THE BLANK FUSILADE.
With Rouvigny we captured a few of his men, and an officer (a very
handsome young man), who gave up his sword to me with the most
perfect _sang froid_. Before I could address our chief prisoner, who
never deigned or affected to recognize me, the brigadier came
galloping up and on discovering the rank and importance of Rouvigny,
desired me to conduct him under escort, to a ruined sugar-mill, which
stood about a mile in our rear, and was beyond range of the cannon in
the redoubt. As we moved off, the young officer began to sing
gaily,--
Halte la! halte la!
La Garde Royale est la!
Surprised to hear the refrain of this old song in the mouth of one I
deemed a republican officer, I turned to address him, and asked how,
at such a time, he was so light of heart. On this, he told me that
he was one of those whose sympathies were with the recently
extinguished monarchy of France--that he was sick of serving among
republican soldiers, who daily put his life in jeopardy--and that he
rejoiced in being taken prisoner by the allies of Louis XVII.
"Your name, monsieur?" said I.
"Dutriel--sous-lieutenant of the 37th, late the regiment of M. le
Maréchal de Turenne; and now a ragged battalion in the service of the
republic--_sacredie_!"
"The name you have given sounds familiar to me."
"'Tis very probable, _mon camerade_, for my father was M. le
Chevalier Naudau Dutriel, governor of Guadaloupe and La Grande Terre,
for his most Christian majesty; but was unfortunately defeated and
taken prisoner by the British under General Harrington in the old
war, before we became republicans, atheists, philosophers, and the
devil only knows what more."
"Such sentiments will place your head in peril at home."
"Bah!" said he; "I have no intention of going home. I am a soldier;
my head can take care of itself; but it is my heart and purse that
are usually in most danger; for the first is sure to fall a prey to
any pretty wench, and the last is ever shared with a comrade while a
shot remains in it."
There is among men who serve or have served in the army, a community
of sentiment--a species of freemasonry peculiar to them alone. The
French so happy at all times in their terms, style it _cameraderie_;
thus the chevalier and I became as old friends in ten minutes.
"Sir, as a gentleman, you are at liberty to retain your sword," said
I, presenting him with his weapon, which he received with courtly
grace.
"And I?" demanded Rouvigny fiercely.
I placed his sabre under my foot, and snapped the blade in pieces.
"Tonnerre de Ciel!" he cried in a voice of fury.
"As for you, sir," said I, "you shall hear from me presently."
It was clear there was no "freemasonry" between M. Rouvigny and his
captor.
"Vive le Chevalier Dutriel!" cried a French soldier.
"A bas l'aristocrat--vive le bonnet rouge!" growled another, of the
new régime.
"Oh, pray keep your temper, my dear M. de Rouvigny," said Dutriel;
"you have, on many a day sorely tried mine--I, a gentleman of old
France--you a child of rapine--a mushroom, fostered in the pestilent
mire of the republic. A colonel--_sacredie!_--who found his
epaulettes on a barricade or at the foot of a gallows. He is your
prisoner, _mon camerade_--make much of him, for he is a very
distinguished man.
Halte la! halte la!
La Garde Royale est la!"
By this time we had reached the ruined sugar-mill, from the quiet
neighbourhood of which our arrival scared away some poor negro women
who were weaving pretty baskets of canes and bamboo, and in the lower
apartment of which I confined Rouvigny, apart from the other
prisoners, as I had a project to put in execution against him.
Circumstanced as he was, I could not challenge him to a duel, and, as
I had not yet my epaulettes, the chances were, that natheless his
republicanism and boasted spirit of égalité, he would have declined
to meet me; yet I was resolved that he should taste all the
bitterness of degradation, and all the agony of death, without its
actual infliction.
After posting sentinels round the mill, and making other dispositions
to preclude an escape, I entered the wretched apartment,--if it could
be named so,--a mere vault or storehouse, where Rouvigny was
confined. It was littered by heaps of rotting sugar-canes, old
casks, and broken packing-boxes. On one of these I found him seated,
with a sullen air; his blue uniform coat was open, and his
tri-coloured sash was thrown aside for coolness, as the atmosphere
was still close and sultry.
"Monsieur de Rouvigny will soon have reason for the exertion of all
his philosophy," said I.
"An easy matter for him at all times," he replied, with a gesture of
scorn.
"We shall see."
"_Bon!_" said he, with a grimace.
"Think what you are, sir, and how situated?"
"I am one of the new French school of philanthropists."
"Indeed!"
"I am an exterminator of aristocrats. Dolt that I was to spare that
jesting dog, Dutriel."
"Then it was in this spirit that you murdered the Sieur de Mazancy at
the head of his regiment."
"Excuse me, _mon soldat_, but you are very ignorant. He died by the
same decree of the National Assembly which doomed all his class to
the lantern, the sabre, or the guillotine."
"And his daughter----" my voice trembled.
He ground his teeth,--then gave a sardonic smile, and replied,--"I
converted Eulalie into the wife of a plain but honest French citizen.
Into _what_ have you converted her?"
"Assassin and spy!" I exclaimed, with fury.
"_Ouf_--you are anything but polite."
"Poltroon! to murder a woman in the night," I continued, with growing
bitterness.
