The King's Own Part 57

Seymour returned to the beach, and, collecting his men, found the survivors to consist of forty-four seamen and marines, the boatswain and himself. Of these, fifteen were helpless, from wounds and fractured limbs. The articles which had been collected were a variety of spars and fragments of wood, some of the small sails which had been triced up in the rigging, one or two casks of beef and pork, and a puncheon of rum, which had miraculously steered its course between the breakers, and had been landed without injury. The sails which had been spread out to dry, were first carried up to form a bed for the sick and wounded, who, in the s.p.a.ce of an hour, were all made as comfortable as circ.u.mstances would admit, a general bed having been made on the floor of the hut, upon which they and the wounded Frenchmen shared the sails between them.

The spars and fragments were then brought up, and a fire made in the long deserted hearth, while another was lighted outside for the men to dry their clothes. The cask of rum was rolled up to the door, and a portion, mixed with the water from a rill that trickled down the sides of the adjacent mountain, served out to the exhausted parties. The seamen, stripping off their clothes, and spreading them out to dry before the fire which had been made outside, collected into the hut to shield their naked bodies from the inclemency of the weather.

The spirits, which had been supplied with caution to the survivors of the French vessel, had been eagerly seized by the one who had first addressed our hero, and in half an hour he seemed to be quite revived.

He rose, and after trying his limbs, by moving slowly to and fro, gradually recovered the entire use of them; and by the time that the circulation of his blood had been thoroughly restored by a second dose of spirits, appeared to have little to complain of. He was a powerful, well-looking man, with a large head, covered with a profusion of s.h.a.ggy hair. Seymour looked at him earnestly, and thought he could not well be mistaken, long as it was since they had been in company.

"Excuse me--but I think we once met at Cherbourg. Is not your name Debriseau?"

"_Sacristie_!" replied the Frenchman, seizing himself by the hair, "_je suis connu_! And who are you?"

"Oh! now I'm sure it's you," replied Seymour, laughing--"that's your old trick--do you not recollect the boy that Captain McElvina took off the wreck?"

"_Ah mon ami_--Seymour, I believe--midshipman, I believe," cried Debriseau. "_Est-ce donc vous? Mais, mon Dieu, que c'est drole_"

(again pulling his hair as he grinded his teeth) "_Un diable de rencontre_!"

"And how is it that you have been on board of a French man-of-war?"

"How! oh, I was unlucky after McElvina went away, and I thought, on reflection, notwithstanding his arguments, that it was a dishonest sort of concern. Being pretty well acquainted with the coasts, I shipped on board as pilot."

"But, Debriseau, are you not a native of Guernsey, which is part of the British dominions?"

"Bah! it's all one, _mon ami_; we islanders are like the bat in the fable--beast or bird, as it suits us--we belong to either country. For my own part, I have a strong national affection for _both_."

The conversation was here interrupted by the entrance of the boatswain, who had remained outside, in charge of the cask of rum, upon which he had seated himself occupied with his Bible. "Here's a.s.sistance coming, Mr Seymour. There's at least twenty or thirty men descending the hill."

"Hurrah for old Ireland! they are the boys that will look after a friend in distress," shouted Conolly, one of the seamen, who thus eulogised his own countrymen, as he hung naked over the fire.

CHAPTER FIFTY SIX.

With dauntless hardihood And brandish'd blade rush on him, And shed the luscious liquor on the ground, ...though he and his cursed crew Fierce sign of battle make, and menace high.

MILTON.

The information received from Mr Hardsett induced our hero to break off his conversation with Debriseau, and he immediately quitted the hut. A party of men, wild in their appearance and demeanour, were bounding down through the rocks, flourishing their bludgeons over their heads, with loud shouts. They soon arrived within a few yards of the shealing, and, to the astonishment of Seymour and the boatswain, who, with a dozen more, had resumed their clothes, seemed to eye them with hostile, rather than with friendly glances. Their intentions were, however, soon manifested by their pouncing upon the habiliments of the seamen which were spread out to dry, holding them rolled up under one arm, while they flourished their shillelahs in defiance with the other.

"Avast there, my lads!" cried the boatswain "why are you meddling with those clothes?"

A shout, with confused answers in Irish, was the incomprehensible reply.

"Conolly," cried Seymour, "you can speak to them. Ask them what they mean?"

Conolly addressed them in Irish, when an exchange of a few sentences took place.

"b.l.o.o.d.y end to the rapparees!" said Conolly, turning to our hero. "It's helping themselves they're a'ter, instead of helping us. They say all that comes on sh.o.r.e from a wreck is their own by right, and that they'll have it. They asked me what was in the cask, and I told them it was the cratur, sure enough, and they say that they must have it, and everything else, and that if we don't give it up peaceably, they'll take the lives of us."

