"It's a witch turned into a man!" cried a drunken woman from her window.
"Give him the wheel of fire at the blacksmith's forge."
"That's it! Gad'rabotin—the wheel of fire'll turn him back to a hag again!"
The little gentleman protested, but they seized him and dragged him from the steps. Tossed like a ball, so light was he, he grasped the gold- headed cane as one might cling to life, and declared that he was no witch, but a poor French exile, arrested the night before for being abroad after nine o'clock, against the orders of the Royal Court.
Many of the crowd knew him well enough by sight, but they were too delirious to act with intelligence now. The dark cloud was lifting a little from the sun, and dread of the Judgment Day was declining; but as the pendulum swung back towards normal life again, it carried with it the one virulent and common prejudice of the country—radical hatred of the French—which often slumbered but never died.
The wife of an oyster-fisher from Rozel Bay, who lived in hourly enmity with the oyster-fishers of Carteret, gashed his cheek with the shell of an ormer. A potato-digger from Grouville parish struck at his head with a hoe, for the Granvillais had crossed the strait to the island the year before, to work in the harvest fields for a lesser wage than the Jersiais, and this little French gentleman must be held responsible for that. The weapon missed the Chevalier, but laid low a centenier, who, though a municipal officer, had in the excitement lost his head like his neighbours. This but increased the rage against the foreigner, and was another crime to lay to his charge. A smuggler thereupon kicked him in the side.
At that moment there came a cry of indignation from a girl at an upper window of the Place. The Chevalier evidently knew her, for even in his hard case he smiled; and then he heard another voice ring out over the heads of the crowd, strong, angry, determined.
From the Rue d'Driere a tall athletic man was hurrying. He had on his shoulders a workman's han basket, from which peeped a ship-builder's tools. Seeing the Chevalier's danger, he dropped his tool-basket through the open window of a house and forced his way through the crowd, roughly knocking from under them the feet of two or three ruffians who opposed him. He reproached the crowd, he berated them, he handled them fiercely. By a dexterous strength he caught the little gentleman up in his arms, and, driving straight on to the open door of the smithy, placed him inside, then blocked the passage with his own body.
It was a strange picture: the preacher in an ecstasy haranguing the foolish rabble, who now realised, with an unbecoming joy, that the Last Day was yet to face; the gaping, empty prison; the open windows crowded with excited faces; the church bell from the Vier Marchi ringing an alarm; Norman lethargy roused to froth and fury: one strong man holding two hundred back!
Above them all, at a hus in the gable of a thatched cottage, stood the girl whom the Chevalier had recognised, anxiously watching the affray. She was leaning across the lower closed half of the door, her hands in apprehensive excitement clasping her cheeks. The eyes were bewildered, and, though alive with pain, watched the scene below with unwavering intensity.
Like all mobs this one had no reason, no sense. They were baulked in their malign intentions, and this man, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, was the cause of it—that was all they knew. A stone was thrown at Delagarde as he stood in the doorway, but it missed him.