# The Red Captain

Extracted from Pall Mall Magazine, 1901 Nov pp. 315–328. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
THE RED CAPTAIN
BY BERNARD CAPES
I.
IN February of the year 1809, when the French were sat down before Saragossa—then enduring its second and more terrific siege within a period of six months—it came to the knowledge of Monseigneur the Duc d’Abrantes, at that time the general commanding, that his army, though undoubtedly the salt of the earth, was yet so little sufficient to itself in the matter of seasoning, that it was reduced to the necessity of flavouring its soup with the saltpetre out of its own cartridges. In this emergency, monseigneur sent for a certain Ducos, captain on the staff of General Berthier, but at present attached to a siege-train before the doomed town, and asked him if he knew whence—if anywhere in the vicinity—it might be possible to make good the deficiency.
Now this Ducos was a very progressive evolution of the times, spawned of the rising sun, hatched stinging and splendid from the exotic quagmires of the past. A facile linguist, by temperament and early training an artist, he had flown naturally to the field of battle as to that field most fertile of daring new effects whose surprises called for record rather than analysis. It was for him to collect the impressions that, later, duller wits should classify. And, in the meantime, here he was at twenty a captain of renown, and always a creature of the most unflagging resourcefulness.
“You were with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon last year?” demanded Junot.
“I was, general; both before the siege and during it.”
“You heard mention of salt mines in this neighbourhood?”
“There were rumours of them, sir, amongst the hills of Ulebo; but it was never our need to verify the rumours.”
“Take a company now, and run them to earth. I will give you a week.”
“Pardon me, general; I need no company but my own, which is ever the safest colleague.”
Junot glared demoniacally. He was already verging on the madness that was presently to destroy him.
“The devil!” he shouted. “You shall pickle yourself for that assurance. Go alone, sir, since you’re so confident, and find salt; and at your peril be killed before reporting the result to me. Bones of God! is every. skip-jack with a shoulder-knot to better my commands?”
Ducos saluted and wheeled impassive. He knew that in a few days Marshal Lannes was to supplant this maniac.
Up and away amongst the intricate ridges of the mountains, where the half-unravelled knots of the Pyrenees flow down in threads, or clustered threads, that are by-and-by combed into the plains south of Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered amongst the chestnut trees on a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order; his elastic young cheeks glowed with the hot ripeness that precedes, but is not yet mellowness; his eyebrows were resolute bows; the rapid caressing speech of his lips was set between double dimples like quotation-marks. For, as he sat, he would talk to his own shadow as it lay on the ground before him—pout at it, coquet with it, affect an attention to its replies—all after a fashion that was surely not that of the sex he represented: “Oh, shameful! who art thou? Not Anita, that Eugenio loved of old? Go, go, before he returns—as he promised he would one day—and change thy dress, lest, coming back, he should say, This is no girl’s shadow. Ah, me! I have lost the shadow of my love!’”
She raised her head quickly on the word, and her heart leapt. It was to hear the sound of a footstep, on the stones far below, coming up the mountain-side. She looked to her shirt and jacket. Ragged as they were, undeveloped as was the figure within them, she had been so jealous a housewife that there was not even such an eyelet-hole in all as would attract a Peeping Tom. Now, leaving her goats amongst the scattered boulders of the open, she backed into the groves precautionally, but a little reluctantly, because in her heart she lusted for company.
The footsteps came on toilfully, and the man who sounded them hove into sight. He wore the dress of an English officer, save for the shepherd’s felt hat on his head; but his scarlet jacket was knotted loosely by the sleeves about his throat, in order to the disposition of a sling that held his left arm crooked in a bloody swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he was otherwise weaponless. According to Eugène Ducos, a pistol was folly’s resource, but wit’s embarrassment in an emergency.
Having reached a little plateau, irregular with rocks shed from the cliffs above, he sat down within the shade of a grove of chestnut and carob trees, and sighed, and wiped his brow, and nodded to all around and below him.
“Yes, and yes, and of a truth,” thought he, “here is the country of my knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right—a browner clod amongst the furrows of the valleys—heaves up the ruined monastery of St. Ildefonso, that Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah, the week of sweet Malvoisie and sweeter love!) the little inn at the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has become of Anita of the inn?—of—— Oh, plague take it! if I could but find and use my little rogue now!”
The goatherd slipped round the wing of a boulder, and stood before him, breathing hard. Her black curls were for all the world bandaged, as it might be (though they were more in the way to give than take wounds), and a soft black sombrero stood askew on the top. She had a kind of gaskins on her legs, loose, so as to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across her shoulders was slung a sunburnt shawl that depended in a bib against her chest.
Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions magnetically meeting and blending till the eyes of the goatherd were delivered of very stars of rapture.
