The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to his legs with an immense sigh of relief. Love, he thought, could be presuming, could be obtuse, could be positively a bore. It all turned upon the context of the moment; and the present was quick with desires other than for endearments. For it must be related that the young captain, having manoeuvred matters to this accommodating pass, was designing nothing less than an instant return, on the wings of transport, to the blockading camp, whence he proposed returning, with a suitable force and all possible dispatch, to seize and empty of its varied treasures the salt mine of St Ildefonso.

  ‘Pouf!’ he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation; ‘this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still – I have Cangrejo’s word for it.’

  He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to refocus in his memory the position of the mound, which still from here was plainly visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder. The footsteps came on – approached him – paused – so long that he was induced at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes encountered other eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his refuge. The newcomer was a typical Spanish Romany – slouching, filthy, with a bandage over one eye.

  ‘God be with thee, Caballero!’ said the Frenchman defiantly.

  To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of laughter, and flung himself towards him.

  ‘Judge thou, now,’ said he, ‘which is the more wide-awake adventurer and the better actor!’

  ‘My God!’ cried Ducos; ‘it is de la Platière!’

  ‘Hush!’ whispered the mendicant. ‘Are we private? Ah, bah! Junot should have sent me in the first instance.’

  ‘I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt return, and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.’

  Half an hour later, de la Platière – having already, for his part, mentally absorbed the details of a certain position – swung rapidly, with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had ascended earlier. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill regathered itself to silence. 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. When he opened his eyes for the second time, the shadows of the peaks were slanting to the east. He got to his feet, shivering a little. This utter silence and desertion discomforted him. Where was the girl? God! was it possible after all that she had betrayed him? He might have questioned his own heart as to that; only, as luck would have it, it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. 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.

  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. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk to – and deceive. He was depressed.

  By and by he pulled off, turned inside-out and resumed his scarlet jacket, which he had taken the provisional precaution to have lined with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and looked eagerly into the lower vortices of dusk. In the very direction to which his thoughts were engaged, a little glow-worm light was burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify – Spaniards or French, ambush or investment? Allowing – as between himself on the height and de la Platière on the road below – for the apparent discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of an immediate descent necessary.

  Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the black ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces he would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new perspective. Still, over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump, like a gigantic thatched kraal, loomed oddly upon him through the dark.

  And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great lantern hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot of the mound – a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy.

  A cluster of rocks neighboured the clearing about the tree. To these Ducos padded his last paces with a catlike 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; their ink-black whiskers hummocked on their shoulders.

  So, in the moment of Ducos’s alighting on it, was the group postured – silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full tide of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.

  ‘Confess!’ it cried, vibrating: ‘him thou wert seen with at the gallows; him whom thou foisted, O! unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy! on 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 agonised tones.

  The inquisitor, with an oath, half-wheeled.

  ‘Pignatelli, father of this accursed – if by her duty thou canst prevail?’

  A figure – agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanised as Brutus – stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm aloft.

  ‘No child of mine, alguazil!’ it proclaimed in a shrill, strung cry. ‘Let her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!’

  Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.

  ‘Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah, naughty!) is half-absolved. 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, sayst 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 thumbnails.

  ‘But he will not move her,’ he thought – and, on the thought, started; for from his high perch his eye had suddenly caught, he was sure of it, the sleeking of a French bayonet in the road below.

  ‘Master!’ cried Anit
a, in a heart-breaking voice; ‘he is gone – they cannot take him. O, don’t let them hurt me!’

  The alguazil made a sign. Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, was dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl; and, in a moment, the group fell apart to watch her being hauled up to the branch by her thumbs.

  Ducos looked on greedily.

  ‘How long before she sets to screaming?’ he thought, ‘so that I may escape under cover of it.’

  So long, that he grew intolerably restless – wild, furious. He could have cursed her for her endurance.

  But presently it came, moaning up all the scale of suffering. And, at that, slinking like a rat through its run, he went down swiftly towards the road – to meet de la Platière and his men already silently breaking cover from it.

  And, on the same instant, the Spaniards saw them.

  ‘Peste!’ whispered de la Platière. ‘We could have them all at one volley but for that!’

