The red cockade

by Stanley John Weyman

It showed to the sunshine a wide blind front, long rows of shuttered windows, and not a sign of life. Nevertheless, here was something I knew, something which wore a semblance of familiarity, and I hailed it with hope; and, flinging myself on the door, knocked long and recklessly. The noise seemed fit to wake the dead; it boomed and echoed in every doorway of the empty street, that on the evening of my arrival had teemed with traffic; I shivered at the sound--I shivered standing conspicuous on the steps of the house, expecting a score of windows to be opened and heads thrust out.

But I had not yet learned how the extremity of panic benumbs; or how strong is the cowardly instinct that binds the peaceful man to his hearth when blood flows in the streets. Not a face showed at a casement, not a door opened; worse, though I knocked again and again, the house I would awaken remained dead and silent. I stood back and gazed at it, and returned, and hammered again, thinking this time nothing of myself.

But without result. Or not quite. Far away at the end of the street the echo of my knocking dwelt a little, then grew into a fuller, deeper sound--a sound I knew. The mob was returning.

I cursed my folly then for lingering; thought of the passage in the rear of the house that led to the church, found the entrance to it, and in a moment was speeding through it. The distant roar grew nearer and louder, but now I could see the low door of the church, and I slackened my pace a little. As I did so the door before me opened, and a man looked out. I saw his face before he saw me, and read it; saw terror, shame, and rage written on its mean features; and in some strange way I knew what he was going to do before he did it. A moment he glared abroad, blinking and shading his eyes in the sunshine, then he spied me, slid out, and with an indescribable Judas look at me, fled away.

He left the door ajar--I knew him in some way for the door-keeper, deserting his post; and in a moment I was in the church and face to face with a sight I shall remember while I live; for that which was passing outside, that which I had seen during the last few minutes, gave it a solemnity exceeding even that of the strange service I had witnessed there before.

The sun shut out, a few red altar lamps shed a sombre light on the pillars and the dim pictures and the vanishing spaces; above all, on a vast crowd of kneeling women, whose bowed heads and wailing voices as they chanted the Litany of the Virgin, filled the nave.

There were some, principally on the fringe of the assembly, who rocked themselves to and fro, weeping silently, or lay still as statues with their foreheads pressed to the cold stones; whilst others glanced this way and that with staring eyes, and started at the slightest sound, and moaned prayers with white lips. But more and more, the passionate utterance of the braver souls laid bonds on the others; louder and louder the measured rhythm of "Ora pro nobis! Ora pro nobis!" rose and swelled through the vaults of the roof; more and more fervent it grew, more and more importunate, wilder the abandonment of supplication, until--until I felt the tears rise in my throat, and my breast swell with pity and admiration--and then I saw Denise.

She knelt between her mother and Madame Catinot, nearly in the front row of those who faced the high altar. Whence I stood, I had a side view of her face as she looked upward in rapt adoration--that face which I had once deemed so childish. Now at the thought that she prayed, perhaps for me--at the thought that this woman so pure and brave, that though little more than a child, and soft, and gentle, and maidenly, she could bear herself with no shadow of quailing in this stress of death--at the thought that she loved me, and prayed for me, I felt myself more or less than a man. I felt tears rising, I felt my breast heaving, and then--and then as I went to drop on my knees, against the great doors on the farther side of the church, came a thunderous shock, followed by a shower of blows and loud cries for admittance.

A horrible kind of shudder ran through the kneeling crowd, and here and there a woman screamed and sprang up and looked wildly round. But for a few moments the chant still rose monotonously and filled the building; louder and louder the measured rhythm of "Ora pro nobis! Ora pro nobis!" still rose and fell and rose again with an intensity of supplication, a pathos of repetition that told of bursting hearts. At length, however, one of the leaves of the door flew open, and that proved too much; the sound sent three parts of the congregation shrieking to their feet--though a few still sang. By this time I was half way through the crowd, pressing to Denise's side; before I could reach her the other door gave way, and a dozen men flocked in tumultuously. I had a glimpse of a priest--afterwards I learnt that it was Father Benôit--standing to oppose them with a cross upraised; and then, by the dim light, which to them was darkness, I saw--unspeakable relief--that the intruders were not the leaders of the mob, but foremost the two St. Alais, blood-stained and black with powder, with drawn swords and clothes torn; and behind them a score of their followers.

In their relief women flung themselves on the men's necks, and those who stood farther away burst into loud sobbing and weeping. But the men themselves, after securing the doors behind them, began immediately to move across the church to the smaller exit on the alley; one crying that all was lost, and another that the east gate was open, while a third adjured the women to separate--adding that in the neighbouring houses they would be safe, but that the church would be sacked; and that even now the Calvinists were bursting in the gates of the monastery through which the fugitives had retreated, after being driven out of the Arènes.