Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “It was something, I tell you!” roared a soldier. “Something that jumped over the cliff!”

  “It was an owl, idiot!” retorted his comrade.

  “I tell you I saw it!” protested the other, in a shaking voice.

  “Then you saw a witch of Ker-Ys,” bawled another. “Look out for your skin in the first battle. It’s death to see such things.”

  I looked at Speed. He stood wide-eyed, staring at vacancy.

  “Could she do it?” I asked, horrified. 373

  “God knows,” he whispered.

  Soldiers were beginning to clamber up the garden wall from the outside; torches were raised to investigate. As we shrank back into the shadow of the shrubbery I stumbled over something soft — Jacqueline’s clothes, lying in a circle as she had stepped out of them.

  Speed took them. I followed him, creeping back to the window, where we entered in time to avoid discovery by a wretch who had succeeded in mounting the wall, torch in hand.

  One or two soldiers climbed over and dropped into the garden, prowling around, prodding the bushes with their bayonets, even coming to press their dirty faces and hands against our window.

  “They’re all here!” sang out one. “It was an owl, I tell you!” And he menaced us with his rifle in pantomime and retired, calling his companions to follow.

  “Where is Jacqueline?” asked the Countess, looking anxiously at the little blue skirt on Speed’s knees. “Have they harmed that child?”

  I told her.

  A beautiful light grew in her eyes as she listened. “Did I not warn you that we Bretons know how to die?” she said.

  I looked dully at Speed, who sat by the window, brooding over the little woollen skirt on his knees, stroking it, touching the torn hem, and at last folding it with unaccustomed and shaky hands.

  There were noises outside our door, loud voices, hammering, the sound of furniture being dragged over stone floors, and I scarcely noticed it when our door was opened again.

  Then somebody called out our names; a file of half-drunken soldiers grounded arms in the passageway with a bang that brought us to our feet, as Mornac, flushed with wine, entered unsteadily, drawn sword in hand.

  “I’m damned if I stay here any longer,” he broke out, angrily. “I’ll see whether my rascals can’t shoot straight by torch-light. Here, you! Scarlett, I mean! And you, Speed; and you, too, madame; patter your prayers, for you’ll get no priest. Lieutenant, withdraw the guard at the wall. Here, captain, march the battalion back to Paradise and take the servants!”

  A second later the drums began to beat, but Mornac, furious, silenced them.

  “They can hear you at sea!” he shouted. “Do you want a boat-load of marines at your heels? Strike out those torches! Four will do for the garden. March!”

  The shuffling tread of the insurgent infantry echoed across the gravel court-yard; torches behind the walls were extinguished; blackness enveloped the cliffs.

  “Well,” broke out Speed, hoarsely, “good-bye, Scarlett.”

  He held out his hand.

  “Good-bye,” I said, stunned.

  I dropped my hand as two soldiers placed themselves on either side of him.

  “Well, good-bye,” he repeated, aimlessly; and then, remembering, he went to the Countess and offered his hand.

  “I am so sorry for you,” she said, with a pallid smile. “You have much to live for. But you must not feel lonely, monsieur; you will be with us — we shall be close to you.”

  She turned to me, and her hands fell to her side.

  “Are you contented?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I, too,” she said, sweetly, and offered her hands.

  I held them very tightly. “You say,” I whispered, “that it is not — love. But you do not speak for me. I love you.”

  A bright blush spread over brow and neck.

  “So — it was love — after all,” she said, under her breath. “God be with us to-day — I love you.”

  “March!” cried Mornac, as two soldiers took station beside me.

  “I beg you will be gentle with this lady,” I said, angrily, as two more soldiers pushed up beside the young Countess and laid their hands on her shoulders.

  “Who the devil are you giving orders to?” shouted Mornac, savagely. “March!”

  Speed passed out first; I followed; the Countess came behind me.

  “Courage,” I stammered, looking back at her as we stumbled out into the torch-lit garden.

  She smiled adorably. Her forefathers had mounted the guillotine smiling.

  Mornac pointed to the garden wall near the bench where we had sat together. A soldier dressed like a Turco lifted a torch and set it in the flower-bed under the wall, illuminating the spot where we were to stand. As this soldier turned to come back I saw his face.