Was this a ghost, thought Ducos, summoned of his passion, or perhaps of his necessity? But the other had no such infidelity. All in a moment she had fallen upon her brown knees before him, and was pitifully kissing his bandaged arm; and was moaning and murmuring her ecstasy; and, with every fondling plea, was ceding and abasing herself to wring a gesture of response.
She laughed and sobbed.
“Ah! the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will I repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! Yes, Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own Littlenose—thy child, thy baby, who never doubted that this day would come—oh, love of my heart, that it would come!” (She clung up to him and hid her face)—“Eugenio! though the garden of my soul bears no fruit for the mouth of my lord that planted the seed!”
He smiled, recovered of his first astonishment. Ministers of revolution! In all the pandemonium of passion they evoked, should not Love’s coincidences have a place? Their very creed was opportunism. Here was he in proof to it; here was he chanced again, and timely, upon that same sweet instrument he had once used, and done with, and thrown aside, careless of its direction. He had but to stoop and return it to his bosom, and use and discard it once more. Great were the ministers of revolution, and great would he, their agent, show himself. He caressed her with a real delight. She was something more than lovable. His longest kiss upon her lips was his earnest of a most enthusiastic gratitude.
“Anita—my little Anita,” began he glowingly.
But she took him up with a rippling swiftness, answering the question of his eyes:
“Oh, my beloved! I had offended Truth, and it turned upon me. After thou hadst gone, it stood at my father’s ear, denouncing us. He held a last letter of thine, that had missed my hands for his. Oh, love, how I swooned not to read it! He was for killing me—me a traitor (soul of my soul, but wert thou banished to the sunless country, I would make my kingdom of the ice!) Then Tia Joachina had pity, and dressed me as you see, and smuggled me to the hills that I might have at least a chance to live without suffering wrong. And, behold! the heavens smiled upon me, knowing my love! and Señor Cangrejo took me to herd his goats. For seven months—for seven long, faithful months; until the sweetest of my heart’s flock should return to pasture in my bosom. And now he has come, my lamb, my prince, even as he had promised. He has come, and I too, to meet him, counting nothing of the mazes of the world—drawn together by the silent song of our hearts. What could we do but surely meet? Eugenio: ah Dios! and thou hast dared this for my sake?”
“Sweet my beautiful,” answered the ingenuous young officer, “I should have dared only in breaking my word. Un honnête homme n'a que sa parole—sa parole d’honneur, is the motto for a little poor captain, Nariguita. And who is this Señor Cangrejo?”
Some terror, offspring of his question, set her clinging to him once more.
“What dost thou here?” she cried, with immediate inconsistency—“a lamb amongst the wolves! Eugenio——”
“Eh!” he took her up, with an air of bewilderment: “I am Sir Zhones, the English capitaine, though it lose me your favour, mamselle. W’at! damn eet, I say!”
She fell away, staring at him a moment; then gathered, and leapt to him again between tears and laughter.
“But this?” she asked, her teeth glistening; and she touched the bandage.
“Ah, that?” he answered. “I was wounded and taken prisoner by the French—you understand? Also, I escaped from their lines. As you remark, mamselle, the blood is real. It came—lint and splint and all—from the arm of a broken sabreur, who, indeed, had no longer need of it.”
“Por amor de su alma!” she cried. “Come away into the trees, where none will notice you.”
“I have no fear, I,” said Captain Zhones. But he rose, with a smile, and followed whither she led. And then, sitting amidst the veiling shadows, he told her (the Machiavel) with what eagerness he had awaited this moment; and he carelessly suggested how, now that it was come, he should turn the occasion to account by looking for salt. Then at that she stared at him troubled, and her lip began to quiver.
“Ah, God!” she said, “am not I enough? Go thy ways, then; but for pity’s heart-sake let me weep a little. Yes, yes, there is salt in the mountains. That I know, and where the caves lie. But there are also Cangrejo—whom the French ruined and made a madman—and a hundred like him—wild-cats hidden amongst the leaves. And there are the homeless friars of St. Ildefonso; and dear body of Christ!—the Tribunal of Terror, the Junta of women, that would penetrate your disguise as readily as did the shepherd the lion’s skin.”
“By my soul, madam, I am obliged to you for omitting the ass. And what is this Junta?”
“It is a scourge,” she whispered, shivering, “for traitors and for spies. It gathers nightly, at sunset, in the dip yonder, and there waters with blood its cross of death. This very evening, Cangrejo tells me——”
She broke off, cuddled closer to her companion, and clasping her hands and shrugging up her shoulders to him, went on solemnly:
“Eugenio, there was a waggon-full of piastres coming secretly for Saragossa by the Tolosa road. It was badly convoyed. One of your generals got scent of it. The guard had time to hide their treasure and disperse, but him whom they thought had betrayed them the tribunal of women claimed, and to-night——”
“Well, he will receive his wages. And where is the treasure concealed?”
