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If Mallalieu and Cotherstone could have looked out of the windows of the court in the Town Hall, they would have seen the Market Square packed with a restless and seething crowd of townsfolk, all clamouring for whatever news could permeate from the packed chamber into which so few had been able to fight a way. But the prisoners seemed strangely indifferent to their surroundings.
Ruth's pride in her brother's success at the bank and in the encomiums of the townsfolk had to find expression somewhere. She could express them to her landlord and she did. Almost every day she dropped in at the windmill shop for a moment's call and chat, the subject of that chat always, of course, the same. "I told you he would succeed," she declared, her eyes shining and her face alight.
As Jeanne d'Arc had done just two centuries before, St. Jean de Losne saved the country in 1636. When the Imperial forces under Galas attempted the occupation of Burgundy, the dauntless townsfolk long held the enemy at bay and compelled final retreat. After generations profited by this heroism. Until the great year of 1789, the town, by royal edict, enjoyed complete immunity from taxation.
Then provisions would pour in on every side. The peasant would only withhold what he needed for his own use, and would send the rest into the cities, feeling for the first time in the course of history that these toiling townsfolk were his comrades his brethren, and not his exploiters. We shall be told, perhaps, that this would necessitate a complete transformation of industry.
The hard faces of the townsfolk scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the fields. Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war.
On the same Sabbath Melville was preaching in his own college chapel to a crowded congregation; and a neighbouring laird, with a number of his friends, having come to the city on that Sabbath to hear Melville, there was an unusual stir which drew most of the townsfolk to the chapel.
To have betrayed too much haste to be gone might have proved as dangerous as a long delay; and our horses needed rest. But an hour before noon next day I gave the order and we mounted in the square, in the presence of a mixed mob of soldiers and townsfolk, whom it needed but a spark to kindle.
But hereupon came many of the townsfolk with divers counsellors and chief men of the city who, kneeling, most earnestly prayed Beltane to abide for their defence. "Good my lord," quoth the Reeve, "bethink thee, when Duke Ivo shall hear of our doings he will seek bitter vengeance. Ah, my lord, 'twas but five years agone he stormed Belsaye and gave it up to pillage and on that day my wife was slain!
Many, however, doubted if these really were the brothers Polo and young Marco; this last was a mere lad of seventeen when he went away, and now was grown to be a portly man of forty-odd years. So incredulous were the townsfolk that the brothers hit upon a scheme to convince the doubting ones.
Bright as the scene of his journey had been, it had had from time to time its grisly touches; a forbidden fortress with its steel-clad inmates thrust itself upon the way; the village church had been ruined too recently to count as picturesque; and at last, at the meeting-point of five long causeways across a wide expanse of marshland, where the wholesome sea turned stagnant, La Rochelle itself scowled through the heavy air, the dark ramparts still rising higher around its dark townsfolk: La Rochelle, the "Bastion of the Gospel" according to John Calvin, the conceded capital of the Huguenots.
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