Bernard Capes

“ Carabas sprang up.
“Monsieur!” he cried.
“I am a lawyer,” said Mr. G——; “I was connected with the case. The man confessed, I say. If I had only known that—Carabas! Carabas! you were the one witness we wanted, and could not find!”
Campaspe knelt down, and put a pitiful young arm round the shoulders of the unluckiest man in the world.
“Not only we now,” she said softly, “but others also, it seems, owe you a great debt, dear Carabas. We shall all be unable to pay it if you die. If—if I give you a kiss, will you live to return it to me on my wedding day?”
“Mademoiselle!” cried Carabas, radiant. ”

“ Now this Eugène Ducos was a very progressive evolution of the times, hatched by the rising sun, emerged stinging and splendid from the exotic quagmires of the past. A facile linguist, by temperament and early training an artist, he had flown naturally to the field of battle as to that field most fertile of daring new effects, whose surprises called for record rather than analysis. It was for him to collect the impressions which, later, duller wits should classify. And, in the meantime, here he was at twenty a captain of renown, and always a creature of the most unflagging resourcefulness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Art thou the shadow of the girl that Eugenio loved? Fie, fie! thou wouldst betray this poor Anita—mock the round limbs and little feet that will not look their part. Yet, betray her to her love returning, and Anita will fall and kiss thee on her knees—kiss the very shadow of Eugenio’s love. Ah, little shadow! take wings and fly to him, who promised quickly to return. Say I am good but sad, awaiting him; say that Anita suffers, but is patient. He will remember then, and come. No shadow of disguise shall blind him to his love. ”

“ The Fair lifted her brows.
“Why, I am told, madam,” said Avenant, “that you feed on raw hearts; but I am willing to believe that the one lie is as certain as the other.”
The imperious beauty bit her underlip, and laughed.
“I perceive, Sir Richard,” she said, “that you do not court by flattery.”
“I do not court at all, madam,” he answered.
“Ah, true!” she replied. “You buy in the open market. It must be simpler; though, in the plain lodging where I hear you lie at present, the disposal of so responsible an establishment must exercise your diplomacy.” ”

“ Suddenly the Carmelite, as if in an uncontrollable frenzy, dropped his weapon, and scuttling to the mule, where it stood near at hand, tore a great horse pistol from its holster among the trappings, and pointed it at the insensible body.
“Scum of all devils!” he bellowed. “In fire descend to fire that lasts eternal!”
He pulled the trigger. There was a flash and shattering explosion. A blazing hornet stung Ducos in the leg. He may have started and shrieked. Any cry or motion of his must have passed unnoticed in the screaming panic evoked of the crash. ”

“ OUR LADY OF REFUGE When Luc Caron and his mate, whom, officially, he called Pepino, plodded with their raree-show into the sub-Pyrenean village of San Lorenzo, their hearts grew light with a sense of a haven reached after long stress of weather. Caron sounded his bird-call, made of boxwood, and Pepino drummed on his tabor, which was gay with fluttering ribbons, and merrily they cried together:
“Hullo, gentles and simples! hullo, children of the lesser and the larger growth—patriots all! Come, peep into the box of enchantment! For a quarter-real one may possess the world. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Eugenio! O, ecstasy! Thou hast dared this for my sake?”
“Child,” answered the admirable Ducos, “I should have dared only in breaking my word. Un honnête homme n’a que sa parole. That is the single motto for a poor captain, Nariguita. And who is this Señor Cangrejo?”
Some terror, offspring of his question, set her clinging to him once more.
“What dost thou here?” she cried, with immediate inconsistency—“a lamb among the wolves! Eugenio!”
“Eh!”—he took her up, with an air of bewilderment. “I am Sir Zhones, the English capitaine, though it loose me your favour, mamsellee. Wat! Damn eet, I say!” ”

“ Anita, like Ducos, was a child of her generation. To her mind the heroic purpose of this deed overpowered its pungency. She kissed her lover’s feet; secured the safe disposition of the cloak about them; then turned and fled into hiding.
* * * * *
At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the crows dispersed. Eugène, for all his self-sufficiency, had sweated over their persistence. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any moment, in blinding him, have laid him open to a general attack before help could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love watched his every movement. ”

