It was late before any one ventured to go to bed; and Louis, weak and weary, had wakened many times from dreamy perceptions that some wonderful discovery had been made, always fixing it upon Mary, and then finding himself infinitely relieved by recollecting that it did not regard her. He was in the full discomfort of the earlier stage of this oft-repeated vision, when his door was pushed open, and Delaford's trembling voice exclaimed, 'My Lord, I beg your pardon, the massacre is beginning.'
'Let me know when it is over,' said Louis, nearly in his sleep.
Delaford reiterated that the city was bombarded, thousands of armed men were marching on the hotel, and my Lady ought to be informed. A distant cannonade, the trampling of many feet, and terrified voices on the stairs, finally roused Louis, and hastily rising, he quitted his room, and found all the ladies on the alert. Lady Conway was holding back Virginia from the window, and by turns summoning Isabel to leave it, and volubly entreating the master of the hotel to secure it with feather-beds to defend them from the shot.
'Oh, Fitzjocelyn!' she screamed, 'tell him so-tell him to take us to the cellars. Why will he not put the mattresses against the windows before they fire?'
'I should prefer a different relative position for ourselves and the beds,' said Louis, in his leisurely manner, as he advanced to look out. 'These are the friends of order, my dear aunt; you should welcome your protectors. Their beards and their bayonets by gaslight are a grand military spectacle.'
'They will fire! There will be fighting here! They will force their way in. Don't, Virginia-I desire you will not go near the window.'
'We are all right. You are as safe as if you were in your own drawing-room,' said Captain Lonsdale, walking in, and with his loud voice drowning the panic, that Louis's cool, gentle tones only irritated.
Isabel looked up and smiled, as Louis stood by her, leaving his aunt and Virginia to the martial tones of their consoler.
'I could get no one to believe me when I said it was only the soldiers,' she observed, with some secret amusement.
'The feather-bed fortress was the leading idea,' said Louis. 'Some ladies have a curious pseudo presence of mind.'
'Generally, I believe,' said Isabel, 'a woman's presence of mind should be to do as she is told, and not to think for herself, unless she be obliged.'
'Thinking for themselves has been fatal to a good many,' said Louis, relapsing into meditation-'this poor Paris among the rest, I fancy. What a dawn for a Sunday morning! How cold the lights look, and how yellow the gas burns. We may think of home, and be thankful!' and kneeling with one knee on a chair, he leant against the shutter, gazing out and musing aloud.
'Thankful, indeed !' said Isabel, thoughtfully.
'Yes-first it was thinking not at all, and then thinking not in the right way.'
Isabel readily fell into the same strain. 'They turned from daylight and followed the glare of their own gas,' said she.
So they began a backward tracing of the calamities of France; and, as Louis's words came with more than usual slowness and deliberation, they had only come to Cardinal de Richelieu, when Captain Lonsdale exclaimed, 'I am sorry to interrupt you, Lord Fitzjocelyn, but may I ask whether you can afford to lose any more blood?'
'Thank you; yes, the bandage is loosened, but I was too comfortable to move,' said Louis, sleepily, and he reeled as he made the attempt, so that he could not have reached his room without support.
The Captain had profited sufficiently by the Sister's example to be able to staunch the blood, but not till the effusion had exhausted Louis so much that all the next day it mattered little to him that the city was in a state of siege, and no one allowed to go out or come in. Even a constant traveller like Captain Lonsdale, fertile in resource, and undaunted in search of all that was to be seen, was obliged to submit, the more willingly that Fitzjocelyn needed his care, and the ladies' terror was only kept at bay by his protection. He sat beside the bed where lay Louis in a torpid state, greatly disinclined to be roused to attend when his aunt would hasten into the room, full of some horrible rumour brought in by Delaford, and almost petulant because he would not be alarmed. All he asked of the Tricolor or of the Drapeau Rouge for the present was to let him alone, and he would drop into a doze again, while the Captain was still arguing away her terror.
More was true than he would allow her to credit and when the little Soeur de Charite found a few minutes for visiting her patient's wound, her bright face was pale with horror and her eyes red with weeping.
'Our good Archbishop!' she sobbed, when she allowed herself to speak, and to give way to a burst of tears. 'Ah, the martyr! Ah, the good pastor! The miserable-But no-my poor people, they knew not what they did!'
And as Louis, completely awakened, questioned her, she told how the good Archbishop Affre had begun that Sunday of strife and bloodshed by offering his intercessions at the altar for the unhappy people, and then offering his own life. 'The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,' were his words, as he went forth to stand between the hostile parties, and endeavour to check their fury against one another. She herself had seen him, followed by a few priests, and preceded by a brave and faithful ouvrier, who insisted on carrying before him a green branch, as an emblem of his peaceful mission. She described how, at the sight of his violet robes, and the white cross on his breast, the brave boy gardes mobiles came crowding round him, all black with powder, begging for his blessing, some reminding him that he had confirmed them, while others cried, 'Your blessing on our muskets, and we shall be invincible,' while some of the women asked him to carry the bandages and lint which they wished to send to the wounded.
On he went, comforting the wounded, absolving the dying, and exhorting the living, and at more than one scene of conflict the combatants paused, and yielded to his persuasions; but at the barricade at the Faubourg St. Antoine, while he was signing to the mob to give him a moment to speak, a ball struck him, and followed by the weeping and horror-struck insurgents, he was borne into the curate's house, severely wounded, while the populace laid down their weapons, to sign a declaration that they knew not who had fired the fatal shot.
'No, no, it was none of our people!' repeated the little nun. 'Not one of them, poor lost creatures as too many are, would have committed the act-so sacrilegious, so ungrateful! Ah! you must not believe them wicked. It is misery that drove them to rise. Hold! I met a young man-alas! I knew him well when he was a child-I said to him, 'Ah! my son, you are on the bad train.' 'Bread, mother-it is bread we must have,' he answered. 'Why, would you speak to one who has not eaten for twenty-four hours?' I told him he knew the way to our kitchen. 'No, mother,' he said, 'I shall not eat; I shall get myself killed.''
Many a lamentable detail of this description did she narrate, as she busied herself with the wound; and Louis listened, as he had listened to nothing else that day, and nearly emptied his travelling purse for the sufferers. Isabel and Virginia waylaid her on the stairs to admire and ask questions, but she firmly, though politely, put them aside, unable to waste any time away from her children-her poor wounded!
On Monday forenoon tranquillity was restored, the rabble had been crushed, and the organized force was triumphant. Still the state of siege continued, and no one was allowed free egress or ingress, but the Captain pronounced this all nonsense, and resolutely set out for a walk, taking the passports with him, and promising Lady Conway to arrange for her departure.
By-and-by he came in, subdued and affected by the procession which he had encountered-the dying Archbishop borne home to his palace on a litter, carried by workmen and soldiers, while the troops, who lined the streets, paid him their military salutes, and the people crowded to their doors and windows-one voice of weeping and mourning running along Paris-as the good prelate lay before their eyes, pale, suffering, peaceful, and ever and anon lifting his feeble hand for a last blessing to the flock for whom he had devoted himself.