Flower o' the lily: A romance of old Cambray

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

II

So Cambray starved and endured.

For four months her citizens waited, confident that the promised help from France would come in the end. They had hoped and trusted on that never-to-be-forgotten day four months ago when they covered themselves with glory, and their trust had not been misplaced. The masked stranger whom they had followed unto death and victory, the man who had rallied them and cheered them, who had shown them the example of intrepid valour and heroic self-sacrifice, had promised them help from France on that day, and that help had come just as he had promised. Now that he was gone from them, the burghers and the soldiers, the poor and the rich alike—aye! even the women and the children—would have felt themselves eternally disgraced if they had surrendered their city which he had so magnificently defended.

So they tightened their belts and starved, and waited with stoicism and patience for the hour of their deliverance.

And every evening when the setting sun threw a shaft of crimson light through the stately windows of Notre Dame, and the gathering dusk drew long shadows around the walls, the people of Cambray would meet on the Place d'Armes inside the citadel, and pray for the return of the hero who had fought for their liberty. Men and women with pale, gaunt faces, on which hunger and privations had already drawn indelible lines; men and women, some of whom had perhaps never before turned their thoughts to anything but material cares and material pleasures, flocked now to pray beneath the blue vault of heaven and to think of the man who had saved them from ruin and disgrace.

Nobody believed that he was dead; though many had seen him fall, they felt that he would return. God Himself had given Cambray her defender in the hour of her greatest peril: God had not merely given in order to take away again. Vague rumours were afloat that the mysterious hero was none other than the Duc d'Anjou, own brother of the King of France, who one day would be Sovereign Lord over all the United Provinces; but as to that, no one cared. He who was gone was the Defender of Cambray: as such, he was enshrined in thousands of hearts, as such he would return one day to receive the gratitude and the love of the people who worshipped him.

III

Le Carpentier draws a kindly veil over the sufferings of the unfortunate city. With pathetic exactitude, he tells us that a cow during the siege fetched as much as three hundred francs—an enormous sum these days—a sheep fifty francs, an egg forty sols and an ounce of salt eight sols; but he altogether omits to tell us what happened to the poor people, who had neither fifty francs nor yet forty sols to spend.

Maître Manuchet, on the other hand, assures us that at one time bread was entirely unobtainable and that rats and mice formed a part of the daily menu of the rich. He is more crude in his statements than Le Carpentier, and even lifts for our discreet gaze just one corner of that veil, wherewith history has chosen to conceal for ever the anguish of a suffering city. He shows us three distinct pictures, only sketched in in mere outline, but with boldness and an obvious regard for truth.

One of these pictures is of Jacqueline de Broyart, the wealthy heiress who shared with the departed hero the worship of the citizens of Cambray. Manuchet speaks of her as of an angel of charity, healing and soothing with words and hands and heart, as of a vision of paradise in the midst of a torturing hell—her courage and endurance a prop for drooping spirits; her voice a sweet, insistent sound above the cries of pain, the curses and the groans. Wide-eyed and pale, but with a cheering smile upon her lips, she flits through the deserted streets of Cambray, bringing the solace of her presence, the help that can be given, the food that can be shared, to many a suffering home.