his way to his lodgings in a state of despair difficult to describe,
impossible to exaggerate. Chilled, sobered, and affrighted he looked
back and saw how he had thrown for all and lost all, how he had saved
the dregs of his fortune at the expense of his loyalty, how he had seen
a way of escape--and lost it for ever! No wonder that as he trudged
through the mud and darkness of the sleeping town his breath came
quickly and his chest heaved, and he looked from side to side as a
hunted animal might look, uttering great sighs. Ah, if he could have
retraced the last three hours! If he could have undone that he had done!
In a fever, he entered his lodging, and securing the door behind him
stumbled up the stone stairs and entered his room. The impulse to
confide his misfortunes to some one was so strong upon him that he was
glad to see a dark form half sitting, half lying in a chair before the
dying embers of a wood fire. In those days a man's natural confidant was
his valet, the follower, half friend, half servant, who had been born on
his estate, who lay on a pallet at the foot of his bed, who carried his
_billets-doux_ and held his cloak at the duello, who rode near his
stirrup in fight and nursed him in illness, who not seldom advised him
in the choice of a wife, and lied in support of his suit.
The young Vicomte flung his cloak over a chair. "Get up, you rascal!" he
cried impatiently. "You pig, you dog!" he continued, with increasing
anger. "Sleeping there as though your master were not ruined by that
scoundrel of a Breton! Bah!" he added, gazing bitterly at his follower,
"you are of the _canaille_, and have neither honour to lose nor a town
to betray!"
The sleeping man moved in his chair but did not awake. The Vicomte, his
patience exhausted, snatched the bonnet from his head, and threw it on
the ground. "Will you listen?" he said. "Or go, if you choose look for
another master. I am ruined! Do you hear? Ruined, Gil! I have lost
all--money, land, Lusigny itself--at the cards!"
The man, roused at last, stooped with a sleepy movement, and picking up
his hat dusted it with his hand, then rose with a yawn to his feet.
"I am afraid, Vicomte," he said, in tones that, quiet as they were,
sounded like thunder in the young man's astonished and bewildered ears,
"I am afraid that if you have lost Lusigny--you have lost something
which was not yours to lose!"
As he spoke he struck the embers with his boot, and the fire, blazing
up, shone on his face. The Vicomte saw, with stupor, that the man before
him was not Gil at all--was indeed the last person in the world to whom
he should have betrayed himself. The astute smiling eyes, the aquiline
nose, the high forehead, and projecting chin, which the short beard and
moustache scarcely concealed, were only too well known to him. He
stepped back with a cry of despair. "Sir!" he said, and then his tongue
failed him. His arms dropped by his sides. He stood silent, pale,
convicted, his chin on his breast. The man to whom he had confessed his
treachery was the master whom he had agreed to betray.
"I had suspected something of this," Henry of Navarre continued, after a
lengthy pause, and with a tinge of irony in his tone. "Rosny told me
that that old fox, the Captain of Creance, was affecting your company
somewhat too much, M. le Vicomte, and I find that, as usual, his
suspicions were well-founded. What with a gentleman who shall be
nameless, who has bartered a ford and a castle for the favour of
Mademoiselle de Luynes, and yourself, and another I know of--I am blest
with some faithful followers, it seems! For shame! for shame, sir!" he
continued seating himself with dignity in the chair from which he had
risen, but turning it so that he confronted his host, "have you nothing
to say for yourself?"
The young noble stood with bowed head, his face white. This was ruin,
indeed, absolute, irremediable ruin. "Sir," he said at last, "your
Majesty has a right to my life, not to my honour."
"Your honour!" Henry exclaimed, biting contempt in his tone.
The young man started, and for a second his cheek flamed under the
well-deserved reproach; but he recovered himself. "My debt to your
Majesty," he said, "I am willing to pay."
"Since pay you must," Henry muttered softly.
"But I claim to pay also my debt to the Captain of Creance."
The King of Navarre stared. "Oh," he said. "So you would have me take
your worthless life, and give up Lusigny?"
"I am in your hands, sire."
"Pish, sir!" Henry replied in angry astonishment. "You talk like a
child. Such an offer, M. de Noirterre, is folly, and you know it. Now
listen to me. It was lucky for you that I came in to-night, intending to
question you. Your madness is known to me only, and I am willing to
overlook it. Do you hear? I am willing to pardon. Cheer up, therefore,
and be a man. You are young; I forgive you. This shall be between you
and me only," the young prince continued, his eyes softening as the
other's head sank lower, "and you need think no more of it until the day
when I shall say to you, 'Now, M. de Noirterre, for Navarre and for
Henry, strike!'"
He rose as the last words passed his lips, and held out his hand. The
Vicomte fell on one knee, and kissed it reverently, then sprang to his
feet again. "Sire," he said, his eyes shining, "you have punished me
heavily, more heavily than was needful. There is only one way in which I
can show my gratitude, and that is by ridding you of a servant who can
never again look your enemies in the face."
"What new folly is this?" Henry asked sternly. "Do you not understand
that I have forgiven you?"
"Therefore I cannot betray Lusigny, and I must acquit myself of my debt
to the Captain of Creance in the only way which remains," the young man
replied firmly. "Death is not so hard that I would not meet it twice
over rather than again betray my trust."
"This is midsummer madness!" said the King, hotly.
"Possibly," replied the Vicomte, without emotion; "yet of a kind to
which your Grace is not altogether a stranger."
The words appealed to that love of the fanciful and the chivalrous which
formed part of the young King's nature, and was one cause alike of his
weakness and his strength. In its more extravagant flights it gave
opportunity after opportunity to his enemies, in its nobler and saner
expressions it won victories which all his astuteness and diplomacy
could not have compassed. He stood now, looking with half-hidden
admiration at the man whom two minutes before he had despised.
"I think you are in jest," he said presently and with some scorn.
"No, sir," the young man answered, gravely. "In my country they have a
proverb about us. 'The Noirterres,' say they, 'have ever been bad
players but good payers.' I will not be the first to be worse than my
name!"
He spoke with so quiet a determination that the King was staggered, and
for a minute or two paced the room in silence, inwardly reviling the
obstinacy of this weak-kneed supporter, yet unable to withhold his
admiration from it. At length he stopped, with a low exclamation.
"Wait!" he cried. "I have it! _Ventre Saint Gris_, man, I have it!" His
eyes sparkled, and, with a gentle laugh, he hit the table a sounding
blow. "Ha! ha! I have it!" he repeated gaily.
The young noble gazed at him in surprise, half suspicious, half
incredulous. But when Henry in low, rapid tones had expounded his plan,
the young man's face underwent a change. Hope and life sprang into it.
The blood flew to his cheeks. His whole aspect softened. In a moment he
was on his knee, mumbling the prince's hand, his eyes moist with
gratitude. Nor was that all; the two talked long, the murmur of their
voices broken more than once by the ripple of laughter. When they at
length separated, and Henry, his face hidden by the folds of his cloak,
had stolen to his lodgings, where, no doubt, more than one watcher was
awaiting him with a mind full of anxious fears, the Vicomte threw open
his window and looked out on the night. The moon had set, but the stars
still shone peacefully in the dark canopy above. He remembered, his
throat choking with silent emotion, that he was looking towards his
home--the round towers among the walnut woods of Navarre which had been
in his family since the days of St. Louis, and which he had so lightly
risked. And he registered a vow in his heart that of all Henry's
servants he would henceforth be the most faithful.
Meanwhile the Captain of Creance was enjoying the sweets of his coming
triumph. He did not look out into the night, it is true--he was over old
for sentiment--but pacing up and down the room he planned and
calculated, considering how he might make the most of his success. He
was still comparatively young. He had years of strength before him. He
would rise high and higher. He would not easily be satisfied. The times
were troubled, opportunities were many, fools not few; bold men with
brains and hands were rare.
At the same time he knew that he could be sure of nothing until Lusigny
was actually in his possession; and he spent the next few days in
painful suspense. But no hitch occurred nor seemed likely. The Vicomte
made him the necessary communications; and men in his own pay informed
him of dispositions ordered by the governor of Lusigny which left him in
no doubt that the loser intended to pay his debt.
It was, therefore, with a heart already gay with anticipation that the
Captain rode out of Creance two hours before midnight on an evening
eight days later. The night was dark, but he knew his road well. He had
with him a powerful force, composed in part of thirty of his own
garrison, bold hardy fellows, and in part of six score horsemen, lent
him by the governor of Montauban. As the Vicomte had undertaken to
withdraw, under some pretence or other, one-half of his command and to
have one of the gates opened by a trusty hand, the Captain foresaw no
difficulty. He trotted along in excellent spirits, now stopping to scan
with approval the dark line of his troopers, now to bid them muffle the
jingle of their swords and corselets that nevertheless rang sweet music
in his ears. He looked for an easy victory; but it was not any slight
misadventure that would rob him of his prey. If necessary he would fight
and fight hard. Still, as his company wound along the river-side or
passed into the black shadow of the oak grove, which stands a mile to
the east of Lusigny, he did not expect that there would be much
fighting.
Treachery alone, he thought, could thwart him; and of treachery there
was no sign. The troopers had scarcely halted under the last clump of
trees before a figure detached itself from one of the largest trunks,
and advanced to the Captain's rein. The Captain saw with surprise that
it was the Vicomte himself. For a second he thought that something had
gone wrong, but the young noble's first words reassured him. "It is
arranged," M. de Noirterre whispered, as the Captain bent down to him.
"I have kept my word, and I think that there will be no resistance. The
planks for crossing the moat lie opposite the gate. Knock thrice at the
latter, and it will be opened. There are not fifty armed men in the
place."
"Good!" the Captain answered, in the same cautious tone. "But you----"
"I am believed to be elsewhere, and must be gone. I have far to ride to
night. Farewell."
