Rain of Dollars
by "Q"
(A.T. Quiller-Couch)
[from Shakespeare's Christmas and Other Stories, New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905]
I
At nine o'clock or thereabouts in the morning of January 5, 1809, five regiments of British infantry and a troop of horse artillery with six guns were winding their way down the eastern slope of a ravine beyond Nogales, in the fastnesses of Galicia. They formed the reserve of Sir John Moore's army, retreating upon Corunna; and as they slid or skidded down the frozen road in the teeth of a snowstorm, the men of the 28th and 95th Rifles, who made up the rearguard —for the cavalry had been sent forward as being useless for protection in this difficult country —were forced to turn from time to time and silence the fire of the French, close upon their heels and galling them.
A dirty brown trail, trodden and churned by the main army and again frozen hard, gave them the course of the road as it zig-zagged into the ravine; but, even had the snow obliterated the track, the regiments could have found their way by the dead bodies strewing it —bodies of men, of horses, even of women and children —some heaped by the wind's eddies with thick coverlets of white, so that their forms could only be guessed; others half sunk, with a glazing of thin ice over upturned faces and wide-open eyes; others again flung in stiff contortions across the very road —here a man with his fists clenched to his ribs, there a horse on its back with all four legs in air, crooked, and rigid as poles. The most of these horses had belonged to the dragoons, who, after leading them to the last, had been forced to slaughter them: for the poor brutes cast their shoes on the rough track, and the forage-carts with the cavalry contained neither spare shoes nor nails. The women and children, with sick stragglers and plunderers, had made up that horrible, shameful tail-pipe which every retreating army drags in its wake —a crowd to which the reserve had for weeks acted as whippers-in, herding them through Bembibre, Calcabellos, Villa Franca, Nogales; driving them out of wine-shops; shaking, pricking, clubbing them from drunken stupor into panic; pushing them forward through the snow until they collapsed in it to stagger up no more. Strewn between the corpses along the wayside lay broken carts and cartwheels, bundles, knapsacks, muskets, shakos, split boots, kettles, empty wine-flasks —whatever the weaker had dropped and the stronger had found not worth the gleaning.
The regiments lurched by sullenly, savagely. They were red-eyed with want of sleep and weary from an overnight march of thirty-five miles; and they had feasted their fill of these sights. On this side of Herrerias, for example, they had passed a group of three men, a woman, and a child, lying dead in a circle around a broken cask and a frozen pool of rum. And at Nogales they had drained a wine-vat, to discover its drowned owner at the bottom. They themselves were sick and shaking with abstinence after drunkenness; heavy with shame, too. For though incomparably better behaved than the main body, the reserve had disgraced themselves once or twice, and incurred a stern lesson from Paget, their General. On a low hill before Calcabellos he had halted them, formed them in a hollow square with faces inwards, set up his triangles, and flogged the drunkards collected during the night by the patrols. Then, turning to two culprits taken in the act of robbing a peaceful Spaniard, he had them brought forward with ropes around their necks and hoisted, under a tree, upon the shoulders of the provost-marshal's men. While the ropes were being knotted to the branches overhead, an officer rode up at a gallop to report that the French were driving in our picquets on the other side of the hill. "I am sorry for it, Sir," answered Paget; "but though that angle of the square should be attacked, I shall hang these villains in this one." After a minute's silence he asked his men, "If I spare these two, will you promise me to reform?" There was no answer. "If I spare these men, shall I have your word of honour as soldiers that you will reform?" Still the men kept silence, until a few officers whispered them to say "Yes," and at once a shout of "Yes!" broke from every corner of the square. This had been their lesson, and from Calcabellos onward the division had striven to keep its word. But a sullen flame burned in their sick bodies; and when they fought they fought viciously, as men with a score to wipe off and a memory to drown.
A few hours ago they had resembled scarecrows rather than British soldiers; now, having ransacked at Nogales a train of carts full of Spanish boots and clothing —which had been sent thither by mistake and lay abandoned, without mules, muleteers, or guards —they showed a medley of costumes. Some wore grey breeches, others blue; some black boots, others white, others again black and white together; while not a few carried several pairs slung round their necks. Some had wrapped themselves in ponchos, others had replaced the regulation greatcoat with a simple blanket. But, wild crew as they seemed, they swung down the road in good order, kept steady by discipline and the fighting spirit and a present sense of the enemy close at hand.
Ahead of them, on the far side of the ravine, loomed a mountain white from base to summit save where a scarp of sheer cliff had allowed but a powder of snow to cling or, settling in the fissures, to cross-hatch the wrinkles of its forbidding face. A stream, hidden far out of sight by the near wall of the ravine, chattered aloud as it swept around the mountain's base on a sharp curve, rattling the boulders in its bed. During the first part of the descent mists and snow-wreaths concealed even the lip of the chasm through which this noisy water poured; but as the leading regiment neared it, the snowstorm lifted, the clouds parted, and a shaft of wintry sunshine pierced the valley, revealing a bridge of many arches. For the moment it seemed a fairy bridge spanning gulfs of nothingness; next —for it stood aslant to the road —its narrow archways appeared as so many portals, tall and cavernous, admitting to the bowels of the mountain. But beyond it the road resumed its zig-zags, plainly traceable on the snow. The soldiers, as they neared the bridge, grunted their disapproval of these zig-zags beyond it. A few lifted their muskets and took imaginary aim, as much as to say, "That's how the French from here will pick us off as we mount yonder."
The General had been the first to perceive this, and ran his forces briskly across the bridge —his guns first, then his infantry at the double. He found a party of engineers at work on the farther arches, preparing to destroy them as soon as the British were over; but ordered them to desist and make their way out of danger with all speed. For the stream —as a glance told him —was fordable both above and below the bridge, and they were wasting their labour. Moreover, arches of so narrow a span could be easily repaired.
