CHAPTER XXXVIAT BAY
In obedience to his mistress, Bartoletti had endeavoured to secure the few weak fastenings of the house, but his hands shook so, that without Fleurette’s aid not a bolt would have been pushed nor a key turned. The black girl, however, seconded his efforts with skill and coolness, so that Hippolyte’s summons to surrender was addressed to locked doors and closed windows. The Coromantee was now so inflamed with rum as to be capable of any outrage, and since neither his band nor himself were possessed of firearms, nothing but Célandine’s happy suggestion about the concealed powder restrained him from ordering a few faggots to be cut, and the building set in a blaze. Advancing with an air of dignity, that would at any other time have been ludicrous, and which he would certainly have abandoned had he known that the Marquise covered his body with her pistol the while, he thumped the door angrily, and demanded to know why “dis here gentleman comin’ to pay compliment to buckra miss,” was not immediately admitted; but receiving no answer, proceeded at once to batter the panels with an iron crowbar, undeterred by the expostulations of Fleurette, who protested vehemently, first, that her mistress was engaged with a large party of French officers; secondly, that she lay sick in bed, on no account to be disturbed; and lastly, that neither she nor ma’amselle were in the house at all.
The Coromantee of course knew better. Shouting a horrible oath, and a yet more hideous threat, he applied his burly shoulders to the entrance, and the whole wood-workgiving way with a crash, precipitated himself into the passage, followed by the rest of the band, to be confronted by Fleurette alone, Bartoletti having fled ignominiously to the kitchen.
“I could have hit him through the neck,” observed the Marquise, withdrawing from her post behind the shutter, “but I was too directly above him to make sure, and every charge is so valuable I would not waste one on a mere wound. My darling, I still hope that two or three deadly shots may intimidate them, and we shall escape after all.”
Cerise answered nothing, though her lips moved. The two ladies listened, with every faculty sharpened, every nerve strung to the utmost.
A scream from Fleurette thrilled through them like a blow. Hippolyte, though willing enough to dally with the comely black girl for a minute or two, lost patience with her pertinacity in clinging about him to delay his entrance, and struck her brutally to the ground. Turning fiercely on him where she lay, she made her sharp teeth meet in the fleshy part of his leg, an injury the savage returned with a kick, that after the first shriek it elicited left poor Fleurette stunned and moaning in the corner of the passage, to be crushed and trampled by the blacks, who now poured in behind their leader, elated with the success of this, their first step in open rebellion.
Presently, loud shouts, or rather howls of triumph, announced that the overseer’s place of concealment was discovered. Bartoletti, pale or rather yellow, limp, stammering, and beside himself with terror, was dragged out of the house and consigned to sundry ferocious-looking negroes, who proceeded to amuse themselves by alternately kicking, cuffing, and threatening him with instantaneous death.
The Marquise listened eagerly; horror, pity, and disgust succeeding each other on her haughty, resolute face. Once, something like contempt swept over it, while she caught the tone of Bartoletti’s abject entreaties for mercy. He only asked for life—bare life, nothing more; they might make a slave of him then and there. He was their property, he and his wife, and all that he had, to do what they liked with. Only let him live, he said, and he would join them heart and hand; show them where the rum was kept, themoney, the jewels; nay, help them cheerfully to cut every white throat on the island. The man was convulsed with terror, and the negroes danced round like fiends, mocking, jeering, flouting him, exulting in the spectacle of abuckraoverseer brought so low.
“There is something inraceafter all,” observed the Marquise, as if discussing an abstract proposition. “I suppose it is only thecanaillethat can thus degrade themselves from mere dread of death. Though our families have not alwayslivedvery decently, I am glad to think that there was never yet a Montmirail or La Fierté who did not know howto die. My child, it is the pure old blood that carries us through such moments as these; neither of us are likely to disgrace it now.”
Again her daughter’s lips moved, although no sound escaped them. Cerise was prepared to die, but she could not bring herself to reason on the advantages of noble birth at such a moment, like the Marquise; and indeed the girl’s weaker frame and softer heart quailed in terror at the prospect of the ordeal they had to go through.
From their chamber of refuge the two ladies could hear the insulting jests and ribald gibberish of the slaves, now bursting into the sitting-room, breaking the furniture, shivering the mirrors, and wantonly destroying all the delicate articles of use and ornament, of which they could neither understand the purpose nor appreciate the value. Presently a discordant scream from Pierrot announced that the parrot had protested against the intrusion of these riotous visitors, while a shout of pain, followed by loud bursts of laughter, proclaimed the manner in which he had resented the familiarity of one more daring than the rest. Taking the bird roughly off its perch, a stout young negro named Achille had been bitten to the bone, and the cross-cut wound inflicted by the parrot’s beak so roused his savage nature, that twisting its neck round with a vindictive howl, he slew poor Pierrot on the spot.