"Till we meet again," the Captain answered; and without more he saw his
ally glide away and disappear in the darkness. A cautious word set the
troop in motion, and a very few minutes saw them standing on the edge
of the moat, the outline of the gateway tower looming above them, a
shade darker than the wrack of clouds which overhead raced silently
across the sky. A moment of suspense while one and another shivered--for
there is that in a night attack which touches the nerves of the
stoutest--and the planks were found, and as quietly as possible laid
across the moat. This was so skilfully done that it evoked no challenge
and the Captain crossing quickly with a few picked men, stood in the
twinkling of an eye under the shadow of the gateway. Still no sound was
heard save the hurried breathing of those at his elbow, the stealthy
tread of others crossing, the persistent voices of the frogs in the
water beneath. Cautiously he knocked three times and waited. The third
rap had scarcely sounded before the gate rolled silently open, and he
sprang in, followed by his men.
So far so good. A glance at the empty street and the porter's pale face
told him at once that the Vicomte had kept his word. But he was too old
a soldier to take anything for granted, and forming up his men as
quickly as they entered, he allowed no one to advance until all were
inside, and then, his trumpet sounding a wild note of defiance,
two-thirds of his force sprang forward in a compact body while the other
third remained to hold the gate. In a moment the town awoke to find
itself in the hands of the enemy.
As the Vicomte had promised, there was no resistance. In the small keep
a score of men did indeed run to arms, but only to lay their weapons
down without striking a blow when they became aware of the force opposed
to them. Their leader, sullenly acquiescing, gave up his sword and the
keys of the town to the victorious Captain; who, as he sat his horse in
the middle of the marketplace, giving his orders and sending off riders
with the news, already saw himself in fancy Governor of Angouleme and
Knight of the Holy Ghost.
As the red light of the torches fell on steel caps and polished
hauberks, on the serried ranks of pikemen, and the circle of whitefaced
townsfolks, the picturesque old square looked doubly picturesque and he
who sat in the midst, its master, doubly a hero. Every five minutes,
with a clatter of iron on the rough pavement and a shower of sparks, a
horseman sprang away to tell the news at Montauban or Cahors; and every
time that this occurred, the Captain, astride on his charger, felt a new
sense of power and triumph.
Suddenly the low murmur of voices about him was broken by a new sound,
the distant beat of hoofs, not departing but arriving, and coming each
moment nearer. It was but the tramp of a single horse, but there was
something in the sound which made the Captain prick his ears, and
secured for the arriving messenger a speedy passage through the crowd.
Even at the last the man did not spare his horse, but spurred through
the ranks to the Captain's very side, and then and then only sprang to
the ground. His face was pale, his eyes were bloodshot. His right arm
was bound up in bloodstained cloths. With an oath of amazement, the
Captain recognized the officer whom he had left in charge of Creance,
and he thundered, "What is this? What is it?"
"They have got Creance!" the man gasped, reeling as he spoke. "They have
got--Creance!"
"Who?" the Captain shrieked, his face purple with rage.
"The little man of Bearn! The King of Navarre! He assaulted it five
hundred strong an hour after you left, and had the gate down before we
could fire a dozen shots. We did what we could, but we were but one to
seven. I swear, Captain, that we did all we could. Look at this!"
Almost black in the face, the Captain swore another oath. It was not
only that he saw governorship and honours vanish like Will-o'-the-wisps,
but that he saw even more quickly that he had made himself the
laughing-stock of a kingdom! And that was the truth. To this day, among
the stories which the southern French love to tell of the prowess and
astuteness of their great Henry, there is no tradition more frequently
told, none more frequently made the subject of mirth, than that of the
famous exchange of Creance for Lusigny; of the move by which between
dawn and sunrise, without warning, without a word, he gave his opponents
mate.
THE HOUSE ON THE WALL
In the summer of 1706, two years after the second battle of Hochstett,
which Englishmen call Blenheim, in a world ringing with the names of
Marlborough and Eugene, Louis of Baden and Villars, Villeroy the
Incapable and Boufflers the Brave--a world, for us of later days, of
dark chaos, luridly lit by the flames of burning hamlets, and galloped
through by huge troopers wearing periwigs and thigh boots, and carrying
pistols two feet long in the barrel--one of the Austrian captains sat
down before the frontier town of Huymonde, in Spanish Flanders, and
prepared to take it.
Whereat Huymonde was not too greatly or too fearfully moved. A warm
town, of fat burghers and narrow streets, and oak wainscots that winked
in the firelight, and burnished flagons that caught the drinker's smile,
it was not to be lightly excited; and it had been besieged, heaven only
knows how many times before. Men made ready as for a long frost, took
count of wine and provisions, and hiding a portion of each under the
cellar floor, thanked God that they were not the garrison, and that
times were changed since the Thirty Years' War. These things done and
the siege formed, they folded their hands and let themselves slide into
the current of an idle life, flecked from time to time with bubbles of
excitement. When the Austrian guns rumbled without, and the smoke eddied
slowly over the walls, they stood in the streets, their hands in their
muffs, and gossiped not unpleasantly; when the cannon were silent they
smoked their long pipes on the ramparts, and measured the advance of the
trenches, and listened while the oldest inhabitant prosed of the sack by
Spinola in '24 and the winter siege of '41.
Whether the good townsfolk were as brave in private--when at home with
their wives, for instance--may be doubted; but this for certain, the
Burgomaster's trouble lay all with the women. Whether they had less
faith in the great Louis, Fourteenth of the name, King of France--who,
indeed, seemed in these days less superior to a world in arms than in
the dawn of his glory--or they found the oldest inhabitant's tales too
precisely to the point, they had a way of growing restive once a week,
besieged the good Burgomaster's house, and demanded--with a thousand
shrill and voluble tongues--immediate surrender on terms. Between
whiles, being busy with scrubbing and baking, and washing their
children, they were quiet enough. But as surely as Sunday came round,
and with it a clean house and leisure to chat with the neighbours, the
Burgomaster's hour came too, and with it the mob of women shaking
crooked fingers at him, and bursting his ears with their shrill abuse.
He was a bold man, but he began to dream at night of De Witt and his
fate--of which he knew, with many gruesome particulars; and, from a
stout and pompous burgher, he dwindled in six weeks to a lean and morose
old tyrant. Withal he had no choice, for at his shoulder lurked the
French Commandant, a resolute man with a wit of his own and a pet
curtain--between the Stadthaus bastion and the bastion of the Bronze
Horse, and very handy to the former--whereat he shot deserters and the
like on the smallest pretext.
Still, the Burgomaster, as he wiped his sallow face, and watched the
last of the women withdraw on the seventh Sunday of the Siege, began to
think that, rather than pass through this again, he would face even the
curtain and a volley; if he were sure that one volley would do it, and
no botching. The ordeal had been more severe than usual: his cheek still
twitched, and he leaned against his official table to belie his
trembling knees. He had been settling a change of billets, when the
viragos broke in on him, and only his clerk had been present; for his
council--and this he felt sorely--much bullied in old days, were
treating him to solitude and the monopoly of the burden. His clerk was
with him now; but affected to be busy with the papers on the table.
Perhaps he was scared too, and equally bent on hiding it; at any rate,
it was the Burgomaster who first discovered that they were not alone,
but that one woman still lingered. She had placed herself in a corner of
the oak seat that ran round the panelled room; and the stained glass of
the windows, blazoned with the arms of Huymonde and the Counts of
Flanders, cast a veil of tawny lights between her and the gazer; behind
which she seemed to lurk. The Burgomaster started, then remembered that
the danger was over for the time--he was not afraid of one woman; and in
a harsh voice he bade her follow her mates.
"Begone, wench!" he said. "And go to your prayers! That is women's work.
Leave these things to men."
The woman rose to her full height. "When men," she answered, in a voice
at which the Burgomaster started afresh, "hide themselves, it is time
women stood forward. Where is your son?"
The Burgomaster swore.
"Where is your son?" the woman repeated firmly.
The Burgomaster swore again, his sallow face grown purple: then he
looked at his clerk and signed to him to go. The clerk went, wondering
and gaping--for this was unusual--and the two were left together.
At that the Burgomaster found his voice. "You Jezebel!" he cried,
approaching the woman. "How dare you come here to make mischief? How
dare you lay your tongue to my son's name? Do you know, shameless one,
that if I were to give the word----"
But at that word the woman caught fire, blazed up, and outdid him in
rage. She was a middle-aged woman and spare, with a face naturally pale
and refined, and an air of pride that peeped even through the neat
poverty of her dress. But at that word she shook her hands in his face
and her eyes blazed.
"Shameless?" she retorted. "No, but shameful; and through whom? Through
your son, your villain, your craven of a son who hides now! Through your
base-born tradesman of a son who dare face neither woman nor man."
"Silence!" the Burgomaster cried. "Silence!"
She broke off, but only to throw her whole soul into one breathless cry.
"Will he marry her?" she panted; and she held out her hands to him, palm
uppermost. "Will he marry her? In a word."
"No," the Burgomaster answered grimly.
She flung up her arms.
"Then beware!" she cried wildly, and for the first time she raised her
voice to the pitch of those other shrews. "Beware! You and yours have
brought us to shame; but the end is not yet, the end is not yet! You do
not know us."
At that he rallied himself. "I may not know you yet," he said hardily,
and indeed brutally; "but I know this, that such things as these come,
woman, of people setting themselves up to be better than their
neighbours, when they are as poor as church mice. They come of slighting
honest fellows and setting caps at those above you. Your daughter--or
you, woman, if you like it better--set the trap, and you are caught in
it yourselves. That is all."
"You wretch!" she gasped. "And he--will not marry her?"
"Not while I live," he answered firmly.
"And that is your last word?"
"It is," he said. "My very last."
He was on his guard, prepared to defend himself even against actual
violence. For he knew what angry women were and of what they were
capable even against a Burgomaster. But after a tense pause of suspense,
during every moment of which he expected her to fall upon him, she said
only, "Where is he?"