Engineers, therefore, and artillery and infantry together pressed briskly up the exposed gradients, and were halted just beyond musket-shot from the bank opposite, having suffered little on the way from the few French voltigeurs who had arrived in time to fire with effect. Though beyond their range, the British position admirably commanded the bridge and the bridge-head; and Paget, warming to his work and willing to give tit-for-tat after hours of harassment, devised an open insult for his pursuers.
He ordered the guns to be unlimbered and their horses to be led out of sight. Then, regiment by regiment, he sent his division onward —20th, 52nd, 91st, and Rifles —pausing only at his trusted 28th, whom he proceeded to post with careful inconspicuousness; the light company behind a low fence in flank of the guns and commanding the bridge, the grenadiers about a hundred yards behind them, and the battalion companies yet a little further to the rear. While the 28th thus disposed themselves, the rest of the division moved off, leaving the guns to all appearance abandoned. The General spread his greatcoat, and seating himself on the slope behind the light company, cheerfully helped himself to snuff from the pocket of his buff-leather waist coat. Meanwhile the sky had been clearing steadily, and the sunshine, at first so feeble, fell on the slope with almost summer warmth. The 28th, under the lee of the mountain-cliffs, looked up and saw white clouds chasing each other across deep gulfs of blue, looked down and saw the noon rays glinting on their enemy's accoutrements beyond the bridge-head. The French were gathering fast, but could not yet make up their minds to assault.
"Our friends," said the General, pouring himself a drink from his pocket-flask, "don't seem in a hurry to add to their artillery."
The men of the light company, standing near him, laughed as they munched their rations. For three days they had plodded through snow and sleet with hot hearts, nursing their Commander-in-Chief's reproof at Calcabellos: "You, 28th, are not the men you used to be. You are no longer the regiment who to a man fought by my side in Egypt!" So Moore had spoken, and ridden off contemptuously, leaving the words to sting. They not only stung, but rankled; for to the war-cry of "Remember Egypt!" the 28th always went into action: and they had been rebuked in the presence of Paget, now their General of Division, but once their Colonel, and the very man under whom they had won their proudest title, "the Backplates." It was Paget who, when once in Egypt the regiment had to meet two simultaneous attacks, in front and rear, had faced his rear rank about and gloriously repulsed both charges. At the moment of Moore's reproof Paget had said nothing, and he made no allusion to it now. But the 28th understood. They knew why he had posted them alone here, and why he remained to watch. He was giving them a splendid chance, if a forlorn one. In the recovered sunshine their hearts warmed to him.
Unhappily, the French did not seem disposed to walk into the trap. Their fire slackened —from the first it had not been serious —and they loitered by the bridge-end awaiting reinforcements. Yet from time to time they pushed small parties across the fords above and below the bridge; and at length Paget sent a young subaltern up to the crest of the ridge on his flank, to see how many had collected thus on the near side of the stream. The subaltern reported —"Two or three hundred."
By this time the 28th had been posted for an hour or more; time enough to give the main body of the reserve a start of four miles. General Paget consulted his watch, returned it to his fob, and ordered the guns to be horsed again. As the artillerymen led their horses forward, he turned to the infantry, eyed their chapfallen faces, and composedly took snuff.
"Twenty-eighth, if you don't get fighting enough it's not my fault."
This was all he said, but it went to the men's hearts. "You'll give us another chance, Sir?" answered one or two. He had given them back already some of their old self-esteem, and if they were disappointed of a scrimmage, so was he.
But it would never do, since the French shirked a direct attack, to linger and be turned in flank by the numbers crossing the fords. So, having horsed his guns and sent them forward to overtake the reserve, Paget ordered the 28th to quit their position and resume the march.
No sooner were they in motion than the enemy's leading column began to pour across the bridge; its light companies, falling in with the scattered troops from the fords, pressed down upon the British rear; and the 28th took up once more the Parthian game in which they were growing expert. For three miles along the climbing road, they marched, faced about for a skirmish, drove back their pursuers, and marched forward again, always in good order; the enemy being encumbered by its cavalry, which, useless from the first in this rough and wavering track, at length became an impediment and a serious peril. It was by fairly stampeding a troop back upon the foot-soldiers following that the British in the end checked the immediate danger, and, hurrying forward unmolested for a couple of miles, gained a new position in which they could not easily be assailed. The road here wound between a line of cliffs and a precipice giving a sheer drop into the ravine; and here, without need of flankers or, indeed, possibility of using them, the rearmost (light) company, halted for a while and faced about.
This brought their right shoulders round to the precipice, at the foot of which, and close upon three hundred feet below, a narrow plateau (or so it seemed) curved around the rock-face. The French, held at check, and once more declining a frontal attack, detached a body of cavalry and voltigeurs to follow this path in the hope of turning one flank. But a week's snow had smoothed over the true contour of the valley, and this apparent plateau proved to be but a gorge piled to its brim with drifts, in which men and horses plunged and sank until, repenting, they had much ado to extricate themselves.
On the ledge over their heads a young subaltern of the 28th —the same that Paget had sent to count the numbers crossing the fords —was looking down and laughing, when a pompous voice at his elbow inquired ——
"Pray, Sir, where is General Paget?"
The subaltern, glancing up quickly, saw, planted on horseback before him, with legs astraddle, a podgy, red-faced man in a blue uniform buttoned to the chin. The General himself happened to be standing less than five yards away, resting his elbows on the wall of the road while he scanned the valley and the struggling Frenchmen through his glass: and the subaltern, knowing that he must have heard the question, for the moment made no reply.
