They lived in comparative comfort. Gaming tables had been set up. But beyond the tents and the barracks the melancholy swamps and marshes spread away, full of mist under dim stars and pallid moon. Every one avoided that scene as much as possible. They dined luxuriously. Père Joseph ate cold dry bread and drank the water from the ditches. Never a decadent gourmet, he castigated himself more and more, as if to balance the casual and rich living of the besiegers. The strong huts of the soldiers disgusted him; their revelry affronted him. They seemed imbued by no holy ardor, no godly exhilaration. They talked of loot, and the fun they would have among the Rochellais after the surrender.
Despite the Cardinal’s casualness, he was much worried. Among the Catholic nobles of his train, he knew there existed astute men who realized that a strong Protestant minority in France guaranteed that the power of the King would not become absolute, and that should that absoluteness finally be obtained, they, themselves, would be curtailed and hampered in the management of their own provinces and estates. He also knew that in some mysterious way provisions had been smuggled into La Rochelle, and he needed to ask no questions from whence they came.
The King’s desire to return to Paris now became stronger than a furtive suggestion. This alarmed the Cardinal. The Queen Mother presided in Paris like a waiting black spider, hoping to enmesh the King and withdraw him from the Cardinal’s influence, and thus obtain once more the old power of which the Cardinal had deprived her. Let the King once return to Paris, and the work of long years would be undone.—He knew, that in his absence, the Queen Mother was surrounded by hating malcontents and enemies who would plot unceasingly to destroy him.
Finally, the King abruptly bade the Cardinal farewell, and returned to Paris. He promised to return after the winter passed, but it was a promise given with a sly sliding of the eyes, and surly pouting of the lips. The Cardinal, overcome with dread and worry, would have followed precipitously, had not Père Joseph been present. But under the fixed glare of those terrible eyes, even his fear dared not betray itself. He was caught in this disgusting debacle whether he wished it or not. His only hope was in the continued insistence of his advisers that La Rochelle could not be taken. He frequently called in the Capuchin to hear these pessimistic reports, hoping that the dread monk might, himself, be convinced.
But the Capuchin looked at Cardinal and advisers and said in a loud and most frightful voice: “It can be taken! Nothing is impregnable, before God! We shall remain.” The Cardinal shrugged, and smiled, but groaned internally. For the first time he had a real desire to smite his old friend very firmly and consign him to hell. But some shame withheld him from announcing that the city could not be taken, and returning posthaste to Paris. He began to curse Madame, the Queen. On such an ignominous venture, jeopardizing himself, he had come at the behest of a miserable Spaniard whose pink and white flesh he could not resist. He had many sour meditations with himself on man’s vulnerability to woman, and most of them were obscene. His former idle scorn and wonder at himself for his weakness in being enmeshed in the ancient trap now became active detestation. With it, the first shaking of his self-confidence came. When might his body not betray him again into such abysmal folly? He could control its achings, but he could not control its itch. This placed him again in the detestable pen with all of the mankind he loathed.
Now, perversely, he began to pity the Rochellais. He felt himself one with them. He had been betrayed by a woman into this ludicrous degradation, and, indirectly, they had been so betrayed by the same woman. He saw himself and them as victims of a silly Spaniard’s nether regions. How many worlds, how many deaths, had disappeared into the bodies of foolish women? he questioned himself. It infuriated him, with appalling disgust, that he was so absurd, so weak, so contemptible, that he could aid in the universal conspiracy, and be caught in it.
His respect and admiration for the Rochellais became almost extreme. He meditated upon the Mayor, the Duchesse, Arsène, and all the others, with surprised pleasure. What ideal sustained them? He, who had no ideals, had found them ridiculous in others, had believed they were pretentious affectations, either the vaporings of fools or sly intriguers. But apparently idealism sustained the Rochellais. It shocked him. Did men actually exist for which some philosophy was bread and honey, and the wine of heaven? He knew that the Rochellais had been seduced with promises of clemency, therefore it was no fear that kept them obstinate within their walls. He knew that they knew that continued resistance would have terrible consequences for them. Yet, they preferred to starve and die rather than surrender. For the first time in his life a dim respect for some element in mankind, unknown in him, began to dawn in his mind.
