In The Day Of Adversity Part 24

"My G.o.d!" In that moment there came back to him a memory. The lad, Gaston, had his arm in a sling the morning he learned the child was missing; the woman, who lived in the hut and saw the child taken from Pierre, had said, "His arm hung straight by his side, as though stiff with pain."

Had he found the truth at last?

"Go on," he said.

"The bishop's man--had--got it safe. Aurelie and Gaston--caught--slew him--took the child. She--knew--your birth--and--hated you--and would gain--as much as--as I. Seek her--if you--would-know----"

He fell p.r.o.ne on the lid and spoke no more.

And St. Georges, reeling back against the opposite bulkhead, stared down at him, forgetting all that was taking place around the burning transport in his misery at that revelation.

"Aurelie," he whispered, "Aurelie! Hated me, too, and hated her. O G.o.d, pity me!"

And again above all else there rose the triumphant shout:

"Send him victorious, Happy and glorious, G.o.d save the king!"

NOTE.--The description of the battle of La Hogue is taken from many sources, but princ.i.p.ally from the narrative of the chaplain on board the Centurion. It is the most full and complete, especially as regards the ships engaged, which I know of. The worthy divine was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and this seems to have been his first cruise. He returned "home" afterward, viz., to Oxford, and has left very fervent expressions of grat.i.tude at having been able to do so.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE BITTERNESS OF DEATH.

As he staggered back after that revelation, St. Georges noticed that the great chant sounded less strongly and more distantly in his ears, and, seized with a sudden apprehension, he rushed to the cabin porthole.

Then he knew that what he had dreaded, that the idea which had sprung into his mind a second before, as the st.u.r.dy English voices became more hushed and subdued, was indeed an absolute fact--the flotilla was retiring. It had finished its work of destruction--it was returning to the man-of-war.

And he was left behind!

Behind! to fall into the hands of the French, who, he knew very well, would come forth from the fort and batteries directly the conquerors had withdrawn. He was in a trap from which there was no escape. He would be found there, and his doom be swift.

Yet, in a moment, even as he glanced down at his enemy at his feet and noted the set features--handsome as in life--the white face, the blood at either side of the mouth, looking as before like two small down-turned horns, he asked himself if he was indeed doomed? Also, why stay there to be taken like a rat in a trap? The sea was beneath him; a mile off was the English fleet. If he could swim to that, even halfway to it, he could make signs and, perhaps, be seen and rescued; at the worst it would but be death. And a more fearful death than any the sea could bring awaited him if he remained here.

He cast one more look at De Roquemaure lying with his head upon the locker. At last he was done for! He would never cross his path again.

If he himself could live, if he could escape out of this burning pandemonium, could again stand a free man on an English deck, he would have to contend with him no more. There would be but one thing further to do then--to stand face to face with Aurelie de Roquemaure, to ask her if this charge against her was true--as St. Georges never doubted!--to demand his child, and, if she would not restore it to him, to--to--what? His mind was full of deeds of savagery now; the last few days, filled with slaughter and spent amid the arousal of men's fiercest pa.s.sions, had made him fierce too. At this moment if Aurelie could appear before him he knew that he should slay her--send her to join her brother and all the other victims of his own aroused pa.s.sions. It would be dangerous for her if she were face to face with him at this moment and refused to acknowledge where she had hidden Dorine.

She was not there, however; at the present moment he had to take steps to free himself, to escape from the burning transport. "'Twill be time enough," he muttered, "to tax her with her perfidy when I stand once more before her to punish her for it. And my own hour is too near, may be too close at hand, for me to think of that. But when it comes, then----"

He heard an explosion in another part of the vessel--he knew another tier of guns had been reached by the flames; he was tarrying too long.

The magazine must be close to the cabin in which he was, might be, indeed, beneath the cabin floor--at any moment he risked being blown to atoms. He must lose no time. To be caught there was death, instant and certain!

Lying at the door of the main cabin where he had been slain was one of the officers of the transport; near him another man of lower rank, the one shot through the back the other cut down by Rooke's sailors as he fled into the cabin; and as his eye rested on them a thought struck him. None of Bellefonds and James's forces on land could say who were or were not officers of the transports--what was there to prevent him from being one for the time being? All was fair in war!--and he was as much French as any who might come out from the forts or batteries to the sinking and exploding ships--if any dared to come at all. Once in the garb of either of these lying here, officer or petty officer, and he would be able to get safely ash.o.r.e, and could avoid question by disappearing a moment afterward, or as soon as might be.