"Be so good as to answer at once, Sir? Where is General Paget?"
The General closed his glass leisurably and came forward.
"I am General Paget, Sir —at your commands."
"Oh —ah —er, I beg pardon," said the little blue-coated man, slewing about in his saddle. "I am Paymaster-General, and —er —the fact is ——'
"Paymaster-General?" echoed Paget in a soft and musing tone, as if deliberately searching his memory.
"Assistant," the little man corrected.
"Get down from your horse, Sir."
"I beg pardon ——"
"Get down from your horse."
The Assistant-Paymaster clambered off. His vanity was wounded and he showed it; the mottles on his face deepened to crimson. "Beg pardon —ceremony —hardly an occasion —treasure of the army in danger."
Paget eyed him calmly, but with a darkening at the corner of the eye; a sign which the watching subaltern knew to be ominous.
"Be a little more explicit, if you please."
"The treasure, Sir, for which I am responsible ——"
"Yes? How much?"
"I am not sure that I ought ——"
"How much?"
"If you press the question, Sir, it might be twenty-five thousand pounds. I should not have mentioned it in the hearing of your men ——" he hesitated.
The General concluded his sentence for him. "——Had not your foresight placed it in safety and out of their reach: that's understood. Well, Sir, —what then?"
"But, on the contrary, General, it is in imminent peril! The carts conveying it have stuck fast, not a mile ahead: the bullocks are foundered, and cannot proceed; and I have ridden back to request that you supply me with fresh animals."
"Look at me, Sir, and then pray look about you."
"I beg your pardon ——"
"You ought to. Am I a bullock-driver, Sir, or a muleteer? And in this country" —with sharp wave of his hand —"can I breed full-grown mules or bullocks at a moment's notice to repair your d——d incompetence ? Or, knowing me, have you the assurance to tell me coolly that you have lost —yes, lost —the treasure committed to you? —to confess that you, who ought to be a day's march ahead of the main body,are hanging back upon the rearmost company of the rear guard ? —and come to me whining when that company is actually engaged with the enemy? Look, Sir" —and it seemed to some of the 28th that their General mischievously prolonged his address to give the Assistant-Paymaster a taste of rearguard work, for Soult's heavy columns were by this time pressing near to the entrance of the defile —"Observe the kind of strife in which we have been engaged since dawn; reflect that our tempers must needs be short; and congratulate yourself that, if this mountain be bare of fresh bullocks, it also fails to supply a handy tree."
The little man waited no longer on the road, along which French bullets were beginning to whistle, but clambered on his horse, and galloped off with hunched shoulders to rejoin his carts.
The rearguard, galled now by musketry and finding that, for all their floundering, the enemy were creeping past the rocky barrier below, retired in good order but briskly, and so, in about twenty minutes, overtook the two treasure-carts and their lines of exhausted cattle. Plainly this procession had come to the end of its powers and could not budge: and as plainly the officers in charge of it were at loggerheads. Paget surveyed the scene, his brow darkening thunderously: for, of the guns he had sent forward to overtake the reserve, two stood planted to protect the carts, and the artillery-captain in charge of them was being harangued by the fuming Assistant-Paymaster, while the actual guard of the treasure —a subaltern's party of the 4th (King's Own) —stood watching the altercation in surly contempt.
Now the 28th and the Kings Own were old friends, having been brigaded together through the early days of the campaign. As Paget rode forward they exchanged hilarious grins.
"Pray, Sir," he addressed the artilleryman, "why are you loitering here when ordered to overtake the main body with all speed? And what are you discussing with this person?"
"The Colonel, Sir, detached me at this officer's request."
"Hey?" Paget swung round on the Assistant-Paymaster. "You dared to interfere with an order of mine? And, having done so, you forbore to tell me, just now, the extent of your impudence!"
"But —but the bullocks can go no farther!" stammered the poor man.
"And if so, who is responsible? Are you, Sir?" Paget demanded suddenly of the subaltern.
"No, General," the young man answered, saluting. "I beg to say that as far back as Nogales I pointed out the condition of these beasts, and also where in that place fresh animals were to be found: but I was bidden to hold my tongue."
"Do you admit this?" Paget swung round again upon the Assistant-Paymaster.
"Upon my word, Sir," the poor man tried to bluster, "I am not to be cross-examined in this fashion. I do not belong to the reserve, and I take my orders ——"
"Then what the devil are you doing here? And how is it I catch you ordering my reserve about? By the look of it, a moment ago you were even attempting to teach my horse-artillery its business."
"He was urging me, Sir," said the artillery-captain grimly, "to abandon my guns and hitch my teams on to his carts."
The General's expression changed, and he bent upon the little man in blue a smile that was almost caressing. "I beg your pardon, Sir: it appears that I have quite failed to appreciate you."
"Do not mention it, Sir. You see, with a sum of twenty-five thousand pounds at stake ——"
"And your reputation."
"To be sure, and my reputation; though that, assure you, was less in my thoughts. With all this at stake ——"
"Say rather 'lost.' I am going to pitch it down the mountain."
"But it is money!" almost screamed the little man.
"So are shot and shells. Twenty-eighth, forward, and help the guard to overturn the carts!"
Even the soldiers were staggered for a moment by this order. Impossible as they saw it to be to save the treasure, they were men; and the instinct of man revolts from pouring twenty-five thousand pounds over a precipice. They approached, unstrapped the tarpaulin covers, and feasted their eyes on stacks of silver Spanish dollars.
"You cannot mean it, Sir! I hold you responsible ——" Speech choked the Assistant-Paymaster, and he waved wild arms in dumbshow.
