THE DAUPH'YEERS.
Now let us quit the old world, and, taking an immense stride, transport
ourselves to the new one at a single leap.
There is in America a city which possibly cannot be compared to any
other in the whole world. That city is Valparaiso!
Valparaiso! The word resounds in the enchanted ear like the gentle soft
notes of a love song.
A coquettish, smiling, and mad city, softly reclining like a careless
Creole, round a delicious bay, at the foot of three majestic mountains,
lazily bathing her rosy and dainty feet in the azure waves of the
Pacific, and veiling her dreamy brow in the storm-laden clouds which
escape from Cape Horn, and roll with a sinister sound round the peaks of
the Cordilleras, to form a splendid glory for them.
Although built on the Chilean coast, this strange city belongs, in fact,
to no country, and recognises no nationality: or to speak more
correctly, it admits all into its bosom.
At Valparaiso the adventurer of every clime have given each other the
meeting. All tongues are spoken there, every branch of trade is carried
on. The population is the quaintest amalgam of the most eccentric
personalities, who have rushed from the most remote parts of the four
quarters of the old world, to attack fortune in this city, the advanced
sentinel of Transatlantic civilisation, and whose occult influence
governs the Hispano-American republic.
Valparaiso, like nearly all the commercial centres of South America, is
a pile of shapeless dens and magnificent palaces jostling each other,
and hanging in abrupt clusters on the abrupt flanks of the three
mountains.
At the period the event occurred which we are about to describe, the
streets were narrow, dirty, deprived of air and sun. The paving, being
perfectly ignored, rendered them perfect morasses, in which the wayfarer
sank to the knee when the winter's rains had loosened the soil. This
rendered the use of a horse indispensable, even for the shortest
passage.
Deleterious exhalations incessantly escaped from these mud holes,
heightened by the filth of every description which the daily cleaning of
the inhabitants accumulated, while no one dreamed of draining these
permanent abodes of pernicious fevers.
At the present day, we are told, this state of things has been altered,
and Valparaiso no longer resembles itself. We should like to believe it;
but the carelessness of the South American, so well known to us, compels
us to be very circumspect in such a matter.
In one of the dirtiest and worst-famed streets of Valparaiso was a house
which we ask the reader's permission to describe in a few words.
We are compelled at the outset, to confess that if the architect
intrusted with its construction had shown himself more than sober in the
distribution of the ornaments, he had built it perfectly to suit the
trade of the various tenants destined in future to occupy it one after
the other.
It was a clay-built hovel. The _façade_ looked upon the Street de la
Merced; the opposite side had an outlook of the sea, above which it
projected for a certain distance upon posts.
This house was inhabited by an innkeeper. Contrary to the European
buildings, which grow smaller the higher they rise from the ground, this
house grew larger; so that the upper part was lofty and well lighted,
while the shop and other ground floor rooms were confined and gloomy.
The present occupier had skilfully profited by this architectural
arrangement to have a room made in the wall between the first and second
floors, which was reached by a turning staircase, concealed in the
masonry.
This room was so built that the slightest noise in the street distinctly
reached the ears of persons in it, while stifling any they might make,
however loud it might be.
The worthy landlord, occupier of this house, had naturally a rather
mixed custom of people of every description--smugglers, _rateros_,
rogues, and others, whose habits might bring them into unpleasant
difficulties with the Chilean police; consequently, a whaleboat
constantly fastened to a ring under a window opening on the sea,
offered a provisional but secure shelter to the customers of the
establishment whenever, by any accident, the agents of government
evinced a desire to pay a domiciliary visit to his den.
This house was known--and probably is still known, unless an earthquake
or a fire has caused this rookery to disappear from the face of the
earth of Valparaiso--by the name of the _Locanda del Sol._
On an iron plate suspended from a beam, and creaking with every breath
of wind, there had been painted by a native artist a huge red face,
surrounded by orange beams, possibly intended as an explanation of the
sign to which I have alluded above.
Señor Benito Sarzuela master of the Locanda del Sol, was a tall, dry
fellow with an angular face end crafty look; a mixture of the Araucano,
Negro and Spaniard, whose _morale_ responded perfectly to his
_physique;_ that is to say, he combined in himself the vices of the
three races to which he belonged--red, black, and white--without
possessing one single virtue of theirs, and that beneath the shadow of
an avowed and almost honest trade he carried on clandestinely some
twenty, the most innocent of which would have taken him to the
_presidios_ or galleys for life, had he been discovered.
Some two months after the events we described in a previous chapter,
about eleven of the clock on a cold and misty night, Señor Benito
Sarzuela was seated in melancholy mood within his bar, contemplating
with mournful eye the deserted room of his establishment.
