Robert Buchanan, poet, novelist, and playwright, was born on
Aug. 18, 1841, at Caverswall, Staffordshire, England, the son
of a poor journeyman tailor from Ayrshire, in Scotland, who
wrote poetry, and wandered about the country preaching
socialism of the Owen type, afterwards editing a Glasgow
journal. Owing, perhaps, in part to his very unconventional
training, Robert Buchanan entered on life with a strange
freshness of vision. Nothing in ordinary human life seemed
common or mean to him, and this sense of wonder, combined with
a power of judgment much steadier than his father's, made him
a poet of considerable genius. "Undertones," published in
1863, and "Idylls and Legends of Inverburn," which appeared
two years later, made him famous. The same qualities which he
displayed in his poetry Buchanan exhibited in his earliest and
best novels. "The Shadow of the Sword," published in 1876, was
originally conceived as a poem, and it still remains one of
the best of modern English prose romances. In his latter years
Robert Buchanan, tortured by the long and painful illness of
his beautiful and gentle wife, wrote a considerable amount of
work with no literary merit; but this does not diminish the
value of his best and earliest work, which undoubtedly
entitles him to a place of importance in English literature.
He died on June 10, 1901.
_I.--The King of the Conscripts_
"Rohan Gwenfern!" cried the sergeant, in a voice that rang like a
trumpet through the length of the town hall.
No one answered. The crowd of young Kromlaix men looked at each other in
consternation. Was the handsomest, the strongest, and the most daring
lad in their village a coward? It was the dark year of 1813, when
Napoleon was draining France of all its manhood. Even the only sons of
poor widowed women, such as Rohan Gwenfern was, were no longer exempted
from conscription. Having lost half a million men amid the snows of
Russia, Napoleon had called for 200,000 more soldiers, and the little
Breton fishing village of Kromlaix had to provide twenty-five recruits.
"Rohan Gwenfern!" cried the sergeant again.
The mayor rose up behind the ballot-box on the large table, about which
the villagers were gathered, and looked around in vain for the splendid
figure of the young fisherman.
"Where is your nephew?" he said to Corporal Derval, in an angry voice.
Derval, one of Napoleon's veterans, who had been pensioned after losing
his leg at Austerlitz, looked at his pretty niece, Marcelle, with a
strange pallor on his furrowed, sunburnt face.
"Rohan was too ill to come," said Marcelle, with a troubled look in her
sweet grey eyes. "I will draw in his name."
"Very well, my pretty lass," said the mayor, his grim face softening
into a smile as he looked at the beautiful girl, "you shall draw for
him, and bring him luck."
Marcelle's hand trembled as she put it into the ballot-box. She let it
stay there so long that some of the soldiers began to laugh. But the
village women, gathered in a dense crowd at the back of the hall, gazed
at her with tears in their eyes. They knew what she was doing. She was
praying that she might draw a lucky number for her lover, Rohan.
Twenty-five conscripts were wanted, and those who drew a paper numbered
twenty-six or upwards were free.
"Come, come, my dear!" said the mayor, stroking his moustache, and
nodding encouragingly at Marcelle.
She slowly drew forth a paper, and handed it to her uncle, who opened
it, read it with a stare, and uttered his usual expletive. "Soul of a
crow!" in an awstricken whisper.
"Read it, corporal!" said the mayor, while Marcelle looked wildly at her
uncle.
"It is incredible!" said Corporal Derval, handing the paper to the
sergeant, with the look of amazement still on his face.
"Rohan Gwenfern--one!" shouted the sergeant, while Marcelle clung to her
uncle, and hid her face upon his arm.
Rohan Gwenfern, who had taken a solemn oath that he would never go forth
to slay his fellow-men at the bidding of Napoleon, whom he regarded as a
horrible, murderous monster, found himself, when he returned to Kromlaix
late that evening, in the sorry position of King of the Conscripts. He
was a young man who had led a very solitary life, but solitude, instead
of making him morbid, had strengthened his natural feelings of pity and
affection. His immense physical strength had never been exerted for any
evil, and even in the roughest wrestling matches he had never fought
brutally or cruelly.
