She turned to her father, and all the people breathed hard; for it passed their understanding, and seemed most scandalous that a girl could thus defy the Church, and answer the bishop in his own cathedral. Her father rose, and then I saw her sway with faintness. I know not what might have occurred, for the bishop stood with hand upraised and a great indignation in his face, about to speak, when out of the desultory firing from our batteries there came a shell, which burst even at the cathedral entrance, tore away a portion of the wall, and killed and wounded a number of people.
Then followed a panic which the priests in vain tried to quell. The people swarmed into the choir and through the vestry. I saw Doltaire with Juste Duvarney spring swiftly to the side of Alixe, and, with her father, put her and Mademoiselle Lotbiniere into the pulpit, forming a ring round it, and preventing the crowd from trampling on them, as, suddenly gone mad, they swarmed past. The Governor, the Intendant, and the Chevalier de la Darante did as much also for Madame Lotbiniere; and as soon as the crush had in a little subsided, a number of soldiers cleared the way, and I saw my wife led from the church. I longed to leap down there among them and claim her, but that thought was madness, for I should have been food for worms in a trice, so I kept my place.
XXVI. THE SECRET OF THE TAPESTRY
That evening, at eight o’clock, Jean Labrouk was buried. A shell had burst not a dozen paces from his own door, within the consecrated ground of the cathedral, and in a hole it had made he was laid, the only mourners his wife and his grandfather, and two soldiers of his company sent by General Bougainville to bury him. I watched the ceremony from my loft, which had one small dormer window. It was dark, but burning buildings in the Lower Town made all light about the place. I could hear the grandfather mumbling and talking to the body as it was lowered into the ground. While yet the priest was hastily reading prayers, a dusty horseman came riding to the grave, and dismounted.
“Jean,” he said, looking at the grave, “Jean Labrouk, a man dies well that dies with his gaiters on, aho!... What have you said for Jean Labrouk, m’sieu’?” he added to the priest.
The priest stared at him, as though he had presumed.
“Well?” said Gabord. “Well?”
The priest answered nothing, but prepared to go, whispering a word of comfort to the poor wife. Gabord looked at the soldiers, looked at the wife, at the priest, then spread out his legs and stuck his hands down into his pockets, while his horse rubbed its nose against his shoulder. He fixed his eyes on the grave, and nodded once or twice musingly.
“Well,” he said at last, as if he had found a perfect virtue, and the one or only thing that could be said, “well, he never eat his words, that Jean.”