers,
and a silence followed his taking of the speaker's place. He was in no
hurry to begin. He knew his power and the worth of his opinion, and was
determined to conduct himself with the restraint and gravity which he
demanded from his audience.

Pere Felix opened by a word as to the speaker who had preceded him on
the rostrum. Comrade Barres had spoken (he said) with an earnestness
which would have been noble if it had been allied with wisdom. But of
course their companion laboured under the double disadvantage of being a
foreigner himself, a Spaniard from Catalonia, and of knowing nothing
about the district. The Englishmen who were to be killed like rats had
been for the most part of them friends and neighbours ever since the
works were opened, and in any case for a much longer period than Comrade
Barres had spent in France. Besides, like themselves, they were men with
wives and families. They had aided each other in sickness, their wives
had interchanged kindlinesses, their children had played together--why
should they be doomed to a slaughter of the innocents worse than that of
Bethlehem?

As for Director Deventer, he had defended himself when he was attacked
in his own house as every man has a right to do. And what was the use of
founding an Internationale in Aramon to bring about universal peace if
its first action was to send men sneaking forth under cloud of night to
kill women and children? Blood had been shed and he regretted it, but
the lesson learned was a useful one, bitter in the mouth, but sweet in
the belly.

When Gaston Cremieux rose to give an account of his mission he was
received with a storm of applause, but the young men at the back,
clustered near the door, were conspicuously silent. But lately Cremieux
had been their idol, and would be so again; but for the moment he was
under deep suspicion, and they stood sullenly glowering at him,
occasionally murmuring to each other the accusations so typical of men
of Latin race, when their idol does not exactly fulfil their
expectations.

Gaston was a traitor. He had sold himself. So much was evident to them,
though as usual it was difficult to see who would have money or interest
to buy the traitor to the Cause.

But after all there is something communicative in the thunderous
applause of a great assembly, and many of those who had come to hoot
were readiest with their cheers before Cremieux had uttered a score of
sentences. He spoke rather slowly, with marked emphasis, and repeated
each point of his argument in different words till he had firmly
impressed his meaning on his audience.

Yes, he had seen the manager. He had talked with him on the subject of
their grievances, and he knew that so far as the power lay with Monsieur
Dennis Deventer, their demands would be granted. Moreover, the Director
would use what influence he had with the Government to prevent reprisals
for the expulsion of the garrison from the town on the 21st of January.

They, on their side, must return as good workmen to take up their jobs.
Nothing would be said. No man would suffer for the past, and pay on the
higher scale would begin from the day they started work.

"And the comrades who died fighting, what of them?"

The question came bitter and scornful from the back of the hall, deep
under the shadow of the gallery.

"What of them?" answered Gaston Cremieux calmly. "Well, we are all
travelling the same road. We shall all end the same. They a little
earlier, I a little later. We are not making revolution by sprinkling
rosewater. From the beginning your Aramon outbreak was a mistake, as all
such things done in a corner must be. When the bells ring for that
august Twilight of the Newer Gods, you must waste no time storming
through the streets of Aramon, shooting and destroying. You must go in
mass to the railway, requisition trains, get yourselves instantly
transported to Marseilles, to Lyons, or to Paris. There your brothers
will have formed governments which your disciplined bayonets must
sustain. Then, having established a firm rule over the big towns, the
submission of the rural districts is only a matter of time.

"But," he added, with slow emphasis, "we can only succeed by being sure
of our comrades. They must wait for the signal, and the signal may not
be long in coming."

He concluded with a moving picture of the new Heavens and earth which
would arise when the workman was made part owner of his factory, and
when wars were no longer made by kings and emperors against the will of
the people--a glad peaceful world, well ordered, well content, and
without poverty.

It was very noble and very convincing, delivered with a kind of austere
fire strange in one so young and fragile. The people shouted for
"Gaston" as if he had been a son of each of their houses. The motherly
women shed tears, and I heard prayers spoken aloud that this and that
saint, or more especially the Holy Virgin, should protect him.

There was no doubt at all that he carried the meeting with him. The
works of Aramon would be reopened next day, and the director's terms
would be accepted.

This was the sense of the meeting as interpreted by the President. It
was put to the vote and carried unanimously, but the sullen young men
under the gallery had already opened the doors and passed silently out.
I could see them resuming their wolf's prowl in little packs of four or
five, keeping quite distinct from the decent burgesses who had so lately
filled the body of the riding-school, and were now pouring towards their
homes in Aramon in dense black streams.




CHAPTER X

JEANNE'S VELVET EYES


"These are our potential Troppmanns," said Gaston Cremieux, as we passed
through the grounds of the riding-school. "We must not blame them too
much. It is partly our fault. We have taken their religion from them,
and they have not yet enough moral sense to balance the loss. They have
learned at our meetings and conferences that they have not come to their
own, and they want to break their way to immediate wealth and
independence by the stroke of their own hands. All they can see is that
the rich have pleasures from which they are shut out--wine, women, and
feasting chiefly. This orgy of their imaginations heats the blood so
that the younger of them have come to think such things the only good.
The schoolmasters also are to blame. They have not instructed them in
noble thoughts and duties. The Church which has let them slip without
effort is to blame. But we of the liberating societies are most to
blame, for we have given them nothing to replace the Catechism they
learned, and the mystic trappings of that religion in which we have
taught them not to believe. Hence they are our Troppmanns in haste to be
rich, on edge to taste every sort of forbidden fruit, and in order to
reach their pleasure they are ready to slaughter men, women, and little
children with as much cold-bloodedness as did the murderer of the Kinck
family at Pantin."

Gaston spoke of a terrible crime which had shaken France the year
before, when a young man of twenty, active and intelligent, had with
devilish cunning slain an entire family of eight, his friends and
neighbours, in order that he might "get rich quick," and begin a new
life in a new country.

Cremieux seemed to feel himself in some measure responsible for these
lost sheep, but he made no attempt at present to conciliate them,
feeling perhaps that the pains would be thrown away or his motives
misunderstood.

"If we can keep them from active mischief till we want them, all will be
well," he kept repeating. "A time will come when such as they will be
invaluable, but at present they exist in every town and village in
France--budding 'hooligans' or 'Apaches,' ready for robbery and murder,
counting their own life a light thing and the taking of another's a
jest. If only they would take service with Garibaldi and be made into
men! That is where the North and East are going to outstrip us in the
coming years. Their Troppmanns are all being swept into the fighting
line, and will come out honourable citizens, while we of the South,
untouched by the German armies, have our idle rascals on our hands,
becoming a greater curse and burden every year, and a standing menace to
the next generation.

"But," he paused thoughtfully upon the phrase, "when the day for the
real struggle begins, we can find them work to do, and shoot them if
they will not do it. To keep them quiet in the meantime is the
difficulty."

By the time Gaston Cremieux had thus delivered his soul upon the
question of the town-bred ne'er-do-weels--the Vauriens of the Midi--he
was striding along the edge of the Rhone, till at the end of the quay we
turned in the direction of the Durance, the swift river which comes
rushing from the mountains, and the muddy torrent of which makes
turbulent the clear glaucous-blue of the Rhone from a little below
Avignon.

By this time my stomach, always on campaign, began to remind me that,
though I had been learning the secrets of Communism, particularism was
still rampant within my body.

"Let us go to see Madame Felix," I suggested. "Her husband spoke at the
reunion to-day. He is a chief among the workmen, but his wife is worth a
score of him when a fellow is hungry, and his daughter Jeanne Felix is
the girl best worth looking at in these parts--our friends at the
Chateau alone excepted."

Gaston Cremieux smiled indulgently and with a sort of patient scorn for
my enthusiasms.

"I hardly know what it is to be hungry," he said gently; "and except
some of our brave mothers of the Commune, and of course Rhoda Polly, one
woman is much the same to me as another."

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, as I should have done to
Deventer, "Then the more fool you!" But there was actually something
about the young ex-Procureur of the Republic which made one shrink from
familiarity. Instead, I turned through a growth of tall rushes, the
cane-brakes peculiar to Provence, in the direction of the little
ferry-house. It was war-year, and nobody had thought of cutting them.
The stiff leaves whistled frostily as we pushed our way through, the
supple yellow _cannes_ clattering behind us as they sprang back. After
them came a tangle of withered vines, still clinging to the trellis of a
dismantled house, and then we found ourselves on the river bank
overlooking the cottage belonging to Mere Felix of the Durance Ferry.
The boats were all on the other side, so I was obliged to make a trumpet
of my hands and call loud and long for "Mariana," which besides being
the baptismal name of the lady of the house, is an excellent resonant
word to carry across an estuary. Now the Durance, though an absurdly
tricky river, is no arm of the sea. Its race is short and turbulent,
though it makes as much trouble as possible (which is no little) for
those who dwell on its banks. It plays with inundations, whirlpools,
eddies, and deceitful currents, as a child with toys. You cannot row for
ten strokes straight upon it, for it will bubble up and snatch the oar
out of your hand, or failing in this, it will suddenly send the bow of
your boat deep into a reed-bed as if it were part of a conjuring trick.
I knew somewhat more of the matter than most, for had not Jeanne Felix
taught me? I had often gone over to spend a day there during the long
vacations. For my father, buried among his books, made no objections to
my roaming the country at will.

Cremieux and I presently stood at the top of a rough and tumble-down
flight of steps which led to a pier in somewhat better condition. I
recognised the work of my own hands upon this last. For Jeanne and I had
coopered it up only last year, so that her passengers might land without
risking their lives each time. Paths extended both up and down stream,
but as yet nothing had been done to the flight of rough-hewn steps of
split pinewood leading to the forest above. These things I did not
communicate to my new revolutionary friend, for I was busy wondering
what effect Jeanne Felix would have upon him.