He certainly rejoiced in his splendid powers of body; but he had the
gentleness of soul of a poetic mind, as well as the magnanimity that
often goes with great strength. There was, indeed, something lion-like
about him as he strode up to the door of his cottage, with his mane of
yellow hair floating over his broad brows and falling on his shoulders.
An eager crowd was waiting for him, and when he appeared, they all
shouted.
"Here he is at last!" cried a voice, which he recognised as that of
Mikel Grallon. "Three cheers for the King of the Conscripts!"
Some bag-pipe players struck up a merry tune, but Rohan, with a wild
face and stern eyes, pushed his way through the throng into his cottage.
On a seat by the fire his mother sat weeping, her face covered with her
apron; round her was a band of sympathising friends. The scene explained
itself in one flash, and Rohan Gwenfern knew his fate. Pale as death, he
rushed across the floor to his mother's side, just as a troop of young
girls flocked into the house singing the Marseillaise. At their head was
Marcelle.
A hard struggle had gone on in the heart of Rohan's sweetheart. She had
been overcome with grief when she drew the fatal number. But her dismay
had quickly turned into an heroic pride at the thought of her lover
becoming a soldier of Napoleon. From her childhood she had learnt from
her uncle to admire and worship the great emperor who had led the armies
of France from victory to victory, and she did not think that Rohan
would refuse to follow him. It is true that she had often heard Gwenfern
say that he loathed war; but many other men of Kromlaix had said the
same thing; and yet, when the hour came, and they were called to serve
in the Grand Army, they had obeyed.
"Look, Rohan!" she cried, holding up in her hand a rosette with a long,
coloured streamer. "Look! I have brought this for you."
Each of the conscripts wore a similar badge, and old Corporal Derval had
stuck one on his own breast. All the crowd cheered as Marcelle advanced,
with bright eyes and flaming cheeks, to her sweetheart.
"Keep back! Do not touch me!" cried Rohan, his face blazing with strange
anger.
"The boy's mad!" exclaimed Corporal Derval, in an angry voice.
"Do you not understand, Rohan?" exclaimed Marcelle, terrified by her
lover's look. "As you did not come, someone had to draw in your name. I
did so, and you are now the King of the Conscripts, and this is your
badge. Let me fasten it upon your breast!"
In a moment her soft fingers attached the rosette to his jacket. Rohan
did not stir; his eyes were fixed on the ground, but his features worked
convulsively.
"Forward now, all of you to the inn!" said Corporal Derval, when the
cheering was over. "We will drink the health of Number One!"
As everybody was moving towards the door, Rohan started as if from a
trance.
"Stay!" he shouted.
All stood listening, and his widowed mother crept up and clasped his
hand.
"You are all mad," he said, in a wild voice, "and I seem to be going
mad, too. What is this you tell me about a conscription and an emperor?
I do not understand. I only know you are all mad. Napoleon has no right
to compel me to fight for him; and if every Frenchman had my heart, he
would not reign another day. I refuse to be led like a sheep to the
slaughter. He can kill me if he wills, but he cannot force me to kill my
fellow-men. You can go if you like, and do his bloody work. Had I the
power I would serve him as I serve this badge of his!"
Tearing the rosette from his breast, he cast it into the flaming fire.
"Rohan, for God's sake be silent!" cried Marcelle. "You speak like a
madman. It is all my fault. I thought I should bring you good luck by
drawing for you. Won't you forgive me?"
The young fisherman looked sadly into his sweetheart's face, and when he
saw her wet eyes and quivering lips his heart was stirred. He took her
hand and kissed it, but suddenly an ill-favoured face was thrust forward
between the two lovers.
"Isn't it a pity," sneered Mikel Grallon, "to see a pretty girl wasting
herself on a coward, when----"
He did not complete the sentence, for Rohan stretched out his hand and
smote him down. Grallon fell like a log.
A wild cry arose from all the men, the women screamed, even Marcelle
shrank back; and Rohan strode to the door, pushing his way out.
"Hold him! Kill him!" shouted some.
"Arrest him!" cried Corporal Derval.
