“What is that to you? It is the law! The mongrel is accursed—l’âme damnée—le tison d’enfer! Down with this insolent the stranger! he is a Cagot himself!”
Ned waited calmly for the tumult to subside.
“I ask you what this man has done?” said he.
“Cannot you tell the heretic by his smell? Oh-a-eh! here is a fine Catholic nose! Out of our way—the pig is forfeit!”
They hissed and yelped, and raised a shrill chorus of “baas” at the unfortunate. Curiously, he seemed to feel this last form of insult more acutely than any. Suddenly a clod of earth, aimed presumably at the poor creature, hurtled through the air and struck Ned’s shoulder in passing. It might have rebounded on the assailant, so immediate was the retribution that followed. The erst-calm paladin went for the vermin like a terrier, and like a terrier repaid his own punishment with interest.
The great chuff howled and blubbered and wriggled under the blows that rained upon him. Presently Ned, exhausted, swung his victim in a hysteric heap upon the ground, and stood to breathe himself. Then it was that the reserve, withdrawn in affright, seeing his momentary fatigue, gathered heart of numbers, and came down upon him in phalanx. He received them, nothing dismayed, and accounted for the first with a “give-upon-the-nose,” and for another with a “poached eye.” He was patently tired, however—enervated by the heat of the day—and his adversaries, recognising this, were encouraging one another to annihilate him, when all in a moment a volume of water slapped into their faces and quenched their ardour for ever.
A new champion had come upon the field, and that was no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne with her pitcher. She laughed volubly, on a menacing note, in the washed and streaming countenances.
“Beasts, pigs, cowards!” she shrilled. “For one Englishman—name of God!—for one trumpery Englishman to lay you out flat as linen on a bleaching-green! Get back—hide yourselves in your furrows, or play bully to the little rabbits in the field corners! Not to the bucks—that were too bold.”
She made as if to follow up the water with the vessel. Ned cried out: “You will break the earthenware sooner than their heads, mademoiselle!” in agony lest she should blaze beyond self-extinguishment, as on the previous evening; but she only stiffened her claws like a cat and prepared to spring. It was enough. The swamped and demoralised crew gathered up its wreckage and fled incontinent, and was in a moment out of sight round the curve.
Ned took off his hat to his tutelary divinity—this Athena to his Achilles.