Part 10

It was not a considerable body as the two gauged it, for Colonel de Regnac’s troops—raw Tuscan recruits, and possessed with a panic terror of the enemy—were showing a very laggard spirit in the venture, and no emulation whatever of their officers’ eagerness to encounter. In fact, Colonel de Regnac, with his regimental staff, some twenty all told, and few beside, had run ahead of his column by the measure of a mile or two, and was sitting down to rest and curse, below his breath, in a hollow of the hills, when the two captured vagabonds were brought before him.

There had been no light but the starlight, no voice but the downpouring of a mountain stream until the sentry had leaped upon them. Chatter and fire were alike prohibited things in those rocky ante-rooms of hate and treachery.

“Who are you?” had demanded the Colonel of Caron.

“A son of France, monsieur.”

“Whither do you go?”

“To attend the deathbed of my old father in Rousillon,” had answered Luc, lying readily.

The Colonel had arisen, and scanned his imperturbable face keenly.

“His name?”

Luc had told him truthfully—also his father’s circumstances and misfortunes.

The officer had grunted: “Well, he pays the toll to glory. Whence, then, do you come?”

“From Figueras.”

“Ha! They have news of us there?”

“On the contrary, monsieur; your coming will surprise them greatly.”

“It is well; let it be well. Go in peace.”

A little later the sentry, confiding to one who was relieving him, was overheard to say: “Ventre de biche! I would have made sure first that those two rascals went _up_ the hill!”

He was brought before the Colonel.

“My son, what did you say?”

The sentry, scenting promotion for his perspicacity, repeated his remark, adding that, if he were right in his suspicions of the vagabonds’ _descent towards San Lorenzo_, there would be trouble on the morrow.

He was soundly welted with a strap for his foresight, and thereafter degraded—to his intense astonishment, for a private was not supposed to volunteer counsel. But his prediction was so far vindicated that, in the course of the following morning, a well-aimed shot, succeeded by a very fusillade, vicious but harmless, from the encompassing rocks, laid low a member of the staff, and sent the rest scattering for shelter. They were, at the time, going leisurely to enable the main body to come up with them; but this stroke of treachery acted upon men and officers like a goad. Re-forming, they deployed under cover, and charged the guerrillas’ position—only to find it abandoned. Pursuit was useless in that welter of ridges; they buckled to, and doubled down the last slopes of the mountain into San Lorenzo.

“_If_ I could only encounter that Monsieur Caron!” said the Colonel sweetly.

And, lo! under the wall of a churchyard they came plump upon the very gentleman, sitting down to rest with his comrade Pepino.

It seemed a providence. The village, for all else, appeared deserted, depopulated.

Luc scrambled to his feet, with his face, lean and mobile, twitching under its tan. The Colonel, seated on his horse, eyed him pleasantly, and nodded.

He was hardly good to look at by day, this Colonel. It seemed somehow more deadly to play with him than it had seemed under the starlight. He had all the features of man exaggerated but his eyes, which were small and infamous—great teeth, great brows, great bones, and a moustache like a sea-lion’s. He could have taken Faith, Hope, and Charity together in his arms, and crushed them into pulp against his enormous chest. Only the lusts of sex and ambition were in any ways his masters. But, for a wonder, his voice was soft.

“Son of France,” he said, “thou hast mistaken the road to Rousillon.”

Luc, startled out of his readiness, had no word of reply. Pepino crouched, whimpering, unnoticed as yet.

“What is that beside him?” asked the Colonel.

A soldier hoisted up the peep-show, set it on its legs, and looked in.

“Blank treason, Colonel,” said he. “Here is the Emperor himself spitting fire.”

“It is symbolical of Jove,” said Caron.

“Foul imps attend him!”

“They are his Mercuries.”

“No more words!” said the Colonel. “String the rascal up!”

That was the common emergency exit in the then theatres of war. It had taken the place of the “little window” through which former traitors to their country had been invited to look.

Pepino leapt to his feet, with a sudden scream.

“No, no! He is Caron, the wit, the showman, dear to all hearts!”

Colonel Regnac’s great neck seemed to swell like a ruttish wolf’s. His little eyes shot red with laughter. He had as keen a scent as the sub-prefect for a woman.

“Good!” he said; “he shall make us a show.”

