Part 8

I pushed Carminowe forward, and believe that he was among the first to mount. One by one the others followed, Grylls carrying with him the coil of rope. I, as senior in command, took last turn. This adventure was not mine, nor could I see the end of it; but I supposed that in the uncommon military operation of retreating up a steeple the commanding officer's place must be the extreme rear.

My foot was on the lowest rung when some fool above, who had taken the coil of rope off Grylls' shoulders, let it slip through the hatchway. It struck the ladder, and came glancing down with a rush fit to wake the dead; and almost on the instant two or three of the men in the chancel had sprung to their feet and were snatching down the lanterns there. Now I had leapt aside nimbly--and luckily too, or the blow of it had either brained or, at the least, stunned me: and as it thudded on to the pavement I made a clutch at the rope and sprang for the ladder with a shout that woke the whole church and echoed back on me with a roar.

"Hoist!" I yelled, clambering as high as I might, and anchoring myself with an arm crookt through a rung.

"'Hoist' it is!" sung down Trecarrel's voice cheerfully. "Hold tight below--and you, lads, up with him! One, two, three--heave, my hearties!"

'Twas the only way: for already half a score of the rebel rogues were bearing down the nave towards me at a run. But, I thank Heaven, they had started in too great a hurry to remember their muskets. They reached the belfry arch to find the foot of my stairway lifted a good six feet above their heads. One or two leaped high and made a clutch for it, but missed; and as they fell back, staring and raising their lanterns, I was borne aloft and removed from them through the trapway like any stage god.

My comrades lifting me off the ladder, I found myself on a floor of stout oak, and in the midst of an octagonal chamber filled with a pale, foggy light--as I supposed, of the declining moon. Directly overhead, in a cavernous darkness, hung the great bells like monstrous black spiders, with their ropes like filaments let down and swaying: for a stiff and chilly breeze blew every way through the chamber, which had a high open window in each of its eight sides.

For these windows the most of us scrambled at once, foreseeing what must happen. Indeed, the baffled rogues below lost no time over their next move; but running for their muskets, began firing up at the hatch and at the floor under our feet--the boards of which, by the favour of Heaven, were of oak and marvellous solid; also the heavy beams took many of their shot; but none the less they made us skip.

This volley, fired suddenly within, at once, as you may guess, alarmed all the bivouacs in the churchyard. Crowds poured into the church, and word passing that all the eleven prisoners were escaped into the belfry under the spire, other crowds ran back into the street and began firing briskly at the windows. But this helped them nothing, the angle being too steep, and the bullets--or so many of them as found entrance--striking upwards over our heads. By-and-by a few cleverer marksmen climbed to the upper rooms of certain houses around the church, and thence peppered us hotly: yet with no more effect than the others, for by this time I had discovered, by sounding with my heel, where the stout beams ran beneath us. Slipping down from our window-sconces and choosing these beams to stand upon, we were entirely safe from the musketeers outside, and reasonably protected from those below.

"Now the one thing to pray for," whispered Trecarrel to me in a pause of the firing, "is that Lestithiel town contains no second ladder so tall as ours: and I believe it cannot."

"There is another thing to pray for," said I; "which is, that the dawn may come quickly."

He stared at me. "My good Sir, are you crazed?" he demanded. "Day has broke already! What light on earth do you suppose this to be all about us?"

"I took it for the moon," I confessed somewhat shamefacedly.

He burst into a laugh. "You and your friend then must have sped the time rarely with your Scropes and your Grosvenors, your fesses and bends, your counter-paleys and what-not. I can tell you the night dragged by tediously enough for me, that had to lie and listen to your discoursing!"

"But hullo!" said I; "they seem to have ceased firing below. And whose voice is that calling?"

'Twas the voice of the Provost-Marshal summoning us to parley. He had been roused up in haste, and by the tone of his voice was in a towering passion of temper.

"At your service, Sir!" I called out in answer, approaching the trap. "But if you want a parley it must be an honourable one, and no shooting up or catching me at disadvantage."