And he would be in France--would be so much nearer to the reckoning with Aurelie de Roquemaure!

He drew on the jacket of the officer as the thoughts of all this chased one another through his mind, threw his own sword down and took up that of the dead man, placed on his head the hat he had worn--bearing in it a gold c.o.c.kade on which a glittering sun was stamped--and then, glancing through the square porthole that gave on the sh.o.r.e, he looked to see if, yet, any of the French were coming out to save some of their vessels from the conflagration. But the wind was blowing off the sea to the land and carrying with it the smoke from the burning ships; between those ships and the sh.o.r.e all was obscured.

And still, as he looked, the explosions--though fainter now--took place at every moment; he could hear the crackling of the flames in the vessel in which he was.

He knew that he must go--must not tarry another instant. Those flames were gaining round him; they would reach the magazine before long--and--then! He must go at once.

He cast one more hurried glance at De Roquemaure, who seemed quite dead now. But, dead or alive, what mattered it? If dead, so much the better; if alive, he would be blown to atoms in a few more moments--as he would himself if he tarried longer. He must go at once.

"Farewell, dog!" he muttered, with one look downward at his enemy.

"Farewell. Your account is made!" And without wasting another moment--for his fear of being hurled into eternity himself the next moment had gained terrible hold on him--he rushed to the main cabin door and seized the handle.

An awful sweat of fear--a cold, clammy sweat--broke out all over him as he did so; he knew now how dear life was to him--dearer than he had ever dreamed before that it would be; or was it rather the fear of an awful death than death itself? Was it that which caused him to almost faint with horror as he recognised that the door was either locked or jammed, so that it would not open?

He was doomed--the fire was spreading--he heard one great gun explode by itself--a gun on the lower deck near where the powder room must be--_beneath_ him--he was doomed! In another few moments--perhaps not more than four or five at most--the bulkheads would fly asunder, the deck split like matchwood, he and the dead bodies of De Roquemaure and the others be flung to the elements, be blown into portions of the elements themselves.

Drenched with sweat, paralyzed with terror--it _was_ the terror of an awful death and not of death itself; livid with horror--though he was not aware such was the case; his lips parched and glued together; not knowing whether his limbs were shaking beneath him or the deck of the cabin quivering before its impending upheaval, his starting eyes glared round the prison he was in. And as he so glared he saw--if G.o.d gave him a moment more--his opportunity. The great square ports--an invention of but the last few years and superseding the old small round ones--furnished that opportunity.

With a gasp--nay, almost a cry--he clambered on the locker beneath the nearest one--again it seemed as though the ship was quivering with the impending explosion!--thrust his head and shoulders through, dragged the sword by his side carefully after him, seized a top chain hanging down into the water, and was himself in the water a moment later. Then a nervous, hurried thrust of one foot against the hull, with an impetus obtained thereby which propelled him a dozen feet from the vessel, a few masterful strokes made boldly, all trembling with fear and horror as he was, and he plunged into a puff of black smoke, the cinders among which hissed on his face as he struck it, and he was saved--saved from that most awful death, even though countless other deaths surrounded and loomed up before him; saved, at least, from being dismembered and flung piecemeal in a million atoms on the bosom of the ocean.

The smoke drifting in his face recalled to him that he was swimming toward the English fleet; the current still making toward the sh.o.r.e told him that he could never reach that fleet. Even as he swam away from the doomed transport he knew that the powerful tide beneath was carrying him back; he must change his course, or another moment would carry his body against the after part of the ship he had but now escaped from, the ship which must now ere long be hurled out of the sea! It was easy to do so, however; to turn himself away from her so that, even though borne back to the coast of Cotentin, he would pa.s.s far astern of her. He had enough strength for that, enough left to haul himself far out from where she lay--but not much more. He was sore spent now with all he had gone through, and was borne down also with the double weight of clothes upon him; as he glided by, or was carried back--though some forty yards adrift of the transport--he could do nothing more than tread water and so manage to keep himself afloat.

