“A long night indeed, in which the sunksink tree very time.”
“Comment!” broke out the aide-de-camp hoarsely, and instantly realized
his mistake.
“Ah! devil take the French!” said he explanatorily. “I been in their
camp so long that to catch their lingo. But I spik l’Espagnol, señor.
It shall be good to us to converse there.”
The other bowed impenetrably. His habit of a profound and melancholy
aloofness might have served for mask to any temper of mind but that
which, in real fact, it environed—a reason, that is to say, more lost
than bedevilled under the long tyranny of oppression.
“I have been ill, I am to understand?” said Ducos, on his guard.
“For three days and nights, señor. My goatherd came to tell me how a
wounded English officer was lying on the hills. Between us we conveyed
you hither.”
“_Ah, Dios!_ I remember. I had endeavoured to carry muskets into
Saragossa by the river. I was hit in the leg; I was captured; I
escaped. For two days I wandered, señor, famished and desperate. At
last in these mountains I fell as by a stroke from heaven.”
“It was the foul blood clot, señor. It balked your circulation. There
was the brazen splinter in the wound, which I removed, and God
restored you. What fangs are theirs, these reptiles! In a few days you
will be well.”
“Thanks to what ministering angel?”
“I am known as Don Manoel di Cangrejo, señor, the most shattered, as
he was once the most prosperous of men. May God curse the French! May
God” (his wild, mournful face twitched with strong emotion) “reward
and bless these brave allies of a people more wronged than any the
world has yet known!”
“Noble Englishman,” said he by and by, “thou hast nothing at present
but to lie here and accept the grateful devotion of a heart to which
none but the inhuman denies humanity.”
Ducos looked his thanks.
“If I might rest here a little,” he said; “if I might be spared——”
The other bowed, with a grave understanding.
“None save ourselves, and the winds and trees, señor. I will nurse
thee as if thou wert mine own child.”
He was as good as his word. Ducos, pluming himself on his
perspicacity, accepting the inevitable with philosophy, lent himself
during the interval, while feigning a prolonged weakness, to recovery.
That was his, to all practical purposes, within a couple of days,
during which time he never set eyes on Anita, but only on Anita’s
master. Don Manoel would often come and sit by his bed of mats; would
even sometimes retail to him, as to a trusted ally, scraps of local
information. Thus was he posted, to his immense gratification, in the
topical after-history of his own exploit at the gallows.
“It is said,” whispered Cangrejo awfully, “that one of the dead,
resenting so vile a neighbour, impressed a goatherd into his service,
and, being assisted from the beam, walked away. Truly it is an age of
portents.”
On the third morning, coming early with his bowl of goat’s milk and
his offering of fruits, he must apologize, with a sweet and lofty
courtesy, for the necessity he was under of absenting himself all day.
“There is trouble,” he said—“as when is there not? I am called to
secret council, señor. But the boy Ambrosio has my orders to be ever
at hand shouldst thou need him.”
Ducos’s heart leapt. But he was careful to deprecate this generous
attention, and to cry _Adios!_ with the most perfect assumption of
composure.
He was lying on his elbow by and by, eagerly listening, when the
doorway was blocked by a shadow. The next instant Anita had sprung to
and was kneeling beside him.
“Heart of my heart, have I done well? Thou art sound and whole? O,
speak to me, speak to me, that I may hear thy voice and gather its
forgiveness!”
For what? She was sobbing and fondling him in a very lust of entreaty.
“Thou hast done well,” he said. “So, we were seen indeed, Anita?”
“Yes,” she wept, holding his face to her bosom. “And, O! I agonize for
thee to be up and away, Eugenio, for I fear.”
“Hush! I am strong. Help me to my legs, child. So! Now, come with me
outside, and point out, if thou canst, where lies the Little Hump.”
She was his devoted crutch at once. They stood in the sunlight,
looking down upon the hills which fell from beneath their feet—a
world of tossed and petrified rapids. At their backs, on a shallow
plateau under eaves of rock, Cangrejo’s eyrie clung to the
mountain side.
“There,” said the goatherd, indicating with her finger, “that mound
above the valley—that little hill, fat-necked like a great mushroom,
which sprouts from its basin among the trees?”