From his acquaintance with the Capuchin, and others like him, he knew that there was some intoxication in religion which sustained them, made them insensible to suffering. But he knew that the Rochellais did not have this kind of religion. Protestantism, in the majority of the Huguenots, was a cool and liberal thing, more attuned to logic and reason than ecstasy. And logic and reason were usually the first to succumb before assault, despite their vaunted power. What was it, then, that sustained them?
When the thought came to him that some men might be willing to die for the right to think and act as they willed, that there might be a kind of pride in a few men which refused slavery to another man’s ideas, and demanded liberty and honor and enlightenment, not only for themselves, but for others who cared nothing for it, he was astounded. He repudiated the thought. It was not possible! Where lived the man, who, without the intoxication and irrationality of religion and superstition, had the fortitude to believe that freedom was the most precious possession of all men, and was willing to die for it? How could such a man operate steadfastly in a chill and bitter light, not enraptured, not drugged?
The evidence was before him, beyond those scowling battlements that guarded the exhausted and starving city. Despite the traitors, the expedient, the soft and the opportunistic who dwelt among the Rochellais, there were many who believed that the rights of man were the holiest things on earth, beyond chants and churches and altars and an unknowable God. He was more and more astonished. It shook the evidences of a lifetime. It shook the knowledge of men which he had acquired in his long and embittered years. He was compelled to believe that some men were above the beasts of the field, above the love of self, and the thought humbled him.
Now he vowed that when La Rochelle fell, if it did, he would treat the surrendered with all courtesy, all admiration, all wonder, as strange creatures of which he would like to know more, in order to complete his education.
Men had killed and been killed in the name of religion, in a miasma of rapture. They had been drugged, debased creatures, as were all creatures robbed of reason. But how many had died because they had loved other men, and demanded for them the same liberation and reason, the same right to live in peace and knowledge which they demanded for themselves? So few. So very few! A Socrates, here and there, stood like a pillar of light in the black desert of history, which was strewn with the ruins of those who had only hated in the name of dead gods and forgotten deities.
Yet, those pillars had not fallen from heaven. They had been raised by countless dusty hands; they had been born of the sucking muck and slime in which all humanity struggled.
And now some strange passion was born in him that the Rochellais would resist to the death. Should he retire? No, he would not retire! He would observe this humbling, this glorious miracle, to its end. Perhaps, then, the sickness that lived in his flesh and his soul would be relieved, and he might dare hope that all men were not vile. It became a necessity in him to believe this. If he lost this belief, then the remainder of his life must be a thing of evil, of blood and death, of fury and madness and hatred.
He, who never prayed except before an altar, before a multitude, found himself praying that the Rochellais would prefer death to surrender to superstition and slavery. To what God did he pray, who believed in no God? He did not know. But he
seemed to pray to a vast and universal spirit, who had a thousand faces, yet had none.
CHAPTER LV
The terrible winter slowly passed. The condition within the walls was most frightful. But it was not yet hopeless. The aristocrats, the leaders, suffered the most, but they suffered with white faces and resolute hearts, and in silence. Their courage still intimidated the people, and shame was still strong among them.
Then, on a certain day, when the spring winds blew softly, and the fields beyond the towers and the walls were green and shimmering as new emeralds, when gulls flew with the sunlight on their wings over the harbor, a feeble shout from the heart rose from the watchers of the sea.
For, in the distance, the thronging white sails of the English could be seen, approaching the desperate city. Fifty sails there were, strong, smooth and serene, seeming to touch the distant clouds that floated through the polished young sky. They cast their shadows on the opalescent sea. The gulls wheeled about them, like the doves of heavenly messengers. They came under the direction of Denbigh, the brother-in-law of the assassinated Buckingham.