He uttered a shout of laughter, and rasped his spurred heels to and
fro against the cask on which he was seated. Then, with provoking
_nonchalance_, he proceeded to light a cigar.
"Do you smoke?" said he;--"oh, you don't--well, you will permit me;
these are very choice Havannahs. You have no objections?--_bon!_
such an obliging fellow you are! It seems we come to Martinique to
talk as well as to fight."
"We have come to repress and punish outrage--to save Frenchmen from
Frenchmen and savages," said I.
"True; we have been apt to consider prosperity treason to the people.
Wealth, an enemy to the purity of a republic, and in this spirit have
ventured to hang and even to boil in their own coppers a few very
aristocratic planters in their exceedingly democratic
sugar-mills--but what then? Do have a cigar, _mon ami_."
"Bantering villain! we have had enough of this. I would speak of
Eulalie de Rouvigny, whom you have destroyed like a wretch as you
are."
"Monsieur permits himself to be impertinent. Am I, a French
citizen--a husband, to be accountable in this little matter to you?"
"You are accountable to humanity."
"Bah! we don't value that much in these days when charges of bayonets
are common things."
"It would seem so."
"Well, monsieur?"
"What inspired a deed so foul, so cruel, as the abduction and the
death of Eulalie?"
"Honour."
"Honour!" I reiterated contemptuously.
"Nay, don't interrupt me, and don't repeat my words if you please,"
he replied, grinding his sharp teeth; "honour and retributive justice
were my guides and my incentives. The honour of a husband whom she
had deserted--the vengeance of France, whom she had betrayed. Love
and revenge are two fingers of the same hand."
"By Heaven, Colonel Rouvigny, she was a thousand times better and
purer than the mother who, for her sins, encumbered the earth with
such a being as you."
"Very probably," he continued in his bantering manner, while whiffing
his cigar, and while the savage gleam in his eyes belied the affected
suavity of his manner; "but my most choleric friend, have the
kindness to remember that she was mine by marriage----"
"A marriage!--a foul snare, which she abhorred, and by which her
happiness was withered, her future blasted."
"_Sang Dieu!_ she told you all this?"
"Yes," said I, with a cutting smile.
"Well--did this entitle her to betray France?"
"She was, like her father, true to France and France's ancient line
of kings."
"Tyrants and gluttons, with whom the men of the new world had done."
"Monsieur, you are here at my mercy----"
"At yours--_tonnerre de Ciel!_ well?"
"I am about to kill you by a platoon of musketry."
"Would you dare to murder me--a prisoner of war--in cold blood?" said
he, starting.
"Yes--as a spy and assassin; you will therefore have the Christian
spirit, I trust, to make your peace with Heaven, and to reveal to me
the fate of your wife--of Eulalie de Mazancy--on board that vessel,
the schooner _Les Droits ds l'Homme_, off Barbadoes."
As I said this with considerable solemnity, he changed colour. Rage,
malignant hatred, and fear, were all very plainly expressed in his
pale and marble-like visage. His stern brow grew frightfully
contracted, and glistening beads of perspiration seemed to start from
the old sabre-cut that had traversed it. He knocked the ashes
carefully from his cigar, and then tossing it away, spat full at me,
in all the fury of impotent wrath, and uttered the single word--
"_Never!_"
It seemed to come from the depths of his chest. He covered his face
with his hands; then starting up erect, he cried in a voice of stern
authority,--
"Lead on--I am ready."
"Follow me," I replied.
He hesitated, so I added, full of rage that I had failed to learn the
secret of her fate,--
"Follow, if you would avoid the disgrace of being dragged."
"_Tête Dieu!_" he exclaimed, and smote his forehead.
We stepped from the ruined sugar-mill into the full blaze of the
sunshine, and on the green luxuriant grass that grew under the
foliage of a citron-grove. All Nature seemed so sunny and beautiful,
that I felt a momentary compunction on witnessing the farewell glance
he cast around him--a farewell to light, to life, and to the future;
for he could not have a shadow of hope, on seeing eight of my
comrades in line resting on their muskets, and close by Tom Telfer,
standing shovel in hand beside a newly-made grave--a hole of ominous
aspect, six feet by two, which he had just dug by my directions.
While he tied a handkerchief over the eyes of Rouvigny, I ordered the
party to load with _blank_ cartridge, and his frame shuddered when he
heard the ramrods go home with a dull sound on the powder; but
knowing the trick we were to play, they all loaded carefully.
Our prisoner knelt down near the pretended grave, and folded his arms
without a word of prayer or entreaty; while the Chevalier Dutriel
lighted a fresh cigar, and looked on with perfect indifference, for
he had an undisguised hatred for his newly-made republican colonel,
and had seen too many of his friends perish thus in the citadel of
St. Pierre, to be startled by such an episode. He deemed it merely
an act of retribution.
In a low voice I offered Rouvigny his life for the secret of
Eulalie's fate; but received no reply.
"Fire!" I exclaimed.
At twenty paces eight muskets were discharged full at his head. When
the smoke cleared away, to my astonishment and alarm we saw him lying
flat on his face, with the ammunition-paper whirling about him.
Dreading some terrible mistake, we all rushed forward and lifted him.
Not a ball had been fired; he was without even a scratch, but hung in
our grasp--_stone dead_!