But the General did mean it. At a word from him the artillerymen stood to their guns, and at another word the fatigue party of the 28th climbed off the carts, put their shoulders to the wheels and axle-trees, and with a heave sent the treasure over, in a jingling avalanche. A few ran and craned their necks to mark where it fell: but the cliffs just here were sharply undercut, and everywhere below spread deep drifts to receive and cover it noiselessly. After the first rush and slide no sound came up from the depths into which it had disappeared. The men strained their ears to listen. They were listening still when, with a roar, the two guns behind them spoke out, hurling their salutation into Soult's advance guard as it swung into view around the corner of the road.
II
In a mud-walled hut perched over the brink of the ravine and sheltered there by a shelving rock, an old Gallegan peasant sat huddled over a fire and face to face with starvation. The fire banked in the centre of the earthen floor, filled all the cabin with smoke, which escaped only by a gap in the thatch and a window-hole overlooking the ravine. An iron crock, on a chain furred with soot, hung from the rafters, where sooty cobwebs, a foot and more in length, waved noiselessly in the draught. It was empty, but he had no strength to lift it off its hook; and at the risk of cracking it he had piled up the logs on the hearth, for the cold searched his old bones. The windowhole showed a patch of fading day, wintry and sullen: but no beam of it penetrated within, where the firelight flickered murkily on three beds of dirty straw, a table like a butcher's block, and, at the back of the hut, an alcove occupied by three sooty dolls beneath a crucifix —the Virgin, St. Joseph, and St. James.
The alcove was just a recess scooped out of the adobe wall: and the old man himself could not have told why his house had been built of unbaked mud when so much loose stone lay strewn about the mountain-side ready to band. Possibly even his ancestors, who had built it, could not have told. They had come from the plain-land near Zamora, and built in the only fashion they knew —a fashion which their ancestors had learnt from the Moors: but time and the mountain's bad habit of dropping stones had taught them to add a stout roof. For generations they had clung to this perch, and held body and soul together by the swine-herding. They pastured their pigs three miles below, where the ravine opened upon a valley moderately fertile and wooded with oak and chestnut; and in midwinter drove them back to the hill and styed them in a large pen beside the hut, in which, if the pen were crowded, they made room for the residue.
The family now consisted of the old man, Gil Chaleco, (a widower and past work); his son Gil the Younger, with a wife, Juana; their only daughter, Mercedes, her young husband, Sebastian May, and their two-year-old boy. The two women worked with the men in herding the swine and were given sole charge of them annually, when Gil the Younger and Sebastian tramped it down to the plains and hired themselves out for the harvest.
But this year Sebastian, instead of harvesting, had departed for Corunna to join the insurrectionary bands and carry a gun in defence of his country. To Gil the Elder this was a piece of youthful folly. How could it matter, in this valley of theirs, what King reigned in far-away Madrid? And would a Spaniard any more than a Corsican make good the lost harvest-money? The rest of the family had joined him in raising objections; for in this den of poverty the three elders thought of money morning, noon, and night, and of nothing but money; and Mercedes was young and in love with her husband, and sorely unwilling to lend him to the wars. Sebastian, however, had smiled and kissed her and gone his way; and at the end of his soldiery had found himself, poor lad, in hospital in Leon, one of the many hundreds abandoned by the Marquis of Romana to the French.
News of this had not reached the valley, where indeed his wife's family had other trouble to concern them: for a forage party from the retreating British main guard had descended upon the cabin four days ago and carried off all the swine, leaving in exchange some scraps of paper, which (they said) would be honoured next day by the Assistant-Paymaster: he could not be more than a day's march behind. But a day had passed, and another, and now the household had gone off to Nogales to meet him on the road, leaving only the old man, and taking even little Sebastianillo. The pigs would be paid for handsomely by the rich English; Juana had some purchases to make in the town; and Mercedes needed to buy a shawl for the child, and thought it would be a treat for him to see the tall foreign redcoats marching past.
So they had started, leaving the old man with a day's provision (for the foragers had cleared the racks and the larder as well as the sty), and promising to be home before nightfall. But two days and a night had passed without news of them.
With his failing strength he had made shift to keep the fire alight; but food was not to be found He had eaten his last hard crust of millet-bread seven or eight hours before, and this had been his only breakfast. His terror for the fate of the family was not acute. Old age had dulled his faculties, and he dozed by the fire with sudden starts of wakefulness, blinking his smoke-sored eyes and gazing with a vague sense of evil on the straw beds and the image in the alcove. His thoughts ran on the swine and the price to be paid for them by the Englishman: they faded into dreams wherein the family saints stepped down from their shrine and chaffered with the foreign paymaster; dreams in which he found himself grasping silver dollars with both hands. And all the while he was hungry to the point of dying; yet the visionary dollars brought no food —suggested only the impulse to bury them out of sight of thieves.
So vivid was the dream that, waking with a start and a shiver, he hobbled towards the windowhole and stopped to pick up the wooden shutter that should close it. Standing so, still half asleep, with his hand on the shutter-bar, he heard a rushing sound behind him, as though the mountain-side were breaking away overhead and rushing down upon the roof and back of the cabin.
He had spent all his life on these slopes and knew the sounds of avalanche and land-slips —small land-slips in this Gallegan valley were common enough. This noise resembled both, yet resembled neither, and withal was so terrifying that he swung round to face it, aquake in his shoes —to see the rear wall bowing inwards and crumbling, and the roof quietly subsiding upon it, as if to bury him alive.
For a moment he saw it as the mirror of his dream, cracking and splitting; then, as the image of the Virgin tilted itself forward from its shrine and fell with a crash, he dropped the shutter, and running to the door, tugged at its heavy wooden bolt. The hut was collapsing, and he must escape into the open air.
