As the column of light cavalry wheeled off by sections to return to the camp and bivouac, a staff officer who was riding hurriedly past in the dark addressed me—
"Young man," said he, "do you see those lights twinkling in the hollow yonder?"
"Yes, sir; the port fires of the artillery."
"Exactly; ride with all speed to the officer commanding the brigade of guns, and say it is the order of General Elliot that he falls back at once towards the hills of Paramé."
I bowed, for the speaker was the general in person.
To execute this order, I had to ride nearly a mile to the rear, skirting the wide stretch of sand that lies between St. Malo and St. Servand. The morning was still quite dark, and the fires yet smouldered redly in the dockyards and harbour, while a heavy smoke and odour of burning loaded the air, which was very still and oppressive.
I rode towards the place, where the matches of the artillery shone brilliantly; but I had scarcely reached the flank of the brigade, when the whole force got into motion at a rapid trot, the gunners on their seats, and the drivers plying well their whips, as they wheeled off towards the hills with a tremendous noise, chains, shot, rammers, spunges, and buckets all swinging and clattering. Thus I had no occasion to deliver the anticipated orders of General Elliot; but as the artillerymen were driving with such fury, I reined up to let them pass, and followed leisurely in their rear.
Day was now beginning to break, and the summits of the hills and the spires of the city of St. Malo—in the dark ages the abode of saints, in more modern times the asylum of criminals—were brightening in the ruddy gloom; but smoke hung like a sombre pall over all the harbour below.
From time to time I could hear in the distance the hollow bay of the fierce dogs which watched the city walls, a custom that was not abolished until 1770, when one night they tore to pieces and devoured a naval officer.
The sound of water plashing by the wayside drew my horse towards it. The poor animal was thirsty after the long and weary patrol duty of the past night. The stream poured from a rock, and through a moss-green wooden duct fell into the stone basin of a wayside well, and there, while my horse drunk long and thirstily, I heard the rumble of the artillery as they passed away among the echoing mountains and I was left alone in the rear.
By the roadside near the fountain, there grew a dense thicket of mulberry trees and wild broom-bushes, from amid which—just as I was turning my horse to ride off—there rung a half-stifled cry, followed by a fierce and very unmistakeable malediction in French—for that language, and not the old Armoric, is spoken by the Bretons of Dol and St. Malo.
Supposing that some unfortunate English straggler or wounded man might be lying there at the mercy of some of the enemy, I drew a pistol from my holsters and dismounted. My horse was so well trained, that I knew he would remain where I left him, while penetrating into the thicket. The gloom of the latter was excessive, but day was breaking, and a faint light stole between the slender stems of the trees.
Two figures now appeared—those of a man and woman. Having come close upon them unobserved, I now shrunk behind a bush to watch. The woman was on her knees, and her left shoulder reclined against the root of a tree; her whole attitude indicated weariness or despair, or both together. Her hands were tied with a scarf or handkerchief, and her dark hair hung over her face so as to conceal her features entirely. Close by her, and with one hand resting against the same tree, the man stood erect, but looking down, and surveying her with some solicitude, or at least with interest. He wore a peasant's frock of blue linen, girt at the waist by a belt with a square buckle. He was armed with a small hatchet and couteau de chasse, and carried in his right hand a knotted cudgel.
They were quite silent; at least I heard only from time to time the half-stifled sobs of the female.
"Here is some mystery or premeditated mischief," thought I; "let me watch warily."
At last the woman said faintly—
"Release me!"
The man uttered a growling guttural laugh.
"Release me, I implore you!" she continued in a voice of great softness and pathos.
"For the hundredth time you have thus implored me, mademoiselle, and for the hundredth time I reply—never."
"My father——"
"Tonnerre de Ciel! don't speak to me of your father," said the man, grinding his teeth; "I was an honest woodcutter in the Black Forest of Hunandaye till he ruined me."
"Impossible! my good father is incapable of such a thing."
"Nothing is impossible to dukes and peers of France, who have the Bastille and the dungeons of their own chateaux at their command."
"But he ruined you? Alas! how?"