The Marquise in her chamber above could hear the brutal acclamations that greeted this exploit, and distinguished the smothered thump of her favourite’s feathered body as it was dashed into a corner of the room.
Then her lips set tight, her brows knit, and the whitehand clenched itself round her pistol, firm, rigid, and pitiless as marble.
Heavy footsteps were now heard hurrying on the stairs, and whispered voices urging contrary directions, but all with the same purport. There seemed to be no thought of compassion, no talk of mercy. Even while hearing their victims, Hippolyte and Achille, who was his second in command, scrupled not to discuss the fate of the ladies when they should have gained possession of their persons—a fate which turned the daughter’s blood to ice, the mother’s to fire. It was no time now to think of compromise or capitulation, or aught but selling life at the dearest, and gaining every moment possible by the sacrifice of an enemy.
Even in the last extremity, however, the genius of system, so remarkable in all French minds, did not desert the Marquise. She counted the charges in her pistol-case, and calculated the resources of her foes with a cool, methodical appreciation of the chances for and against her, totally unaffected by the enormous disproportion of the odds. She was good, she argued, for a dozen shots in all. She would allow for two misses; sagely reflecting that in a chance medley like the present she could hardly preserve a steadiness of hand and eye that had heretofore so discomfited Madame de Sabran in the shooting galleries of Marly and Versailles. Eight shots would then be left, exclusive of two that she determined at all risks to reserve for the last. The dead bodies of eight negroes she considered, slain by the hand of one white woman, ought to put the whole black population of the island to the rout; but supposing that the rum they had drunk should have rendered them so reckless as to disregard even such a warning, and that, with her defences broke down, she found herself and daughter at their mercy, then—and while the Marquise reasoned thus, the blood mounted to her eyes, and a hand of ice seemed to close round her heart—the two reserve shots should be directed with unerring hand, the one into her daughter’s bosom, the other through her own.
And Cerise, now that the crisis had arrived at last, in so far as they were to be substantiated by the enforced composure of a passive endurance, fully vindicated her claimsto noble blood. She muttered many a prayer indeed, that arose straight from her heart, but her eyes were fixed on her mother the while, and she had disposed the ammunition on a chair beside her in such a manner as to reload for the Marquise with rapidity and precision. “We are like a front and rear rank of the Grey Musketeers,” said the latter, with a wild attempt at hilarity, in which a strong hysterical tendency, born of over-wrought feelings, was with difficulty kept down. “The affair will soon commence now, and, my child, if worst comes to worst, remember there is no surrender. I hear them advancing to the assault. Courage! my darling. Steady! andVive la France!”
The words were still upon her lips, when a swarm of negroes, crowding and shouldering up the narrow passage, halted at her door. Hippolyte commenced his summons to the besieged by a smashing blow with the crowbar, that splintered one of the panels and set the whole wood-work quivering to its hinges. Then he applied his thick lips to the keyhole, and shouted in brutal glee—
“Time to wake up now, missee! You play ’possum no longer, else cut down gum-tree at one stroke. Wot you say to dis nigger for buckra bridegroom? Time to come out now and dance jigs at um wedding.”
There was not a quiver in her voice while the Marquise answered in cold imperious tones—
“You are running up a heavy reckoning for this night’s work. I know your ringleaders, and refuse to treat with them. Nevertheless, I am not a severe mistress. If the rest of the negroes will go quietly home, and resume their duties with to-morrow’s sunrise, I will not be hard uponthem. You know me, and can trust my word.”
Cheers of derision answered this haughty appeal, and loud suggestions for every kind of cruelty and insult, to be inflicted on the two ladies, were heard bandied about amongst the slaves. Hippolyte replied fiercely—
“Give in at once! Open this minute, or neither of you shall leave the house alive! For the Marquise—Achille! I give her to you! For lilly ma’amselle—I marry her this very night. See! before the moon goes down!”
Cerise raised her head in scornful defiance. Her face was livid, but it was stamped with the same expression asher mother’s now. There could be no question both were prepared to die game to the last.