“ Their invitation excited no laughter, and but a qualified interest, among the loafing village ancients and sullen-faced women who appeared to be the sole responsible inhabitants of the place. A few turned their heads; a dog barked; that was all. Not though Caron and Pepino had come wearifully all the way from Rousillon, over the passes of the mountains, and down once more towards the plains of Figueras, that they might feel the atmosphere of home, and claim its sympathetic perquisites, was present depression to be forgotten at the call of a couple of antics. ”

“ On one of these lies Beauty, unspoiled by adulation; on another lies Virtue, that respects her sex too well to traduce it; on the third lies feminine Truth, loveliest of her sisters. These are my whole establishment; and as they are shadows all, existing only in the imagination, they exercise nothing but my fondness for unattainable ideals.”
The company broke into much laughter over this Jeremiad; and the girl joined her young voice to theirs. But a little glow of colour was showing in her cheek, verily as if Sir Richard had flicked that fair surface with his glove. ”

“ Your hair is the most lovely thing! I would give my soul—more, I would give a thousand pounds to possess it.”
“I see, sir,” she said; “to carry your conquest at your belt.”
“Nay,” he answered, with feigned eagerness. “Not a soul need know. The thing is done constantly. You have but to subscribe to the fashion of powder, and you gain a novel beauty, and I a secret I swear to hold inviolate.”
“O!” she said softly “This is Samson come with the shears to turn the tables on poor Delilah!”
And on the instant she flashed out, breaking upon him in a storm of passion. ”

“ There was a decrepit inn, of another and the social type, budded, like a vicious intestinal growth, within Furnival’s. I used to speculate, as I looked down at night on its tottering portico, and solemn old frequenters, and the lights blinking behind its blinds like corpse-candles, if it were not a half-way house of call for the dead. For, by day, all business seemed withdrawn from it, and its upper rooms might have been mortuaries for any life they exhibited. No cheery housemaid ever looked from their windows to chaff the amorous Boots below. There was none to chaff. The dead need no boots. ”

“ Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her considerable estate was administered by her guardian, Jason’s father, a widower, who was possessed of this single adored child. The fruits of parental infatuation had come early to ripen on the seedling. The boy was self-willed and perverse, the more so as he was naturally of a hot-hearted disposition. Violence and remorse would sway him in alternate moods, and be made, each in its turn, a self-indulgence. ”

“ It may have been a year ago that, coming silently into my rooms one night, Valentine “jumped” me, to my dignified annoyance. I hate being so taken off my guard. Generally, I hold it that a man’s consideration for his fellow-creatures’ nerves is the measure of his mental endowment. Valentine, however, does not, to do him justice, make these noiseless entrances to surprise one, so much as to entertain himself with one’s preoccupations. Mine, as it happened, was the evening paper.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, breathing the monosyllable suddenly over my shoulder, like an enlightened ghost. ”

“ Twelve miles away was not there the fort of San Fernando, and the cursed French garrison, which had possessed it by treachery, beleagured in their ill-gotten holding by a force of two thousand Spaniards, which included all the available manhood of San Lorenzo? There would be warrant for gaiety, indeed, should news come of a bloody holocaust of those defenders; but that it did not, and in the meanwhile, blown from another quarter, flew ugly rumours of a large force of French detached somewhere from the north, and hastening to the relief of their comrades. ”

“ She sat at her mirror, in the hands of her perruquier. She was the most beautiful insolent creature Sir Richard had ever seen. There was not an inch of her which Nature could have altered to its improvement. The very patch on her cheek was a theft from perfection. But to so much loveliness her hair was the glory, a nimbus which, condensing in the heavy atmosphere of adoration, dropped in a melting flood of gold, which, short of the ground only, shrank and curled back from its gross contact. ”

