The Galley Slave's Ring Part 23

The Munic.i.p.al Guard fired; the insurgents responded; soon a cloud of smoke hovered above the barricade. Shots were fired from the neighboring windows; shots came from the air-holes of the cellars; even the old grandfather of George d.u.c.h.ene could be seen at his attic window throwing upon the heads of the Munic.i.p.al Guard, in default of better arms and ammunition, all manner of household furniture and kitchen utensils--tables, chairs, pots and pitchers; in short, everything that could go through the window was hurled down by the good old invalid of toil, as Lebrenn had justly styled him. It was an almost comic sight.

The old man seemed to be moving out by the window. When his supply of projectiles was exhausted, he threw in despair even his cotton cap at the troops. He then looked around, disconsolate at finding nothing more handy to his purpose, but immediately a shout of triumph went up from his throat, and he began to tear up the roof tiles that were within reach of his hands, and to fling them one after the other down upon the soldiers.

The engagement was hotly contested. After returning the discharges of the insurgents with several rounds of shot, the Munic.i.p.alists rushed intrepidly upon the barricade with felled bayonets, expecting to carry it by a.s.sault.

Several groups could be descried through the dense whitish smoke that settled and rose over the top of the barricade. In one of these groups, Marik Lebrenn, after having discharged his gun, was wielding it as a club to drive the a.s.sailants back. His son and George, close behind him, seconded his efforts vigorously. From time to time, and without lagging in the fight, father and son cast a hurried glance at the half open blinds above their heads, and off and on these words reached their ears:

"Courage, Marik!" would come from Madam Lebrenn. "Courage, my son!"

"Courage, father!" echoed Velleda. "Courage, brother!"

A stray bullet shattered with a great clatter one of the thin slats of the lattice behind which the two heroic women were posted. The two true Gallic women, as Lebrenn called them, did not wince. They remained in their places to watch the merchant and his son.

There was a moment when, after boldly struggling hand to hand with a captain, and having beaten the officer down, Lebrenn was endeavoring to regain his feet, which slipped and stumbled over the uncertain cobblestones; on the instant a soldier who had succeeded in reaching the top of the barricade, and from his elevated position towered over the merchant, raised his gun, and was on the point of transfixing the linendraper with his bayonet. George perceived the imminent danger of Velleda's father; he threw himself in front of the threatened thrust; the bayonet ran through his arm and he dropped to the ground. The soldier was about to deal the merchant's protector a second thrust when two small hands seized him by his legs, and holding him with the convulsive grip of despair, caused him to lose his balance. Head foremost the soldier rolled down the other side of the barricade.

George owed his life to Pradeline. Bold as a lioness, her hair streaming, her cheeks aflame, the girl had managed to draw near to George during the struggle. The very instant, however, after she had saved him, a rebounding bullet struck her in the breast. She fell down upon her knees and fainted--her last glances sought George.[9]

Father Bribri, seeing the young woman wounded, dropped his musket, ran to her, and raised her up. He was looking around for some safe place to lay her down when he noticed Madam Lebrenn and her daughter at the door of the shop. They had just descended from the floor above, and were busy, with the help of Gildas and Jeanike, making preparations to receive the wounded.

Gildas was beginning to accustom himself to the firing. He aided father Bribri to transport Pradeline into the rear room, where Madam Lebrenn and her daughter immediately turned their attention to her.

The ragpicker was stepping out of the shop when there came, rolling down to his feet, a frail body clad in tattered trousers and a ragged jacket, all clotted with blood.

"Oh, my poor Flameche!" cried the old man, trying to pick up the boy.

"Are you wounded? It may not be dangerous--courage!"

"I am done for, father Bribri," answered the boy in a fast ebbing voice.

"It is a pity--I shall not--go--angling for the red fishes in--the--pond--of--"

And he expired.

A big tear rolled down upon the scrubby beard of the ragpicker.

"Poor little devil! he was not a bad boy," father Bribri soliloquized with a sigh. "He dies as he lived--on the Paris pavement!"

Such was the short funeral oration p.r.o.nounced over Flameche's body.

At the moment that the poor boy died, George's grandfather, unable any longer to restrain himself, decided, despite his feebleness, to join the fray. He hurried down to the street, and ran to the barricade. From his window, his ammunition, moveables and fixtures, being exhausted, he had had leisure to follow the vicissitudes of the conflict. He saw the little fellow fall; looked for him among the dead and the wounded; he called to him in heartrending accents.

So stubborn was the resistance offered by the defenders of the barricade that the Munic.i.p.alists, after sustaining heavy losses, were compelled to beat a retreat, which they effected in good order.

The firing had ceased for several minutes when suddenly a shot was heard in the near vicinity, and, almost immediately after, the sound of horses approaching at a gallop.