  “Salah Ben-Ahmed!” I cried, hoarsely. “Do Marabouts do this butcher’s work?”

  The Turco stared at me as though stunned.

  “Salah Ben-Ahmed is a disgraced soldier!” I said, in a ringing voice.

  “It’s a lie!” he shouted, in Arabic— “it’s a lie, O my inspector! Speak! Have these men tricked me? Are you not Prussians?”

  “Silence! Silence!” bawled Mornac. “Turco, fall in! Fall in, I say! What! You menace me?” he snarled, cocking his revolver.

  Then a man darted out of the red shadows of the torch-light and fell upon Mornac with a knife, and dragged him down and rolled on him, stabbing him through and through, while the mutilated wretch screamed and screamed until his soul struggled out through the flame-shot darkness and fled to its last dreadful abode.

  The Lizard rose, shaking his fagot knife; they fell upon him, clubbing and stabbing with stock and bayonet, but he swung his smeared and sticky blade, clearing a circle around him. And I think he could have cut his way free had not Tric-Trac shot him in the back of the head.

  Then a frightful tumult broke loose. Three of the torches were knocked to the ground and trampled out as the insurgents, doubly drunken with wine and the taste of blood, seized me and tried to force me against the wall; but the Turco, with his shrill, wolf-like battle yelp, attacked them, sabre-bayonet in hand. Speed, too, had wrested a rifle from a half-stupefied ruffian, and now stood at bay before the Countess; I saw him wielding his heavy weapon like a flail; then in the darkness Tric-Trac shot at me, so close that the powder-flame scorched my leg. He dropped his rifle to spring for my throat, knocking me flat, and, crouching on me, strove to strangle me; and I heard him whining with eagerness while I twisted and writhed to free my windpipe from his thin fingers.

  At last I tore him from my body and struggled to my feet. He, too, was on his legs with a bound, running, doubling, dodging; and at his heels I saw a dozen sailors, broadaxes glittering, chasing him from tree to shrub.

  “Speed!” I shouted— “the sailors from the Fer-de-Lance!”

  The curtains of the house were on fire; through the hallway poured the insurgent soldiery, stampeding in frantic flight across the court out into the moors; and the marines, swarming along the cliffs, shot at them as they ran, and laughed savagely when a man fell into the gorse, kicking like a wounded rabbit.

  Speed marked their flight, advancing coolly, pistol flashing; the Turco, Ben-Ahmed, dark arms naked to the shoulder, bounded behind the frightened wretches, cornering, hunting them through flower-beds and bushes, stealthily, keenly, now creeping among the shadows, now springing like a panther on his prey, until his blue jacket reeked and his elbows dripped.

  I had picked up a rifle with a broken bayonet; the Countess, clasping my left arm, stood swaying in the rifle-smoke, eyes closed; and, when a horrid screeching arose from the depths of the garden where they were destroying Tric-Trac, she fell to shuddering, hiding her face on my shoulder.

  Suddenly Speed appeared, carrying a drenched little figure, partly wrapped in a sailor’s pea-jacket, slim limbs drooping, blue with cold.

  “Put out that fire in there,” he s
aid, hoarsely; “we must get her into bed. Hurry, for God’s sake, Scarlett! There’s nobody in the house!”

  “Jacqueline! Jacqueline! brave little Bretonne,” murmured the Countess, bending forward and gathering the unconscious child into her strong, young arms.

  Through the dim dawn, through smoke and fading torch-light, we carried Jacqueline into the house, now lighted up with an infernal red from the burning dining-room.

  “The house is stone; we can keep the flames to one room if we work hard,” I said. A sailor stood by the door wiping the stained blade of his broadaxe, and I called on him to aid us.

  A fresh company of sailors passed on the double, rifles trailing, their officer shouting encouragement, And as we came in view of the semaphore, I saw the signal tower on fire from base to top.

  The gray moorland was all flickering with flashes where the bulk of the insurgent infantry began firing in retreat; the marines’ fusillade broke out from Paradise village; rifle after rifle cracked along the river-bank. Suddenly the deep report of a cannon came echoing landward from the sea; a shell, with lighted fuse trailing sparks, flew over us with a rushing whistle and exploded on the moors.