Seymour, who was aware that the surrender of the means of intoxication would probably lead to worse results, turned to his men, who had a.s.sembled outside of the hut, and had armed themselves with spars and fragments of the wreck on the first appearance of hostility, and directed them to roll the cask of rum into the hut, and prepare to act on the defensive. The English seamen, indignant at such violation of the laws of hospitality, and at the loss of their clothes, immediately complied with his instructions, and, with their blood boiling, were with difficulty restrained from commencing the attack.

A s.h.a.ggy-headed monster, apparently the leader of the hostile party, again addressed Conolly in his own language.

"It's to know whether ye'll give up the cask quietly, or have a fight for it. The devil a pair of trousers will they give back, not even my own, though I'm an Irishman, and a Galway man to boot. By Jesus, Mr Seymour, it's to be hoped ye'll not give up the cratur without a bit of a row."

"No," replied Seymour. "Tell them that they shall not have it, and that they shall be punished for the theft they have already committed."

"You're to come and take it," roared Conolly, in Irish, to the opposing party.

"Now, my lads," cried Seymour, "you must fight hard for it--they will show little mercy, if they gain the day."

The boatswain returned his Bible to his breast, and seizing the mast of the frigate's jolly-boat, which had been thrown up with the other spars, poised it with both hands on a level with his head, so as to use the foot of it as a battering-ram, and stalked before his men.

The Irish closed with loud yells, and the affray commenced with a desperation seldom to be witnessed. Many were the wounds given and received, and several of either party were levelled in the dust. The numbers were about even; but the weapons of the Irish were of a better description, each man being provided with his own shillelah of hard wood, which he had been accustomed to wield. But the boatswain did great execution, as he launched forward his mast, and prostrated an Irishman every time, with his cool and well-directed aim. After a few minutes' contention, the Englishmen were beaten back to the shealing, where they rallied, and continued to stand at bay. Seymour, anxious at all events that the Irish should not obtain the liquor, directed Robinson, the captain of the forecastle, to go into the hut, take the bung out of the cask, and start the contents. This order was obeyed, while the contest was continued outside, till McDermot, the leader of the Irish, called off his men, that they might recover their breath for a renewal of the attack.

"If it's the liquor you want," cried Conolly to them, by the direction of Seymour, "you must be quick about it. There it's all running away through the doors of the shealing."

This announcement had, however, the contrary effect to that which Seymour intended it should produce. Enraged at the loss of the spirits, and hoping to gain possession of the cask before it was all out, the Irish returned with renewed violence to the a.s.sault, and drove the English to the other side of the shealing, obtaining possession of the door, which they burst into, to secure their prey. About eight or ten had entered, and had seized upon the cask, which was not more than half emptied, when the liquor, which had run out under the door of the hut, communicated, in its course, with the fire that had been kindled outside. With the rapidity of lightning the flame ran up the stream that continued to flow, igniting the whole of the spirits in the cask, which blew up with a tremendous explosion, darting the fiery liquid over the whole interior, and communicating the flame to the thatch, and every part of the building, which was instantaneously in ardent combustion.

The shrieks of the poor disabled wretches, stretched on the sails, to which the fire had communicated, and who were now lying in a molten sea of flame like that described in Pandemonium by Milton--the yells of the Irish inside of the hut, vainly attempting to regain the door, as they writhed in their flaming apparel, which, like the shirt of Nessus, ate into their flesh--the burning thatch which had been precipitated in the air, and now descended in fiery flakes upon the parties outside, who stood aghast at the dreadful and unexpected catastrophe,--the volumes of black and suffocating smoke which poured out from every quarter, formed a scene of horror to which no pen can do adequate justice. But all was soon over. The shrieks and yells had yielded to suffocation, and the flames, in their fury, had devoured everything with such rapidity, that they subsided for the want of further aliment. In a few minutes, nothing remained but the smoking walls, and the blackened corpses which they encircled.

Ill-fated wretches! ye had escaped the lightning's blast--ye had been rescued from the swallowing wave--and little thought that you would encounter an enemy more cruel still--your fellow-creature--man.

The first emotions of Seymour and his party, as soon as they had recovered from the horror which had been excited by the catastrophe, were those of pity and commiseration; but their reign was short--

"Revenge impatient rose, And threw his blood-stain'd sword in thunder down."

The smoking ruins formed the altar at which he received their vows, and stimulated them to the sacrifice of further victims. Nor did he fail to inspire the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the other party, indignant at the loss of their companions, and disappointed at the destruction of what they so ardently coveted.