He neither screamed nor shouted, for his terror throttled him; and after the first rushing noise the wall bowed inwards silently, with but a trickle of dry and loosened mud. His gaze, cast back across his shoulder, was on it while he tugged at the bolt. Slowly —very slowly, the roof sank, and stayed itself, held up on either hand by two corner-props. Then, while it came to a standstill, sagging between them, the wall beneath it burst asunder, St. Joseph and St. James were flung head-over-heels after the Virgin, and through the rent poured a broad river of silver.
He faced around gradually, holding his breath. His back was to the door now, and he leaned against it with outspread palms while his eyes devoured the miracle.
Dollars! Silver dollars!
He could not lift his gaze from them. If he did, they would surely vanish, and he awake from his dream. Yet in the very shock of awe, and starving though he was, the master-habit of his life, the secretive peasant cunning, had already begun to work. Never once relaxing his fixed stare, fearful even of blinking with his smoke-sored eyes, he shuffled sideways toward the window-hole, his hands groping the wall behind him. The wooden shutter and its fastening bar —a short oak pole —lay where he had dropped them, on the floor beneath the window. He crouched, feeling backwards for them; found, lifted them on to the inner ledge, and, with a half-turn of his body, thrust one arm deep into the recess and jammed the shutter into its place. To fix the bolt was less easy; it fitted across the back of the shutter, its ends resting in two sockets pierced in the wall of the recess. He could use but one hand; yet in less than a minute he found the first socket, slid an end of the bolt into it as far as it would go, lifted the other end and scraped with it along the opposite side of the recess until it dropped into the second socket. He was safe now —safe from prying eyes. In all this while —these two, perhaps three, minutes —his uppermost terror had been lest strange eyes were peering in through the window-hole: it had cost him anguish not to remove his own for an instant from the miracle to assure himself. But he had shut out this terror now: and the miracle had not vanished.
A few coins trickled yet. He crawled forward across the floor, crouching like a beast for a spring. But as he drew close his old legs began to shake under him. He dropped on his knees and fell forward, plunging both hands into the bright pile.
Dollars! real silver dollars!
He lay on the flood of wealth, stretched like a swimmer, his fingers feebly moving among the coins which slid and poured over the back of his, hands. He did not ask how the miracle had befallen. He was starving; dying in fact, thou he did not know it; and lo! he had found a heaven beyond all imagination, and lay in it and panted, at rest. The firelight played on the heave and fall of his gaunt shoulder-blades, and on the glass eyes of the Virgin, whose head had rolled half-way across the floor and lay staring up foolishly at the rafters.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
"Mother, open! Ah, open quickly, mother, for the love of God!"
Whose voice was that? Yes, yes —Mercedes', to be sure, his granddaughter's. She had gone to Nogales . . . long ago . . . Yet that was her voice. Had he come, then, to Paradise that her voice was pleading for him —pleading for the door to open ?
"Mother —Father! It is I, Mercedes! Open quickly —It is Mercedes, do you hear? I want my child —Sebastianillo —my child —quick!"
The voice broke into short agonised cries, into sobs. The door rattled.
At the sound of this last the old man raised himself on his knees. His eyes fell again on the shining dollars all around him. His throat worked.
Suddenly terror broke out in beads on his forehead. Someone was shaking the door! Thieves were there trying the door: they were come to rob him!
He drew himself up slowly. As he did so the door ceased to rattle, and presently, somewhere near the windy edge of the ravine, a faint cry sounded.
But long after the door had ceased to rattle, old Gil Chaleco stared at it, fascinated. And long after the cry had died away it beat from side to side within the walls of his head, while he listened and life trickled from him; drop by drop.
"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night." But he was listening for it: it would come again. . . .
And it came —with a rough summons on the door, and, a moment later, with a thunderous blow. The old man stood up, knee-deep in dollars, lifting both arms to cover his head. As the door fell he seemed to bow himself toward it, toppled, and slid forward —still with his arms crooked —amid a rush of silver.
III
Although crushed in the rear and broken inwards there, the hut showed its ordinary face to the path as Mercedes reached it in the failing daylight. She ran like a madwoman, and with short, distraught cries, as she neared her home. Her eyes were wild as a hunted creature's, her coarse black hair streamed over her shoulders, her bare feet bled where the rocks and ice had cut them. But one thing she did not doubt —would not allow herself to doubt —that at home she would find her child. For two days she had been parted from him, and in those two days . . . God had been good to her, very good: but she could not thank God yet —not until she clutched Sebastianillo in her arms, held his small, wriggling body, felt his feet kick against her breast. . . .
The great sty beside the cabin was empty, of course: and the cabin itself looked strange to her and desolate and unfriendly. For some hours the snow had ceased falling, and, save in a snowstorm or a gale, it was not the family custom to close door or window before dark: indeed, the window-hole usually stood open night and day the year round. Now both were closed. But warm firelight showed under the chink of the door; and on the door she bowed her head, to take breath, and beat with her hands while she called urgently —-
"Mother! Quickly, mother —open to me for the love of God!"
No answer came from within.
"Mother! Father! Open to me —it is I, Mercedes!"
Then, after listening a moment, she began to beat again, frantically, for at length she was aftaid.
"Quick! Quick! Ah, do not be playing a trick on me: I want my child —Sebastianillo!"
Again and again she called and beat. No answer came from the hut or from the sombre twilight around her. She drew back, to fling her full weight against the door. And at this moment she heard, some way down the path, a man's footstep crunching the snow.
She never doubted that this must be her father returning up the mountain-side, perhaps after a search for her. What other man —now that her husband had gone soldiening —ever trod this path? She ran down to meet him.
