Alice Lorraine: A Tale of the South Downs

“Come, come!” said Hilary (for an Englishman always says “come, come,” when he is taken aback), “you cannot mean half of this, of course. Come, Claudia; what can have made you take such a turn? You never used to do it!”

“Ah, I may have been fickle in the days gone by. But absence – absence is the power that proves – ”

“Hark! I hear a sound down the river! Horses’ feet, and wheels, and clashing – ”

“No; it is only the dashing of the water. I know it well. That is why this bridge is called the ‘bridge of echoes.’ The water makes all sorts of sounds. Look here; and I will show you.”

She took his hand, as she spoke, and led him away from the parapet facing the ford to the one on the upper side of the bridge; when, suddenly, such a faintness seized her, that she was obliged to cling to him, as she hung over the low and crumbling wall. And how lovely she looked in the moonlight, so pale, and pure, and perfect; and at the same time so intensely feminine and helpless!

“Let me fall,” she murmured; “what does it matter, with no one in the world to care for me? Hilary, let me fall, I implore you.”

“That would be nice gratitude to the one who nursed me, and saved my life. Senhorita, sit down, I pray you. Allow me to hold you. You are in great danger.”

“Oh no, oh no!” she answered faintly; as he was obliged to support her exquisite, but alas! too sensitive figure. “Oh, I must not be embraced. Oh, Hilary, how can you do such a thing to me?”

“How can I help such a thing, you mean? How beautiful you are, Claudia!”

“What is the use of it? Alas! what is the use of it, if I am? When the only one in all the world – ”

“Ah! There I heard that noise again. It is impossible that it can be the water, – and I see horses, and the flash of arms.”

“Oh, do not leave me! I shall fall into the torrent. For the sake of all the saints, stay one moment! How can I be found here? What infamy! – at least, at least, swear one thing.”

“Anything – anything. But I must be gone. I may be ruined in a moment.”

“And so may I. In the name of the Saviour, swear not to tell that I met you here. My father would kill me. You cannot even dream – ”

“I swear that no power on earth shall make me say a word about you.”

“Oh, I faint, I faint! Lay me there in the shadow. No one will see me. It is the last time. O how cruel, how cold, how false! how bitterly cruel you are to me!”

“Is it true,” in a breath he whispered – for now he was in great stir, and hurry, and heard the Spanish trumpets sound, as he carried her towards the shadow of the keep, and there for an instant leaned over her: “is it true that you love me, Claudia?”

“With my whole – oh, what do I say?” And as if she could not trust the echoes, she glanced at the corner timidly; “oh, do not go, for one moment, darling! – with every atom of my poor – ”

“Heart,” she was going to say, no doubt, but was spared the trouble; for down fell Hilary, stunned by a crashing blow from that dark corner; and in a moment Alcides d’Alcar had him by the throat with gigantic hands, and planted one great knee on his breast.

“Did I do it well?” asked Claudia, recovering bright activity, “Oh, don’t let him see me. He never must know it.”

“Neither that nor anything else shall he know,” the brigand muttered, with a furious grasp; until poor Hilary’s blue eyes started forth their sockets. “You did it too well, my fair actress; so warmly, indeed, that I am quite jealous. The bottom of the Zujar is his marriage-couch.”

“Loosen his throat, or I scream for his comrades. You promised me not to hurt him. He shall not be hurt more than we can help; although he has been so faithless to me.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed the great brigand; “there is no understanding the delicate views of the females. But you shall be obeyed, beloved one. He will come to himself in about ten minutes; these Englishmen have such a thickness of head. Search him; be quick; let me have his despatch-book. You know where your lovers keep their things.”

Senseless though Hilary lay, the fair maiden kept herself out of the range of his eyes, as her nimble fingers probed him. In a moment she drew from an inner breast-pocket his private despatch-book, and Mabel’s letter, and portrait. Those last she stowed away for her own revenge, after glancing with great contempt at them; but the book she spread open to her lover.