"I shall not tell you," he answered. "Nor would it help you if you
knew!"
"And that is all?"
"That is all."
It was not their first interview. She had pled with him before, and
knelt and wept and abased herself before him. She had done all that the
love that tore her heartstrings--the love that made it so much more
difficult to see her child suffer than to suffer herself, the love that
every moment painted the bare room at home, and her daughter prostrate
there in shame and despair--she had done all that even love could
suggest. There was no room therefore for farther pleading, for farther
prayers; she had threatened, and she had failed. What, then, remained to
be done?
Nothing, the Burgomaster thought, as in a flash of triumph and relief he
watched her go, outfaced and defeated. Nothing; and he hugged himself on
the prudence that had despatched his son out of the way in time, and
rendered a match with that proud pauper brat impossible. Nothing; but to
the woman, as she went, it seemed that everything remained to be done.
As she left the little square with its tall slender gabled houses and
plunged into the narrow street that led to her house on the wall, the
story of her life in Huymonde spread itself before her in a string of
scenes that now--now alas! but never before--seemed to find their
natural sequence in this tragedy. Nine years before she had come to
Huymonde with her artist husband; but the great art of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries was already dying or dead in Flanders, and with it
the artistic sense, and the honour once paid to it. Huymonde made delft
still, and pottery, but on old conventional lines, in an endless
repetition of old formal patterns, with no touch of genius or
appreciation. Trade, and a desire to win the florid ease, the sleek
comfort of the burgher, possessed the town wholly. The artist had found
himself a stranger in a strange land; had struggled on, despising and
despised, in the quaint house on the wall, at which he had snatched on
his first coming because it looked over the open country. There, after
seven years, he had slipped out of life, scarcely better known, and no
whit more highly appreciated than on the day of his arrival.
After that the story was of two women living _sola cum sola_--one wholly
for the other--suspected, if not disliked, by their neighbours, and for
their part alien in all their thoughts and standards; since the artist's
widow could not forget that he had been the favourite pupil of Peter
Paul's old age, or that her father had counted quarterings. _Sola cum
sola_, until one day the war began, and Huymonde set about looking to
its defences. Then a young man appeared on a certain evening to inspect
the House on the Wall, and see that the window, which looked out upon
the level country side, was safely and properly built up and
strengthened.
"You must have a sergeant and guard billeted here!" was his first sharp
word; and the widow had sighed at this invasion of their privacy, which
was also their poverty. But the young girl, standing sideways in that
very window, which was to be closed, had pouted her red lips and frowned
on the intruder, and the sergeant had not come, nor the guard. Instead
the young man had returned, at first weekly, then at shorter intervals,
to see that the window defences remained intact; and with his appearance
life in the House on the Wall had become a different thing. He was the
son of the Burgomaster of the town, he would be the richest man in the
town, his wife might repay with interest and advantage the dull bovine
scorn to which the city dames had treated her mother. The widow
permitted herself to hope. Her child was beautiful, with the creamy
fairness of Gueldres, and as pure as the sky. The young man was gay and
handsome; qualities which made their due impression on the elder woman's
heart, long unfamiliar with them. So, for more than a year he had had
the run of the house, he had been one of the family; and then one day he
had disappeared, and then one other day----
Oh, God of vengeance! She paused in the darkening street, as she thought
of it. Beside her a long window, warmly curtained, sent out a stream of
ruddy light. From the opposite house issued cheery voices and tinkling
laughter, and the steam of cooking. And before and behind, whichever way
she looked, firelight flashed through diamond panes and glowed in the
heart of green bottle-glass. Out in the street men shouldered past her,
talking blithely; and in distant kitchens cups clinked and ware
clattered, and every house--every house from garret to parlour, seemed
to her a home happy and gleeful. A home; and _her_ home! She stood at
the thought and cursed them; cursed them, and like the echo of her
whispered words the solemn boom of a cannon floated over the town.
A chance passer, seeing her stand thus, caught the whiteness of her
face, and thought her afraid. "Cheer up, mother!" he said over his
shoulder, "they are all bark and little bite!"
"I would they bit to the bone!" she cried in fury.
But luckily he was gone too far to hear or to understand; and, resuming
her course, she hurried on, her head bowed. A few minutes' walking
brought her to the foot of the stone steps that, in two parallel
flights, led up to the low-browed door of her house. There, as she set
her foot on the lowest stair, and wearily began the ascent, a man
advanced out of the darkness and touched her sleeve. For an instant she
thought it _the_ man, and she caught her breath and stepped back. But
his first word showed her her mistake.
"You live here?" he said abruptly. "Can I come in?"
In ordinary times his foreign accent and the glint of a pistol-barrel,
which caught her eye as he spoke, would have set her on her guard. But
to-night she had nothing to lose--nothing, it seemed to her, to hope.
She scarcely looked at the man. "As you please," she said dully. "What
do you want?"
"To speak to you."
"Come in then," she said.
She did not turn to him again until they stood together in the room
above, and the door was shut. Then she asked him a second time what he
wanted.
"Are we alone?" he returned, staring suspiciously about him.
"My daughter is above," she answered. "There is no one else in the
house."
"And you are poor?"
She shrugged her shoulders indifferently, and by a movement of her hands
seemed to put the room in evidence; one or two pictures, standing on
easels, and a few common painter's properties redeemed it from utter
bareness, utter misery, yet left it cold and faded.
Nevertheless, his next question took her by surprise. "What rent do you
pay?" he asked harshly.
"What rent?" she repeated, shaken out of her moodiness.
"Yes. How many crowns?"
"Twenty," she answered mechanically. What was his aim? What did he want?
"A year?"
"Yes, a year."
The man had a round shaven whitish face that sat in the circle of a
tightly tied Steinkirk cravat, like an ivory ball in a cup; and short
hair, that might on occasion line a periwig. Notwithstanding his pistol,
he had rather the air of a tradesman than a soldier until you met his
eyes, which flashed with a keen glitter that belied his smug face and
shaven cheeks. Those eyes caught the widow's eyes as he answered her,
and held them.
"Twenty crowns a year," he said. "Then listen. I will give you two
hundred crowns for this house--for one night."
"For this house for one night?" she repeated, thinking she had not heard
aright.
"For this house, for one night!" he answered.
Then she understood. She was quick-witted, she had lived long in the
house and knew it. Without more she knew that God or the devil had put
that which she sought into her hands; and her first impulse was to pure
joy. The thirst for vengeance welled up, hot and resistless. Now she
could be avenged on all; on the hard-hearted tyrant who had rejected her
prayer, on the sleek dames who would point the finger at her child, on
the smug town that had looked askance at her all these years--that had
set her beyond the pale of its dull grovelling pleasures, and shut her
up in that lonely House on the Wall! Now--now she had it in her hand to
take tenfold for one. Her face so shone at the thought that the man
watching her felt a touch of misgiving; though he was of the boldest or
he had not been there on that errand.
"When?" she said. "When?"
"To-morrow night," he answered. And then, leaning forward, and speaking
lightly but in a low voice, he went on, "It is a simple matter. All you
have to do is to find a lodging and begone from here by sunset, leaving
the door on the latch. No more; for the money it shall be paid to you,
half to-night and half the day after to-morrow."
"I want no money," she said.
"No money?" he exclaimed incredulously.
"No, no money," she answered, in a tone and with a look that silenced
him.
"But you will do it?" he said, almost with timidity.
"I will do it," she answered. "At sunset to-morrow you will find the
door on the latch and the house empty. After that see that you do your
part!"
His eyes lightened. "Have no fear," he said grimly. "But mark one thing,
mistress," he continued. "It is an odd thing to do for nothing."
"That is my business!" she cried, with a flash of rage.
He had been about to warn her that during the next twenty-four hours she
would be watched, and that on the least sign of a message passing
between her and those in authority the plot would be abandoned. But at
that look he held his peace, said curtly that it was a bargain then;
and in a twinkling he was gone, leaving her--leaving her alone with her
secret.
Yet for a time it was not of that or of her vengeance that she thought.
Her mind was busy with the years of solitude and estrangement she had
passed in that house and that room; with the depression that little by
little had sapped her husband's strength and hope, with the slow decay
of their goods, their cheerfulness, even the artistic joys that had at
first upheld them; with the aloofness that had doomed her and her child
to a dreary existence; with this last great wrong.
"Yes, let it be! let it be!" she cried. In fancy she saw the town lie
below her--as she had often seen it with the actual eye from the
ramparts--she saw the clustering mass of warm red roofs and walls, the
outlying towers, the church, the one long straight street; and with
outstretched arm she doomed it--doomed it with a vengeful sense of the
righteousness of the sentence.
Yet, strange to say, that which was uppermost in her mind and steeled
her soul and justified the worst, was not the last thing of which she
had to complain--her daughter's wrong--but the long years of loneliness,
the hundred, nay, the thousand, petty slights of the past, bearable at
the time and in detail, but intolerable in the retrospect now hope was
gone. She dwelt on these, and the thought of what was coming filled her
with a fearful joy. She thought of them, and took the lamp and passed
into the next room, and, throwing the light on the rough face of
brickwork that closed the great window, she eyed the cracks eagerly, and
scarcely kept her fingers from beginning the work. For she understood
the plot. One man working silently within, in darkness, could demolish
the wall in an hour; then a whistle, rope ladders, a line of men
ascending, and before midnight the house would vomit armed men, the
nearest gate would be seized, the town would lie at the mercy of the
enemy!
Presently she had to go to her daughter, but the current of her thoughts
kept the same course. The girl was sullen, and lay with her face to the
wall, and gave short answers, venting her misery after the common human
fashion on the one who loved her best. The mother bore it, not as before
with the patience that scorned even to upbraid, but grimly, setting down
each peevish word to the score that was so soon to be paid. She lay all
night beside her child, and in the small hours heard her weep and felt
the bed shake with her unhappiness, and carried the score farther; nay,
busied herself with it, so that day and the twittering of sparrows and
the booming of the early guns took her by surprise. Took her by
surprise, but worked no change in her thoughts.