Rohan hurled his opponents right and left like so many ninepins. They
fell back and gasped. Then, turning his white face for an instant on
Marcelle, her lover passed unmolested out into the darkness.
_II.--In the Cathedral of the Sea_
Along the wild, rugged shore, a little way from Kromlaix, was an immense
cavern of crimson granite, hung with gleaming moss, and washed by the
roaring tides of the sea. Its towering walls had been carved by wind and
water into thousands of beautiful, fantastical forms, and a dim
religious light fell from above through a long, funnel-shaped hole
running from the roof of the cavern to the top of the great cliff.
It was here that Rohan Gwenfern hid from the band of soldiers sent in
pursuit of him. The air was damp and chill, but he breathed it with the
comfort of a hardy animal. He made a bed of dry seaweed on the top of
the precipice leading to the hole in the cliff, where his mother came
and lowered food to him every evening; and Jannedik, a pet goat that
used to follow him everywhere in the days when he was a free man, was
his only companion. Strange and solitary was the life he led, but he
slept as soundly in his bed of seaweed on the wild precipice as he did
in his bed at home.
But one morning, when he awoke, a confused murmur broke upon his ear.
Peering over the ledge, he saw a crowd of soldiers standing on the
shingle at the mouth of the cavern.
"Come down and surrender, in the name of the emperor!" cried the
sergeant.
"Surrender!" shouted all his men. And the vast, dim place rang with the
echoing sound of their voices.
"You can have my dead body if you care to come up here for it!" cried
Rohan, stepping into the light that fell from the hole in the cliff.
The soldiers stared up in astonishment when Rohan appeared on the ledge
of the precipice. He was now a gaunt, forlorn, hunted man, with a few
rags hanging about his body, and a great shock of yellow hair tumbling
below his shoulders. Under the stress of mental suffering his flesh had
wasted from his bones, but his eyes flashed with a terrible light.
"Come down," said the sergeant, raising his gun, "or I will pick you off
your perch as if you were a crow."
Instead of getting behind a rock, Rohan stood up with a strange smile on
his face, and said, "If you want me, you must come and fetch me."
There was a flash, a roar--the sergeant had fired. But when the smoke
had cleared away, Rohan was still standing on the ledge with the strange
smile on his face. The shot had gone wide.
"You can smile," said the sergeant angrily, "but you cannot escape. If I
cannot bring you down, I will starve you out. My men are watching for
you, above and below. You are surrounded."
"And so are you," said Rohan, with a laugh, pointing to the mouth of the
cavern. "Look behind you!"
The sergeant and his men turned round, and gave a cry of dismay. The
tide had turned, and the sea was surging fiercely into the mouth of the
cavern.
"Give him one volley," shouted the sergeant, "and then swim for your
lives."
But when the men turned to aim at Rohan, he was no longer visible. They
fired at random at the hole in the cliff, and after filling the great
cavern with drifting smoke and echoing thunder, they fled for their
lives, wading, swimming through the high spring tide.
"At any rate," said the sergeant, when they had all got safely back to
land, "we can stop Mother Gwenfern from bringing the mad rebel any more
food."
So a watch was set over the cottage in which Rohan's widowed mother
lived, and she was always searched whenever she left her house, and
bands of armed men kept guard night and day by the hole at the top of
the cliff and by the seaward entrance to the cavern. At the end of two
weeks the sergeant resolved to make another attack. The man, he thought,
must surely have been starved to death, as every avenue of aid had long
since been blocked.
So one moonlight night at ebb tide the crowd of soldiers crept into the
cavern and lashed two long ladders together, and began to climb up the
precipice. But a strong arm seized the ladders from above, and flung
them back on the granite floor of the cave. Standing like a ghost in the
faint, silvery radiance falling through the hole in the cliff, Rohan
hurled down upon the dark mass of the besieging crowd great fragments of
rock which he had placed, ready for use, along the ledge on which he
slept.
"Fire Fire!" shrieked the sergeant, pointing at the white figure of
Rohan.
