Kitabı oku: «The Firebrand», sayfa 11
"Tell them my mother gave me that, and made me promise to carry it. I don't want them to take it away!"
Rollo translated, and Cabrera, after turning over the pages, handed it back with a bow.
"A gage d'amour?" he said, smiling.
"Yes, from my mother!" said John Mortimer, blushing yet more.
The search through the pockets of Etienne produced nothing except a number of brief notes, daintily folded but indifferently written, and signed by various Lolas, Felesias, and Magdalenas. Most of these were brief, and to the point. "Meet me at the gate by the rose-tree at seven. My father has gone to the city!" or only "I am waiting for you! Come."
But in the outer pocket of Rollo Blair was found a far more compromising document. When the searcher drew it forth from his coat, the eyes of Luis Fernandez gleamed with triumph.
Cabrera took the paper and glanced it over carelessly, but as soon as his eye fell upon the signature the fashion of his countenance changed. He leaped to his feet.
"Nogueras!" he cried; "you are in correspondence with Nogueras, the villain who, in cold blood, shot my poor old mother, for no crime but that of having borne me. Have the fellow out instantly, and shoot him!"
Rollo stood a moment dumfounded, then he recovered himself and spoke.
"General Cabrera," he said, "this is a trick. I have had no correspondence with Nogueras. I had not even heard his name. This has been dropped into my pocket by some traitor. I hold a commission in the service of Don Carlos, and have had no communication with his enemies."
"But in this place you gave yourselves out as Nationalists, is it not so?" queried Cabrera.
"Certainly," answered Rollo; "we were on a secret mission, and we were given to understand that this was a hostile village."
Cabrera took up the letter again and read aloud —
"To the young Englishman of the Foreign Legion, pretending service with Don Carlos.
"You are ordered to obtain any information as to the movements of the brigand Cabrera and his men, by penetrating into their district, and, if possible, joining their organisation. You will report the same to me, and this pass will hold you safe with all servants and well-wishers of the government of the Queen-Regent.
"Nogueras."
The Carlist commander, whose voice had been rising as he read, shouted rather than uttered the name of the murderer of his mother. He did not again sit down, but strode up and down, his cavalry sword clanging and battering against the furniture of the little room as if expressing the angry perturbation of his mind.
"General," said Rollo, as calmly as if arguing a point in theology, "if I had been guilty of this treachery, would I have kept a paper like that loose in an outer pocket? Is it not evident that it has been placed there by some enemy – probably by that archtraitor there, the miller Fernandez?"
Luis Fernandez smiled benignly upon Rollo, but did not speak. He believed that the poison had done its work.
Cabrera took not the slightest notice of Rollo's words, but continued to pace the floor frowning and muttering.
More than one Carlist soldier glanced at his neighbour with a look which said, plain as a printed proclamation, "It is all over with the foreigners!"
At last Cabrera stopped his promenade. He folded his arms and stood looking up at Rollo.
"The morning – I think you said. Well, I will give your friend till the morning to be ready with the proofs of your innocence. But if not, so soon as the sun rises over the hills out there, you four shall all be shot for spies and traitors. Take them away!"
CHAPTER XXI
TO BE SHOT AT SUNRISE!
The Carlist soldiers conducted Rollo and his three friends to the granary of the mill-house, where in the mean time they were permitted to recline as best they might upon the various piles of grain heaped here and there in preparation for the work of the morrow.
The Carlists were mostly quite young, Basques and Navarrese, whose jokes and horseplay, even after a long day's marching, were boyish and natural.
Rollo and El Sarria were placed at one side of the granary, and at the other Etienne and John Mortimer lay at full length upon a heap of corn. Between paced a sentry with musket and bayonet.
The kindly lads had, with characteristic generosity, brought their prisoners a portion of their scanty rations – sausages and dried fish with onions and cheese, all washed down with copious draughts of red wine.
As before, owing to the position of Sarria among its mountains, the night fell keen and chill. The Carlists slept and snored, all save the double guards placed over the prisoners.
