by Eugène Sue
The bourgeois of Nantes turned around sharply and saw the heaped-up combustibles under the gridiron beginning to take fire. Several tongues of flame lighted with their ruddy glow the black walls of the cell, while forcing themselves through thick columns of smoke. A frightful suspicion flashed through the mind of the merchant, but he dared not even allow his thoughts to dwell upon them; and, wishing to comfort his daughter, said to her: “Be not afraid, you dear bundle of fears, that fire is built to drive off the chill in this cell; we may have to spend the night here. I was thanking the worthy bailiff for his thoughtfulness.” But immediately upon this answer, uttered only in order to reassure his daughter, the merchant, shivering, despite himself with fear, turned to Garin: “Speaking truly, why is that fire made under the gridiron?”
“Merely to give you an idea of the omnipotence of this last test, Bezenecq the Rich. I now commence the description.”
“It is superfluous. I take your word for it.”
“A fire is built under the gridiron, as they are doing now; when the fire has ceased to shoot up flames, a necessary precaution, and consists of a bed of live coals, the recalcitrant patient is stretched naked upon the gridiron, and he is kept there with the aid of those rings and iron chains. At the end of a few instants the skin of the patient, red and shriveling, rips up, bleeds, then turns black. I have seen the hot coals patter with fat that, clotted with blood, dripped from the body of men even less fat than you, Bezenecq the Rich.”
“Hold on, bailiff! I must confess to you my heart fails me, my head reels at the mere thought of such infliction,” said the bourgeois of Nantes, shivering from head to foot. “I am ready to faint. Let me out of this cell with my daughter. I have assigned to your master my whole fortune. You have taken everything — —”
“Come, come, Bezenecq the Rich,” broke in the bailiff, “a man who empties himself as easily as you did at the first word, and without having suffered the least tortures, must have reserved other riches. That’s what we’ll learn all about in a moment.”
“I? I have reserved part of my fortune!” exclaimed the merchant, struck almost speechless with amazement. “I have given you all, down to my last piece.”
“You observed, my wily friend, that despite the assignment of all the property that you were credited with having, I continued to call you Bezenecq the Rich. I feel certain you still merit the name. Come, now! You must disgorge. Come, let’s have the rest of your fortune.”
“Upon the salvation of my soul, I have nothing left! I have given you all I possess.”
“May not the three tests draw from you some admission to the contrary?”
“What tests are you speaking of?”
“The tests of the carcan, of the hook and of the gridiron. Yes, if you do not surrender to me the other property that you are hiding from us, you will undergo the three tests under the very eyes of your daughter,” and saying this, Garin the Serf-eater raised his voice in such a way that Isoline, hearing his threats, darted through the gaolers and threw herself distracted at the feet of the bailiff, crying: “Mercy! Mercy upon my father! Have pity upon us!”
“Mercy depends upon him,” said Garin, imperturbably. “Let him surrender to our seigneur what he still holds in reserve.”
“Father!” cried out the young girl, “I know not what the extent of your wealth is. But if, in your tenderness for me, you sought to reserve aught to shelter me against poverty, I conjure you give it all! Oh, dear father, surrender everything!”
“You hear!” resumed Garin the Serf-eater, smiling fiendishly upon the couple, and seeing the demoralizing effect upon the merchant of the imprudent words that terror had drawn from Isoline, “I am not the only one to suspect you of hiding from us a part of your treasures, Bezenecq the Rich. Like a good father you have sought to keep a fat dower for your daughter. Come, now, you must give us the dower!”
“Garin,” one of the gaolers approached to notify the bailiff, “the coals are red hot. They may go out if you put the man through the trials of the carcan and the hook.”
“As a favor to this young girl I shall be generous,” said Garin. “The gridiron test will be enough, but stir the coals. And now answer, Bezenecq the Rich. I ask you for the last time, yes or no, will you give all you possess to my seigneur, the Count of Plouernel, including your daughter’s dower?”
“It is my daughter whom I shall make the answer to,” answered the merchant, in a solemn voice. “Gaolers will not believe me;” and addressing Isoline in a voice broken with tears: “I swear to you, my child, by the sacred memory of your mother, by my tenderness for you, by all the pleasures you have afforded me since your birth, — I swear to you, by the salvation of my soul, I have not a denier left; I have surrendered all to the Seigneur of Plouernel!”