“It is noble!” he cried, as the brilliant moonlight shone upon the pages. “What could be more fortunate? Here are the blank forms with the heading, and the flourish prepared for his signature. There is his metal pencil. Now write as I tell you in Spanish, but with one or two little barbarisms; such as you know him given to. ‘The detachment is here. I am holding them back. They are not to cross the water. Send the two carts through; but do not come yourselves. Good-night, and many thanks to you. May we soon meet again. (Signed) Hilary Lorraine.’ You know how very polite he is.”

“It is written, and in his own hand, most clearly. He has been my pupil, and I have been his. Poor youth, I am very sorry for him. Now let me go. Have I contented you?”

“I will tell you at the chapel to-morrow night. I shall have the cleverest and most beautiful bride in all Iberia. How can I part with you till then?”

“You will promise me not to hurt him,” she whispered through his beard, as he clasped her warmly; while Hilary lay at their feet, still senseless.

“By all the saints that ever were, or will be, multiplied into all the angels! One kiss more, and then adieu, if it must be.”

The active young Claudia glided away; while the great brigand proceeded, with his usual composure, to arrange things to his liking. He lifted poor Hilary, as if he were a doll, and bound him completely with broad leather straps, which he buckled to their very tightest; and then he fixed over his mouth a scarf of the delicate wool of the mountains; and then he laid him in the shade; for he really was a most honourable man, when honour came into bearing. And though (as far as his own feelings went) he would gladly have pitched this Captain Lorraine into the rush of the Zujar, he had pledged his honour to Claudia. Therefore he only gagged and bound him, and laid him out of the moonlight; which, at the time of year, might have maddened him. After this, Don Alcides d’Alcar struck flint upon punk, and lit a long cigar.

The whole of that country is full of fleas. The natives may say what they like; but they only damage their credit by denying it, or prove to a charitable mind their own insensibility. The older the deposit or the stratum is, the greater is the number of these active insects; and this old bridge, whether Moorish, or Gothic, or even Roman (as some contended), had an antiquarian stock of them.

Therefore poor Hilary, coming to himself – as he was bound to do by-and-by – grew very uneasy, but obtained no relief through the natural solace of scratching. He was strapped so tightly that he could only roll; and if he should be induced to roll a little injudiciously through a gap of the parapet he must go to the bottom of the lashing water. Considering these things, he lay and listened; and though he heard many things which he disliked (and which bore a ruinous meaning to him for the rest of his young life, and all who loved him) he called his high courage to his help; and being unable to talk to himself (from the thickness of the wool between his teeth, which was a most dreadful denial to him), he thought in his inner parts – “Now, if I die, there will be no harm to say of me.” He laid this to his conscience, and in contempt of all insects rolled off to sleep.

The uncontrollable outbreak of day, in the land where the sun is paramount, came like a cataract over the mountains, and scattered all darkness with leaps of light. The winding valley and the wooded slope, the white track of water, and the sombre cliffs, all sprang out of their vaporous mantle; and even the bridge of echoes looked a cheerful place to lounge on.

“A bad job surely!” said Corporal Nickles, marching with his footsteps counted, as if he were a pedometer. “Bones, us haven’t searched this here ramshackle thing of a Spanish bridge. Wherever young Cap’en can be, the Lord knows. At the bottom of the river, I dessay.”

“Better if he never was born,” replied Bones; “or leastwise now to be a dead one. Fifty thousand guineas in a sweep! All cometh of trusting them beggarly Dons. Corporal, what did I say to you?”

“Like a horacle, you had foreseen it, sergeant. But we’m all right, howsomever it be. In our favour we has the hallerby.”

Hilary, waking, heard all this, and he managed to sputter so through the wool, that the faithful non-commissioned officers ran to look for a wild sheep coughing.

“Is it all gone?” he asked pretty calmly, when they had cut him free at last, but he could not stand from stiffness. “Do you mean to say that the whole is gone?”

