The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

The little common boy suddenly began to cry loudly. ‘I’m frightened, mother!’ he wailed. ‘Take me away.’

  The stranger, bending to look for him, made as if to claw through the group. I saw a most diabolical expression on his face.

  ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I’ll have you yet!’

  The child screamed violently, and beat in frantic terror against his mother. I interposed, an odd damp on my forehead.

  ‘Look here,’ I said; ‘leave the boy alone, will you?’

  They were all backing, startled and scared, when there came a hurried, loud step into the room from behind us, and we turned in a panic huddle. It was the commissionaire, very flustered and irate.

  ‘Now, then, you know,’ he said, ‘you’d no right to take it upon yourselves to go round like this unattended.’

  ‘Pardon me,’ I said, resuming my charge of spokesman; ‘we did nothing of the sort. This gentleman offered himself to escort us.’

  I turned, as did all the others, and my voice died in my throat. There was no gentleman at all – the room was empty. As I stood stupidly staring, I was conscious of the voice of the commissionaire, aggrieved, expostulatory, but with a curious note of distress in it:

  ‘What gentleman? There’s nobody has the right but Mrs Somerset, and she’s ill – she’s had a stroke. We’ve just found her in her room, with a face like the horrors on her.’

  Suddenly one of the women shrieked hysterically: ‘O look! He’s there! O come away!’

  And, as she screamed, I saw. The empty picture frame in the next room was empty no longer. It was filled by the form of him, handsome and smiling, he who had just been conducting us round the walls.

  A GALLOWS-BIRD

  In February of the year 1809, when the French were sat down before Saragossa – then enduring its second and more terrific siege within a period of six months – it came to the knowledge of the Duc d’Abrantes, at that time the General commanding, that his army, though undoubtedly the salt of the earth, was yet so little sufficient to itself in the matter of seasoning, that it was reduced to the necessity of flavouring its soup with the saltpetre out of its own cartridges. In this emergency, d’Abrantes sent for a certain Ducos, captain on the staff of General Berthier, but at present attached to a siege train before the doomed town, and asked him if he knew whence, if anywhere in the vicinity, it might be possible to make good the deficiency.

  Now this Eugene 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.

  ‘You were with Lefebvre-Desnouettes in Aragon last year?’ demanded Junot.

  ‘I was, General; both before the siege and during it.’

  ‘You heard mention of salt mines in this neighbourhood?’

  ‘There were rumours of them, sir – amongst the hills of Ulebo; but it was never our need to verify the rumours.’

  ‘Take a company, now, and run them to earth. I will give you a week.’

  ‘Pardon me, General; I need no company but my own, which is ever the safest colleague.’

  Junot glared demoniacally. He was already verging on the madness which was presently to destroy him.

  ‘The devil!’ he shouted. ‘You shall answer for that assurance! Go alone, sir, since you are so obliging, and find salt; and at your peril be killed before reporting the result to me. Bones of God! is every skipjack 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, which are combed by-and-by into the plains south of Saragossa, a dusky young goatherd loitered among the chestnut trees on a hot afternoon. This boy’s beauty was of a supernal order. His elastic young cheeks glowed with colour; his eyebrows were resolute bows; his lips, like a pretty phrase of love, were set between dimples like inverted commas. And, as he stood, he coquetted like Dinorah to his own shadow, chasséd to it, spoke to it, upbraiding or caressing, as it answered to his movements on the ground before him—

  ‘Ah, pretty one! ah, shameless! 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. Go, go, before I repent and hold thee, jealous that mine own shadow should run before to find his lips.’

  She stooped, and, with a fantastic gesture, threw her soul upon the winds; then rose, and leaned against a tree, and began to sing, and sigh and murmur softly:

  ‘At the gate of heaven are sold brogues

  For the little bare-footed angel rogues—’

  ‘Ah, little dear mother! it is the seventh month, and the sign is still delayed. No baby, no lover. Alack! why should he return to me, who am a barren olive! The husbandman asks a guerdon for his care. Give me my little doll, Santissima, or I will be naughty and drink holy water: give me the shrill wee voice, which pierces to the father’s heart, when even passion loiters. Ah, come to me, Eugenio, my Eugenio!’