  Between the French force, ensconced behind the rocks whither Ducos had led them, and the Spaniards who, completely taken by surprise, had clustered foolishly in a body under the lantern, hung the body of Anita, its torture suspended for the moment because its poor wits were out.

  ‘How, my friend!’ exclaimed Ducos. ‘But for what?’

  ‘The girl, that is all.’

  ‘She will feel nothing. No doubt she is half-dead already. A moment, and it will be too late.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I will not,’ said de la Platière.

  Ducos stamped ragingly.

  ‘Give the word to me. She must stand her chance. For the Emperor!’ he choked – then shrieked out, ‘Fire!’

  The explosion crashed among the hills, and echoed off.

  A dark mass, which writhed and settled beyond the lantern shine, seemed to excite a little convulsion of merriment in the swinging body. That twitched and shook a moment; then relaxed, and hung motionless.

  THE SWORD OF CORPORAL LACOSTE

  ’Tis many a wise Man’s hap, while he is

  providing against one Danger, to fall into another:

  And for his very Providence to turn his Destruction.’

  Corporal Lacoste – cuirassier in the following of Murat, the Rupert of an Imperial army – had had a long dream, chiefly of a roaring thunder of surf bursting upon jagged rocks. And, as the storm of water thrashed the very pinnacles that toppled into mist, he had seen the ribs of cliff laid bare and bleeding – as it were the laceration of a living land that he looked on. Then, ‘Corne et tonnerre!’ he had seemed to cry to himself, ‘the very world is torn by some inhuman power, and flows to the sea in rivers of purple!’ and he heard the bells of the ocean receding innumerably, choke at their moorings, muffled and congested with the floating scum of carnage that no wind might ruffle and only God’s fire cleanse.

  Now, in a moment, he saw that what he had taken for land was in truth a great cliff built up of human bodies – a vast reserve of human force accumulated by, and for the use of, a single dominant will. And this cliff was washed by the waves of an ocean of blood, to which its life contributed in a thousand spouting rivulets. And it was compact of limitless pain; and the cry of torture never ceased within it. And suddenly the dreamer – as in the way of dreams – felt himself to be a constituent agony of that he gazed upon – a pulp of suffering self-contained, yet partaking of the wretchedness of all.

  Suddenly there was a faint stir and pushing here and there into the mound, a quiet soft heaving such as a mole makes; and whenever this ceased a moment, a shriek, thin as a needle, pierced the very nerve of the mass. And, with horror indescribable, the dreamer felt the approach of the thing, testing and feeling at one point or another, until it reached and entered his breast. ‘Hideous and unnameable!’ he would have screamed, but clenched his teeth upon the cry; for lo! it was but a little familiar hand, plump and white, that groped within his ribs, seeking to find and snap the tendons that held his heart in place.

  Then he found voice, and whispered in his extremity, ‘Spare me, my Emperor!’ But the hand neither shook nor hurried, severing his chords of being one by one, until it could lift the heart from its socket and fling it into the waves that leapt like wolves beneath. And, at the instant of the lifting, it was as if a tooth of flame were thrust into him and withdrawn; and thereafter he fell cold – colder, waxing blithe and painless, until he was moved to laugh to himself with a secret ecstasy of applause.

  ‘A good soldier has no heart. Of a truth, le p’tit caporal must now as always have his way. And he has done it so deftly that I scarce feel a wound.’

  The very association of the word seemed to open his eyes morally and physically. Immediately he was conscious of a slit of blinding daylight; of the grip upon some exposed parts of his body of a frost sharp enough to hold him by the legs like a mantrap. Yet, save for these partial seizures, he appeared to be reclining under a blanket so suffocatingly thick that he could not account for his certain conviction that the heat was slowly retiring from it.

  All in a moment he had comprehended, and was struggling to relieve himself of his incubus. It rolled from him as he emerged from under it. It fell ridiculously into the caricature of a dead dragoon. Corporal Lacoste knew the thing for a mess-sergeant of his late acquaintance. He nodded to the body as he sat himself down in the snow.

  ‘Thou never servedst a comrade so well before, sergeant,’ said he; and, indeed, he would surely have died of the frost in his wound had not this unconscious trooper given him the heat of his own vitality.