“Oh, father, I believe you!” exclaimed the girl at his feet, and turning to Garin, she extended her hands towards him in prayer: “You have heard my father’s oath; you may join mine to it.”
“I hold Bezenecq the Rich incapable of leaving his daughter thus penniless,” retorted the bailiff. Turning then to the gaolers: “He will now have to confess to us. Strip him, stretch him on the gridiron and stir the coals. Let the brand flame up.”
The men of the seigneur of Plouernel threw themselves upon Bezenecq the Rich. Despite the resistance and the heart-rending, desperate cries of his daughter, whom they brutally held back, they stripped the bourgeois of Nantes, spread him upon the gridiron, and, by means of the iron chains, fastened him over the burning coals. “Oh, my father!” exclaimed Bezenecq, “I have disregarded your advice ... I now undergo the punishment for my cowardice ... for my selfishness ... I die under the torture for having been afraid to die arms in hand at the head of the serfs in revolt against the Frankish seigneurs.... Triumph, Neroweg! Yet, perchance, the terrible day of reprisals will come to the sons of Joel!”
CHAPTER IX.
THE RESCUE.
IN HER APARTMENT, lighted by a lamp, Azenor the Pale was engaged in the preparation of the magical philter, promised by her to the seigneur of Plouernel. After blowing some powder on a fluid that she had poured into a flagon, she pulled out of a chest a little vial, whose contents she drank. Laying down the vial, she remarked with a sinister smile: “Now, Neroweg, you may come ... I am ready for you.” Then, taking up the flagon, half full with a solution of several powders, she proceeded: “This flagon must now be filled with blood ... the imagination of these ferocious brutes must be struck ... come....” she added with a sigh, turning towards the turret where the little Colombaik was secreted. Raising the curtain that masked the alcove, Azenor saw before her the innocent little creature huddled in a lump in a corner, and silently weeping. “Come,” said the sorceress to him in a sweet voice, “come to me.” The son of Fergan the Quarryman obeyed, he rose and advanced timidly. Wan, thin, broken with want, his pale mien had, like his mother’s, Joan the Hunchback’s, an inexpressible charm of kindness. “Must you always be sad?” inquired Azenor, sitting down and drawing the child near to her and to a table on which lay a poniard. “Why do you always weep?” The little fellow wept afresh. “What’s the cause of your sorrow?”
“My mother, my father,” faltered the child, without ceasing to weep, “I do not see them any more!”
“You love your mother and father very much?” Instead of answering the sorceress, the poor little one threw himself sobbing upon her neck. The woman could not resist the impulse of responding to the childish prompting of a caress, and she embraced Colombaik at the very moment when, fearing he had been disrespectful to Azenor, the child was about to drop on his knees before her. Sinking upon the floor, he broke out into copious tears. The young woman, more and more moved, silently contemplated Colombaik, murmuring to herself: “No, no ... I lack courage.... I shall not kill that poor child, a few drops of his blood will be enough for the philter.” Already her hand approached the poniard on the table, when suddenly her ear caught an unusual noise in the turret. It was like the scraping of a cha
in drawn with difficulty over an iron bar. The sorceress, alarmed, pushed the child back and ran toward the turret at the moment that Fergan the Quarryman stepped in, pale, bathed in perspiration and holding in his hand his iron pick. Azenor drew back, dumb with stupor and fear, while Colombaik, with a cry of joy, rushed to the quarryman, holding up his arms to him and calling: “My father! my father!” Beside himself with happiness, Fergan dropped his iron bar, took up the child in his robust arms, and, raising him to his breast, pressed him passionately, interrogating the face of Colombaik with inexpressible anxiety, while the child, taking between his little hands the gruff face of the quarryman, covered it with kisses, muttering: “Good father! Oh, good father! I see you again at last!”
