The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  He was feeling now very sick. His wounds, opening to his returned vitality, were beginning to run afresh. He rose and looked about for his helmet. It lay, a mere crushed tin kettle, under the dead dragoon. But his sword was flung aside uninjured, and this he recovered and slipped back into its scabbard.

  ‘It retires with a hiss. Mon Dieu, what a poisonous snake!’ he said; and then he took off his neckcloth and fastened it about his battered head.

  It was while he was thus engaged that his vision, wandering afield, rested on a figure that moved at the far end of the glen. This figure – that seemed to be the only thing living in all the length of the pass – had an odd appearance to the dim eyes of the corporal. It was squat, and of fantastic garb and gesture; and to his weak exalted perceptives it presented itself as a gnome, crept, like a hound from the womb of sin, out of some icy dark crypt of the forest. Now and again it would stoop; now and again fling a goblin dance, and then all of a sudden it seemed to catch sight of the tall shape standing high in the lift of the defile, and stopped motionless and shaded its forehead with horizontal palm.

  Now, in a moment it appeared to set an extinguisher on its head, literally, as if subduing an unholy flame; and immediately it came up the glen with a quick elastic step, the cone standing back at a rakish angle.

  The creature drew near.

  ‘Much cry and little wool!’ muttered Corporal Lacoste, with a rallying twinge of self-contempt; for the thing had resolved itself into nothing more formidable than a little fat monk in a cowl; and ‘Bénédicité, mon pére,’ he added, as a concession to a certain traditional superstition that yet affected him.

  ‘My cap is already doffed, or I would pull it off to your reverence,’ he said, leavening his grace with a pinch of mockery. ‘But – corne et tonnerre! I am forgetting. You will only converse in your own detestable tongue.’

  ‘I know a little French,’ said the monk promptly.

  ‘It is well,’ cried the soldier, but without surprise; for, indeed, he could not comprehend how one could speak any other language from choice.

  ‘And what was my father doing down there?’ he asked. ‘And why did he dance?’

  The monk had steady little brown eyes, of the shape and fulness of a rabbit’s. His face was round, ruddy, and extremely dirty; his chin peaked and under-hung; his stomach shaped like a case-bottle, but a hogshead in capacity. He had on a hooded cassock, the original black of which had paid a fine interest of coppery blotches to the investors of trinkgeld in that hallowed paunch; and he was altogether a very typical example, it must be admitted, of a filthy little Bavarian priest.

  ‘I looked,’ he said – ‘yes, I looked for one or two yet in the state to receive the viaticum.’

  ‘And that was a good thought, mon pére; but the frost-demon had an earlier and a better. Still, it does not explain why you danced.’

  The monk kept each of his hands thrust up the wide sleeve of the opposite arm. He seemed to hug himself over some nameless jest – the physical condition of what was thus concealed, perhaps. But he was more ostentatious of his teeth, the under-row of which broke up his conscious smile into unlovely intervals, and were like little dilapidated gravestones to the memory of deceased appetites.

  ‘I danced because the cold bit my feet,’ he said.

  ‘Oh!’ said Corporal Lacoste. ‘And is not the cold, like the sunlight, a dispensation of Providence?’

  ‘Of Providence, assuredly – yes, of Providence.’

  The soldier smacked his chest, consequentially but feebly.

  ‘Behold a Providence, then, that favours its recreant children at the expense of its ministers! That which is your chastisement hath been my salvation. So it rebukes the arrogance of priestcraft, and demonstrates it more an honour to be a soldier than a monk.’

  The stranger lifted his elbows and embraced himself, drawing in his breath.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, suddenly giggling and voluble, ‘it sanctifies, we understand, the double gift. The Bishop of Beauvais, he was soldier and divine: the Archbishop of Canterbury also. It is good to be either in its season – very good to be both. To know to put one you slay on the road to heaven, eh?’

  ‘If there is time. But, mon père, do you always stop to show him the way?’

  He took the monk invitingly by a sleeve, and led him to the dead dragoon.

  ‘He is passed before I come,’ said the curé.

  ‘It is all a question of tenses,’ said the corporal. ‘Come or came: which is it? And who killed him, my father?’

  ‘How – do you say?’