Presently, on the rear side of the barricade, a colonel of dragoons hove in sight, followed by a number of hors.e.m.e.n, sabers in hand, like their commander, driving before them a group of insurgents who fired at intervals as they retreated on the run.

It was Colonel Plouernel. Separated from his squadron by an onrush of insurgents, he was endeavoring to cut himself a pa.s.sage to the boulevard, not imagining he would find his path barred at that spot by a barricade.

The combat, suspended for a moment, broke out afresh. At first the defenders of the barricade believed that the small number of troopers was the vanguard of a regiment which meant to take them in the rear, and thus place them between two fires, by the return of the Munic.i.p.alists to the a.s.sault.

The fifteen or twenty dragoons commanded by Colonel Plouernel were received with a general discharge of musketry. Several of the dragoons fell; the colonel himself was wounded. But obedient to his natural intrepidity, he drove his spurs into his horse's flanks, waved his sword and cried out:

"Dragoons! Cut down this rabble with your swords!"

The colonel's horse gave an enormous bound; it brought him to the very base of the barricade, but the animal slipped over the rolling cobblestones and fell p.r.o.ne.

Although wounded and pinned to the ground under his mount, the Count of Plouernel still defended himself with heroic valor. His every sword thrust found its mark. But it was all of no avail; he was about to succ.u.mb to superior numbers when, at the risk of his own life, Monsieur Lebrenn, a.s.sisted by his son and George, although the latter was wounded, threw themselves between the prostrate colonel and his exasperated a.s.sailants, and succeeded in extricating him from under his horse, and in pushing him into the shop.

"Friends! These dragoons are isolated; they are in no condition to resist us; let us disarm them; let there be no useless carnage--they are our brothers!" someone cried.

"Mercy to the soldiers--but death to their colonel!" cried the men who had just been driven to the spot before the merciless and headlong onslaught of the Count of Plouernel. "Death to the colonel!"

"Yes! Yes!" repeated several voices.

"No!" shouted back the linendraper, barring the door with his gun, while George came to his support. "No! No! No ma.s.sacre after battle! No cowardice!"

"The colonel killed my brother with a pistol shot fired within an inch of his face--down there, at the corner of the street," bellowed a man with bloodshot eyes, his mouth foaming with rage, and brandishing a sword. "Death to the colonel!"

"Yes! Yes! Death!" shouted several threatening voices. "Death!"

"No! You shall not kill a wounded man! You can not mean to murder an unarmed man--a prisoner!"

"Death," shouted back an increasing number of angry voices. "Death!"

"Very well, walk in! Let us see if you will have the heart to dishonor the cause of the people with a crime."

And the merchant, although ready to offer fresh resistance to the ferocity of the angry men, left free the pa.s.sage of the door which he had until then blocked.

The a.s.sailants remained motionless. Lebrenn's words had gone home.

Nevertheless, the man who desired to avenge his brother rushed forward, sword in hand, emitting a savage cry. Already his feet were on the threshold when, seizing him by the waist, George held him back, saying:

"Would you, indeed, commit murder! Oh, no, brother! You are no murderer!"

And with tears in his eyes, George d.u.c.h.ene embraced the man.

George's voice, his countenance, his accent and his deportment made so deep an impression upon the angry man who cried for vengeance, that he lowered his head, flung away his sword, and, dropping upon a heap of cobblestones, covered his face in his hands, murmuring between the sobs that choked him:

"My brother! My poor brother!"

The struggle was over. The merchant's son went out for tidings, and returned with the information that the King, together with the royal family, had fled; that everywhere the troops fraternized with the people; that the Chamber of Deputies was dissolved; and that a provisional government was set up at the City Hall.

The wounded, whether they belonged to the insurrectionists or to the army, were transported to the improvised hospitals that were set up in several shops, as had been done in the linendraper's. As much attention was bestowed upon the soldiers as upon those who shortly before were engaged in a deadly struggle with them. The women gathered around the wounded. If there was aught to be regretted it was the excessiveness of the zeal of the tenders of good offices.

Several soldiers of the Munic.i.p.al Guard, besides an officer of dragoons who accompanied Colonel Plouernel, having been taken prisoner, they were distributed among the neighboring houses, whence they soon thereafter emerged in civilian dress, and arm in arm with their adversaries of the same morning.

Lebrenn's shop was crowded with wounded men. One of these lay upon the counter; the others on mattresses hastily spread upon the floor. The merchant and his family a.s.sisted several surgeons of the quarter. Gildas was engaged in distributing wine mixed with water to the patients, whose throats were parched with thirst. Among the latter, and lying beside each other upon the same mattress, were father Bribri and a sergeant of the Munic.i.p.al Guards, an old soldier with moustaches as grey as those of the ragpicker himself.

The latter, after having p.r.o.nounced Flameche's funeral oration, had been shot in the leg during the encounter with the dragoons. The sergeant, on his part, had received a wound in the loins in the course of the first attack that the barricade had to sustain.