“Wait! mine eyes are dazzled.”
“Ah, poor sick eyes! Look, then! Dost thou not see the white worm of
the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”
“I see it—yes, yes.”
“Now, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine tree leans to
the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”
“Stay—I have it.”
“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once,
they say, an island in the midst of a lake, which burst its banks and
poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”
He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the position
of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his anger a
second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved out a sigh,
and turned on her, smiling.
“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where we met three
days ago.”
It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent—by way of
aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper
between—of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony plateau
which he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice of chestnuts
and locust trees. To the other, the road by which he had climbed went
down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to emulate—into the
valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed. He seated himself
down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only by a violent
effort.
“Anita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou
must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and
plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee
presently.”
She sighed, and crept away obedient. O, forlorn, most forlorn soul of
love, which, counting mistrust treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet
Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in
love with loyalty.
The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to his legs
with an immense sigh of relief. Love, he thought, could be presuming,
could be obtuse, could be positively a bore. It all turned upon the
context of the moment; and the present was quick with desires other
than for endearments. For it must be related that the young captain,
having manœuvred matters to this accommodating pass, was designing
nothing less than an instant return, on the wings of transport, to the
blockading camp, whence he proposed returning, with a suitable force
and all possible dispatch, to seize and empty of its varied treasures
the salt mine of St. Ildefonso.
“Pouf!” he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation;
“this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still—I have
Cangrejo’s word for it.”
He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to refocus in his
memory the position of the mound, which still from here was plainly
visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of
footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder. The
footsteps came on—approached him—paused—so long that he was induced
at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes encountered other
eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his refuge. The new-comer was
a typical Spanish Romany—slouching, filthy, with a bandage over one
eye.
“God be with thee, Caballero!” said the Frenchman defiantly.
To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of laughter,
and flung himself towards him.
“Judge thou, now,” said he, “which is the more wide-awake adventurer
and the better actor!”
“My God!” cried Ducos; “it is de la Platière!”
“Hush!” whispered the mendicant. “Are we private? Ah, bah! Junot
should have sent me in the first instance.”
“I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In
good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt
return, and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.”
Half an hour later, de la Platière—having already, for his part,
mentally absorbed the details of a certain position—swung rapidly,
with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had ascended
earlier. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill
regathered itself to silence. Ducos, on terms with destiny and at
peace with all the world, sat for hours in the shadow of the trees.
Perhaps he was not yet Judas enough to return to Anita, awaiting him
in Cangrejo’s eyrie. But at length, towards evening, fearing his long
absence might arouse suspicion or uneasiness, he arose and climbed the
hill. When he reached the cabin, he found it empty and silent. He
loitered about, wondering and watchful. Not a soul came near him. He
dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread; he dozed again.
When he opened his eyes for the second time, the shadows of the peaks
were slanting to the east. He got to his feet, shivering a little.
This utter silence and desertion discomforted him. Where was the girl?
God! was it possible after all that she had betrayed him? He might
have questioned his own heart as to that; only, as luck would have it,
it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. So, let him think. De la
Platière, with his men (as calculated), would be posted in the
Pampeluna road, round the spur of the hill below, an hour after
sunset—that was to say, at fifteen minutes to six. No doubt by then
the alarm would have gone abroad. But no great resistance to a strong
force was to be apprehended. In the meantime—well, in the meantime,
until the moment came for him to descend under cover of dark and
assume the leadership, he must possess his soul in patience.
The sun went down. Night flowing into the valleys seemed to expel a
moan of wind; then all dropped quiet again. Darkness fell swift and
sudden like a curtain, but no Anita appeared, putting it aside, and
Ducos was perplexed. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless
subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk
to—and deceive. He was depressed.
By and by he pulled off, turned inside-out and resumed his scarlet
jacket, which he had taken the provisional precaution to have lined
with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and
looked eagerly into the lower vortices of dusk. In the very direction
to which his thoughts were engaged, a little glow-worm light was
burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify—Spaniards or
French, ambush or investment? Allowing—as between himself on the
height and de la Platière on the road below—for the apparent
discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the
appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of an
immediate descent necessary.
Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one
instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with
caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the black
ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces he
would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned
some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer
radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new
perspective. Still, over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches
he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump, like a
gigantic thatched kraal, loomed oddly upon him through the dark.
And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great lantern
hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot of the
mound—a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy.
A cluster of rocks neighboured the clearing about the tree. To these
Ducos padded his last paces with a cat-like stealth—crouching, hardly
breathing; and now from that coign of peril he stared down.
A throng of armed guerrillas, one a little forward of the rest, was
gathered about a couple more of their kidney, who, right under the
lantern, held the goatherd Anita on her knees in a nailing grip. To
one side, very phantoms of desolation, stood Cangrejo and another. The
faces of all, densely shadowed in part by the rims of their sombreros,
looked as if masked; their mouths, corpse-like, showed a splint of
teeth; their ink-black whiskers hummocked on their shoulders.
So, in the moment of Ducos’s alighting on it, was the group
postured—silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full
tide of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.
“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the
gallows; him whom thou foisted, O! unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy! on
the unsuspecting Cangrejo; him, thy Frankish gallant and spy” (the
voice guttered, and then, rising, leapt to flame)—“what hast thou
done with him? where hidden? Speak quickly and with truth, if, traitor
though thou be, thou wouldst be spared the traitor’s estrapade.”
“Alguazil, I cannot say. Have mercy on me!”
Ducos could hardly recognize the child in those agonized tones.
The inquisitor, with an oath, half wheeled.
“Pignatelli, father of this accursed—if by her duty thou canst
prevail?”
A figure—agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanized as
Brutus—stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm aloft.
“No child of mine, alguazil!” it proclaimed in a shrill, strung cry.
“Let her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!”
Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.
“Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah,
naughty!) is half absolved. Tell him, tell him—ah, there—now, now,
now! He, thy lover, was in the cabin. I left him prostrate, scarce
able to move. When the council comes to seek him, he is gone. Away,
sayst thou? Ah, child, but I must know better! It could not be far.
Say where—give him up—let him show himself only, chiquita, and the
good alguazil will spare thee. Such a traitor, ah, Dios! And yet I
have loved, too.”
He sobbed, and clawed her uncouthly. Ducos, in his eyrie, laughed to
himself, and applauded softly, making little cymbals of his
thumb-nails.
“But he will not move her,” he thought—and, on the thought, started;
for from his high perch his eye had suddenly caught, he was sure of
it, the sleeking of a French bayonet in the road below.
“Master!” cried Anita, in a heart-breaking voice; “he is gone—they
cannot take him. O, don’t let them hurt me!”
The alguazil made a sign. Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, was
dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl;
and, in a moment, the group fell apart to watch her being hauled up to
the branch by her thumbs.
Ducos looked on greedily.
“How long before she sets to screaming?” he thought, “so that I may
escape under cover of it.”
So long, that he grew intolerably restless—wild, furious. He could
have cursed her for her endurance.
But presently it came, moaning up all the scale of suffering. And, at
that, slinking like a rat through its run, he went down swiftly
towards the road—to meet de la Platière and his men already silently
breaking cover from it.
And, on the same instant, the Spaniards saw them.
* * * * *
“Peste!” whispered de la Platière “We could have them all at one
volley but for that!”
Between the French force, ensconced behind the rocks whither Ducos had
led them, and the Spaniards who, completely taken by surprise, had
clustered foolishly in a body under the lantern, hung the body of
Anita, its torture suspended for the moment because its poor wits were
out.
“How, my friend!” exclaimed Ducos. “But for what?”
“The girl, that is all.”
“She will feel nothing. No doubt she is half dead already. A moment,
and it will be too late.”
“Nevertheless, I will not,” said de la Platière.
Ducos stamped ragingly.
“Give the word to me. She must stand her chance. For the Emperor!” he
choked—then shrieked out, “Fire!”
The explosion crashed among the hills, and echoed off.
A dark mass, which writhed and settled beyond the lantern shine,
seemed to excite a little convulsion of merriment in the swinging
body. That twitched and shook a moment; then relaxed, and hung
motionless.