The path, about forty yards below, rounded an angle of the sheer cliff, and at this angle she came to a terrified halt. The man, too, had halted a short gunshot away. He did not see her, but was staring upward at the cliff overhead; and he was not her father. For an instant there flashed across her brain an incredible surmise —that he was her husband, Sebastian: for he wore a soldier's overcoat and shako, and carried a musket and knapsack. But no: this man was taller than Sebastian by many inches; taller and thinner.
He was a soldier, then: and to Mercedes all soldiers were by this time incarnate devils —or all but one, and that one a plucky little British officer who had snatched her from his men just as she fell swooning into their clutches, and had dragged and thrust her through the convent doorway at Nogales and slammed the door upon her; and (though this she did not know) held the doorstep, sword in hand, while the Fathers within shot the heavy bolts.
The British had gone, and after them —close after —came the French: and these broke down the convent door and ransacked the place. But the Fathers had bidden her and a score or so more of trembling women, nor would allow her to creep out and search for Sebastianillo in the streets through which swept, hour after hour, a flood of drunken yelling devils. So now Mercedes, who had left home two days ago to watch an army pass, turned from this one soldier with a scream and ran back towards the cabin.
In her terror lest he should overtake and catch her by the closed door, she darted aside, clambered across the wall of the empty sty, and crouched behind it in the filth, clutching at her bodice: for within her bodice was a knife, which she had borrowed of the Fathers at Nogales.
The footsteps came up the path and went slowly past her hiding-place. Then they came to a halt before the hut. Still Mercedes crouched, not daring to lift her head.
Rat, rat-a-tat!
Well, let him knock. Her father was a strong man, and always kept a loaded gun on the shelf. If this soldier meant mischief, he would find his match: and she, too, could help.
She heard him call to the folks within once or twice in bad Spanish. Then his voice changed and seemed to threaten in a language she did not know.
Her hand was thrust within her bodice now, and gripped the handle of her knife; nevertheless, what followed took her by surprise, though ready for action. A terrific bang sounded on the timbers of the door. Involuntarily she raised her head above the wall's coping. The man had stepped back a pace into the path, and was swinging his musket up for another blow with the butt.
She stood up, white, with her jaw set. Her father could not be inside the hut, or he would have answered that blow on his door as a man should. But Sebastianillo might be within —nay, must be! She put her hands to the wall's coping and swung herself over and on to the path, again unseen, for the dusk hid her, and a dark background of cliff behind the sty: nor could the man hear, for he was raining blow after blow upon the door. At length, having shaken it loose from its hasp, he stepped back and made a run at it, using the butt of his musket for a ram, and finishing up the charge with the full weight of one shoulder. The door crashed open before him, and he reeled over it into the hut. A second later, Mercedes had sprung after him.
"Sebastianillo! You shall not harm him! You shall not ——"
The door, falling a little short of the fire, had scattered some of the buring brands about the floor and fanned the rest into a blaze. In the light of it he faced round with a snarl, his teeth showing beneath his moustache. The light also showed —though Mercedes neither noted it nor could have read its signification —a corporal's chevron on his sleeve.
"Who the devil are you?" The snarl ended in a snap.
Mercedes stood swaying on the threshold, knife in hand.
"You shall not harm him!"
She spoke in her own tongue and he understood it, after a fashion; for he answered in broken Spanish, catching up her word ——
"Harm? Who means any harm.? When a man is perishing with hunger and folks will not open to him ——"
He paused, wondering at her gaze. Travelling past him, it had fastened itself on the back wall of the hut, across the fire. "Hullo! What's the matter?" He swung round. "Good Lord!" said he, with a gulp.
He sprang past the fire and stooped over the old man's body, which lay face downward on the shelving heap of silver. It did not stir. By-and-by he took it by one of the rigid arms and turned it over, not roughly.
"Warm," said he: "warm, but dead as a herring! Come and see for yourself."
Mercedes did not move. Her eyes sought the dark corners of the cabin, fixed themselves for a moment on the shattered image of the Virgin, and met his across the firelight in desperate inquiry.
"What is this? What have you done?"
"Done? I tell you I never touched the man; never saw him before in my life. Who is he? Your father? No: grandfather, more like. Eh ? Am I right?"
She bent her bead, staring at the money.
"This? This is dollars, my girl: dollars enough to set a man up for life, with a coach and lads in livery, and dress you in diamonds from head to heel. Don't stand playing with that knife. I tell you I never touched the old man. What's more, I'm willing to be friendly and go shares." He stared at her with quick suspicion. "You're alone here, hey ?"
She did not answer.
"But answer me," he insisted, "do you live alone with him?" And he pointed to the body at his feet.
"There was my mother," said Mercedes slowly, in her turn pointing to the third bed of straw by the fire. "We journeyed over to Nogales, she and I. Your soldiers came and took away our pigs, giving us pieces of paper for them. They said that if we took these to Nogales someone would pay us: so we started, leaving him. And at Nogales your men were rough and parted us, and I have not seen her since."
The Corporal eyed her with the beginnings of a leer. She faced him with steady eyes. "Well, well," said he, after a pause, "I mean no harm to you, anyway. Lord! but you're in luck. Here you reach home and find a fortune at your door —a sort of fortune a man can dig into with a spade; while a poor devil like me ——" He paused again and stood considering.
"You knew about this?" She nodded towards the dollars. "You knew how it came here, and you came after it?"
"I did and I didn't. I knew 'twas somewhere hereabouts; but strike me, if a man could dream of finding it like this!"
"Yet you came to this door and beat it open!"
"You've wits, my girl," said the Corporal admiringly; "but they are on the wrong tack. I mean no harm; and the best proof is that here I'm standing with a loaded musket and not offering to hurt you. As it happens, I came to the door asking a bite of bread. I'm cruel hungry."