“Señor, for the love of God! He spoke the truth. His father is dead.”

“He will be in a dutiful haste to rejoin him.”

“Señor, be merciful! You are of a gallant race.”

“That is certain,” said de Regnac. “You, for your part, are acquitted, my child. I take you personally under my protection.”

“Good-bye, comrade!” cried Caron sadly. “We have gone the long road together, and I am the first to reach home. Follow me when you will. I shall wait for you.”

“Fie!” said the Colonel. “That is no sentiment for a renegade. Heaven is the goal of this innocence, whom I save from your corruption.”

They hung him from the branch of a chestnut tree, and lingered out his poor dying spasms. Pepino, after one burst of agony, stood apathetic until the scene was over. Then, with a shudder, correlative with the last of the dangling body’s, she seemed to come awake.

“Well,” she said, “there goes a good fellow; but it is true he was a renegade.”

The Colonel was delighted.

“They have always a spurious attraction,” he said, “to the sex that is in sympathy with naughtiness in any form. But consider: false to one is false to all, and this was a bad form of treachery—though,” he added gallantly, “he certainly had his extreme temptation.”

“The French killed his father,” she said indifferently.

“The French,” he answered, “kill, of choice, with nothing but kindness. You, though a Spaniard, my pet, shall have ample proof if you will.”

“I am to come with you?”

“God’s name! There is to be no enforcement.”

“Well, you have left me little choice. Already here they had looked upon us with suspicion, and, if I remained alone, would doubtless kill me. I do not want to die—not yet. What must be must. The king is dead, live the king!”

He was enchanted with her vivacity. He took her up before him on his saddle, and chuckled listening to the feverish chatter with which she seemed to beguile herself from memory.

“These jays have no yesterday,” he thought; and said aloud, “You are not Pepino? Now tell me.”

“No, I am Pepa,” she said. “I am only a man in seeming. Alack! I think a man would not forget so easily.”

“Some men,” he answered, and his hand tightened a little upon her. “Trust me, that dead rogue is already forgathering with his succuba.”

By and by he asked her: “How far to Figueras?”

“Twelve miles from where we started,” she answered.

A thought struck him, and he smiled wickedly.

“You will always bear in mind,” he said, “that the moment I become suspicious that you are directing us wide, or, worse, into a guet-apens, I shall snap off your little head at the neck, and roll it back to San Lorenzo.”

“Have no fear,” she said quietly; “we are in the straight road for the town—or what used to be one.”

“And no shelter by the way? I run ahead of my rascals, as you see. We must halt while they overtake us. Besides”—he leered horribly—“there is the question of the night.”

“I know of no shelter,” she said, “but Our Lady of Refuge.”

“An opportune title, at least. What is it?”

“It is a hospital for the fallen—for such as the good Brotherhoods of Madrid send for rest and restoration to the sanctuary of the quiet pastures. The monks of Misericorde are the Brothers’ deputies there—sad, holy men, who hide their faces from the world. The house stands solitary on the plain; we shall see it in a little. They will give you shelter, though you are their country’s enemies. They make no distinctions.”

De Regnac pulled at his moustache, frowning, pondering.

“Where these monks forgather are fat kids and old Malaga—a tempting alternative to the munching of cold biscuit under the stars. But—_sacré chien!_ one may always take in more with the gravy than ever fell from the spit. What, then!”

He jerked his feet peevishly in the stirrups, and growled—

“Limping and footsore already come my cursed rabble—there you are, white-livered Tuscan sheep! The bark of a dog will scare them; they would fear a thousand bogies in the dark. It is certain I must wait for them, and bivouac somewhere here in the plains.”

Indeed, the first of them came on as he spoke—a weary, stumbling body of laggards, trailing feet and muskets.

“Halte-là!” he thundered; and the men came to a loose-kneed stand, while the corporals went round prodding and cursing them into a form of discipline. De Regnac grumbled—

“Are we to have this cold grace to our loves? God’s name! my heart cries out for fire—fire within and without. These monks!”

“Shall I slip before, and sound them? You may trust me, for a Spanish girl, who has learned how to coax her confessor.”

“Ha! _You!_” He held her, biting his great lips. “What are you good for but deceit, rogue! No, no; we will go together.”