My fourth or fifth shout brought the Mere Felix wrathfully down to the
river edge where her white cap and broad head ribbons showed between the
tall _cannes_. She had a couple of oars upon one shoulder and called
across at us, "Who is making such a noise with their Marianas? There is
no Mariana here except to my husband, the Pere Felix, who is now from
home, doubtless at one of his foolish reunions----"

"Dear Mariana," I answered, showing myself at the end of the little
pier, "push out a boat and you can kiss me for it. My father says you
may. Also send Jeanne quickly, for she and I can row so well together."

"It is that rascal of an English student, Monsieu' Auegoose from Gobelet.
Well, I might have guessed. Yet it is not playtime at St. Andre that I
have heard. I shall have you sent back and whipped. What, they do not
whip at St. Andre? Ah, it is no wonder, then, that you young people wax
so impertinent. If only you were _my_ boy, I should not call upon Pere
Felix to help me. No, no--I would----" and the old lady, smacking one
hard hand upon the other, conveyed her meaning exactly.

"Send Jeanne," I repeated, taking no notice of her pantomime.

"Send Jeanne," she imitated my college-trained voice,
"Jeanne--Jeanne--it is always Jeanne!"

"Perhaps," I ventured, "when you were Jeanne's age it was always
'Mariana'! I'll wager that more people than Pere Felix called you that
in those days, petite mere!"

"Here comes Jeanne at last," she called, so that I could hear. "Do not
put up with his insolence, Jeanne. He is a spoilt schoolboy, nothing
more."

Jeanne stepped sagely into the skiff, with a foot so light and practised
that the frail craft hardly quivered in the water. She was a tall, dark
girl with a supple figure, both light and well-rounded, remarkably
Diana-ish in a land where the women, save a few, are inclined to
shortness, and in addition are already overshadowed by the stoutness
which inevitably overtakes them after marriage.

Jeanne Felix received us without the least embarrassment into her boat.
When I mentioned my friend's name in introducing him, there was one
rapid up-and-down flicker of the drooping eyelashes, a flash of velvet
eyes, and then without a word or a salutation she handed me the bow oar
as if we had parted only the night before.

When we landed on the neat little _embarcadere_, below the Restaurant
Sambre-et-Meuse, Madame Felix had vanished. I knew her to be already
busy with the _menu_ of our dinner, a matter which, in spite of her
abuse of me, she would entrust to nobody.

There was a great chestnut tree before the door, and though the month
was January, my pocket thermometer registered 62 deg. Fahrenheit in our
shadowed nook.

Here we sat and waited, talking with Jeanne till her mother should call
us in to lunch.

The reformer smoked innumerable cigarettes, but he said little. I fancy
he had not much small talk, and at times he seemed so far away that I
wondered whether he heard the light badinage in which Jeanne and I are
fond of engaging. Jeanne is freed from all fear of her mother's reproof
and I do as I like, because I am a choice favourite with that lady,
being the only person in the world she permits herself to abuse grossly,
except her goodman Pere Felix--who, according to her, is still more
_impayable_ and gifted with a faculty of irritation not to be told.

As for me, I am younger and not her husband, but she has known me since
I could really receive from her palm the manual chastisement she had so
familiarly illustrated.

Still, I must admit that so far as Cremieux was concerned, interest in
the Restaurant Sambre-et-Meuse awaked only when from the river-path
along the Durance we heard the sound of voices, and presently Pere Felix
emerged talking eagerly with Pipe-en-Bois Soult, nicknamed the Marshal,
and several of the Old Guard of the Commune. Then his eyes lit up
suddenly. He rose as if throwing a weight from his shoulders. He had
come to his own again. This man bore the weight of a bullet he had
gained on the day of the _coup d-etat_. Pipe-en-Bois had been in front
of the battle about the Luxembourg that morning of 1848 when Cavaignac's
fusillade proved the futility of moderate Republican promises.

In the kitchen was great rattling of dishes, the voice of Mere Felix
calling on her daughter Jeanne, summoning from a great way off her
"torchon" Babette, a kind of scullery-maid gathered chance-wise from
among the numerous squatter families clustered along the river's edge.

Such long-limbed slatterns were plentiful as blackberries and of as rank
a growth all along the Durance. Monsieur Brunet, horsemaster and former
"Red of the Midi," owned the water meadows all about, and smilingly
allowed the little street of wooden houses fringing the banks. A stray
rabbit might be caught out of the pine knolls, but Monsieur's grazing
rights must be respected, and his ponies and brood-mares left in peace.

Probably none except the family Felix all along that riverine sweep of
reed-bed paid a penny of rent or a tax to the Government. The rural
guard with his sash and his great brass plate of office must, of course,
have known of the colony. But for some reason or another he said
nothing, and all the time the huts of the "zoniers" tailed out at both
ends into more and more ramshackle sheds and _bicoques_.

Here arose the danger of the community. They could only exist by
attracting no attention, and many of the ancient inhabitants, in good
odour with the Sieur Brunet, were compelled to replace the fences which
had been torn down to burn, or used as building material by their less
scrupulous neighbours.

Hence came quarrels, sharp words, and occasionally the breaking of
heads. The chief penalty was that no offenders against the unwritten law
of the settlement were allowed to drink under the cool shade of Mere
Felix's vine trellises.

The men who had come back with the proprietor of the Restaurant
Sambre-et-Meuse were, of course, the fine flower of this scattering
Faubourg Durance. They were full of admiration for their host, but every
man of them knew that Pere Felix would occupy a very different position
at the Sambre-et-Meuse from what had been his in the late great meeting
of citizens at the riding-school of Aramon. They seemed to be wishing to
make up to him all the way for the coming loss of prestige.

At the journey's end he would have to submit to his wife's inevitable
dictatorship, and support in his own proper person the reproach of the
whole company. He became responsible (among other things) for the
misdeeds of the half-wild cook-maid, for the uncertainties of the
weather, for the lack of fuel, and for the vicissitudes of the lady's
culinary apparatus. Like many a high officer, colonel, or commandant,
whose word is law to a thousand men in barracks, the Pere Felix came
home to do pack-drill and practise the goose-step under the eye of a
severe drill-sergeant armed with a broomstick.

But the good woman allowed no one except herself to treat her husband
lightly, so that in a measure his self-esteem was re-established before
company. The more guests there were at the Sambre-et-Meuse, the more
consideration was it necessary to show for the proprietor.

A chicken had been set aside for me, and of that I was not to be
deprived, or at least of as great a portion as could be piled on my
plate within her inviolable kitchen, by Mariana of the liberal hand.
Gaston Cremieux, though she looked upon him as a perverter of youth, and
the worst of examples for her husband, was still a guest of honour, and
he had come there in my company. Therefore he should have a share in the
chicken. Roast mutton, soup, and boiled beef out of the soup-pot which
had simmered all day by the fire were good enough for the others. There
was plenty of good bread, better than rich men could buy in Paris at
that moment--let the newcomers "bank up" with that and be thankful.
These, with regard to food supply, were the conclusions of Mariana of
the Restaurant of Sambre-et-Meuse among the reed-beds of the Durance.




CHAPTER XI

HOW MEN SEE RED


I need not tell at length of the wonderful talk, so new and strange to
me, in which men and things were judged wholly from a revolutionary
point of view. But all the same I began to perceive that the men before
me were really and fundamentally simple souls, to whom the future state
of Liberty and Equality appeared as a kind of fairy godmother. Out of
some inexhaustible bag she would pay each man according to his family
needs, money sufficient for his wants and pleasures. He would labour
just long enough to place an equivalent in the Fairy Godmother's hands,
but no longer. Their wives would keep in order the wardrobes of the
bachelor leaders and orators. They would at certain hours also set their
houses in order. Others would clean the schools and public-buildings,
and for such services additional monies would accrue.

The immediate settlement with the Small Arms Company and its manager was
considered purely a temporary matter. Oh, yes, Monsieur Deventer was a
good man, and no one could find any fault with him so far as the work
was concerned. But, of course, there would be no real peace till they
themselves owned the mines and factories, the rolling-mills, the
assembling sheds and the hard-stone quarries. Then, indeed, a golden
flood would flow directly into their pockets, and in a year or two they
might be busily building houses "like proprietors." It was their own
word, and even then they did see the delightful incongruity of the
proposal. I did not think it worth while to point out that if they
disinherited the mill-owners, a younger and still more advanced
generation would very hastily expropriate any villas they might build.

But one question I did put to them. "Supposing," I said, "that you take
possession of the Arms Factories and carry them on dividing the proceeds
among you in proper ratio, after all machinery such as you use is
delicate. It wears out quickly. Who is to replace it? Will you keep back
so much each week from your wages? Whom will you entrust with the money?
How do you know that he will not escape to Switzerland or Italy,
carrying your new machinery with him in his breeches pocket?"

This they could not answer themselves. They had not thought of it. Of
course, they were accustomed to seeing Deventer and his gang installing
a new machine, but where it came from or who paid for it never crossed
their minds. With one accord they looked to Gaston Cremieux. He would
know what to reply, for he had taught them all they knew. Only by his
teaching did they understand even so much. His answer was ready.

"The Commune will lay aside so much of the factory profits each week or
month for repairs, the renewal of machinery, the introduction of new
types, and so on. This deduction shall be made before wages can be
paid."

Such was the oracle's decision, which to me seemed just and natural, but
it was wonderful to see the swiftly darkening brows of those who
listened.

"What, the Commune would keep back a part of our earnings!" cried
Pipe-en-Bois. "Then I say that we will only have exchanged one master
for another, and it is not worth the trouble."