She was so completely under the influence of the idea, that she felt no
fear; the chance of discovery, and the certainty that if discovered she
would be done to death without mercy, did not trouble her in the least.
She went about her ordinary tasks until late in the afternoon; then,
without preface or explanation, she told her daughter that she was going
out to seek a lodging.
The girl was profoundly astonished. "A lodging?" she cried, sitting up.
"For us?"
"Yes," the mother answered coldly. "For whom do you think?"
"And you will leave this house?"
"Yes."
"But when?"
"To-night."
"Leave this house--for a lodging--to-night?" the girl faltered. She
could not believe her ears. "Why? What has happened?"
Then the woman, in the fierceness of her mood, turned her arms against
her child. "Need you ask?" she cried bitterly. "Do you want to go on
living in this house--in this house, which was your father's? To go in
and out at this door, and meet our neighbours and talk with them on
these steps? To wait here--here, where every one knows you, for the
shame that will come? For the man who will never come?"
The girl sank back, shuddering and weeping. The woman covered her head
and went out, and presently returned; and in the grey of the evening,
which within the walls fell early, the two left the house, the elder
carrying a bundle of clothes, the younger whimpering and wondering.
Stupefied by the suddenness of the movement, and her mother's stern
purpose, she did not observe that they had left the door on the latch,
and the House on the Wall unguarded.
The people with whom they had found a lodging, a little room under the
sharply sloping tiles, knew them by name and sight--that in so small a
place was inevitable--but found nothing strange in the woman's reason
for moving; she said that at home the firing broke her daughter's rest.
The housewife indeed could sympathize with her, and did so. "I never go
to bed myself," she said roundly, "but I dream of those wretches sacking
the town, and look to awake with my throat cut."
"Tut--tut!" her husband answered angrily. "You will live to wag your
tongue and make mischief a score of years yet. And for the town being
sacked, there is small chance of that--in these days."
The elder of his new lodgers repeated his words. "Small chance of that?"
she said mechanically. "Is that so?"
The man looked at her with patronage. "Little or none," he said. "If we
have to cry Enough, we shall cry it in time, and on terms you may be
sure; and they will march in like gentlemen, and an end of it."
"But if it happen at night?" the woman asked curiously. She felt a
strange compulsion to put the question. "If they should take us by
surprise? What then?"
The man shrugged his shoulders. "Well, then, of course, things might be
different," he said. "But, sho! it won't happen. No fear!" he continued
hastily, and in a tone that belied his words. "And you, wife, get back
to your pots and leave this talking! You frighten yourself to death with
imaginings!"
The woman from the House on the Wall went upstairs to her garret. She
did not repent of what she had done; but a sense of its greatness began
to take hold of her, and whether she would or not, she found herself
waiting--waiting and watching for she alone knew what. Given a companion
less preoccupied with misery and she must have been suspected. But the
girl lay moodily on her bed, and the widow was at liberty to stand at
the window with her hands spread on the sill, and look, and listen, and
look, and listen, unwatched. She could not see the street, for below
their dormer the roof ran down steeply a yard or more to the eaves; but
she had full command of the opposite houses, and at one of the windows a
young girl was dressing herself. The woman watched her plait her fair
hair, looking sideways the while at a little mirror; and saw her put on
a poor necklace and remove it again and try a piece of ribbon.
Gradually the watcher became interested; from interest she passed to
speculation, and wondered with a slight shudder how this girl would fare
between that and morning. And then the girl looked up and met the
woman's eyes with the innocence of her own--and the woman fell back from
the window as if a hand had struck her.
She went no more after that to the window; but until it was quite dark
she sat in a chair with her hands on her lap, forcing herself to
quietude, as women will, where men would tramp the floor unceasingly.
When it was quite dark she trimmed and lit the lamp, and still she did
not repent. But she listened more and more closely, and with less
concealment. And the face of the girl preening herself at her poor
mirror returned again and again, and troubled her. She could contemplate
the fate of the town as a whole, and say, let it be! Ay, in God's name
let it be! But the one face seen at a window, the one case brought home
to her, clung to her mind, and pricked and pained her--dully.
By-and-by she heard the clock strike ten, and her daughter, turning
feverishly on the bed, asked her peevishly when she was going to lie
down. "Presently," she answered, "presently." And still she sat and
listened, and still the girl's face haunted her. She began to picture in
detail the thing for which she was waiting. She fancied that she could
hear the first alert, followed by single cries, these by a roar of
alarm, this by the wild rush of feet; then she heard the crashing
volley, the rattle of hoofs on the pavement, the whirl of the flight
through the streets, the shouts of "Germany! Germany!" as the troops
swept in triumphant! And then--ah, then!--she heard the things that
would follow, the crashing in of doors, the sudden glare of flames, the
screams of men driven to the wall, the yells of drunken Saxons, the
shrieks of women, the----
No more! No more! She could not bear it. With a shudder she stood erect,
and looked about her--wildly. The lamp burned low, her daughter was
asleep. With a swift movement the mother caught up a shawl that lay
beside the bed, and turned to the door.
Alas, too late. She had repented, but too late. With her hand on the
latch, her foot on the threshold, she stood, arrested by a low distant
cry that caught her ear, and swelled even as she listened to it, into a
roar of many voices rousing the town. What was it? Alas, she knew; she
knew, and cowered against the door whitefaced and shaking. A moment
passed, and the alarm, after sinking, rose again, and now there was no
doubt of its meaning. Shod feet pattered through the streets, windows
clattered up noisily; a wild medley of voices broke out, and again in a
few seconds was lost in the crashing sound of the very volley she had
foreheard!
From that moment it seemed to her that hell was broken loose in the
town; and she had loosed it! She could no longer, in the din that rose
from the street, distinguish one sound from another; but the crash of
distant cannon, the heavy tramp of feet near at hand, the screams and
cries and shouting, the blare of trumpets, all rose in a confused babel
of sounds that shook the very houses, and blanched the cheeks and drove
the blood to the heart. The woman, cowering against the door, covered
her ears, and groaned. Her horror at what she had done was so great,
that she did not heed what was passing near her, nor give a thought to
the child in the same room with her until the latter's voice struck her
ear, and she turned and found her daughter standing in the middle of the
floor, her hand to her breast, and her eyes wide. Then the mother awoke
in her again; with pallid shaking lips she cried to her to lie down--to
lie down, for there was no danger.
But the girl raised her hand for silence. "Hush!" she said. "I hear a
step! It is his! It is his! And he is coming to me! Mother, he is coming
to me!"
The mother imagined that terror had turned the girl's brain; it was
inconceivable that in that roar of sound a single step could make itself
heard, or be recognized. And she tried, in a voice that shook with
horror and remorse, to repeat her meaningless words of comfort. But
they died on her lips, died still-born, as the door flew open, and a man
rushed in, gazed an instant, then caught her child in his arms.
It was the Burgomaster's son!
The woman from the House on the Wall leaned an instant against the
door-post, gazing at them. Little by little as she looked the expression
in her eyes changed, and they took the cold, fixed, distant look of a
sleep-walker. A moment and she drew a shuddering breath, and turned and
went out, and, groping in the outside darkness for the balustrade, went
unfaltering into the street.
A part of the garrison happened to be retreating that way at the time. A
few were still turning to fire at intervals; but the greater number were
hurrying along with bent heads, keeping close to the houses, and intent
only on escaping. Reaching the middle of the roadway she stood there
like a rock, her face turned in the direction whence the fugitives were
hastening.
Presently she saw that for which she waited. In the reek of smoke about
the burning gate, towards which she looked--and the flames of which
filled the street with a smoky glare--the glitter of steel shone out;
and in a moment, rank on rank, a dense column of men appeared, marching
shoulder to shoulder. She watched them come nearer and nearer, filling
the street from wall to wall, until she could see the glare of their
eyes; then with a cry which was lost in the tumult she rushed on the
bayonets.
With eyes shut, with arms open to receive the thrust. But the man whom
she had singled out--for one she had singled out--dropped his point with
an oath, and dealt her a buffet with butt and elbow that flung her aside
unhurt. A second did the same, and a third, until, bandied from one to
another, she fell against the wall, breathless and dizzy, but unhurt.
The column swept on; and she rose. She had escaped--by a miracle, as it
seemed to her. But despair still held her, and the roar of a mine
exploding not far off, the stunning report of which was followed by
heartrending wails, drove her again on her fate. She had not far to
look, for hard on the foot followed a troop of dragoons. The horses,
excited by the fire and the explosion, were plunging in every direction;
and even as the crazed woman's eyes alighted on them one fell and threw
its rider. It seemed to her that she saw her doom; and, darting from the
wall, she flung herself before them.
What was one woman on such a night, in such an inferno? The torrent of
iron, remorseless, unchecked, thundered over her and drove on along the
street. It seemed impossible that she should have escaped. Yet when some
came to look to the fallen soldier--whose neck was broken--the woman
beside him rose unhurt and without a scratch, and staggered to the
wall. There she leaned one moment to recover her breath and shake off
her giddiness, and a second to think; then with a new expression on her
face, an expression between hope and fear, she took her way weakly along
the street. The first turning on the right, the second on the left
brought her unmolested--for the enemy were quelling the last resistance
in the Square--to the front of the House on the Wall. She looked up
eagerly and saw that the windows were dark; looked at the door, and by
the light of the distant fire saw that it was closed.
Still she scarcely dared to hope that the thing was true; that thing
which her miraculous escape had suggested to a mind almost unhinged. It
took her more than a minute to mount the steps and push the heavy door
open, and satisfy herself that in the outer room at least all was as she
had left it. A spark of fire still glowed on the hearth; she groped her
way to it, and blew it into a flame; and with shaking hands she lit a
spill of wood and waved it above her head, then held it.
