Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  And through the Dance of Death Lys trembled in my arms, and sobbed and clung to me, murmuring that the Purple Emperor was dead; but the wind tore the words from her white lips, and flung them out across the sea, where the winter lightning lashed the stark heights of Groix.

  Then the fear of death was stilled in my soul, and I raised her from the ground, holding her close.

  And I saw the sexton, just beyond us, hurry across the ground and seek shelter under a little dead skylark, stiff-winged, muddy, lying alone in the rain.

  In the storm, above us, a bird hovered singing through the rain. It passed us twice, still singing, and as it passed again we saw the shadow it cast upon the world was whiter than snow.

  Little gray messenger,

  Robed like painted Death,

  Your robe is dust.

  Whom do you seek

  Among lilies and closed buds

  At dusk?

  Among lilies and closed buds

  At dusk,

  Whom do you seek,

  Little gray messenger,

  Robed in the awful panoply

  Of painted Death?

  R. W. C.

  THE MESSENGER.

  All-wise,

  Hast thou seen all there is to see with thy two eyes?

  Dost thou know all there is to know, and so,

  Omniscient,

  Darest thou still to say thy brother lies?

  R. W. C.

  “THE bullet entered here,” said Max Tortin, and he placed his middle finger over a smooth hole exactly in the centre of the forehead.

  I sat down upon a mound of dry seaweed and unslung my fowling piece.

  The little chemist cautiously felt the edges of the shot-hole, first with his middle finger, then with his thumb.

  “Let me see the skull again,” said I.

  Max Fortin picked it up from the sod.

  “It’s like all the others,” he observed. I nodded, without offering to take it from him. After a moment he thoughtfully replaced it upon the grass at my feet.

  “It’s like all the others,” he repeated, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief. “I thought you might care to see one of the skulls, so I brought this over from the gravel pit. The men from Bannalec are digging yet. They ought to stop.”

  “How many skulls are there altogether?” I inquired.

  “They found thirty-eight skulls; there are thirty-nine noted in the list. They lie piled up in the gravel pit on the edge of Le Bihan’s wheat field. The men are at work yet. Le Bihan is going to stop them.”

  “Let’s go over,” said I; and I picked up my gun and started across the cliffs, Fortin on one side, Môme on the other.

  “Who has the list?” I asked, lighting my pipe. “You say there is a list?”

  “The list was found rolled up in a brass cylinder,” said the little chemist. He added: “You should not smoke here. You know that if a single spark drifted into the wheat — —”

  “Ah, but I have a cover to my pipe,” said I, smiling.

  Fortin watched me as I closed the pepper box arrangement over the glowing bowl of the pipe. Then he continued:

  “The list was made out on thick yellow paper; the brass tube has preserved it. It is as fresh to-day as it was in 1760. You shall see it.”

  “Is that the date?”

  “The list is dated ‘April, 1760.’ The Brigadier Durand has it. It is not written in French.”

  “Not written in French!” I exclaimed.

  “No,” replied Fortin solemnly, “it is written in Breton.”

  “But,” I protested, “the Breton language was never written or printed in 1760.”

  “Except by priests,” said the chemist.

  “I have heard of but one priest who ever wrote the Breton language,” I began.

  Fortin stole a glance at my face.

  “You mean — the Black Priest?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  Fortin opened his mouth to speak again, hesitated, and finally shut his teeth obstinately over the wheat stem that he was chewing.

  “And the Black Priest?” I suggested encouragingly. But I knew it was useless; for it is easier to move the stars from their courses than to make an obstinate Breton talk. We walked on for a minute or two in silence.

  “Where is the Brigadier Durand?” I asked, motioning Môme to come out of the wheat, which he was trampling as though it were heather. As I spoke we came in sight of the farther edge of the wheat field and the dark, wet mass of cliffs beyond.

  “Durand is down there — you can see him; he stands just behind the Mayor of St. Gildas.”

  “I see,” said I; and we struck straight down, following a sun-baked cattle path across the heather.