“Captain,” said Bones, with a solemn salute, which Nickles repeated as junior, “every guinea are gone, as clean as a whistle; and the Lord knows where ’em be gone to.”

“Yes, your honour, every blessed guinea,” said Nickles, in confirmation. “To my mind it goes against the will of the Lord to have such a damned lot of money.”

“You are a philosopher,” answered Lorraine; “it is pleasing to find such a view of the case. But as for me, I am a ruined man. No captain, nor even ‘your honour,’ any more.”

“Your honour must keep your spirits up. It mayn’t be so bad as your honour thinks,” they answered very kindly, well knowing that he was a ruined man, but saluting him all the more for it.

CHAPTER LI.
EMPTY LOCKERS

It may perhaps be said, without any painful exaggeration, that throughout the whole course of this grand war, struggle of great captains, and heroic business everywhere, few things made a deeper, sadder, and more sinister impression than the sudden disappearance of those fifty thousand guineas. On the other hand, it must not be supposed that the disappearance of guineas was rare. Far otherwise – as many people still alive can testify; and some of them perhaps with gratitude for their reappearance in the right quarter. But these particular fifty thousand were looked out for in so many places, and had so long been the subject of hope, as a really solid instalment of a shilling in the pound for heroes, that the most philosophical of these latter were inclined to use a short, strong word, of distinctive nationality.

Poor Hilary felt that for this bad verb his own name must be the receptive case; and he vainly looked about for any remedy or rescue. Stiff as he was in the limbs, by reason of the straps of Don Alcides, and giddy of head from the staff of that most patriotic Spaniard, he found it for some time a little hard to reflect as calmly as he should have done. Indeed it was as much as he could do to mount his horse – who (unlike his master) had stuck to his post very steadfastly – and with sadness alike with soul and body to ride down to the fatal ford. Sergeant-major Bones and Corporal Nickles also remounted and followed the bewildered captain, keeping behind him at a proper distance for quiet interchange of opinion.

“Corporal, now,” said the sergeant-major, sliding his voice from behind one hand, “what may be your sentiments as consarns this very pecooliar and most misfortunate haxident?”

“Sergeant, it would be misbehooving,” replied Nickles, who was a west-country man, “as well as an onceremonious thing for me to spake first in the matter. To you it belongeth, being the one as foretold it like a book; likewise senior hofficer.”

“Corporal, you are a credit to the army. Your discretion, at your age, is wonderful. There be so few young men as remember when a man has spoken right. I am the last man in the world to desire to be overpraised, or to take to myself any sense of it. And now I wants no credit for it. To me it seems to come natteral to discern things in a sort of way that I find in nobody else a’most.”

“You doos, you doos,” answered Corporal Nickles. “Many’s the time as I’ve said to myself – ‘Whur can I goo, to find sergeant-major, in this here trick of the henemy?’ And now, sergeant, what do ’ee think of this? No fear to tell truth in spaking ’long of me.”

“Corporal, I have been thinking strongly ever since us untied him. And I have been brought up in the world so much, that I means to think again of it.”

“Why, sergeant, you never means to say – ”

“Nickles, I means just what I means. I may be right, and yet again I may be altogether wrong; as is the way of every man. ‘Let me alone’ is all I say. But if I was sure as you could hold your tongue, I might have something to say to you. Not of any account, you know; but still, something.”

“Now, sergeant, after all the thumps us has seen and been through together, you never would behave onhandsome to me.”

“Corporal Nickles, if you put it upon that footing, I cannot deny you. And mind you, now, my opinion is that this is a very queer case indeed.”

“Now, now, to think of that! Why, sergeant, you ought to be a general!”

“Nickles, no flattery; I am above it. Not but what I might have done so well as other people, if the will of the Lord had been so. Consarning, however, of this to-do, and a precious rumpus it will be, my opinion is that we don’t know half.”