Yes, here all was as she had left it. But in the farther room--_the_
room? What would she find there? She stared at the door and dared not
open it; then with a desperate hand tore it open, and stood on the
threshold.
Yes, and here! Here, too, all was as she had left it. She waved the
little brand above her head heedless of the sparks, waved it until it
flamed high and cast a light into every corner. But the searcher's eyes
sought only one thing, saw only one thing, and that was the mask of
brickwork that blocked the great window.
It was untouched! It was untouched! She had hoped as much for the last
five minutes; for everything, the closed door, the unchanged room had
pointed to it. Yet now that she was assured of it, and knew for certain
that she had not done the thing--that guilty as she had been in will,
not one life lost that night lay at her door, not one outrage, she fell
on her face and wept--wept, though it was the sweetest moment of her
life, prayed though she sought nothing but to thank God--prayed and wept
with childish cries of gratitude, until the light at her side went out
and left her in darkness, and through a rift in the masonry a single
star peered in at her.
In Huymonde there was wailing enough that night; ruin and loss, and a
broadcasting of lifelong sentences of penury. One fell to the
Burgomaster's lot; and had she still aught against him--but she had
not--the score was paid. And many prayed, and a few, when morning came,
and showed their roofs still standing, gave thanks. But to this woman
prostrate through the hours on the floor of the forsaken House on the
Wall, all that night was one long prayer and thanksgiving. For she had
passed through the fire, the smell of the singeing was on her garments,
and yet she was saved.
HUNT, THE OWLER
(1696)
Something more than two centuries ago--and just two years after Queen
Mary's death--when William the Third had been eight years on the throne,
and the pendulum of public sentiment, accelerated by the brusqueness of
his manners and no longer retarded by his consort's good nature, was
swinging surely and steadily to the Stuart side, the discovery of a
Jacobite plot to assassinate the King on his return from hunting set
back the balance with a shock which endured to the end of his reign.
It was the King's habit to go on Saturdays in his coach to Richmond
Park, returning to Kensington in the evening; and the scheme, laid bare,
was to fall upon him in a narrow lane leading from the river to Turnham
Green, where the miry nature of the ground rendered his progress slow.
For complicity in this plot nine persons, differing much in rank, from
Sir John Fenwick, who had been Colonel of King Charles's Life Guards, to
Keyes, a private in the Blues, suffered on the scaffold; and for a time
all England rang with it. The informers, Porter and Goodman, were viewed
with an abhorrence hardly less than that which the plot itself excited
in honest circles; and in this odium a man shared in some small degree,
who, though he had not been a party to the plot, had stooped, under the
stress of confinement and the fear of death, to give some evidence.
This was James Hunt, the Owler, or smuggler, a name forgotten now,
famous then. For years his house, in a lonely situation in the dreariest
part of Romney Marsh, had been the favourite house of call for Jacobites
bound for St. Germains or returning thence. At regular intervals, if
wind and tide served, a packet-boat ran between it and the French coast,
and between whiles the hiding-places in his rambling old house, which
had been originally contrived to hold runlets of Nantz and bales of
Lyons, lodged men whose faces were known in the Mall and St. James's,
and whose titles were not less real because for the nonce they wore
them, with their stars, in their pockets. Naturally, in the general
break-up consequent on the discovery of the Turnham Green plot, these
practices came to light, the lonely house in the marshes was entered,
and Hunt was himself seized and conveyed to London under a strong guard.
There he lay in the Marshalsea until, by discovering the names of
certain persons who had used his hiding-places, he was permitted to
ransom his life.
When all was told he was of no further use to the Government. He was
released, and one fine morning in September, '96, he walked out of his
prison a morose and lonely man. Resolute and daring by nature, but
accustomed to live in the open, with the sound of the lark in his ears,
it was only in the solitude of his cell that he had fallen below
himself. Now, under the open sky, he paid the penalty in a load of shame
and remorse. His feet carried him to the Jacobite house of call in
Maiden Lane, whither he had directed his nag to be sent; but on his
arrival at the inn his eye told him that the place was changed. The
ostler, who had been his slave, looked askance at him, the landlord,
once his obedient servant, turned his back. He was no longer Mr. Hunt,
of Romney, but Hunt the Approver, Hunt the Evidence. Flinging down a
crown and a curse he rode desperately out of the yard, and made haste to
leave London behind him.
But in the country it was little better. At inns on the Dover road,
where he had swaggered in old days the hero of a transparent mystery,
and only less admired than the famous Mr. Birkenhead, the Jacobite post,
whom even the Tower failed to confine--at these his reception was now
cold and formal; and presently the man's heart and hopes went forward
and settled hungrily on the two things left to him in this changed
world, his home in the marshes and his girl. His heart cried home! The
slighting looks of men who would have succumbed to a tithe of his
temptations, would not reach him there; there--he had a reason for
believing it--he would still read love and welcome in his child's eyes.
He was so far from having a turn for sentiment that the gibbet at
Dartford, though he had lain down and risen up for weeks under the
shadow of the gallows, caused him no qualms as he passed under it; nor
the man who hung in chains upon it. But when he rode up to the tavern at
the last stage short of Romney and saw Trot Eubank, the Romney
apothecary, loitering before the house, he drove an oath through his
closed teeth.
The man of drugs was too distant to hear it; nevertheless he smiled, and
not pleasantly. The apothecary had red cheeks and a black wig, and a
splayed face that promised heartiness. His small fishy eyes, however,
with a cast in them that was next door to a squint, belied the promise.
He came up to Hunt's stirrup and gave him joy of his freedom very
loudly. "And you will find all well at home," he continued. "All well
and hearty."
Hunt thanked him coldly, watered his horse, and drank a cup of ale with
the landlord; who looked at him pitifully, as at a man once admirable
and now fallen. Then he climbed into his saddle again and started
briskly. But he had not ridden a hundred paces before Eubank, on his old
white mare, was at his side. "My way is your way," said he.
Hunt grunted, and wondered how long that had been so; for New Romney,
where the apothecary lived, lay to the right. But he said nothing.
"They have quartered three soldiers on you," Eubank continued, squinting
out of the corner of one eye to mark the effect of his words, "and an
officer."
The smuggler checked his horse. "As if I had not done enough for them!"
he cried bitterly.
"Umph!" said the apothecary, drily, and with meaning. "The truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth! Eh, Mr. Hunt?"
He spoke below his breath, but Hunt caught the words and turned on him,
his face blazing with rage. "You dirty tar-mixer!" he cried, flinging
caution to the winds. "What do you mean? And how dare you ride out to
meet me? If you have anything to say, say it, and begone."
"Softly, softly, Mr. Hunt," Eubank answered, his face a shade paler.
"You know what I mean. There was a name wanting in your evidence--in
your deposition. A name lacking, d'ye take me?"
"A name?"
"Ay, Mr. Fayle's. And Mr. Fayle is missing, too. But I don't think," the
apothecary continued cunningly, his eyes gazing far apart, "that he is
in France. I think that he is nearer Romney. And that is why they have
quartered three soldiers on you."
"You villain!" Hunt cried, his voice shaking with passion. "This is
your work." And he raised his heavy riding-whip, and made as if he would
ride the other down. The two were alone on the marsh.
But quick as thought Eubank lugged a pistol from his holster and
levelled it.
"Softly, Mr. Hunt," he said. "Softly! I warn you, if anything happens to
me, it is known who is with me. Besides, I mean you no harm."
"And no good," said the smuggler, between his teeth. "What do you want?"
"What I have always wanted," the other answered. "Is there any harm in
wanting a wife?" he added, a whine in his voice.
"Yes, when she does not want you," Hunt retorted.
"She will want me--when the other is out of the way," the apothecary
answered sullenly.
"Out of the way?"
"Ay; in France, or--there!"--and the apothecary nodded towards the
gibbet on Dymchurch Flat, which they were just approaching. "It is for
her to choose," he added softly. "This side or that!"
"How?"
"If she takes me, Fayle may go hang, or cross the water, or as you
please, so that he go far enough. But if she will have him----"
"Well?" Hunt said; for Eubank paused, squinting horribly.
"She will marry him there!" the apothecary answered, pointing to the
gibbet.
"Ay?"
"I know that he is here," Eubank continued, his voice low, "and he
cannot escape me. She has bubbled the soldiers; they do not know him.
And for aught I know he goes out and in, and no one is the wiser. And
the game may be played as long as you please. But from to-day I am
there."
"You!" Hunt cried.
"To be sure," Eubank answered, letting his ill-concealed triumph appear.
"At the farm. I am the officer. Ah, would you? Mr. Hunt, back! Back, or
I fire."
The smuggler, on the impulse of the moment, had gone near to striking
him down; in face of the pistol and common-sense he lowered his hand,
cursed him, and bade him keep his distance for the cur he was; and so
with the width of the track between them the two rode on, like dogs
ill-coupled, Eubank keeping a squinting watch on Hunt's movements, Hunt
with his face hard set, and a gleam of fear in his eyes.
A little later he spied his daughter waiting and watching for him, on
the dyke near the farm--a lissom, graceful figure, with wind-blown hair
and skirts, visible half a mile away. Possibly he wished then that he
had struck hard and once while the man and he were alone on the Marsh.
But it was too late. She was there, and in a moment the meeting so long
and tenderly anticipated was over, and the girl, gently disengaging
herself with wet cheeks from his arms, turned to his companion.
"You may go, Mr. Eubank," she said austerely. "We do not need you. My
father is at home now."
But the apothecary, cringing and smiling, faltered that he was--that he
was coming to the house.
The words were barely audible, for his courage, not his malice, failed
him under her eyes. At any rate she did not understand. "To our house?"
she said.
"Yes," he answered, mouthing nervously, and looking his meanest, in his
vain endeavour to appear at ease.
