THE TEN CROSSES.
OGIER DEL' PEYRA, with a much larger body of men, murderously, if not
well, equipped, had left Ste. Soure an hour after the departure of Jean.
The Vézère makes a great sweep to meet the Beune, but, as though
disgusted at the insignificance of its tributary, after having received
its waters, it at once turns and flows in an almost directly opposite
direction, leaving a broad, flat tongue of land round which it curls, a
tongue of rich alluvial soil, interspersed with gravel that is purple in
autumn with crocus, and in summer blue with salvia.
Here the party, headed by Ogier, waited in patience till the signal
flashed thrice from the heights opposite, when it was immediately
answered by three corresponding flares of dry grass.
Then Ogier and his men, under cover of the darkness, moved up the river
to the ford, waded across the water, and cautiously crept along the
river bank among the osiers in straggling line, till they had reached a
suitable point below the "Church." From this point they could see the
lights from the windows of that unhallowed edifice shining before them,
half-way up the sky like stars, but stars of lurid hue.
Then they sat down in the dewy grass and waited. Hour passed after hour.
The stars before them waxed faint and went out.
Then, suddenly, bringing all to their feet, came the peal of the horn,
echoed and re-echoed from every cliff, and followed by a crash and a
flare.
The scene that ensued was one such as none who witnessed it had ever had
a chance of beholding before, or were likely to see again.
The immense pile of brushwood and fat and other fuel caught with
rapidity and rose in a burst of flame high up, as it were in mid-heaven,
followed immediately by its being poured over the lip of the precipice,
the molten, blazing tar, the incandescent fat, streaked the cliff as
with rivers of light, fell on the projecting roof, ran in through the
interstices created by the fall of stones that had shivered the covering
tiles, and set fire to the rafters they had protected.
Dense volumes of swirling red smoke, in which danced ghostly jets of
blue flame, rolled about the habitation of the robber band, and
penetrated to its interior. It broke out of the windows in long spirals
and tongues, forked as those of adders.
The rocks up the Vézère were visible, glaring orange, every tree was lit
up, and its trunk turned to gold. The Vézère glowed a river of flame;
clouds that had vanished gathered, crowding to see the spectacle, and
palpitated above it.
"Forward!" yelled Ogier, and the whole party rushed up the steep ascent.
For one reason it would have been better had they crept up the steep
slope before the horn was blown, so as to be ready at once to burst the
gates and occupy every avenue. But Ogier had considered this course, and
had deemed the risk greater than the advantage. To climb the rubble
slope without displacing the shale was impossible; to do so without
making sufficient noise to alarm the sentinel was hardly feasible in
such a still night. This might have been done in blustering wind and
lashing rain, not on such a night as that when the bullfrog's call rang
down the valley and was answered by another frog a mile distant.
The ascent was arduous; it could not have been made easily in pitch
darkness; now it was effected rapidly by the glare of the cataract of
falling fire and of blazing rafters.
In ten minutes, with faces streaming, with lungs blowing, the peasants
reached the gate-house. They beat at it with stones, with their fists;
they drove their pikes at it, but could not open it.
Then a man--it was one of those who had been taken and confined in the
castle--bid all stand back. He buckled on to his feet a sort of spiked
shoe, with three prongs in each sole, and held a crooked axe in his
hand.
"I have not been in there for nothing," laughed he. "I saw what they had
for climbing walls, and I've made the like at my forge."
Then he went to the wall, drove in the end of his pick, and in a moment,
like a cat, went up from stone course to stone course, till he reached
the summit of the wall, when he threw aside his foot-grapnels and leaped
within. In the panic caused by the sudden avalanche of stones and fire
the sentinel had deserted the gate. The oak doors were cast open, and
the whole body of armed men burst in.
They found the small garrison huddled together, paralysed with fear, all
their daring, their insolence, their readiness on an occasion gone. They
stood like sheep, unable to defend themselves, and were taken without
offering any resistance.
The surprise was so complete, the awfulness of the manner in which they
were visited was so overwhelming, that the ruffians did not know whether
they were not called to their final account, and whether their
assailants were not fiends from the flaming abyss.
It had come on them in the midst of sleep when stupefied with drink.
"Follow me!" ordered Ogier, and he led the way through fallen flakes of
fire, smouldering beams, and smoking embers, to a portion of the castle
that was intact. It consisted wholly of a cavern faced up with stone,
and the cataract of fire had not reached it, or had not injured it.
"Bring the prisoners to me," said Ogier. "Where is the Captain? Where is
Le Gros Guillem?"
The head of the band was not taken.
"Disperse--seek him everywhere!" ordered Del' Peyra.
The men ran in every possible direction. They searched every cranny.
"He has escaped up the ladder to the Last Refuge!" shouted one. The Last
Refuge was the chamber excavated above the projecting roof of the
castle, cut in the solid rock.
"He cannot," said another, "the ladder was the first thing to burn. See,
it is in pieces now."
"If he be there," scoffed a third, "let him there abide. He can neither
get up nor down."
"I do not think he is there. He is in Hell's Mouth."
This Hell's Mouth was the tortuous cavern opening upon the ledge of rock
occupied by the castle.
"If he is there, who will follow him?" asked one.
"Aye! who--when the foul fiend will hide him."
"I do not believe it," said one of the men who had been confined in the
"Church." He indicated with his finger. "There is a _mal-pas_ yonder; he
has escaped along that."
