AT BAY
In obedience to his mistress, Bartoletti had endeavoured to secure the
few weak fastenings of the house, but his hands shook so, that without
Fleurette’s aid not a bolt would have been pushed nor a key turned.
The black girl, however, seconded his efforts with skill and coolness,
so that Hippolyte’s summons to surrender was addressed to locked doors
and closed windows. The Coromantee was now so inflamed with rum as to
be capable of any outrage, and since neither his band nor himself were
possessed of firearms, nothing but Célandine’s happy suggestion about the
concealed powder restrained him from ordering a few faggots to be cut,
and the building set in a blaze. Advancing with an air of dignity, that
would at any other time have been ludicrous, and which he would certainly
have abandoned had he known that the Marquise covered his body with her
pistol the while, he thumped the door angrily, and demanded to know why
“dis here gentleman comin’ to pay compliment to buckra miss,” was not
immediately admitted; but receiving no answer, proceeded at once to
batter the panels with an iron crowbar, undeterred by the expostulations
of Fleurette, who protested vehemently, first, that her mistress was
engaged with a large party of French officers; secondly, that she lay
sick in bed, on no account to be disturbed; and lastly, that neither she
nor ma’amselle were in the house at all.
The Coromantee of course knew better. Shouting a horrible oath, and a
yet more hideous threat, he applied his burly shoulders to the entrance,
and the whole wood-work giving way with a crash, precipitated himself
into the passage, followed by the rest of the band, to be confronted by
Fleurette alone, Bartoletti having fled ignominiously to the kitchen.
“I could have hit him through the neck,” observed the Marquise,
withdrawing from her post behind the shutter, “but I was too directly
above him to make sure, and every charge is so valuable I would not waste
one on a mere wound. My darling, I still hope that two or three deadly
shots may intimidate them, and we shall escape after all.”
Cerise answered nothing, though her lips moved. The two ladies listened,
with every faculty sharpened, every nerve strung to the utmost.
A scream from Fleurette thrilled through them like a blow. Hippolyte,
though willing enough to dally with the comely black girl for a minute or
two, lost patience with her pertinacity in clinging about him to delay
his entrance, and struck her brutally to the ground. Turning fiercely on
him where she lay, she made her sharp teeth meet in the fleshy part of
his leg, an injury the savage returned with a kick, that after the first
shriek it elicited left poor Fleurette stunned and moaning in the corner
of the passage, to be crushed and trampled by the blacks, who now poured
in behind their leader, elated with the success of this, their first step
in open rebellion.
Presently, loud shouts, or rather howls of triumph, announced that the
overseer’s place of concealment was discovered. Bartoletti, pale or
rather yellow, limp, stammering, and beside himself with terror, was
dragged out of the house and consigned to sundry ferocious-looking
negroes, who proceeded to amuse themselves by alternately kicking,
cuffing, and threatening him with instantaneous death.
The Marquise listened eagerly; horror, pity, and disgust succeeding each
other on her haughty, resolute face. Once, something like contempt swept
over it, while she caught the tone of Bartoletti’s abject entreaties for
mercy. He only asked for life—bare life, nothing more; they might make a
slave of him then and there. He was their property, he and his wife, and
all that he had, to do what they liked with. Only let him live, he said,
and he would join them heart and hand; show them where the rum was kept,
the money, the jewels; nay, help them cheerfully to cut every white
throat on the island. The man was convulsed with terror, and the negroes
danced round like fiends, mocking, jeering, flouting him, exulting in the
spectacle of a _buckra_ overseer brought so low.
“There is something in _race_ after all,” observed the Marquise, as if
discussing an abstract proposition. “I suppose it is only the _canaille_
that can thus degrade themselves from mere dread of death. Though our
families have not always _lived_ very decently, I am glad to think that
there was never yet a Montmirail or La Fierté who did not know how _to
die_. My child, it is the pure old blood that carries us through such
moments as these; neither of us are likely to disgrace it now.”
Again her daughter’s lips moved, although no sound escaped them. Cerise
was prepared to die, but she could not bring herself to reason on the
advantages of noble birth at such a moment, like the Marquise; and
indeed the girl’s weaker frame and softer heart quailed in terror at the
prospect of the ordeal they had to go through.
From their chamber of refuge the two ladies could hear the insulting
jests and ribald gibberish of the slaves, now bursting into the
sitting-room, breaking the furniture, shivering the mirrors, and wantonly
destroying all the delicate articles of use and ornament, of which they
could neither understand the purpose nor appreciate the value. Presently
a discordant scream from Pierrot announced that the parrot had protested
against the intrusion of these riotous visitors, while a shout of pain,
followed by loud bursts of laughter, proclaimed the manner in which he
had resented the familiarity of one more daring than the rest. Taking the
bird roughly off its perch, a stout young negro named Achille had been
bitten to the bone, and the cross-cut wound inflicted by the parrot’s
beak so roused his savage nature, that twisting its neck round with a
vindictive howl, he slew poor Pierrot on the spot.
