The Firebrand

"Quick!" said a voice at Rollo's elbow, "here is your chocolate. Nothing like it for strengthening the knee-joints at a time like this. I've seen men die on wine and on rum and on brandy; but for me, give me a cup of chocolate as good as that, when my time comes!"

Rollo drank the thick sweet strength-giving stuff to the accompaniment of clattering hoofs and jingling accoutrements.

"Come!" said a voice again, "give me the cup. Do not keep the general waiting. He is in no good temper this morning, and we are to march immediately."

The young man stepped out of the mill-door into the crisp chill of the dawn. All the east was a glory of blood-red cloud, and for the second time Rollo and his companions stood face to face with General Cabrera.

It was within a quarter of an hour of the sun-rising.

CHAPTER XXII

HIS MOTHER'S ROSARY

It was, as the soldier had said most truly, a cold morning to be shot in. But the Carlists, accustomed to Cabrera's summary methods, appeared to think but little of the matter, and jested as the firing parties were selected and drawn out. Ragged and desolate they looked as they stood on a slight slope between the foreigners and the red dawn, biting their cartridges and fingering the pulls of their rifles with hands numbed with cold. At elbow and knee their rags of uniforms flapped like bunches of ribbons at a fair.

"In the garden!" whispered Luis Fernandez to Cabrera.

"To the garden!" commanded the general, lighting a new cigarette and puffing vigorously, "and at this point I may as well bid you good-bye. I wish our acquaintance had been pleasanter. But the fortune of war, gentlemen! My mother had not so long time to say her prayers at the hands of your friend Nogueras – and she was a woman and old, gentlemen. I doubt not you know as well how to die as she?"

And they did. Not one of them uttered a word. John Mortimer, seeing there was now no chance of making his thousand pounds, set an example of unbending dignity. He comported himself, indeed, exactly as he would have done on his marriage day. That is, he knew that the eyes of many were upon him, and he resolved not to shame the performance. So he went through his part with the exact English mixture of awkward shyness and sulky self-respect which would have carried him creditably to the altar in any English church.

Etienne faced his death like the son of an ancient race, and a good Catholic. He could not have a confessor, but he said his prayers, committed his soul to God and the Virgin, and faced the black muzzles not greatly abashed.

As for El Sarria, death was his métier, his familiar friend. He had lived with him for years, as a man with a wife, rising up and lying down, eating and breathing in his company. "The fortune of war," as Cabrera said. El Sarria was ready. Dolóres and her babe were safe. He asked no more.

And not less readily fell into line Rollo Blair. A little apart he stood as they made ready to march out of the presence of the Carlist general. John Mortimer was already on his way, carefully and conscientiously ordering his going, that he might not in these last things disgrace his nation and his upbringing. Etienne and Ramon were following him. Still the young Scot lingered. Cabrera, nervously fingering his accoutrement and signing papers at a folding table, found time to eye him with curiosity.

"Did he mean to make a last plea for mercy?" he thought.

Cabrera smiled contemptuously. A friend of Nogueras might know Ramon Cabrera of Tortosa better. But Rollo had no such thought. He had in his fingers Etienne's last slip of Alcoy paper, in which the cigarette of Spain, unfailing comforter, is wrapped. To fill it he had crumbled his last leaf of tobacco. Now it was rolled accurately and with lingering particularity, because it was to be the last. It lay in his palm featly made, a cigarette worthy to be smoked by Don Carlos himself.

Almost unconsciously Rollo put it to his lips. It was a cold morning, and it is small wonder that his hand shook a little. He was just twenty-three, and his main regret was that he had not kissed little Concha Cabezos – with her will, or against it – all would have been one now. Meantime he looked about him for a light. The general noticed his hesitation, rose from the table, and with a low bow offered his own, as one gentleman to another. Rollo thanked him. The two men approached as if to embrace. Each drew a puff of his cigarette, till the points glowed red. Rollo, retreating a little, swept a proud acknowledgment of thanks with his sombrero. Cabrera bowed with his hand on his heart. The young Scot clicked his heels together as if on parade, and strode out with head erect and squared shoulders in the rear of his companions.

"By God's bread, a man!" said Cabrera, as he resumed his writing, "'tis a thousand pities I must shoot him!"