"Shall we try a rush? Is it any use?" whispered Rollo to El Sarria.
The outlaw silently shook his head. He had long ago considered the position, and knew that it was impossible. The windows were mere slits. There was only one trap-door in the floor, and that was closed. Moreover, there were fifty Carlists asleep in the loft, and the floor below was the bed-chamber of as many more.
Cast back upon his own thoughts, Rollo reviewed many things – his short life, the reckless ups-and-downs in which he had spent it – but all without remorse or regret.
"I might have been a lawyer, and lived to a hundred!" he said to himself. "It is better as it is. If I have done little good, perhaps I have not had time to do a great deal of harm."
Then very contentedly he curled himself up to sleep as best he might, only dreamily wondering if little Concha would be sorry when she heard.
Ramon Garcia sat with his eyes fixed on the sentry who had ceased his to-and-fro tramp up the centre, and now leaned gloomily against the wall, his hands crossed about the cross-bar of his sword-bayonet.
Across the granary John Mortimer reclined with his head in his hands, making vows never to enter Spain or trust himself under the leadership of a mad Scot, if this once he should get clear off.
"It isn't the being shot," he moaned; "it's not being able to tell them that I'm not a fool, but a respectable merchant able to pay my way and with a balance at William Deacon's Bank. But it serves me right!" Then a little inconsequently he added, "By gum, if I get out of this I'll have a Spanish clerk in the works and learn the language!"
Which was John Mortimer's way of making a vow to the gods.
Etienne, having his hands comparatively free, and finding himself sleepless, looked enviously at Rollo's untroubled repose, and began to twist cigarettes for himself and the sentry who guarded his side of the granary.
Without, the owls circled and cried. A dog barked in the village above, provoking a far-reaching chorus of his kind. Then blows fell, and he fled yelping out of earshot.
Rollo was not wholly comfortable on his couch of grain. The bonds about his feet galled him, having been more tightly drawn than those of his companions in virtue of his chiefship. Nevertheless he got a good deal of sleep, and each time that he awoke it seemed to him that El Sarria was staring harder at the sentry and that the man had moved a little nearer.
At last, turning his head a little to one side, he heard distinctly the low murmur of voices.
"Do you remember Pancorbo?" said Ramon Garcia.
Rollo could not hear the answer, but he caught the outlaw's next question.
"And have you forgotten El Sarria, who, having a certain Miguelete under the point of his knife, let him go for his sweetheart's sake, because she was waiting for him down in the valley?"
The sentry's reply was again inaudible, but Rollo was fully awake now. Ramon Garcia had not abandoned hope, and why should he? When there was anything to be done, none could be so alert as Rollo Blair.
"I am El Sarria the outlaw," Ramon went on, "and these are my companions. We are no traitors, but good Carlists to a man. Our papers are – "
Here the words were spoken so low that Rollo could not hear more, but the next moment he was nudged by Ramon on the leg.
"Write a note to Concha Cabezos, telling her to bring the papers here at once if she would save our lives. You are sure she is faithful?"
"I am sure!" said Rollo, who really had no reason for his confidence except the expression in her eyes.
He had no paper, but catching the sentry's eye, he nodded across to where Etienne was still diligently rolling cigarettes.
"Alcoy?" he whispered.
The sentry shouldered his piece and took a turn or two across the floor, keeping his eye vigilantly on his fellow guard, who, having seated himself in the window-sill, had dozed off to sleep, the cigarette still drooping from the corner of his mouth. Yes, he was certainly asleep.
He held out his hand to Etienne, who readily gave him the last he had rolled. The sentry thanked him with a quick martial salute, and after a turn or two more, deftly dropped the crumbled tobacco upon the floor and let the leaf drop on Rollo's knees with a stump of pencil rolled up in it.
Then the young man, turning his back upon the dozing guard in the stone window-sill, wrote with some difficulty the following note, lying on his breast and using the uneven floor of the granary for a desk.
