At this moment one of the masks drew near Pauline, who stood a little apart, pale and sorrowful, and whispered hurriedly in her ear:
“Dearest, come; it is the time. A post-chaise waits for us in yonder clump. In an hour’s time we shall have you safe behind the convent walls.”
Pauline shrank from him in mingled astonishment and terror. Then he showed her a withered rose; she knew it at once for the same she had sent the night before to André upon receiving D’Aubuisson’s letter. This she had torn to pieces in a transport of indignation and bade Angélique carry the pieces back to the writer. But the very suggestion so terrified her in her nervous state with the idea of an attempted abduction such as was only too common in that lawless time, that her scruples yielded at last, and she resolved to take André’s advice and seek refuge in a convent. With this view she commissioned the housekeeper to carry to her cousin the signal rose. That crafty old person, however, shrewdly surmising that the return of his own torn letter would win her scant esteem or guerdon from her employer, took it upon herself to give him the rose instead—a message on which at need she could put her own construction.
At sight of the flower Pauline hesitated. Surely this could not be her cousin; the figure seemed much too tall, yet, if not, how came he by the signal? In her confusion and incertitude she suffered herself to be half-passively drawn by the unknown in the direction of the thicket he spoke of. As she did so the other masks drew together about them—a movement unnoticed by the rest of the company, whose thoughts and eyes were all intent upon the loaded and steaming tables, to which they were on the point of sitting down under the trees.
Suddenly a wild scream startled them. It was from Pauline, who had just caught sight of André’s pale, reproachful face gazing at her fixedly from the outskirts of the crowd. At her scream the wedding guests, headed by Papa Lamouracq, came hurrying towards the bride with various cries of anger, astonishment, and menace. The situation bade fair to be embarrassing.
But the chevalier was a man of promptness and decision, by no means one to draw back from an undertaking once begun. Besides, to him Pauline was only hysterical; she must be saved in spite of herself. Further disguise was useless; force only would now prevail. So catching the fainting girl in his arms as if she were an infant, and shouting, A moi, mousquetaires! he pressed on to the carriage.
But he was not to reach it unopposed, however. The word mousquetaires made plain the whole design to the dullest-witted in the assembly: the fame of those audacious scamps for similar exploits was wide-spread. Among the wedding company was more than one old privateering comrade of Raoul’s who had swung cutlass and boarding-hatchet by his side; and it so chanced that two other wedding parties had brought to the mill that same day some scores of sturdy blacksmiths and fishermen and stout butchers from the Halles. Armed with stools and benches, with sticks and stones, they flung themselves furiously upon the mousquetaires, some fifty or sixty in number. The latter, casting off mask and domino, and forming a circle about D’Aubuisson and the unconscious Pauline, defended themselves with vigor.
The fight was long and uncertain, and many were hurt on both sides. But disciplined valor won the day as usual over brute strength, and in spite of every effort of their antagonists the mousquetaires slowly but surely made their way towards the fatal thicket. Papa Lamouracq, himself wounded more than once, and disabled, could only gnash his teeth and howl impotent curses at the foe; the bridegroom, at his first step towards the scene of conflict, had staggered and fallen, and was lying on the grass in a drunken stupor; the little poet, bleeding already from a ghastly wound in the forehead, had to be forcibly held back from flinging himself like another Winkelried upon the bristling blades of the mousquetaires. All seemed lost.
But despair, too, has its inspirations. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, seeking everywhere for a weapon to annihilate his enemies, fell upon one of the steaming tureens of soup just served for the wedding feast. Instantly he caught it up and hurled it, contents and all, full at the heads of the victorious mousquetaires. Two went down at once before the shock; half a score were scalded by the boiling liquor; double that number—O much more direful and appalling tragedy!—had their splendid uniforms stained by good Mère Leroux’s most savory potage.
Shrewdly did Cæsar bid his veterans strike only at the faces of Pompey’s dandy cavaliers. Thus does history repeat itself. Death and torture our mousquetaires would have faced unflinchingly, and charged a battery as gaily as they would have danced a minuet; but their clothes were dear to them. For most of them they were their only clothes, and what wonder if at the onslaught of this novel and terrific weapon they wavered? So might the bravest knight who first faced the terrors of gunpowder have hesitated without shame to his courage. André’s example was infectious. From all sides was rained upon the hapless mousquetaires a shower of soups, ragouts and entremets, sauces, sausages and salads, omelettes aux fines herbes and omelettes sucrées, until they fairly broke and fled, dripping, not blood, but gravy at every pore, and dragging with them by main force their frantic leader, who wished not to survive the loss of his Pauline.