They stood all four of them in the garden of the mill-house, underneath the fig trees in whose shade El Sarria had once hidden himself to watch the midnight operations of Don Tomas.

The sun was just rising. His beams red, low, and level shot across the mill-wheel, turning the water of the unused overshot into a myriad pearls and diamonds as it splashed through a side culvert into the gorge beneath, in which the gloom of night lingered.

The four men still stood in order. Mortimer and Etienne in the middle, with slim Rollo and the giant Ramon towering on either flank.

"Load with ball – at six paces – make ready!"

The officer's commands rang out with a certain haste, for he could already hear the clattering of the horses of the general's cavalcade, and he knew that if upon his arrival he had not carried out his orders, he might expect a severe reprimand.

But it was not the general's suite that rode so furiously. The sound came from a contrary direction. Two horses were being ridden at speed, and at sight of the four men set in order against the wall the foremost rider sank both spurs into her white mare and dashed forward with a wild cry.

The officer already had his sword raised in the air, the falling of which was to be the signal for the volley of death. But it did not fall. Something in the aspect of the girl-rider as she swept up parallel with the low garden wall, her hair floating disordered about her shoulders – her eyes black and shining like stars – the sheaf of papers she waved in her hand, all compelled the Carlist to suspend that last irrevocable order.

It was Concha Cabezos who arrived when the eleventh hour was long past, and leaped from her reeking horse opposite the place of execution. With her, wild-haired as a Mænad, rode La Giralda, cross-saddled like a man.

"General Cabrera! Where is General Cabrera?" cried Concha. "I must see him instantly. These are no traitors. They are true men, and in the service of Don Carlos. Here are their papers!"

"Where is Ramon Cabrera? Tell me quickly!" cried La Giralda. "I have news for him. I was with his mother when she died. They whipped me at the cross of Tortosa to tell what I knew – stripping me to the waist they whipped me, being old and the mother of many. Cabrera will avenge me. Let me but see Ramon Cabrera whom of old I suckled at my breasts!"

The officer hesitated. In such circumstances one might easily do wrong. He might shoot these men, and after all find that they were innocent. He preferred to wait. The living are more easily deprived of life than the dead restored to it. Such was his thought.

In any case he had not long to wait.

Round the angle of the mill-house swept the general and his staff, brilliant in scarlet and white, heightened by the glitter of abundant gold-lace. For the ex-butcher of Tortosa was a kind of military dandy, and loved to surround himself with the foppery of the matador and the brigand. At heart, indeed, he was still the guerrillero of Morella, riding home through the streets of that little rebel city after a successful foray.

As his eyes fell on the row of men dark against the dusty adobe of the garden wall, and on the two pale women, a dark frown overspread his face.

"What is the meaning of this?" he cried. "Why have you not obeyed your instructions? Why are these men not yet dead?"

The officer trembled, and began an explanation, pointing to Concha and La Giralda, both of whom stood for a moment motionless. Then flinging herself over the low wall of the garden as if her years had more nearly approached seventeen than seventy, La Giralda caught the great man by the stirrup.

"Little Ramon, Ramon Cabrera," she cried, "have you forgotten your old nurse, La Giralda of Sevilla, your mother's gossip, your own playmate?"

The general turned full upon her, with the quick indignant threat of one who considers himself duped, in his countenance. It had gone ill with La Giralda if she had not been able to prove her case. But she held something in her hand, the sight of which brought the butcher of Tortosa down from his saddle as quickly as if a Cristino bullet had pierced him to the heart.

La Giralda was holding out to him an old string of beads, simply carved out of some brown oriental nut, but so worn away by use that the stringing had almost cut through the hard and polished shell.

"My mother's rosary!" he cried, and sinking on his knees, he devoutly received and kissed it. He abode thus a moment looking up to the sky – he, the man who had waded in blood during six years of bitter warfare. He kissed the worn beads one by one and wept. They were his mother's way to heaven. And he did not know a better. In which perchance he was right.

"Whence gat you this?" cried Cabrera, rising sharply as a thought struck him; "my mother never would have parted with these in her life – you plundered it from her body after her death! Quick, out with your story, or you die!"