The wind blowing violently, caused the sign of the _mesón_ to creak on
its hinges with gloomy complaints, and the heavy black clouds coming
from the south moved weightily athwart the sky, dropping at intervals
heavy masses of rain on the ground loosened by previous storms.
"Come," the unhappy host muttered to himself with a piteous air, "there
is another day which finishes as badly as the others. _Sangre de Dios!_
For the last week I have had no luck. If it continues only a fortnight
longer I shall be ruined a man."
In fact, through a singular accident, for about a month the Locanda del
Sol had been completely shorn of its old brilliancy, and the landlord
did not know any reason for its eclipse.
The sound of clanking glasses and cups was no longer heard in the room,
usually affected by thirsty souls. Strange change in human things!
Abundance had been too suddenly followed by the most perfect vacuum. It
might be said that the plague reigned in this deserted house. The
bottles remained methodically arranged on the shelves, and hardly two
passers-by had come in during the past day to drink a glass of _pisco_,
which they hastily paid for, so eager were they to quit this den, in
spite of the becks, and nods, and wreathed smiles of the host, who tried
in vain to keep them to talk of public affairs, and, above all, cheer
his solitude.
After a few words we have heard him utter, the worthy Don Benito rose
carelessly, and prepared, with many an oath, to close his establishment,
so at any rate to save in candles, when suddenly an individual entered,
then two, then ten, and at last such a number that the locandero gave up
all attempts at counting them.
These men were all wrapped up in cloaks; their heads were covered by
felt hats, whose broad brims, pulled down carefully over their eyes,
rendered them perfectly unrecognisable.
The room was soon crowded with customers drinking and smoking, but not
uttering a word.
The extraordinary thing was that, although all the tables were lined,
such a religious silence prevailed among these strange bibbers that the
noise of the rain pattering outside could be distinctly heard, as well
as the footfall of the horses ridden by the serenos, which resounded
hoarsely on the pebbles or in the muddy ponds that covered the ground.
The host, agreeably surprised by this sudden turn of fortune, had
joyfully set to work serving his unexpected customers; but all at once a
singular thing happened, which Señor Sarzuela was far from anticipating.
Although the proverb say that you can never have enough of a good
thing--and proverbs are the wisdom of nations--it happened that the
affluence of people, who appeared to have made an appointment at his
house, became so considerable, and assumed such gigantic proportions,
that the landlord himself began to be terrified; for his hostelry, empty
a moment previously, was now so crammed that he soon did not know where
to put the new arrivals who continued to flock in. In fact the crowd,
after filling the common room, had, like a rising tide, flowed over
into the adjoining room, then it escaladed the stairs, and spread over
the upper floors.
At the first stroke of eleven more than two hundred customers occupied
the Locanda del Sol.
The locandero, with that craft which was one of the most salient points
of his character, then comprehended that something extraordinary was
about to happen, and that his house would be the scene.
At the thought a convulsive tremor seized upon him, his hair began to
stand on end, and he sought in his brain for the means he must employ to
get rid of these sinister and silent guests.
In his despair he rose with an air which he sought to render most
resolute, and walked to the door as if for the purpose of closing his
establishment. The customers, still silent as fish, did not make a sign
of moving; on the contrary, they pretended they noticed nothing.
Don Benito felt his nervousness redoubled.
Suddenly the voice of a sereno singing in the distance furnished him
with the pretext he vainly sought, by shouting as he passed the
locanda,--
"_Ave Maria purísima. Las onze han dado y llueve._"[1]
Although accompanied by modulations capable of making a dog weep, the
sacramental cry of the sereno absolutely produced no impression on mine
host's customers. The force of terror at length restoring him a slight
degree of courage, Señor Sarzuela decided on directly addressing his
obstinate customers. For this purpose he deliberately posted himself in
the centre of the room, thrust his fist into his side, and raising his
head, said in a voice which he tried in vain to render firm, but whose
tremor he could not hide,--
"Señores caballeros, it is eleven o'clock. The police regulations forbid
me keeping open longer. Have the goodness, I beg you, to withdraw
without delay, so that I may close my establishment."
This harangue, from which he promised himself the greatest success,
produced an effect exactly contrary to what he expected. The strangers
vigorously smote the table with their glasses, shouting unanimously,--
"Drink!"
The landlord bounded back at this fearful disturbance.
"Still, caballeros," he ventured to remark, after a moment's hesitation,
"the police regulations are severe. It is eleven, and--"
He could say no more: the noise recommenced with even greater intensity,
and the customers shouted together, in a voice of thunder, "Drink!"
A reaction, easy to comprehend, then took place in the mind of mine
host. Fancying that a personal attack was made on himself, persuaded
that his interests were at stake, the coward disappeared to make room
for the miser, threatened in what is dearest to him--his property.
"Ah," he shouted in feverish exasperation, "that is the game! Well, we
will see if I am master in my own house. I will go and fetch the alcalde."
