THE RESCUE.
In her apartment, lighted by a lamp, Azenor the Pale was engaged in the
preparation of the magical philter, promised by her to the seigneur of
Plouernel. After blowing some powder on a fluid that she had poured into
a flagon, she pulled out of a chest a little vial, whose contents she
drank. Laying down the vial, she remarked with a sinister smile: "Now,
Neroweg, you may come ... I am ready for you." Then, taking up the
flagon, half full with a solution of several powders, she proceeded:
"This flagon must now be filled with blood ... the imagination of these
ferocious brutes must be struck ... come...." she added with a sigh,
turning towards the turret where the little Colombaik was secreted.
Raising the curtain that masked the alcove, Azenor saw before her the
innocent little creature huddled in a lump in a corner, and silently
weeping. "Come," said the sorceress to him in a sweet voice, "come to
me." The son of Fergan the Quarryman obeyed, he rose and advanced
timidly. Wan, thin, broken with want, his pale mien had, like his
mother's, Joan the Hunchback's, an inexpressible charm of kindness.
"Must you always be sad?" inquired Azenor, sitting down and drawing the
child near to her and to a table on which lay a poniard. "Why do you
always weep?" The little fellow wept afresh. "What's the cause of your
sorrow?"
"My mother, my father," faltered the child, without ceasing to weep, "I
do not see them any more!"
"You love your mother and father very much?" Instead of answering the
sorceress, the poor little one threw himself sobbing upon her neck. The
woman could not resist the impulse of responding to the childish
prompting of a caress, and she embraced Colombaik at the very moment
when, fearing he had been disrespectful to Azenor, the child was about
to drop on his knees before her. Sinking upon the floor, he broke out
into copious tears. The young woman, more and more moved, silently
contemplated Colombaik, murmuring to herself: "No, no ... I lack
courage.... I shall not kill that poor child, a few drops of his blood
will be enough for the philter." Already her hand approached the poniard
on the table, when suddenly her ear caught an unusual noise in the
turret. It was like the scraping of a chain drawn with difficulty over
an iron bar. The sorceress, alarmed, pushed the child back and ran
toward the turret at the moment that Fergan the Quarryman stepped in,
pale, bathed in perspiration and holding in his hand his iron pick.
Azenor drew back, dumb with stupor and fear, while Colombaik, with a cry
of joy, rushed to the quarryman, holding up his arms to him and calling:
"My father! my father!" Beside himself with happiness, Fergan dropped
his iron bar, took up the child in his robust arms, and, raising him to
his breast, pressed him passionately, interrogating the face of
Colombaik with inexpressible anxiety, while the child, taking between
his little hands the gruff face of the quarryman, covered it with
kisses, muttering: "Good father! Oh, good father! I see you again at
last!"
The serf, without noticing the presence of the sorceress, devoured
Colombaik with his eyes. Presently he observed, with a profound sigh of
relief: "He is pale, he has been weeping, but he does not seem to have
suffered; they can't have hurt him!" Embracing Colombaik with frenzy, he
repeated several times: "My poor child! How happy your mother will be!"
But his paternal alarms being calmed, he remembered that he was not
alone, and not doubting that Azenor was the sorceress, whose dreaded
name had reached as far as the serfs of the seigniory, he put his child
down, took up again his pick, approached the young woman slowly with a
savage mien and said to her: "So, it is you, who have children
kidnapped to serve your diabolical sorceries?" and with glistening eyes
he raised his iron bar with both hands. "You will now die, infernal
witch!"
"Father, do not kill her!" cried out the child impetuously, clasping the
quarryman's legs with both his hands. "Oh, do not kill this good lady
who was embracing me just as you came in!"
Fergan looked at Azenor, who, somber, pensive, her arms crossed upon her
palpitating breast, seemed to brave death. Turning to the child: "Was
this woman embracing you?"
"Yes, father; and since I have been here she has been kind to me. She
has sought to console me. She even often rocked me in her arms."
"Why, then," said the quarryman to the sorceress, "did you have my child
kidnapped? What have you to say!"
Azenor the Pale, without answering the question of the serf, and
pursuing the thought that turned in her head, said: "Where does the
passage run out through which you have penetrated to this turret?"
"What's that to you!"
The young woman stepped to a cabinet of massive oak, took from it a
casket, opened it, and displaying before the quarryman the gold pieces
that it was filled with, said: "Take this casket and let me accompany
you. You have been able to enter this donjon by a secret passage, you
will be able to get out again. We shall escape together from this
accursed den. I pay a rich ransom."