“Ah! that I do not know.”
Ducos got to his feet, and stretched and yawned,
“I have a fancy to see this meeting-place of the tribunal. Wilt thou lead me to it, Nariguita?”
“Mother of God, thou art mad!”
“Then I must go alone, like a madman.”
“Eugenio, it is cursing and accurst. None will so much as look into it by day; and, at dusk, only when franked by the holy Church.”
“So greatly the better. Adios, Nariguita!”
It took them half an hour, descending cautiously, and availing themselves of every possible shelter of bush and rock, to reach a strangely formed amphitheatre, set stark and shallow amongst the higher swales of the valley, but so overhung with scrub of myrtle and wild pomegranate as to be only indefinitely distinguishable from above. A ragged track, running from the lower levels into this hollow, tailed off and was attenuated into a point where it took a curve of the rocks at a distance below.
As Ducos entered the brush, approaching the rim, a toss of black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like ashes of paper spouted from a chimney.
He looked over. The bush ceased at the edge of a considerable pit, roughly circular in shape, whose sides of bare sloping sand met and flattened at the bottom into an extended platform. Thence arose a triangular gibbet—a very rack in a devil’s larder, all about which a horde of little pitchy bird scullions were busy with the joints. Holy Mother, how they squabbled and flapped at one another with their sleeves! The two carcases that hung there seemed, for all their heavy pendulosity, to reel and rock with laughter, bumping together in eyeless merriment.
Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from any available coign of concealment.
“One could hear nothing,” he murmured, shaking his head in aggravation; “and, this Junta of ladies—it will probably talk. What if it were to discuss that very question of the piastres? Noseling, will you go and be my little reporter at the ceremony?”
Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: “It is impossible. ‘hey admit none but priests and women.”
“And are you not a woman, most beautiful?”
“God forbid!” she said. “I am the little goatherd, Ambrosio.”
He stood some moments, frowning. A scheme, daring and characteristic, was beginning to take shape in his brain.
“What is that clump of rags by the gallows?” he asked, without looking round,
“It is not rags; it is rope, señor.”
He thought again,
“And when do they come to hang this rascal?” he said.
“It is always at dusk.—Eugenio! Oh, dear Mother!” she whimpered, for the young man had suddenly slipped between the branches, and was going swiftly and softly down the pit-side,
Already the basin of sand was locked in the shadows of the hills. Ducos approached the gibbet. The congress of scullions arose and dispersed, quarrelling with nothing so much as the sunlight they encountered above.
“It is an abominable task,” said the aide-de-camp, looking up at the dangling bodies, “but par égard pour l'Empereur! That fellow there in the domino—it will make us of one build; and, as for complexion, why, he at least has no eyes for the travesty. Mon Dieu, what a Providence!”
There was a ladder leaned against the third, and empty, beam. He put it into position for the cloaked figure and ran up it. The rope was hitched to a hook in the cross-piece. He must clasp and lever up by main strength his burden before he could slacken and detach the cord. Then, with an exclamation of relief, he let the body drop upon the sand beneath. He descended the ladder in excitement.
“Anita!” he called.
She had followed and was at hand, She trembled, and was as pale as death.
“Help me,” he panted, “with this—into the bush.”
He had lifted his end by the shoulders.
“What devil possesses you? I cannot,” she sobbed; “I shall die.”
“Ah! Noseling—for my sake! There is no danger if thou art brave and expeditious.”
Between them they tugged and trailed their load into the dense undergrowth skirting the open track, and there let it plunge and sink. Ducos removed the domino from the body, rolling and hauling at that irreverently. Then he saw how the wretch had been pinioned, wrists and ankles, beneath.
Carrying the cloak, he hastened back to the gallows. There he cautiously selected from the surplus stock of cord a length of some twelve feet, at either end of which he formed a loop. So, mounting a ladder, over the hook he hitched this cord by one end, and then, swinging himself clear, slid down the rope until he could pass both his feet into the lower hank.
“Voilà!” said he. “Come up and tie me to the other with some little pieces round the waist and knees and neck.”
She obeyed, weeping. Her love and her duty were to this wonder of manhood, however dreadful his counsel. Presently, trussed to his liking, he bade her fetch the brigand’s cloak and button it over all.
“Now,” said he, “one last sacramental kiss; and so, descending and placing the ladder and all as before, thou shalt take standing-room in the pit for this veritable dance of death.”
A moment—and he was hanging there, to all appearances a corpse. The short rope at his neck had been so disposed and knotted—the collar of the domino serving—as to make him look, indeed, as if he strained at the tether’s end. He had dragged his long hair over his eyes; his head lolled to one side; his tongue protruded. For the rest, the cloak hid all, even to his feet.
The goatherd whimpered.
“Ah, holy saints, he is dead!
The head came erect, grinning.