But before the command could be obeyed, Rohan got under shelter, and the
bullets rained harmlessly round the spot where he had just stood. Then,
under cover of fire, some men advanced and again placed the ladder
against the precipice. As Rohan crouched down on the ledge, he was
startled by the apparition of a human face. With a cry of rage, he
sprang to his feet, and, heedless of the bullets thudding on the rock
around him, he slowly and painfully lifted up a terrible granite
boulder, poised it for a moment over his head, and then hurled it down
at the shapes dimly struggling below him. There was a crash, a shriek.
Under the weight of the boulder the ladders broke, and the men upon them
fell down, amid horrible cries of agony and terror.
What happened after this Rohan never knew; for, overcome by frenzy and
fatigue, he swooned away. When he opened his eyes, he was lying beneath
the hole in the cliff, with the moonlight streaming upon his face. From
below him came the soft sound of lapping water, and, looking down, he
saw that the tide had entered the cave, and forced the besiegers to give
over their attack.
Yes, the battle was over, and he had conquered! His position indeed was
impregnable; had he been well supplied with food, he could have held it
against hundreds of men for a long period. But, as he laid down on his
bed of seaweed, a rough tongue licked his hand. It was his goat,
Jannedik. For the last fortnight, Rohan's mother had sent the goat every
day to her son with a basket of food tied round its neck and hidden in
the long hair of its throat. Rohan groped in the darkness for the
basket, and Jannedik uttered a low cry of pain, rolled over at his feet
into the moonlight, revealing a terrible bullet-wound in its side, and
quivered and died. Some soldier had shot it.
As Rohan stared at the dead body of his four-footed friend, the strength
of mind which had enabled him to withstand all the power that Napoleon,
the conqueror of Europe, could bring against him at last went from him.
Trembling and shivering, he looked around him, overcome by utter
desolation and despair. He had held out bravely, but he could hold out
no longer; slowly and laboriously he climbed down the dark face of the
precipice, and reached the narrow strip of shingle below, just as the
moon got clear from a cloud and lighted up the cavern. Its cold rays
fell on the white face of the sergeant, who laid half on the shingle and
half in the water, crushed by the great boulder with which Rohan had
broken down the ladders.
Rohan gazed for a moment on the features of the man he had killed, and
then, with a cry of agony and despair, he fell upon his knees.
"Not on my head, O God, be the guilt!" he prayed. "Not on my head, but
on his who hunted me down and made me what I am; on his, whose red sword
shadows all the world, and drives on millions of innocent men to murder
each other! Ah, God, God, God! The men that Napoleon has slain! Is it
not high time that some man like me sought him out and killed him, and
brought peace back once more to this blood-covered earth of ours? Yes, I
will do it!"
Rising wildly to his feet, full of the strange strength and the strange
powers of madness, Rohan Gwenfern climbed up the precipice to his bed of
seaweed, and then took a path that no man had taken and lived--the
sheer, precipitous path from the roof of the cavern to the top of the
cliff.
_III.--Rohan Meets Napoleon_
As the Grand Army swept into Belgium for the last great battle against
the united powers of England, Germany, Austria, and Russia, a strange,
savage creature followed it--a gaunt, half-naked man, with long yellow
hair falling almost to his waist, and bloodshot eyes with a look of
madness in them. How he lived it is difficult to tell. He never begged,
but the soldiers threw lumps of bread at him as he prowled round their
camp-fires, asking everyone whom he met: "Where is the emperor? Where is
Napoleon? Do you think he will come this way?"
Twice he had been arrested as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot.
But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a
laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free,
saying with scornful pity, "It is a harmless maniac. Let him go."
He always lagged in the rear of the advancing army, and as each fresh
regiment arrived he mingled with the soldiers, and asked them in a
fierce whisper, "Is the emperor coming now? Isn't he coming?"
At last, one dark rainy evening, the wild outcast saw the man for whom
he was seeking. Wrapped in an old grey overcoat, and wearing a cocked
hat from which the rain dripped heavily, Napoleon stood on a hill, with
his hands clasped behind his back, his head sunk deep between his
shoulders, looking towards Ligny. But he was guarded; a crowd of
officers stood close behind him, waiting for orders.