"By permitting his nephew—the Comte de Bourgneuf—to carry off my sister; and because I resented the act, he had my cottage demolished, my mother driven into the forest where she was devoured by wolves, and myself he chained to work like a felon on the roads and ramparts of St. Malo and the aqueducts at Dol."
"Alas! monsieur, I swear to you that my father was blameless in all this, and even were it not so, why are you so merciless to me—why make me thus your prisoner?"
"Because you are beautiful," said the fellow, with a grating laugh. "Despite these wrongs, I risked my life for France, or rather for French gold. I have been at the bottom of the sea, pardieu! and am now on firm land. I have been dead, and am come alive again! Ha! ha! Bourgneuf carried off my sister. I carry off you—chacun à son gout—(every man to his taste.")
"Ah! have mercy. See how I weep."
"Of course; weeping is a complaint that is very common among women. The count took my sister to Paris, and she was never heard of again. I shall take you to the Black Forest of Hunandaye, and never shall you be heard of either, unless your friends are rash enough to seek you in the subterranean torrent of St. Aubin du Cormier."
"This fellow is mad; but whether mad or not, I must save the poor girl at all hazards," thought I, while shaking the priming in the pan of my holster pistol.
"Have you no dread of punishment, for thus daring to molest me?" demanded the lady.
"No. Neither here nor hereafter. You shall live with me in the forest, and when tired of you——"
"I shall escape and proclaim you."
"Pardieu! you won't, my beauty; because I shall kill you, and your disappearance will, like the king's ships, be set down to the score of these pestilent English, who have come hither to turn our Brittany upside down. Besides, who knows that I have carried you off?"
"And you will kill me—I, who never harmed you in thought, in word, or deed?" said she, with a shudder.
"Yes," he hissed through his clenched teeth.
"Oh, horror! Will no one rescue me?"
"Oui! Sacré! Kill you quietly and secretly, even as I killed quietly and surely the English captain of the Chevaux Legers in the wood near Cancalle yesterday."
I started on hearing this, for the assassin of poor Captain Brook of the 11th was now covered by the muzzle of my weapon. The speaker was a tall, rawboned fellow, whose form exhibited great strength and stature; he had a shambling gait, and a dirty visage of a very bilious complexion. His hair was black and shaggy; he had dark lacklustre eyes and large, fierce, blubberlike lips, yellowed as his broken fangs were by coarse tobacco juice. I had somewhere before seen this hideous face, the features of which gradually came to view as the increasing light stole gradually through the mulberry wood. How was it that this countenance, so pale and repulsive, the forehead which receded like that of a hound, the immense frontal bones, and the square jaw like that of a tiger, were in some sort not unfamiliar to me?
Though torn and in wild disorder, the dress of his prisoner, grey silk brocaded with white, evinced that she was of some rank, and her arms, which her tattered sleeves displayed almost to the shoulder, were beautiful in form and of exceeding delicacy.
"Nombril de Belzebub!" said he, suddenly, as he ground his teeth. "Come, come, we've had enough of this. Let us begone, lest those English wolves return."
Then the girl uttered a pitiful cry, as his huge knotty hand grasped her slender wrists.
"Kill me now!" she implored; "for mercy's sake, kill me now!"
"By no means, my beauty—you must first see the black dingles of Hunandaye. I may kiss you as often as you please, but as for killing, until I weary of you, pardieu! there is no chance of that."
He was now proceeding to drag her along the ground, when I rushed forward, and by a blow of my sword, felled the savage to the ground. A small cap of thick fur which he wore saved him from being cut, but not from the weight of a stunning blow.
With a dreadful Breton oath he leaped up, and with uplifted cudgel was springing on me, when on seeing my levelled pistol he paused and shrunk back, with a terrible expression of baffled rage and ferocity in his eyes.
Judge then of my astonishment on recognising in this hideous fellow the pretended French deserter, the spy, Theophile Damien or Hautois, whom I had met at Portsmouth—whom I had seen run up to the yardarm of the Essex, and from thence consigned to the deep with a cold thirty-two pound shot at his heels!