THE ABDUCTION OF AURELIA.
In the main, the newspaper report was correct.
Madame Darnel, with the amiable object in view stated in the letter
of Aurelia, had been proceeding with her toward her own estate, which
was near the pleasant and well-built village of St. Eustache, in
Lower Canada. It consisted then of about a hundred houses, a
handsome church and parsonage, and is situated near the mouth of the
river Du Chine.
Her sledge was a handsome and fashionable one; the day was clear and
bright, the snow, though deep, was frozen hard, and the sledge glided
along delightfully. It was drawn by two fine horses, with showy
harness, set off by high hoops with silver bells on the saddles, with
rosettes of ribbon and streamers of coloured horse-hair on the
bridles; and Aurelia--her charming face flushed and pinky with frosty
air, a cosy boa round her slender neck, her hand, through gloved,
inserted in a sable muff,--was enjoying to the utmost the gay jingle
of the bells, the nice crisp sound of the runners of the sledge, when
suddenly and involuntarily a shrill scream broke from her, when at a
turn of the road near the river, where the cuttings in the banked-up
snow lay deep between two rows of picket-fencing, a musket was fired,
and their driver fell forward, a corpse, shot through the head, and
the vehicle was surrounded by a mob of men.
Infuriated or sullen, but all ruffianly in aspect, these men nearly
all wore fur caps, with large flaps down their cheeks, enormous pea
jackets or blanket coats patched and tattered, with India-rubber
shoes, or moose-skin mocassins, or thick cloth boots with high
leggings.
All were armed with pikes, pitch-forks, swords, and pistols; many had
fowling pieces; many more had muskets and bayonets, and wore
cross-belts stolen from Government armouries or stripped from the
slain; and some carried their ammunition in hunting pouches and shot
bags.
One who seemed the leader wore a huge coat of buffalo hide, and
looked like some great wild animal, for of the human face, nothing
was visible, but a long blue nose and a pair of red and blood-shot
eyes.
"Jerusalem and ginger nuts, but that was a shot well put in!"
exclaimed this personage, whose voice there was no mistaking, and the
two horrified and helpless creatures found that they were in the
hands of that gang of the insurgents--the most dastardly and
lawless--led by Ithuriel Smash.
Their first emotions on finding themselves in the centre of such a
savage throng, were undoubtedly those of extreme terror and shrinking
delicacy; but Madame Darnel for a time forgot her naturally womanish
apprehensions, collected the powers of her mind, and throwing up her
veil, confronted the whole band, which mustered more than a hundred
men.
Among that mob were many on whom Aurelia and her mother had conferred
countless acts of kindness and charity in sickness and health; but,
like low-born and ungrateful cowards, they hung back now, when they
should have rushed to her defence.
Certainly, to some of the French insurgents, the appeal of Madame
Darnel, a handsome woman about forty years of age, with an
intelligent and sweet expression in her well-cut features, and every
way a person of refinement and delicacy, was not without a little
effect; but the announcement of Smash that her daughter was his
affianced wife who "intended to slope with one of the 'tarnal
Britishers," against whom they were in arms, deprived poor Aurelia of
all sympathy, and a roar of menace escaped his hearers.
"Is this conduct your return for my kindness and charity to a
creature so immensely beneath me?" asked Madame Darnel.
"As whom?" asked Smash.
"You, fellow!"
"D--n your cussed impudence! Now then, Aurelia, come along, white
face. You look as if you required a box of our New York
'Never-say-die or Health-restoring pills,'" said Smash; and a shriek
burst from the girl as his coarse fingers with their long spiky nails
grasped her tender arm, and she was literally torn away from her
horrified mother, who fainted, and was borne off by some of the
better disposed to the house of the curé.
Followed by the armed rabble, the helpless Aurelia incapable of all
resistance, was dragged through the village of St. Eustache, and
taken a literal prisoner, or victim, to her mother's house which
adjoined, the seigneury of the Darnels, wherein Colonel Smash had
established his headquarters.
For a moment or two she thought to conciliate her chief captor.
Tears big and bright were welling in her dark blue eyes; her bonnet
and veil had been torn off, and her dark hair all unconfined rolled
over her back and shoulders, as she stood with clasped hands and
pleading looks before the so-called Colonel.
"Do shake hands with me," she condescended in her first fear to say;
"shake hands, Ithuriel--let us be friends, and send me back to mamma,
or bring her here."
"Friends--friends be darned!" roared Ithuriel, whose plug of pigtail
dropped out of his lantern jaws, after which he proceeded to air it
on the point of his jack knife, while eyeing her with mingled
malevolence and admiration, and seated himself on a table. "You
won't give me a kiss, I suppose; but I can take as many as I like, I
reckon; and you look as if you scarcely remembered me--Ithuriel
Alcibiades Smash. Strike me ugly, but that's a bad compliment.
But," added the bantering ruffian, "I calculate I'll survive it!
Flirtation and courtship are two very different things, Miss Aurelia,
and I ain't disposed to flirt with you, as you'll find out before
long."