  When we reached the edge of the wheat field, Le Bihan, the Mayor of St. Gildas, called to me, and I tucked my gun under my arm and skirted the wheat to where he stood.

  “Thirty-eight skulls,” he said in his thin, high-pitched voice; “there is but one more, and I am opposed to further search. I suppose Fortin told you?”

  I shook hands with him, and returned the salute of the Brigadier Durand.

  “I am opposed to further search,” repeated Le Bihan, nervously picking at the mass of silver buttons which covered the front of his velvet and broadcloth jacket like a breastplate of scale armour.

  Durand pursed up his lips, twisted his tremendous mustache, and hooked his thumbs in his sabre belt.

  “As for me,” he said, “I am in favour of further search.”

  “Further search for what — for the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked.

  Le Bihan nodded. Durand frowned at the sunlit sea, rocking like a bowl of molten gold from the cliffs to the horizon. I followed his eyes. On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.

  “Where is that list, Durand?” I asked.

  The gendarme rummaged in his despatch pouch and produced a brass cylinder about a foot long. Very gravely he unscrewed the head and dumped out a scroll of thick yellow paper closely covered with writing on both sides. At a nod from Le Bihan he handed me the scroll. But I could make nothing of the coarse writing, now faded to a dull brown.

  “Come, come, Le Bihan,” I said impatiently, “translate it, won’t you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems.”

  Le Bihan went to the edge of the pit where the three Bannalec men were digging, gave an order or two in Breton, and turned to me.

  As I came to the edge of the pit the Bannalec men were removing a square piece of sail-cloth from what appeared to be a pile of cobblestones.

  “Look!” said Le Bihan shrilly. I looked. The pile below was a heap of skulls. After a moment I clambered down the gravel sides of the pit and walked over to the men of Bannalec. They saluted me gravely, leaning on their picks and shovels, and wiping their sweating faces with sunburned hands.

  “How many?” said I in Breton.

  “Thirty-eight,” they replied.

  I glanced around. Beyond the heap of skulls lay two piles of human bones. Beside these was a mound of broken, rusted bits of iron and steel. Looking closer, I saw that this mound was composed of rusty bayonets, sabre blades, scythe blades, with here and there a tarnished buckle attached to a bit of leather hard as iron.

  I picked up a couple of buttons and a belt plate. The buttons bore the royal arms of England; the belt plate was emblazoned with the English arms, and also with the number “27.”

  “I have heard my grandfather speak of the terrible English regiment, the 27th Foot, which landed and stormed the fort up there,” said one of the Bannalec men.

  “Oh!” said I; “then these are the bones of English soldiers?”

  “Yes,” said the men of Bannalec.

  Le Bihan was calling to me from the edge of the pit above, and I handed the belt plate and buttons to the men and climbed the side of the excavation.

  “Well,” said I, trying to preven
t Môme from leaping up and licking my face as I emerged from the pit, “I suppose you know what these bones are. What are you going to do with them?”

  “There was a man,” said Le Bihan angrily, “an Englishman, who passed here in a dogcart on his way to Quimper about an hour ago, and what do you suppose he wished to do?”

  “Buy the relics?” I asked, smiling.

  “Exactly — the pig!” piped the mayor of St. Gildas. “Jean Marie Tregunc, who found the bones, was standing tfyere where Max Fortin stands, and do you know what he answered? He spat upon the ground, and said: ‘Pig of an Englishman, do you take me for a desecrator of graves?”

  I knew Tregunc, a sober, blue-eyed Breton, who lived from one year’s end to the other without being able to afford a single bit of meat for a meal.

  “How much did the Englishman offer Tregunc?” I asked.

  “Two hundred francs for the skulls alone.”

  I thought of the relic hunters and the relic buyers on the battlefields of our civil war.

  “Seventeen hundred and sixty is long ago,” I said.

  “Respect for the dead can never die,” said Fortin.

  “And the English soldiers came here to kill your fathers and burn your homes,” I continued.