"My men will not fire again until I give the word."

"Very well, then: what do you require of us?"

"I require you to give up to me, and instantly, the prisoner whom we took last night. This done, I may consent to overlook your escapade."

"For what purpose do you want him?"

"That, Sir, is my affair, I should hope. 'Tis enough that I require his surrender."

"Indeed no, Sir: 'tis nothing like enough. The gentleman you speak of happens to be a friend of mine; and you have formed an opinion of him as incorrect as it is injurious. If I consent to release him to you it will only be on your engaging yourself most solemnly to do him no harm."

'Tis wonderful what an advantage height gives a man in an argument. The Provost-Marshal, dancing with rage on the floor far below and cricking back his neck to get sight of me, cut one of the absurdest figures in the world.

"I'll hang you all!" he threatened, lifting and shaking his fist. "I'll hang every mother's son of you!"

But here I felt a hand laid on my shoulder, and looked up to see Trecarrel standing over me and smiling, and the belfry full of a sudden with rosy morning light.

"Wyvern," said he, "don't be keeping all the fun to yourself! Let me have a turn with the man, and go you to the window--the north-east window yonder, and tell me an I speak not the truth to him."

I gave over the parley to him and moved to the window, as he directed.

"'Tis too late, my master!" Trecarrel called cheerfully down the trap. "You have thirty minutes at the most to reduce us, and 'twill take you all that time to pack up and clear. Already a body of the King's foot are coming over the hill straight for the bridge, and your one ragged regiment there is making haste to quit. Do I not speak the truth, Captain Wyvern?" He flung this question to me over his shoulder.

"The Lord be praised, you do!" I cried. "And see--another and stronger body making down to cross the ford to the southward!" By this time all the troopers around me were shouting and pointing and some of them capering for joy; and sure the morning sun has rarely looked on blesseder sight than these gallant troops made as they descended glittering to the river.

"Softly--softly!" Trecarrel rebuked us. "With so much noise I cannot hear what Master Provost-Marshal is threatening. Indeed, Sir," he called down, "your game is up. Go your ways now, and may they lead you to the proper end of all rebels!"

I did not hear the Provost-Marshal's answer: and for a minute or so--since the firing did not start afresh but all remained quiet--I supposed that he had taken our advice and given up the game. But turning for a look down into the church to assure myself, I saw Trecarrel rise to his feet with a face deadly white.

"The villains!" he gasped out, pointing to the hatchway. "They are bringing powder--there--right under us!"

And, while he pointed, the Provost-Marshal's voice came up to us, cold and sneering. "I'll give you this last chance, my gentlemen," he called. "Will you hand over my prisoner, or must I blow you all into air? You have half a minute to decide."

"Let us go down, gentlemen," said Carminowe, stepping forward. "I thank you sincerely: but in truth, as I have told you, I do not value life."

In an instant Trecarrel had recovered his composure. "With your leave, Captain," he said, addressing me, "'twas I that set this game going, and I for one am willing to play it out."

I glanced from him to Grylls, who stood against the wall with his arms folded. He wasted no words, but answered me with a gloomy nod. Now I turned to the troopers, from whom--as men of mean station--I confess that I looked for no such folly of magnanimity as to lay down their lives for an old man, who, besides, was begging us to yield him up. Judge my amazement then when a red-bearded fellow called Wilkes spoke up with a big oath, growling that "surrender" was no word for his stomach. "Suppose we belonged to your own troop, Captain--what would you look for us to answer?"

"In general," I told him, "I should look for my troop to follow where I dared to lead. But this is a different matter----"

A man by Wilkes' side cut me short. "Wounds alive, Sir! You don't command the only men in the army! Didn't his Majesty pick and choose us for special service? Very well, then; tell the old devil to fire and be damned to him!"

I ran my eyes over their faces. "I thank you all, friends," said I: "and because of your answer I, for one, shall die--if God wills it--in good hope for England."

"Time is up," the Provost-Marshal's voice announced from below. "Do you submit, Sir?"

