With that a hail-storm of knocks fell on the door and on the shutters. A dozen voices cried, "Open! Open!" The jangle of a halberd as its bearer let the butt drop heavily on the stone steps added force to the summons.
Anne's first impulse was to retreat upstairs, and leave them to do their worst. Her next—she was in a state of collapse in which resistance seemed useless—was to open. She moved to the door, and with cold hands removed the huge bars and let down the chain. It was only when she had done so much, when it remained only to unlock, that she wavered; that she trembled to think on what the crowd might be bent, and what might be her fate at their hands. She paused then, with her fingers on the key; but not for long. She remembered that, before she descended, she had heard neither shot nor cry. Resistance therefore had ceased, and that of a single house, held by two helpless women, could avail nothing, could but excite to fury and reprisals.
She turned the key and opened. The lights dazzled her. The doorway, as she stood faltering, almost fainting, before it, seemed to be full of grotesque dancing faces, some swathed in bandages, others powder-blackened, some hot with excitement, others pallid with fatigue. They were such faces, piled one above the other, as are seen in bad dreams.
On the intruders' side, those who pressed in first saw a girl strangely quiet, who held the door wide for them. "My mother is ill," she said in a voice that strove for composure; if they were the enemy, her only hope, her only safety, lay in courage. "And she is old," she continued. "Do not harm her."
"We come to do harm neither to you nor to her," a voice replied. And the foremost of the troop, a thick dwarfish man with a huge two-handed sword, stood aside. "Messer Baudichon," he said to one behind him, "this is the daughter."
She knew the fat, sturdy councillor—who in Geneva did not?—and through her stupor she recognised him, although a great bandage swathed half his head, and he was pale. And, beginning to have an inkling that things were well, she began also to tremble. By his side stood Messer Petitot—she knew him, too, he had been Syndic the year before—and a man in hacked and blood-stained armour with his arm in a sling and his face black with powder. These three, and behind them a dozen others—men whom she had seen on high days robed in velvet, but who now wore, one and all, the ugly marks of that night's work—looked on her with a strange benevolence. And Baudichon took her hand.
"We do not come to harm you," he said. "On the contrary we come to thank you and yours. In the name of the city of Geneva, and of all those here with me——"
"Ay! Ay!" shouted Jehan Brosse, the tailor. And he rang his sword on the doorstep. "Ay! Ay!"
"We come to thank you for the blow struck this night from this house! That it rid us of one of our worst foes was a small thing, girl. But that it put heart into our burghers and strength into their arms at a critical moment was another and a greater thing. Which shall not, if Geneva stand—as stand by God's pleasure she shall, the stronger for this night's work—be forgotten! The name of Mère Royaume will at the next meeting of the Greater Council be inscribed among the names of those whom the Free City thanks for their services this night!"
A murmur of stern approval that began with those in the house rolled through the doorway and was echoed by the waiting throng that filled the street.