The red cockade

by Stanley John Weyman

"Softly, Monsieur, softly."

There were five of them, for two had remained at the door. The passage was dark, but they had a lantern, and we waited in silence two or three minutes. Then the door opened a few inches, and the man who seemed to be the leader went to it, and having received his orders, returned.

"Forward!" he said. "In No. 6. And do you, Petitot, fetch the key."

The man named went off quickly, and we followed more slowly along the corridor; the steady tramp of my guards, as they marched beside me, awaking sullen echoes that rolled away before us. The yellow light of the lantern showed a white-washed wall on either side, broken on the right hand by a dull line of doors, as of cells. We halted presently before one of these, and I thought that I was to be confined there; and my courage rose, for I should still be near Denise. But the door, when opened, disclosed only a little staircase which we descended in single file, and so reached a bare corridor similar to that above. Half-way along this we stopped again, beside an open window, through which the night wind came in so strongly as to stir the hair, and force the man who carried the lantern to shield the light under his skirts. And not the night wind only; with it entered all the noises of the night and the disturbed city; hoarse cries and cheers, and the shrill monotonous jangle of bells, and now and then a pistol-shot--noises that told only too eloquently what was passing under the black veil that hid the chaos of streets and houses below us. Nay, in one place the veil was rent, and through the gap a ruddy column poured up from the roofs, dispersing sparks--the hot glare of some great fire, that blazing in the heart of the city, seemed to make the sky sharer in the deeds and horrors that lay beneath it.

The men with me pressed to the window, and peered through it, and strained eyes and ears; and little wonder. Little wonder, too, that the man who was responsible for all, and had staked all, walked the roof above with tireless steps. For the struggle below was the one great struggle of the world, the struggle that never ceases between the old and the new: and it was being fought as it had been fought in Nîmes for centuries, savagely, ruthlessly, over kennels running with blood. Nor could the issue be told; only, that as it was here, it was likely to be through half of France. We who stood at that window, looked into the darkness with actual eyes; but across the border at Turin, and nearer at Sommières and Montpellier, thousands of Frenchmen bearing the greatest names of France, watched also--watched with faces turned to Nîmes, and hearts as anxious as ours.

I gathered from the talk of those round me, that M. Froment had seized the Arènes, and garrisoned it, and that the flames we saw were those of one of the Protestant churches; that as yet the patriots, taken by surprise, made little resistance, and that if the Reds could hold for twenty-four hours longer what they had seized, the arrival of the troops from Montpellier would then secure all, and at the same time stamp the movement with the approval of the highest parties.

"But it was a near thing," one of the men muttered. "If we had not been at their throats to-night, they would have been at ours to-morrow!"

"And now, not half the companies have turned out."

"But the villages will come in in the morning," a third cried eagerly. "They are to toll all the bells from here to the Rhone."

"Ay, but what if the Cevennols come in first? What then, man?"