CHAPTER IX.

THE ABDUCTION OF AURELIA.

In the main, the newspaper report was correct.

Madame Darnel, with the amiable object in view stated in the letter of Aurelia, had been proceeding with her toward her own estate, which was near the pleasant and well-built village of St. Eustache, in Lower Canada. It consisted then of about a hundred houses, a handsome church and parsonage, and is situated near the mouth of the river Du Chine.

Her sledge was a handsome and fashionable one; the day was clear and bright, the snow, though deep, was frozen hard, and the sledge glided along delightfully. It was drawn by two fine horses, with showy harness, set off by high hoops with silver bells on the saddles, with rosettes of ribbon and streamers of coloured horse-hair on the bridles; and Aurelia--her charming face flushed and pinky with frosty air, a cosy boa round her slender neck, her hand, through gloved, inserted in a sable muff,--was enjoying to the utmost the gay jingle of the bells, the nice crisp sound of the runners of the sledge, when suddenly and involuntarily a shrill scream broke from her, when at a turn of the road near the river, where the cuttings in the banked-up snow lay deep between two rows of picket-fencing, a musket was fired, and their driver fell forward, a corpse, shot through the head, and the vehicle was surrounded by a mob of men.

Infuriated or sullen, but all ruffianly in aspect, these men nearly all wore fur caps, with large flaps down their cheeks, enormous pea jackets or blanket coats patched and tattered, with India-rubber shoes, or moose-skin mocassins, or thick cloth boots with high leggings.

All were armed with pikes, pitch-forks, swords, and pistols; many had fowling pieces; many more had muskets and bayonets, and wore cross-belts stolen from Government armouries or stripped from the slain; and some carried their ammunition in hunting pouches and shot bags.

One who seemed the leader wore a huge coat of buffalo hide, and looked like some great wild animal, for of the human face, nothing was visible, but a long blue nose and a pair of red and blood-shot eyes.

"Jerusalem and ginger nuts, but that was a shot well put in!" exclaimed this personage, whose voice there was no mistaking, and the two horrified and helpless creatures found that they were in the hands of that gang of the insurgents--the most dastardly and lawless--led by Ithuriel Smash.

Their first emotions on finding themselves in the centre of such a savage throng, were undoubtedly those of extreme terror and shrinking delicacy; but Madame Darnel for a time forgot her naturally womanish apprehensions, collected the powers of her mind, and throwing up her veil, confronted the whole band, which mustered more than a hundred men.

Among that mob were many on whom Aurelia and her mother had conferred countless acts of kindness and charity in sickness and health; but, like low-born and ungrateful cowards, they hung back now, when they should have rushed to her defence.

Certainly, to some of the French insurgents, the appeal of Madame Darnel, a handsome woman about forty years of age, with an intelligent and sweet expression in her well-cut features, and every way a person of refinement and delicacy, was not without a little effect; but the announcement of Smash that her daughter was his affianced wife who "intended to slope with one of the 'tarnal Britishers," against whom they were in arms, deprived poor Aurelia of all sympathy, and a roar of menace escaped his hearers.

"Is this conduct your return for my kindness and charity to a creature so immensely beneath me?" asked Madame Darnel.

"As whom?" asked Smash.

"You, fellow!"

"D--n your cussed impudence! Now then, Aurelia, come along, white face. You look as if you required a box of our New York 'Never-say-die or Health-restoring pills,'" said Smash; and a shriek burst from the girl as his coarse fingers with their long spiky nails grasped her tender arm, and she was literally torn away from her horrified mother, who fainted, and was borne off by some of the better disposed to the house of the curé.

Followed by the armed rabble, the helpless Aurelia incapable of all resistance, was dragged through the village of St. Eustache, and taken a literal prisoner, or victim, to her mother's house which adjoined, the seigneury of the Darnels, wherein Colonel Smash had established his headquarters.

For a moment or two she thought to conciliate her chief captor.

Tears big and bright were welling in her dark blue eyes; her bonnet and veil had been torn off, and her dark hair all unconfined rolled over her back and shoulders, as she stood with clasped hands and pleading looks before the so-called Colonel.

"Do shake hands with me," she condescended in her first fear to say; "shake hands, Ithuriel--let us be friends, and send me back to mamma, or bring her here."

"Friends--friends be darned!" roared Ithuriel, whose plug of pigtail dropped out of his lantern jaws, after which he proceeded to air it on the point of his jack knife, while eyeing her with mingled malevolence and admiration, and seated himself on a table. "You won't give me a kiss, I suppose; but I can take as many as I like, I reckon; and you look as if you scarcely remembered me--Ithuriel Alcibiades Smash. Strike me ugly, but that's a bad compliment. But," added the bantering ruffian, "I calculate I'll survive it! Flirtation and courtship are two very different things, Miss Aurelia, and I ain't disposed to flirt with you, as you'll find out before long."

