The Long Night Part 47

Claude did not know this, but had he known it, it would not have reduced his courage.

"Yes, I hear them," he whispered in answer to the soldier's words. "But they have not mounted far yet. And when they come, if two pikes cannot hold this doorway which they can pa.s.s but one at a time, there is no truth in Thermopylae!"

"I know naught of that," the other answered, rising nervously to his feet. "I don't favour heights. Give me the lee of a wall and fair odds----"

"Odds?" Claude echoed vain-gloriously--but only the stars attended to him--"I would not have another man!"

Marcadel seized him by the sleeve. His voice rose almost to a scream.

"But, by Heaven, there is another man!" he cried. "There!" He pointed with a shaking hand to the outer corner of the leads, in the neighbourhood of the place where the winch of the portcullis stood. "We are betrayed! We are dead men!" he babbled.

Claude made out a dim figure, crouching against the battlement; and the thought, which was also in Marcadel's mind, that the enemy had set a ladder against the wall and outflanked them, rendered him desperate. At any rate there was but one on the roof as yet: and quick as thought the young man lowered his pike and charged the figure.

With a shrill scream the man fell on his knees before him. "Mercy!"

cried a voice he knew. "Mercy! Don't kill me! Don't kill me!"

It was Louis Gentilis. Claude halted, looked at him in amazement, spurned him with his foot. "Up, coward, and fight for your life then!"

he said. "Or others will kill you. How come you here?"

The lad still grovelled. "I was in the guard-room," he whimpered. "I had come with a message--from the Syndic."

"The Syndic Blondel?"

"Yes! To remind the Captain that he was to go the rounds at eleven exactly. It was late when I got there and they--oh, this dreadful night--they broke in, and I, hid on the stairs."

"Well, you can hide no longer. You have got to fight now!" Claude answered grimly, "There are no more stairs for any of us except to heaven! I advise you to find something, and do your worst. Take the winch-bar if you can find nothing else! And----"

He broke off. Marcadel, who had remained at the stairhead, was calling to him in a voice that could no longer be resisted--a voice of despair.

Claude ran to him. He found him with his head in the stairway, but with his pike shortened to strike. "They are coming!" he muttered over his shoulder. "They are more than half-way up now. Be ready and keep your eyes open. Be ready!" he continued after a pause. "They are nearly--here now!" His breath began to come quickly; at last stepping back a pace and bringing his point to the charge. "They are here!" he shouted. "On guard!"

Claude stooped an inch lower, and with gleaming eyes, and feet set warily apart, waited the onset; waited with suspended breath for the charge that must come. He could hear the gasps of the wounded man who lay on the uppermost step; and once close to him he caught a sound of shuffling, moving feet, that sent his heart into his mouth. But seconds pa.s.sed, and more seconds, and glare as he might into the black mouth of the staircase, from which the hood averted even the light of the stars, he could make out nothing, no movement, no sign of life!

The suspense was growing intolerable. And all the time behind him the alarm-bell was flinging "Doom! Doom!" down on the city, and a thousand sounds of fear and strife clutched at his mind and strove to draw it from the dark gap at which he waited, as a dog waits for a rat at the mouth of its hole. His breath began to come quickly, his knees shook. He heard his companion gasp--human nerves could stand it no longer. And then, just as he felt that, come what might, he must plunge his pike into the darkness, and settle the question, the shuffling sound came anew and steadied him, and he set his teeth and waited--waited still.

But nothing happened, nothing moved. Again the seconds, almost the minutes pa.s.sed, and the deep note of the alarm-bell swelled louder and heavier, filling all the air, all the night, all the world, with its iron tongue--setting the tower reeling, the head swimming. In spite of himself, in spite of the fact that he knew his life hung on his vigilance, his thoughts wandered; wandered to Anne, alone and defenceless in that h.e.l.l below him, from which such wild sounds were beginning to rise; to his own fate if he and Marcadel got the worst; to the advantage a light properly shaded would have given them, had they had it. But, alas, they had no light.

And then, while he thought of that, the world was all light. A sheet of flame burst from the hood, dazzled, blinded, scorched him; a crashing report filled his ears; he recoiled. The ball had missed him, had gone between him and Marcadel and struck neither. But for a moment in pure amazement, he stood gaping.

That moment had been his last had the defence lain with him only, or even with him and Marcadel. It was the senseless form that c.u.mbered the uppermost step which saved them. The man who had fired tripped over it as he sprang out. He fell his length on the roof. The next man, less hasty or less brave, sank down on the obstacle, and blocked the way for others.

Before either could rise all was over. Claude brought down his pike on the head of the first to issue, and laid him lifeless on the leads. The guard, who was a better man at a pinch than in the antic.i.p.ation of it, drove the other back--as he tried to rise--with a wound in the face.

Then with a yell, a.s.sured that in the narrow stairhead the enemy could not use their weapons, the two charged their pikes into the obscurity, and thrust and thrust, and thrust again, in the cruelty of rage and fear.

What they struck, or where they struck, they could not see; but their ears told them that they did not strike in vain. A shrill scream and the gurgling cry of a dying man proved it, and the wild struggle that ensued on the stairs; where the uppermost, weighed down by the fallen men, turned in a panic on those below and fought with them to force them to descend.