Borne through the murky grime, along that water there came now the swish of oars and the voices of men speaking in French--French strongly accentuated and in the Manche _patois_. What were they doing, he wondered. Had they come out to save some of the burning transports and boats, to endeavour to stop the flames and also the firing of the guns by the heat--their own guns that, as they fired, hurled their charges on their own sh.o.r.e? Were they going to meet their dooms unknowingly by venturing on that very place of death which he had just escaped from?

It might be--might well be so; and though he had fought against them--though they were Frenchmen and his enemies, too, he must warn them, save them, if he could: they were men, human beings; he could not let them go unwittingly to such an awful end as this, could not let them board that ship and meet the fate he had avoided. Therefore he hailed them as loudly as he was able, screamed to them, besought them to enter no vessel near; above all to avoid the burning transport. But whether they understood him, even if they heard, he could not guess; he caught still the beat of the oars upon the waves, heard their chattering voices, even one or two of their expressions; and then, as the tide took him nearer and nearer to the sh.o.r.e, he lost sound of those voices altogether.

"Strange," he muttered, "strange she blows not up--many minutes have elapsed since I quitted her--twenty at the least, and yet the explosion has not come. They may have boarded her, those men, have extinguished the flames: there may have been no powder left in the mag--Ah!"

There came an awful roar as he so muttered, a roar such as he had heard twenty times in as many hours; a hundred feet above and behind him, as he turned swiftly in the water, he saw a fan-shaped ma.s.s of flame ascending to the skies; he saw black objects amid that ma.s.s of flame--what were they, beams, masts, or human bodies?--he saw the smoke rent open, and great pieces of the transport floating or falling on to the waters with terrific crashes. Then there rushed down on him a fresh mountain of blood-coloured smoke, with blazing cinders and pieces of burning wood, and smouldering sails all borne along in its midst, and it enveloped him and choked him, while the burning matter fell on him and hissed on his wet hair and skin, so that he was fain to let himself sink below the waves for some few seconds to escape the _debris_ and those suffocating fumes. And even as he did so, and when he arose to the surface once more, cooled and refreshed by the immersion of his face, his first thought was to utter a heartfelt prayer for his escape from the awful fate that, but half an hour ago, had threatened him and been so near.

Scarce had he done so than, as he swam a little now, being eased by having floated and trod water for some time, he saw beneath the smoke, which dispersed as it neared the sh.o.r.e and drifted inland, that he himself was close in sh.o.r.e. He could perceive quite clearly the yellow beach of Cotentin on which the incoming tide was rippling, and could see also several bodies lying about on that beach--soldiers doubtless killed by the fire from the English war vessels, or, perhaps, by the discharge of the French guns when turned upon them by the parties which had boarded their own ships. But that was all, except one or two figures moving about and bending over them--no doubt the ghouls who are to be found wherever a dead body is after a battle.

And as he glanced at these last relics of the great battle of La Hogue, his foot touched the bottom; a moment later he was wading ash.o.r.e.

He stood once more in France, the land in which he would find his child--if she was still alive.

CHAPTER XXIV.

ON THE ROAD.

He stood once more upon French ground--then fell half fainting on the wet, shining shingle, struggling to get his breath back, panting and gasping painfully.

Then came toward him a figure terrible to behold, a creature in the garb of a woman, a knife at her girdle, her pockets, which were outside her dress, bulging, and from their openings pieces of gold lace, a silver-hilted pistol, and other things protruding. But besides her and the dead bodies lying further inland upon the beach nothing else was to be seen. The thirty thousand men--some, and most of them, those rapparees whom Louis had thought good enough to send against England--some forming part of the regiments of Picardy, Verdelin, Le Calvados, and others, were not visible, although he could see on the roofs and turrets of the forts that they were still there and lined the coast for many miles. Also he saw with dimmed eyes that the English fleet was moving. It had done its work!

The creature prowling about came nearer, and St. Georges sprang to his feet and drew from the wet scabbard which had remained by his side during his swim ash.o.r.e, his sword.

"Wretch," he said, "put down that knife and come no nearer, or I will run you through, woman though you seem to be! Begone, vulture!"