The World's Greatest Books - Volume 2 Part 21

He did not complete the sentence, for Rohan stretched out his hand and smote him down. Grallon fell like a log.

A wild cry arose from all the men, the women screamed, even Marcelle shrank back; and Rohan strode to the door, pushing his way out.

"Hold him! Kill him!" shouted some.

"Arrest him!" cried Corporal Derval.

Rohan hurled his opponents right and left like so many ninepins. They fell back and gasped. Then, turning his white face for an instant on Marcelle, her lover pa.s.sed unmolested out into the darkness.

_II.--In the Cathedral of the Sea_

Along the wild, rugged sh.o.r.e, a little way from Kromlaix, was an immense cavern of crimson granite, hung with gleaming moss, and washed by the roaring tides of the sea. Its towering walls had been carved by wind and water into thousands of beautiful, fantastical forms, and a dim religious light fell from above through a long, funnel-shaped hole running from the roof of the cavern to the top of the great cliff.

It was here that Rohan Gwenfern hid from the band of soldiers sent in pursuit of him. The air was damp and chill, but he breathed it with the comfort of a hardy animal. He made a bed of dry seaweed on the top of the precipice leading to the hole in the cliff, where his mother came and lowered food to him every evening; and Jannedik, a pet goat that used to follow him everywhere in the days when he was a free man, was his only companion. Strange and solitary was the life he led, but he slept as soundly in his bed of seaweed on the wild precipice as he did in his bed at home.

But one morning, when he awoke, a confused murmur broke upon his ear.

Peering over the ledge, he saw a crowd of soldiers standing on the shingle at the mouth of the cavern.

"Come down and surrender, in the name of the emperor!" cried the sergeant.

"Surrender!" shouted all his men. And the vast, dim place rang with the echoing sound of their voices.

"You can have my dead body if you care to come up here for it!" cried Rohan, stepping into the light that fell from the hole in the cliff.

The soldiers stared up in astonishment when Rohan appeared on the ledge of the precipice. He was now a gaunt, forlorn, hunted man, with a few rags hanging about his body, and a great shock of yellow hair tumbling below his shoulders. Under the stress of mental suffering his flesh had wasted from his bones, but his eyes flashed with a terrible light.

"Come down," said the sergeant, raising his gun, "or I will pick you off your perch as if you were a crow."

Instead of getting behind a rock, Rohan stood up with a strange smile on his face, and said, "If you want me, you must come and fetch me."

There was a flash, a roar--the sergeant had fired. But when the smoke had cleared away, Rohan was still standing on the ledge with the strange smile on his face. The shot had gone wide.

"You can smile," said the sergeant angrily, "but you cannot escape. If I cannot bring you down, I will starve you out. My men are watching for you, above and below. You are surrounded."

"And so are you," said Rohan, with a laugh, pointing to the mouth of the cavern. "Look behind you!"

The sergeant and his men turned round, and gave a cry of dismay. The tide had turned, and the sea was surging fiercely into the mouth of the cavern.

"Give him one volley," shouted the sergeant, "and then swim for your lives."

But when the men turned to aim at Rohan, he was no longer visible. They fired at random at the hole in the cliff, and after filling the great cavern with drifting smoke and echoing thunder, they fled for their lives, wading, swimming through the high spring tide.

"At any rate," said the sergeant, when they had all got safely back to land, "we can stop Mother Gwenfern from bringing the mad rebel any more food."

So a watch was set over the cottage in which Rohan's widowed mother lived, and she was always searched whenever she left her house, and bands of armed men kept guard night and day by the hole at the top of the cliff and by the seaward entrance to the cavern. At the end of two weeks the sergeant resolved to make another attack. The man, he thought, must surely have been starved to death, as every avenue of aid had long since been blocked.

So one moonlight night at ebb tide the crowd of soldiers crept into the cavern and lashed two long ladders together, and began to climb up the precipice. But a strong arm seized the ladders from above, and flung them back on the granite floor of the cave. Standing like a ghost in the faint, silvery radiance falling through the hole in the cliff, Rohan hurled down upon the dark ma.s.s of the besieging crowd great fragments of rock which he had placed, ready for use, along the ledge on which he slept.

"Fire Fire!" shrieked the sergeant, pointing at the white figure of Rohan.

But before the command could be obeyed, Rohan got under shelter, and the bullets rained harmlessly round the spot where he had just stood. Then, under cover of fire, some men advanced and again placed the ladder against the precipice. As Rohan crouched down on the ledge, he was startled by the apparition of a human face. With a cry of rage, he sprang to his feet, and, heedless of the bullets thudding on the rock around him, he slowly and painfully lifted up a terrible granite boulder, poised it for a moment over his head, and then hurled it down at the shapes dimly struggling below him. There was a crash, a shriek.

Under the weight of the boulder the ladders broke, and the men upon them fell down, amid horrible cries of agony and terror.

What happened after this Rohan never knew; for, overcome by frenzy and fatigue, he swooned away. When he opened his eyes, he was lying beneath the hole in the cliff, with the moonlight streaming upon his face. From below him came the soft sound of lapping water, and, looking down, he saw that the tide had entered the cave, and forced the besiegers to give over their attack.