"Little Concha" (it ran), "we are General Cabrera's prisoners. Bring the papers as soon as you receive this. Otherwise we are to be shot at day-break. – Rollo Blair."
There was still a little space left upon the leaf of Alcoy paper, and with a half shamefaced glance at El Sarria, he added, "And in any case do not wholly forget R. B."
He passed the note to the outlaw, who folded it to the size of a postage stamp and apparently gave directions where and to whom it was to be delivered.
"In half an hour we shall be relieved and I will go," said the Carlist ex-Miguelete, and resumed his steady tramp. Presently he awoke his comrade so that he might not be found asleep at the change of guard.
There was nothing more to be done till day-break. They had played their last card, and now they must wait to see what cards were out against them, and who should win the final trick at the hour of sunrise.
Rollo fell asleep again. And so soundly this time, that he only woke to consciousness when a soldier in a white boina pulled roughly at his elbow, and ordered him to get up.
All about the granary the Carlists were stamping feet, pulling on boots, and flapping arms.
"It's a cold morning to be shot in," said the man, with rough kindliness; "but I will get you some hot chocolate in a moment. That will warm your blood for you, and in any case you will have a quick passage. I will pick you a firing party of the best shots in the three provinces. The general will be here in a quarter of an hour, and the sun will rise in another quarter. One is just as punctual as the other. A cigarette? – thank you. Well, you are a cool hand! I'm off to see about the chocolate!"
And Rollo Blair, with a slight singing in his ears, and a chill emptiness about the pit of his stomach, stood on his feet critically rolling a cigarette in a leaf of Etienne's Alcoy paper.
John Mortimer said nothing, but looked after the man who had gone for the chocolate.
"I wish it had been coffee," he said; "chocolate is always bad for my digestion!"
Then he smiled a little grimly. His sufferings from indigestion produced by indulgence in this particular chocolate would in all probability not be prolonged, seeing that the glow of the sun-rising was already reddening the sky to the east.
Etienne was secretly fingering his beads. And El Sarria thought with satisfaction of the safety of Dolóres; he had given up hope of Concha a full hour ago. The ex-Miguelete had doubtless again played the traitor. He took a cigarette from Rollo without speaking and followed him across the uneven floor between the heaps of trodden grain.
They were led down the stairway one by one, and as they passed through the ground floor, with its thick woolly coating of grey flour dust, a trumpet blew without, and they heard the trampling of horses in the courtyard.
"Quick!" said a voice at Rollo's elbow, "here is your chocolate. Nothing like it for strengthening the knee-joints at a time like this. I've seen men die on wine and on rum and on brandy; but for me, give me a cup of chocolate as good as that, when my time comes!"
Rollo drank the thick sweet strength-giving stuff to the accompaniment of clattering hoofs and jingling accoutrements.
"Come!" said a voice again, "give me the cup. Do not keep the general waiting. He is in no good temper this morning, and we are to march immediately."
The young man stepped out of the mill-door into the crisp chill of the dawn. All the east was a glory of blood-red cloud, and for the second time Rollo and his companions stood face to face with General Cabrera.
It was within a quarter of an hour of the sun-rising.
CHAPTER XXII
HIS MOTHER'S ROSARY
It was, as the soldier had said most truly, a cold morning to be shot in. But the Carlists, accustomed to Cabrera's summary methods, appeared to think but little of the matter, and jested as the firing parties were selected and drawn out. Ragged and desolate they looked as they stood on a slight slope between the foreigners and the red dawn, biting their cartridges and fingering the pulls of their rifles with hands numbed with cold. At elbow and knee their rags of uniforms flapped like bunches of ribbons at a fair.
"In the garden!" whispered Luis Fernandez to Cabrera.
"To the garden!" commanded the general, lighting a new cigarette and puffing vigorously, "and at this point I may as well bid you good-bye. I wish our acquaintance had been pleasanter. But the fortune of war, gentlemen! My mother had not so long time to say her prayers at the hands of your friend Nogueras – and she was a woman and old, gentlemen. I doubt not you know as well how to die as she?"