Nor could he be moved from his position. Gaston Cremieux could silence
him, telling him that doubtless he would himself be a member of the
Commune of Aramon. But the man's dark mask as of a gargoyle only took on
a deeper scowl, and he looked from one to the other of his companions,
sure of their sympathy as he repeated, "What is the use of changing when
the Commune will steal from us the earnings of our hands even as the
masters do now?"

These were early days and militant theorists (as at present) found
construction as difficult as destruction was easy.

Marvelling I sat, and viewed about me these grave men, the elect of the
factories and mills, accomplished artisans, yet even now incapable of
leadership, or even of submitting to the guiding brain which would give
them a chance of success. This thoughtful young advocate of Marseilles
was their idol, yet for a mere difference of opinion they were ready to
cast him down from the throne they had just set for him. I conceived a
new opinion as to the value of popular favour, and I noted that the head
of an iconoclast had no easier a resting-pillow than that of the king
whose crown he threatened.

We waited till the feast had begun to degenerate a little. Sundry jests
and snatches of song seemed to offend the austere thoughtfulness of
Cremieux. So I made a signal to Jeanne, previously agreed upon, and she
hastened away to get ready the boat, while Gaston and I regulated the
expenses with the good hostess, her face still shining from her culinary
labours.

While she was changing a ten-franc piece from an immense pocket which
swung from her side under her blue rep petticoat, she seemed suddenly to
become aware of the noise within. She stepped to the door of the
dining-room, listened a moment, and then opening it sharply, said, "Pere
Felix, if you continue as you are doing, I shall ask you to leave my
house!"

"Pardon, Madame," said her husband instantly, rising to his feet and
bowing, and the company, feeling themselves somehow vaguely in the
wrong, rose to their feet and bowed also in the direction of the door at
which appeared the heated face of Madame la Menagere.

There was no doubt about it that Mere Felix intended to be both master
and mistress in her own house, and behind her back the men rubbed their
hands and thought how differently _they_ could manage a woman.

We stepped outside into the clean well-aired vault of the twilight. The
breeze was from the east, which in Provence of the South has not the
terrors of our wind of that name, but is soft and perfumed with the
early blossoms along the Gulf of Genoa. The Coast of Azure was sending
us up an evening blessing.

We strolled a long way in silence, taking the river road which leads
towards Aramon. Then Cremieux broke the silence by asking me brusquely
if I had known Rhoda Polly long. I did not think the question ought to
have been asked in that tone, but he had done a good deal for me that
day and I most certainly owed him a civil answer.

"I have known Rhoda Polly," I said, "ever since I can remember. We used
to fight in the garden for pig-nuts and in the woods for acorns. Rhoda
Polly scratched my face with long sharp nails, and I thumped her back
with little attention to chivalry. She could run faster than I, scratch
more savagely, and when trapped she would sometimes bite like a little
squirrel taken in the hand--yes, bite till the blood came."

Gaston Cremieux listened with a rather forced smile upon his lips. "And
the others--were they present? Were you two allowed to run about the
woods all by yourselves?"

You can change anything about a Frenchman except his idea concerning the
co-education of the sexes. Here the anarchist is at one with Monsieur
the Count de Mun, and Monsieur Jean Jaures with the Archbishop of Paris.

The convent rule, whether applied by lay mistress or sister of the Sacre
Coeur, constant supervision, a fiction of ignorance of things of the
commonest knowledge, the girl never to be out of sight of her mother or
aunt till the day she is delivered to her husband--these are what the
heart of every Frenchman believes to be the only path which the girls he
would marry should be allowed to tread. He may praise English and
American methods, allow the charm of the result, but in his heart he
prefers for himself his "snow-white gosling."

"Tell me about the college to which Rhoda Polly went," he continued,
putting aside the early fightings and scratchings as too unsatisfactory
for comment.

I told him of the restless yet ordered activity of Selborne College, of
the work and of the professors, of the days when the students were
permitted to receive young men of other colleges, properly introduced
and vouched for. I dwelt mischievously upon the friendships which arose
during the common intellectual life of these years. I pitched it all a
little strong, because I could not see why in the world he could not
take Rhoda Polly as she was, and accept her marked kindness to him
without submitting her past to hostile analysis.

When I told him all, he seemed to shake himself suddenly as a man half
awake by force of will breaks his way out of a bad dream.

"Good night," he said, "I must go back to Aramon."

And so he left me planted open-mouthed upon the river bank.




CHAPTER XII

"GOOD-BYE, RHODA POLLY"


At Chateau Schneider I was received with tumultuary questioning on my
return from the reed-beds. Where had I been? What had I been doing? I
might easily have got my throat cut and no one would have been sorry. It
was a scurvy trick I played them, slipping off like that. And so
on--Hugh De venter being the loudest and most persistent.

"My friend in whom I trusted," was his cry. His grievance was not that I
had broken bounds and would give no account of myself, but that I had
sneaked off alone without giving him a chance to come along with me.
However, a glance from Rhoda Polly and the smiling response of her eyes
shut my ears to all this hubbub. She understood, and that was enough. I
would, of course, tell her about it, making only a mental reservation in
the little private matter of Jeanne Felix, and the spraying shadows
which her long lashes cast on her eyes of purple-velvet. With a woman,
there is no use of talking of another woman--not at least till the
listener is well over fifty, and even then it must be done with
circumspection.

But I knew my duty, and with another glance at Rhoda Polly I demanded to
know where her father was, and in five minutes was sitting among the
chimney-pots with that old fighter and captain of men stuffing a pipe
bowl and preparing to listen. He nodded his head gravely when I told of
my meeting with Gaston Cremieux. He grew restless as a caged beast
himself when I described to him the hither-and-yon wolf's prowl of the
sullen young men in front of the riding-school. But when I told him of
the men's resolve to go at once to work, he rose suddenly to his feet
with a shout.

"Jaikes, Irvin, Allerdyce, Brown, Macallister! Here!"

And at his cry these subordinates came running to him like dogs at the
shepherd's whistle. Eagerness was in their faces, and confidence in
their leader showed in their eyes.

"Young Cawdor has brought good news," he said. "The men are coming back.
It may not be for long, but they are coming. They have taken the terms,
and now I shall have to fight the masters single-handed. However, I can
manage that. Run, fellows! Get the squads together. Set the furnaces
going, and steam up in the boilers. It will be the easier for the men
when they come in if they find everything ready for them. A few will
troop in first in a non-committal way, then will set in a steady trickle
of the secretly willing, and lastly the factory benches will fill up
with a rush. In two days we will have the ateliers working at high
pressure, and we may begin to send out our orders by Saturday."

The engineering sub-chiefs swung their hats in the air and yelled. It
was the best of news for them, and they did not even wait to ask how I
chanced to be so well informed. Dennis Deventer had doubtless assured
himself of that. That was his business, not theirs. They rattled down
the ladder one after the other as quickly as a barrel would roll the
same distance. They simply fell through the trap-door and disappeared
from sight. Presently we could see them leading their emergency gangs
across the courtyard to the entrance of the works. In Jack Jaikes's
contingent I noticed the broad shoulders and rough blond head of Hugh
Deventer, towering like a Viking among the wiry Clydeside and bearded
Tynemouth men about him.

His father must have noticed him too, for he turned to me with a smile.

"Yonder goes our Hugh. He is a strong lad, but has no spring. He falls
all over himself at present. If you are still set on soldiering, you can
take him with you. He has little sense as yet, but I can see that he
will do what you tell him."

"Thank you, sir," I said; "war is a stranger business than we young
fellows dream of. I cannot be responsible for accidents, but if you
trust me with Hugh--well, he is my comrade, and I shall look after him
as myself."

He held out his hand, after first glancing about to see that we were not
overlooked, and grasped my fingers. Such demonstrations of emotion were
by no means in his way.

"With Hugh it is a case of thews and brawn," he said. "When it comes to
the marching, see that you make him carry your musket as well as his
own. He has no heavy load in his top story."

Of course I had to see Rhoda Polly before our final marching off towards
the north. As I came down the great front steps of the Chateau Schneider
I saw her crossing the lawn far away to the right. She was going in the
direction of the vegetable garden, and I stood still on the steps till I
watched her into the potting-house. With her hand on the latch she cast
a look over her shoulder in my direction.

"Amaryllis desires to be first seen," I muttered, and after a
comprehensive tour of the grounds I approached the potting-house from
the rear.

Rhoda Polly was sitting on a bench with peat and leaf-mould in little
boxes about her, and a red flowerpot held firmly between her knees while
she kneaded the black flaky mass down with urgent little knuckles.

"If I don't get those Alan Richardson roses to do this year--why, the
devil fly away with me!"

She spoke in French, and the words had not the same sound as in English.
Something gay and Rhoda Polly-ish rang cheerfully in my heart.

"Really you should not swear!" said I. "What would Miss
Balfour-Lansdowne say to that at Selborne College?"

"Oh, sometimes we said a good deal worse than that on the hockey ground,
or in the heat of an argument. Besides, if you did not want to hear, you
need not have followed me."

"Rhoda Polly," I said, "you know that I followed you because you made me
a signal that you wanted to talk to me."

"Yes, I know," owned up Rhoda Polly, who scorned concealment. "Well,
what have you to tell me now that you are here? I let you go just now
and unbosom yourself to the Paternal without complaining. That was only
playing the game, but certainly you owe it to me to stand and deliver as
soon as you got clear."

"Well, and here I am, Rhoda Polly--which will you have--plain
narrative--question and answer--the Socratic method, or a judicious
mixture of the two?"

I knew the inquiry would resolve itself into the latter. Rhoda Polly
went on with the potting of her Alan Richardson, biting her under lip at
critical points, but ever and anon flashing a pertinent query at me over
the boxes of mould without once raising her head.