Yes, the battle was over, and he had conquered! His position indeed was impregnable; had he been well supplied with food, he could have held it against hundreds of men for a long period. But, as he laid down on his bed of seaweed, a rough tongue licked his hand. It was his goat, Jannedik. For the last fortnight, Rohan's mother had sent the goat every day to her son with a basket of food tied round its neck and hidden in the long hair of its throat. Rohan groped in the darkness for the basket, and Jannedik uttered a low cry of pain, rolled over at his feet into the moonlight, revealing a terrible bullet-wound in its side, and quivered and died. Some soldier had shot it.

As Rohan stared at the dead body of his four-footed friend, the strength of mind which had enabled him to withstand all the power that Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe, could bring against him at last went from him.

Trembling and shivering, he looked around him, overcome by utter desolation and despair. He had held out bravely, but he could hold out no longer; slowly and laboriously he climbed down the dark face of the precipice, and reached the narrow strip of shingle below, just as the moon got clear from a cloud and lighted up the cavern. Its cold rays fell on the white face of the sergeant, who laid half on the shingle and half in the water, crushed by the great boulder with which Rohan had broken down the ladders.

Rohan gazed for a moment on the features of the man he had killed, and then, with a cry of agony and despair, he fell upon his knees.

"Not on my head, O G.o.d, be the guilt!" he prayed. "Not on my head, but on his who hunted me down and made me what I am; on his, whose red sword shadows all the world, and drives on millions of innocent men to murder each other! Ah, G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d! The men that Napoleon has slain! Is it not high time that some man like me sought him out and killed him, and brought peace back once more to this blood-covered earth of ours? Yes, I will do it!"

Rising wildly to his feet, full of the strange strength and the strange powers of madness, Rohan Gwenfern climbed up the precipice to his bed of seaweed, and then took a path that no man had taken and lived--the sheer, precipitous path from the roof of the cavern to the top of the cliff.

_III.--Rohan Meets Napoleon_

As the Grand Army swept into Belgium for the last great battle against the united powers of England, Germany, Austria, and Russia, a strange, savage creature followed it--a gaunt, half-naked man, with long yellow hair falling almost to his waist, and bloodshot eyes with a look of madness in them. How he lived it is difficult to tell. He never begged, but the soldiers threw lumps of bread at him as he prowled round their camp-fires, asking everyone whom he met: "Where is the emperor? Where is Napoleon? Do you think he will come this way?"

Twice he had been arrested as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot.

But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free, saying with scornful pity, "It is a harmless maniac. Let him go."

He always lagged in the rear of the advancing army, and as each fresh regiment arrived he mingled with the soldiers, and asked them in a fierce whisper, "Is the emperor coming now? Isn't he coming?"

At last, one dark rainy evening, the wild outcast saw the man for whom he was seeking. Wrapped in an old grey overcoat, and wearing a c.o.c.ked hat from which the rain dripped heavily, Napoleon stood on a hill, with his hands clasped behind his back, his head sunk deep between his shoulders, looking towards Ligny. But he was guarded; a crowd of officers stood close behind him, waiting for orders.

Suddenly a bareheaded soldier came riding along the road, spurring and flogging his horse as if for dear life; galloping wildly up the hill he handed the emperor a dispatch. Napoleon glanced at it, and spoke to his staff officers. With a wild movement of joy they drew their swords, and waved them in the air, shouting, "_Vive l'Empereur!"_ Napoleon smiled.

His star was again in the ascendant! The Prussians were retreating from Ligny; he had struck the first blow, and it was a victory!

Near the hill on which he was standing was a deserted farmhouse; he gave orders that it should be prepared for his reception. But, as he rode down the hill at the head of his staff, the man who had been watching him divined his intention, and reached the house before his attendants.

The soldiers who searched the place before Napoleon entered failed to see the dark figure crouching up in the corner of a loft among the black rafters.

"Leave me," said Napoleon to his men, after he had finished the plain meal of bread and wine set before him.

To-morrow he would meet for the first time, on the rolling fields of Waterloo, the only captain of a European army whom he had not defeated.

He wanted to think his plans of battle over in silence. Some time he paced up and down the room, his chin drooping forward on his breast, and his hands clasped upon his back. Through the wide, clear s.p.a.ces of his mind great armies pa.s.sed in black procession, moving like storm-clouds over the stricken earth; burning cities rose in the distance, amid the shrieks of dying men, and the thunder of cannon. His plan was at last matured. Victory? Yes, that was certain! So his thoughts ran. An aide-de-camp entered with a dispatch. He tore it open, and ran his eye over it.

"It is nothing," he said. "Don't disturb me for two hours except on a matter of great importance. I want to sleep."

Going up to the old armchair of oak that was set before the fire, he fell on his knees, and covered his eyes and prayed.

"What!" said the man who was watching him up in the rafters. "Does Cain dare to pray? Surely G.o.d will not answer his prayers! He is praying that he may wipe the English to-morrow from the face of the earth, and again cement his throne with blood, and forge his sceptre of fire!"