“Eugenio!” she cried. “Oh, my God! Thou wilt be discovered—thou wilt slip and strangle! Ah, the crows—soul of my soul, the crows!”
“Imbecile! have I not my hands? See, I kiss one to thee, with the very grace of Talma, in acknowledgment of thy compliment. Now the sun sinks and my ghostly vigil will be short. Pray heaven only they alight not on that in the bush. Nariguita, little fanfan, this is my last word. Go, hide thyself in the thickets above, and watch what a Frenchman, the most sensitive of mortals, will suffer to serve his emperor.”
It was an era, indeed, of sublime lusts and barbaric virtues, when men must mount upon stepping-stones, not of their dead selves, but of their slaughtered enemies, to higher things. Anita, like Ducos, was a child of her generation. To her mind the heroic pungency of this deed overpowered its horror. She kissed her lover’s feet; secured the safe disposition of the cloak about them; then turned and fled to do his bidding.
At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the crows dispersed. Eugène, for all his truculence, had sweated over their persistency. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any moment have blinded him, and have so fastened all on to the feast, before help could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love watched his every motion. Now—common earnest of the Providence that waits on derring do—the sudden lift and scatter of the swarm left his hearing free to the tinkle of a bridle sounding rhythmical from the track below. Immediately he fell, with all his soul, into the pose of death.
The cadence of the steel so little altered, the footsteps padded in so muffled and so deadly, that, peering presently through slit eyelids for the advent of the troop, it twitched his strung nerves to see a sinister congress already drawn soundless about the gibbet on which he hung. Perhaps for the first time in this stagnant atmosphere he realised the peril he had invited. But still the gambler’s Providence befriended him.
All were women but two—the victim, a sullen, whiskered Yanguesian, strapped cuttingly to a mule, and a paunchy, shovel-hatted Carmelite, who hugged a crucifix between his roomy sleeves.
Ducos had heard of these banded vengeresses. Now, he was Frenchman enough to appreciate in full the significance of their attitude as they clustered beneath him in the dusk, a veiled and voiceless huddle of phantoms. “How,” he thought, peeping through the dropped curtain of his hair, “will the adorables do it?” He had a hysterical inclination to laugh; and at that moment the monk, with a sudden decision to action, brushed against him and set him slowly twirling until his face was averted from the show.
Immediately thereupon—as he interpreted sounds—the mule was haled under the gallows. He heard the ladder placed in position; he heard a strenuous shuffling as of concentrated movement. What he failed to hear (at present) was any cry or protest from the victim. The beam above creaked—a bridle tinkled—a lighter drop of hoofs receded. A pregnant pause ensued, broken only by a slight noise like rustling or vibrating, and then, in an instant, by a voice, chuckling, hateful—the voice of the priest.
“What! to hang there without a word, Carlos! Wouldst thou go and never ask what became of that very treasure thou soldst thy soul to betray? The devil has rounded on thee, Carlos; for, after all, it is thou that art lost, and not the treasure. That is all put away—shout it in the ears of thy neighbours up there it is all put away, Carlos, safe in the salt-mines of the Little Hump. Cry it to the whole world now; thou mayst if thou canst. In the salt-mines of the Little Hump. Dost hear? Ah, then, we must make thee answer.”
With his words the pit was all at once in shrill hubbub—noise indescribable and dreadful, the shrieking of harpies bidden to their prey. It rose demoniac—to a very Walpurgis.
“No, no,” thought the almost unnerved Frenchman; “it is unlawful so to refine on justice.”
He was twisting again, for all his mad will to prevent it. He would not look; and yet he looked. The monk, possessed, was thrashing the torn and twitching rubbish with his crucifix. The others, their fingers busy with the bodkins they had plucked from their mantillas, had retreated for the moment to a little distance.
Suddenly the Carmelite, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy, dropped his weapon, and, scuttling to the mule, where it stood near at hand, tore a great horse-pistol from its holster among the trappings, and pointed it at the insensible body.
“Scum of all devils!” he bellowed. “In fire descend to fire that lasts eternal!”
He pulled the trigger. There was a flash and shattering explosion, A blazing hornet stung Ducos in the leg. He may have started and shrieked. Any cry or motion of his must have passed unnoticed in the screaming panic evoked of the crash. He clung on with his hands and dared to raise his head. The mouth of the pass was dusk with flying skirts. Upon the sands beneath him, the body of the priest, a shapeless bulk, was slowly subsiding and settling, one fat fist of it yet gripping the stock of a pistol that, overgorged, had burst as it was discharged.
II.
The reek of the little tragedy had hardly dissipated before Ducos found himself. The sentiment of revolt, deriving from his helpless position, had been indeed but momentary. To feel his own accessibility to torture painted torture to him as an inhuman lust. With the means to resist, or escape, at will, he might have sat long in ambush watching it, even condoning it as an extravagant posture of art.