  She raised her head quickly on the word, and her heart leaped. It was to hear the sound of a footstep, on the stones far below, coming up the mountainside. She looked to her shirt and jacket. Ragged as they were, undeveloped as was the figure within them, she had been so jealous a housewife that there was not in all so much as an eyelet hole to attract a peeping Tom. Now, leaving her goats amongst the scattered boulders of the open, she backed into the groves, precautionally, but a little reluctant, because in her heart she was curious.

  The footsteps came on toilfully, and presently the man who was responsible for 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 which held his left arm crookt in a bloody swathe. He levered himself up with a broken spear-shaft; but he was otherwise weaponless. A pistol, in Ducos’s creed, was the argument of a fool. He carried his ammunition in his brains.

  Having reached a little plateau, irregular with rocks shed from the cliff above, he sat down within the shadow of a grove of chestnut and carob trees, and sighed, and wiped his brow, and nodded to all around and below him.

  ‘Yes, and yes, and of a truth,’ thought he: ‘here is the country of my knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right, a browner clod amongst the furrows of the valleys, heaves up the ruined monastery of San Ildefonso, which Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah, the week of sweet malvoisie and sweeter passion!) the little inn at the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has become of Anita of the inn? Alack! if my little fille de joie were but here to serve me now!’

  The goatherd slipped round the shoulder of a rock and stood before him, breathing hard. Her black curls were, for all the world, bandaged, as it might be, with a yellow napkin (though they were more in the way to give than take wounds), and crowned rakishly with a dusky sombrero. She wore a kind of gaskins on her legs, loose, so as to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across her shoulders was slung a sunburnt shawl, which depended in a bib agai
nst her chest.

  Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions magnetically meeting and blending, till the eyes of the goatherd were delivered of very stars of rapture.

  Was this a spirit, thought Ducos, summoned of his hot and necessitous desire? But the other had no such misgiving. All in a moment she had fallen on her brown knees before him, and was pitifully kissing his bandaged arm, while she strove to moan and murmur out the while her ecstasy of gratitude.

  ‘Nariguita!’ he murmured, rallying as if from a dream; ‘Nariguita!’

  She laughed and sobbed.

  ‘Ah, the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will I repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! 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? It was nothing out of that context that here was he chanced again, and timely, upon that same sweet instrument which he had once played on and done with, and thrown aside, careless of its direction. Now he had but to stoop and reclaim it, and the discarded strings, it seemed, were ready as heretofore to answer to his touch with any melody he listed.

  He caressed her with real delight. She was something more than lovable. He made himself a very Judas to her lips.

  ‘Anita, my little Anita!’ he began glowingly; but she took him up with a fevered eagerness, answering the question of his eyes.

  ‘So long ago, ah Dios! And thou wert gone; and the birds were silent; and under the heavy sky my father called me to him. He held a last letter of thine, which had missed my hands for his. Love, sick at our parting, had betrayed us. O, the letter! how I swooned to be denied it! He was for killing me, a traitor. Well, I could not help but be. But Tia Joachina had pity on me, and dressed me as you see, and smuggled me to the hills, that I might at least have a chance to live without suffering wrong. And, behold! the heavens smiled upon me, knowing my love; and Señor Cangrejo took me to herd his goats. For seven months – for seven long, faithful months; until the sweetest of my heart’s flock should return to pasture in my bosom. And now he has come, my lamb, my prince, even as he promised. He has come, drawing me to him over the hills, following the lark’s song of his love as it dropped to earth far forward of his steps. 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 lose me your favour, mamselle. What! Damn it, I say!’

  She fell away, staring at him; then in a moment gathered, and leapt to him again between tears and laughter.

  ‘But this?’ she asked, her eyes glistening; and she touched the bandage.

  ‘Ah! that,’ he answered. ‘Why, I was wounded, and taken prisoner by the French, you understand? Also, I escaped from my captors. It comes, blood and splint and all, from the smashed arm of a sabreur, who, indeed, had no longer need of it.’

  ‘For the love of Christ!’ she cried in a panic. ‘Come away into the trees, where none will observe us!’

  ‘Bah! I have no fear, I,’ said Ducos. But he rose, nevertheless, with a smile, and, catching up the goatherd, bore her into the shadows. There, sitting by her side, he assured her, the rogue, of the impatience with which he had anticipated, of the eagerness with which he had run to realise this longed-for moment. The escapade had only been rendered possible, he said truthfully, by the opportune demand for salt. Doubtless she would help him, for love’s sake, to justify the venture to his General?