Speaking thus, the sergeant nodded to the corporal impressively, and jerked his thumb towards the captain in front, and winked, and then began again.

“You see, corporal, my place is to keep both eyes wide open. There was a many things as struck me up at the old Don’s yonder. A carrying on in corners, and a going to lamps to read things, and a winking out of young ladies’ eyes, to my mind most unmilitary. But I might a’ thought that was all young people, and a handsome young chap going on as they will, only for what one of they dirty devils as drives them mules have said to me.”

“No, now, sergeant; never, now!”

“As true as I sit this here hoss, when us come back with the sun getting up, what did that pagan say to me? You seed him, corporal, a-running up, and you might have saved me the trouble, only you was nodding forward. ‘Senhor captain,’ he said to me, and the whites of his eyes was full of truth, ‘the young cavalier has been too soft.’ That was how I made out his country gibberish; the stuff they poor beggars are born to.”

“It gooeth again the grain of my skin,” Corporal Nickles answered, “to harken them fellows chattering. But sergeant, what did he say next?”

“Well, they may chatter, or hold their tongues, to them as cannot understand them. Requireth a gift, which is a denial to most folk, to understand them. And what he said, Corporal Nickles, was this – that he was coming up the river, while the carts was waiting, and afore the robbery, mind you; and he seed a young woman come on to the bridge – you knows how they goes, corporal, when they expects you to look after them.”

“Sergeant, I should think so.”

“Well, she come on the bridge for all the world like that. Us have seen it fifty times. And she had a white handkercher on her head, or an Ishmaelitish mantle; and she were looking out for some young chap. And our young cap’en come after her. And who do you think she were? Why, one of the daughters of the old Don up yonner!”

“Good heart alaive, now, Sergeant Bones, I can’t a’most belave it!”

“Nickles, I tell you what was told me – word for word; and I say no more. But knowing what the ways of the women is, as us dragoons is so forced to do, even after a marriage and family – ”

“Ah, sergeant, sergeant! we tries in vain to keep inside the strick line of dooty. I does whatever a man can do; and my father were a butcher.”

“Corporal, it is one of the trials which the Lord has ordered. They do look up at one so, and they puts the middle of their lips up, and then with their bodies they turns away, as if there was nothing to look at. But, Nickles, they gives you no sort of a chance to come to the bottom of them. And this is what young cap’en will find out. The good females always is found out at last; the same as my poor wife was. But here us are. We have relaxed the bonds of discipline with conversation. Corporal, eyes right, and wait orders!”

While these two trusty and veteran fellows had been discussing a subject far too deep for a whole brigade of them, and still were full of tender recollections (dashed with good escape), poor Hilary had been vainly spurring, here and there, and all about, himself not come to his clear mind yet, only hoping to know where the money was gone. Hope, however, upon that point was disappointed, as usual. The track of the heavy carts was clear in the gravel of the river, and up the rocky bank, and on the old Roman road towards Merida. And then, at the distance of about a furlong from the Zujar, the rut of the wooden wheels turned sharply into an elbow of a mountain-road. Here, on the hump of a difficult rise, were marks, as if many kicks, and pricks, and even stabs, had been ministered to good mules labouring heavily. There was blood on the road, and the blue shine of friction, where hard rock encountered hard iron, and the scraping of holes in gravelly spots, and the nicks of big stones laid behind wheels to ease the tugging, and afford the short relief of panting. These traces were plain, and becoming plainer as the road grew worse, for nearly a mile of the mountain-side, and then the track turned suddenly into a thicket of dark ilex, where, out of British sight and ken, the spoil had been divided.

The treasure-carts had been upset, and two of the sturdy mules, at last foundered with hard labour, lay in their blood, contented that their work was over, and that man (a greater brute than themselves) had taken all he wanted out of them. The rest had been driven or ridden on, being useful for further torment. And here on the ground were five stout coffers of good British iron; but, alas! the good British gold was flown.