The serf, without noticing the presence of the sorceress, devoured Colombaik with his eyes. Presently he observed, with a profound sigh of relief: “He is pale, he has been weeping, but he does not seem to have suffered; they can’t have hurt him!” Embracing Colombaik with frenzy, he repeated several times: “My poor child! How happy your mother will be!” But his paternal alarms being calmed, he remembered that he was not alone, and not doubting that Azenor was the sorceress, whose dreaded name had reached as far as the serfs of the seigniory, he put his child down, took up again his pick, approached the young woman slowly with a savage mien and said to her: “So, it is you, who have children kidnapped to serve your diabolical sorceries?” and with glistening eyes he raised his iron bar with both hands. “You will now die, infernal witch!”
“Father, do not kill her!” cried out the child impetuously, clasping the quarryman’s legs with both his hands. “Oh, do not kill this good lady who was embracing me just as you came in!”
Fergan looked at Azenor, who, somber, pensive, her arms crossed upon her palpitating breast, seemed to brave death. Turning to the child: “Was this woman embracing you?”
“Yes, father; and since I have been here she has been kind to me. She has sought to console me. She even often rocked me in her arms.”
“Why, then,” said the quarryman to the sorceress, “did you have my child kidnapped? What have you to say!”
Azenor the Pale, without answering the question of the serf, and pursuing the thought that turned in her head, said: “Where does the passage run out through which you have penetrated to this turret?”
“What’s that to you!”
The young woman stepped to a cabinet of massive oak, took from it a casket, opened it, and displaying before the quarryman the gold pieces that it was filled with, said: “Take this casket and let me accompany you. You have been able to enter this donjon by a secret passage, you will be able to get out again. We shall escape together from this accursed den. I pay a rich ransom.”
“You ... you mean to accompany me?”
“I wish to flee from this castle, where I am a prisoner, and run to rejoin at Angers William IX., Duke of Aquitaine — —” Stopping short and leaning her ear towards the door, Azenor made a sign of silence to Fergan, and proceeded in a whisper: “I hear voices and steps on the staircase. Someone is coming up here.... It is Neroweg!”
“The count!” exclaimed the quarryman, with savage joy, stepping towards the door: “Oh, Worse than a Wolf, you will no longer bite! I shall kill the wretch!”
“Keep still or we are lost,” interrupted Azenor in a low voice. “The Count is not alone; think of your child!” and pointing with rapid gesture to the cabinet of massive oak, she hastily whispered to the serf: “Push that piece of furniture across the door. Be quick! We shall have time to flee! Your enemy, Neroweg, has only a few more steps to climb! I hear his spurs clank upon the stone floor!”
Fergan, thinking only of the safety of his child, followed the advice of Azenor, and, thanks to the herculean strength he was endowed with, succeeded in pushing the massive piece of furniture across the door, which, thus barricaded, could not swing open into the room. The sorceress hastily wrapped herself in a mantle; took from the cabinet whence she had extracted the casket, a little leathern bag containing precious stones, and said to the quarryman, holding the casket out to him: “Take this gold and let’s flee.”
“Carry your gold, yourself! I shall carry my child and my pick to defend him!” answered the serf, taking up his iron bar with one hand, and placing on his left arm little Colombaik, who held fast by his father’s neck. At that very moment the fugitives heard from without the sound of the key that turned in the lock, followed by the voice of the seigneur of Plouernel: “Who is holding that door back inside? Is that one of your enchantments, accursed sorceress?”
While the Count was beating against the door, and, redoubling his imprecations, vainly sought to force it, the quarryman, his son and Azenor, gathered in the turret, prepared to flee by the secret passage. One of the slabs of the flooring, being swung aside by means of a counterweight and chains wound around an iron axis, exposed the first step of a ladder so narrow that it could barely allow passage to one person at a time, and of such a slope at that spot that its first ten rungs could be cleared only by sliding down almost on the back from step to step. Azenor was the first to undertake the narrow passage; the little Colombaik imitated her; the two were followed by Fergan, who then readjusted the counterweight. The stone slab, back again in its place, again masked the secret passage. This steep portion of the ladder was wrought in an abutment of the turret, where its base projected beyond the wall of the donjon. Its foot connected with the narrow stone spiral, which, wrought in the ten-foot thick wall, descended to the lowest depths of the donjon. At each landing, a skilfully masked outlet opened upon this secret passage, lighted by not a ray from without. But Fergan, equipped with his tinder box, punk and wick, of the kind that he helped himself with in the quarries, lighted the passage, and, with his iron pick in one hand, his light in the other, preceded his son and Azenor down the stone spiral. The descent was but slowly effected.
