A REPRISAL.
"Proud of the favours mighty Jove has shown,
On certain dangers we too rashly run;
If 'tis His will our haughty foes to tame,
Oh, may this instant end the Grecian name!
Here far from Argos let their heroes fall,
And one great day destroy and bury all!"
_Iliad_ xiii.
Quentin's nerves received something like an electric shock when, on
proceeding a little further forward, he saw a line consisting of
sixteen poor French prisoners, partly bound by ropes, standing in
front of the rudely-formed rampart which closed up the archway, and
in front of them were four large pits, whose appalling shape and
aspect left no doubt that they were to be the premature graves of the
unfortunate men who now stood in health and strength beside them.
Those sixteen persons were of various ranks, as four at least seemed
by their silver epaulettes to be officers, and medals and crosses
glittered on the breasts of several. Their uniform was dark blue,
lapelled with red, and all the privates wore large shoulder-knots of
scarlet worsted. They were all French infantry men, taken in some
recent skirmish. Bareheaded, they stood a sad-looking line, and in
their pale but war-bronzed faces, on which the flickering glare of
the torches fell with weird and wavering gleams, there seemed to be
no ray of hope for mercy or reprieve at the hands of their captors,
who were about to sacrifice them in the horrid spirit of reprisal
which then existed between the Spanish guerillas and the French
invaders.
"Good heavens!" said Quentin, in an agitated whisper; "are these men
about to be shot?"
"Si, senor--every one of them!"
"For what reason?"
"Being on the wrong side of the Pyrenees," replied the Spaniard, with
a cruel grin.
"Shot--and without mercy?"
"Precisely so, senor."
"By whose order?"
"One who does not like his orders questioned--Don Baltasar de Saldos."
"Is he capable of such an act?"
"Capable! Santiago! The French have made his heart as hard as if it
had been dipped in the well of Estremoz (beyond the mountains), which
turns everything to flinty rock."
As if to enhance the torture of their anticipated doom, the Spaniards
went slowly and deliberately about the selection of a firing party,
which consisted of no less than sixty men, who loaded in a very
irregular manner, and, as their steel ramrods flashed in the
torch-light and went home with a dull thud on the ball cartridges, a
thrill seemed to pass through the prisoners.
One, a grim-visaged and grey-moustached old captain of grenadiers,
folded his arms, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled in scorn and
defiance. Doubtless, since the fall of the Bastile and the days of
the barricades, he had seen human lives lavished with a recklessness
that hardened him; but there was another officer who covered his face
with his handkerchief and wept; not in cowardice, for his gallant
breast was covered with the medals of many an honourable field; but
perhaps his heart at that moment was far away with his wife and
little ones in some sunny vale of Languedoc, or by the banks of the
silvery Garonne.
Some had their teeth clenched, and their eyes wearing a wild glare of
hate, of fear, and defiance mingled; some there were who seemed
scarcely conscious of the awful doom prepared for them, and some
glanced wistfully and fearfully at the newly-dug pits which were to
receive them when all was over.
Some were occupied by external objects, and the eyes of one followed
earnestly the course of a falling star of great beauty and
brilliance, which vanished behind the hills of Albuquerque.
A guerilla, clad in somewhat tattered black velvet, now took off his
sombrero, and in doing so, displayed, by a pretty plain tonsure, that
he was an unfrocked or degraded priest; but now inspired by something
of his former holy office, he held up a small crucifix, and
exclaimed--
"Frenchmen, if any man among you is a true son of the Church, I pray
God and the Blessed Madonna to receive him, and have mercy on his
soul!"
"That is the Padre Trevino, our second in command," whispered
Lazarillo; "and he is the best shot among us."
As Trevino spoke, the sixteen prisoners and all the onlookers,
crossed themselves very devoutly. Some of the doomed closed their
eyes, and by their muttering, seemed to be praying very earnestly.
Intensity of emotion seemed to render them all more or less athirst,
as they were seen to moisten their pale lips with their tongues.
The stern grey-haired captain on the right alone seemed unmoved; he
had neither a prayer to give to Heaven or to earth, and thus stood
gazing stonily and grimly at his destroyers.
"On your knees, senors! on your knees!" said Trevino.
"Never to Spaniards!" replied the old captain.
"Are they really in earnest, M. le Capitaine?" asked the prisoner
next him, a mere youth.
"Earnest--ma foi! I should think so, Louis."
"Ah, mon Dieu--to be shot thus--it is terrible!" he exclaimed, in a
piercing voice.
"On your knees, Frenchmen," repeated the militant friar, "not to us,
but to God!"
"To the blessed God, then," said the old captain; "kneel, comrades;
'tis the last word of command you will ever hear from me."