  ‘Why, dead men do not bleed if you stick them through the neck.’

  ‘Doubtless that is so.’

  ‘And he hath lain on me all night like a toast; yet I wake to find him with the fresh blood running.’

  ‘It must be, then, that the sun-warmth broke anew his wound that the frost had closed.’

  ‘Corne et tonnerre! It was a fine lance of sunwarmth to go clean through his neck and into my shoulder.’

  The priest rolled his eyes, so as to show little parings of white at their edges. His fingers seemed to twitch within the sleeves. Suddenly he burst out, sputtering—

  ‘You damned devil, if you think that I, a servant of God, killed this man!’

  Corporal Lacoste was inexpressibly shocked – as much to hear this snake of profanity hiss from an anointed vessel, as to find that he had been understood to suggest a charge so execrable. At the same time his instincts as a soldier were hard set to discount a truism.

  ‘I ask only for information,’ he cried, dismayed. ‘A dead man struck does not bleed. If you are priest only, there may be those of the flock abroad who would give their pastor an opportunity to exercise his office.’

  The monk mumbled to himself like an angry layman.

  ‘Those and those! But it is you that empty the land – that desolate the hearths – that convert the innocuous hind into a beast of desperation!’

  He was gesticulating violently with his shoulders.

  ‘They crashed down the defile!’ he yelled, wheeling himself about: ‘they carried all before them with atrocious glee – the hopes, the happiness, the innocent life of the poor jocund foresters. Follow, you, down the glen! Track the storm by its litter! Go, rejoin your comrades of blood, that the measure of your iniquity may be theirs.’

  Corporal Lacoste stood amazed.

  ‘My father,’ he said, ‘the rebuke may be just; but the long night and many leagues by now stretch between me and mine. And I am a wounded and famished man.’

  Perhaps he was discreetly humble in his realisation of the fact that he was abandoned alone to the perils of a hostile country.

  ‘Confiteor Deo omnipotenti,’ he began to murmur, jogging a drowsy memory. He bowed his head and struck his dinted breastplate, his expression studiously set to the very formula of deprecation.

  The rabbit eyes seemed all pupil in their searching watchfulness of him.

  ‘God forbid!’ said the priest at last, ‘that I deny succour to the worst of His erring sons. But what is this courage that, in its aggregate, roars down the world, and, disintegrated, cries for help, abasing itself before the least of its would-be victims?’

  His tone and speech, to the common hearing, were sufficiently fraught with a sarcastic bitterness. But, in moments of excitement, he would relapse into his native Low German, the barbarous gutturals of which, shouldering their way amongst the crisp bowing idioms of the more courtly tongue, would confound the intelligibility they sought to emphasise. Therefore Corporal Lacoste – whose hearing, indeed, was at the moment a diffuse faculty – took no umbrage of the affront, and recognised only that the priest – as he pushed by him to pass on his way – was pattering aves innumerable in expiation of his late verbal transgression.

  At what number he ceased, having squared his account with Heaven, it did not appear; and in the meanwhile he was going with his dancing step up the glen, having first signed to the wounded soldier to follow
him.

  Before Corporal Lacoste’s eyes the goblin figure rose from terrace to terrace of the pass, mounting to the chill black portico, as it were, of the forest above. Reaching this, it turned, beckoned, and faced about – and immediately darkness took it at a gulp.

  Instinctive mockery, some old-worn rags of reverence, contempt and trepidation were all confused in the soldier’s mind with an ever-present consciousness of suffering. His skull – as he reeled in pursuit of the gnomish thing by endless corridors of trunks, stark and silent, above which the roof, like slabs of stone, let in slits and blotches of piercing light – seemed to sway to the roll of a shifting cargo of quicksilver, his legs to move independent of any will to control them. But through all he never lost sight of the fact that he was a beau sabreur. His sword, flapping against his thigh, was a link long enough to connect any apparent discrepancies in mind or matter. He longed very ardently, nevertheless, for a period to be put to his pain and fatigue.

  Still the priest went on before, flitting and hopping like some ungainly lob of the underworld, by glades of thronging gloom as voiceless and sightless as the streets of an excavated city. Once or twice only he turned about sharply as he sped.