  But, at that, she stared at him, troubled, and her lip began to quiver.

  ‘Ah, God!’ she cried; ‘then it was not I in the first place! Go thy ways, love; but for pity’s heart-sake let me weep a little. Yes, yes, there is salt in the mountains, that I know, and where the caves lie. But there are also Cangrejo – whom you French ruined and made a madman – and a hundred like him, wild-cats hidden amongst the leaves. And there, too, are the homeless friars of St Ildefonso; and, dear body of Christ! the tribunal of terror, the junta of women, who are the worst of all – lynx-eyed demons.’

  He smiled indulgently. Her terror amused him.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said; ‘well, well. And what, then, is this junta?’

  ‘It is a scourge,’ she whispered, shivering, ‘for traitors and for spies. It gathers nightly, at sunset, in the dip yonder, and there waters with blood its cross of death. This very evening, Cangrejo tells me—’

  She broke off, cuddled closer to her companion, and clasping her hands and shrugging up her shoulders to him, went on awfully—

  ‘Eugenio, there was a wagon-load of piastres coming secretly for Saragossa by the Tolosa road. It was badly convoyed. One of your generals got scent of it. The guard had time to hide their treasure and disperse, but him whom they thought had betrayed them the tribunal of women claimed, and tonight—’

  ‘Well, he will receive his wages. And where is the treasure concealed?’

  ‘Ah! that I do not know.’

  Ducos got to his feet, and stretched and yawned.

  ‘I have a fancy to see this meeting-place of the tribunal. Wilt thou lead me to it, Nariguita?’

  ‘Mother of God, thou art mad!’

  ‘Then I must go alone, like a madman.’

  ‘Eugenio, it is cursing and accurst. None will so much as look into it by day; and, at dusk, only when franked by the holy church.’

  ‘So greatly the better. Adios, Nariguita!’

  It took them half an hour, descending cautiously, and availing themselves of every possible shelter of bush and rock, to reach a strangely formed amphitheatre set stark and shallow amongst the higher swales of the valley, but so overhung with scrub of myrtle and wild pomegranate as to be only distinguishable, and that scarcely, from above. A ragged track, mounting from the lower levels into this hollow, tailed off, and was attenuated into a point where it took a curve of the rocks at a distance below.

  As Ducos, approaching the rim, pressed through the thicket, a toss of black crows went up from the mouth ahead of him, like cinders of paper spouted from a chimney. He looked over. The brushwood 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 hoard of little pitchy bird scullions were busy with the joints. Holy mother, how they squabbled, and flapped at one another with their sleeves, it seemed! The two carcasses which hung there appeared, for all their heavy pendulosity, to reel and rock with laughter, nudging one another in eyeless merriment.

  Ducos mentally calculated the distance to the gallows below from any available coign of concealment.

  ‘One could not hide close enough to hear anything,’ 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? Nariguita, will you go and be my little reporter at the ceremony?’

  Anita, crouching in the brush behind him, whispered terrified: ‘It is impossible. They admit none but priests and women.’

  ‘And are not you a woman, most beautiful?’

  ‘God forbid!’ she said. ‘I am the little goatherd Ambrosio.’

  He stood s
ome moments, frowning. A scheme, daring and characteristic, was beginning to take shape in his brain.

  ‘What is that clump of rags by the gallows?’ he asked, without looking round.

  ‘It is not rags; it is rope, Eugenio.’

  He thought again.

  ‘And when do they come to hang this rascal?’ he said.

  ‘It is always at dusk. O, dear mother!’ she whimpered, for the young man had suddenly slipped between the branches, and was going swiftly and softly down the pit-side.

  Already the basin of sand was filled with the shadows from the hills. Ducos approached the gibbet. The last of the birds remaining arose and dispersed, quarrelling with nothing so much as the sunlight which they encountered above.

  ‘It is an abominable task,’ said the aide-de-camp, looking up at the dangling bodies; ‘but – for the Emperor – always for the Emperor! That fellow, now, in the domino – it would make us appear of one build. And as for complexion, why, he at least would have no eyes for the travesty, Mon Dieu! I believe it is 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 crosspiece. He must clasp and lever up his burden by main strength before he could slacken and detach the cord. Then, with an exclamation of relief, he let the body drop upon the sand beneath. 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, Nariguita! 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 he saw how the wretch had been pinioned, wrists and ankles, beneath.