Of the more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants of La Rochelle, ten thousand of the weak, the old, the women and the children, had died of starvation and misery and disease. The winds and clouds and storms of winter, the hunger and hopelessness, had lain in the streets like a poisonous fog, stifling and strangling. Grief and agony had resounded in every house. But, with the coming of the English—the blessed English!—joy awoke again with irresistible brilliance, and the streets became alive with singing, weeping, rejoicing crowds. Now, they were to be rescued! Now the troops and the priests of the foul Catholics, the murderers, were to be routed, driven away! God had prevailed.
Thousands crowded the battlements like skeleton birds. Thousands of famished and sinking faces, radiant with joy, turned seawards. Inexorably, the English approached. Then, the ships appeared to move no more. They stood like a bowing tall barrier near the harbor, the sinking sun red on their upper sails, the last light sparkling on metal and on the wet and glistening hulls. Triumphant pennants streamed in the breeze. But they did not come on, though they crowded the sea.
“Tomorrow,” said the Rochellais, “they will attack, and deliver us.”
They went to bed, gnawed by terrible hunger, but their hearts uplifted.
The watchers remained at their posts all night, their eyes fixed without rest on the ships. They could hear the far and distant sounds of those on the ships. They could hear the wind rushing between the fairy sails. They could hear the plunging of the anchored keels, the shriek of ropes. They could see the glittering restless lights, and they could just catch the thin brilliant notes of trumpets.
The night passed. Then, one by one, the watchers began to blink. Where were the lights? Were their eyes too strained? Had they become blind? Only darkness now rested on the ocean, profound and smothering. Now there was no sound. No man dared speak to his neighbor of what he discerned, lest a wild scream of agony arise from him. Oh, it was only that the English—the clever unpredictable English!—had extinguished their lights in order that their nearer approach to the harbor might be concealed. It was a narrow channel, that, between the curve of the harbor and the mole! They must slip between them, dark and unseen. At dawn, they would be within the harbor, beyond the mole!
The dawn came, gray and floating, as unreal as a dream. And then the watches saw that the ocean was empty. The English had fled.
No man spoke. No man looked at his neighbor. But they gazed out upon the sea with dead eyes. There was no question in their hearts, no asking if the English had found it impossible to enter the harbor. It was enough that they had gone, that La Rochelle was doomed, that the English had taken with them the souls and the courage, the hope and the faith, of Frenchmen, of a whole continent, of dedicated men and heroic hearts. They had taken with them, in their fault, or their lack of fault, the banners of freedom and peace. A world had gone down in the wake of their fleeing ships. For countless generations, for centuries, that world would be submerged, its lights drowned, its banners lost, its brave spirits mute and sleeping. They had taken with them all reason, all the hope of deliverance, all the ghosts of noble men who had died in the ruck of centuries that other men might be free. They had taken the shades of Luther, of Huss, of Erasmus, of Knox and Calvin, and those shades were dumb and weeping. The flags of freedom were gone, and there was only the scarlet dawn presaging a thousand thousand scarlet dawns of slavery and death and blood, of hatred and fury.
There was no need for the watchers to descend and inform the city. While they stood there, like statues of frozen snow, the city knew.
No sound arose from the cobbled streets, from the houses. There was no word. There was no outcry of denunciation or despair. There was only the staring of dead faces, the feeble touch of dying hands.
The siege continued. The dying dropped in the streets. Children wailing for food were suddenly strangled by a merciful death. Now the spring storms came, beating over the silent and deserted city. Hundreds thronged to the churches, but they could not pray. They could only kneel there, with bent heads and hanging hands, their lightless eyes fixed unseeingly on the stones beneath their knees.
The old Duchesse, as indomitable as ever, but with her old face sunken and gray, summoned the Mayor. She sat in her gaunt splendor before her empty fireplace, and looked at him with eyes that still glowed.
“My dear Guiton,” she said, her voice still clear but very feeble, “we must do something for the children, for the weaker women.”