  ‘It pleases you,’ he would demand, ‘to know how your comrades left you without thought or care where you fell?’

  ‘Mon père,’ the cuirassier would cry, answering, ‘it pleases me in that my abandonment means their success. Pity is, in truth, a flower; but one cannot stop to pick flowers during a pursuit.’

  Again, to emphasise a final enquiry, the monk had fallen back a little.

  ‘What is this Emperor, then, to you?’

  ‘He is my god!’ Corporal Lacoste answered promptly.

  ‘Be the measure of his mercy thy judgment,’ had been the reply; and thereat they had come into a sudden mist of twilight, that broadened and increased until it broke into the blinding glare of day beating upon a little house set in the flat of a snowy clearing.

  Corporal Lacoste started, hung fire, and dropped his hand to his sword-hilt.

  ‘A tavern!’ he exclaimed.

  The priest wheeled round and faced him, his head cocked derisively in the shadow of his cowl.

  ‘And what better house of rest and entertainment to a brave chasseur of the Emperor?’ said he.

  ‘But the people, my father! It is to lead a blind man into a nest of hornets!’

  ‘Truly, if you fear the stings of beauty. There is no peril other than that.’

  The frost was in the trooper’s blood, and sickness in his brain.

  ‘Lead on!’ he cried. ‘A gallant soldier dreads neither man nor devil.’

  They went forward to the house. It was a mean enough little shanty, sloughing piecemeal its skin of rough-cast. From the thatched lean-to of the porch, that went up to the broken shingles of the roof above, a pole, with a withered fardel of heather tied to its end, stuck out like an ironical finger-post to signify to the convivial wanderer any direction but that immediately behind it.

  Nevertheless, the two men passed under, walking straight into a ramshackle kitchen, where only the figure of a solitary wench moved in a world of disorder.

  She was busying herself desultorily near a great open hearth, above which projected a wedge-shaped chimney-hood of battered plaster, with an iron chain and hook pendulous from its sooty maw. A crazy wooden partition cut the room at a third of its length; and over this appeared the top of a ladder, on whose highest rung a squatting hen reposed. Some steaming dishcloths drooped from a line; parings and foul greasy scraps littered the corners into which they had been kicked; and the brick floor was everywhere sodden, as from the precipitated atmosphere of much unsqueamish revelry.

  ‘Wilma, mein mädchen,’ said the priest softly.

  The girl glanced round and up, as she stooped. The gallant corporal’s heart seemed to fill to so great an extent as to ease the throbbing of his wounds. This composed, this actually stolid-looking jade in her stone-grey petticoat and striped corset and degraded slippers – Corne et tonnerre! she was a very Hebe, a wall-peach, a china-rose of prettiness. One might wish to cull her face at its slender neck like a flower, and put it in a vase of fragrant water to watch the blue eyes bud and open.

  ‘Here,’ said Corporal Lacoste, ‘I may divest myself of all fear save that this love is plighted to another.’

  The girl expressed no surprise, no concern, very little interest. Indeed, she did not understand a word that he spoke. But the priest interpreted.

  ‘He would swear his heart to you at the outset. He is a wounded enemy that had not the courage to enter until I assured him that you were alone. Now he would willingly value his life at the price of your favour. Wilt thou minister to him, Wilma?’

  ‘Ask him,’ said the girl, in a low dull voice, ‘why the peril lies here when all our manhood is flown to Vienna?’

  The soldier stood smiling, and desperately catching himself from an inclination to faint.

  ‘But it is right, is it not, Wilma,’ continued the priest, without heeding her answer, ‘to forgive our enemies, though they come like the wolves at night into a peaceful fold, wantonly harrying and destroying? “Et dimitte nobis debita nostra.” Yet we must trespass to be forgiven; and heaven loves a repentant sinner, Wilma.’

  ‘Where is my father?’ said the girl (they seemed to talk at cross-purposes). ‘Hast thou left him down there?’

  ‘I saw him watching us from ambush. Be assured he will follow soon.’

  The girl turned away.

  ‘The stranger, like any other,’ she said coldly, ‘can share, for the paying, in whatever he and his devil-comrades have left us;’ and with that she went to feel her drying dishcloths.