Mercedes pulled a crust of millet-bread from her pocket. The Fathers at the convent had given it to her at parting, but she had forgotten to eat. She stepped forward; the Corporal stretched out a hand.
"No," said she, and, avoiding him, laid the crust on the block-table. He caught it up and gnawed it ravenously. "I think there is no other food in the house."
"You don't get rid of me like that." He ran a hand along the shelves, searching them. "Hullo! a gun?" He took it down and examined it beside the fire, while Mercedes' heart sank. She had hoped to possess herself of it, snatching it from the shelf when he should be off his guard. "Loaded, too!" He laid it gently on the block and eyed her, munching his crust.
"You'd best put down that knife and talk friendly," said he at length. "What's the use? —you a woman, and me with two guns, both loaded? It's silliness; you must see for yourself it is. Now look here: I've a notion —a splendid notion. Come sit down alongside of me, and talk it over. I promise you there's no harm meant."
But she had backed to her former position in the doorway and would not budge.
"It's treating me suspicious, you are," he grumbled: "hard and suspicious."
"Cannot you take the money and go?" she begged, breathing hard, speaking scarcely above a whisper.
"No, I can't: it stands to reason I can't. What can I do in a country like this with dollars —it took two carts to drag here —two carts with six yoke of bullocks apiece? And that's where my cruel luck comes in. All I can take, as things are, is just so much as this knapsack will carry: and even for this I've run some risks."
The man —it was the effect of hunger, perhaps, and exposure and drunkenness on past marches —had an ugly, wolfish face; but his eyes, though cunning, were not altogether evil, not quite formidably evil. She divined that, though lust for the money was driving him, some weakness lay behind it.
"You are a deserter," she said.
"We'll pass that." He seated himself, flinging a leg over the block and laying the two guns side by side on his knees. "I can win back, maybe. As things go, between stragglers and deserters it's hard to choose in these times, and I'll get the benefit of the doubt. I've taken some risks," he repeated, glancing from the guns on his knees to the pile of silver and back: "pretty bad risks, and only to fill my knapsack. But, now it strikes me —Can't you come closer?"
But she held her ground and waited.
"It strikes me, why couldn't we collar the whole of this, we two ? We're alone: no one knows; I've but to lift one of these" —he tapped the guns - "and where would you be? But I don't do it. I don't want to do it. You hear me?"
"You don't do it," said Mercedes slowly, "because without me you can't get away with more than a handful of this money. And you want the whole of it."
"You're a clever girl. Yes, I want the whole of it. Who wouldn't? And you can help. Can't you see how?"
"No."
He sat swinging his legs. "Well, that's where my notion comes in. I wish you'd drop that knife and be friendly: it's a fortune I'm offering you. Now my notion is that we two ought to marry." He stood up.
Mercedes lifted the knife with its point turned inward against her breast. "If you take another step! "
"Oh, but look here: look at it every way. I like you. You're a fine build of a woman, with plenty of spirit —the very woman to help a man. We should get along famously. One country's as good as another to me: I'm tired of soldiering, and there's no woman at home, s' help me!" He was speaking rapidly now, not waiting to cast about for words in Spanish, but falling back on English whenever he found himself at a loss. "I dare say you can fit me out with a suit of clothes." His glance ran round the hut and rested on the body of the old man.
Mercedes had understood scarce half of his words: but she divined the meaning of that look and shuddered.
"No, no; you cannot do that!"
"Hark!" said he raising his head and listening. "What's that noise?"
"The wolves. We hear them every night in winter."
"A nice sort of place for a woman to live alone in! See here, my dear; it's sense I'm talking. Better fix it up with me and say 'yes.'"
She appeared to be considering this. "One thing you must promise."
"Well?"
"You won't touch him" —she nodded towards her grandfather's corpse. "You won't touch him to —to ——"
"Is it strip him you mean ? Very well, then, I won't."
"You will help me to bury him? He cannot lie here. I can give you no answer while he lies here."
"Right you are, again. Only, no tricks, mind!"
He stowed the guns under his left arm and gripped the collar of the old man. Mercedes took the feet; and together they bore him out —a light burden enough. Outside the hut a pale radiance lay over all the snow, forerunner of the moon now rising over the crags across the ravine.
"Where?" grunted the Corporal.
Mercedes guided him. A little way down the path, beyond the wall of the sty, they came to a recess in the base of the cliff where the wind's eddies had piled a smooth mound of snow. Here, under a jutting rock, they laid the body.
"Cover him as best you can," the Corporal ordered. "My hands are full."
He stood, clasping his guns, and watched Mercedes while she knelt and shovelled the snow with both hands. Yet always her eyes were alert and she kept her knife ready. From their mound they looked down upon the ravine in front and over the wall of the sty towards the cabin. Behind them rose the black cliff.
"Hark to the wolves!" said, the Corporal, listening: and at that moment something thudded down from the cliff, striking the snow a few yards from him; rolled heavily down the slope and came to a standstill against the wall of the sty, where it lay bedded.
The round moon had risen over the ravine, and was flooding the mound with light. The Corporal stared at Mercedes: for the moment he could think of nothing but that a large, loose stone had dropped from the cliff. He ran to the thing and turned it over.
It was a knapsack.
He did not at once understand, but stepped back a few paces and gazed up at the crags mounting tier by tier into the vague moonlight. And while he gazed a lighter object struck the wall over head, glanced from it, went spinning by him, and disappeared over the edge of the ravine. As it passed he recognized it —a soldier's shako.
Then he understood. Someone had found the spot on the road above where the treasure had been upset, and these things were being dropped to guide his search. The Corporal ran to Mercedes and would have clutched her by the wrist. The knife flashed in her hand as she evaded him.