"No!" I shouted, and all shouted together with me; nor did one or two forbear to add to their defiance words of the grossest insult.

I motioned to them to copy me and lay themselves down at full length above the strongest beams: and, so lying, I commended my soul to God. This waiting upon the slow-match was the worst of all. "Will it never come?" groaned one man, clenching his hands.

But it came at last, with a jarring lift of the earth and a great wind that took us--flat-laid as we were--and tossed us like straws in a heap against the wall. Then the foundations of the world opened with a roar, beating all sensation out of us--so that, had we died then, all taste of dying was gone from us. Answering the roar, as the walls rocked with it, the heavens seemed to split and open, letting through a downrush of slates and stones and mortar: and overhead a great bell clanged once. But in my memory the explosion and the answering downrush stand separated by a dark gulf, in which time was blotted out. I had covered my face with my cloak, and saw no flame at all. Yet when my eyes opened they rested first upon a great rent in the belfry flooring, through which one of the heavy beams, broken midway, thrust up two jagged ends. I saw this through a cloud of smoke, dust, and lime. Beside me my comrades lay under a thick coating of limewash and cobwebs. A couple of them had been flung across my legs, and one or two were groaning. On the far side of the chamber the man Wilkes had scrambled to his feet unhurt, and was leaning with his elbow against the wall. I found my voice, and, while the walls yet rocked, called to Grylls and Trecarrel. To my amazement their two voices answered me: and to my greater amazement one by one the heap of men disengaged themselves, and, shaking off the dust and lime from them, rose to their feet--the whole of them, save for a cut or two and a few bruises, unharmed. Old Carminowe, in particular, had not taken a scratch.

But while I stared at them, and while my shaken wits little by little took assurance that the tower stood yet and we were yet alive, in my ears rang the note of that bell which had sounded once overhead. I stared up with a new and horrible apprehension, mercifully till this moment delayed. I had not thought of the bells. The wind of the explosion had whirled two or three of their ropes aloft and flung them over the beams: but the concussion, which had shaken cartloads of cobwebs down upon us, had seemingly left the cage itself uninjured. My eyes sought to pierce the gloom up there in the bells' dark throats. It seemed to me that one of the clappers was swaying. I thought of all that mass of metal slipping, falling; and called on the men in a panic to fetch and lower the ladder.

Trecarrel or Grylls--I forgot which--besought me to delay: the enemy might yet be lying in wait for us outside the church. I, possessed with this new terror of the bells, scarcely heard them, and insisted upon lowering the ladder with all speed. It had fallen forward from the wall against which we had rested it, and now lay right across our heads. Fast as they could the men obeyed us, lowering it through the hatchway and thence guiding its descent by the rope knotted about an upper rung. As I had been last to mount, so I was first to slip down; as I reached the foot and steadied it for the others I heard Wilkes at the window overhead calling out that our troops had won the bridge.

And now comes in the strangest thing in all my story. We, that had lived in comradeship for three weeks, and had come through this extreme peril together, parted at the ladder's foot and ran our several ways without a word said! I took one glance around the church. A good third of the roof had been blown away and one of the tower-piers was evidently tottering. Two columns of the arcade along the south aisle lay prone. I need not say that scarce a pane remained in the windows: but I can remember marvelling that so much of the glass had fallen inwards and lay strewn over the whole flooring, even in the nave, and I remember it all the better through having to pick my way to the door with shoeless feet. In the porch I overtook and ran past old Carminowe. He did not halt to thank me, nor did I pause to receive his thanks.

Yet I saw him once again. From the church I ran to meet our troops, now re-forming at the bridge-end to clear the town. Half an hour later, as we drove the retreating rebels beyond the suburbs and out into the dusty lanes towards Fowey, almost by the last cottage we passed a corpse huddled under the hedgerow to the left of our march. It was the body of Carminowe, killed by a chance shot of the men from whom we had lately saved him. But with what purpose he had pursued them and invited it, I cannot tell.

