Читать книгу A Joyous Adventure - Baroness Orczy - Страница 5

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Outside the small band started on its way.

“Where do we go first?” one of the men had asked as soon as Cottereau had joined them.

“To Glatigny,” he replied. “There are three men there and they have a good many guns.”

The road was soggy from the recent rain and a head wind made going still more difficult. But the men—most of them, at any rate—appeared strong and resolute. Those who carried guns had formed fours, taking others, such as Gilbert and one or two who did not appear over-enthusiastic, between them.

The farm of Glatigny was only distant a few hundred mètres. The band trudged across the muddy road, then over a ploughed field, and came to a halt in front of a low irregular building flanked by a square tower, under the roof of which pigeons were roosting.

Two of the men knocked loudly against the door with the butt-end of their muskets. After a time the shutters of one of the windows above were thrown open and a man thrust his head out of the window.

“Qui va là?” he called.

“Le Gros,” one of the men replied, and Cottereau added peremptorily: “Don’t keep us waiting! We have still far to go.”

After which they all waited down in the lane, while inside the house awakened activity showed itself by dim lights appearing here and there at the windows, by quick steps scurrying up and down stairs, by calls and oaths and admonitions.

“Eh, Joseph! Get the guns while I find my boots.”

“Lazy lout to have fallen asleep! ’Twas thy turn to watch.”

“No harm done! Everything is ready.”

There were also intermittent cries from a woman:

“Nom de nom de Dieu! What an affair! Don’t go, my man. It is madness!”

Cottereau and the men below waxed impatient.

“We shall never get on if we have to wait like this everywhere.”

“Here we are! here we are!” came with an excited shout as the front door was thrust open and three men appeared on the threshold—an elderly man and two younger ones, obviously father and sons. Each of them had a musket slung over his shoulder and carried another in his hand; and behind them a woman with tousled hair about her head, kirtle and shift awry, obviously just out of bed, held a candle aloft with one hand and with the other mopped her streaming eyes.

“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! What madness!” she lamented.

Cottereau gave a cry of satisfaction at sight of the guns.

“A splendid beginning!” he declared. “A good augury!”

The farmer and his two sons fell in with the others, and without further heed to the wailing woman the little party set out once more on its way. From house to house they went, from farm to cottage or to château; trudging sometimes ankle-deep in the mud of the fields, or pushing their way through a bit of woodland to find a short cut. The proceedings were always the same: a halt, a challenge, a demand for men and guns. Nearly always the men were ready, eager for the enterprise. This was Cottereau’s scheme, to fight Bonaparte, the Italian usurper, who drove their priests away from their parishes and forced men to leave their villages and join his army, drill, march, obey orders, all of which was hateful to the independent Normandy peasant, yeoman, farmer, seigneur, or whatever he might be.

To-night was the night when the whole of Normandy would rise and take up arms against the usurper and restore King Louis XVIII by the Grace of God to the throne of France.

Fight? They were only too ready to fight. They had always hated the Revolution, which had deprived them of their curé and sent their seigneur to exile or to death. They were ready to fight—most of them, that is—though there were a few waverers, like Gilbert—cowards Cottereau called them, and had his own short way with them.

Thus, at Plancy, where lived Farmer Chatel and his three sons, when the men pounded against the massive oaken door of the substantial farm-house there was no answer for a long time. It was only when Cottereau gave the order in a loud voice to break the door open that a woman’s head appeared at one of the windows on the floor above.

“What do you want?” she called.

“It is for to-night,” one man shouted in reply. “Chatel has had the word. Where is he?”

“Sick,” the woman replied curtly, “in bed.”

The men jeered.

“And Paul?” they shouted. “And Georges? And Henri? Are they sick, too?”

“They have work to do in the fields to-morrow. They cannot come.”

With that she pulled the shutters to with a bang, but not before Cottereau had called out in his stentorian voice: “Break open the door, comrades!”

With great gusto and lusty shouts the men hammered on the door. After a time it was opened from within and a young man appeared holding a lighted candle in his hand. His hair, all rough about his head, his flushed face, his bare feet, showed that he had only just tumbled out of bed. He looked wide-eyed and scared as he peered into the night.

“Now then, Paul,” Cottereau commanded, “do not keep us waiting. Tell thy brothers to hurry, and pull thy father out of bed. Where are the guns?”

“My father—” Paul commenced, stammering.

“We’ll see about him,” Cottereau broke in curtly. “Get thy coat and thy brothers and bring us the guns.”

Paul hesitated a moment or two longer. By a strange freak the flickering light of the tallow candle glinted on the brass-studded butt-end of Cottereau’s pistols and on Cottereau’s hand, which rested upon them. Without another word Paul turned on his heel and went up the creaking stairs.

“Where are the guns?” one or two of the men shouted after him.

As Paul made no reply, they invaded the house, some going in one direction, some in another. Cottereau followed the boy up the stairs. He overtook him on the landing and seized him roughly by the arm.

“No nonsense, Paul, remember!” he said in a rough hoarse whisper. “This is a matter of life and death to us all. The allied armies are marching on Paris and the King of France by the Grace of God looks to us just as much as to Prussian or English soldiers to set him back on his throne. To-night throughout Normandy, in every city, village and hamlet, men are rallying, arming ready to fight. For Bonaparte’s police have got wind of this rising; they are well armed and well trained—far better than we are—and it is only by superior numbers and steadfast loyalty that we can hope to cope with them. Anyway, we have gone too far now to retreat. We are not going to play the coward and let our comrades of Caen and Falaise, of Evreux and Coutances, call us traitors. Those who are not with us are against us. And those who are against us are traitors whom I will shoot with my own hand like dogs.”

Paul Chatel had listened in silence to this long peroration delivered in short, crisp sentences, each one of which seemed to strike a warning blow against his attempts at defiance. Cottereau was a fanatic, and with such a fanatic armed and ruthless there was no use in arguing, still less in resistance. Paul nearly lost his balance when the grip on his arm suddenly relaxed.

“Now go and fetch thy brothers,” Cottereau concluded curtly. “I’ll deal with thy father myself. Where does he lie?”

Paul, without a word, pointed to a door at the farther end of a narrow passage. He watched with very obvious apprehension Cottereau’s big, ungainly figure stalk across the landing, then roughly kick open the door which had been pointed out to him and disappear within the room. He heard his mother’s outcry, his father’s vigorous oaths, and after that nothing more.

What happened in that room the three brothers Chatel never knew. Presumably, Cottereau used the same arguments which had already got the better of Paul’s resistance. Certain it is that ten minutes later Farmer Chatel and his three sons, each of them armed with a gun, formed part of the recruiting band, now swelled to considerably over a hundred. Most of the men had come willingly; others had yielded to the threats of the irascible Cottereau, who was just as ready to murder waverers in cold blood as he was to shed his own in King Louis’s cause.

And the band marched on through the night to the many villages that lie dotted along the valley of the Orne. Glatigny and Donnay, Meslay and Plancy, Le Quesnay and Aubigny, and many more did they visit that night; and every time, in cottage or farm, they left the women lamenting—a sister in tears, a mother or wife protesting at the madness of it all.

The women wept because they knew. Somehow, women always seem to know when their menfolk engage in a forlorn hope.

But Cottereau and the enthusiasts were exultant.

“Three hundred,” they declared, “three hundred from our small district to fight for King Louis! We’ll not stop till there are five hundred of us to join our comrades at Caen. And then let Bonaparte and his army look to themselves!”