And they did. Not one of them uttered a word. John Mortimer, seeing there was now no chance of making his thousand pounds, set an example of unbending dignity. He comported himself, indeed, exactly as he would have done on his marriage day. That is, he knew that the eyes of many were upon him, and he resolved not to shame the performance. So he went through his part with the exact English mixture of awkward shyness and sulky self-respect which would have carried him creditably to the altar in any English church.
Etienne faced his death like the son of an ancient race, and a good Catholic. He could not have a confessor, but he said his prayers, committed his soul to God and the Virgin, and faced the black muzzles not greatly abashed.
As for El Sarria, death was his métier, his familiar friend. He had lived with him for years, as a man with a wife, rising up and lying down, eating and breathing in his company. "The fortune of war," as Cabrera said. El Sarria was ready. Dolóres and her babe were safe. He asked no more.
And not less readily fell into line Rollo Blair. A little apart he stood as they made ready to march out of the presence of the Carlist general. John Mortimer was already on his way, carefully and conscientiously ordering his going, that he might not in these last things disgrace his nation and his upbringing. Etienne and Ramon were following him. Still the young Scot lingered. Cabrera, nervously fingering his accoutrement and signing papers at a folding table, found time to eye him with curiosity.
"Did he mean to make a last plea for mercy?" he thought.
Cabrera smiled contemptuously. A friend of Nogueras might know Ramon Cabrera of Tortosa better. But Rollo had no such thought. He had in his fingers Etienne's last slip of Alcoy paper, in which the cigarette of Spain, unfailing comforter, is wrapped. To fill it he had crumbled his last leaf of tobacco. Now it was rolled accurately and with lingering particularity, because it was to be the last. It lay in his palm featly made, a cigarette worthy to be smoked by Don Carlos himself.
Almost unconsciously Rollo put it to his lips. It was a cold morning, and it is small wonder that his hand shook a little. He was just twenty-three, and his main regret was that he had not kissed little Concha Cabezos – with her will, or against it – all would have been one now. Meantime he looked about him for a light. The general noticed his hesitation, rose from the table, and with a low bow offered his own, as one gentleman to another. Rollo thanked him. The two men approached as if to embrace. Each drew a puff of his cigarette, till the points glowed red. Rollo, retreating a little, swept a proud acknowledgment of thanks with his sombrero. Cabrera bowed with his hand on his heart. The young Scot clicked his heels together as if on parade, and strode out with head erect and squared shoulders in the rear of his companions.
"By God's bread, a man!" said Cabrera, as he resumed his writing, "'tis a thousand pities I must shoot him!"
They stood all four of them in the garden of the mill-house, underneath the fig trees in whose shade El Sarria had once hidden himself to watch the midnight operations of Don Tomas.
The sun was just rising. His beams red, low, and level shot across the mill-wheel, turning the water of the unused overshot into a myriad pearls and diamonds as it splashed through a side culvert into the gorge beneath, in which the gloom of night lingered.
The four men still stood in order. Mortimer and Etienne in the middle, with slim Rollo and the giant Ramon towering on either flank.
"Load with ball – at six paces – make ready!"
The officer's commands rang out with a certain haste, for he could already hear the clattering of the horses of the general's cavalcade, and he knew that if upon his arrival he had not carried out his orders, he might expect a severe reprimand.
But it was not the general's suite that rode so furiously. The sound came from a contrary direction. Two horses were being ridden at speed, and at sight of the four men set in order against the wall the foremost rider sank both spurs into her white mare and dashed forward with a wild cry.
The officer already had his sword raised in the air, the falling of which was to be the signal for the volley of death. But it did not fall. Something in the aspect of the girl-rider as she swept up parallel with the low garden wall, her hair floating disordered about her shoulders – her eyes black and shining like stars – the sheaf of papers she waved in her hand, all compelled the Carlist to suspend that last irrevocable order.