Still she did not comprehend, and she looked to her father for light.
"Mr. Eubank is quartered on us," he said grimly.
And then for certain he wished that he had closed with the man while
they were alone; and had taken the chance of what might follow, pistol
or no pistol. For he saw the healthy brown of sun and wind fade from her
cheeks, and her grey eyes dilate with sudden terror; and he read in
these signs the perfect confirmation of the misgiving he had begun to
entertain. He knew as certainly as if she had told him that Mr. Fayle,
of Fawlcourt, was hidden at the farm. And what was worse, that Eubank,
if he had eyes, could not fail to know it also.
It was a relief to all three when a soldier sauntered into sight,
mooning up the path from the farm, and civilly greeting the owner, said
something about drinking his health. No further words passed then
between them, but all moved together towards the house, each avoiding
the other's eyes. The threshold reached, there was a momentary pause,
the girl looking full at the intruder with a flame of passion in her
face, as if she defied him to enter. But Eubank's eyes were lowered, he
saw nothing, and with a smirk, and a poor show of making apology, he
went in.
Hunt thought of force, and weighed the odds in his mind. But fresh from
prison, under the ban of Government, and with a wholesome dread of the
Marshalsea, he shrank from the attempt. And matters, once they were in
the house, went so quietly, that he began to fancy that he had been
mistaken. For one thing, the girl sought no private word with him, was
obtrusively public, and once gripped the nettle danger in a way that
startled him. It was at the evening meal. Eubank, ill at ease and
suspicious, was stealing glances this way and that, his one eye on the
settle that screened the entrance, the other on the staircase door that
led to the upper floor. On a sudden she rose as if she must speak or
choke. "Mr. Eubank," she cried, "you are here to hunt down Mr. Fayle!
You think that he is in my room! My room! I read it in your eyes, you
cur! You traitor!"
"Hush!" Hunt said in warning. This was no open fight such as he had
dared a score of times; and the malice in the man's face frightened him.
"But, I will speak!" she cried, fighting with her passion. "He thinks
it, and he shall search! Go--go now I Leave your men here, sir, to
watch, and do you see for yourself that he is not there! And then leave
the house!"
He was not at all for going to search, and cringed and muttered an
apology; but she would have him, and as good as forced him. Then, when
he had searched as much as he pleased--and it was little, with her
burning eyes watching him from the doorway--she brought him down again
and bade him go. "Go!" she cried.
"I never thought that he was there," he said slyly, smiling at the
floor. And of course he did not go, and she could not make him; and the
desperate attempt failed as hopelessly as her father could have told her
it would.
The whole position was strange. The tall clock ticked in the corner of
the great warm panelled kitchen; where the fire shone cosily on delft
and pewter, and on the china dogs and Nankin idols that skippers,
bringing cargoes of Hollands and Mechlin, had given to the Owler's
daughter. Through the open window the belated bees could be heard among
the hollyhocks, and a frugal swallow hawked to and fro for flies. The
quiet that falls on a farm in the evening lay on everything.
But within was a difference. There, to say nothing of the soldiers, who,
irritated by Eubank's supervision, hung about the open windows listening
sullenly, the three never ceased to watch and observe one another, ready
to spring, ready to fall back at a sign. Of all, perhaps, Hunt was most
mystified. He knew that in the search which had attended his arrest the
premises had been ransacked from roof to cellar; that every locker and
hiding-place had been laid open and discovered; and that apart from this
Eubank, who had played jackal in many of his adventures, was familiar
with all, even the most secret. Where, then, was Fayle?
He learned only too soon. When it came to closing time, "Your woman is
not in," said one of the soldiers; and he looked at the girl.
"Woman?" said Eubank, with meaning; "I have seen no woman."
"She was here at midday," the man answered, without suspicion.
Perhaps the girl had been expecting it, for she did not blench, though
Eubank's eyes were on her face. "Then leave the door on the latch," she
said; and she added, with fine contempt, "If a wench has a lover you
need not tell the town!"
She went upstairs with that, and Hunt, who was tired and mystified and
in a poor humour--things at home promising to turn out as ill as matters
abroad, went to his den off the kitchen and shut himself in to sulk. For
the use of Eubank and the soldiers two pallets had been laid in a room
on the farther side of the kitchen if they chose to use them; but with
the door on the latch Hunt had a shrewd suspicion that they would sit up
and watch. They soon fell silent, however, and though the remembrance of
the events which had happened since he last lay there kept him long
waking, and in miserable mood, he heard neither voices nor movements.
For himself he was sick at heart thinking of the girl and her lover, and
furious at the treachery of the hound who pursued her. Nevertheless,
Nature would have its way, and he was in the act of sinking into slumber
when a cry which pierced the night and was followed by a discord of
voices, raised in sharp contention, brought him startled to his feet.
He had little doubt that Eubank and his men had seized Fayle in the act
of entering the house; and enraged, yet bitterly aware of his impotence,
he huddled on some clothes, and in a twinkling was out of his room. But
in the kitchen, of which the outer door stood wide open to the night,
was only Eubank; who, without his wig, and with a pistol poised in his
uncertain hand, had entrenched himself in the angle between the settle
and the hearth. The smuggler, seeing no one else, vented his wrath on
him.
"You dog!" he cried. "Are honest men to be kept awake by such as you?
What does this mean?"
"It means that we have got your fine son-in-law!" the other retorted
with venom. "And we are going to keep him. So your distance, if you
please. I know you of old, and if you come within a yard of me I will
put a ball into you. Now mark that!"
"You have got him?" said Hunt, restraining himself with difficulty.
"Where?"
"They are bringing him," Eubank answered. "You will see him soon
enough." And then, as one of the soldiers appeared in the doorway, "Have
you got him?" the apothecary cried eagerly.
"Ay, ay," the man said.
"But where is he?"
"Hughes and Lort are bringing him."
"Are they enough?" Eubank cried anxiously.
"Plenty," the soldier answered with some scorn. "He made no fight."
"I'll lay you caught him under her window?" Eubank returned, licking his
lips.
The man nodded; then stood twiddling his cap, and looking ashamed of
himself. For Kate Hunt had just appeared at the open staircase door,
and thence, raised a step above the floor, with a hand on each post, was
taking in the scene.
Eubank--who did not see her--chuckled. "I thought so," he said, with an
evil grin; and between his bald head and his vile triumph he looked as
ugly as sin itself. "I knew he would be there. She did not deceive me,
with her door on the latch!"
Pistol, or no pistol, Hunt nearly fell upon him. The owler only
refrained because he became aware of his daughter's presence, and to his
great bewilderment read in her face not horror or misery, but a strange
passionate relief. He turned from her--they were bringing in the
prisoner. It was no surprise to him when Eubank, with a howl of
consternation, stepped back almost into the fire. "You fools!" the
apothecary cried, all his malignity appearing in his face, "that is not
the man! That is not----"
"Mr. Fayle?" said the prisoner coolly. "No, it is not. And yet, Mr.
Eubank, I think you know me. Or, you should know me. You have seen me
often enough."
The apothecary stared, started, drew a deep breath of relief, and was
himself again. "Yes, I know you--Mr. Birkenhead," he said. "I have lost
Fayle, but I have won a thousand guineas. Lads!" he continued, raising
his voice almost to a scream, "we have shot at the pigeon and killed
the crow! We have killed the crow! It is Birkenhead, the Post--the
Jacobite Post! And there is a thousand guineas on his head!"
Hunt gathered himself together. "Mr. Birkenhead," he said, "we are two
to four, but say the word, and----"
"I'll say a word for you presently," the Jacobite answered with a quick
look of acknowledgment, "where we are going. But first, to show Mr.
Eubank that he is more lucky than he thinks, and has caught his pigeon
as well as his crow. Fayle," he continued, raising his voice, "come in!"
A gawky, long-limbed woman stalked in, smiling grimly at Eubank, but
with the tail of his eye on the girl in the doorway. Eubank drew back,
and the colour faded from his cheeks. He breathed hard, and the pistol
in his hand wavered. "Look here," he began. "Let us talk about this."
But the Jacobite raised his hand for silence. "Dewhurst!" he cried.
A tall, swarthy seaman, with a scarred cheek and a knitted nightcap,
stepped briskly in, a cutlass in his hand.
"Fawcus!"
Another entered, who but for the scar might have been his twin.
"Bonaventure! And Mr. Eubank," Birkenhead continued, lowering his voice
and speaking with treacherous civility, "let me warn you not to be too
free with that pistol, for these good fellows will assuredly put you on
the fire if any one is hurt. Is Bonaventure there? Yes. Moyreau? Yes.
Valentin? I am sure that you understand me, Mr. Eubank. You will be
careful."
But the warning was needless. As man after man filed in and formed up
before him--all armed to the teeth, and all wild, reckless fellows in
sea-boots, nightcaps, and tarry jerkins--Eubank's craven heart melted
within him. Setting his pistol down on the settle, he stood speechless,
sallow, shaking with fear, such fear as almost stays the heart, yet
leaves the brain working--leaves the man created in God's image to be
dragged out to his death, writhing and shrieking--a sight to haunt brave
men's memories.
He was spared that, yet came near to it. "Mr. Eubank," said Birkenhead
sternly, "you will come with me. I have a sloop at the old
landing-place, and before daylight we shall be in Calais roads. There is
a cell in the Bastille waiting for you, and I shall see you in it. I'll
hold you a hostage for Bernardi."
The wretch shrieked and fell on his knees and grovelled, crying for
mercy; but Birkenhead only answered, "Get up, man, get up; or must my
men prick you?" And then to the others, "Mr. Hunt," he continued, "you
too must come with us. But have no fear. Believe me you will be better
there than here, and shall be well reported. Mr. Fayle and your daughter
will come, of course. Tie the others and leave them. And hurry, men,
hurry. Bring your money, Mr. Hunt; King James has none too much of that.