The Marquise in her chamber above could hear the brutal acclamations
that greeted this exploit, and distinguished the smothered thump of her
favourite’s feathered body as it was dashed into a corner of the room.
Then her lips set tight, her brows knit, and the white hand clenched
itself round her pistol, firm, rigid, and pitiless as marble.
Heavy footsteps were now heard hurrying on the stairs, and whispered
voices urging contrary directions, but all with the same purport.
There seemed to be no thought of compassion, no talk of mercy. Even
while hearing their victims, Hippolyte and Achille, who was his second
in command, scrupled not to discuss the fate of the ladies when they
should have gained possession of their persons—a fate which turned the
daughter’s blood to ice, the mother’s to fire. It was no time now to
think of compromise or capitulation, or aught but selling life at the
dearest, and gaining every moment possible by the sacrifice of an enemy.
Even in the last extremity, however, the genius of system, so remarkable
in all French minds, did not desert the Marquise. She counted the charges
in her pistol-case, and calculated the resources of her foes with a cool,
methodical appreciation of the chances for and against her, totally
unaffected by the enormous disproportion of the odds. She was good, she
argued, for a dozen shots in all. She would allow for two misses; sagely
reflecting that in a chance medley like the present she could hardly
preserve a steadiness of hand and eye that had heretofore so discomfited
Madame de Sabran in the shooting galleries of Marly and Versailles.
Eight shots would then be left, exclusive of two that she determined at
all risks to reserve for the last. The dead bodies of eight negroes she
considered, slain by the hand of one white woman, ought to put the whole
black population of the island to the rout; but supposing that the rum
they had drunk should have rendered them so reckless as to disregard even
such a warning, and that, with her defences broke down, she found herself
and daughter at their mercy, then—and while the Marquise reasoned thus,
the blood mounted to her eyes, and a hand of ice seemed to close round
her heart—the two reserve shots should be directed with unerring hand,
the one into her daughter’s bosom, the other through her own.
And Cerise, now that the crisis had arrived at last, in so far as
they were to be substantiated by the enforced composure of a passive
endurance, fully vindicated her claims to noble blood. She muttered
many a prayer indeed, that arose straight from her heart, but her eyes
were fixed on her mother the while, and she had disposed the ammunition
on a chair beside her in such a manner as to reload for the Marquise
with rapidity and precision. “We are like a front and rear rank of the
Grey Musketeers,” said the latter, with a wild attempt at hilarity, in
which a strong hysterical tendency, born of over-wrought feelings, was
with difficulty kept down. “The affair will soon commence now, and, my
child, if worst comes to worst, remember there is no surrender. I hear
them advancing to the assault. Courage! my darling. Steady! and _Vive la
France_!”
The words were still upon her lips, when a swarm of negroes, crowding
and shouldering up the narrow passage, halted at her door. Hippolyte
commenced his summons to the besieged by a smashing blow with the
crowbar, that splintered one of the panels and set the whole wood-work
quivering to its hinges. Then he applied his thick lips to the keyhole,
and shouted in brutal glee—
“Time to wake up now, missee! You play ’possum no longer, else cut down
gum-tree at one stroke. Wot you say to dis nigger for buckra bridegroom?
Time to come out now and dance jigs at um wedding.”
There was not a quiver in her voice while the Marquise answered in cold
imperious tones—
“You are running up a heavy reckoning for this night’s work. I know your
ringleaders, and refuse to treat with them. Nevertheless, I am not a
severe mistress. If the rest of the negroes will go quietly home, and
resume their duties with to-morrow’s sunrise, I will not be hard upon
_them_. You know me, and can trust my word.”
Cheers of derision answered this haughty appeal, and loud suggestions for
every kind of cruelty and insult, to be inflicted on the two ladies, were
heard bandied about amongst the slaves. Hippolyte replied fiercely—
“Give in at once! Open this minute, or neither of you shall leave the
house alive! For the Marquise—Achille! I give her to you! For lilly
ma’amselle—I marry her this very night. See! before the moon goes down!”
Cerise raised her head in scornful defiance. Her face was livid, but it
was stamped with the same expression as her mother’s now. There could be
no question both were prepared to die game to the last.