"Nay, little foster-son," said La Giralda, "I was indeed with your mother at the last – when she was shot by Nogueras, and five minutes before she died she gave her rosary into my hands to convey to you. 'Take this to my son,' she said, 'and bid him never forget his mother, nor to say his prayers night and morn. Bid him swear it on these sacred beads!' So I have brought them to you. She kissed them before she died. At the risk of my life have I brought it."

"And these," said Cabrera – "do you know these dogs, La Giralda?"

He pointed to the four men who still stood by the wall, the firing party at attention before them, and the eyes of all on the next wave of the general's hand which would mean life or death.

La Giralda drew a quick breath. Would the hold she had over him be sufficient for what she was about to ask? He was a fierce man and a cruel, this Ramon Cabrera, who loved naught in the world except his mother, and had gained his present ascendency in the councils of Don Carlos by the unbending and consistent ferocity of his conduct.

"These are no traitors, General," she said; "they are true men, and deep in the councils of the cause."

She bent and whispered in his ear words which others could not hear. The face of the Carlist general darkened from a dull pink to purple, and then his colour ebbed away to a ghastly ashen white as he listened.

Twice he sprang up from the stone bench where he had seated himself, ground his heel into the gravel brought from the river-bed beneath, and muttered a characteristic imprecation, "Ten for one of their women I have slain already – by San Vicente after this it shall be a hundred!"

For La Giralda was telling him the tale of his mother's shooting by Nogueras.

Then all suddenly he reseated himself, and beckoned to Concha.

"Come hither," he said; "let me see these fellows' papers, and tell me how they came into your hands!"

Concha was ready.

"The Señor, the tall stranger, had a mission to the Lady Superior of the Convent," she began. "From Don Baltasar Varela it was, Prior of the great Carlist Monastery of Montblanch. He trusted his papers into her hands as a guarantee of his loyalty and good faith, and here they are!"

Concha flashed them from her bosom and laid them in the general's hands. Usually Cabrera was blind to female charms, but upon this occasion his eye rested with pleasure on the quick and subtle grace of the Andaluse.

"Then you are a nun?" he queried, looking sharply at her figure and dress.

"Ah, no," replied Concha, thinking with some hopefulness that she was to have at least a hearing, "I am not even a lay sister. The good Lady Superior had need of a housekeeper – one who should be free of the convent and yet able to transact business without the walls. It is a serious thing (as your honour knows) to provision even a hundred men who can live rough and eat sparely – how much harder to please a convent-school filled from end to end with the best blood in Spain! And good blood needs good feeding – "

"As I well knew when I was a butcher in Tortosa!" quoth Cabrera, smiling. "There were a couple of ducal families within the range of my custom, and they consumed more beef and mutton than a whole barrio of poor pottage-eaters!"

To make Cabrera smile was more than half the battle.

"You are sure they had nothing to do with the slayers of my mother?" He was fierce again in a moment, and pulled the left flange of his moustache into his mouth with a quick nervous movement of the fingers.

"I will undertake that no one of them hath ever been further South than this village of Sarria," said Concha, somewhat hastily, and without sufficient authority.

Cabrera looked at the papers. There was a Carlist commission in the name of Don Rollo Blair duly made out, a letter from General Elio, chief of the staff, commending all the four by name and description to all good servants of Don Carlos, as trustworthy persons engaged on a dangerous and secret mission. Most of all, however, he seemed to be impressed with the ring belonging to Etienne, with its revolving gem and concealed portrait of Carlos the Fifth.

He placed it on his finger and gazing intently, asked to whom it belonged. As soon as he understood, he summoned the little Frenchman to his presence. Etienne came at the word, calm as usual, and twirling his moustache in the manner of Rollo.

"This is your ring?" he demanded of the prisoner. Concha tried to catch Etienne's eye to signal to him that he must give Cabrera that upon which his fancy had lighted. But her former lover stubbornly avoided her eye.

"That is my ring," he answered dryly, after a cursory inspection of the article in question as it lay in the palm of the guerillero's hand.

"It is very precious to you?" asked the butcher of Tortosa, suggestively.

"It was given to me by my cousin, the king," answered Etienne, briefly.