  ‘But, what made the man delay his going till the sun rose?’ thought Corporal Lacoste.

  He looked again, and started.

  The dragoon’s throat had been pierced by a sword-thrust. A thread of vermilion yet crawled from it down his swarthy neck, like the awkward tracing by a schoolboy of a river on a map.

  Corporal Lacoste screwed his eyes, intuitively and obliquely, to get glimpse of his own right shoulder. There was a sensation of wet numbness thereabouts. Something had pricked him pretty deeply – possibly the point of the very murderous weapon that had finished off the dragoon.

  ‘It was when I dreamt of the tooth of flame,’ thought Corporal Lacoste. ‘There have been vampires here amongst the wounded.’

  It hardly troubled him, this familiar experience. Those of Murat’s hated beaux sabreurs who fell alive and had the misfortune to be left for dead, must always run the risk of mutilation. It was enough for him that the blow that had prostrated him had failed of its deadliness; that his senseless condition had not been made by the frost everlasting; that he owed his salvation to the accidental superimposition of a wounded dragoon.

  He took his dazed head between his hands, and indulged a little retrospect of the events that had preceded his downfall, as he dwelt upon the scene before him.

  That was marvellous enough to a Gascon. He crouched in the bed of a precipitous defile that joined higher and lower terraces of the Amstetten forest. Beneath him, the gully went down with a rush of trampled snow, in the swirl of which dead horses and men and the wreck of accoutrements, half-buried in a foam of white, seemed the very freebooty of a frost-stricken waterfall. It was a strange picture of furious motion held in suspension – the more wonderful for its framing. For all the trees, great and small, that over-stooped the lip and sprouted from the sides of the pass, were hung with monstrous lustres of ice, up which millions of little reflected suns travelled like beads of champagne rising in specimen-glasses.

  Of the stunning effectiveness of these icicles, as a species of natural artillery, Corporal Lacoste had had a recent demonstration. His mind now was slowly electrotyping, in the midst of a clearing obscurity, certain images impressed upon it during the moments antecedent to his collapse. He recalled the weird long ride through forest vaults so roofed with snow that the world had seemed one vast tent propped by countless poles. He recalled how here and there a sluice of sunlight pouring through a rift overhead had reminded him of that strange Roman Pantheon tha
t he had once seen when serving in the military suite of M. Barthollet, the appraiser of works of art to the Directory. He recalled how, jingling blithely in his saddle in the wake of his swashbuckler general, with all the glory of the late capitulation of Ulm tingling in his careless heart, he had started to the sudden shout, the recoiling shock of ambush; and had seen and heard the outlet of this very glen, down which Murat and his advance-guard were riding, clank to the wheel of an Austrian regiment, that shut upon it like a gate of steel. He remembered the thunderous rush that succeeded – the charge of the beaux sabreurs down the defile – the crash, the retreat, the rally; and again he saw the young artillery officer – some cadet inconnu – gallop his two pieces into position, and, at the critical moment, discharge his buzzing canisters of grape into the welter of the enemy.

  Corne et tonnerre! what a clearing of the pass! It had been like cleaning a pipe-stem with a fizz of gunpowder. But, at the same time, a catastrophe quite unexpected had resulted. For the explosion had brought down a very avalanche of snow and icicles from the weighted branches a hundred feet above; and these terrific bolts, bursting as it were in a cloud of smoke, had salvoed on helmet and breastplate of friend and foe alike, with a sound like the clanging of enormous cymbals, and had hurled horses and men in one shouting ruin to the ground.

  And it was precisely at this point that Corporal Lacoste’s perceptions had been severed, and so left for the night as clean-ended as a pack of straw in a chaff-cutter.

  But destiny – his particular Atropos – was now to turn at the knife again – for a time.

  ‘To be floored by an icicle!’ he muttered, twirling his fierce moustache. ‘Corne et tonnerre! it is after all a weapon unknown to courage and passion. This Queen of the snow is a barbarous fighter. Yet all night she kisses the wounds of her victims that they may not bleed. She woos to her embraces by the twin snares of hurt and pity. It is an amiable artifice, not unfamiliar to the experience of us that ply the sword. Whom a woman strikes she loves. My faith – but she was a chill bed-fellow, nevertheless!’