The Red Book of Heroes Part 22

At length they were outside, and were walking quietly down the road to Pontoise, where they took refuge in a church, till the inhabitants, hearing of their arrival, placed all they had at their disposal.

Great was the indignation of the king and the abbot when, next morning, a letter from mere Angelique informed them of what had happened.

Instantly a warrant was issued for the arrest of madame d'Estrees, and a large body of archers was sent off post-haste to Maubuisson in order to carry it out. But the abbess had received warning of her danger, and was not to be found, though her flight was so hurried that on searching her rooms the captain discovered several important papers that she had left behind her. Her friend, madame de la Serre, took refuge in a cupboard, which was concealed by tapestry, high up in a wall. The dust seems to have got into her nose, and she sneezed, and in this manner betrayed herself to the archers who set a ladder against the wall, which the lady instantly threw down. The captain then levelled his pistol at her, and bade his men put up the ladder again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The archers set a ladder against the wall, which the lady instantly threw down.]

'I will shoot you if you do not surrender,' he said, and as she was sure he meant it, she gave herself up.

When all was quiet in the abbey, the archers mounted their horses and rode to Pontoise, and under their protection Angelique and her nuns walked back to Maubuisson at ten o'clock that night, escorted by the people of Pontoise, and lighted by a hundred and fifty torches borne by the archers. For six months a guard of fifty remained there, but when madame d'Estrees was at last captured and sent back for life to the Convent of the Penitents, at the request of Angelique they returned to their quarters, and she was left to manage the nuns herself.

The last year of her residence at Maubuisson was, if possible, more unpleasant than the rest had been, for the t.i.tle of abbess was given to a lady of high birth whose views were far more worldly than those of Angelique. She was very angry at the presence of the thirty poor nuns who had been added to the community, and declared she would turn them out. So Angelique begged them to come with her to Port Royal, small though her abbey was, and had them taken there in a number of carriages sent by madame Arnauld.

After this Angelique, or some of the nuns chosen by her, was often sent to reform other convents, and very hard work it was. She had, besides, her own cares at Port Royal, for the abbey, always unhealthy, was made worse by overcrowding and underfeeding, and the income and the dormitories which had been held sufficient for sixteen now had to do for eighty. A low fever broke out, of which many died, and soon it became clear that the rest would follow if they did not leave. At length, at the entreaty of her mother, Angelique applied for permission to move into Paris, where madame Arnauld had taken a house for them.

It is not easy, of course, even in a big town, to find a ready-made building large enough to hold so many people, and, though Angelique added a sleeping-gallery, the refectory or dining-room was so small that the nuns had to dine in parties of four. Her father was dead, and she does not seem to have thought of consulting any of her brothers; more s.p.a.ce appeared a necessity, and, much as she hated debt, in her strait she made up her mind that she must borrow money in order to build fresh dormitories, and, breaking her rule, accepted a rich boarder, who became the cause of infinite trouble.

Just at this period the king's mother, who was in Paris, paid a visit to the famous abbess, and inquired if she had nothing to ask for, as it was her custom always to grant some favour on entering a convent for the first time.

Angelique replied that she prayed her to implore the king's grace to allow a fresh abbess to be chosen every three years, and leave being granted, she and her sister Agnes, who was her coadjutor, instantly resigned. She meant the change to be a safeguard, so that no one nun should enjoy absolute power for long; but as regarded her own abbey it was a great mistake, for she had a gift of ruling such as belonged to few women, and often when a mean or spiteful sister was elected she would wreak her ill-temper upon the late abbess, and impose all sorts of absurd penances upon her, which Angelique always bore meekly.

During the years that followed Angelique not only had her four younger sisters with her, Agnes, Anne, Marie, and Madeleine, but later her mother and her widowed sister, madame le Maitre. They were all happy to be together, though the rule of silence laid down by Angelique to prevent gossip must have stood in the way of much that would have been pleasant. By-and-by her nieces almost all entered the convent, and, what is still more surprising, her brothers and several of her nephews, most of them brilliant and successful men, one by one quitted the bar or the army, and formed a little band known as the 'Recluses of Port Royal,'

who afterwards did useful work in draining and repairing the abbey 'in the fields,' so that the nuns could go back to it.

And all this was owing to the example and influence of one little girl, who had been thrust into a position for which she had certainly shown no liking.