Smash did not yet molest her; but she knew not what he might do if he
imbibed much brandy, as he had a bottle beside him, and was helping
himself liberally to the contents thereof, while he talked; and she
eyed him with fast-growing alarm.
That he had shot the poor sledge-driver, an old and faithful domestic
whom she had known from childhood, Aurelia never doubted; and that
deed added to her unfathomable loathing and horror of him. She
shivered in his presence, and shuddered whenever he drew near her.
She glanced wildly at the room door, but escape was hopeless. He saw
the glance and laughed aloud.
Was she acting in a melo-drama with the ruffian, as the heavy villain
of the piece? Was it all a dream? It almost seemed so, the whole
situation with all its contingent horrors and future uncertainties,
appeared so new, so unnatural and unreal! He seemed to read her
thoughts, for he said,--
"Was it not to spite that tarnation Britisher, who used to come into
the room with an opera hat under his arm, like a roasted fowl with
its gizzard, I might give you a little time to think of marrying me."
"Marry _you_!" exclaimed Aurelia in a peculiar tone, that filled him
with rage and caused him to indulge in much language that was "more
pagan than parliamentary" till he roused her scorn and anger.
"Coarse fool, and worse than fool! how dare you use language that is
unfit for me to hear?"
"'Guess your Britisher will never see his wretched little island
again--too many rifle bullets flying for that," said he irrelevantly,
as he saw how every reference to Roland affected her. "You
encouraged that 'ere Britisher," continued the Colonel, still airing
his quid on his jack knife.
"Encouraged--how dare you say so?"
"Dare--there is no daring in it, my dear. Who commands here--you or
I?"
"Sir, you presume upon your relationship in some way with mamma, to
talk to me thus, surely."
"I presume only on my own love for you, and would keep you, a
daughter of Canada, as I would a daughter of America, from the
contamination of that 'tarnal red-coated British slave!"
Still, as yet, save when dragging her to the house--her own father's
house--he had not laid hands on her. With all his roughness and
innate brutality, he felt that there was an undefinable something in
the grand hauteur, the excessive delicacy, the tone of refinement, in
the general aspect and bearing of Aurelia, that quelled, while it
secretly "riled" him.
He noticed the very expression of her nostrils, the quiver of her
proud lip and the flash of her dark blue eye--the flash of scorn and
loathing when she replied to him, and he quailed under it--he, the
utter American rowdy! But this emotion began to die as he drained
another bumper of stiff brandy and water, and he took to blustering
and swearing again.
"Do not use language such as this--and to me," said Aurelia, putting
her trembling hands to her ears; "surely you do not know the nature
of oaths."
"Don't I? I calculate I've sworn enough to sink a seventy-four-gun
ship," said he, with a mocking laugh; "but surely," he added, drawing
nearer her, and adopting a coaxing tone and bearing, "in time you'll
forget all about that fellow, and see the necessity of quietly
becoming Mrs. Ithuriel Smash, when you cannot make a _better of it_."
The girl's heart seemed to give a great bound, and then to die within
her, at these words, the look that accompanied and the dreadful
inference to be deduced from them.
"Anyhow, I calculate that I shan't forget the evening I saw you and
that yaw-haw beast of a Britisher giving each other such nice tokens
of your mutual good-will--he giving you what he calls his heart--and
you making a free gift of the whole seigneury of St. Eustache! If
once he comes within the reach of my rifle...!"
The Colonel was unable to express what would happen then. He
clenched hands and set his great yellow teeth with such force, that
his quid slipped down his throat and nearly choked him.
Two or three days were passed by Aurelia in extreme misery and
captivity, and almost hourly she was warned by Smash that his
patience would soon be exhausted, and he would "send for the parson."
She secluded herself in her own room, and found for a little time a
temporary protector in Papineau, one of the rebel leaders, a dapper
little French colonist, who had now come to concert measures for the
defence of the village, and urged that the young lady must not be
intruded upon.
"Snakes alive! man, don't I tell you she is to be my wife?" roared
Smash.
"_Mon Dieu_, my dear Colonel, that may be so," replied Papineau,
taking a pinch in the old Parisian fashion; "win the heiress, but woo
her gently. A lady can only receive in her own apartment a clergyman
or a doctor."
"And a hairdresser," added the barber of the village who was there,
armed to the teeth.
"By Jerusalem, then, I'll go as a hairdresser and scalp her, if she
gives me more trouble! I'll teach her that I'm half-horse,
half-alligator!" exclaimed Smash, who by this time was intoxicated to
a dangerous extent.
A violent illness--the fever of great fear--had prostrated Madame
Darnel.
Separated from the latter, Aurelia was without the little protection
her presence might have afforded. She was glad to keep beside the
female domestics of the seigneury, from among whom she was often
haled forth shrieking to endure the extraordinary love-speeches of
Smash; at last the women quitted the house in terror, and she was
left there alone--alone with a man whom she now loathed with a fear
indescribable!