Claude shuddered as he listened, as he waited, his pike still levelled; shuddered at the pitiful groaning that issued from the blackness, shuddered at the blows he had struck, and the scream that still echoed in his ears. He had not trembled when he fought, but he trembled at the thought of it.

"They are beaten," he muttered huskily.

"Ay, they are beaten!" Marcadel--he who had trembled before the fight--answered with exultation. "You were right. We wanted no more men!

But it was near. If this rogue had not tripped our throats would have suffered."

"He was a brave man," Claude answered, leaning heavily on his pike. He needed its support.

Marcadel knelt down and felt the man over. "Ay," he said, "he was, to give the devil his due! And that reminds me. We've a skulker here who has escaped so far. He shall play his part now. We must have their arms, but it is dirty work groping in the dark for them; and maybe life enough in one of them to drive a dagger between one's ribs. He shall do it.

Where is he?"

Claude was feeling the reaction which ensues upon intense excitement. He did not answer. Nor did he interfere when Marcadel, pouncing on Louis, where he crouched in the darkest corner, forced him forward to the head of the staircase. There the lad fell on his knees weeping futilely, wailing prayers. But the guard kicked him forward.

"In!" he said. "You know what you have to do! In, and strip them! Do you hear? And if you leave as much as a knife----"

"I won't! I daren't!" Louis screamed. And grovelling on his face on the leads he clung to whatever offered itself.

But men who have just pa.s.sed through a life and death struggle, are hard. "You won't?" Marcadel answered, applying his boot brutally, but without effect. "You will! Or you will feel my pike between your ribs!

In! In, my lad!"

A scream answered each repet.i.tion of the word, and proved that the threat was no empty one. Claude might have intervened, but he remembered Anne and the humiliations she had suffered in this craven's presence.

"In!" Marcadel repeated a third time. "And if you leave so much as a knife upon them I will throw you off the tower. You understand, do you?

Then in, and strip them!"

And driven by sheer torture--for the pike had thrice drawn blood from his writhing body--Louis crept, weeping and quaking, into the staircase; and on one of her tormentors Anne was avenged. But Claude was thinking more of her present peril than of this; he had moved from the stairhead.

A swell in the volume of sound which rose from the Corraterie had drawn him to that side of the tower, where shaking off the exhaustion which for a time had overcome him, he was straining his eyes to learn what was pa.s.sing in the babel below.

The sight was a singular one. The Monnaye Gate far to the left, the Terta.s.se immediately before him, and the Treille on his right, were the centres of separate conflagrations. In one place a house, fired by the petard employed to force the door, was actually alight. In other places so great was the conflux of torches, the flash and gleam of weapons, and the babel of sounds that it wrought on the mind the impression of a fire blazing up in the night. Behind the Porte Terta.s.se, in the narrow streets of the Terta.s.se and the Cite--immediately, therefore, behind the Royaumes' house--the conflict seemed to rage most hotly, the shots to be most frequent, the uproar greatest, even the light strongest; for the reflection of the combat below bathed the Terta.s.se tower in a lurid glow. Claude could distinguish the roof of the Royaumes' house; and to see so much yet to be cut off as completely as if he stood a hundred miles away, to be so near yet so hopelessly divided, stung him to a new impatience and a greater daring.

He returned to Marcadel. "Are we going to stay on this tower?" he cried.

"Shut up here, while this goes forward and we may be of use?"

"I think we have done our part," the other answered soberly. "If any man has saved Geneva, it is you! There, man, I give you the credit," he continued, in a burst of generosity, "and it is no small thing! For it might make my fortune. But I have done some little too!"

"Ay! But cannot we----"

"What would you have us do more?" the man continued, and with reason.

"Leave the roof to them? 'Tis all they want! Leave them to raise the old iron grate, and let in--what I hear yonder?" He indicated the darker outer plain below the wall, whence rose the murmur of halted battalions, waiting baffled, and uncertain, the opening of the gate.

"Ay, but if we descend?"

"May we not win the gate from a score?" Marcadel answered, between contempt and admiration. "Is that what you mean? And when we have won it, hold it? No, not if each of us were Gaston of Foix, Bayard, and M.

de Crillon rolled into one! But what is this? We are winning or we are losing! Which is it?"

From the Treille Gate had burst a rabble of men; a struggling crowd illumined by the glare of three or four lights. Pikes and halberds flashed in the heart of the mob as it swirled and struggled down the Corraterie in the direction of the gate from which the two men viewed it. Half-way thither, in the open, its progress seemed to be checked; it hung and paused, swaying this way and that; it recoiled. But at length, with a roar of triumph, it rolled on anew over half a dozen prostrate forms, and in a trice burst about the base of the Porte Neuve, swept, as it seemed to those above, into the gateway, and--in a twinkling broke back, repelled by a crashing volley that shook the tower.

"They are our people!" cried Claude.

"Ay!"

"And now is our time!" The lad waved his weapon. "A diversion in the rear--and 'tis done!"

"In Heaven's name stop!" cried Marcadel, and he gripped Claude's sleeve.