In the last twenty-five years of Angelique's life her religious views underwent a change, and her confessor, St. Cyran, who shared them, was imprisoned, on a charge of heresy, at Vincennes. Even as a young girl she had left the chapel at Port Royal bare of ornaments, and later sold the silver candlesticks which were a gift to the altar of Port Royal de Paris, in order to bestow the money on the poor. Everyone looked up to her, but by-and-by it began to be whispered that she was 'a dangerous person,' who thought that the Church needed reforming as well as the convents, and had adopted the opinions of one Jansen, a Swiss, who wished to go back to the faith of early times, when St. Augustine was bishop.

In 1654 she heard through one of her nephews that in consequence of some of the recluses having resisted a decree of the pope condemning a book of Jansen's, a resistance supposed to have been inspired by the abbess herself, it was reported that she was either to be sent to the Bastille or imprisoned in some convent. She did not take any notice, and neither threat was fulfilled; but the hatred which the order of the Jesuits bore to the 'Jansenists,' as their opponents were called, never rested, and later a command came for the recluses to be dispersed, and the leaders were forced to go into hiding. Then her schoolgirls were sent to their homes, 'la belle Hamilton,' a Scotch girl, among them; and after them went the candidates, or those who wished to take the veil. All these blows came thick and fast, and Angelique, with health broken from the incessant labours of over fifty years, was attacked by dropsy.

The nuns were in despair, and hung about her night and day, hoping that she might let fall some words which they might cherish almost as divine commands; but Angelique, who, unlike her sister Agnes, had all her life been very impatient of sentimentality, detected this at once, and took care 'neither to say nor do any thing remarkable.' 'They are too fond of me,' she once said, 'and I am afraid they will invent all sorts of silly tales about me.' And in order to put a stop as far as she could to all the show and parade which she knew her nuns would rejoice in, as she felt that her end was drawing near she gave them her last order:

'Bury me in the churchyard, and do not let there be any nonsense after my death.'

GORDON

Many years hence, when the children of to-day are growing old men and women, they will perhaps look back over their lives, as I am doing now, and ask themselves questions about the people they have known or have heard of. 'Who,' they will say, 'was the person I should have gone to at once if I needed help?' 'Who was the man whose talk made me forget everything, till I felt as if I could listen to him for ever?' 'What woman was the most beautiful, or the most charming?' and they will turn over the chapters in the Book of Long Ago and give the answers to themselves, or to the boys and girls who are listening for their reply.

Well, if the question were put throughout England at this moment, 'What man has kindled the greatest and most undying enthusiasm during your life?' the answer would be given with one voice:

'Gordon.'

It seemed as if from the very first Nature had intended him for a soldier. His father came of a clan that has a fighting record even in Scotch history, and he was living on Woolwich Common, within hearing of the a.r.s.enal guns, when his fourth son, Charles George, was born on January 28, 1833. Yet, strange to say, though fearless in many ways, and accustomed to rough games with his numerous brothers and sisters, Charles as a small boy hated the roar of cannon. Unlike queen Christina of Sweden, who at four years old used to clap her hands when a gun was discharged near her, and cry 'Again!' Charles shrank away and put his fingers in his ears to shut out the noise. It was not lack of courage, for he showed plenty of that about other things, but simply that the sudden sound made him jump, and was unpleasant to him.

His life was from the first full of change, as the lives of soldiers'

children often are, for the Gordons were stationed in Dublin and near Edinburgh before they went out to the island of Corfu when Charles was seven. During the three years he spent there Charles grew big and strong and full of daring; guns might fire all day long without his moving a muscle, and he was always trying to imitate the deeds of boys bigger than himself. When he saw them diving and swimming about in the beautiful clear water, he would throw himself from a rock into their midst, feeling quite sure that somebody would help him to float. And as courage and confidence are the two chief qualities necessary to make a good swimmer, by the time he left Corfu he was as much at home in the sea as any of his friends.

After his tenth birthday his life at Corfu came to an end, and Charles was brought home by his mother and sent to school at Taunton, where he stayed for five years. He is sure to have been liked by his schoolfellows, for he was a very lively, mischievous boy, constantly inventing some fresh prank, but never s.h.i.+rking the punishment it frequently brought. At Woolwich, which he entered as a cadet at fifteen, it was just the same. He was continually defying, in a good-humoured way, those who were set over him, and more than once he had a very narrow escape of having his career cut short by dismissal.