With the exception of my talks with Jeanne and the harmless little
philandering we had indulged in to pass the time, I confided the whole
of my day's adventures to Rhoda Polly. I told her also of the permission
that her father had given that Hugh should go north and join the new
armies with me.

Then at last Rhoda Polly did lift her eyes with a vividness of reproach
in them.

"You cannot find enough to do here?" she said. "You trust these men at
the works? I tell you they are not to be trusted. I know them better
than either you or my father, I have heard their women-folk talking, and
I know what they mean to do."

"I know what they _say_ they mean to do," I retorted. "I also have heard
them in their cups, but it is only folly and emptiness."

"Do not be too sure," she said, patting the flowerpot round the edges
and squinting down at it as if it were a work of art symmetrically
finished. "I warn you we may need you here sooner than you think, and
then Gaston Cremieux may not be so friendly as he is to-day."

I asked her why, but she only bent more over her work and shook her
head. It had been clear to me from Cremieux's questions that he was in
love with Rhoda Polly, and now from Rhoda Polly's prophecy of his future
unfriendliness that she had made up her mind to reject him. But, in the
meantime, it was my clear duty to go on and do what I could in the army.

We could not hope to defeat the Germans, but at least every additional
man in the ranks added to the chance of withstanding them. If we could
only hold them at bay till the politicians did their work, all this
peaceful Southland would be spared the horrors of war and the more
wearing pains of occupation and pillage.

I said this to Rhoda Polly and she could not help agreeing. Her assent,
however, came from her clear head and trained intelligence, but her
heart was still unconvinced that Hugh and I ought to go, leaving that
houseful of women in Chateau Schneider. All this was perhaps natural
enough, and certainly it made me feel warmer within to know that Rhoda
Polly would regret me.

"I owe you a grudge," she said, as she stood up and rubbed the black
crumbly mould briskly from her hands, "for without you we should at
least have had Hugh. He would never have thought of going by himself."

Rhoda Polly had finished with her roses. She set out the boxes in a row,
and then stood up facing me. Her eyes were steady and level like a
man's--I mean a man of the North. They did not droop and flutter like
Jeanne's at the Ferry. Her breast did not heave nor her full throat
swell. The pent-up emotion in Rhoda Polly's bosom found no such
commonplace feminine vents. Only the firm lines about her mouth betrayed
her, and perhaps a certain moist luminousness of eye.

"I would not hinder you, Angus Cawdor," she said steadily, "let a man do
what he knows he ought. But at least you owe it to me to come back the
very day the war is over. It is not till then that the storm here will
break. I have it from the women. They advise us to go out of the
country, but I have a better plan in my head. You must be here to help
me carry it out."

"I shall be here, Rhoda Polly, if I get through all right!"

"If you get through all right----?" The words fell uncertainly.

"If I live, Rhoda Polly."

"Ah, if you live," repeated the girl, mechanically holding out her hand.
And even as I looked, the bold bright look in her eyes was dimmed, as a
pool greys over with the first coming of a breeze.

And thus I took my real farewell of Rhoda Polly. There was some of the
black mould on my fingers as I went over to the shops to search for Hugh
Deventer.




CHAPTER XIII

WE SEEK GARIBALDI


Hugh Deventer and I reached Orange only to hear that the recruiting
parties of the Garibaldians had gone away north. But on the railway,
hundreds of wagons laden with supplies were moving in the same
direction, and with the conductors of these we made what interest we
could.

We showed the letter we had brought from Gaston Cremieux, but these were
men of the Saone and Isere, who had never heard of the agitator. But
Hugh's willing help during heavy hours of loading and "transhipment,"
and perhaps also the multitude and flavour of my tales of Scotland,
gained us a footing.

From them we heard with pride of what had already been done by
Garibaldi, with such wretched material, and how the great Manteuffel
himself, in his dispatches, had allowed the excellence of Garibaldi's
tactics.

What we were most afraid of was that the whole war would be over before
we got a chance. The men of the Isere, however, who on the strength of
six months' campaigning considered themselves veterans, laughed
scornfully at our young enthusiasms. They would march. They would fight.
But as for beating the Germans in the long run it was impossible. That
time had gone by when Bazaine had let himself be locked up in Metz.

"All we can do is to help the Republic to get out of the mess with some
credit!" said a tall sergeant who sat in the open door of a bullock
wagon. And the others agreed with him. They were on tenterhooks to know
why we English should be so eager to take up their quarrel. The thousand
Italians they could understand. They came because Garibaldi did, touched
by the glory of his name, but we English--what had we to do with the
affair?

Me they suspected of Southern blood from my quick slimness and swarthy
colour, but Deventer was a joy to them. "That Englishman!" they cried,
and laughed as at an excellent jest. His big hearty blundering ways, his
ignorance of military affairs kept them perpetually on the grin. But
when they saw him strip and repair a chassepot with no more tools than a
pocket screw-driver and a nail file, they changed the fashion of their
countenances. Hugh was not the son of Dennis Deventer for nothing.

Presently we found ourselves privileged stowaways, whirling in the
direction of Lyons, protected by these good fellows, who hid us
carefully from the rounds of inspection which visited the wagons at
every stopping place. Mostly, however, no severe examination was made,
and the word of the sergeant was taken that all was right inside.

But as soon as the train slackened speed we sprang on a shelf which ran
along one end of the wagon, and there lay snug behind a couple of bags
of potatoes.

At last, near Civry, a little town on the foothills of the Cote d'Or, we
were abruptly ordered down.

It was a dark night and raining as we set our noses out. We would much
rather have remained behind the potato sacks, but there was no help for
it. Out we must come along with the rest, for Manteuffel's Uhlans were
off on a raid and had cut the line between us and Dijon. At first we
could only see the blackness and the shapes of the trees bent eastward
by many winter blasts, but after a time our eyes grew accustomed, and we
became aware of a long line of wagoners' teams drawn up on a road that
skirted the railway.

We did our best to assist at the changing of the provisions and
ammunition, and would have been glad of permission to accompany the
convoy through the hills to its destination.

But we had the ill fortune to fall in the way of a captain of regulars
who asked us our business there, and on our telling him, he answered
with evident contempt, that in that case we had better go and look for
"Monsieur Garibaldi." As far as he was concerned, if he found us in his
convoy again he would have us shot for spies. Hugh Deventer and I could
not rejoice enough that we had left our two beautiful Henry rifles and
our stores of ammunition on our sleeping shelf. We knew well that our
protector the sergeant and his men would say nothing about the matter,
though they looked with unrestrained envy and desire of possession upon
our repeating rifles.

Accordingly I advised Hugh to confide to the sergeant in private the
name of his father, and promise that a similar rifle would be sent to
him with the next consignment of chassepots.

The sergeant's eyes glowed, and he told us that he was under orders for
his native town of Epinal, which he hoped to reach in about a fortnight.
Hugh promised that he would find a Henry repeater with an abundant
supply of cartridges waiting for him there at his mother's house. And
accordingly he sat down in the empty wagon, and by the light of the
lantern wrote a note to his father which he gave into the sergeant's
hands to be posted at the first opportunity. He in his turn entrusted it
to the care of the engine driver, who was getting ready to take his
empty wagons rattling southward again to bring further supplies from the
rich Rhone valley.

The sergeant also arranged that we should accompany the rear-guard so
far as was possible during the night, when we were to strike off
diagonally to the west to pick up Autun, where Menotti Garibaldi was
reported to be waiting with a large force to cut off the retreat of the
German raiders.

So we started on our march, and had soon reason to be glad that we were
not stumbling at hazard up and down those leg-breaking vine-terraces.

The convoy had relays of peasants as guides, and at least we were kept
along some semblance of a path. We could hear the rumbling and creaking
of the wheels before us, but for that night the goad superseded the loud
crack of the whip, and the language beloved of all nationalities of
teamsters was, if not wholly silenced, at least sunk to a whisper. We
marched far enough in the rear to be rid of the cloud of dust raised by
the convoy, which fell quickly in the damp night air.

Occasionally an orderly would gallop back, dust-mantled in grey from
head to heel. He was sent to see that we of the rear-guard kept our
distance and did not straggle. The Isere and Grenoble men with whom we
marched were veterans and in no ways likely to desert, so that the
adjutant's report was at once accepted, and the officer galloped back.
All the same we two regularly sneaked aside into a belt of trees or took
refuge behind the vine-terraces as soon as the sound of hoofs was heard.

We had marched many hours in the darkness--from eight or nine of the
evening till the small hours were passing one by one with infinite
weariness. I was lighter on my feet than Hugh, having less to carry in
the way of "too, too solid flesh." Consequently he suffered more, both
from the weight of his rifle, and the dumb remorseless steadiness of the
marching column. Forward we went, however, stumbling now and then with
sleep, our feet blistered, and the rattle and wheeze of the ammunition
wagons coming back to us mixed with a jingle of mules' gear through the
dark.

At last, when it seemed as if we could do no more, the column halted,
and our grateful sergeant came back in order to set us on the road to
Autun.

"Yonder," he said, "you can see a hill which cuts the stars. It is high
and steep, but to the right of it is a pass, and when you reach the top
you will look down upon the lights of Autun."

He bade us a rapid good-bye, and hastened away to his own place in the
column. With a final word of thanks to the adjutant (who is here a kind
of sergeant-major), we left our kindly rear-guard and set out to find
Garibaldi.

The night grew suddenly darker as we missed the shoulder-touch of a
comrade on either side of us. We rolled over vine-terraces, clutching at
the gnarled roots, or stumbled with a breath-expelling "ouch" into dry
ditches all laid out for the summer irrigation. Fence rails and the
corner posts of vineyard guard-shelters marked us black, and blue, but
aloft or alow we held firm to the Henry rifles which were to be our
chief treasures, when we should at last don the red cardigan of the
Garibaldian troops.