  The priest turned upon the Corporal.

  ‘It is the custom in our Bavarian inns,’ said he, ‘for the guest to bring his own food. Wine, you will understand, is another matter.’

  ‘S’il ne tient qu’à ça!’ cried Corporal Lacoste jovially. ‘I have meat in my haversack and louis-d’ors in my pouch. We will make a feast, my father!’

  He was so direfully in need of stimulant that he would do nothing till he had drunk.

  ‘Here!’ he shouted arrogantly, conscious of the hesitation of the other; and he fetched out and clapped upon a plank-table hard by a fistful of jangling pieces.

  ‘Put them away,’ said the priest, his eyes quite rigid in their sockets. ‘My profession is one of faith.’

  He profited by demonstration, however, to give an entirely generous order. Wilma attended to it with the cold tranquillity that seemed to characterise all her actions. She was like a beautiful cataleptic.

  The hole in Corporal Lacoste’s head served as no vent, apparently, to the heady Steinwein. The core of heat it represented appeared rather to aggravate the potency of the fumes. He reddened, he sang, he rattled; by the time he had put down his share of the first bottle he was clamorous with good-fellowship and braggadocio.

  ‘Oh, mon Dieu Jésus!’ he cried; ‘to accuse us of stripping you when, in this chance corner, I find such wine and such beauty!’

  The monk was no coy toss-pot. He pledged the other glass for glass, till his heated face glared forward of its cowl like a great opening nasturtium bud. He showed, moreover, a tendency to coarseness and violence of speech that effectively counter-buffed the soldier’s insolence.

  Corporal Lacoste’s veins were flushed to their remotest channels. They made up in fever what they had lost in measure. Once he suddenly leapt to his feet.

  ‘To pluck the fruit that will not fall!’ he shouted – and staggered away from the table.

  In a moment the priest had risen and thrown himself upon him. He was little and under-weighted; but he held the cuirassier in a clutch as crippling as that of a ‘scavenger’s daughter’.

  ‘You go to insult the maid!’ he shrieked. ‘My God, I will tear your heart out!’

  Corporal Lacoste vainly struggled, shaken with crapulous laughter.

  ‘But for dessert to the
feast!’ he protested: ‘my lips only to the warm side of the peach!’

  The part profile of Wilma, seated knitting against the farther lintel of a rough opening in the partition, seemed unruffled by the least interest or apprehension. It did not even turn towards the wrestling men. At the instant, as it happened, that these came to the floor, the priest uppermost, the house-door was flung open, and a man ran into the room.

  ‘Hold his hands from his neck, my father!’ cried this newcomer, in a small biting voice; and, flicking a thin knife from his sleeve, he dropped quickly upon his knees at the head of the labouring soldier and raised his arm.

  The monk uttered a stifled oath.

  ‘Down, down!’ he cried in fury, as if to a dog. ‘Don’t you see the girl?’

  The man leapt to his feet, springing straight from his soles backwards with an odd nimble movement. There he stood watching the soldier – his eyes as sharp as flint-stones – as the latter, released by the monk, scrambled upright, staggering.

  The trooper, the instant he felt himself free, swept his blade from its sheath.

  ‘The sword of Corporal Lacoste!’ he shouted, the wild tipsy Gascon. ‘Is there a wolf here will set his tooth against that?’

  The word might have been haphazard – or vinously inspired. For, indeed, the face and attitude of the man opposite him were curiously wolfish in character – the temples wide, the forehead sweeping downwards and forth into a pinched snout, the projecting under-jaw spiked with savage teeth and hung with tangs of brindled hair. If, for the rest, the creature was phenomenally small and lithe and active for a Bavarian peasant, still it was a peasant patently and clothed as such, from its close-bodied homespun tunic belted by a crimson sash, and its rusty cloak buckled under the right arm, to its cap of mangy fur from which a flock of coarse hair fell upon its shoulders.

  ‘The sword of Corporal Lacoste!’ howled the soldier again, and spun his weapon so that it whistled, making an arc of light.

  The stranger stood rigidly set, the hilt of his long lancet clutched against his shoulder, his head thrust forward like a pointing hound’s. There could be no least doubt as to which would prove the deadlier adversary.