At this period his father held the appointment of director of the carriage department of the a.r.s.enal, and his whole family suffered greatly from the plague of mice which overran the house they lived in.

After putting up with it for some time, Charles and his brother Henry, also a cadet, laid traps and caught vast numbers of the mice, and during the night they carried them stealthily across the road in baskets to the commandant's house, exactly opposite. Opening a door which they felt pretty sure of finding unlocked, they emptied the baskets one by one, and let the mice run where they would. Then the boys crept back softly to their own room, shaking with laughter at the thought of the commandant's face when he came down in the morning.

The two youths were great favourites with the workmen in the a.r.s.enal, who used often to leave off the work they should have been doing to make squirts, crossbows, and other weapons for Charles and Henry. They must have trembled sometimes when they heard that the windows of the storehouse had been mysteriously broken, or that an officer who was known to be disliked by the cadets had received a deluge of water down his neck from a hedge bordering the road. But the culprits never betrayed each other, and the young Gordons soon grew so bold that they thought they might venture on a piece of mischief which very nearly ended their military career.

Some earthworks had been newly thrown up near a room where the senior cadets, known as 'p.u.s.s.ies,' attended lectures on certain evenings in the week. One night the two Gordons hid themselves behind this rampart, and while listening to remarks upon fortification and strategy the cadets were startled by a crash of gla.s.s and a shower of small shot falling about their ears. In an instant they were all up and out of the house, das.h.i.+ng about in the direction from which the shots had come; and so quick were they that if Charles and Henry had not known every inch of the ground and dodged their pursuers, they would certainly have been caught and expelled, as they richly deserved.

In June 1852 Charles Gordon was given a commission as second lieutenant in the Engineers, and was sent to Chatham for two years. In spite of the mice and the crossbows and the earthworks and many other things, he had gained several good conduct badges, for he had worked hard, and was noted for being clever both at fortifications and at surveying.

Mathematics he never could learn. So Charles said good-bye to his father, who was thankful to see him put to man's work--for during the four years his son had pa.s.sed at Woolwich he had, as he expressed it, 'felt himself sitting on a powder barrel'--and set out on the career in which he was to earn a name for justice and truth throughout three continents.

It was while Gordon was learning in Pembroke Dock something of what fortifications really were that the Crimean war broke out, and in December he was ordered to Balaclava, in charge of the materials for erecting wooden huts for the troops. He went down to Portsmouth and put the planks and fittings on board some collier boats, but not wis.h.i.+ng to share their voyage, he started for Ma.r.s.eilles, and there took a steamer to Constantinople. He arrived in the harbour of Balaclava on January 1, 1855, and heard the guns of Sebastopol booming six miles away. The cold was bitter, men were daily frozen to death in the trenches, food was very scarce, and the streets of Balaclava were full of 'swell English cavalry and horse-artillery carrying rations, and officers in every conceivable costume foraging for eatables.'

Soon the young engineer was sent down to the trenches before Sebastopol, where he and his comrades were always under fire and scarcely ever off duty. It was here that his friends.h.i.+p began with a young captain in the 90th Foot, now lord Wolseley, who has many stories to tell of what life in the trenches was like. Notwithstanding all the suffering and sadness around them, these young men, full of fun and high spirits, managed to laugh in the midst of their work. At Christmas-time captain Wolseley and two of his friends determined to have a plum-pudding, so that they might feel as if they were eating their Christmas dinner in England. It is true that they only had dim ideas how a plum-pudding was to be made, and nothing whatever to make it with, but when one is young that makes no difference at all. One of the three consulted a sergeant, who told him he thought it would need some flour and some raisins, as well as some suet; but as none of these things could be got, they used instead b.u.t.ter which had gone bad, dry biscuits which they pounded very fine, and a handful of raisins somebody gave them. Stirring this mixture carefully by turns, they calculated how long it would have to boil--in one of captain Wolseley's three towels which he sacrificed for the purpose--so that they might be able to enjoy it at a moment when they would all be off duty. Five hours, they fancied, it must be on the fire, but it had scarcely been boiling one when the summons came to go back to their work. Resolved not to lose the fruits of so much labour and care, they s.n.a.t.c.hed the plum-pudding from the pot and ate a few spoonfuls before running out to their posts. But Wolseley had hardly reached his place before he was seized with such frightful pains that he felt as if he would die. His commanding officer, who happened to pa.s.s, seeing his face looking positively green, ordered him back to his hut. But a little rest soon cured him, and, like the others, he spent the night in the trenches.