"Quick, my girl —back with you, quick! They're after the money, I tell you!"
He caught up the knapsack. They ran back together and flung themselves into the cabin., The Corporal bolted the door.
"King's Own," he announced, having dragged the knapsack to the firelight. "If there's only one, we'll do for him."
He stepped to the window-hole, pulled open the shutter, laid the two guns on the ledge, and waited, straining his ears.
"Got such a thing as a shovel or a mattock?" he asked after a while. "I reckon you could make shift to cover up the dollars: there's a deal of loose earth come down with them."
It took her some time to guess what he wanted, for he spoke in a hoarse whisper. He listened again for a while, then pointed to the treasure.
"Cover it up. If there's more than one, we'll have trouble."
She produced a mattock from a corner of the cabin and began, through the broken wall, to rake down mud and earth and cover the coins. For an hour and more she worked, the Corporal still keeping watch. Once or twice he growled at her to make less noise.
He did not stand the suspense well, but after the first hour grew visibly uneasy.
"I've a mind to give this over," he grumbled, and fell to unstrapping his knapsack. "Here!" —he tossed it to her —"pack it, full as you can. Half a loaf may turn out better than no bread."
She laid the knapsack open on the floor and set to work, cramming it with dollars.
"Talking of bread," he went on by-and-by, "that's going to be a question. My stomach's feeling at this moment like as if it had two rows of teeth inside."
"Hist!" Mercedes rose, finger to lip. He turned again to the window-hole and peered out, gun in hand, his shoulder blocking the recess.
A man's footsteps were coming up the path —coming cautiously. Their crunch upon the snow was just audible, and no more. Mercedes stole towards the window and crept close behind the Corporal's back; stood there, holding her breath.
The man on the path halted for a moment, and came on again, still cautiously. . . . There was a jet of flame, a roar; and the Corporal, after the kick of his musket, strained himself forward on the window-ledge to see if his shot bad told.
"Settled him!" he announced, drawing back and turning to face her with a triumphant grin.
But Mercedes confronted him with her father's fowling-piece in hand. She had slipped it off, the window-ledge from under his elbow as he leaned forward.
"Unbar the door!" she commanded.
"Look here, no nonsense!"
"Unbar the door!" She believed him to be a coward, and he was.
"You just wait a bit, my lady!" he threatened, but drew the bolt, nevertheless; when he turned, the muzzle of the fowling-piece still covered him.
She nodded toward the knapsack. "Pick up that, if you will. . . . Now turn your back —your back to me, if you please —and go."
He hesitated, rebellious: but there was no help for it.
"Go!" she repeated. And he went.
Above the cabin the path ended almost at once in a cul de sac —a wall of frowning cliff. There was no way for him, whether he wished to descend or climb the mountain, but that which led him past the body of the man he had just murdered. He went past it tottering, fumbling with the straps of his knapsack: and Mercedes stood in the moonlit doorway and watched him out of sight.
By-and-by she seated herself before the threshold, and, laying the gun across her knees, prepared herself to wait for the dawn. The dead man lay huddled on his side, a few paces from her. Overhead, along the waste mountain heights, the wolves howled.
Hours passed. Still the wolves howled, and once from the upper darkness Mercedes heard, or fancied that she heard, a scream.
At noon, next day, two men —a priest and a young peasant —were climbing the mountain-path leading to the hut. The young man carried on his shoulder a two-year-old child; and, because the sun shone and the crisp air put a spirit of life into all things untroubled by thought, the child crowed and tugged gleefully at his father's berret. But his father paid no heed, and strode forward at a pace which forced the priest (who was stout) now and again into a run.
"She will not be there," he kept repeating, steeling himself against the worst. "She cannot be there. When she missed her child ——"
"She is waiting on her grandfather, belike," urged the priest. "They left him with one day's food: so she told the Brothers. And they, like fools, let her go with just sufficient for her own needs. Yet I ought not to blame them for losing their heads in so small a matter. They saved many women."
He told again how he —the parish priest of Nogales —had found Gil the Younger and his wife dead and drunken, with their heads in a gutter and the child wailing in the mud beside them. "Your wife had given her mother the child to guard but a minute before she fell in with the soldiers. A young officer saved her, the Brothers said."
"Mercedes will have sought her child first," persisted Sebastian; and rounding the corner of the cliff, they came in sight of the hut and of her whom they sought.
She sat in the path before it, still with the fowling-piece across her knees. But to reach her they had to pass the body of a soldier lying with clenched hands in a crimson patch of snow. The child, who had passed by many horrors on the road, and all with gay unconcern, stretched out his arms across this one, recognising his mother at once, and kicking in his father's clasp.
She raised her eyes dully. She was too weak even to move. "I knew you would come," she said in a whisper; and with that her eyes shifted and settled on the body in the path.
"Take him away! I —I did not kill him."
Her husband set down the child. "Run indoors, little one: you shall kiss mamma presently."
He bent over her, and, unstringing a small wine-skin from his belt, held the mouth of it to her lips. The priest stooped over the dead man, on whose collar the figures "28" twinkled in the sunlight. The child, for a moment rebellious, toddled towards the doorway of the hut.
Mercedes' eyelids had closed: but some of the wine found its way down her throat, and as it revived her, they flickered again.
"Sebastian," she whispered.
"Be at rest, dear wife. It is I, Sebastian."
"I did not kill him."
"I hear. You did not kill him."
"The child ?"
"He is safe-safe and sound," he assured her, and called, "Sebastianillo!"
For a moment there was no answer: but as he lifted Mercedes and carried her into the hut, on its threshold the boy met them, his both hands dropping silver dollars.
[The End]
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