Debriseau, who had played no idle game in the previous skirmish, was the first who rushed to the attack. Crying out, with all the theatrical air of a Frenchman, which never deserts him, even in the agony of grief, "_Mes braves compagnons, vous serez venges_!" he flew at McDermot, the leader of the Irish savages.

A brand of half-consumed wood, with which he aimed at McDermot's head, broke across the bludgeon which was raised to ward the blow. Debriseau closed; and, clasping his arms round his neck, tore him with his strong teeth with the power and ferocity of a tiger, and they rolled together in the dust, covered with the blood which poured in streams, and struggling for mastery and life. An American, one of the _Aspasia's_ crew, now closed in the same way with another of the Irish desperadoes, and as they fell together, twirling the side-locks on the temples of his antagonist round his fingers to obtain a fulcrum to his lever, he inserted his thumbs into the sockets of his eyes, forced out the b.a.l.l.s of vision, and left him in agony and in darkness.

"The sword of the Lord!" roared the boatswain, as he fractured the skull of a third with the mast of the boat, which, with herculean force, he now whirled round his head.

"Fight, _Aspasias_, you fight for your lives," cried Seymour, who was everywhere in advance, darting the still burning end of the large spar into the faces of his antagonists, who recoiled with suffocation and pain. It was, indeed, a struggle for life; the rage of each had mounted to delirium. The English sailors, stimulated by the pa.s.sions of the moment, felt neither pain nor fatigue from their previous sufferings.

The want of weapons had been supplied by their clasp knives, to which the Irish had also resorted, and deadly wounds were given and received.

McDermot, the Irish leader, had just gained the mastery of Debriseau, bestriding his body and strangling him, with his fingers so fixed in his throat that they seemed deeply to have entered into the flesh. The Guernsey man was black in the face, and his eyes starting from their sockets: in a few minutes he would have been no more, when the mast in the hands of the boatswain descended upon the Irishman's head, and dashed out his brains. At the same moment, one of the Irishmen darted his knife into the side of Seymour, who fell, streaming with his own blood. The fate of their officer, which excited the attention of the seamen, and the fall of McDermot, on the opposite side, to whose a.s.sistance the Irish immediately hastened, added to the suspension of their powers from want of breath, produced a temporary cessation of hostilities. Dragging away their killed and wounded, the panting antagonists retreated to the distance of a few yards from each other, tired, but not satisfied with their revenge, and fully intending to resume the strife as soon as they had recovered the power. But a very few seconds had elapsed, when they were interrupted by a third party; and the clattering of horses' hoofs was immediately followed by the appearance of a female on horseback, who, galloping past the Irishmen, reined up her steed, throwing him on his haunches, in his full career, in the s.p.a.ce between the late contending parties.

"'Tis the daughter of the House!" exclaimed the Irishmen, in consternation.

There wanted no such contrast as the scene described to add l.u.s.tre to her beauty, or to enhance her charms. Fair as the snow-drift, her cheeks mantling with the roseate blush of exercise and animation--her glossy hair, partly uncurled, and still played with by the amorous breeze, hanging in long ringlets down her neck--her eye, which alternately beamed with pity or flashed with indignation, as it was directed to one side or the other--her symmetry of form, which the close riding-dress displayed--her graceful movements, as she occasionally restrained her grey palfrey, who fretted to resume his speed, all combined with her sudden and unexpected appearance to induce the boatswain and his men to consider her as superhuman.

"She's an angel of light!" muttered the boatswain to himself.

She turned to the Irish, and, in an energetic tone, addressed them in their own dialect. What she had said was unknown to the English party, but the effect which her language produced was immediate. Their weapons were thrown aside, and they hung down their heads in confusion. They made an attempt to walk away, but a few words from her induced them to remain.

The fair equestrian was now joined by two more, whose pace had not been so rapid; and the boatswain, who had been contemplating her with astonishment, as she was addressing the Irish, now that she was about to turn towards him, recollected that some of his men were not exactly in a costume to meet a lady's eye. He raised his call to his mouth, and, with a sonorous whistle, cried out, "All you without trousers behind shealing, hoy!" an order immediately obeyed by the men who had been deprived of their habiliments.

Conolly, who had understood the conversation which had taken place, called out in Irish, at the same time as he walked round behind the walls, "I think ye'll be after giving us our duds now, ye dirty spalpeens, so bring 'um wid you quick;" a request which was immediately complied with, the clothes being collected by two of the Irish, and taken to the men who had retired behind the walls of the shealing.

Mr Hardsett was not long in replying to her interrogations, and in giving her an outline of the tragical events which had occurred, while the ladies, trembling with pity and emotion, listened to the painful narrative.