"You ... you mean to accompany me?"
"I wish to flee from this castle, where I am a prisoner, and run to
rejoin at Angers William IX., Duke of Aquitaine----" Stopping short and
leaning her ear towards the door, Azenor made a sign of silence to
Fergan, and proceeded in a whisper: "I hear voices and steps on the
staircase. Someone is coming up here.... It is Neroweg!"
"The count!" exclaimed the quarryman, with savage joy, stepping towards
the door: "Oh, Worse than a Wolf, you will no longer bite! I shall kill
the wretch!"
"Keep still or we are lost," interrupted Azenor in a low voice. "The
Count is not alone; think of your child!" and pointing with rapid
gesture to the cabinet of massive oak, she hastily whispered to the
serf: "Push that piece of furniture across the door. Be quick! We shall
have time to flee! Your enemy, Neroweg, has only a few more steps to
climb! I hear his spurs clank upon the stone floor!"
Fergan, thinking only of the safety of his child, followed the advice of
Azenor, and, thanks to the herculean strength he was endowed with,
succeeded in pushing the massive piece of furniture across the door,
which, thus barricaded, could not swing open into the room. The
sorceress hastily wrapped herself in a mantle; took from the cabinet
whence she had extracted the casket, a little leathern bag containing
precious stones, and said to the quarryman, holding the casket out to
him: "Take this gold and let's flee."
"Carry your gold, yourself! I shall carry my child and my pick to defend
him!" answered the serf, taking up his iron bar with one hand, and
placing on his left arm little Colombaik, who held fast by his father's
neck. At that very moment the fugitives heard from without the sound of
the key that turned in the lock, followed by the voice of the seigneur
of Plouernel: "Who is holding that door back inside? Is that one of your
enchantments, accursed sorceress?"
While the Count was beating against the door, and, redoubling his
imprecations, vainly sought to force it, the quarryman, his son and
Azenor, gathered in the turret, prepared to flee by the secret passage.
One of the slabs of the flooring, being swung aside by means of a
counterweight and chains wound around an iron axis, exposed the first
step of a ladder so narrow that it could barely allow passage to one
person at a time, and of such a slope at that spot that its first ten
rungs could be cleared only by sliding down almost on the back from
step to step. Azenor was the first to undertake the narrow passage; the
little Colombaik imitated her; the two were followed by Fergan, who then
readjusted the counterweight. The stone slab, back again in its place,
again masked the secret passage. This steep portion of the ladder was
wrought in an abutment of the turret, where its base projected beyond
the wall of the donjon. Its foot connected with the narrow stone spiral,
which, wrought in the ten-foot thick wall, descended to the lowest
depths of the donjon. At each landing, a skilfully masked outlet opened
upon this secret passage, lighted by not a ray from without. But Fergan,
equipped with his tinder box, punk and wick, of the kind that he helped
himself with in the quarries, lighted the passage, and, with his iron
pick in one hand, his light in the other, preceded his son and Azenor
down the stone spiral. The descent was but slowly effected.
Presently the fugitives, leaving above them the level of the landing
where the hall of the stone table was located, and which was situated on
the ground floor, arrived at the place that corresponded with the
subterranean cells. Here the passage served not merely as a means of
retreat in case of a siege, it also afforded the chatelain an
opportunity to spy upon the prisoners and overhear their confidential
communications. By its construction, the cell of Bezenecq the Rich gave
special facilities for such espionage. Furthermore, a slab three feet
square by two inches thick, fastened in a strong oaken frame on hinges,
constituted a sort of stone door, undistinguishable from the inside of
the somber apartment, but easy to push open from without. Thus the
seigneur reserved to himself an access to those subterraneous chambers,
unknown even to the dwellers of the castle. Above the opening and within
the cell was sculptured that hideous mask, whose sight had frightened
the daughter of the merchant. The two eyes and the mouth of this grim
figure, bored through the full thickness of the wall and exteriorly
chiseled in the form of a niche, permitted the spy, posted at that
place of concealment, to see the prisoners and overhear what they said.
Thus it happened a few hours before that Fergan, climbing up by the
light of his wick, had overheard the conversation between the Bishop of
Nantes and Jeronimo, the legate of the Pope, and then that of the
bourgeois of Nantes and his daughter. The fugitives were now on a level
with the cell of Bezenecq, when suddenly brilliant rays of light shot
through the openings in the stone mask, proceeding from a light within.