“ He appears at night—a sort of ghoulish, indescribable monster, black and huge and dripping, and utters one beastly sound and disappears. Nobody’s been able to trace him, or see where he comes from or goes to. He just appears in the night, in all sorts of unexpected places—houseboats, and bungalows, and shanties by the water—and terrifies some lonely child or woman, and is gone. The devil!—O, the devil! We’ve made parties and hunted him, to no good. It’s a regular reign of terror hereabouts. People don’t dare being left alone after dark. ”

“ There is nothing so incomprehensible to the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part with their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the folly. At least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set sourly, he paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound of expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door conveniently opened. ”

“ Many solemn conundrums were propounded; but the Deputy Clerk, as usual, pushed himself to the front with an impertinence—
“If I slink out of the company of a bore, am I guilty of stealing from his person?”
“Pooh, pooh!” said Brindley, with contempt. “Don’t be flippant, sir.”
The Deputy Clerk was not a whit abashed.
“Sir, to you,” he said. “If that isn’t liked, I’ll propose another. If a woman is divorced from her husband, and a child is born to her before the decree is made absolute, is that child, lawfully begot, legitimate or illegitimate?” ”

“ For Mr. Gardener, as a true ‘poor relation’ of the gods, was humbly thankful for their cheapest condescensions.
“You stuck to your principles, sir,” he said, standing on one leg and the toe of the other, in humble deprecation of his right to any but the smallest possible allowance of oilcloth. Perhaps he would have brought his foot down, even he, could he have guessed the true significance of his own remark.
“I did, Robert,” said Mr. Plumley, placidly sleeking his hair. “I always do. Have a pipe, Robert?”
“Thank you kindly, sir,” said the man. “That was a mistake you made, sir.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yes, Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own ‘little nose’—thy child, thy baby, who never doubted that this day would come—O darling of my soul, that it would come!”— (she clung to him, and hid her face) —“Eugenio! though the blossom of our love delays its fruitage!”
He smiled, recovered from his first astonishment. Ministers of coincidence! In all the fantastic convolutions of war, the merry, the danse-macabre, should not love’s reunions have a place? ”

“ I said, as if I were deprecating the inevitably undesirable. “But what is a Ghost-Leech?”
“A Ghost-Leech,” he said—“the sort, anyhow, that I’ve knowledge of—is one who has served seven years goal-keeper in the hurling-matches of the dead.”
I stared at him. Was he really going, or gone, off his head? He laughed again, waving his hand to reassure me.
“You may accept my proof or not. Anyhow, Bobo’s recovery was proof enough for me. A sense of humour, I admit, is outside our conception of the disembodied. We lay down laughter with life, don’t we? You’d count it heresy to believe otherwise. ”

“ Ah, mademoiselle, I entreat you, do not torture me!”
“Are you so sensitive? Alas! I have much for which to blame myself! Perhaps I have coquetted too long with my happiness; but how many women realize their feelings for the first time in the shock of imminent loss! We do not know our hearts until they ache, Nicanor.”
“Poor Miguel—poor fellow!”
“You love him best of all, I think. Well, go! I have no more to say.”
“Suzanne!” ”

“ Miss Belmont, a little hurt, but more sad, got into her fly and was driven home. Arrived there, she sat up an hour contemplative. She was just preparing to go to bed in the grey dawn, when she heard the garden-gate click and footsteps rapidly traverse the path to the front door. Her heart seemed to stop. She stole trembling into the hall. “Who’s there?” she demanded in a quavering voice. The answer came, with a clearness which made her start, through the letter-box.
“Me, Missis—Jim Hurley.” ”

“ Joan looked up, softly panting. Could he somehow have got wind already of their mission, and have taken them by the way to forestall it? But her eyes fell again before the besieging gaze of the cavalier.
He was a swart man of fifty or so, with a rather sooty expression, and his under-lip stuck out. His eyes, bagging a little in the lower lids, smouldered half-shut, between lust and weariness, under the blackest brows; and, for the rest, he was dressed as black as the devil, with a sparkle of diamonds here and there in his bosom. ”