  “They were murderers and thieves, but — they are dead,” said Tregunc, coming up from the beach below, his long sea rake balanced on his dripping jersey.

  “How much do you earn every year, Jean Marie?” I asked, turning to shake hands with him.

  “Two hundred and twenty francs, monsieur.”

  “Forty-five dollars a year,” I said. “Bah! you are worth more, Jean. Will you take care of my garden for me? My wife wished me to ask you. I think it would be worth one hundred francs a month to you and to me. Come on, Le Bihan — come along, Fortin — and you, Durand. I want somebody to translate that list into French for me.”

  Tregunc stood gazing at me, his blue eyes dilated.

  “You may begin at once,” I said, smiling, “if the salary suits you?”

  “It suits,” said Tregunc, fumbling for his pipe in a silly way that annoyed Le Bihan.

  “Then go and begin your work,” cried the mayor impatiently; and Tregunc started across the moors toward St. Gildas, taking off his velvet-ribboned cap to me and gripping his sea rake very hard.

  “You offer him more than my salary,” said the mayor, after a moment’s contemplation of his silver buttons.

  “Pooh!” said I, “what do you do for your salary except play dominoes with Max Fortin at the Groix Inn?”

  Le Bihan turned red, but Durand rattled his sabre and winked at Max Fortin, and I slipped my arm through the arm of the sulky magistrate, laughing.

  “There’s a shady spot under the cliff,” I said; “come on, Le Bihan, and read me what is in the scroll.”

  In a few moments we reached the shadow of the cliff, and I threw myself upon the turf, chin on hand, to listen.

  The gendarme, Durand, also sat down, twisting his mustache into needlelike points. Fortin leaned against the cliff, polishing his glasses and examining us with vague, near-sighted eyes; and Le Bihan, the mayor, planted himself in our midst, rolling up the scroll and tucking it under his arm.

  “First of all,” he began in a shrill voice, “I am going to light my pipe, and while lighting it I shall tell you what I have heard about the attack on the fort yonder. My father told me; his father told him.”

  He jerked his head in the direction of the ruined fort, a small, square stone structure on the sea cliff, now nothing but crumbling walls. Then he slowly produced a tobacco pouch, a bit of flint and tinder, and a long-stemmed pipe fitted with a microscopical bowl of baked clay. To fill such a pipe requires ten minutes close attention. To smoke it to a finish takes but four puffs. It is very Breton, this Breton pipe. It is the crystallization of everything Breton.

  “Go on,” said I, lighting a cigarette.

  “The fort,” said the mayor, “was built by Louis XIV, and was dismantled twice by the English. Louis XV restored it in 1739. In 1760 it was carried by assault by the English. They came across from the island of Groix — three shiploads — and they stormed the fort and sacked St. Julien yonder, and they started to burn St. Gildas — you can see the marks of their bullets on my house yet; but the men of Bannalec and the men of Lorient fell upon them with pike and scythe and blunderbuss, and those who did not run away lie there below in the gravel pit now — thirty-eight of them.”

  “And the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked, finishing my cigarette.

  The mayor had succeeded in filling his pipe, and now he began to put his tobacco pouch away.

  “The thirty-ninth skull,” he mumbled, holding the pipestem between his defective teeth— “the thirty-ninth skull is no business of mine. I have told the Bannalec men to cease digging.”

  “But what is whose is the missing skull?” I persisted curiously.

  The mayor was busy trying to strike a spark to his tinder. Presently he set it aglow, applied it to his pipe, took the prescribed four puffs, knocked the ashes out of the bowl, and gravely replaced the pipe in his pocket.

  “The missing skull?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said I impatiently.

  The mayor slowly unrolled the scroll and began to read, translating from the Breton into French. And this is what he read:

  “ON THE CLIFFS OF ST. GILDAS,

  “April 13, 1760.

  “On this day, by order of the Count of Soisic, general in chief of the Breton forces now lying in Kerselec Forest, the bodies of thirty-eight English soldiers of the 27th, 50th, and 72d regiments of Foot were buried in this spot, together with their arms and equipments.”