To us it seemed as if we never would reach the top of that pass. We
could see the mountain towering up on our left hand, and once a shower
of stones came rumbling down as a warning not to venture too near. The
wind was now soft and equal, and the unusual warmth had served no doubt
to loosen the frost-bound rocks above, as well as to keep us in a gentle
perspiration while we climbed the corkscrew pathway towards the hill
crest. Things became easier after we had left the vineyards beneath us,
and our road lay over the clean grassy plateau on which the sheep had
that day been grazing. We rested a while in a shepherd's shelter hut,
and did not scruple to refresh ourselves with some slices of bread and
sausage, washed down by a long swig from a skin of wine. We left a franc
in payment, stuck into the cut end of the sausage, with a note appended
that we were two recruits on our way to join Garibaldi. Little did we
imagine that in a few weeks we should, without hurt to our consciences,
simply have transferred the whole supply to our haversacks without
thanks or payment.

There was still no hint of dawn when we started out, but beyond the
lowest part of the ridge immediately above us a kind of faint
illumination appeared. It burned steadily, and for a long while we could
not explain it. It could not be the approaching sunrise, for our
compasses told us that we were marching as near as possible due west.

Quite suddenly we topped the crest, and saw beneath us the lights of
Autun gleaming hazily through a kind of misty drizzle. But that which
struck our faces was in no wise wetting. It only struck a chill through
us, making our greatcoats welcome. We had so far carried them _en
bandouliere_.

The west side of the ridge was, in fact, already spotted with fine
sifted snow, which blew in our faces and sought a way down our necks.
Its coming had caused the fluorescent light we had seen as we were
mounting the eastern slopes, and now with bowed heads and our rifles as
well "happed" as possible, we strode downhill in the direction of the
town.

At the limits of the chestnut woods the vineyards began again, and our
troubles threatened to be as great as they had been after we left the
convoy. But though fine snow fell steadily, its clinging whiteness
showed up the stone-dykes and terraces as black objects to be avoided.
There was, therefore, less tumbling about among the ledges of loose
stones, and presently we came out upon a regular "departmental" road,
with drainage ditches on either side, rows of pollarded willows and
poplars, and kilometric pillars, with numbers on them which it was too
dark to see.

Along this we made all haste, for we were bent on getting to Autun as
soon as possible, and indeed it was not long before we were in the way
of getting our wish.

"Halt! Who goes there?" came a challenge out of the unseen. Well was it
for us that we had attempted no stealthy approach upon the town, but
serenely clattered down the middle of the turnpike. Luckier still that
we fell into the hands of regular mobiles of the army of the Vosges,
instead of a stray company of _franc-tireurs_, who as like as not, would
have cut our throats for the sake of our rifles, the stores of
ammunition, and the few silver coins we carried.

We had come upon a picket of men of the regiment of Gray on the borders
of the Haute Saone. It was like one of Napoleon's levies after
Moscow--young lads of sixteen and men of forty or fifty standing by each
other cheerfully, and without distinction of age or previous occupation.

We stated our purpose and asked to be taken to head-quarters. Like most
of such casual recruits, we thought we would be taken directly into the
presence of Garibaldi, but the Gray men astonished us by the information
that the great soldier was almost a recluse, and indeed so much of an
invalid that he could only review his troops from a carriage. His sons,
Menotti and Ricciotti, were his fighting generals, but all directing
power was centred in Colonel Bordone, through whom all orders came to
the army.

In the meantime we were conveyed amicably to the temporary head-quarters
of the 14th Mobiles of the Haute Saone. Here we found several officers,
but after a look at us and a civil enough demand for the production of
our papers, we were permitted to betake ourselves to the snug kitchen of
an ancient monastery, where the soldiers of the outpost guard were
sitting around a huge fire, or lying extended on couches of straw,
sleeping the sleep of men who had marched far the day before, and
expected to do as much more on the morrow.

Our clothes were soon dry, and our overcoats spread out to the blaze,
after being well shaken and thumped to get rid of the clinging snow. The
morning began to come tardily, and as if reluctantly. The snow had
ceased, but a thin whitish mist had been left behind, softening and
dimming all outlines.

The town of Autun bethought itself of waking up. A few shopkeepers took
down their shutters in a leisurely fashion, the first of these being a
couple of ladies, venders of sweet cakes, both pretty and apparently
exceedingly attractive to the young Italian officers, all of whom had
the racial sweet tooth as well as the desire to rival each other in the
eyes of beauty.

Our men of Gray were rather contemptuous, but could not deny that these
young sweet-suckers fought well and bravely whenever it came to blows.

"And I dare say, after all," said a tall brigadier, "it is better to
munch sugar cakes flavoured with cinnamon than to swallow the filth they
serve out to you in the _cafes_."

The others agreed, but we did not observe that their teetotal sentiments
were more than platonic. At least, during all our stay with the 3rd
Corps in the town of Autun, the Frenchmen went to the _cafe_ and the
Italians to the _patissiere_.

It was nine o'clock when the brigadier of the post detailed two men to
accompany us to the Cadran Bleu, the inn where the army head-quarters
was established. We had a short time to wait, for the officers within
were judging the case of a spy, a dull heavy-witted fellow who had
formerly served in a line regiment, but who had had the ill thought to
turn his knowledge of the army of the Vosges to account by compiling a
careful estimate of the strength of Garibaldi's command, and offering it
by ordinary letter post to General Werder of the Prussian service. The
letter was addressed to his brother-in-law at Macon, who was to arrange
terms. He, however, preferred patriotism (and the chance of a possible
heritage) to his relative's life. So the officer of the day was already
picking out the firing-party, for, as was the way of the army of the
Vosges under Garibaldi, a very short shrift was given to any traitor.
Though the supreme judges were Italian and the man a Frenchman, the good
sense of the soldiers supported them in the certainty and rapidity of
such military punishments. I saw the man come out between a couple of
Mobiles with fixed bayonets. His hair fell in an unkempt mass over his
brow. His face was animal and stupid, but he had little pig's eyes that
glanced rapidly from one side to the other as if seeking for any way of
escape. But there was none for him, as the rattle of musketry testified
almost before we had reached the antechamber.

Here there were half a dozen young French officers and many Italians all
talking together, who turned from their conversations to gaze at us. We
had made what toilets we could, and the men of the Gray regiments had
rolled up our overcoats in military style.

"Two English come from Aramon to enlist," we heard them say, with a
certain resentment as if they had been offered an affront. "Do all the
foreigners in the world think that France has need of them to fight her
battles?"

However, one of the sub-lieutenants, a handsome lad, from a Protestant
family in the Isere, came over to talk to us. The ice was at once
broken, and the next moment we had quite a gathering round us admiring
our Henry repeaters, and asking questions.

"That is the new Remington action!" said one who stated that he read
English and American periodicals, but became appallingly unintelligible
as soon as he attempted to speak a single sentence of the language.

"No," said Hugh Deventer, "the movement was invented by my father."

"And who may your father be? Are you travelling for the firm?"

"My father," said Hugh steadily, "is Monsieur Dennis Deventer,
director-in-chief of the Arms Factory at Aramon-sur-Rhone, and he will
supply as many of these repeaters as the Company is paid for. The
Government have the matter under consideration, but if they do not
hurry, the war will be over before their minds are made up."

An officer in the red cloak of the Italian corps pushed a door open,
spoke an order in imperfect French, and the next moment we found
ourselves in an apartment where two men were sitting rolling cigarettes
at opposite sides of a long table. They were both tall, dark-bearded men
with swarthy faces, clad in uniforms much the worse for wear. I knew
them by instinct to be Menotti and Ricciotti Garibaldi. Both had a look
of the common lithograph portraits of their father, but perhaps no more
than one weather-beaten shepherd on a Scottish hill resembles his
comrade on the next.

We stood at attention after the English manner instilled into us by Jack
Jaikes and the numerous old soldiers who by Dennis Deventer's orders had
taken us for drill during vacation time at the works.

The two grave men looked at one another and smiled. "We have seen
something like this when the English lads came to us in Sicily eleven
years ago, eh, brother? Tell us your names, little ones! Can you speak
Italian?"

We could, and that made us, if not of the "children," at least something
very different from the dull peasants whom Gambetta's conscription
supplied, or the innumerable company of ne'er-do-weels who appeared from
nowhere in particular, drawn by the mere sound of Garibaldi's name.

Hugh Deventer did not much like to be called a "little one," but the
Italian speech is not like our English, which lends itself more easily
to oaths and cursing than to the "little language" and the expression of
emotion.

We presented the letters with which we had been furnished--one a
personal epistle to Ricciotti from Dennis Deventer--the others for the
most part addressed to the General himself.

That, however, made no difference. His sons opened them all without
hesitation or apology. Indeed, we soon learned that, excepting the
conduct of the campaign, Father Garibaldi was not allowed to concern
himself with anything.

"Ah, Dennis Deventer," said Ricciotti, starting up and embracing Hugh on
both cheeks. "I owe much to your father, more than I am likely to pay
for some while. He took our word for it that the chassepots for the new
troops would be paid for, even though he knows that the Government is
likely to fall into the hands of those who hate us. Also the new
twelve-pounders--Menotti, brother, what shall we do for this man's son?"

"I must stay with my comrade, Angus Cawdor," put in Hugh Deventer. "He
is far more clever than I am, and I should be lost without him. I am
only a boy, but he----"

"Has the thoughts of a man--I see," interrupted Menotti, who had been
considering us from under his hand without speaking. "I think it would
be no kindness to add two recruits of such mettle to the number of the
admirably combed and pressed young gentlemen in the anteroom out there.
You had better take them, Ricciotti. You will be sure to find old
Manteuffel hammering away at you on your return to Dijon, and the lads
can take bite and sup with the 'Enfants.' Since they speak Italian no
explanations need be made. They can be fitted out by the commissariat
adjutant."