FRENCHMAN'S CREEK

A REPORTED TALE

Frenchman's Creek runs up between overhanging woods from the southern shore of Helford River, which flows down through an earthly paradise and meets the sea midway between Falmouth and the dreadful Manacles--a river of gradual golden sunsets such as Wilson painted; broad-bosomed, holding here and there a village as in an arm maternally crook'd, but with a brooding face of solitude. Off the main flood lie creeks where the oaks dip their branches in the high tides, where the stars are glassed all night long without a ripple, and where you may spend whole days with no company but herons and sandpipers--

_Helford River, Helford River, Blessèd may you be! We sailed up Helford River By Durgan from the sea...._

And about three-quarters of a mile above the ferry-crossing (where is the best anchorage) you will find the entrance of the creek they call Frenchman's, with a cob-built ruin beside it, and perhaps, if you come upon it in the morning sunlight, ten or a dozen herons aligned like statues on the dismantled walls.

Now, why they call it Frenchman's Creek no one is supposed to know, but this story will explain. And the story I heard on the spot from an old verderer, who had it from his grandfather, who bore no unimportant part in it--as will be seen. Maybe you will find it out of keeping with its scenery. In my own words you certainly would: and so I propose to relate it just as the verderer told it to me.

I

First of all you'll let me say that a bad temper is an affliction, whoever owns it, and shortening to life. I don't know what your opinion may be: but my grandfather was parish constable in these parts for forty-seven years, and you'll find it on his headstone in Manaccan churchyard that he never had a cross word for man, woman, or child. He took no credit for it: it ran in the family, and to this day we're all terribly mild to handle.

Well, if ever a man was born bad in his temper, 'twas Captain Bligh, that came from St. Tudy parish, and got himself known to all the world over that dismal business aboard the _Bounty_. Yes, Sir, that's the man--"Breadfruit Bligh," as they called him. They made an Admiral of him in the end, but they never cured his cussedness: and my grandfather, that followed his history (and good reason for why) from the day he first set foot in this parish, used to rub his hands over every fresh item of news. "Darn it!" he'd say, "here's that old Turk broke loose again. Lord, if he ain't a warrior!" Seemed as if he took a delight in the man, and kept a sort of tenderness for him till the day of his death.

Bless you, though folks have forgotten it, that little affair of the _Bounty_ was only the beginning of Bligh. He was a left'nant when it happened, and the King promoted him post-captain straight away. Later on, no doubt because of his experiences in mutinies, he was sent down to handle the big one at the Nore. "Now, then, you dogs!"--that's how he began with the men's delegates--"his Majesty will be graciously pleased to hear your grievances: and afterwards I'll be graciously pleased to hang the lot of you and rope-end every fifth man in the Fleet. That's plain sailing, I hope!" says he. The delegates made a rush at him, triced him up hand and foot, and in two two's would have heaved him to the fishes with an eighteen-pound shot for ballast if his boat's crew hadn't swarmed on board by the chains and carried him off. After this, he commanded a ship at Camperdown, and another at Copenhagen, and being a good fighter as well as a man of science, was chosen for Governor of New South Wales. He hadn't been forty-eight hours in the colony, I'm told, before the music began, and it ended with his being clapped into irons by the military and stuck in prison for two years to cool his heels. At last they took him out, put him on board a ship of war and played farewell to him on a brass band: and, by George, Sir, if he didn't fight with the captain of the ship all the way home, making claim that as senior in the service he ought to command her! By this time, as you may guess, there was nothing to be done with the fellow but make him an Admiral; and so they did, and as Admiral of the Blue he died in the year 'seventeen, only a couple of weeks ahead of my poor grandfather, that would have set it down to the finger of Providence if he'd only lived to hear the news.

Well, now, the time that Bligh came down to Helford was a few months before he sailed for Australia, and that will be a hundred years ago next summer: and I guess the reason of his coming was that the folks at the Admiralty couldn't stand him in London, the weather just then being sultry. So they pulled out a map and said, "This Helford looks a nice cool far-away place; let the man go down and take soundings and chart the place"; for Bligh, you must know, had been a pupil of Captain Cook's, and at work of this kind there was no man cleverer in the Navy.