He called his staff about him, and they went forward in a body. Presently, topping a longish slope, they saw, sprung out of the plain before them, a huddled grey building, glooming monstrous in the dusk. Its barred windows stared blindly; twin towers held the portico between them, as it were the lunette of a vast guillotine; a solitary lamp hung motionless in the entrance. Far away across the flats a light or two twinkled over ruined Figueras, like marsh-candles over a swamp. The place seemed lifeless desolation embodied—Death’s own monument in a desert. Gaiety in its atmosphere shivered into silence.

But at length a captain rallied, with a laugh.

“Peste!” he cried; “a churchyard refuge! Let us see if the dead walk!”

He battered with his sword-hilt on the great door. It swung open, in staggering response, and revealed a solitary figure. Cowled, spectral, gigantic—holding, motionless, a torch that wept fire—the shape stood without a word. It was muffled from crown to heel in coarse frieze; the eyelets in its woollen vizor were like holes scorched through by the burning gaze behind—the very rims of them appeared to smoulder. Laville, the captain, broke into an agitated laugh.

“Mordieu, my friend, are the dead so lifeless?”

“What do you seek?”

The voice boomed, low and muffled, from the folds.

“Rest and food,” answered Laville. “We are weary and famished. For the rest, we ask no question, and invite none.”

“So they come in peace,” said the figure, “all are welcome here.”

The Colonel pushed to the front, carrying his burden.

“We come in peace,” he said—“strangers and travellers. We pay our way, and the better where our way is smoothed. Take that message to your Prior.”

The figure withdrew, and returned in a little.

“The answer is, Ye are welcome. For those who are officers, a repast will be served within an hour in the refectory; for the rest, what entertainment we can compass shall be provided in the outhouses. A room is placed at the disposal of your commander.”

“It is well,” said de Regnac. “Now say, We invite your Prior to the feast himself provides, and his hand shall be first in the dish, and his lip to the cup; else, from our gallantry, do we go supperless.”

Once more the figure withdrew and returned.

“He accepts. You are to fear no outrage at his hands.”

The Colonel exclaimed cynically, “Fie, fie! I protest you wrong our manners!”—and, giving some orders _sub voce_ for the precautionary disposal of his men, entered with his staff. They were ushered into a stone-cold hall, set deep in the heart of the building—a great windowless crypt, it seemed, whose glooms no warmth but that of tapers had ever penetrated. It was bare of all furniture save benches and a long trestle-table, and a few sacred pictures on the walls. While the rest waited there, de Regnac was invited to his quarters—a cell quarried still deeper into that hill of brick. No sound in all the place was audible to them as they went. He pushed Pepino before him.

“This is my servant,” he said. “He will attend me, by your leave.”

The girl made no least demur. She went even jocundly, turning now and again to him with her tongue in her cheek. He, for his part, was in a rapture of slyness; but he kept a reserve of precaution. They were escorted by the giant down a single dim corridor, into a decent habitable cell, fitted with chairs, a little stove, and a prie-Dieu; but the bed was abominably rocky. De Regnac made a wry face at it for his companion’s secret delectation.

The ghostly monk, intimating that he would await outside the señor commandante’s toilet, that he might re-escort his charge to the refectory, closed the door upon the two. De Regnac cursed his officiousness, groaning; but Pepino reassured his impatience with a hundred drolleries. However, when the Colonel came out presently, he came out alone; and, moreover, turned the key in the door and pocketed it.

“Merely a prudential measure,” he explained to his guide. “These gaillards are not to be trusted in strange houses. I will convey him his supper by and by with my own hands.”

The figure neither answered nor seemed to hear. De Regnac, joining a rollicking company, dismissed him from his mind.

And alone in the cell stood mad Pepino.

But not for long. A trap opened in the floor, and from it sprouted, like a monstrous fungus, the head and shoulders of the giant monk. Massively, sombrely he arose, until the whole of his great bulk was emerged and standing in a burning scrutiny of the prisoner. A minute passed. Then, “Whence comest thou, Pepa Manoele? With whom, and for what purpose?” said the voice behind the folds.