"The favour is an unusual one, brother. There will be grumbling."

"The circumstances are unusual, and so are the lads. There is but one
Dennis Deventer, and we must do the best we can for his son."

And in this manner we became part of the personal following of Ricciotti
Garibaldi, and were destined to take part in the war game which he
played out successfully against Manteuffel and Werder till the coming of
the armistice stopped all fighting.




CHAPTER XIV

"THE CHILDREN"


"The Children" were young men, some of them hardly more than boys, who
had followed the Dictator from Italy. They came from all parts of the
Peninsula, but the wide windy Milanese plain supplied most of them. A
curious exaltation reigned in the camp. It was like the mystic aura of a
new religion. One became infected with it after a few hours among the
troops.

They were already veterans in their own opinion, and, feeling that the
eyes of their General was always upon them, they claimed as their
monopoly all desperate ventures, the front rank in stubborn defences,
the rear-guard in retreat, and they died with an "Evviva, Garibaldi!"
upon their lips. One snatched the standard from a falling comrade that
he might carry it closer to the Prussian lines, only in most cases to
fall in his turn under the fatal steadiness of the needle-gun.

The rest of the army of the Vosges fought under the tricolour of France,
but for "Les Enfants" Garibaldi had devised his own emblem. It was
sufficiently striking and characteristic of the man, but in France at
least it only excited astonishment among the masses, and hatred and
contempt among the clerical and aristocratic party, which was at that
time in a great majority in the provinces. The flag was of a vivid
crimson, darker a little than the "Tatter of Scarlet" I had seen go up
at Aramon when the Communards expelled the troops from the town. There
was no device upon it--only the one word in large letters:

"PATATRAC!"

I saw the rustics gazing open-mouthed upon it every day, yet it was a
word admirably descriptive and one which I have heard in frequent use
among the peasant folk of the South. "Patatrac!" or "Patatras!" the
labourer will exclaim when he lets a bucket fall at a stair-head and
hears it go rumbling down. "Patatrac!" a housewife will say when she
describes how a careless maid drops a trayful of crockery. It is the
crashing sound of the fall that is represented, and in this fashion
Garibaldi had been so accustomed to bring down in thunderous earthquake
ruin all the brood of century-old tyrannies.

It was his well-earned boast that he had made the device good against
all comers (except his special _bete noires_ of the Papacy) until the
fell day at Mentana when the French chassepots rather belatedly gave him
as we say at home "his kail through the reek!"

Yet here he was, only five years after, a broken man, fighting for that
same France, just because she had shaken off the yoke of the tyrant and
become a republic.

Wonderful always to hear the soldiers speak of their leader. They did
not cheer him as did the French corps. They clustered close about his
carriage as he moved slowly along, his thin hand, which had so long held
a sword, touching their heads, and his feeble sick man's voice saying:
"My children--oh, my children!"

Neither of his sons accompanied him on these pilgrimages in the shabby
hired barouche in which he drove out every day, but Bordone was always
with him--watchful, stern, and devoted, the real tyrant of the little
army. Menotti and Ricciotti were always with their troops, perhaps from
jealousy of Bordone, perhaps because they had enough to do licking their
raw levies into some manner of fighting shape.

The winter was bitter even among bitter winters, and the snow soon began
to be trampled hard. The troops, continually arriving, were quartered
all over Autun, and in the villages about. Finally the churches had to
be occupied, and though nothing was done there that would not have
happened with any army of occupation, Garibaldi the polluter was cursed
from one end of France to the other as if he had torn down the golden
cross upon St. Peter's dome. Not that it mattered to the old Dictator.
In silence and solitude he made his plans. He read the reports and
dispatches as they came in. He issued his orders through Bordone, before
driving out in the halting ramshackle barouche, sometimes with two
horses, more often with only one. At every halt he spoke a word or two
to the troops as he passed among them, words treasured by the true
"Children" like the oracles of God. Then he would return to his
lodgings, sit down to his bowl of soup, his loaf of bread, and his glass
of water, exactly as if he were on his own island farm within hearing of
the waves breaking on the rocks of Caprera.

We found ourselves among Ricciotti's fourth corps of Guides. We were
sent to the outfitting captain whose quarters were established in a long
hangar overlooking the river. There we found a little rotund man, very
bright of eye and limber of tongue, who fitted us out with many
compliments and bows. We had brought a letter from the commander
himself.

Our first uniform was the gayest ever seen--too picturesque indeed for
sober British tastes. It consisted of a red shirt, blue-grey riding
breeches, and high boots with jingling silver spurs (for which last we
paid from our own purses). On our heads we wore a fascinating "biretta,"
or cap with a tall feather. The captain of outfitting showed us how to
sport it with a conquering air, and with what a grace to swing the short
red cloak over one shoulder so that we should not be able to pass a girl
in Autun who did not turn and look after us.

This was what the master of the stores said as he stood with his back
against the rough pine door-post of his quarters and rubbed his
shoulder-blades luxuriously. But in practice I looked like a carnival
Mephistopheles, while Hugh Deventer's feather generally drooped over one
eye in a drunken fashion. We were not long in suppressing these gauds,
though we did our duty in them as gallopers for several days. Finally we
went to Ricciotti and begged to be allowed to carry our rifles in one of
the foot regiments. We did not want to leave the foreign troops, knowing
something of the ostracism and persecution which would be our part among
the French regiments. So we were allowed to return our chargers to the
remounting officer, and make another visit to the small rotund outfitter
in his wooden barrack by the river. There of all our gallant array we
retained only our red shirts, and for the rest were rigged out in sober
dark blue, a _kepi_ apiece, and a pair of stout marching shoes on our
feet.

We mounted knapsack and haversack, shouldered our Henry rifles, and in
an hour found ourselves established among the first "Etranger," a
Milanese regiment with three or four mountain companies from Valtelline
and the Bergel.

Now it chanced that I had spent some part of my vacations climbing among
the peaks about Promontonio. There I had taken, more as companion than
as guide, a Swiss-Italian, or to be exact "Ladin"--of my own age or a
little older, by the name of Victor Dor. He was a pleasant lad, and we
talked of many things as we shared the contents of our ruek-sacks on the
perilous shoulder of some mountain just a few feet removed from the
overhang of the glacier.

And here and now, with the chevrons of a sergeant, was this same Victor
Dor, who embraced me as if he had been my brother.

"Oh, the happiness to see you!" he cried. "And among the children of our
father. I know you do not come to save the French who shot us down at
Mentana. You are like us. You come because our father calls, and yet to
think of those long days in the Val Bergel when we never knew that we
were brothers. And yet I do not know. You spoke of the Man who was a
Carpenter at Nazareth, and who called his disciples to follow him. So
our father came, and we followed him. Princes and Emperors scatter
honours. Republics give decorations and offices. But look at our lads
lying on the straw yonder. Where will they be in a week? In the hospital
or in the grave? Some of these men are well off at home, others are
poor. No matter! All share alike, and all are equal before our father.
Ah, that is it! You see there is nothing to be gained except the joy of
following him. Our poor dear father Garibaldi, what has he to offer? He
has nothing for himself but a barren isle, and even that he owes to you
English.[1] The liberty of following him, of seeing his face when he
passes by, of hearing his voice as he calls us his children, the pride
of being his very own chosen, who have shared his perils and never
deserted him to the last. These are our rewards. Tell me if they are of
this world?"

     [Footnote 1: See Hamerton's "Round my House."]




CHAPTER XV

FIRST BLOOD


On the third morning after our entry into the Ricciotti's first foreign
legion, both Hugh and I awoke stiff and chilled by the frost. The lucky
among us had early found quarters in byres and cattle-sheds, where the
closely packed animals kept the place warm. We had to make the best of
it on a floor of beaten earth, still sparsely strewn with heads of wheat
and flecks of straw. The fodder had been requisitioned to the last
armful, and not enough was left to build a nest for a sparrow. The barn
was doorless, and, except for the shelter of the roof, we might as well
have slept in the open air. At least so we thought, but next day men on
the outposts told us a different tale. That night the head-quarters
thermometers had showed twenty below zero, and many men slept never
again to waken, under the open sky--slept leaning on their chassepots,
and so died standing up, no one guessing they were dead till they fell
over all in one piece like an icicle snapped.

But even Hugh Deventer and I were sorely tried in our open barn. We had
lain soft and fed well all our lives. We were not yet broken to the work
like the campaigners of Sicily, or even like those who had passed
through the war since the autumn.

"If I bored a hole or two where the joints are," groaned Hugh, "one of
Jack Jaikes's oil cans might easy my bearings greatly this morning!"

"From what I can guess," said Victor Dor, "you will find it warm enough
in an hour or two. Manteuffel is going to make a push for it to-day.
Ricciotti managed to capture a couple of Werder's Uhlans, and one of our
_franc-tireurs_ says that the whole Pomeranian army corps is coming upon
us as fast as the men can march."

"A _franc-tireur_ always lies," said another Valtelline man, Marius
Girr, scornfully, but enunciating a principle generally received in the
army.

"Still, it is possible that this one told the truth by mistake--at any
rate, it is not a safe thing to lie to Ricciotti about a matter which,
in a few days, will prove itself true or untrue. Ricciotti knows the use
of a firing party at twelve yards just as well as Bordone."

The morning grew more and more threatening as time passed. The chill
tang of coming snow clung to the nostrils. We had breakfasted meagrely
on the last rinds of bacon and scraps of sausage in our haversacks. We
longed for hot coffee till we ached, but had to content ourselves with
sucking an icicle or two from the roof of the barn, good for the thirst,
but very afflicting to the tongue at a temperature of minus twenty.