Smash did not yet molest her; but she knew not what he might do if he imbibed much brandy, as he had a bottle beside him, and was helping himself liberally to the contents thereof, while he talked; and she eyed him with fast-growing alarm.

That he had shot the poor sledge-driver, an old and faithful domestic whom she had known from childhood, Aurelia never doubted; and that deed added to her unfathomable loathing and horror of him. She shivered in his presence, and shuddered whenever he drew near her. She glanced wildly at the room door, but escape was hopeless. He saw the glance and laughed aloud.

Was she acting in a melo-drama with the ruffian, as the heavy villain of the piece? Was it all a dream? It almost seemed so, the whole situation with all its contingent horrors and future uncertainties, appeared so new, so unnatural and unreal! He seemed to read her thoughts, for he said,--

"Was it not to spite that tarnation Britisher, who used to come into the room with an opera hat under his arm, like a roasted fowl with its gizzard, I might give you a little time to think of marrying me."

"Marry _you_!" exclaimed Aurelia in a peculiar tone, that filled him with rage and caused him to indulge in much language that was "more pagan than parliamentary" till he roused her scorn and anger.

"Coarse fool, and worse than fool! how dare you use language that is unfit for me to hear?"

"'Guess your Britisher will never see his wretched little island again--too many rifle bullets flying for that," said he irrelevantly, as he saw how every reference to Roland affected her. "You encouraged that 'ere Britisher," continued the Colonel, still airing his quid on his jack knife.

"Encouraged--how dare you say so?"

"Dare--there is no daring in it, my dear. Who commands here--you or I?"

"Sir, you presume upon your relationship in some way with mamma, to talk to me thus, surely."

"I presume only on my own love for you, and would keep you, a daughter of Canada, as I would a daughter of America, from the contamination of that 'tarnal red-coated British slave!"

Still, as yet, save when dragging her to the house--her own father's house--he had not laid hands on her. With all his roughness and innate brutality, he felt that there was an undefinable something in the grand hauteur, the excessive delicacy, the tone of refinement, in the general aspect and bearing of Aurelia, that quelled, while it secretly "riled" him.

He noticed the very expression of her nostrils, the quiver of her proud lip and the flash of her dark blue eye--the flash of scorn and loathing when she replied to him, and he quailed under it--he, the utter American rowdy! But this emotion began to die as he drained another bumper of stiff brandy and water, and he took to blustering and swearing again.

"Do not use language such as this--and to me," said Aurelia, putting her trembling hands to her ears; "surely you do not know the nature of oaths."

"Don't I? I calculate I've sworn enough to sink a seventy-four-gun ship," said he, with a mocking laugh; "but surely," he added, drawing nearer her, and adopting a coaxing tone and bearing, "in time you'll forget all about that fellow, and see the necessity of quietly becoming Mrs. Ithuriel Smash, when you cannot make a _better of it_."

The girl's heart seemed to give a great bound, and then to die within her, at these words, the look that accompanied and the dreadful inference to be deduced from them.

"Anyhow, I calculate that I shan't forget the evening I saw you and that yaw-haw beast of a Britisher giving each other such nice tokens of your mutual good-will--he giving you what he calls his heart--and you making a free gift of the whole seigneury of St. Eustache! If once he comes within the reach of my rifle...!"

The Colonel was unable to express what would happen then. He clenched hands and set his great yellow teeth with such force, that his quid slipped down his throat and nearly choked him.

Two or three days were passed by Aurelia in extreme misery and captivity, and almost hourly she was warned by Smash that his patience would soon be exhausted, and he would "send for the parson."

She secluded herself in her own room, and found for a little time a temporary protector in Papineau, one of the rebel leaders, a dapper little French colonist, who had now come to concert measures for the defence of the village, and urged that the young lady must not be intruded upon.

"Snakes alive! man, don't I tell you she is to be my wife?" roared Smash.

"_Mon Dieu_, my dear Colonel, that may be so," replied Papineau, taking a pinch in the old Parisian fashion; "win the heiress, but woo her gently. A lady can only receive in her own apartment a clergyman or a doctor."

"And a hairdresser," added the barber of the village who was there, armed to the teeth.

"By Jerusalem, then, I'll go as a hairdresser and scalp her, if she gives me more trouble! I'll teach her that I'm half-horse, half-alligator!" exclaimed Smash, who by this time was intoxicated to a dangerous extent.

A violent illness--the fever of great fear--had prostrated Madame Darnel.

Separated from the latter, Aurelia was without the little protection her presence might have afforded. She was glad to keep beside the female domestics of the seigneury, from among whom she was often haled forth shrieking to endure the extraordinary love-speeches of Smash; at last the women quitted the house in terror, and she was left there alone--alone with a man whom she now loathed with a fear indescribable!