It was Concha Cabezos who arrived when the eleventh hour was long past, and leaped from her reeking horse opposite the place of execution. With her, wild-haired as a Mænad, rode La Giralda, cross-saddled like a man.
"General Cabrera! Where is General Cabrera?" cried Concha. "I must see him instantly. These are no traitors. They are true men, and in the service of Don Carlos. Here are their papers!"
"Where is Ramon Cabrera? Tell me quickly!" cried La Giralda. "I have news for him. I was with his mother when she died. They whipped me at the cross of Tortosa to tell what I knew – stripping me to the waist they whipped me, being old and the mother of many. Cabrera will avenge me. Let me but see Ramon Cabrera whom of old I suckled at my breasts!"
The officer hesitated. In such circumstances one might easily do wrong. He might shoot these men, and after all find that they were innocent. He preferred to wait. The living are more easily deprived of life than the dead restored to it. Such was his thought.
In any case he had not long to wait.
Round the angle of the mill-house swept the general and his staff, brilliant in scarlet and white, heightened by the glitter of abundant gold-lace. For the ex-butcher of Tortosa was a kind of military dandy, and loved to surround himself with the foppery of the matador and the brigand. At heart, indeed, he was still the guerrillero of Morella, riding home through the streets of that little rebel city after a successful foray.
As his eyes fell on the row of men dark against the dusty adobe of the garden wall, and on the two pale women, a dark frown overspread his face.
"What is the meaning of this?" he cried. "Why have you not obeyed your instructions? Why are these men not yet dead?"
The officer trembled, and began an explanation, pointing to Concha and La Giralda, both of whom stood for a moment motionless. Then flinging herself over the low wall of the garden as if her years had more nearly approached seventeen than seventy, La Giralda caught the great man by the stirrup.
"Little Ramon, Ramon Cabrera," she cried, "have you forgotten your old nurse, La Giralda of Sevilla, your mother's gossip, your own playmate?"
The general turned full upon her, with the quick indignant threat of one who considers himself duped, in his countenance. It had gone ill with La Giralda if she had not been able to prove her case. But she held something in her hand, the sight of which brought the butcher of Tortosa down from his saddle as quickly as if a Cristino bullet had pierced him to the heart.
La Giralda was holding out to him an old string of beads, simply carved out of some brown oriental nut, but so worn away by use that the stringing had almost cut through the hard and polished shell.
"My mother's rosary!" he cried, and sinking on his knees, he devoutly received and kissed it. He abode thus a moment looking up to the sky – he, the man who had waded in blood during six years of bitter warfare. He kissed the worn beads one by one and wept. They were his mother's way to heaven. And he did not know a better. In which perchance he was right.
"Whence gat you this?" cried Cabrera, rising sharply as a thought struck him; "my mother never would have parted with these in her life – you plundered it from her body after her death! Quick, out with your story, or you die!"
"Nay, little foster-son," said La Giralda, "I was indeed with your mother at the last – when she was shot by Nogueras, and five minutes before she died she gave her rosary into my hands to convey to you. 'Take this to my son,' she said, 'and bid him never forget his mother, nor to say his prayers night and morn. Bid him swear it on these sacred beads!' So I have brought them to you. She kissed them before she died. At the risk of my life have I brought it."
"And these," said Cabrera – "do you know these dogs, La Giralda?"
He pointed to the four men who still stood by the wall, the firing party at attention before them, and the eyes of all on the next wave of the general's hand which would mean life or death.
La Giralda drew a quick breath. Would the hold she had over him be sufficient for what she was about to ask? He was a fierce man and a cruel, this Ramon Cabrera, who loved naught in the world except his mother, and had gained his present ascendency in the councils of Don Carlos by the unbending and consistent ferocity of his conduct.
"These are no traitors, General," she said; "they are true men, and deep in the councils of the cause."
She bent and whispered in his ear words which others could not hear. The face of the Carlist general darkened from a dull pink to purple, and then his colour ebbed away to a ghastly ashen white as he listened.
