The Galley Slave's Ring Part 20

The agitation grew intenser on the street with every minute. From the distance the m.u.f.fled rumbling could be heard of large surging ma.s.ses. It sounded threateningly, like the distant blast of an approaching storm. A few windows on the street were lighted in honor of the change of Cabinet officers. But some friends of Monsieur Lebrenn's, who came in and went out again several times to bring tidings of what was afoot, reported that the royal concessions were interpreted as a sign of weakness, that the night would be decisive, that everywhere the people were arming themselves by entering certain appointed houses and demanding guns, after which they would take their departure, leaving on the door an inscription in chalk--"Arms delivered."

After supper, Madam Lebrenn, her daughter and the maid returned upstairs to the first floor, into a room that faced the street. The merchant, his son and Gildas remained in the rear of the shop.

Gildas was gifted by nature with a robust appet.i.te; nevertheless, he did not partake of supper. His uneasiness grew at every instant; with more insistence than ever he whispered to Jeanike, or muttered to himself:

"A puzzling house! A puzzling street! Altogether a puzzling city!"

"Gildas," called Lebrenn, "fetch me a couple of hammers and chisels. My son and I shall open these cases, while you may rip up the bales."

"The bales of linen, monsieur?"

"Yes--rip them open with your knife."

Furnished with hammers and chisels, the merchant and Sacrovir began to pry open the chests, while Gildas, who had rolled one of the bales flat on the floor, knelt down beside it and made ready to cut it open.

"Monsieur!" he suddenly cried, frightened by the hard blows that Lebrenn was dealing to the chest with his hammer. "Monsieur! If it please you, take care--look at the lettering on the chests--_gla.s.s_! You will break the looking-gla.s.ses to pieces!"

"Do not be frightened, Gildas," answered his employer, "these looking gla.s.ses are of solid material."

"They are plated with lead and iron, my friend Gildas," added Sacrovir, striking still more heavily.

"More and more puzzling!" muttered Gildas to himself as he again went down on his knees beside one of the bales in order to rip it open. In order to furnish himself with more light at his work he took a candle, and placed it upon the floor beside him. He was just about to remove the heavy outer wrappage of coa.r.s.e grey burlap when Monsieur Lebrenn, who only then noticed the illumination which his shop-a.s.sistant had provided himself with, cried out:

"Hold, Gildas! Are you crazy? Put the candle back on the table, quick.

The devil take it! You would blow us all up, my boy!"

"Blow us all up!" echoed Gildas, terror-stricken, and he bounded away from the bale, while Sacrovir himself placed the candle on the table.

"What should blow us up?"

"The cartridges, my lad, which these bales contain. You must look out what you are doing."

"Cartridges!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the amazed Gildas, stepping still further back, and more and more overcome with fear, while his employer took out two guns from the chest which he had just opened, and his son drew from the same receptacle several braces of pistols, muskets and carbines.

At the sight of these weapons, and knowing himself surrounded by cartridges, the head of Gildas swam, he grew pale, and leaning against a table again muttered to himself:

"A puzzling house, this! Its bales of linen are filled with cartridges!

Its looking gla.s.ses turn into guns and muskets and pistols!"

"My good Gildas," said Lebrenn, addressing him affectionately, "there is no danger whatever in unpacking these arms and munitions. That is all I want you to do. After you have done that, you may, if you prefer, either go down into the cellar, or climb up into the garret, where you can remain in all security until after the battle. Because, I might as well let you know, there will be fighting going on with the break of day.

Once you are ensconced in the hiding place that you may choose, all I warn you against is sticking your nose either out of the sky-light or out of the air-hole when the firing has begun--not infrequently bullets fly astray."

The linendraper's words--stray bullets, fighting, firing--completely plunged Gildas into a vertigo that is easily imaginable. He had not expected to find in the St. Denis quarter a stronghold of belligerency.

Other events soon crowded upon each other, all conspiring to increase the terror of Gildas. Fresh clamors, at first distant, drew perceptibly nearer and nearer, and finally seemed to explode with such fury that not only Lebrenn and his son, but Gildas also, ran to the shop door in order to ascertain what was happening on the street.

CHAPTER IX.

POPULAR JUSTICE.

When, attracted by the growing tumult, Monsieur Lebrenn, his son and Gildas reached the door of the shop, the street was already filled with a large crowd.

Windows were flying open and inquisitive heads appeared at them.

Presently a flickering reddish glare lighted the house fronts. A vast and swelling flood of people was rushing by. Some preceded, others accompanied the sinister illumination. The uproar grew more and more violent. Now and then, rising above the din, the angry cries could be heard:

"To arms!" "Vengeance!"

Exclamations of horror kept chorus with the cries. Women, who, attracted by the noise, looked out of their windows, recoiled with horror as if anxious to escape the sight of some frightful vision.

Their hearts gripped with apprehension, and drops of sweat standing out upon their foreheads, the linendraper and his son realized that some horrible spectacle was approaching, and remained motionless upon their threshold.

Finally the procession hove in sight.

An innumerable ma.s.s of men in blouses, in bourgeois dress and also in the uniform of the National Guard, and brandishing guns, swords, knives and sticks, preceded a cart, that was slowly drawn by a horse, and that was surrounded by a number of men bearing torches.

In the cart lay heaped up a ma.s.s of corpses.

A tall man with a scarlet hat on his head, naked from the waist up, and his breast bleeding from a recent wound, stood erect in the front part of the cart, carrying aloft a burning flambeau, which he waved to right and left.

He might have been taken for the genius of Vengeance and of Revolution.

At each movement of his flambeau, he lighted with a ruddy glare to the left of him the bloodstained head of an old man, to the right the bust of a woman whose arms, like her bleeding head, half veiled by her disheveled hair, dangled down over the edge of the cart.

From time to time the man with the scarlet hat waved his torch and cried out in stentorian tones:

"They are butchering our brothers! Vengeance! To the barricades! To arms!"

And thousands of voices, trembling with indignation and rage, repeated:

"Vengeance! To the barricades! To arms!"

Whereupon thousands of arms, some equipped with weapons, others not, rose up toward the somber and threatening sky as if to take it to witness of the vengeful pledges.

In the meantime the exasperated mob that the funeral procession recruited in its pa.s.sage went steadily on increasing. It pa.s.sed as a b.l.o.o.d.y vision before the linendraper and his son. So painful was the first impression of both that they could not utter a word. Their eyes swam in tears at learning that the butchery of inoffensive and unarmed people had taken place upon the Boulevard of the Capuchins.

Hardly had the cart of corpses disappeared when Lebrenn seized one of the iron bars, used to fasten the shop window from within, brandished it over his head, and cried out to the indignant ma.s.s of people who were trooping by:

"Friends! Royalty throws us the gage of battle by butchering our brothers! Let the blood of the victims fall upon the head of that accursed royalty! To the barricades! Long live the Republic!"

Immediately the merchant and his son tore up the first paving stones.

The man's words and example produced a magic effect. From a thousand throats the answer came back:

"To arms! To the barricades! Long live the Republic!"

The next moment the people had invaded the neighboring houses, everywhere demanding arms, and levers and crowbars to tear up the pavement. Soon as the first row of cobblestones was removed, those who had neither iron bars, nor sticks, pulled up the pavement with their bare hands and nails.

Monsieur Lebrenn and his son were hard at work raising the barricade a few paces above their door when they were joined by George d.u.c.h.ene, the young carpenter, who arrived in the company of a score of armed men, the members of a demi-section of the secret society with which they, together with the linendraper, were affiliated.