Bernard Capes

“ 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 and forgather with Nariguita 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, desultorily seeking. Not a soul came near him. He dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread; he dozed again. ”

“ As Ducos entered the brush, approaching the rim, a toss of black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like ashes of paper spouted from a chimney.
He looked over. The bush ceased at the edge of a considerable pit, roughly circular in shape, whose sides of bare sloping sand met and flattened at the bottom into an extended platform. Thence arose a triangular gibbet—a very rack in a devil’s larder, all about which a horde of little pitchy bird scullions were busy with the joints. Holy Mother, how they squabbled and flapped at one another with their sleeves! ”

“ Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from any available coign of concealment.
“One could hear nothing,” he murmured, shaking his head in aggravation; “and, this Junta of ladies—it will probably talk. What if it were to discuss that very question of the piastres? Noseling, will you go and be my little reporter at the ceremony?”
Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: “It is impossible. ‘hey admit none but priests and women.”
“And are you not a woman, most beautiful?”
“God forbid!” she said. “I am the little goatherd, Ambrosio.” ”

“ Oh, forlorn, most forlorn soul of love, that, counting disbelief 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 expanding sigh and smile, such as those with which one welcomes the acquittance from boredom. ”

“ He descended the ladder in excitement.
“Anita!” he called.
She had followed and was at hand, She trembled, and was as pale as death.
“Help me,” he panted, “with this—into the bush.”
He had lifted his end by the shoulders.
“What devil possesses you? I cannot,” she sobbed; “I shall die.”
“Ah! Noseling—for my sake! There is no danger if thou art brave and expeditious.”
Between them they tugged and trailed their load into the dense undergrowth skirting the open track, and there let it plunge and sink. Ducos removed the domino from the body, rolling and hauling at that irreverently. ”

“ Then, as his muscles stiffened to their task, the goatherd’s voice, in a last heart-broken cry, was wafted to him.
“Master! He is gone. They cannot take him. Oh, don’t let them hurt me!”
Curious still, in the midmost of his excitement, Ducos paused and again looked down. He saw the alguazil make a sign. He saw Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, being dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl; and then....
Whether he had betrayed himself to eye or ear was all one. A guttural screech denounced him; a bullet spat on a boulder and blinded his eyes with dust. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At dusk, with the sound of footsteps coming up the pass, the crows dispersed. Eugène, for all his truculence, had sweated over their persistency. A single more gluttonous swoop might at any moment have blinded him, and have so fastened all on to the feast, before help could reach him from the eyrie whence unwearying love watched his every motion. ”

“ And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.
“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the gallows—him that thou foisted—oh, unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy!—upon 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 recognise the child in those deep and suffering tones. ”

“ 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, sayest 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. ”

“ The footsteps came on toilfully, and the man who sounded them hove into sight. He wore the dress of an English officer, save for the shepherd’s felt hat on his head; but his scarlet jacket was knotted loosely by the sleeves about his throat, in order to the disposition of a sling that held his left arm crooked in a bloody swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he was otherwise weaponless. According to Eugène Ducos, a pistol was folly’s resource, but wit’s embarrassment in an emergency. ”

“ The reek of the little tragedy had hardly dissipated before Ducos found himself. The sentiment of revolt, deriving from his helpless position, had been indeed but momentary. To feel his own accessibility to torture painted torture to him as an inhuman lust. ”

“ That was because he lay in an eyrie on the hill-side. Then at once, into his white field of vision, as if thrown from a magic-lantern slide, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an ancient cocked hat (whereof the flaps had slouched down from their buttons) and hung from the throat, like an august Aunt Sally, with a bat-wing funeral cloak. ”

“ Pray heaven only they alight not on that in the bush. Nariguita, little fanfan, this is my last word. Go, hide thyself in the thickets above, and watch what a Frenchman, the most sensitive of mortals, will suffer to serve his emperor.”
It was an era, indeed, of sublime lusts and barbaric virtues, when men must mount upon stepping-stones, not of their dead selves, but of their slaughtered enemies, to higher things. Anita, like Ducos, was a child of her generation. ”

“ A pregnant pause ensued, broken only by a slight noise like rustling or vibrating, and then, in an instant, by a voice, chuckling, hateful—the voice of the priest.
“What! to hang there without a word, Carlos! Wouldst thou go and never ask what became of that very treasure thou soldst thy soul to betray? The devil has rounded on thee, Carlos; for, after all, it is thou that art lost, and not the treasure. That is all put away—shout it in the ears of thy neighbours up there it is all put away, Carlos, safe in the salt-mines of the Little Hump. Cry it to the whole world now ”

“ 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 he was 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, descending from the beam, walked away. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That fellow there in the domino—it will make us of one build; and, as for complexion, why, he at least has no eyes for the travesty. Mon Dieu, what a Providence!”
There was a ladder leaned against the third, and empty, beam. He put it into position for the cloaked figure and ran up it. The rope was hitched to a hook in the cross-piece. He must clasp and lever up by main strength his burden before he could slacken and detach the cord. ”

“ Bones of God! is every. skip-jack with a shoulder-knot to better my commands?”
Ducos saluted and wheeled impassive. He knew that in a few days Marshal Lannes was to supplant this maniac.
*****
Up and away amongst the intricate ridges of the mountains, where the half-unravelled knots of the Pyrenees flow down in threads, or clustered threads, that are by-and-by combed into the plains south of Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered amongst the chestnut trees on a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order ”