I can give you ten minutes to pack, and then we must be moving lest they
take the alarm in Romney."
As a fact they took no alarm in Romney. But a shepherd, belated that
night with a sick ewe, saw a long line of lanthorns go bobbing across
the marsh to the sea, and went home and told his neighbours that Hunt
was at his old tricks again. One of them, knowing that the soldiers were
there, laughed in his face and went to see, and learning the truth
carried the story into Romney, whence it spread to London and brought
down a mob of horse and foot and messengers, and from one end of England
to the other the descent and the audacity of it were a nine days'
wonder. However, by that time the nest was cold and the birds long
flown, and Birkenhead, with one more plume in his crest, was preening
his feathers at St. Germains.
THE TWO PAGES
(1580)
Yes, I have seen changes. When I first served at court, whither I went
in the year 1579--seven years after the St. Bartholomew--the King
received all in his bedchamber, and there every evening played primero
with his intimates, until it was time to retire; Rosny and Biron, and
the great men of the day, standing, or sitting on chests round the
chamber. If he would be more private he had his cabinet; or, if the
matter were of prime importance, he would take his confidants to an open
space in the garden--such as the white-mulberry grove, encircled by the
canal at Fontainebleau; where, posting a Swiss guard who did not
understand French, at the only bridge that gave access to the place, he
could talk without reserve.
In those days the court rode, or if sick, went in litters. Coaches were
only coming into fashion, Henry, who feared nothing else, having so
invincible a distaste for them that he was wont to turn pale if the
coach in which he travelled swayed more than usual. Ladies, the Queen's
mother and her suite excepted, rode sideways on pads, their feet
supported by a little board; and side-saddles were rare. At great
banquets the fairest and noblest served the tables. We dined at ten in
the country and eleven in Paris; instead of at noon, as is the custom
now.
When the King lay alone, his favourite pages took it by turns to sleep
at his feet; the page on duty using a low truckle bed that in the
daytime fitted under the King's bed, and at night was drawn out. Not
seldom, however, and more often if the times were troublous, he would
invite one of his councillors to share his couch, and talk the night
through with him; a course which in these days might seem undignified.
Frequently he and the Queen received favourite courtiers before they
left their beds; particularly on New Year's morning it was the duty of
the Finance Minister to wait on them, and awaken them with a present of
medals struck for the purpose.
And I recall many other changes. But one thing, which some young sparks,
with a forwardness neither becoming in them nor respectful to me, have
ventured to suggest, even in my presence--that we who lived in the old
war time were a rougher breed and less dainty and chivalrous than the
Buckinghams and Bassompierres of to-day--I roundly deny. On the
contrary, I would have these to know that he who rode in the wars with
Henry of Guise--or against him--had for his example not only the
handsomest but the most courtly man of all times; and has nothing to
learn from a set of pert fellows who, unable to acquire the stately
courtesy that becomes a gentleman, are fain to air themselves in a
dandified-simpering trim of their own, with nought gallant about them
but their ribbons and furbelows.
That such are stouter than the men of my day, no one dare maintain. I
have seen Crillon, whom veterans called the brave; and I have talked
with La Noue of the Iron Arm; for the rest, I can tell you of one--he
was a boy fourteen years old--known to me in my youth, who had it not in
him to fear.
He was page, along with me, to the King of Navarre; a year my junior,
and my rival. At riding, shooting and fencing he was the better; at
paume and tennis he always won. But naturally, being the elder, I had
the greater strength, and when the sharp sting of his wit provoked me, I
could drub him, and did so more than once. No extremity of defeat,
however, no, nor any severity of punishment could wring from Antoine a
word of submission; prostrate, with bleeding face, he was as ready to
fly at my throat as before I laid hand on him. And more, though I was
the senior, he was the life and soul and joy of the ante-chamber; the
first in mischief, the last in retreat; the first to cry a nick-name
after a burly priest who chanced to pass us as we lounged at the
gates--and the first to be whipped when it turned out that the King had
a mind to please the clergy.
It followed that from the first I viewed him with a strange mixture of
rivalry and affection; ready at one moment to quarrel with him and beat
him for a misword, and the next to let him beat me if it pleased him. At
this time the King of Navarre had his court sometimes at Montauban,
sometimes at Nerac; and there were rumours of a war between him and the
King of France; to be clear, it was this year, that in the hope of
maintaining the peace, the latter's mother, the Queen Catherine, came
with a glittering train of ladies to Nerac, and paid her court to our
King, and there were ball and pageants and gay doings by day and night.
But the Huguenots were not lightly taken in, and under this fair mask
suspected treachery, and not without reason; for one night, during a
ball, Catherine's friends seized a strong town, and but for Henry's
readiness--who took horse that moment and before daylight had surprised
a town of France to set against it--they would have gained the
advantage. So in the event Catherine did little, no one trusting her,
and in the end she returned to Paris wiser than she came; but for the
time the visit lasted the court gaieties continued, and there were
masques and dances, and the thought of war was seemingly far from the
minds of all.
Now in the room which was then the King's Chamber at Montauban, is a
window, at a great height from the ground, a very deep ravine, which is
one of the main defences of the city, lying below it. In the adjoining
ante-chamber is a similar window, and between the two is a projecting
buttress, and outside the sill of each is a stone ledge a foot wide,
which runs round the buttress. I do not know who first thought of it,
but one day when the King was absent and we pages were lounging in the
room--which was against the rules, since we should have been in the
ante-chamber--some one challenged Antoine to walk on the ledge round the
buttress, going out by the one window and returning by the other. I have
said that the ledge was but a foot wide, the depth below infinite. It
turned me sick only to look down and see the hawks hang and circle in
the gulf. Nevertheless, before any could speak, Antoine was outside the
casement poising himself on the airy ledge; a moment, and with his face
turned inwards to the wall, his slight figure outlined against the sky,
he began to edge his way round the buttress.
I called to him to come back; I expected each moment to see him reel and
fall; the others, too, stood staring with uneasy faces; for they had not
thought that he would do it. But he did not heed; an instant, and he
vanished round the buttress, and still we stood, and no one moved; no
one moved, until with a shout he showed himself at the other window, and
sprang down into the ante-chamber. His eyes were bright with the triumph
of it; his hair waved back from his brow as if the breeze from the gulf
still stirred it. He cried to me to do the feat in my turn, he pointed
his finger at me, dared me, and before them all he called me "Coward!
Coward!"
But I am not ashamed to confess a weakness I share with many men of
undoubted courage--I could never face a great height; and though I
burned with wrath and shame, and raged under his taunts, though I could
have confronted any other form of death, at his instigation, or I
thought I could, though I even went so far as to leap on the seat within
the window and stand--and stand irresolute--I stopped there. My head
turned, my skin crept. I could not do it. The victory was with Antoine;
he whom I had thrashed for some impertinence only the night before, now
held me up to scorn and drove me from the room with jeers and laughter.
None of the others had greater courage; none dared do the feat; but I
was the eldest and the biggest, and the iron entered into my heart. Day
after day for a week, whenever the chamber was empty, I crept to the
window and looked down and watched the kites hover and drop, and plumbed
the depth with my eyes. But only, to turn away--sick. I could not do it.
Resolve as I might at night, in the morning, on the window ledge, with
the giddy deep below me, I was a coward.
One evening, however, when the King was supping with M. de Roquelaure,
and I believed the chamber to be deserted, I chanced to go to the window
of the ante-chamber after nightfall. I stepped on the seat--that I had
done often before; but this time, looking down, I found that I no longer
quailed. The darkness veiled the ravine; to my astonishment I felt no
qualms. Moreover, I had had supper, my heart was high; and in a moment
it occurred to me that now--now in the dark I could do it, and regain my
pride.
I did not give myself time to think, but went straight out to the
gallery, where I found Antoine and two or three others teasing Mathurine
the woman-fool. My entrance was the signal for a taunt. "Ho, Miss White
Face! Come to borrow Mathurine's petticoats?" Antoine cried, standing
out and confronting me. "It is you, is it?"
"Yes," I answered sharply, meeting his eyes and speaking in a tone I had
not used for a week. "And if you do not mend your manners, Master
Antoine----"
"Go round the buttress!" he retorted with a grimace.
"I will!" I answered. "I will! And then----"
"You dare not!"
"Come!" I said; "come, and see! And when I have done it, my friend----"
I did not finish the sentence, but led the way back to the ante-chamber;
assuming a courage which, as a fact, was fast oozing from me. The cold
air that met me as I approached the open window sobered me still more;
but Antoine's jeers and my companions' incredulity stung me to the
necessary point, and at once I stepped on the ledge, and without giving
myself time to think, turned my face to the wall and began to edge
myself slowly along it; my heart in my mouth, my flesh creeping, as I
gradually realized where I was; every nerve in my body strung to
quivering point.
Certainly in the daylight I could not have done it. Even now, when the
depth over which I balanced myself was hidden by the darkness, and I had
only my fancy to conquer, I trembled, my knees shook, a bat skimming by
my ear almost caused me to fall; I was bathed in perspiration. The depth
drew me; I dared not for my life look into it. Yet I turned the corner
of the buttress in safety, and edged my way along its front, glueing
myself to the wall; and came at last, breathing hard, to the second
corner, and turned it, and saw with a gasp of relief the lights in the
chamber. A moment--a moment more, and I should be safe.
At that instant I heard something, and cast a wary eye backwards the way
I had come. I saw a shadowy form at my elbow, and I guessed that Antoine
was following me. With a shudder I hastened my steps to avoid him, and I
was already in the angle formed by the wall and buttress--whence I
could leap down into the chamber--when he called to me.
"Hist!" he cried softly. "Stop, man! the King is there! He has been
there all the time, I think."