  The mayor paused and glanced at me reflectively.

  “Go on, Le Bihan,” I said.

  “With them,” continued the mayor, turning the scroll and reading on the other side, “was buried the body of that vile traitor who betrayed the fort to the English. The manner of his death was as follows: By order of the most noble Count of Soisic, the traitor was first branded upon the forehead with the brand of an arrow-head. The iron burned through the flesh, and was pressed heavily so that the brand should even burn into the bone of the skull. The traitor was then led out and bidden to kneel. He admitted having guided the English from the island of Groix. Although a priest and a Frenchman, he had violated his priestly office to aid him in discovering the password to the fort. This password he extorted during confession from a young Breton girl who was in the habit of rowing across from the island of Groix to visit her husband in the fort. When the fort fell, this young girl, crazed by the death of her husband, sought the Count of Soisic and told how the priest had forced her to confess to him all she knew about the fort. The priest was arrested at St. Gildas as he was about to cross the river to Lorient. When arrested he cursed the girl, Marie Trevec — —”

  “What!” I exclaimed, “Marie Trevec!”

  “Marie Trevec,” repeated Le Bihan; “the priest cursed Marie Trevec, and all her family and descendants. He was shot as he knelt, having a mask of leather over his face, because the Bretons who composed the squad of execution refused to fire at a priest unless his face was concealed. The priest was l’Abbé Sorgue, commonly known as the Black Priest on account of his dark face and swarthy eyebrows. He was buried with a stake through his heart.”

  Le Bihan paused, hesitated, looked at me, and handed the manuscript back to Durand. The gendarme took it and slipped it into the brass cylinder.

  “So,” said I, “the thirty-ninth skull is the skull of the Black Priest.”

  “Yes,” said Fortin. “I hope they won’t find it.”

  “I have forbidden them to proceed,” said the mayor querulously. “You heard me, Max Fortin.”

  I rose and picked up my gun. Môme came and pushed his head into my hand.

  “That’s a fine dog,” observed Durand, also rising.

  “Why don’t you wish to find his skull?” I asked Le Bihan. “It would be curious to see whether
the arrow brand really burned into the bone.”

  “There is something in that scroll that I didn’t read to you,” said the mayor grimly. “Do you wish to know what it is?”

  “Of course,” I replied in surprise.

  “Give me the scroll again, Durand,” he said; then he read from the bottom: “I, l’Abbé Sorgue, forced to write the above by my executioners, have written it in my own blood; and with it I leave my curse. My curse on St. Gildas, on Marie Trevec, and on her descendants. I will come back to St. Gildas when my remains are disturbed. Woe to that Englishman whom my branded skull shall touch!”

  “What rot!” I said. “Do you believe it was really written in his own blood?”

  “I am going to test it,” said Fortin, “at the request of Monsieur le Maire. I am not anxious for the job, however.”

  “See,” said Le Bihan, holding out the scroll to me, “it is signed, ‘l’Abbé Sorgue.’”

  I glanced curiously over the paper.

  “It must be the Black Priest,” I said. “He was the only man who wrote in the Breton language. This is a wonderfully interesting discovery, for now, at last, the mystery of the Black Priest’s disappearance is cleared up. You will, of course, send this scroll to Paris, Le Bihan?”

  “No,” said the mayor obstinately, “it shall be buried in the pit below where the rest of the Black Priest lies.”

  I looked at him and recognised that argument would be useless. But still I said, “It will be a loss to history, Monsieur Le Bihan.”

  “All the worse for history, then,” said the enlightened Mayor of St. Gildas.

  We had sauntered back to the gravel pit while speaking. The men of Bannalec were carrying the bones of the English soldiers to ward the St. Gildas cemetery, on the cliffs to the east, where already a knot of white-coiffed women stood in attitudes of prayer; and I saw the sombre robe of a priest among the crosses of the little graveyard.

  “They were thieves and assassins; they are dead now,” muttered Max Fortin.