This threat of justice from the mouth of the worthy Sarzuela appeared so
droll, that the customers broke out, with a unanimity that did them all
credit, into a burst of Homeric laughter right under the poor fellow's
nose. This was the _coup de grâce_. The host's anger was converted into
raving madness, and he rushed headforemost at the door, under the
laughter and inextinguishable shouts of his persecutors. But he had
hardly crossed the threshold of his house ere a new arrival seized him
unceremoniously by the arm and hurled him back roughly into the room,
saying in a bantering voice,--
"What fly has stung you, my dear landlord? Are you mad to go out
bareheaded in such weather, at the risk of catching a pleurisy?"
And then, while the locandero, terrified and confounded by this rude
shock, tried to regain his balance and re-establish a little order in
his ideas, the unknown, as coolly as if he were at home, had, with the
help of some of the customers, to whom he made signs, shut the shutters
and bolted the door with as much care as Sarzuela himself usually
devoted to this delicate operation.
"There, now that is done," the stranger said, turning to the amazed host
"suppose we have a chat, _compadre_? Ah, I suppose you do not recognise
me?" he added, as he removed his hat and displayed a fine intelligent
face, over which a mocking smile was at this moment playing.
"Oh, el Señor Don Gaëtano!" said Sarzuela, whom this meeting was far
from pleasing, and who tried to conceal a horrible grimace.
"Silence!" the other said. "Come hither."
"With a gesture he drew the landlord into a corner of the room, and,
leaning down to his ear, said in a low voice,--
"Are there any strangers in your house?"
"Look!" he said with a piteous glance, as he pointed to the still
drinking customers, "that legion of demons invaded my house an hour
back. They drink well, it is true; but there is something suspicious
about them not at all encouraging to an honest man."
"The more reason that you should have nothing to fear. Besides, I am not
alluding to them. I ask you if you have any strange lodgers? As for
those men, you know them as well as I do, perhaps better."
"From top to bottom of my house I have no other persons than these
caballeros, whom you say I know. It is very possible; but as ever since
they have been here, thanks to the way in which they are muffled, it has
been impossible for me to see the tip of a nose, I was utterly unable to
recognise them."
"You are a donkey, my good friend. These men who bother you so greatly
are all Dauph'yeers."
"Really!" the amazed host exclaimed: "then why do they hide their
faces?"
"My faith, Master Sarzuela, I fancy it is probably because they do not
wish to have them seen."
And laughing at the landlord, who was sadly out of countenance, the
stranger made a sign. Two men rose, rushed on the poor fellow, and
before he could even guess what they intended, he found himself so
magnificently garroted that he could not even cross himself.
"Fear nothing, Master Sarzuela; no harm will befall you," the stranger
continued. "We only want to talk without witnesses, and as you are
naturally a chatterer, we take our precautions, that is all. So be calm;
in a few hours you will be free. Come, look sharp, you fellows," he
continued, addressing his men. "Gag him, lay him on his bed, and turn
the key in his door. Good-by, my worthy host, and pray keep calm."
The stranger's orders were punctually executed; the luckless Sarzuela,
tied and gagged, was carried from the room on the shoulders of two of
his assailants, borne upstairs, thrown on his bed, and locked in in
a twinkling, ere he had even time to think of the slightest resistance.
We will leave him to indulge in the gloomy reflections which probably
assailed him in a throng so soon as he was alone, face to face with his
despair, and return to the large room of the locanda, where persons far
more interesting to us than the poor landlord are awaiting us.
The Dauph'yeers, so soon as they found themselves masters of the
hostelry, ranged the tables one on the other against the walls, so as to
clear the centre of the room, and drew up the benches in a line, on
which they seated themselves.
The Locanda del Sol, owing to the changes it underwent, was in a few
moments completely metamorphosed into a club.
The last arrival, the man who had given the order to gag the host,
enjoyed, according to all appearances, a certain influence over the
honourable company collected at this moment on the ground floor room of
the hostelry. So soon as the master of the house had disappeared he took
off his cloak, made a sign commanding silence, and speaking in excellent
French, said in a clear and sonorous voice,--
"Brethren, thanks for your punctuality."
The Dauph'yeers politely returned his salute.
"Gentlemen," he continued, "our projects are advancing. Soon, I hope, we
shall attain the object to which we have so long been tending, and quit
that obscurity in which we are languishing, to conquer our place in the
sunshine. America is a marvellous land, in which every ambition can be
satisfied. I have taken all the necessary measures, as I pledged myself
to you to do a fortnight ago, when I had the honour of convening you for
the first time. We have succeeded. You were kind enough to appoint me
director of the Mexican movement, and I thank you for it, gentleman. A
concession of three thousand acres of land has been made me at
Guetzalli, in Upper Sonora. The first step has been taken. My
lieutenant, De Laville, started yesterday for Mexico, to take possession
of the granted territory. I have today another request to make of you.