I thought it only too likely, for I could see none of our comrades at
the window; and I heard men's deeper voices in the room. To go on,
therefore, and show myself was to be punished; and I paused and knelt
down in the angle where the ledge was wider. I recognized the King's
voice, and M. Gourdon's, and that of St. Martin, the captain of the
guard; I caught even their words, and presently, in a minute or two, and
against my will, I had surprised a secret--so great a secret that I
trembled almost as much as I had trembled at the outmost angle of the
buttress, hanging between earth and sky. For they were planning the
great assault on Cahors; for the first time I heard named those points
that are now household words; the walnut grove, and the three gates, and
the bridge, that fame and France will never forget. I heard all--the
night, the hour, the numbers to be engaged; and turned quaking to learn
what Antoine thought of it. Turned, but neither saw nor addressed him;
for he had gone back, and my eye, incautiously cast down, saw far, far
beneath me a torch and a little group of men--at the bottom of the void.
I became giddy at this sudden view of the abyss, wavered an instant, and
then with a cry of fear I chose the less pressing danger, and tumbled
forward into the room.
M. de Roquelaure had his point at my throat before I could rise; and I
had a vision of half a dozen men part risen, of half a dozen startled
faces all glaring at me. Fortunately M. de Rosny knew me and held the
other's arm. I was plucked up roughly, and set on my feet before the
King, who alone had kept his seat; and amid a shower of threats I was
bidden to explain my presence.
"You knave! I wish I had spitted you!" Roquelaure cried, with an oath,
when I had done so. "You heard all?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
They scowled at me between wrath and chagrin. "Friend Rosny, you were a
fool," M. de Roquelaure said with grimness.
"I think I was," the other answered. "But a flogging, a gag, and the
black hole will keep his tongue still as long as is needful."
Henry laughed. "I think we can do better than that!" he said, with a
glance of good nature. "Hark you, my lad; you are big enough to fight.
We will trust you, and you shall wear sword for the first time. But if
the surprise fail, if word of our coming go before us, we shall know
whom to blame, and you will have to reckon with M. de Rosny."
I fell on my knees and thanked him with tears; while Rosny and M. St.
Martin remonstrated. "Take my word for it, he will blurt it out!" said
the one; and the other, "You had better deliver him to me, sire."
"No," Henry said kindly. "I will trust him. He comes of a good stock; if
the oak bends, what tree shall we trust?"
"The oak bends fast enough, sire, when it is a sapling," Rosny retorted.
"In that case you shall apply _your_ sapling!" the King answered,
laughing. "Hark ye, my lad, will you be silent?"
I promised--with tears in my eyes; and with that, and a mind full of
amazement, I was dismissed, and left the presence, a grown man;
overjoyed that the greatest scrape of my life had turned out the
happiest; foreseeing honour, and rewards, and already scorning the other
pages as immeasurably beneath me. It was a full minute before I thought
of Antoine, and the chance that he, too, before he turned back, had
overheard the King's plan. Then I stood in the passage horrified--my
first impulse to return and tell the King. It came too late, however,
for in the mean time he and M. de Rosny had repaired to the closet, and
the others had withdrawn; and while I stood hesitating, Antoine slipped
out of the ante-chamber, and came to me on the stairs.
His first words went some way towards relieving me; they told me that he
had overheard something but not all; enough to know that the King
intended to surprise a place of strength, and a few details, but not the
name of the place. As soon as I understood this, and that I had nothing
to fear from him, I could not hide my triumph. When he declared his
intention of going with the expedition, I laughed at him.
"You!" I said. "You don't understand. This is not child's play!"
"And you will not tell me where it is?" he asked, raging.
"No! Go to your nurse and your pap-boat, child."
He flew at me at that like a mad cat, and I had to beat him until the
blood ran down his face before I could shake him off. Even then, and
while I thrust him out sobbing, he begged me to tell him--only to tell
him. Nor was that all. Through all the next day he haunted me and
persecuted me, now with prayers and now with threats; following me
everywhere with eyes of such hot longing that I marvelled at the
irrepressible spirit that shone in the lad.
Of course I told him nothing. Yet I was glad when the next day came, and
with it an announcement that Henry would visit M. de Gourdon and lie
that night at his house, four miles from Montauban, where the court then
was. Only eight gentlemen were invited to be of the party, with as many
ladies; the troop with a handful of servants riding out of the city
about five o'clock, and no one the wiser. No one saw anything odd in
the visit, nor in my being chosen to attend the King. But I knew; and I
was not surprised when we stopped at M. de Gourdon's only to sup, and
then getting to horse, rode through the night and the dusky oak woods,
by walled farms and hamlets, and under rustling poplars--rode many
leagues, and forded many streams. The night was hot, it was the month of
June; and it thundered continually, but with no rain. At this point and
that bands of men joined us, mysteriously, and in silence; until from
the hill with its bracken and walnut trees, we saw the lights of Cahors
below us, and the glimmer of the winding Lot, and heard the bells of the
city tolling midnight.
By this time, every road adding to our numbers, we were a great company;
and how we lay hidden through the early night in the walnut grove that
looks down on the river all men know; but not the qualms and eagerness
that by turns possessed me as I peered through the leaves at the distant
lights, nor the prayer I said that I might not shame my race, nor how my
heart beat when Henry, who was that day twenty-seven years old, gave the
order to advance in the voice of one going to a ball. Two men with a
petard--then a strange invention--led the way through the gloom,
attended by ten picked soldiers. After them came fifty of the King's
guards, and the King with two hundred foot; then the main body of a
thousand. We had the long bridge with its three gates to pass; and
beyond these obstacles, a city bitterly hostile, and occupied by a
garrison far outnumbering us. Never, indeed, did men enter on a more
forlorn or perilous enterprise.
I remember to this day how I felt as we advanced through the darkness,
and how long it seemed while we waited, huddled and silent, at the head
of the bridge, expecting the explosion of the petard, which had been
fixed to the first gate. At length it burst, filling the heavens with
flame; before the night closed down again on our pale faces, the leaders
were through the breach and past that gate, and charging madly over the
bridge, the leading companies all mingled together.
I had no fear now. If a friendly hand had not pulled me back, I should
have run on to the petard which drove in the second gate. As it was, I
passed through the second obstacle side by side with the King--but went
no farther. The garrison was awake now, and a withering fire from fifty
arquebuses swept the narrow bridge; those who were not struck stumbled
over the dying; the air was filled with groans and cries; a moment and
the very bravest recoiled, and sought safety behind the second gate,
where we stood in shelter.
The moment was critical, for now the whole city was aroused. Shouts of
triumph rose above the exploding of the guns; in every tower bells
jangled noisily, and on the summit of the last gateway on the bridge,
which from every loophole and window poured on us a deadly hail of
slugs, a beacon-fire blazed up, turning the black water below us to
blood.
I have said that the moment was critical--for France and for us. For a
few seconds all hung back. Then St. Martin sprang forward, and by his
side Captain Robert, who had fixed the first petard. They darted along
the bridge, but only to fall and lie groaning and helpless halfway over.
Henry made a movement as if to follow, but young M. de Rosny held him
back by force, while half a dozen soldiers made the attempt. Of these
four fell at once under the pitiless fire, and two crawled back wounded.
It seemed that a man must be more than mortal to pass that space; and
while one might count twenty no one moved.
Captain Robert lay scarcely fifteen paces from us, and by his side the
hammer, spike, and petard he had carried. He and they were visible in
the glow of ruddy light that poured down on the bridge. Suddenly, while
I stood panting and irresolute, longing, yet not daring--since I saw
older men hang back--suddenly a hand twitched my sleeve, and I turned to
find at my elbow, his hair streaming back from his brow, Antoine! The
lad's face and eyes flashed scorn at me. He waved his hand towards the
bridge.
"Coward!" he cried; and he struck me lightly on the cheek with his hand.
"Coward! Now follow me, if you dare!"
And, before any one could stay him, he darted from the shelter of the
gateway in which we stood; and raced on to the bridge. I heard a great
shout on our side, and the roar of a volley; but dully only, for,
enraged by the blow and the challenge, I followed him--I and a dozen
others. Some fell, but he ran on, and I after him. He snatched up the
petard and the hammer, I the spike. In a moment, as it seemed to me, we
were at the farther gate attaching the engine to it. I held the spike,
he hammered it; the smoke and the frowning archway, to some extent,
protected us from the fire of those above.
I often think of those few seconds with the pride and the garrulousness
of an old man. While they lasted we stood alone, separated from our
friends by the whole length of the third span of the bridge. For a few
seconds only indeed; then, with a yell of triumph, the remains of
Henry's "forlorn" rushed forward, and though many fell, enough came on.
In a trice eager hands took the engine from us, and secured the fuse
effectually and lit it, and bore us back--I was going to say, out of
danger; but alas! as a deafening crash and a blaze of light proclaimed
the way open and the last gate down, he who had done the deed, and
opened the way, fell across me, shot from a loophole! As the rain of
fragments from the gate fell hissing and splashing in the stream that
flowed below, and while the foot streamed over the bridge, and pressed
through the breach, Antoine gave a little gasp, and died on my knee.
The rest all men know; how through five days and nights we fought the
great street-fight of Cahors; how we took no rest, save against walls
and doorways, or in the courts of houses we had won; how we ate and
drank with hands smirched with blood, and then to it again; how we won
the city house by house, and foot by foot, until at last the white flag
waved from the great tower, and France awoke with a start to know that
in the young prince of pleasure, whom she had deemed a trifler, was born
the shrewdest statesman and the boldest soldier of all her royal line.
And Antoine? When I went, after many hours, to seek him, the horse had
crossed the bridge, and even his body was gone. How he had traced us,
how managed to come to the front so opportunely, whether without him the
star of Navarre would have risen so gloriously on that night of '80,
never to be forgotten, I cannot say. But when I hear men talk of Crillon
and courage--above all, when I hear them talk of the fops and ribboned
popinjays of to-day, with their loose breeches and their bell-mouthed
boots, I think of my comrade and rival who won Cahors for the King. And
I smile.