He inclined his head. He was almost beyond speech, so famished was he.
“Open the gates sufficiently for some hundreds of them to leave. The Cardinal will be merciful. He will feed them. And just now,” she added wryly, “food is more important than freedom, to these poor bewildered ones.”
Her heart, always so cold and majestic, was touched by the sufferings of the anonymous people, as it had never been touched before. She, like the Cardinal, had had to revise much of her former convictions.
“I will ask them,” said the Mayor, hoarsely. “Perhaps they will not desire to leave.”
The Duchesse smiled darkly. “They will,” she said.
So, within a week, over six hundred women and children received the last kisses of their weeping husbands and fathers, and the gates were opened.
Now hell itself must have been plotting. The Cardinal had had a very bad night. He was sleeping late. He knew nothing of this exodus. But the priests knew. They gave their orders. The women and the children, ragged, fainting, staggering, accompanied by their old men, crept through the gates between the lines of the silent troops. The women carried their babes in their arms, and other of their children unable to walk. They passed through the lines of troops, their haggard faces searching for one eye of pity and compassion, one eye of mercy. But they saw only burly redcheeked men with lifted pikes and swords and ready muskets.
The last of that most dolorous procession trickled through the gates. A promise of mercy had been given under a flag of truce, a promise of gentle Christian succor. Ah, but the priests had promised everything!
The gates, groaning and creaking, closed. The procession went farther from the gates.
Then, at a given signal from some horrible creature in the robes of religion, the troopers fell upon those hundreds of women, girls, babes and old men and massacred them in swift and frightful silence. They did not bleed much, as they fell, with one last sigh, one last groan, one last lifting of skeleton hands. There was not much blood left in their tortured bodies. The corpses were piled up, like tossed fragments of wood and cloth. Babe after babe died in its mother’s clinging arms. Between the trenches and the walls they died silently, old men collapsing on new life, the hair of women mingling, face crushed into face, empty body seeming to dissolve into other empty bodies, staring eye fixed into staring eye.
The sun, bright and gay in its springtime splendor, looked down on that dreadful and piteous s
cene. The arms of the Christian murderers rose and fell, until they were exhausted, and their swords ran with red rivers. Only those faint sighs and groans, and the occasional firing of a musket when sword-arm could no longer be lifted strongly, had broken the morning calm.
The Church had been triumphant! Let the Te Deum now sound from every gilt and scarlet church! Let Rome rejoice! The helpless and the innocent, reason and enlightenment, had suffered another death, another assassination! The tide of liberation had been forced to retreat once more into the dark and formless future. The sleeping ages still slept in the womb of time, awaiting the avenging hour, awaiting the foolish voices who would declare; “But that was long ago!” Awaiting the form and the substance of heroic men who knew that tyranny and hatred never slept, and watched only for the hour to arise again.
The Cardinal, when he awoke at noon, was appraised of what had taken place by the Capuchin, Père Joseph. He went mad. He was beside himself. He raved like an insane man. Then, he became very calm and cold, and the Capuchin rejoiced that at last reason had returned to his friend. He was none too easy, himself. He was angered that he had not been consulted, but that his subordinates had perpetrated this thing. Nevertheless, the Church must not be attacked, nor denounced.
There was a fatal light in the Cardinal’s eye, which the Capuchin, in his relief, did not discern.
The Cardinal called the officers and questioned them in a quiet voice. He gave his commands, over the protestations of the sickened commanders, who had declared that orders had been given the troops without their knowledge. It had been the priests—
That night, at sundown, one hundred of the murderers were ruthlessly selected and shot against the very walls of La Rochelle. The agonized defenders heard those shots, the sounds of the vengeance done in the name of their murdered loved ones. They paused in their weeping long enough to listen. They did not know that the Cardinal had forbidden the administering of the last sacrament to the executed, that the priests smoldered in their huts and whispered among each other, that the Cardinal witnessed the executions with a fierce and contorted face. They did not rejoice at these deaths. Their anguish was too great.