With a heart full of such exultation over the success of his trick that for the moment he forgot the pain of his wound, he hurriedly unpicked the knots of the shorter cords about him, and, jumping to the ground, waited until the shadow of a little depressed figure came slinking across the sand towards him.
“Eugenio!” it cried. “What has happened? Oh, art thou hurt?”
She ran into his arms, sobbing.
“I am hurt,” said Ducos. “Quick, child; unstrap this from my arm and bind it about my calf. Didst hear? But it was magnificent. Two birds with a single stone. The piastres in pickle for us. Didst see, moreover? Dear saints, it was laughable! I would sacrifice a decoration to be witness of the meeting of those two overhead. Death of my life! It should be the Yanguesian for my money, for he has at least his teeth left. Look how he shows them, bursting with rage. Quick, quick, quick! we must be up and away before any of those others thinks of returning.”
“And if one should,” she said; “and mark the empty beam?”
“What does it matter, littlest? I must be off to-night, after thou hast answered me one single question.”
“Off? Eugenio! oh, not without me?”
“Peste, my girl! In this race so much as a doubtful thought were an incumbrance. But I will return for thee—never fear.”
He still sat in his domino. She knelt at his feet, most tenderly and pityingly dressing his wound, from which the blood ran. At his words she looked up breathlessly into his face; then away, to hide from him the filling of her eyes. In the act she slunk down, making herself small in the sand.
“God! Eugenio! we are watched!”
He turned about quickly.
“Whence?”
“From the mouth of the pass,” she whispered.
“I can see nothing,” he said. “Hurry, nevertheless! What a time thou art! There, it is enough of thy bungling fingers. Help me to my feet and out of this place. Come!” he ended angrily. He had an ado to climb the easy slope. By the time they were entered amongst the rocks and bushes above, it was swooping dark.
“Whither wouldst thou, dearest?” asked the goatherd.
He had known well enough—to some point, in fact, whence she could indicate to him the direction of the Little Hump, where the treasure lay,—afterwards, to the very hill-top where some hours earlier they had foregathered. But he would not or could not explain this. His faculties seemed suddenly all engaged to a savage grievance over her obtuseness. He stumbled along, raving in his heart. If she offered to help him, he would tear his arm furiously from her touch. She wondered, poor stricken thing, haunting him with startled eyes. Then at last her misery found voice:
“What have I done? I will not ask again to go with thee, if that is it. It was only one little foolish cry of terror, most dear—that they should suspect, and seize, and torture me. But, indeed, should they do it, thou canst trust me to be silent.”
He stopped, swaying, and regarded her demoniacally. His face was a livid and malignant blot in the thickening dusk. To torture her! why, she was but a child of fifteen. It was he that was being tortured—here, already; and he made no complaint, though all his brain and body were racked with poison from his wound. She sought merely to move him by an affectation of heroism. That, of course, called at once for extreme punishment. He must bite and strangle her to death.
He moved noiselessly upon her. She stood spellbound before him. All at once something seem to strike him on the head, and, without uttering a sound, he fell forward into the bush.
Monsieur the aide-de-camp, as a matter of fact, was misrepresenting himself in the fever and virus of a wound that had torn a worse hole in him than he had supposed,
He opened his eyes presently—to the vision of so preternaturally melancholy a face, that he was shaken with weak laughter over the whimsicality of his own conjuring fancy. But in a moment he realised that he himself was dreaming no longer, and that here was an oddity of fact. He was lying on a heap of grass mats in a tiny house of boards. Above him was a square of leaf-embroidered sky cut out of a cane roof; and his eyes, focussing with a queer stiffness, looked through an open doorway down precipices of swimming cloud. That was because he lay in an eyrie on the hill-side. Then at once, into his white field of vision, as if thrown from a magic-lantern slide, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an ancient cocked hat (whereof the flaps had slouched down from their buttons) and hung from the throat, like an august Aunt Sally, with a bat-wing funeral cloak.
The figure crossed the aperture, and wheeled, with the wind in its skirts. In the act its eyes fixed themselves on those of the Frenchman—eyes staring and protuberant, like white-rimmed onyxes, from the emaciation of the black-bearded cheeks, above which they were set. Immediately their owner came into the hut with a stately and most courtly gesture.
“Vaga usted con Dios!” he said; then he added in English: “The Inglese captain ees heemself again?”
“Not kvite,” answered Ducos, with some chuckling wonder. “He not that just yet. Meantime, thees long night try-a heem.”
“Night? Yes, yes. Jesus-Maria, a long night indeed, in which the sun sink thrice.”
“Comment!” shouted the aide-de-camp hoarsely—only, in an instant, for all his self-irresponsible condition, to recognise the mistake he had made.
“The deveel take the French dogs! said he explanatorily. “I been in their camp so long that to catch their lingo. But I speak Espaneesh, señor. Let us converse there.”