His question seemed to snap in an instant the garrotte about her brain. She flung herself on her knees before him with a lamentable cry—

“They have killed my Luc, brother—my Luc, who took me from your wards of mercy, sins and all. They have killed my sweet singing cricket, my merry, merry cricket, that had no guile in all its roguish heart. They put their heel upon him in the path—what are songs to them!—and left my summer desolate. If I weep one moment, I know that blood will scald my cheeks and drain my heart, and I shall die before I act. O, brother! keep back my tears a little. Show me what to do!”

She clutched in agony at his robe.

“Come,” he said; “the way is clear.”

* * * * *

The feast was served to the tick of the hour by lay brothers, another blank-envisaged form directing them. The tables smoked with cheer, and de Regnac rubbed his hands. There were the joints of fat kid and the flagons of old Malaga—salmis of quail, too; truffled sausages; herrings with mustard sauce, things of strong flavour meet for warriors. The steam itself was an invitation—the smell, the sparkle. Only one thing lacked—the Prior’s grace. De Regnac, bestial always, but most like a tiger in the view of unattainable meats, crowded the interval with maledictions and curses. His courtesy stopped anywhere on the threshold of his appetites. Baulked of his banquet, he would be ready to make a holocaust of the whole hospital. Yet he dared not be the first to put his fingers in the dish.

“Where is our host?” he growled. “Doth he fear the test—or death—a coward faint with indecision?”

Even with the word, he found him at his elbow—an old, dry pipe of a man, wheezing thin air. The father’s face under its dropping cowl (no doubt his lungs were too crazy for the vizor) showed stark with rime; his forehead was streaked with it; his eyes were half-thawed pools. He spoke. Hoarse and feeble, his voice seemed to crow from the attics of a ruined tenement, high up among the winds.

“Fall to, soldiers, fall to! There is no grace like honest appetite. Fall to! And they tell me ye have travelled far to claim our hospitality. Fall to!”

De Regnac smacked his shoulder boisterously, so that he staggered.

“Not till you have blessed our meal for us, old father.”

The Prior raised his trembling hands. The other caught at them.

“Not that way. We ask the taster’s grace. It was a bargain.”

“Be seated, señor,” said the old man, with dignity. “I do not forget my obligations.”

He went round, bent and stiffly, taking a shred from each dish, a sippet dipped in the gravy.

“Bella premunt hostilia,” he expostulated. “Intestine wars invade our breast. What a task for our old digestion!”

His roguery pleased and reassured his company. They attacked the viands with a will. He never ceased to encourage them, going about the board with garrulous cheer.

“And ye come over the hills?” said he. “A hungry journey and a dangerous. It was the mountains, and the spirits of the mountains, that were alone invincible when the Moorish dogs overran all Spain—all but the mountains. The heathen crests were lowered there—rolled back in a bloody foam. Dear God! I’m old.”

“Not so ancient, father,” cried de Regnac, “but that good liquor will revitalize you. There remains the wine.”

“Ah me!” sighed the Prior; “must I?”

They swore him to the toast by every bond of honour. Their throats were ragged with drought.

“Well, well,” he said. “I’ll first dismiss these witnesses to their father’s shame. I’ll be no Noah to my children.”

He drove the servitors, with feeble playfulness, into the passage; pursued them a pace or two. In a moment he was back alone, his cowl pulled about his face.

“Give me the draught,” he said hoarsely, “nor look ye upon the old man’s abasement. I am soon to answer for my frailties.”

Cheering and bantering, they mixed him a cup from every flagon, and put it into his hand, which gripped it through the cloth. He turned his back on them, and took the liquor down by slow degrees, chuckling and gasping and protesting. Then, still coughing, he handed the cup, backwards, to the nearest.

“Bumpers, all!” roared de Regnac. “We toast old Noah for our king of hosts!”

Even as he drank, as they all drank, thirsty and uproarious, the great door of the refectory clanged to, and the Prior spun with a scream to the floor. De Regnac’s cup fell from his hand; a dead silence succeeded.

Suddenly the Colonel was on his feet, ghastly and terrible.

“Something foul!” he whispered; “something foul!”

Staggering, he swerved out, and drove with all his weight against the door. It had been locked and bolted upon them. Not a massive panel creaked. They were entombed!

Hush!

Solemn, low, mystic, arose without the chaunt of voices in unison—the prayers for one sick unto death: “Receive, O Lord, the sacrifice we offer for thy servant, who is near the end of her life.”