You will have read in the story of the 'Lady in Chief' something about the hards.h.i.+ps which the allied army of English, French, and Turks went through during the war with the Russians, so I will not repeat it here.

Gordon, whose quick eye saw everything, was greatly struck with the way the French soldiers bore their sufferings. 'They had nothing to cover them,' he says, 'and in spite of the wet and cold they kept their health and their high spirits also.' Our men worked hard and with dogged determination, but, as a rule, they could not be called lively. True, till Miss Nightingale and her nurses came out they were left when wounded to the care of rough and ignorant, however kindly, comrades, while the French had always their own Sisters of Charity to turn to for help. But it is pleasant to think that the sons of the men who had fallen in the awful pa.s.sage of the Berezina forty years before were worthy of their fathers, and could face death with a smile and a jest as well as they.

As the war went on and the a.s.saults on the town of Sebastopol became more frequent, the English generals learned to know of what stuff their young officers were made, and what special duties they were fit for.

They marked that Gordon had some of Hannibal's power of guessing, almost by instinct, what the enemy was doing--a quality that rendered him extremely useful to his superiors. With all his untiring energy and eagerness--forty times he was in the trenches for twenty hours--he never overlooked the details that were necessary to ensure the success of any work he was entrusted with, and he never relaxed his watchfulness till the post to be won was actually taken. In his leisure moments he seems to have been fond of walking as far as he could without running into danger, and writes home in February of the gra.s.s that was springing and the crocuses that were flowering outside the camp. Sometimes he would go with a friend down to the great harbour on the north side of which the Russians were entrenched, and listen to them singing the sad boating songs of the Volga, or watch them trying to catch fish, chattering merrily all the while.

At last the forts of the Mamelon and the Malakoff were stormed, and the Russians abandoned Sebastopol. Gordon, who had often narrowly escaped death, was mentioned by the generals in despatches; but he did not receive promotion, and, except a scar, the only token he carried away of those long months of toil and strain was the cross of the Legion of Honour bestowed on him by the French. But he was a marked man for all that, and was sent straight from the Crimea, after peace was made, to join a mission for fixing fresh frontiers for Russia south-west along the river Pruth and on the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea.

Wherever he went, whether he was on the borders of Turkey, in Armenia, or in the Caucasus, where he proceeded after a winter in England, he made the best of his opportunities and saw all he could of the country and the people. He was as fond as ever of expeditions and adventures, and climbed Ararat till a blinding snowstorm came on and the guides refused to proceed. In the Caucasus he dined out whenever he was asked, and was equally surprised at the beauty of the smart ladies (who wore bracelets made of coal) and at the ingrained dirt of their clothes and their houses. On the whole, though he thoroughly enjoyed the good dinners they gave him, he preferred going on shooting expeditions into the mountains with their husbands and sons.

At the end of 1858 he was ordered home again, and a few months later obtained his captaincy, and was made adjutant and field-work instructor at Chatham. But this did not last long, for in a year's time he was destined to undertake one of the two great missions of his life.

Early in 1860 a war with China broke out, and in this also the French were our allies. More soldiers were needed, and volunteers were asked for. Gordon was one of the first to send in his name, but before he reached Pekin the Taku forts, at the mouth of the Tientsin River--forts of which in the year 1900 we were to hear so much--had been taken.

However, the famous Summer Palace was still to be captured, and this, which indeed might be called the eighth wonder of the world, lay out in the country, eight miles away from Pekin. The grounds, covering more than twelve miles, were laid out with lakes, fountains, tea-houses, waterfalls, banks of trees, and beds of flowers, while scattered about were palaces belonging to different members of the royal family, all filled with beautiful things--china of the oldest and rarest sorts, silks, lacquer, cabinets, and an immense variety of clocks and watches.

By order of the English envoy this gorgeous place was given over to pillage, in revenge for the ill-treatment of some French and British prisoners. One can form a little idea of the vast amount of treasures it contained from constantly seeing scattered in houses a watch or a lacquer box or a china bowl that, we are told, had once decorated the Summer Palace; they really seem to be endless. Lord Wolseley tells how he happened to be standing by the French general in the gardens while the looting was going on, and as a French soldier came out he handed to his chief something that he had brought expressly for him. Then, turning to the young English officer, he held out a beautiful miniature of a man wearing a dress of the time of Louis XIV.