Presently the fugitives, leaving above them the level of the landing where the hall of the stone table was located, and which was situated on the ground floor, arrived at the place that corresponded with the subterranean cells. Here the passage served not merely as a means of retreat in case of a siege, it also afforded the chatelain an opportunity to spy upon the prisoners and overhear their confidential communications. By its construction, the cell of Bezenecq the Rich gave special facilities for such espionage. Furthermore, a slab three feet square by two inches thick, fastened in a strong oaken frame on hinges, constituted a sort of stone door, undistinguishable from the inside of the somber apartment, but easy to push open from without. Thus the seigneur reserved to himself an access to those subterraneous chambers, unknown even to the dwellers of the castle. Above the opening and within the cell was sculptured that hideous mask, whose sight had frightened the daughter of the merchant. The two eyes and the mouth of this grim figure, bored through the full thickness of the wall and exteriorly chiseled in the form of a niche, permitted the spy, posted at that place of concealment, to see the prisoners and overhear what they said. Thus it happened a few hours before that Fergan, climbing up by the light of his wick, had overheard the conversation between the Bishop of Nantes and Jeronimo, the legate of the Pope, and then that of the bourgeois of Nantes and his daughter. The fugitives were now on a level with the cell of Bezenecq, when suddenly brilliant rays of light shot through the openings in the stone mask, proceeding from a light within.
Fergan was in advance of his child and Azenor. He halted at the sound of rawkish peals of laughter — frightful, like those of a maniac. The serf peeped through the holes pierced in the eyes of the mask, and this was what he saw by the light of a lantern placed upon the ground. Two naked corpses, the one suspended by the neck from the iron gibbet fastened in the wall, the other by the groins from the iron prong. The former, rigid, horribly distended and dislocated by the enormous weight of the stone attached to his feet; the latter, hooked by the flesh upon the sharp prong that penetrated his entrails, was bent backwards with his arms dangling against his legs. Th
ese victims, captured shortly before, from a new troop of travelers on the territory of the seigneur of Plouernel and taken to this cell, better fitted out than the others with instruments of torture, did not survive the experience. The corpse of Bezenecq the Rich was chained to the gridiron above the dying embers of the coal fire. The agonies of that unhappy man had been so excruciating that his members, held fast by the iron bands, had been convulsively distended. Undoubtedly at the moment of expiring he had made a supreme effort to turn his head towards his daughter, so as to die with her in sight. The face of the merchant, blackened, frightful to behold, retained the expression of his agony. A few steps from the corpse of her father, cowering upon the straw bed, her knees held in her arms, Isoline swayed to and fro, emitting at intervals rythmic peals of maniacal laughter. She had gone crazy. Fergan, moved with pity, was considering how to deliver the daughter of Bezenecq, when the door of the cell opened and Gonthram, the eldest son of Neroweg, stepped in, a torch in his hands and his cheeks of purple. His eyes, his unsteady walk, all announced a high stage of inebriety. Approaching Isoline, he struck against the gridiron, where lay the corpse of the bourgeois of Nantes. Unmoved by that spectacle, Gonthram stepped towards the young girl, seized her rudely by the arm, and said in a maudlin voice: “Come, follow me!” The demented girl seemed not to hear, she did not even raise her eyes, and continued swaying to and fro and to laugh. “You are quite gay,” observed the whelp; “I also am gay. Come upstairs. We shall laugh together!”
“Oh, traitor!” broke in a new personage, precipitating himself out of breath into the cell. “I made no doubt what you had in your mind when I saw you leave the table the moment my father went up to the sorceress!” And throwing himself upon his brother, Guy, the second son of Neroweg, cried out: “If you want the girl, you will have to pay for her with your blood!”
“Vile bastard! You, the son of my mother’s chaplain! You dare to threaten me!” In his rage, increased by intoxication, Gonthram raised his burning torch, struck his brother with it in the face and drew his sword. Guy, uttering a furious imprecation, also drew his sword. The struggle was short. Guy fell lifeless at the feet of his brother, who exclaimed: “The bastard is dead. I am the better man. The girl is mine!” and rushing back to Isoline: “Now, you are mine!”