To do him justice, Bligh never complained of work. So off he packed and started from London by coach in the early days of June; and with him there travelled down a friend of his, a retired naval officer by the name of Sharl, that was bound for Falmouth to take passage in the Lisbon packet; but whether on business or a pleasure trip is more than I can tell you.

So far as I know, nothing went wrong with them until they came to Torpoint Ferry: and there, on the Cornish side of the water, stood the Highflyer coach, the inside of it crammed full of parcels belonging to our Vicar's wife, Mrs. Polwhele, that always visited Plymouth once a year for a week's shopping. Having all these parcels to bring home, Mrs. Polwhele had crossed over by a waterman's boat two hours before, packed the coach as full as it would hold, and stepped into the Ferry Inn for a dish of tea. "And glad I am to be across the river in good time," she told the landlady; "for by the look of the sky there's a thunderstorm coming."

Sure enough there was, and it broke over the Hamoaze with a bang just as Captain Bligh and his friend put across in the ferry-boat. The lightning whizzed and the rain came down like the floods of Deva, and in five minutes' time the streets and gutters of Torpoint were pouring on to the quay like so many shutes, and turning all the inshore water to the colour of pea-soup. Another twenty minutes and 'twas over; blue sky above and the birds singing, and the roof and trees all a-twinkle in the sun; and out steps Mrs. Polwhele very gingerly in the landlady's pattens, to find the Highflyer ready to start, the guard unlashing the tarpaulin that he'd drawn over the outside luggage, the horses steaming and anxious to be off, and on the box-seat a couple of gentlemen wet to the skin, and one of them looking as ugly as a chained dog in a street fight. This was Bligh, of course. His friend, Mr. Sharl, sat alongside, talking low and trying to coax him back to a good temper: but Mrs. Polwhele missed taking notice of this. She hadn't seen the gentlemen arrive, by reason that, being timid of thunder, at the very first peal she'd run upstair, and crawled under one of the bed-ties: and there she bided until the chambermaid brought word that the sky was clear and the coach waiting.

If ever you've had to do with timmersome folks I daresay you've noted how talkative they get as soon as danger's over. Mrs. Polwhele took a glance at the inside of the coach to make sure that her belongings were safe, and then, turning to the ladder that the Boots was holding for her to mount, up she trips to her outside place behind the box-seat, all in a fluff and commotion, and chattering so fast that the words hitched in each other like beer in a narrow-necked bottle.

"Give you good morning, gentlemen!" said Mrs. Polwhele, "and I do hope and trust I haven't kept you waiting; but thunder makes me _that_ nervous! 'Twas always the same with me from a girl; and la! what a storm while it lasted! I declare the first drops looked to me a'most so big as crown-pieces. Most unfortunate it should come on when you were crossing--most unfortunate, I vow! There's nothing so unpleasant as sitting in damp clothes, especially if you're not accustomed to it. My husband, now--if he puts on a shirt that hasn't been double-aired I always know what's going to happen: it'll be lumbago next day to a certainty. But maybe, as travellers, you're not so susceptible. I find hotel-keepers so careless with their damp sheets! May I ask, gentlemen, if you've come from far? You'll be bound for Falmouth, as I guess: and so am I. You'll find much on the way to admire. But perhaps this is not your first visit to Cornwall?"

In this fashion she was rattling away, good soul--settling her wraps about her and scarcely drawing breath--when Bligh slewed himself around in his seat, and for answer treated her to a long stare.

Now, Bligh wasn't a beauty at the best of times, and he carried a scar on his cheek that didn't improve matters by turning white when his face was red, and red when his face was white. They say the King stepped up to him at Court once and asked him how he came by it and in what action. Bligh had to tell the truth--that he'd got it in the orchard at home: he and his father were trying to catch a horse there: the old man flung a hatchet to turn the horse and hit his boy in the face, marking him for life. Hastiness, you see, in the family.