Presently the inexorable bugles called us forward to the trenches, which
extended in a vast hollow crescent from the Arroux bank opposite Autun
to the hills above St. Leger on the borders of the Nievre. We could see
against the snow dark masses of overcoated Prussians defiling this way
and that among the valleys, and at sight of them our field-guns began to
speak. With eyes that hardly yet understood we watched the shells
bursting and the marching columns shred suddenly apart to be reformed
automatically only an instant after, as the narrow strips of dark blue
uncoiled themselves towards the plain.

Hugh and I lay close against a railway embankment from which the rails
had been ruthlessly torn up. I was inclined to make an additional
shelter of these, and indeed Hugh and I had begun the work when Victor
Dor stopped us.

"As much earth as you like," he said; "earth or sand stops bullets, but
iron only makes them glance off, and often kill two in place of one.
Scatter all the rails, plates, and ties down our side of the slope. I
will show you something that is far better!"

And with the edge of the shallow iron saucepan which he carried like a
targe at his back, he scooped up the earth so that we soon had in front
of us a very competent breastwork, giving sufficient cover for our heads
and shoulders as well as a resting-place for our rifles.

During the next hour we heard the roar of the German artillery away in
the direction of St. Leger, and the resounding "boom-boom" of our heavy
mortars and twelve-pounders answering them.

"What would Jack Jaikes give to see these in action," I said in Hugh's
ear.

"And still more my father," he answered.

Our outposts began to be driven in, but they had stubbornly defended our
front, nor did they yield till the masses of blue battalions showed
thickly, and then only to give the artillery free play.

It was in waiting behind us, and the first crash as the shells hurtled
over our heads made Hugh and I feel very strange in the pits of our
stomachs--something like incipient sea-sickness. The veterans never once
looked aloft, but only cuddled their rifles and wriggled their bodies to
find a comfortable niche from which to fire.

"Dig your toes into the embankment, you English," Marius Girr of our
company called to us; "if you don't, the first recoil of the rifle will
send you slipping down into the ditch."

It was good advice, and with a few kicks we dug solid stances for our
feet, in which our thick marching shoes were ensconced to the heels. We
excavated also hollow troughs for our knees, and, as Hugh said, we
behaved generally like so many burying beetles instead of gallant
soldiers. All this was not done easily, for the ground was frozen hard,
and in the river behind us we could hear the solid blocks of ice
clinking and crunching together as the sullen grey-green current swept
them along.

It was Sunday, and upon the town road a little behind our line, but
quite within the zone of fire, comfortable mammas and trim little
daughters were trotting to Mass with their service books wrapped in
white napkins. Hugh and I yelled at them to go home, but it was no use.
Luckily I remembered their fear of the Iron Chancellor, and assured them
by all the saints that "Bismarck was coming," whereupon they kilted
their petticoats and made off homeward, their fat white-stockinged legs
twinkling in the pearl-grey twilight. It was like a Dutch
picture--trampled snow, low brooding sky, white-capped matrons and
little girls wrapped in red shawls.

But in a few moments we had other matters to occupy us. The Tanara
regiment was on our right, and the sweep of the crescent being farther
advanced than at our position, they received the first rush of the
Pomeranians.

But there was no waiting, for suddenly out of the woods in front of us
stiff lines of blue emerged and began moving forward with the Noah's Ark
regularity of marionettes. It seemed impossible that these could be
soldiers charging. But we were soon convinced. The dip of the ground hid
them for a long time, and then suddenly they appeared not four hundred
yards off, no longer in column, but in two lines close together, with a
supporting third some distance in the rear.

We could see them extending companies far away on either side. But this
we knew to be in vain, for the river protected us on the right, while on
the left our entrenchments reached as far as the St. Leger hills which
were crowned with our forts.

Then came the splitting growl of the mitrailleuses behind us. These were
still held to be rather uncertain weapons. Men familiarly called them
pepper-pots, and it was as likely as not that a few bullets might come
spattering our way, spread-eagled as we were on the railway embankment,
and offering a far more practicable target than the advancing Germans.

But there were no casualties, at least near us, and in a moment the
Germans fired a volley which swept the embankment like hail. The rifles
of the first Milanese cracked on every side, but I bade Hugh hold his
fire till the charging enemy was only a hundred yards away. Our Henry
rifles gave us an immense advantage in speed of firing. They came on,
breaking at last through a dark barrier of yew and poplar hedge, and as
they came we could see their bayonets flash like silver in the dull
light. Their colonel was mounted on a black charger, a tall fine-looking
man who pushed his horse up every knoll in order the better to see whom
and what he was attacking.

But he dropped a little way from the yew hedge, and almost before he
reached the ground two men with a stretcher were lifting up their
officer, while a third had taken the horse by the bridle and was leading
him to the rear, as composedly as a groom in a stable-yard.

"Now, then, Hugh," I cried, "you take the right of the line and I will
take the left. But sight carefully and don't aim high."

"_Crack_--_crack_--_crack!_!" went our magazine rifles, and the big
Pomeranians went down as if an invisible sickle had mown them. As I
expected, Hugh was finished before me, but we had scarcely time to
adjust our new cartridge holders before the line broke and the blue
coats turned and ran. A few officers and a man or two immediately in
their wake got as far as the curve of the embankment--only, however, to
be shot down.

The air rang with the shouts of "Evivva Garibaldi!" And a few minutes
afterwards the Tanara regiment, encouraged by our success, repulsed the
enemy's bayonet charge, so that in an instant our whole line was
disengaged. Only out in the open the trampled earth and the glistening
crushed-sugar snow were starred here and there with spots and splotches
of red and the contorted bodies of men, some still moving, but mostly
stricken into the strange stiff attitudes of death.

It was our first battle in the service of Garibaldi. It was destined to
be our last. For that night the news of the fall of Paris and the
signing of the armistice stopped the fighting everywhere, except at
Belfort and along the desperate rear-guard line of Bourbaki's army,
which was being driven like a pack of famished wolves into the passes of
the Jura.




CHAPTER XVI

THE COMING OF ALIDA


It was the evening of the 27th of January, and we were back in Autun.
The Milanese were later than most in getting inside the gates. We had
pushed far forward after the retreating Pomeranians, and now our lot was
to bivouac in the square. The houses were full, and the churches with
their damp floors did not tempt us. Besides, we were full of the glow of
victory, and for that night a camp-fire in the middle of the square
satisfied us. The evening had fallen mild and still--clear too, though
rapidly growing misty under the red loom of camp-fire smoke. There was
not much open rejoicing. The French would not believe that the end had
come, and the Italians, still flushed with victory, felt that they had
come a long way to do but little. Still, as we lay close to our
camp-fires or threshed our arms about to keep warm, we could not keep
out of our minds the hope of better days. I know not of what Hugh
Deventer thought, but for me I was talking to Rhoda Polly, or lazily
steering the ferry-boat across the river while before me Jeanne Felix
bent lissomly to the oars. It was clear that I had not yet reached the
age of the grand expulsive passion which ignores partage. Indeed, given
a temperament like mine, no youth is worth his salt who at twenty-one
cannot drive several teams abreast.

Hugh and I put in the night wandering up and down, rendered restless by
the thoughts of peace, and unable to sleep about the camp-fires before
which we had spread our blankets. Upon the advice of a stranger in a
doorway we penetrated into a school, and from the first class-room
brought out benches and desks enough to feed our camp-fires all night in
the square of Autun. With a stroke or two of the axe Hugh smashed these
across the middle, and we soon built up such a range of blaze that the
heat drove back the sleepers, some of whom, caught betwixt two, were in
peril of being roasted. Those who did not waken we dragged off by the
shoulders, usually to be soundly cursed for our officiousness. Then we
went back to find the man who had told us of the school-house treasure.
He was standing at his door grimly regarding our bonfires. We thanked
him courteously in the name of the regiment.

"At least the Jesuits will teach no more lies to poor children on those
benches," he said. "You are true Garibaldians, though you do speak
French like Linn and myself!"

He was a tall man with a grey beard that came half-way to his waistbelt,
and when he invited us in we were wondering who Linn might be.

We found ourselves in a comfortable little kitchen, floored with red
brick. On the walls, trophies of matchlocks and Dervish swords on a
ground of palm leaves and alfa grass told us that we were in the
dwelling of one who in his day had made the campaign of the Atlas.

Over the mantelshelf, and framed in oak in a rough but artistic manner,
was a document which attracted me. One side was written in Arabic of the
dashing and ornamental sort. I had seen many such in my father's
library. The other side was ruled with a pencil, and there the writing
was that of a schoolboy just beyond the stage of pot-hooks.

"Is it permitted to read?" I asked, for my curiosity was great.

The man with the long beard was talking to Hugh, but he turned to me
with a courteous wave of the hand, and said with a ceremony that was
never learned in Autun:

"Sir, this house and all that it contains are at your service."

I followed the ill-traced letters of the translation. It was dated "From
my prison-house, in the fortress-city called Amboise," and was signed
"Sheik Abd-el-Kader." It contained, after the usual compliments,
greetings and affection to the brave fellow soldier and commander of his
forces, Keller Bey--with a congratulation on his release from
imprisonment.

So it became immediately evident to me that our host had indeed made the
campaign of the Atlas, but that he had fought against and not for the
tricolour.

He seemed to watch out of the corner of his eye the effect of the framed
certificate.

"You are English," he said, "and though you have stolen much yourselves,
you can still feel for a great man defending his country, and not
condemn the little man who helped him."

"You are Keller Bey?" I asked, pointing to the name on the much crumpled
sheet.

"I am Keller," he said, "Keller grown old and staid. Linn keeps me at
home. She had the devil's own job ere she got me buckled down, but she
did it, and now there is only Linn and our daughter Alida for me to
think about."

