"Proud of the favours mighty Jove has shown,
On certain dangers we too rashly run;
If 'tis His will our haughty foes to tame,
Oh, may this instant end the Grecian name!
Here far from Argos let their heroes fall,
And one great day destroy and bury all!"
Iliad xiii.
Quentin's nerves received something like an electric shock when, on proceeding a little further forward, he saw a line consisting of sixteen poor French prisoners, partly bound by ropes, standing in front of the rudely-formed rampart which closed up the archway, and in front of them were four large pits, whose appalling shape and aspect left no doubt that they were to be the premature graves of the unfortunate men who now stood in health and strength beside them.
Those sixteen persons were of various ranks, as four at least seemed by their silver epaulettes to be officers, and medals and crosses glittered on the breasts of several. Their uniform was dark blue, lapelled with red, and all the privates wore large shoulder-knots of scarlet worsted. They were all French infantry men, taken in some recent skirmish. Bareheaded, they stood a sad-looking line, and in their pale but war-bronzed faces, on which the flickering glare of the torches fell with weird and wavering gleams, there seemed to be no ray of hope for mercy or reprieve at the hands of their captors, who were about to sacrifice them in the horrid spirit of reprisal which then existed between the Spanish guerillas and the French invaders.
"Good heavens!" said Quentin, in an agitated whisper; "are these men about to be shot?"
"Si, senor—every one of them!"
"For what reason?"
"Being on the wrong side of the Pyrenees," replied the Spaniard, with a cruel grin.
"Shot—and without mercy?"
"Precisely so, senor."
"By whose order?"
"One who does not like his orders questioned—Don Baltasar de Saldos."
"Is he capable of such an act?"
"Capable! Santiago! The French have made his heart as hard as if it had been dipped in the well of Estremoz (beyond the mountains), which turns everything to flinty rock."
As if to enhance the torture of their anticipated doom, the Spaniards went slowly and deliberately about the selection of a firing party, which consisted of no less than sixty men, who loaded in a very irregular manner, and, as their steel ramrods flashed in the torch-light and went home with a dull thud on the ball cartridges, a thrill seemed to pass through the prisoners.
One, a grim-visaged and grey-moustached old captain of grenadiers, folded his arms, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled in scorn and defiance. Doubtless, since the fall of the Bastile and the days of the barricades, he had seen human lives lavished with a recklessness that hardened him; but there was another officer who covered his face with his handkerchief and wept; not in cowardice, for his gallant breast was covered with the medals of many an honourable field; but perhaps his heart at that moment was far away with his wife and little ones in some sunny vale of Languedoc, or by the banks of the silvery Garonne.
Some had their teeth clenched, and their eyes wearing a wild glare of hate, of fear, and defiance mingled; some there were who seemed scarcely conscious of the awful doom prepared for them, and some glanced wistfully and fearfully at the newly-dug pits which were to receive them when all was over.
Some were occupied by external objects, and the eyes of one followed earnestly the course of a falling star of great beauty and brilliance, which vanished behind the hills of Albuquerque.
A guerilla, clad in somewhat tattered black velvet, now took off his sombrero, and in doing so, displayed, by a pretty plain tonsure, that he was an unfrocked or degraded priest; but now inspired by something of his former holy office, he held up a small crucifix, and exclaimed—
"Frenchmen, if any man among you is a true son of the Church, I pray God and the Blessed Madonna to receive him, and have mercy on his soul!"
"That is the Padre Trevino, our second in command," whispered Lazarillo; "and he is the best shot among us."
As Trevino spoke, the sixteen prisoners and all the onlookers, crossed themselves very devoutly. Some of the doomed closed their eyes, and by their muttering, seemed to be praying very earnestly. Intensity of emotion seemed to render them all more or less athirst, as they were seen to moisten their pale lips with their tongues.
The stern grey-haired captain on the right alone seemed unmoved; he had neither a prayer to give to Heaven or to earth, and thus stood gazing stonily and grimly at his destroyers.
"On your knees, senors! on your knees!" said Trevino.
"Never to Spaniards!" replied the old captain.
"Are they really in earnest, M. le Capitaine?" asked the prisoner next him, a mere youth.
"Earnest—ma foi! I should think so, Louis."
"Ah, mon Dieu—to be shot thus—it is terrible!" he exclaimed, in a piercing voice.
"On your knees, Frenchmen," repeated the militant friar, "not to us, but to God!"
"To the blessed God, then," said the old captain; "kneel, comrades; 'tis the last word of command you will ever hear from me."