  All this I saw from the house where I stood with Speed and a sailor, buried in smoke, chopping out blazing woodwork, tearing the burning curtains from the windows. The marines fired steadily from the windows above us.

  “They want the Red Terror!” laughed the sailors. “They shall have it!”

  “Hunt them out! Hunt them out!” cried an officer, briskly. “Fire!” rang out a voice, and the volley broke crashing, followed by the clear, penetrating boatswain’s whistle sounding the assault.

  Blackened, scorched, almost suffocated, I staggered back to the tea-room, where the Countess stood clasping Jacqueline, huddled in a blanket, and smoothing the child’s wet curls away from a face as white as death.

  Together we carried her back through the smoking hallway, up the stairs to my bedroom, and laid her in the bed.

  The child opened her eyes as we drew the blankets.

  “Where is Speed?” she asked, dreamily.

  A moment later he came in, and she turned her head languidly and smiled.

  “Jacqueline! Jacqueline!” he whispered, bending close above her.

  “Do you love me, Speed?” 379

  “Ah, Jacqueline,” he stammered, “more than you can understand.”

  Suddenly a step sounded on the stairs, a rifle-stock grounded, clanging, and a sonorous voice rang out:

  “Salute, O my brother of the toug! The enemies of France are dead!”

  And in the silence around him Salah Ben-Ahmed the Marabout recited the fatha, bearing witness to the eternal unity of God.

  Late that night the light cavalry from Lorient rode into Paradise. At dawn the colonel, established in the mayory, from whence its foolish occupant had fled, sent for Speed and me, and when we reported he drew from his heavy dolman our commissions, restoring us to rank and pay in the regiment de marche which he commanded.

  At sunrise I had bade good-bye to the sweetest woman on earth; at noon we were miles to the westward, riding like demons on Buckhurst’s heavy trail.

  I am not sure that we ever saw him again, though once, weeks later, Speed and I and a dozen hussars gave chase to a mounted man near St. Brieuc, and that man might have been Buckhurst. He led us a magnificent chase straight to the coast, where we rode plump into a covey of Prussian hussars, who were standing on their saddles, hacking away at the telegraph-wires with their heavy, curved sabres.

  That was our first and last sight of the enemy in either Prussian or communistic guise, though in the long, terrible days and nights of that winter of ‘71, when three French armies froze, and the white death, not the Prussians, ended all for France, rumors of insurrection came to us from the starving capital, and we heard of the red flag flying on the Hôtel-de-Ville, and the rising of the carbineers under Flourens; and some spoke of the leader of the insurrection and called him John Buckhurst.

  That Buckhurst could have penetrated Paris neither Speed nor I believed; but, as all now know, we were wrong, though the testimony concerning his death[A] at the hands of his terrible colleague, Mortier, was not in evidence until a young ruffian, known as “The Mouse,” confessed before he expiated his crimes on Sartory Plain in 1872.

  Thus, for three blank, bitter months, freezing and starving, the 1st Regiment de marche of Lorient Hussars stood guard at Brest over the diamonds of the crown of France.

  XXII

  THE SECRET

  The news of the collapse of the army of the East found our wretchedly clothed and half-starved hussars still patrolling the environs of Brest from Belair to the Pont Tournant, and from the banks of the Elorn clear around the ramparts to Lannion Bay, where the ice-sheathed iron-clads lay with banked fires off the Port Militaire, and the goulet guard-boats patrolled the Port de Commerce from the Passe de l’Ouest to the hook on the Digue and clear around to Cap Espagnol.

  All Brest, from the battlements of the Château of St. Martin, in Belair, was on watch, so wrought up was the governor over the attempt on the treasure-train. For three months our troopers scarcely left their saddles, except to be taken to the hospital in Recouvrance.

  The rigor of the constant alert wore us to shadows; rockets from the goulet, the tocsin, the warning boom of a gun from the castle, found us spurring our jaded horses through ice and snow to scour the landward banlieue and purge it of a dreaded revolt. The names of Marx, of Flourens, of Buckhurst, were constantly repeated; news of troubles at Bordeaux, rumors of the red flag at Marseilles, only served to increase the rigid system of patrol, which brought death to those in the trenches as well as to our sleet-soaked videttes.