Fergan was in advance of his child and Azenor. He halted at the sound of
rawkish peals of laughter--frightful, like those of a maniac. The serf
peeped through the holes pierced in the eyes of the mask, and this was
what he saw by the light of a lantern placed upon the ground. Two naked
corpses, the one suspended by the neck from the iron gibbet fastened in
the wall, the other by the groins from the iron prong. The former,
rigid, horribly distended and dislocated by the enormous weight of the
stone attached to his feet; the latter, hooked by the flesh upon the
sharp prong that penetrated his entrails, was bent backwards with his
arms dangling against his legs. These victims, captured shortly before,
from a new troop of travelers on the territory of the seigneur of
Plouernel and taken to this cell, better fitted out than the others with
instruments of torture, did not survive the experience. The corpse of
Bezenecq the Rich was chained to the gridiron above the dying embers of
the coal fire. The agonies of that unhappy man had been so excruciating
that his members, held fast by the iron bands, had been convulsively
distended. Undoubtedly at the moment of expiring he had made a supreme
effort to turn his head towards his daughter, so as to die with her in
sight. The face of the merchant, blackened, frightful to behold,
retained the expression of his agony. A few steps from the corpse of her
father, cowering upon the straw bed, her knees held in her arms, Isoline
swayed to and fro, emitting at intervals rythmic peals of maniacal
laughter. She had gone crazy. Fergan, moved with pity, was considering
how to deliver the daughter of Bezenecq, when the door of the cell
opened and Gonthram, the eldest son of Neroweg, stepped in, a torch in
his hands and his cheeks of purple. His eyes, his unsteady walk, all
announced a high stage of inebriety. Approaching Isoline, he struck
against the gridiron, where lay the corpse of the bourgeois of Nantes.
Unmoved by that spectacle, Gonthram stepped towards the young girl,
seized her rudely by the arm, and said in a maudlin voice: "Come, follow
me!" The demented girl seemed not to hear, she did not even raise her
eyes, and continued swaying to and fro and to laugh. "You are quite
gay," observed the whelp; "I also am gay. Come upstairs. We shall laugh
together!"
"Oh, traitor!" broke in a new personage, precipitating himself out of
breath into the cell. "I made no doubt what you had in your mind when I
saw you leave the table the moment my father went up to the sorceress!"
And throwing himself upon his brother, Guy, the second son of Neroweg,
cried out: "If you want the girl, you will have to pay for her with your
blood!"
"Vile bastard! You, the son of my mother's chaplain! You dare to
threaten me!" In his rage, increased by intoxication, Gonthram raised
his burning torch, struck his brother with it in the face and drew his
sword. Guy, uttering a furious imprecation, also drew his sword. The
struggle was short. Guy fell lifeless at the feet of his brother, who
exclaimed: "The bastard is dead. I am the better man. The girl is mine!"
and rushing back to Isoline: "Now, you are mine!"
"No!" resounded a menacing voice, and before Gonthram, who had taken up
the daughter of Bezenecq in his arms, had time to turn around, he
received over his head a crushing blow with an iron bar, throwing him
down upon his brother's body. From the place of concealment, where
Fergan had stood, he saw the commencement of the fratricidal strife and
had entered the cell by the secret opening when the fight was at its
height between the two sons of Neroweg. Time was passing. Some of the
men of the seigneur of Plouernel, observing the prolonged absence of the
two whelps, might at any moment come down. Fergan took the poor maniac
by the hand and led her to the secret opening. "Now, stoop, dear child,
and get through the aperture." Isoline remained motionless. Renouncing
all hope of being understood by her, Fergan pressed his two hands with
force upon the shoulders of the child. "Woman," the serf cried out to
Azenor the Pale, who had remained outside of the cell, contemplating the
two bleeding bodies of the sons of Neroweg, "take the hand of this poor
girl and try to draw her out."
"Why take this insane woman along?" said Azenor to Fergan. "She will
retard our march and increase the difficulties of our flight."
"I wish to save this unfortunate being."
Sustained by Fergan, who preceded Colombaik, carrying the lighted wick,
Isoline descended with difficulty the steps of the staircase.
Penetrating ever deeper into the bowels of the earth, the fugitives
arrived at the bottom of the stone spiral that connected with a tunnel,
bored through the living rock at such a depth that, passing under the
sheet of water of the gigantic pit, from the midst of which the donjon
rose, it issued out into the open half a league away from the castle at
a place concealed amid tumbling bowlders and brushwood.