A _mal-pas_, in fact, exists in many of these rock castles. It consists
of a track sometimes natural, often artificially cut in the face of the
cliff, so narrow that only a man with an unusually steady head can tread
it; often is the _mal-pas_ so formed that it cannot be walked along
upright, but in a bent posture. Often also it is cut through abruptly
and purposely to be crossed by a board which he who has fled over it can
kick down and so intercept pursuit.
"Bring up the men for me to judge them," said Ogier, "and you, Mathieu,
give me your sharp-pointed pick."
The man addressed handed the implement to his Seigneur, who seated
himself on the floor of rock with his legs apart and extended.
"Giraud!" said Ogier, "and you, Roland, run out a beam through one of
the windows--through yonder, and one of you find rope--abundance. How
many are here?"
"There are twelve," was the answer.
"That is well; twelve--enough rope to hang twelve men, one after another
from the window."
Sufficiency of rope was not to be found.
"It matters not," said Ogier. "There are other ways into another world
than along a rope. They shall walk the beam. Thrust it through the
window and rope the end of it."
"Which end?"
"This one in the room, to hold it down."
A large beam, fallen from the roof in the adjoining chamber, and still
smoking and glowing at one end, was dragged in, and the burning end
thrust out through a window. The driving it through the opening,
together with the inrush of air to the heated apartments, caused the red
and charred wood to burst into light; it projected some ten feet beyond
the wall, fizzing, spurting forth jets of blue flame over the abyss.
"Number one!" shouted Ogier. "Make him walk the rafter. Drive him
forward with your pikes if he shrinks back."
One of the ruffians of the band, his face as parchment, speechless in
the stupefaction of his fear, was made to mount the beam, and then the
peasants round shouted, drove at him with their knives and
pruning-hooks, and made him pass through the window.
There were three men seated on the end of the beam, which rested on a
bench in the chamber.
The moment the unhappy wretch had disappeared through the window, Ogier
began to hew with his pick into the floor.
"Forward! He is hanging back! He clings to the wall! Coward! He is
endeavouring to scramble in again!" was yelled by the peasants, crowding
round the window to watch the man on the charred and glowing beam end.
"Drive him off with a pike! Make him dance on the embers!" called one
within, and a reaping-hook, bound to a pole, was thrust forth.
A scream, horrible in its agony, in its intensity; and those seated on
the beam felt there was no longer a counterpoise.
Chip, chip, went Ogier.
Presently he looked up. He had cut a Greek cross in the chalk floor.
"Number two!" he ordered.
Then the wretch who was seized burst from his captors, rushed up to
Ogier, threw himself on his knees, and implored to be spared. He would
do anything. He would forswear the English. He would never plunder
again.
Old Del' Peyra looked at him coldly.
"Did you ever spare one who fell into your hands? Did you spare
Rossignol? Make him walk the beam."
The shrieking wretch was lifted by strong arms on to the rafter; he
refused to stand, he threw himself on his knees, he struggled, bit,
prayed, sobbed--all the manhood was gone out of him.
"Thrust him through the window," said one. "If he will not walk the beam
he shall cling to it."
The brigand's efforts were in vain. He was driven through the opening.
In his frantic efforts to save himself he gripped the rafter, hanging
from it, his legs swinging in space.
"Cut off his fingers," said one.
Then the man, to escape a blow from an axe, ran his hands along, put
them on glowing red charcoal, and dropped.
Chip, chip! went Ogier. He had cut a second cross.
"Number three!" he said.
The man whose turn came thrust aside those who held him, leaped on the
beam, and walked deliberately through the window and bounded into the
darkness.
Chip, chip! went Ogier. He worked on till he had incised a third cross
in the floor.
Thus one by one was sent to his death out of the chamber reeking with
wood-smoke, illumined by the puffs of flame from the still burning
buildings that adjoined. Ten crosses had been cut in the floor.
"Number eleven!" said Ogier; and at that same moment his son Jean
entered at the head of those who had ignited and sent down the cataract
of fire that had consumed the nest.
"What are you doing, father?"
"Sending them before their Judge," answered Ogier. "See these ten
crosses. There are ten have been dismissed."
Then the man who had been brought forward to be sent along the same road
as the rest said--
"I do not cry for life; but this I say; it was I, aye, I and my fellow
here, Amanieu, who provided the hundred livres, without which the seven
would not have been set free."
"You provided it?"
"Aye, under the Captain's daughter. It was we who did it. If that goes
to abate our sentence--well."
"Father, spare these two," pleaded Jean.
"As you will, Jean; but there is space for two more crosses.
Would--would I could cut an eleventh, and that a big one, for the Gros
Guillem."
Then murmurs arose. The peasants, their love of revenge, their lust for
slaughter whetted, clamoured for the death of the last two of the band.
But Jean was firm.
"My father surrenders them to me," he said.
"Then let them run on the _mal-pas_," shouted one of the peasants.
"Good!" said the brigand Roger; "give me a plank and I will run on it,
so will Amanieu."
Ogier looked ruefully at the crosses.
"'Tis a pity," said he. "I intended to cut a dozen."
If the visitor to the Eglise de Guillem will look, to this day, rudely
hacked in the floor, he will see the ten crosses: he will see
further--but we will leave the rest to the sequel.