The blows of Hippolyte’s crowbar resounded against the strong oaken panels of the door, but the massive wood-work, though it shook and groaned, resisted stoutly for a time. It was well for the inmates that Célandine’s imaginative powers had suggested the concealed gunpowder. Had it not been for their fears of an explosion the negroes would ere this have set fire to the building, when no amount of resistance could have longer delayed the fate of the two ladies. Bartoletti, intimidated by the threats of his captors, and preoccupied only with the preservation of his own life, had shown the insurgents where the rum was kept, and many of these were rapidly passing from the reckless to the stupefied stage of intoxication. The Italian, who was not deficient in cunning, encouraged their potations with all his might. He thus hoped to elude them before morning, and leaving his employers to their fate, reach Port Welcome in safety; where he doubted not he should be met by Célandine, whose influence as an Obi-woman, he rightly conjectured, would be sufficient to insure her safety. A coward rarely meets with the fate he deserves, and Bartoletti did indeed make his eventual escape in the manner he had proposed.
Plying his crowbar with vigorous strokes, Hippolyte succeeded at length in breaking through one of the door panels, a measure to be succeeded by the insertion of hand and arm for withdrawal of the bolts fastened on the inside. The Coromantee possessed, however, a considerable share of cunning mixed with the fierce cruelty of a savage. When he had torn away enough wood-work to make a considerable aperture, he turned to his lieutenant and desired him to introduce his body and unbar the door from within. It is difficult to say what he feared, since even had he been aware that his mistress possessed firearms, he could not have conceived the possibility of her using them so recklessly in a house that he had reason to believe was stored with powder. It was probably some latent dread of the white race that prompted his command to his subordinate. “You peep in, you black nigger. Ladies all in full dress now. Bow-’ticks rosined and fiddlers dry. Open um door, and ask polite company to walk in.”
Thus adjured, Achille thrust his woolly head and half his shining black body through the aperture. Madame de Montmirail, standing before her daughter, was not five paces off. She raised her white arm slowly, and covered him with steady aim. Ere his large thick hand had closed round the bolt for which it groped, there was a flash, a loud report, a cloud of smoke curling round the toilet accessories of a lady’s bed-chamber, and Achille, shot through the brain, fell back stone dead into the passage.
“A little lighter charge of powder, my dear,” said the Marquise, giving the smoking weapon to her daughter to be reloaded, while she poised its fellow carefully in her hand. “I sighted himveryfine, and was a trifle over my mark even then. These pistols always throw high at so short a distance.”
Then she placed herself in readiness for another enemy, and during a short space waited in vain.
The report of her pistol had been followed by a general scramble of the negroes, who tumbled precipitately downstairs, and in some cases even out of the house, under the impression that every succeeding moment might find them all blown into the air. But the very cause of the besiegers’ panic proved, when their alarm subsided, of the utmost detriment to the garrison. Hippolyte, finding himself still in possession of his limbs and faculties, on the same side of the Sulphur Mountain as before, argued, reasonably enough, that the concealed powder was a delusion, and with considerable promptitude at once set fire to the lower part of the house; after which, once more mustering his followers, and encouraging them by his example, he ascended the staircase, and betaking himself to the crowbar with a will, soon battered in the weak defence that alone stood between the ladies and their savage enemies.
Cerise had loaded her mother’s pistol to perfection; that mother, roused out of all thought of self by her child’s danger, was even now reckoning the last frail chance by which her daughter might escape. During the short respite afforded by the panic of the negroes, they had dragged with desperate strength a heavy chest of drawers, and placed it across the doorway. Even when the latter was forced, this slight breast-work afforded an additional impediment to the assailants.
“You must drop from the window, my child,” whispered the Marquise, when the shattered door fell in at length across this last obstruction, revealing a hideous confusion of black forms, and rolling eyes, and grinning fiendish faces. “It is not a dozen feet, but mind you turn round so as to light on your hands and knees. Célandinemustbe outside. If you can reach her you are safe. Adieu, darling! I can keep the two foremost from following you, still!”
The Marquise grasped a pistol in each hand, but she bent her brow—the haughty white brow that had never been carried more proudly than now—towards her child, and the girl’s pale lips clung to it lovingly, while she vowed that neither life nor death should part her from her mother.
“It is all over, dear,” she said, calmly. “We can but die together as we have lived.”
Their case was indeed desperate. The room was already darkening with smoke, and the wood-work on the floor below crackling in the flames that began to light up the lawn outside, and tip with saffron the sleeping woods beyond. The door was broken in; the chest of drawers gave way with a loud crash, and brandishing his crowbar, Hippolyte leaped into the apartment like a fiend, but stood for an instant aghast, rigid, like that fiend turned to bronze, because the white lady, shielding her daughter with her body, neither quailed nor flinched. Her eye was bright, her colour raised, her lips set, her hand steady, her whole attitude resolute and defiant. All this he took in at a glance, and the Coromantee felt his craven heart shrink up to nothing in his breast, thus covered by the deadly pistol of the Marquise.