The other bowed impenetrably. His habit of a profound and scarce approachable melancholy might have served for mask to any temper of mind, but that which, in real fact, it environed—a reason, that is to say, more lost than bedevilled under the long tyranny of oppression.
“I have been ill, I am to understand?” said Ducos, on his guard.
“For three days and nights, señor. My goatherd came to tell me how a wounded English officer was lying on the hills. Between us we conveyed you hither.”
“Ah, Dios! I remember. I had endeavoured to carry muskets into Saragossa by the river. I was hit in the leg; I was captured; I escaped. For two days I wandered, señor, famished and desperate. At last in these mountains I fell as by a stroke from heaven.”
“It was the foul blood clot, señor. It baulked your circulation. There was the brazen splinter in the wound, which I removed, and God restored you. What fangs are theirs, these reptiles! In a few days you will be well.”
“Thanks to what ministering angel?”
“I am known as Don Manoel di Cangrejo, señor—the most shattered, as he was once the most prosperous of men, May God curse the French! May God” (his wild, mournful face twitched with strong emotion) “reward and bless these brave allies of a people more wronged than any the world has yet known.”
“Noble Englishman,” said he by-and-by, “thou hast nothing at present but to lie here and accept the grateful devotion of a heart to which none but the inhuman denies humanity.”
Ducos looked his thanks. “My nerves are broken,” said he. “If I might be spared——”
The Spaniard took him up intuitively. “None save ourselves and the winds and trees, señor,” he said. “I will nurse thee like mine own child.”
He was as good as his word. Ducos, pluming himself on his diplomacy, recognising the inutility of resenting the inevitable, committed himself—while feigning a prolonged weakness—to recovery. That was his, to all practical purposes, within a couple of days, during which time he never set eyes on Anita, but only on Anita’s master. Don Manoel would often come and sit by his bed of mats; would even sometimes retail to him, as to a trusted ally, scraps of local information. Thus he was posted, to his immense gratification, in the topical after-history of his own exploit at the gallows.
“It is said,” whispered Cangrejo awfully, “that one of the dead, resenting so vile a neighbour, impressed a goatherd into his service, and, descending from the beam, walked away. Truly it is an age of wicked portents.”
On the third morning, coming early with his bowl of goat’s milk and his offering of fruits, he must apologise with a sweet and lofty courtesy for the necessity he was under of being absent all day.
“There is trouble,” he said; “as when is there not? I am called to secret council, señor. But the boy Ambrosio has my orders to be ever at hand shouldst thou need him.”
Ducos’ heart leapt. But he deprecated this generous attention, and cried “Adios!” with the most perfect assumption of composure.
He was lying on his elbow by-and-by, eagerly listening, when the door-light was blocked by a shadow. The next instant Anita had sprung to, and was kneeling by him.
“Heart of my heart, have I done well? Thou art sound and whole. Oh, speak to me, speak to me, that I may hear thy voice and gather its forgiveness.”
For what? She was sobbing and fondling him in one passionate lust of entreaty,
“Thou hast done well,” he said. “So we were seen, indeed, Anita?”
“Yes,” she wept, crushing his face to her young bosom. “And I agonise for thee to be up and away—Eugenio, for I fear.”
“Hush! I am strong. Help me to my legs, child. So. Now come with me outside, and point out, if thou canst, where lies the Little Hump.”
She was his devoted support at once. They stood in the sunlight, looking down upon the hills that fell from beneath their feet, a world of tossed and petrified rapids. At their backs, on a little plateau under eaves of rock, Cangrejo’s eyrie clung to the mountain side.
“There,” said the goatherd, indicating with her finger—“that mound above the valley, like a great squat mushroom with a fat neck growing from a basin among the trees.”
“Sweet my little hawk-eyes—I cannot mark.”
“Maria! Dost see the white worm of the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”
‘Go to—I see it.”
“Then, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine-tree leans to the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”
“Stay—I have it.”
“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once, they say, an island in the midst of a lake that burst its banks and poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”
He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the position of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his anger a second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved out a waking sigh, and turned on her with a smile.
“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where the other day we met.”
It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent (by way of aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper between) of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony plateau that he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice of chestnuts and locust-trees. To the other, the road, by which he had climbed, went down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to emulate—into the valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed. He sat down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only by a violent effort.
“Nariguita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee presently.”
She sighed, and crept away obedient. Oh, forlorn, most forlorn soul of love, that, counting disbelief treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in love with loyalty.
The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to his legs with an expanding sigh and smile, such as those with which one welcomes the acquittance from boredom. For it must be related that this young officer—true soldier of his country and period—purposed remaking, therefrom and then, on the wings of transport, for the blockading camp, whence he would return with a proper force, and with all possible speed, to seize and empty of its varied treasures the salt mine of St. Ildefonso.