You who listen to me here are all European or North Americans, and you
will understand me. For a very long time the Dauph'yeers, the successors
of the Brethren of the Coast have been calmly watching, as apparently
disinterested spectators of the endless drama of the American republics,
the sudden changes and shameless revolutions of the old Spanish
colonies. The hour has arrived to throw ourselves into the contest. I
need one hundred and fifty devoted men. Guetzalli will serve them as a
temporary refuge. I shall soon tell them what I expect from their
courage; but you must strive to carry out what I attempt. The enterprise
I meditate, and in which I shall possibly perish, is entirely in the
interest of the association. If I succeed, every man who took part in it
will have a large reward and splendid position insured him. You know the
man who introduced me to you, and he had gained your entire confidence.
The medal he gave me, and which I now show you, proves to you that he
entirely responds for me. Will you, in your turn, trust in me as he has
done? Without you I can do nothing. I await your reply."
He was silent. His auditors began a long discussion among themselves,
though in a low voice, which they carried on for some time. At length
silence was restored, and a man rose.
"Count Gaëtan de Lhorailles," he said, "my brethren have requested me to
answer you in their name. You presented yourself to us, supported by the
recommendation of a man in whom we have the most entire confidence. Your
conduct has appeared to confirm this recommendation. The one hundred and
fifty men you ask for are ready to follow you, no matter whither you may
lead them, persuaded as they are that they can only gain by seconding
your plans. I, Diégo Léon, inscribe myself at the head of the list."
"And I!"
"And I!"
"And I!"
The Dauph'yeers shouted, outcrying each other. The count gave a signal,
and silence was re-established.
"Brothers, I thank you," he said. "The nucleus of our association will
remain at Valparaiso, and if I need them I will draw from that city the
resolute men I may presently want. For the moment one hundred and fifty
men are sufficient for me. If my plans succeed, who knows what the
future may have in store for us? I have drawn up a charter-party, all
the stipulations of which will be rigorously kept by myself and by you,
I have no doubt. Read and sign. In two days I start for Talca: but in
six weeks I will meet here those among you who consent to follow me, and
then I will communicate to them my plans in their fullest details."
"Captain de Lhorailles," Diégo Léon replied, "you say that you have only
need of one hundred and fifty men. Draw them by lots, then; for all wish
to accompany you."
"Thank you once again, my brave comrades. Believe me, each shall have
his turn. The project I have formed is grand and worthy of you.
Selection would only arouse jealousy among men all equally worthy. Diégo
Léon, I intrust to you the duty of drawing lots for the names of those
who are to form part of the first expedition."
"It shall be done," said Léon, a methodical and steady Bearnese and
ex-corporal of the Spahis.
"And now, my friends, one last word. Remember that in three months I
shall expect you at Guetzalli; and, by the aid of Heaven, the star of
the Dauph'yeer shall not be dimmed. Drink, brothers, drink to the
success of our enterprise!"
"Let us drink!" all the Brethren of the Coast shouted quite electrified.
The wine and brandy then began flowing. The whole night was spent in an
orgie, whose proportions became, towards morning, gigantic. The Count de
Lhorailles--thanks to the talisman the baron gave him on parting--had
found himself, immediately on his arrival in America, at the head of
resolute and unscrupulous men, by whose help it was easy for an
intellect like his to accomplish great things.
Two months after the meeting to which we have introduced the reader, the
count and his one hundred and fifty Dauph'yeers were assembled at the
colony of Guetzalli--that magnificent concession which M. de Lhorailles
had obtained through his occult influences.
The count appeared to command good fortune, and everything he undertook
succeeded. The projects which appeared the wildest were carried out by
him. His colony prospered and assumed proportions which delighted the
Mexican government. The count, with the tact and knowledge of the world
he thoroughly possessed, had caused the jealous and the curious to be
silent. He had created a circle of devoted friends and useful
acquaintances, who on various occasions pleaded in his behalf and
supported him by their credit.
Our readers can judge of the progress he had made in so short a
time--scarce three years--when we say that, at the moment we introduce
him on the stage, he had almost attained the object of his constant
efforts. He was about to gain an honourable rank in society by marrying
the daughter of Don Sylva de Torrés, one of the richest hacenderos in
Sonora: and through the influence of his future father-in-law he had
just received a commission as captain of a free corps, intended to
repulse the incursions of the Comanches and Apaches on the Mexican
territory, and the right of forming this company exclusively of
Europeans if he thought proper.
We will now return to the house of Don Sylva de Torrés, which we left
almost at the moment the Count de Lhorailles entered it.
[1] I salute you, most pure Mary! Eleven has struck, and it rains.