"Then I presume you do not care to part with it?" said Cabrera, turning it about on his finger, and holding it this way and that to the light.

"No," said Etienne, coolly. "You see, my cousin might not give me another!"

But the butcher of Tortosa could be as simple and direct in his methods as even Rollo himself.

"Will you give it to me?" he said, still admiring it as it flashed upon his finger.

Etienne looked at the general calmly from head to foot, Concha all the time frowning upon him to warn him of his danger. But the young man was preening himself like a little bantam-cock of vanity, glad to be reckless under the fire of such eyes. He would not have missed the chance for worlds, so he replied serenely, "Do you still intend to shoot us?"

"What has that to do with the matter?" growled Cabrera, who was losing his temper.

"Because if you do," said Etienne, who had been waiting his opportunity, "you are welcome to the jewel —after I am dead. But if I am to live, I shall require it for myself!"

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BURNING OF THE MILL-HOUSE

Cabrera bit his lip for a moment, frowned still more darkly, and then burst into a roar of laughter. For the moment the gamin in him was uppermost – the same curly-pated rascal who had climbed walls and stolen apples from the market-women's stalls of Tortosa thirty years ago.

"You are a brave fellow," cried the general, "and I would to Heaven that your royal cousin had more of your spirit. Are all of your company of the same warlike kidney?"

"I trust I am afraid of no man on the field of honour," answered the loyal little Frenchman, throwing out his chest. "Yet I speak but the truth when I aver that there is not one of my companions who could not say grace and eat me up afterwards!"

Among the letters which had formed part of Rollo's credentials there was one superscribed "To be opened in the camp of General Cabrera."

Cabrera now dismissed the firing party with a wave of his hand, the officer in command exchanging an encouraging nod with Rollo. Then he summoned that young man to approach. Rollo threw away the last inch of his cigarette, and going up easily, saluted the general with his usual self-possession.

"Well, colonel," said the latter, "I little thought to exchange civilities with you again; but for that you have to thank this young lady. The fortune of war once more! But if young men will entrust precious papers to pretty girls, they must have a fund of gratitude upon which to draw – that is, when the ladies arrive in time. On this occasion it was most exactly done. Yet you must have lived through some very crowded moments while you faced the muzzles of yonder rifles!"

And he pointed to the lane down which the firing party was defiling.

Rollo bowed, but did not reply, awaiting the general's pleasure. Presently Cabrera, recollecting the sealed letter in his hand, gave it unopened to the youth.

"There," he said, "that, I see, is to be opened in the camp of General Cabrera. Well – where Cabrera is, there is his camp. Open it, and let us see what it contains."

"I will, general," said the young Scot, "in so far, that is, as it concerns your Excellency."

The Carlist general sat watching Rollo keenly as he broke the seal and discovered a couple of enclosures. One was sealed and the other open. The first he presented to Cabrera, who, observing the handwriting of the superscription, changed colour. Meanwhile, without paying any attention to him, Rollo read his own communication from beginning to end. It had evidently been passed on to him from a higher authority than the Abbot, for only the address was in the handwriting of that learned ecclesiast.

It ran as follows:

"To the Man who shall be chosen by our trusted Councillor for the Mission Extraordinary in the service of Carlos Quinto – These:

"You will receive from General Cabrera such succour and assistance as may seem to you needful in pursuance of the project you have in hand, namely the capturing of the young Princess Isabel together with her mother, the so-called Regent Cristina. Thereafter you will bring them with diligence within our lines, observing all the respect and courtesy due to their exalted rank and to the sex to which they belong.

"At the same time you are held indemnified for all killings of such persons as may stand in your way in the execution of the duty laid upon you, and by order of the King himself you hereby take rank as a full Colonel in his service."

Meanwhile Cabrera had been bending his brows over the note which had been directed to him personally. He rose and paced the length of the garden-wall with the letter in his hand, while Rollo stood his ground with an unmoved countenance. Presently he stopped opposite the young man and stood regarding him intently.

"I am, I understand, to furnish you with men for this venture," he said; "good – but I am at liberty to prove you first. That you are cool and brave I know. We must find out whether you are loyal as well."

"I am as loyal as any Spaniard who ever drew breath," retorted Rollo, hotly, "and in this matter I will answer for my companions as well."