“Pouf!” he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation, “this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still; I have Cangrejo’s word for it.”
He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to re-focus in his memory the position of the mound, which still from here was plainly visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder. The footsteps came on, approached him, paused—so long that he was induced at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes encountered other eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his refuge. The new comer was a typical Spanish Romany, filthy, slouching, with a bandage over one eye.
“God be with thee, cabaleros!” said the Frenchman defiantly.
To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of laughter, and flung himself towards him.
“Judge thou, now,” said he, “which is the more wide-awake adventurer and the better actor!”
“My God!” cried Ducos; “it is De la Platiére!”
“Hush!” whispered the mendicant—“are we private? Ah, bah! Junot should have sent me in the first instance.”
“I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt return and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.”
Half an hour later De la Platière—having already, for his part, mentally absorbed the details of a certain position—swung rapidly, with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had earlier ascended. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill regathered itself to silence. Ducos, on terms with destiny, and at peace with all the world, sat for hours in the shadow of the trees.
Perhaps he was not yet Judas enough to return and forgather with Nariguita in Cangrejo’s eyrie. But at length, towards evening, fearing his long absence might arouse suspicion or uneasiness, he arose and climbed the hill. When he reached the cabin, he found it empty and silent. He loitered about, desultorily seeking. Not a soul came near him. He dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread; he dozed again. When he opened his eyes for the second time, the shadows of the peaks were slanting to the east. He got to his feet, shivering a little. This utter desertion and quiet disconcerted him. Where was the girl? God! was it possible after all that she had betrayed him? He might have questioned his own heart as to that; only, by all that was aggravating, it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. So, let him think: De la Platière, with his men (as calculated), would be posted in the Pampeluna road, round the spur of the hill below, an hour after sunset—that was to say, at fifteen minutes to six. No doubt by then the alarm would have gone abroad. But no great resistance to a strong force was to be apprehended. In the meantime—well, in the meantime, until the moment came for him to descend under cover of dark and assume the leadership, he must possess his soul in patience.
The sun went down. Darkness flowing into the valleys seemed to expel a moan of wind, like the sigh of a sleeper composing himself to rest. It came swift and sudden, as if a curtain had been dropped; but no Anita came with it, and Ducos was perplexed. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk to—and mislead. He was depressed.
By-and-by he pulled off, turned inside-out, and resumed, his scarlet jacket, which he had taken the precaution to have lined with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and looked eagerly into the lower vortexes of dusk. In the very direction to which his thoughts were engaged, a little glowworm light was burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify—Spaniards or French—ambush or investment? Allowing—as between himself on the height, and De la Platière on the road below—for the apparent discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of immediate descent necessary.
Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the black ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces he would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new perspective. Over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump oddly loomed upon him through the dark, like a gigantic thatched kraal. And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great lantern hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot of the mound—a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy, that, seeming already clinched to its closest expression below there, was yet (as his heart leaped under his turned jacket to espy) in process of a deadlier concentration. For, touched by the point of a wicked secret finger of light that this lantern put forth, something in the road to one side and below winked, and ran up a thread of shine, and went out, and winked again—the sleeking of a French bayonet!
He could have sworn it; and he kissed his own fingers to the wicked traitor finger, and to its secret indication of De la Platiére, the brave garçon, come punctual to his tryst, and crouching down there in the road till he received his summons.
Yet—peste! was not this finger, after all, a Judas’s? His were not the only eyes on the hillside that night. It might be serving a loyal mission, and one designed to be quite disastrous to his—Ducos’—plans.
A moment’s reflection convinced him that, for a limited time at least, the warning, or indication, was for his sole use; that the vision of the hillside was all just now intently converged upon that thing that was enacting within the palpitating blob of light under the tree. Thereon, during some instants of precaution, of calculation, even of a rather gloating curiosity, his eyes were fixed, thereto his ears were turned, before he would allow himself to admit that the psychological moment was arrived. For all his principles of opportunism, he must dwell a little on the rapture of anticipation. Castor and Pollux decided for France. To find the whole fighting force of the hills thus clumped unsuspecting en masse for the battue! It exceeded his best hopes. A single well-directed volley would account for the lot.
A cluster of rocks, dragging at the fall of a steepish slope, was perched above the clearing from which the great tree stood up. To this shelter he had padded his last paces with a cat-like stealth, crouching, hardly breathing; and now from his coign of peril, impressed, to the most tingling degree, with the dramatic opportuneness of his arrival, he stared down, appropriating with a certain lust of triumph the situation.
A throng of armed ruffians, one a little forward of the rest, was clustered about a couple more of their kidney, who, right under the lantern, held the goatherd Anita on her knees in a nailing grip. To one side, very phantoms of desolation, stood Cangrejo and another. The faces of all, densely shadowed in part by the rims of their sombreros, looked as if masked; their mouths, corpse-like, showed a splint of teeth; their ink-black whiskers hummocked upon their shoulders.