With a scream, de Regnac threw himself towards the body on the floor, and lifted it with huge strength in his arms. As he did so, the cowl fell away, and revealed the face of Pepino. The shadow of death was already fallen on it; but she spoke, and with a smile.

“When he pursued them, I was waiting and took his place. Curse him not. He observed the letter. ’Twas I poisoned the wine. Take back thy wages, dog! O, I go to find my Luc—if thou darest follow me!”

He roared out—a spasm took his throat. He tried to crush her in his arms. They relaxed in the effort. Howling, he dropped her, and fell beside in a heap.

Then, from out a mortal paralysis, arose sobbing and wailing at the table. Some seized salt, some the wet mustard from the fish, and swallowed it by handfuls. Others ran hither and thither aimlessly, screeching, blaspheming, beating the walls, the obdurate door. There was a regimental doctor among them; he was the first dead. None found help or hope in that ghastly trap. The venom had been swift, gripping, ineradicable. Within half an hour it was all a silent company, and the Miserere long had ceased.

Somewhere in a book I read of a tale like this, which was headed “Patriotic Fanaticism.” Those were certainly the deadly days of retaliation; but in this case Love, as always, was the principal fanatic.

THE GHOST-LEECH

Kelvin, not I, is responsible for this story, which he told me sitting smoking by his study window.

It was a squalid night, I remember, wet and fretful—the sort of night which seems to sojourners in the deep country (as we then were) to bring rumours of plashy pavements, and the roar of rain-sodden traffic, and the wailing and blaspheming of women lost and crying out of a great darkness. No knowledge of our rural isolation could allay this haunting impression in my mind that night. I felt ill at ease, and, for some reason, out of suits with life. It mattered nothing that a belt of wild woodland separated us from the country station five miles away. That, after all, by the noises in it, might have been a very causeway, by which innumerable spectres were hurrying home from their business in the distant cities. The dark clouds, as long as we could see them labouring from the south, appeared freighted with the very burden of congregated dreariness. They glided up, like vast electric tramcars, and seemed to pause overhead, as if to discharge into the sanctuary of our quiet pastures their loads of aggressive vulgarity. My nerves were all jangled into disorder, I fear, and inclining me to imaginative hyperbole.

Kelvin, for his part, was very quiet. He was a conundrum, that man. Once the keenest of sportsmen, he was now for years become an almost sentimental humanitarian—and illogical, of necessity. He would not consent to kill under any circumstances—wilfully, that is to say; but he enjoyed his mutton with the best of us. However, I am not quarrelling with his point of view. He, for one—by his own admission, anyhow—owed a life to “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,” and he would not, from the date of his debt, cross her prerogatives. The same occasion, it appeared, had opened in him an unstanchable vein of superstition, which was wont to gush—bloodily, I might say—in depressing seasons of the mind. It provoked me, on the evening of the present anecdote, to a sort of peevish protest.

“Why the devil,” I said, “are spectral manifestations—at least, according to you fellows—everlastingly morbid and ugly? Are there no gentle disembodied things, who, of their love and pity, would be rather more anxious than the wicked, one would think, to communicate with their survivors?”

“Of course,” said Kelvin; “but their brief sweet little reassurances pass unnoticed. Their forms are insignificant, their voices inarticulate; they can only appeal by symbol, desperately clinging to the earth the while. On the other hand, the world tethers its worldlings by the foot, so that they cannot take flight when they will. There remains, so to speak, too much earth in their composition, and it keeps ’em subject to the laws of gravitation.”

I laughed; then shrugged impatiently.

“What a rasping night it is! The devil take that moth!”

The window was shut, and the persistent whirring and tapping of a big white insect on the glass outside jarred irritably on my nerves.

“Let it in, for goodness’ sake,” I said, “if it _will_ insist on making a holocaust of itself!”

Kelvin had looked up when I first spoke. Now he rose, with shining eyes, and a curious little sigh of the sort that one vents on the receipt of wonderful news coming out of suspense.

“Yes, I’ll open the window,” he said low; and with the word threw up the casement. The moth whizzed in, whizzed round, and settled on his hand. He lifted it, with an odd set smile, into the intimate range of his vision, and scrutinized it intently. Suddenly and quickly, then, as if satisfied about something, he held it away from him.