They all knelt, and now the firing party came forward three paces--
----"a death-determined band,
Hell in their face and horror in their hand."
And forming line about twenty paces from the prisoners, shouldered
arms. Then Quentin felt his excited heart beating painfully in his
breast, and he held his breath as if suffocating. From the shoulder
the muskets were cast to the "ready," and then followed the terrible
clicking of the sixty locks, a sound that made the youngest victim,
who had been named Louis, a fair-haired lad (some poor conscript,
torn from his mother's arms, perhaps), to shudder very perceptibly
and close his eyes; and now came the three fatal and final words of
command from the unfrocked friar.
"Camaradas, preparen las armas!"
"Apunten!"
("Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur!" cried the old captain,
defiantly.)
"FUEGO!"
The straggling volley of musketry broke like a thunder peal upon the
silence of the night, and echoed with a hundred reverberations among
the mountains, till it was heard, perhaps, by the sentinels in
Valencia. Red blood spirted from the wounds of the victims, some of
whom leaped wildly up and fell heavily on the ground. The grey smoke
rolled over them in the torch-light, and when it was lifted upward
like a vapoury curtain by the midnight wind, Quentin could see the
sixteen hapless Frenchmen all lying upon the earth. Six were
screaming in agony, imploring the Spaniards to end it--to finish the
vile work they had begun--writhing in blood and beating the ground
with their heels; but then there were ten, who, alas! lay still
enough, with red currents streaming from the wounds in their yet
quivering corpses.
Half killed and gasping painfully, the old French captain struggled
into a sitting posture, but fell back again, as another volley poured
in at ten paces ended the butchery.
In a few minutes more they were stripped, even to their boots, and
flung quite nude and scarcely cold into the pits at the foot of the
breastwork, four being cast into each.
In the pocket of the poor officer who had wept there was found a
lady's miniature, and three locks of fair hair that had evidently
belonged to little children. The loose earth was heaped over the
dead, the torches were extinguished, and, like a dissolving view or
some horrible phantasmagoria, the whole affair passed away and was
over.
In the horror excited by the scene and all its details, Quentin
forgot his mission, his despatch, almost his own identity; a sickness
and giddiness came over him, till he was roused by the voice of
Lazarillo, his guide, who said in the most matter-of-fact way--
"Follow me, senor--perhaps Don Baltasar can receive you now."
The house to which he was conducted was the most important in the
place, and had been for ages its chief posada or caravanserie, where
the muleteers passing between Oporto, Lisbon, and the southern and
eastern provinces of Spain, had been wont to halt and refresh. It
was said to have been for a time the residence of the Scoto-Spaniard
Don Iago Stuart, who, with the _Sabrina_ and _Ceres_, two Spanish
frigates, fought Lord Nelson for three hours in the Mediterranean, in
1796, with the loss of one hundred and sixty men.
The under story was appropriated to the stabling of horses, mules,
and burros, and from thence a rickety wooden stair led to the upper
floor, the walls of which were cleanly whitewashed, the floors
covered, not with carpets, which in Spain would soon become
intolerable with insects, but with thin matting made of the esparto
grass or wild rush.
Military arms and household utensils were hung upon the walls or
placed on the wooden shelves; the stiff-backed chairs and sofas were
already occupied by some of the before-mentioned picturesque and
motley actors in the late scene, and a large branch candlestick, that
whilom had evidently figured on the altar of some stately church,
with its cluster of sputtering candles, gave light to the long
apartment, and enabled Quentin to examine it, and to see seated at
the upper end, a man in a kind of uniform, writing, occasionally
consulting an old and coarsely engraved map of Alentejo, and
referring from time to time to the Padre Trevino and others, who
leaned on their muskets, and who, lounging and laughing, smoked their
cigaritos about his chair.
This personage wore a black velvet jacket fancifully embroidered with
silver; a pair of British Light Infantry wings, also of silver,
probably stripped from some poor 29th man who fell at Roleia, were on
his shoulders. He wore a gorgeous Spanish sash, with a buff cavalry
waist-belt and heavy Toledo sabre in a steel scabbard. His sombrero,
adorned by a gold band and large scarlet plume, was stuck very much
on one side of his head, as if he were somewhat of a dandy; but
underneath it was tied a handkerchief, deeply saturated with the
blood of a recent wound.
"Senor Don Baltasar," said Lazarillo very respectfully, "a messenger
from the British cantonments on the frontier."
He of the silver wings and Toledo sabre looked up, and Quentin was
thunderstruck on finding himself face to face with the stranger of
the wayside well, the same personage from whom he had rescued Eugene
de Ribeaupierre, and whom he had stunned like an ox by a blow of the
cajado!