  Suddenly the nightmare ended with a telegram. Paris had surrendered. 382

  Immediately the craze to go beset us all; our improvised squadrons became clamoring mobs of peasants, wild to go home. Deserters left us every night; they shot some in full flight; some were shot after drum-head séances in which Speed and I voted in vain for acquittal. But affairs grew worse; our men neglected their horses; bands of fugitives robbed the suburbs, roving about, pillaging, murdering, even burning the wretched hovels where nothing save the four walls remained even for the miserable inmates.

  Our hussars were sent on patrol again, but they deserted with horses and arms in scores, until, when we rode into the Rue du Bois d’Amour, scarce a squadron clattered into the smoky gateway, and the infantry of the line across the street jeered and cursed us from their barracks.

  On the last day of February our regiment was disbanded, and the officers ordered to hold themselves in readiness to recruit the débris of a dragoon regiment, one squadron of which at once took possession of our miserable barracks.

  On the first day of March, by papers from London, we learned that the war was at an end, and that the preliminary treaty of Sunday, the 26th, had been signed at Versailles.

  The same mail brought to me an astonishing offer from Cairo, to assist in the reorganization and accept a commission in the Egyptian military police. Speed and I, shivering in our ragged uniforms by the barrack stove, discussed the matter over a loaf of bread and a few sardines, until we fell asleep in our greasy chairs and dreamed of hot sunshine, and of palms, and of a crimson sunset against which a colossal basking monster, half woman, half lion, crouched, wallowing to her stone breasts in a hot sea of sand.

  When I awoke in the black morning hours I knew that I should go. All the roaming instinct in me was roused. I, a nomad, had stayed too long in one stale place; I must be moving on. A feverish longing seized me; inertia became unbearable; the restless sea called me louder and louder, thundering on the breakwater; the gulls, wheeling above the arsenal at dawn, screamed a challenge.

  Leave of absence, and permission to travel pending acceptance of my resignation, I asked for and obtained before the stable trumpets awoke my comrade from his heavy slumber by the barrack stove.

  I made my packet — not much — a
few threadbare garments folded around her letters, one to mark each miserable day that had passed since I spurred my horse out of Trécourt on the track of the wickedest man I ever knew.

  Speed awoke with the trumpets, and stared at me where I knelt before the stove in my civilian clothes, strapping up my little packet.

  “Oh,” he said, briefly, “I knew you were going.”

  “So did I,” I replied. “Will you ride to Trécourt with me? I have two weeks’ permission for you.”

  He had no clothing but the uniform he wore, and no baggage except a razor, a shirt, a tooth-brush, and a bundle of letters, all written on Madame de Vassart’s crested paper, but not signed by her.

  We bolted our breakfast of soup and black bread, and bawled for our horses, almost crazed with impatience, now that the moment had come at last.

  “Good-bye!” shouted the shivering dragoon officers, wistfully, as we wheeled our horses and spurred, clattering, towards the black gates. “Good-bye and good luck! We drink to those you love, comrades!”

  “And they shall drink to you! Good-bye! Good-bye!” we cried, till the salt sea-wind tore the words from our teeth and bowed our heads as we galloped through the suburbs and out into the icy high-road, where, above us, the telegraph-wires sang their whirring dirge, and the wind in the gorse whistled, and the distant forest sounded and resounded with the gale’s wailing.

  On, on, hammering the flinty road with steel-shod hoofs, racing with the racing clouds, thundering across the pontoon, where benumbed soldiers huddled to stare, then bounding forward through the narrow lanes of hamlets, where pinched faces peered out at us from hovels, and gaunt dogs fled from us into the frozen hedge.

  Far ahead we caught sight of the smoke of a locomotive.

  “Landerneau!” gasped Speed. “Ride hard, Scarlett!”

  The station-master saw us and halted the moving train at a frantic signal from Speed, whose uniform was to be reckoned with by all station-masters, and ten minutes later we stood swaying in a cattle-car, huddled close to our horses to keep warm, while the locomotive tore eastward, whistling frantically, and an ocean of black smoke poured past, swarming with sparks. Crossing the Aune trestle with a ripping roar, the train rushed through Châteaulin, south, then east, then south.