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  A TATTER OF SCARLET




  A TATTER OF
  SCARLET

  ADVENTUROUS EPISODES OF THE
  COMMUNE IN THE MIDI
  1871

  BY
  S. R. CROCKETT

  SECOND EDITION

  HODDER AND STOUGHTON
  LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

  _Printed in 1913_




  CONTENTS


                                            PAGE

          CHAPTER I

  HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN                 1

          CHAPTER II

  KITH AND KIN                                9

          CHAPTER III

  THE LAUNDRY DOOR                           13

          CHAPTER IV

  THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES                  21

          CHAPTER V

  THE DEVENTER GIRLS                         30

          CHAPTER VI

  AN OLD MAN MASTERFUL                       34

          CHAPTER VII

  OUR FIRST COMMUNARD                        44

          CHAPTER VIII

  I SEE THE SCARLET TATTER NEAR AT HAND      50

          CHAPTER IX

  A REUNION OF THE REDS                      57

          CHAPTER X

  JEANNE'S VELVET EYES                       65

          CHAPTER XI

  HOW MEN SEE RED                            73

          CHAPTER XII

  "GOOD-BYE, RHODA POLLY"                    78

          CHAPTER XIII

  WE SEEK GARIBALDI                          84

          CHAPTER XIV

  "THE CHILDREN"                             96

          CHAPTER XV

  FIRST BLOOD                               101

          CHAPTER XVI

  THE COMING OF ALIDA                       107

          CHAPTER XVII

  A DESERT PRINCESS                         117

          CHAPTER XVIII

  THE PRINCESS COMMANDS                     126

          CHAPTER XIX

  KELLER BEY COMES TO ARAMON                132

          CHAPTER XX

  I PLAY "THREE'S COMPANY"                  138

          CHAPTER XXI

  THE GOLDEN HEART OF RHODA POLLY           145

          CHAPTER XXII

  IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW               149

          CHAPTER XXIII

  THE MISGIVINGS OF ALIDA                   156

          CHAPTER XXIV

  PEACE BEFORE STORM                        169

          CHAPTER XXV

  THE PROCLAMATION                          175

          CHAPTER XXVI

  KELLER BEY, INSURGENT                     185

          CHAPTER XXVII

  UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN?               199

          CHAPTER XXVIII

  STORM GATHERING                           208

          CHAPTER XXIX

  WITHIN THE PALE                           216

          CHAPTER XXX

  DEVIL'S TALK                              226

          CHAPTER XXXI

  THE BLACK BAND                            233

          CHAPTER XXXII

  "READY!"                                  239

          CHAPTER XXXIII

  "HELL UPSIDE DOWN!"                       251

          CHAPTER XXXIV

  THE PASSING OF KELLER BEY                 259

          CHAPTER XXXV

  A CAPTAIN OF BRIGANDS                     266

          CHAPTER XXXVI

  LEFT-HANDED MATTHEW                       273

          CHAPTER XXXVII

  LOOT                                      284

          CHAPTER XXXVIII

  THE LAST ADVENTURE OF THE BLACK BAND      291

          CHAPTER XXXIX

  THE CONVERSION OF CHANOT                  306

          CHAPTER XL

  THE LAST OF THE "TATTER OF SCARLET"       312




A TATTER OF SCARLET




CHAPTER I

HOW THE TRICOLOUR CAME DOWN


Deventer and I leaned on the parapet and watched the curious things
which were happening in Aramon across the river. We were the biggest
boys in the school and kept even the Seniors in awe, being "Les Anglais"
to them--and so familiar with the "boxe"--though Deventer was an
Irishman, and I, Angus Cawdor, a Scot of the Scots.

We had explained the difference to them many times by arguments which
may have temporarily persuaded some, but without in the least affecting
the fixed French notion that all English-speaking people are of English
race.

Behind us circulated the usual menagerie-promenade of the "Grands,"
gabbling and whispering tremendous secrets in files of two and three.