"And pray in what way, Sir Spitfire?" said Cabrera, smiling.

"Why, as a man should," said Rollo, "with his sword or his pistol, or – as is our island custom – with his fists – it is all the same to me; yes, even with your abominable Spanish knife, which is no true gentleman's weapon!"

"I am no unfriend to plainness, sir, either in speech or action," said Cabrera; "I see you are indeed a brave fellow, and will not lessen the king's chances of coming to his own by letting you loose on the men under my command. Still for one day you will not object to ride with us!"

Rollo coloured high.

"General," he said, "I will not conceal it from you that I have wasted too much time already; but if you wish for our assistance in your designs for twenty-four hours, I am not the man to deny you."

"I thought not," cried Cabrera, much pleased. "And now have you any business to despatch before we leave this place? If so, let it be seen to at once!"

"None, Excellency," said Rollo, "save that if you are satisfied of our good faith I should like to see Luis Fernandez the miller dealt with according to his deserts!"

"I will have him shot instantly," cried Cabrera; "he hath given false tidings to his Majesty's generals. He hath belied his honest servants. Guard, bring Luis Fernandez hither!"

This was rather more than Rollo had bargained for. He was not yet accustomed to the summary methods of Cabrera, even though the butcher's hand had hardly yet unclosed from himself. He was already meditating an appeal in favour of milder measures, when the guard returned with the news that Luis Fernandez was nowhere to be found. Dwelling-house, strong-room, mill, garden, and gorge beneath – all had been searched. In vain – they were empty and void. The tumbled beds where the general and his staff had slept, the granary with its trampled heaps of corn ready for grinding, the mill-wheel with the pool beneath where the lights and shadows played at bo-peep, where the trout lurked and the water-boxes seemed to descend into an infinity of blackness – all were deserted and lonesome as if no man had been near them for a hundred years.

"The rascal has escaped!" cried Cabrera, full of rage; "have I not told you a thousand times you keep no watch? I have a great mind to stand half a dozen of you up against that wall. Escaped with my entire command about the rogue's home-nest! Well, set a torch to it and see if he is lurking anywhere about the crevices like a centipede in a crack!"

Cabrera felt that he had wasted a great deal of time on a fine morning without shooting somebody, and it would certainly have gone ill with Don Luis or his brother if either of them had been compelled by the flames to issue forth from the burning mill-house of Sarria.

But they were not there. The cur dogs of the village and a few half-starved mongrels that followed the troops had great sport worrying the rats which darted continually from the burning granaries. But of the more important human rats, no sign.

All the inhabitants of the village were there likewise, held back from plundering by the bayonets of the Carlist troops. They stood recounting to each other, wistfully, the stores of clothes, the silk curtains, the uncut pieces of broadcloth, the household linen, the great eight-day clocks in their gilt ormolu cases. Every woman had something to add to the catalogue. Every householder felt keenly the injustice of permitting so much wealth to be given to the crackling flames.

"Yes, it was very well," they said; "doubtless the Fernandez family were vermin to be burned up – smoked out. But they possessed much good gear, the gathering of many years. These things have committed no treason against either Don Carlos or the Regent Cristina. Why then are we not permitted to enter and remove the valuables? It is monstrous. We will represent the matter to General Cabrera – to Don Carlos himself!"

But one glance at the former, as he sat his horse, nervously twisting the reins and watching the destruction from under his black brows, made their hearts as water within them. Their pet Valiant, old Gaspar Perico, too, had judiciously hidden himself. Esteban the supple had accompanied him, and the venta of Sarria was in the hands of the silent, swift-footed, but exceedingly capable maid-servant who had played the trick upon Etienne.

The Sarrians therefore watched the mill-house blaze up, and thanked God that it stood some way from the other dwellings of the place.

Suddenly Cabrera turned upon them.

"Hearken ye, villagers of Sarria," he cried, "I have burned the home of a traitor. If I hear of any shelter being granted to Luis Fernandez or his brother within your bounds, I swear by the martyred honour of my mother that on my return I will burn every house within your walls and shoot every man of you capable of bearing arms. You have heard of Ramon Cabrera. Let that be enough."