The blows of Hippolyte’s crowbar resounded against the strong oaken
panels of the door, but the massive wood-work, though it shook and
groaned, resisted stoutly for a time. It was well for the inmates that
Célandine’s imaginative powers had suggested the concealed gunpowder. Had
it not been for their fears of an explosion the negroes would ere this
have set fire to the building, when no amount of resistance could have
longer delayed the fate of the two ladies. Bartoletti, intimidated by the
threats of his captors, and preoccupied only with the preservation of his
own life, had shown the insurgents where the rum was kept, and many of
these were rapidly passing from the reckless to the stupefied stage of
intoxication. The Italian, who was not deficient in cunning, encouraged
their potations with all his might. He thus hoped to elude them before
morning, and leaving his employers to their fate, reach Port Welcome
in safety; where he doubted not he should be met by Célandine, whose
influence as an Obi-woman, he rightly conjectured, would be sufficient
to insure her safety. A coward rarely meets with the fate he deserves,
and Bartoletti did indeed make his eventual escape in the manner he had
proposed.
Plying his crowbar with vigorous strokes, Hippolyte succeeded at length
in breaking through one of the door panels, a measure to be succeeded
by the insertion of hand and arm for withdrawal of the bolts fastened
on the inside. The Coromantee possessed, however, a considerable share
of cunning mixed with the fierce cruelty of a savage. When he had torn
away enough wood-work to make a considerable aperture, he turned to his
lieutenant and desired him to introduce his body and unbar the door from
within. It is difficult to say what he feared, since even had he been
aware that his mistress possessed firearms, he could not have conceived
the possibility of her using them so recklessly in a house that he had
reason to believe was stored with powder. It was probably some latent
dread of the white race that prompted his command to his subordinate.
“You peep in, you black nigger. Ladies all in full dress now. Bow-’ticks
rosined and fiddlers dry. Open um door, and ask polite company to walk
in.”
Thus adjured, Achille thrust his woolly head and half his shining black
body through the aperture. Madame de Montmirail, standing before her
daughter, was not five paces off. She raised her white arm slowly, and
covered him with steady aim. Ere his large thick hand had closed round
the bolt for which it groped, there was a flash, a loud report, a cloud
of smoke curling round the toilet accessories of a lady’s bed-chamber,
and Achille, shot through the brain, fell back stone dead into the
passage.
“A little lighter charge of powder, my dear,” said the Marquise, giving
the smoking weapon to her daughter to be reloaded, while she poised
its fellow carefully in her hand. “I sighted him _very_ fine, and was
a trifle over my mark even then. These pistols always throw high at so
short a distance.”
Then she placed herself in readiness for another enemy, and during a
short space waited in vain.
The report of her pistol had been followed by a general scramble of the
negroes, who tumbled precipitately downstairs, and in some cases even out
of the house, under the impression that every succeeding moment might
find them all blown into the air. But the very cause of the besiegers’
panic proved, when their alarm subsided, of the utmost detriment to the
garrison. Hippolyte, finding himself still in possession of his limbs and
faculties, on the same side of the Sulphur Mountain as before, argued,
reasonably enough, that the concealed powder was a delusion, and with
considerable promptitude at once set fire to the lower part of the house;
after which, once more mustering his followers, and encouraging them
by his example, he ascended the staircase, and betaking himself to the
crowbar with a will, soon battered in the weak defence that alone stood
between the ladies and their savage enemies.
Cerise had loaded her mother’s pistol to perfection; that mother, roused
out of all thought of self by her child’s danger, was even now reckoning
the last frail chance by which her daughter might escape. During the
short respite afforded by the panic of the negroes, they had dragged
with desperate strength a heavy chest of drawers, and placed it across
the doorway. Even when the latter was forced, this slight breast-work
afforded an additional impediment to the assailants.
“You must drop from the window, my child,” whispered the Marquise, when
the shattered door fell in at length across this last obstruction,
revealing a hideous confusion of black forms, and rolling eyes, and
grinning fiendish faces. “It is not a dozen feet, but mind you turn round
so as to light on your hands and knees. Célandine _must_ be outside.
If you can reach her you are safe. Adieu, darling! I can keep the two
foremost from following you, still!”
The Marquise grasped a pistol in each hand, but she bent her brow—the
haughty white brow that had never been carried more proudly than
now—towards her child, and the girl’s pale lips clung to it lovingly,
while she vowed that neither life nor death should part her from her
mother.
“It is all over, dear,” she said, calmly. “We can but die together as we
have lived.”
Their case was indeed desperate. The room was already darkening with
smoke, and the wood-work on the floor below crackling in the flames that
began to light up the lawn outside, and tip with saffron the sleeping
woods beyond. The door was broken in; the chest of drawers gave way with
a loud crash, and brandishing his crowbar, Hippolyte leaped into the
apartment like a fiend, but stood for an instant aghast, rigid, like that
fiend turned to bronze, because the white lady, shielding her daughter
with her body, neither quailed nor flinched. Her eye was bright, her
colour raised, her lips set, her hand steady, her whole attitude resolute
and defiant. All this he took in at a glance, and the Coromantee felt
his craven heart shrink up to nothing in his breast, thus covered by the
deadly pistol of the Marquise.