Hugh Deventer was a great hulk of a fellow who would take half a dozen
French Seniors and rub their heads together if I told him, laughing
loudly at their protestations as to loss of honour. He had been
challenged several times to fight duels with small swords, but the
Frenchmen had given that up now. For Deventer spat on his palms and
pursued the seconds who came with the challenge round and round the
playground till he caught and smacked them. Whereat he laughed again.
His father was chief of the Small Arms Factory, which of late years had
been added to the arsenal works of New Aramon opposite to us on the left
bank of the Rhone.

My own father was a clergyman, who for the sake of his health had
retired to the dry sunny Rhone valley, and had settled in a green and
white villa at Aramon because of the famous _lycee_ which was perched up
on the heights of Aramon le Vieux.

There was not much to distinguish Aramon the Old from Aramon the New,
that is, from a distance. Both glowed out startingly white and
delicately creamy between the burnished river and the flawless sapphire
of the Provencal sky. It was still winter time by the calendar, but the
sun beat on our bowed shoulders as we bent over the solid masonry of the
breastwork, and the stones were hotter than in English dog-days as we
plucked away our hands from it.

Deventer and I looked across at the greater New Aramon where his father
lived. It was the Aramon of shops and hotels and factories, while Aramon
le Vieux, over which our great _lycee_ throned it like a glorified
barracks, was a place of crumbling walls, ancient arcaded streets,
twelfth-century palaces let as tenements, and all the interesting
_debris_ of a historical city on the verges of Languedoc.

Our French _lyceens_ were too used to all this beauty and antiquity to
care anything about it, but we English did. We were left pretty much to
ourselves on our rare days of liberty, and as the professors, and
especially the _proviseur_, knew that we were to be trusted, we were
allowed to poke about the old Languedocian outpost much as we pleased.

It was the month of January, 1871. France was invaded, beaten, but not
conquered; but here in the far South, though tongues wagged fiercely, in
his heart the good bourgeois was glad to be out of it all.

At any rate, the _lycee_ was carried on just as usual. Punishments were
dealt out and tasks exacted. _Pions_ watched constantly over our
unstable morals, and occasionally reported misdemeanours of a milder
kind, not daring to make their position worse by revealing anything that
really mattered.

But, generally speaking, Aramon le Vieux dreamed away the hours,
blinking in the sunshine. The war did not touch it save in the fierce
clatter of _cafe_ dispute. Only in the forts that rose about the arsenal
of the newer city opposite to us a feeble guard of artillery and
linesmen lingered as a protection for the Small Arms Factory.

For the new Paris Government was still far from stable, and some feared
a renewal of the White Terror of 1815, and others the Red of the Commune
of 1848. The workmen of the arsenal, hastily gathered from all quarters,
were mostly sealed to the "Internationale," but it was supposed that the
field-pieces in Fort St. Andre could easily account for any number of
these hot-heads.

Besides Hugh Deventer and I there were several other English boys, but
they were still screeching like seagulls somewhere in the Lower School
and so did not count, except when an anxious mamma besought us with
tears in her voice to look after her darling, abandoned all day to his
fate among these horrid French.

To "look after" them Deventer and I could not do, but we gathered them
into a sort of fives team, and organised a poor feckless game in the
windowless angle of the refectory. We also got hockey sticks and
bastinadoed their legs for their souls' good to the great marvel of the
natives. Deventer had even been responsible for a trial of lacrosse, but
good missionaries though we were, we made no French converts.

The Juniors squealed like driven piglings when the ball came their way,
while the Seniors preferred walking up and down their paved cattle-pen,
interminably talking with linked arms and lips close to the ear of a
chosen friend.

Always one or two read as they walked alone, memorising fiercely against
next Saturday's examination.

The pariah _pion_ or outcast usher, a most unhappy out-at-elbows youth,
was expected to keep us all under his eye, but we saw to it early that
that eye passed leniently over Deventer and myself. Otherwise he counted
for nothing.

The War--the War--nothing but talk of the War came to our ears from the
murmuring throng behind us. How "France has been betrayed." "How the new
armies of the Third Republic would liberate Paris and sweep the
Prussians