Suddenly a bareheaded soldier came riding along the road, spurring and
flogging his horse as if for dear life; galloping wildly up the hill he
handed the emperor a dispatch. Napoleon glanced at it, and spoke to his
staff officers. With a wild movement of joy they drew their swords, and
waved them in the air, shouting, "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ Napoleon smiled.
His star was again in the ascendant! The Prussians were retreating from
Ligny; he had struck the first blow, and it was a victory!
Near the hill on which he was standing was a deserted farmhouse; he gave
orders that it should be prepared for his reception. But, as he rode
down the hill at the head of his staff, the man who had been watching
him divined his intention, and reached the house before his attendants.
The soldiers who searched the place before Napoleon entered failed to
see the dark figure crouching up in the corner of a loft among the black
rafters.
"Leave me," said Napoleon to his men, after he had finished the plain
meal of bread and wine set before him.
To-morrow he would meet for the first time, on the rolling fields of
Waterloo, the only captain of a European army whom he had not defeated.
He wanted to think his plans of battle over in silence. Some time he
paced up and down the room, his chin drooping forward on his breast, and
his hands clasped upon his back. Through the wide, clear spaces of his
mind great armies passed in black procession, moving like storm-clouds
over the stricken earth; burning cities rose in the distance, amid the
shrieks of dying men, and the thunder of cannon. His plan was at last
matured. Victory? Yes, that was certain! So his thoughts ran. An
aide-de-camp entered with a dispatch. He tore it open, and ran his eye
over it.
"It is nothing," he said. "Don't disturb me for two hours except on a
matter of great importance. I want to sleep."
Going up to the old armchair of oak that was set before the fire, he
fell on his knees, and covered his eyes and prayed.
"What!" said the man who was watching him up in the rafters. "Does Cain
dare to pray? Surely God will not answer his prayers! He is praying that
he may wipe the English to-morrow from the face of the earth, and again
cement his throne with blood, and forge his sceptre of fire!"
That, no doubt, was what Napoleon prayed for. Yet, when he rose up his
face was wonderfully changed and softened by the religious light which
had shone on it for a few moments. Then, throwing himself into the
armchair, he closed his eyes. And, as the fire burnt low, Rohan Gwenfern
silently descended from the loft, and something gleamed in his hand. He
crept up to the sleeping emperor, and stared at his face, reading it
line by line. Napoleon moved uneasily in his sleep, and murmured to
himself, and his hand opened and shut.
As Rohan raised his knife to strike home to the heart of the tyrant he
saw the hand--white and small, like a woman's or a child's. Again he
looked at the face. Ah, there was no imperial grandeur here! Only a
feeble, sallow, tired, and sickly creature, whom a strong man could
crush down with one blow of his fist. Rohan grew weak as he looked, and
the long knife almost fell from his clutch.
"I must kill him--I must kill him!" he kept saying to himself. "His one
life against the peace and happiness of earth--the life of a Cain! If he
awakens, war will awaken, and fire, famine, and slaughter! Kill him,
Rohan, kill him!"
Perhaps if Napoleon had not prayed before he slept, his enemy would have
carried out his purpose. But he had prayed; his face had become
beautiful for a moment, and he fell asleep as fearlessly as a child. No!
Rohan Gwenfern was not made of the stuff of which savage assassins are
formed; though there was madness in his brain, there was still love in
his heart. He could not kill even Cain, when God had sanctified the
murderer with sleep. God had made Napoleon, and God had sent him; bloody
as he was, he, too, was God's child.
Opening the great casement window of the room in the farmhouse, Gwenfern
gazed for a moment with wild eyes and quivering lips on the pale, worn
face of the great conqueror, and then leaped out into the darkness. When
Napoleon awoke, a long knife was lying at his feet; but he heeded it
not, and little dreamt that a few minutes ago it had been pointed at his
heart.
Ah, Rohan Gwenfern had done well to leave the mighty emperor in the
hands of God, and go back, a wild, tattered, mad beggar to his
sweetheart Marcelle, in the little Breton village of Kromlaix. For as
Napoleon came out of the farmhouse, and looked at the dawning sky, there
rose up, clouding the lurid star of his destiny, the blood-red shadow--
WATERLOO!
* * * * *