And in the silence of the house he lifted his voice and called aloud for
"Linn."

Presently we heard footsteps coming swiftly along the passage which led
from the inner rooms. A woman entered--tall, gaunt, and angular. Her
aspect was severe to the borders of being forbidding, and she frowned
upon us as Keller, ex-officer of Abd-el-Kader, made some brief
introduction.

But the smile with which she held out her hand was transfiguring. The
face which had been almost ugly suddenly became attractive and even
fascinating. One saw that her eyes were of forget-me-not blue, and when
she said "You are welcome" to one and the other of us, it was clear that
Linn Keller possessed gifts of attraction which do not depend upon age
or external beauty.

She was taller than her husband, but awkward and angular in her
movement. She walked with a curious shuffle as if the slipper on one
foot was always on the point of coming off, yet--in a moment we found
ourselves at home with her, and in five minutes we were calling her
"Linn" just as her husband had done. The assurance of youth can surely
no farther go.

The lamp on the mantelpiece was of an Oriental design. Curtains and rugs
were abundantly scattered about, and in one corner a looped-up hanging
showed an oblong bath sunk in the tiled floor.

"This house is our own," said Linn; "we have arranged some things to
suit ourselves, having been so long abroad that it seems impossible to
do without them. But at any rate you must stay and see Alida. You must
rise early, for she has to go out to give her lessons. Alida is a
teacher of music. We have put everything except this house and a
provision for our old age into Alida's education."

I explained to the pair that we would indeed be most grateful for the
warmth and refuge of the kitchen, but that if that were inconvenient we
could return at any hour of the morning, always provided the regiment
did not march.

"They are fine lads, eh, Linn?" said Keller, turning to his wife. "Can
we not do something better for them than the kitchen floor?"

I assured them that we asked no more than permission to stretch
ourselves on a couple of rugs with knapsacks beneath our heads. But
Linn's housewifery instinct was roused. She took us to a room on the
entresol, with two beds, and even insisted on helping us off with our
boots. There we should sleep, and she would keep an eye on the regiment,
and have us on parade in good time. As for her she was a barrack's child
and understood such things. Besides, Keller and she were back and
forward all night like the Arabs among whom they had lived.

Never had the touch of sheets felt more caressing. Never did sleep fall
upon us so deep and dreamless as when our heads touched the pillow. It
was still dark when we were awakened by a light touch on the shoulder,
and sitting up each on an elbow we beheld Linn stalking about the room
and putting back our uniforms all carefully brushed and folded. A candle
stood on a stand, and farther back a gigantic Linn was grotesquely
shadowed upon the walls.

"Breakfast is ready," she said, when we had somewhat got over our first
blankness. "You have a good hour before you, and if you dress now you
will have time to breakfast, and besides you shall see Alida."

I do not know whether it was the breakfast or the prospect of Alida seen
in the flesh which aroused us, but no sooner was the door closed behind
Linn's back than we flung ourselves into our uniforms with that ordered
rapidity which only a soldier understands.

Everything we touched had been warmed and cared for with that
affectionate motherliness which looked out of Linn's eyes. We had never
experienced any kindness like this before, and it seemed the more
marvellous that by merely putting aside the blinds of our sleeping-room
we could see our comrades still lying about the fires, and the cooks for
the week beginning with their bayonet butts to crush and grind the
berries for the morning coffee.

Yonder were Victor Dor and Marius Girr looking down at our sleeping
places, and presently beginning to roll up our blankets. It seemed a
shame that we should have passed the night between sheets, thus basely
abandoning our comrades among the trampled snow of the market square of
Autun.

But there interposed between them and us two necessities: a "made"
breakfast which we must eat--eat till we could eat no more, and--we must
see Alida Keller, daughter of the Atlas "goums."

I don't know what Hugh expected. But for myself I mingled Linn and the
ideal music mistress. Tall, forceful, and striding she must be, with
energy to bring into such evident subjection Keller Bey and his wife.
Something younger and less weather-beaten than Linn, of course--perhaps
with a certain passing glow of good looks which would fade out like the
mist bloom upon the peach trees in the frost of April.

But when at last she came in, and stood a moment to give a hand to each
of us, before nestling into her familiar corner of a low old Oriental
couch--I think both our hearts cried out at the same moment: "Oh, the
perfect creature!"

She was not like Linn in the least. Her father still less resembled her.
It is almost impossible to describe this girl of the South, nevertheless
I can but try, Alida Keller was little, but shaped with such delicate
perfection that she gave the impression of a greater height. Her skin
was of a creamy duskiness through which went and came colour now as
faint as that of a rose leaf, which anon flamed out into a vivid red,
the colour of the pomegranate flower.

Her father and Linn served her like a princess, and to this she seemed
accustomed, for except that she patted Linn's hand, or with a smile said
"Petit Pere" to her father, she seemed unconscious of their attentions.

As for Hugh and myself, I declare that we were completely cheated out of
that admirable breakfast. We had meant to square our elbows, grasp our
knives and forks, and fall on. We had rank appetites, sharpened with
fighting and hard fare, but the mere presence of Alida cut at the roots
of hunger as a scythe cuts down reeds.

We simply sat and gazed at her. She was not in the least put out, ate
well and daintily, and looked at us impartially from under her dark
lashes. For the instant--I will not admit more--I forgot Rhoda Polly and
Jeanne Felix.

But I am not much to be blamed. For the burden of the conversation fell
on me. Hugh Deventer could only sit and gape, lifting the same morsel
half a dozen times to his mouth without once getting it safely in. He
uttered not a word, save sometimes in answer to a direct question he
would produce a "yes" or "no," so jerky and mechanical that I was
obliged to kick his shins under the table to keep him aware of himself.

Of this Keller and Linn saw nothing. They were all eyes and ears for
Alida, and had not a glance for us. The table was covered--we were
soldiers and could help ourselves. Meantime I was kept busy answering
the questions of Alida. She spoke in a low and thrilling contralto, a
voice that had a _ron-ron_ in it, something like the pulsing whisper of
a bell after it has been rung in a church tower.

How had we left school? We must tell her. Tell her I did, describing as
vividly as possible the laundry and the secret way out upon the road,
then the good-bye call at my father's house, and our escape from the
sentinel at the bridge end. It was lovely to see the cheeks of Alida now
going pale now flaming scarlet, and I admit that I made the most of my
opportunity. I passed rapidly over the troubles in Aramon-les-Ateliers,
both because I knew such things could not interest Alida Keller--also
(and chiefly) because I gathered that Keller and Linn would be
altogether on the side of the workmen, and I did not feel called upon to
defend the difficult position of Dennis Deventer as Manager of the Small
Arms Factory--at least not just then.

Our later adventures with the transport train, our march by night, our
incorporation in the Garibaldi army, and the many skirmishes culminating
in the big fight when we had defeated the Prussians, were all easy to
tell--and I had scarcely finished when Linn came in with the news that
the regiments were forming up for roll-call.

We had hardly time to promise to come back before we were equipped and
pushed out by Linn with well-plenished haversacks. We scurried across
the square and appeared in our places out of nowhere in particular, to
the great astonishment of Victor and Marius, who hastily arranged our
blankets across our shoulders so that we might pass inspection.

"You English fear nothing, I know," said Victor Dor, "but you almost ran
things a trifle fine this morning. See yonder!"

He pointed with a finger towards a narrow street which debouched into
the upper end of the Market Square. At first we could see nothing--and
then--lo, the ramshackle barouche, and the two fatigued white horses of
the General himself!

"_Garibaldi! Garibaldi!_"

The "Children" of the Milanese regiment could hardly keep their lines.
We front-rank men felt an impulse as if someone were pushing us from
behind. It was the concentred yearning of a thousand men.

Our officers kept whispering to us, "Stand firm. Not just now. He will
return. See how the Tanara regiment is standing--would you have them put
us to shame before our father?" So the Milanese men stood quivering each
like a tuning-fork while their General passed by. Bordone was with him,
and Ricciotti rode on the side farthest from the lines. I saw him
clearly, and noted the waxen pallor of his face. But his eye was still
bright, and the smile kindly on his lips as he passed down the lines. It
was the face of a philosopher, a thinker, or a prophet, rather than that
of the greatest leader of irregular troops the world had ever seen. But
when the carriage turned at the end of the square, the men could no
longer be held. They surrounded the old barouche, hanging round it in
clusters, like grapes, or more exactly like bees about their queen in
her summer flight. Hugh Deventer and I stood a little back, for we felt
that this was, as one might say, a family matter, and no concern of
ours. But Ricciotti spied us out, and putting his horse into the press,
brought us forward to introduce us personally to his father.

The old man extended his hand which, instead of kissing, we shook in the
English fashion. The difference pleased him.

"It is like Sicily to see you here. I had once over eight hundred of
you, and not a white feather or a faint heart among them all. I trusted
them as I trusted my children. They were as my children. Well may I love
England. They fought for me seeking no reward, and afterwards when there
was talk of expelling me, they bought my island and gave it to me, so
that none could take it away for ever."

He moved on, nodding his head and smiling, while Bordone glooming on the
seat opposite seemed vastly relieved. Ricciotti was in high spirits.

"The Chief is better to-day than I have seen him for years," he confided
to us. "He said we had done well against Manteuffel--yes, even I, his
son whom he never praises."

Victor Dor and Marius Girr came and shook hands with us repeatedly. It
was an honour to the company that the General had so distinguished us,
and would we tell them what he had said--yes, every word.

From their archway Keller and Linn had beheld, one standing on either
side of the door, and a slight vibration of the window curtains
suggested that perhaps Alida herself was not wholly without curiosity.

Then the troops were dismissed. The town was placarded with the white
oblongs reserved for Government procla

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