They all knelt, and now the firing party came forward three paces—
——"a death-determined band,
Hell in their face and horror in their hand."
And forming line about twenty paces from the prisoners, shouldered arms. Then Quentin felt his excited heart beating painfully in his breast, and he held his breath as if suffocating. From the shoulder the muskets were cast to the "ready," and then followed the terrible clicking of the sixty locks, a sound that made the youngest victim, who had been named Louis, a fair-haired lad (some poor conscript, torn from his mother's arms, perhaps), to shudder very perceptibly and close his eyes; and now came the three fatal and final words of command from the unfrocked friar.
"Camaradas, preparen las armas!"
"Apunten!"
("Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur!" cried the old captain, defiantly.)
"FUEGO!"
The straggling volley of musketry broke like a thunder peal upon the silence of the night, and echoed with a hundred reverberations among the mountains, till it was heard, perhaps, by the sentinels in Valencia. Red blood spirted from the wounds of the victims, some of whom leaped wildly up and fell heavily on the ground. The grey smoke rolled over them in the torch-light, and when it was lifted upward like a vapoury curtain by the midnight wind, Quentin could see the sixteen hapless Frenchmen all lying upon the earth. Six were screaming in agony, imploring the Spaniards to end it—to finish the vile work they had begun—writhing in blood and beating the ground with their heels; but then there were ten, who, alas! lay still enough, with red currents streaming from the wounds in their yet quivering corpses.
Half killed and gasping painfully, the old French captain struggled into a sitting posture, but fell back again, as another volley poured in at ten paces ended the butchery.
In a few minutes more they were stripped, even to their boots, and flung quite nude and scarcely cold into the pits at the foot of the breastwork, four being cast into each.
In the pocket of the poor officer who had wept there was found a lady's miniature, and three locks of fair hair that had evidently belonged to little children. The loose earth was heaped over the dead, the torches were extinguished, and, like a dissolving view or some horrible phantasmagoria, the whole affair passed away and was over.
In the horror excited by the scene and all its details, Quentin forgot his mission, his despatch, almost his own identity; a sickness and giddiness came over him, till he was roused by the voice of Lazarillo, his guide, who said in the most matter-of-fact way—
"Follow me, senor—perhaps Don Baltasar can receive you now."
The house to which he was conducted was the most important in the place, and had been for ages its chief posada or caravanserie, where the muleteers passing between Oporto, Lisbon, and the southern and eastern provinces of Spain, had been wont to halt and refresh. It was said to have been for a time the residence of the Scoto-Spaniard Don Iago Stuart, who, with the Sabrina and Ceres, two Spanish frigates, fought Lord Nelson for three hours in the Mediterranean, in 1796, with the loss of one hundred and sixty men.
The under story was appropriated to the stabling of horses, mules, and burros, and from thence a rickety wooden stair led to the upper floor, the walls of which were cleanly whitewashed, the floors covered, not with carpets, which in Spain would soon become intolerable with insects, but with thin matting made of the esparto grass or wild rush.
Military arms and household utensils were hung upon the walls or placed on the wooden shelves; the stiff-backed chairs and sofas were already occupied by some of the before-mentioned picturesque and motley actors in the late scene, and a large branch candlestick, that whilom had evidently figured on the altar of some stately church, with its cluster of sputtering candles, gave light to the long apartment, and enabled Quentin to examine it, and to see seated at the upper end, a man in a kind of uniform, writing, occasionally consulting an old and coarsely engraved map of Alentejo, and referring from time to time to the Padre Trevino and others, who leaned on their muskets, and who, lounging and laughing, smoked their cigaritos about his chair.
This personage wore a black velvet jacket fancifully embroidered with silver; a pair of British Light Infantry wings, also of silver, probably stripped from some poor 29th man who fell at Roleia, were on his shoulders. He wore a gorgeous Spanish sash, with a buff cavalry waist-belt and heavy Toledo sabre in a steel scabbard. His sombrero, adorned by a gold band and large scarlet plume, was stuck very much on one side of his head, as if he were somewhat of a dandy; but underneath it was tied a handkerchief, deeply saturated with the blood of a recent wound.
"Senor Don Baltasar," said Lazarillo very respectfully, "a messenger from the British cantonments on the frontier."
He of the silver wings and Toledo sabre looked up, and Quentin was thunderstruck on finding himself face to face with the stranger of the wayside well, the same personage from whom he had rescued Eugene de Ribeaupierre, and whom he had stunned like an ox by a blow of the cajado!