So, as Ducos stared down, was the group postured, silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full tide of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.
“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the gallows—him that thou foisted—oh, unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy!—upon the unsuspecting Cangrejo—him, thy Frankish gallant and spy” (the voice guttered, and then rising, leapt to flame), “what hast thou done with him? Where hidden? Speak quickly and with truth, if, traitor though thou be, thou wouldst be spared the traitor’s estrapade.”
“Alguazil, I cannot say. Have mercy on me!”
Ducos could hardly recognise the child in those deep and suffering tones.
The inquisitor, with an oath, half-wheeled.
“Pignatelli—father of this accursed—if by her duty thou canst prevail?”
A figure, agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanised as Brutus, stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm aloft.
“No child of mine, alguazil!” it proclaimed, in a shrill, strung cry. “Let her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!”
Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.
“Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah, naughty!) is half absolved. Tell him, tell him—ah, there—now, now, now! He, thy lover, was in the cabin. I left him prostrate, scarce able to move. When the council comes to seek him, he is gone. Away, sayest thou? Ah, child, but I must know better. It could not be far. Say where—give him up—let him show himself only, chiquita, and the good alguazil will spare thee. Such a traitor, ah, Dios!—And yet I have loved too!”
He sobbed and clawed her uncouthly. Ducos in his eyrie laughed to himself, and applauded softly, making little cymbals of his thumb-nails.
“But he may move her, after all,” he thought, “and so may they scatter and cut off me and my communications at once.” And on the thought, feeling the moment tense, he gathered himself quietly to action, purposing to turn aside, and, slinking like a rat through its run, to make in a wide détour for the road. Then, as his muscles stiffened to their task, the goatherd’s voice, in a last heart-broken cry, was wafted to him.
“Master! He is gone. They cannot take him. Oh, don’t let them hurt me!”
Curious still, in the midmost of his excitement, Ducos paused and again looked down. He saw the alguazil make a sign. He saw Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, being dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl; and then....
Whether he had betrayed himself to eye or ear was all one. A guttural screech denounced him; a bullet spat on a boulder and blinded his eyes with dust. He dropped, clutching at the nearest stones. Something gave beneath him, and he went sprawling and crashing down the slope.
Dazed, amazed, bruised, he was on his feet in an instant; and for an instant he scurried round and round, like a hare shot through the brain. The analogy, possibly suggesting itself to his enemies, may have saved him from another bullet. And then all at once, some glimmer of conscious vision returning to him, he was running desperately across the open.
“Eugenio!” screamed a mad voice behind him; and, as if its echo were the very snapping of the spell that seizes upon the witnesses of deeds of unexpected daring, in a moment, and with a roar, the whole chase was at his heels.
Sobbing, stumbling, fire in his eyes and death in his heart, he ran on, calling unintelligibly between his gasps on De la Platière. Now he was down—now up—now down again,—and so for the last time, as the gloating pack closed upon him, he came scrambling erect in the thick of a dark huddle, himself, in his turned jacket, an undistinguishable item of the crowd.
Standing so, voiceless and bleeding—his wild vision, with some supernatural prescience, penetrating the film that clouded it—he was aware in that last dreadful moment of a stealthy gleam of gun-barrels concentrated, on the top of a shallow ridge fifty paces below, upon the press, of which he was one—even, presumably, to his comrades, the leader. He tried to scream out—to proclaim himself—to implore the gluttonous fingers to withhold themselves from the triggers. His words, if he could have given them sound and shape, would have been struck back, battered into his throat, used for means to suffocate him. And, even had he triumphed in their utterance—what then? He might cry to his Frenchmen that they were mistaken in supposing this an organised advance upon them by the Spaniards; and so, without saving his own life, he would succeed in nothing but in baulking his party of their prey.
The supreme moment was come; the situation for him was irremediable; it remained only, in one ecstasy of self-sacrifice, to precipitate the dénouement for which he had manœuvred—for which he had bartered his soul.
With a furious effort—his hands being still held, and his shoulders thereby wrenched to agony in their sockets—he tore himself erect and forward, and shrieked, “Fire!”
As when a dusty seam is rent, along the crest in front ran a roaring rift of flame, the smoke of which leapt a yard, and hung and drooped, as if to veil the passing of a score of souls. And, when at length it thinned and withdrew, and the clear bugle sounded, and the Frenchmen, rising from the ground like the dragon-teeth of Thebes, came up the hill to retrieve their game, they found amongst all the littered dead but one quick and breathing—a goatherd boy flung moaning upon the body of him their officer, their comrade, who had spent his last, as often before his living breath, in crying the Emperor’s troops to victory.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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