"Yes, we can afford it," cried the cavern-chief boastfully.
"I thought so, handsome ragmen," returned the visitor. He dropped the point for a moment and suddenly throwing his right hand free from his cloak rose into a curious strain of eloquence which made manifest the nature of this strange organisation, or at least the aims which the man of the death's-head chose to claim for it.
"Let us never forget, comrades, who we are—that our Order is the avenger of the wrongs of the people. Give me each your sufferings that I may treasure them in the common treasury. Give me the tears that have been shed, the deaths, the starvations, the griefs, the insults, the cruelties, that I may heap them one upon another in a secret place, whence, on a day which I see rising very bright out of the days of this generation, we shall thrust them out all bleeding and dreadful to fly forth together swift as eagles for the hearts of the rich. Hugues de la Tour, what wrongs have you to tell?"
"Admiral," cried the young man hoarsely, after drinking a gulp from a bottle, his eyes bloodshot, and swinging his knife, "I have suffered till my blood runs like a current of fire against all who are in ease. I hate the King, the Church, the rich, the judges, the strong, the fair. My father was a noble of the Court, my mother a Huguenot, and wedded to him by the rite of the Reformed Religion, his own pretended faith. With this excuse he threw her off. He denied her the name of wife and us of his children. His servants pushed her from his door. She died in a garret at Dijon. I took my little sister by the hand, and travelling to my father's door in Versailles awaited his entry into his carriage. We caught his skirts and cried, "Our father!" With his own hands he threw us to the pavement. For years I felt, brothers, what you have felt—cold, hunger, and disdain—but I hoarded the thought of 'Justice' as the friend of the wronged.
"I at length petitioned the magistrature. My papers were unheeded. I appealed to the Minister. The Minister was silent. I found a way of presenting our griefs and claims to the King himself. For answer, a sealed warrant empowered the monster of our life to throw us into prison. There my poor sister died; I escaped. Join me to your galley-oars. I hate all monarchs, decrees, nobles, priests, courtiers. Crime is justice, justice is the system of crime!"
"Very good, Hugues la Tour," commended the Admiral, "you shall have your hands full of true justice."
"I," shouted a violent man of haggard countenance, "was a cultivator of Auvergne. By incredible hardship I made myself owner of a plot of ground. My woman and I lived scantily on our daily black bread and 'pepperpot'; we spent nothing; we had no comforts, but from year to year, as the sous were piled away in our hoard, we kept our eyes on the neighbouring acre of moorland. One year a drought came. Our sous were diminished by famine. It was then the tax gatherer came upon us, his claims heavier than in the years before, for one of the village tax commissioners was jealous of us. The rest of our sous were not sufficient; we could not borrow. A bailiff, a 'blue man,' was placed in our cabin at our cost. The suit went through the Court: we were discomfited. They took my possessions, as at the commencement they had designed to do. They starved my wife; they killed my children. I, too, will kill."
"I also," shouted another. "The tithe was my ruin."
"The worse avarice is the cassock's," said the visitor. "A day of blood approaches, a day of cutting of priests' throats and burning of churches."
"I—I can say nothing," another grumbled. "I have always been in rags and a vagabond. Is it my fault? Who taught me to steal, to strike?"