Twice he sprang up from the stone bench where he had seated himself, ground his heel into the gravel brought from the river-bed beneath, and muttered a characteristic imprecation, "Ten for one of their women I have slain already – by San Vicente after this it shall be a hundred!"
For La Giralda was telling him the tale of his mother's shooting by Nogueras.
Then all suddenly he reseated himself, and beckoned to Concha.
"Come hither," he said; "let me see these fellows' papers, and tell me how they came into your hands!"
Concha was ready.
"The Señor, the tall stranger, had a mission to the Lady Superior of the Convent," she began. "From Don Baltasar Varela it was, Prior of the great Carlist Monastery of Montblanch. He trusted his papers into her hands as a guarantee of his loyalty and good faith, and here they are!"
Concha flashed them from her bosom and laid them in the general's hands. Usually Cabrera was blind to female charms, but upon this occasion his eye rested with pleasure on the quick and subtle grace of the Andaluse.
"Then you are a nun?" he queried, looking sharply at her figure and dress.
"Ah, no," replied Concha, thinking with some hopefulness that she was to have at least a hearing, "I am not even a lay sister. The good Lady Superior had need of a housekeeper – one who should be free of the convent and yet able to transact business without the walls. It is a serious thing (as your honour knows) to provision even a hundred men who can live rough and eat sparely – how much harder to please a convent-school filled from end to end with the best blood in Spain! And good blood needs good feeding – "
"As I well knew when I was a butcher in Tortosa!" quoth Cabrera, smiling. "There were a couple of ducal families within the range of my custom, and they consumed more beef and mutton than a whole barrio of poor pottage-eaters!"
To make Cabrera smile was more than half the battle.
"You are sure they had nothing to do with the slayers of my mother?" He was fierce again in a moment, and pulled the left flange of his moustache into his mouth with a quick nervous movement of the fingers.
"I will undertake that no one of them hath ever been further South than this village of Sarria," said Concha, somewhat hastily, and without sufficient authority.
Cabrera looked at the papers. There was a Carlist commission in the name of Don Rollo Blair duly made out, a letter from General Elio, chief of the staff, commending all the four by name and description to all good servants of Don Carlos, as trustworthy persons engaged on a dangerous and secret mission. Most of all, however, he seemed to be impressed with the ring belonging to Etienne, with its revolving gem and concealed portrait of Carlos the Fifth.
He placed it on his finger and gazing intently, asked to whom it belonged. As soon as he understood, he summoned the little Frenchman to his presence. Etienne came at the word, calm as usual, and twirling his moustache in the manner of Rollo.
"This is your ring?" he demanded of the prisoner. Concha tried to catch Etienne's eye to signal to him that he must give Cabrera that upon which his fancy had lighted. But her former lover stubbornly avoided her eye.
"That is my ring," he answered dryly, after a cursory inspection of the article in question as it lay in the palm of the guerillero's hand.
"It is very precious to you?" asked the butcher of Tortosa, suggestively.
"It was given to me by my cousin, the king," answered Etienne, briefly.
"Then I presume you do not care to part with it?" said Cabrera, turning it about on his finger, and holding it this way and that to the light.
"No," said Etienne, coolly. "You see, my cousin might not give me another!"
But the butcher of Tortosa could be as simple and direct in his methods as even Rollo himself.
"Will you give it to me?" he said, still admiring it as it flashed upon his finger.
Etienne looked at the general calmly from head to foot, Concha all the time frowning upon him to warn him of his danger. But the young man was preening himself like a little bantam-cock of vanity, glad to be reckless under the fire of such eyes. He would not have missed the chance for worlds, so he replied serenely, "Do you still intend to shoot us?"
"What has that to do with the matter?" growled Cabrera, who was losing his temper.
"Because if you do," said Etienne, who had been waiting his opportunity, "you are welcome to the jewel —after I am dead. But if I am to live, I shall require it for myself!"