At this sight, Hilary stared a little; and the five chests in the morning sun glanced back at him with such a ludicrously sad expression of emptiness, that, in spite of all his trouble, the poor young captain broke into a hearty laugh. Then his horse walked up, and sniffed at them, being reminded, perhaps, of his manger; and Hilary, dismounting, found a solitary guinea lying in the dust, the last of fifty thousand. The trail of coarse esparto bags, into which the gold had been poured from the coffers, for the sake of easier transport, was very distinct in the parts untrampled by horses, mules, or brigands. But of all the marks there was none more conspicuous than the impressions of some man’s boots, larger and heavier than the rest, and appearing, over and over again, here, there, and everywhere. For a few yards up the rugged mountain, these and other footprints might be traced without much trouble, till suddenly they dispersed, grew fainter, and then wholly disappeared in trackless, hopeless, and (to a stranger) impenetrable forest.

“Thou honest guinea that would not be stolen!” cried poor Lorraine, as he returned and picked up the one remaining coin; “haply I shall never own another honest guinea. Forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine prefer the ownership of rogues. Last of guineas, we will not part till gold outlives humanity!”

“Now, sir, is there anything us can do?” cried Bones and Nickles, or one of them. “We has followed all the way up this here long hill, for want of better orders.”

“No, my good fellows, there is nothing to be done. We cannot follow any further. I must go with all speed to report myself. Follow me, if you can keep up.”

The sergeant nodded to the corporal – for, loyal and steadfast as they were, suspicion was at work with them; that ugly worm which, once set going, wriggles into the stoutest heart. Surely it was a queer thing of the captain not even to let them examine the spot; but order was order, and without a word they followed the young officer back to the high road, and then, for some hours in the heat of the day, on the way towards Estremadura. At noontide they came to a bright, broad stream, known to them as the Guadalmez, a confluent of the Guadiana; and here they were challenged, to their great surprise, by a strong detachment of British hussars.

“What is your duty here?” asked Lorraine, as his uniform and face were acknowledged and saluted by sentries posted across the ford.

“To receive,” cried an officer, riding through the river (for all of these people were wide awake), “Captain Lorraine and his Spanish convoy.”

“I have no convoy,” said Hilary, dropping his voice into very sad music. “All is lost. It is partly your fault. You were ordered to meet me at the Zujar ford.”

“This is the Zujar ford,” the cavalry major answered, sternly; and Hilary’s heart fell from its last hope of recovering anything.

“We have been here these three days waiting for you,” continued the major, with vehemence; “we have lost all our chance of a glorious brush; we sent you advice that we were waiting for you. And now you appear without your convoy! Captain Lorraine, what does all this mean?”

“Major, my explanation is due at head-quarters, rather than to you.”

“And a deuced hard job you’ll have to give it, or my name’s not M’Rustie,” the senior officer muttered, with more terseness and truth than courtesy. “I’m blessed if I’d stand in your shoes before Old Beaky for a trifle.”

Poor Hilary tried in vain to look as if he took it lightly. Even his bright and buoyant nature could not lift head against the sea of troubles all in front of him.

“I have done no harm,” he kept saying to himself, when, after the few words that duty demanded, he urged his stout horse forward; and the faithful sergeant and corporal, who had shunned all inquisitive hussars, spurred vigorously after him, feeling themselves (as a Briton loves to feel himself) pregnant with mighty evidence. “What harm have I done?” asked Hilary. “I saw to everything; I worked hard. I never quitted my post, except through duty towards a lady. Any gentleman must have done what I did. To be an officer is an accident; to be a gentleman is a necessity.”

“Have you felt altogether,” said conscience to him, “the necessity of that necessity? Have you found it impossible to depart from a gentleman’s first duty – good faith to those who trust in him? When you found yourself bewitched with a foreign lady, did you even let your first love know it? For months you have been playing fast and loose, not caring what misery you caused. And now you are fast in the trap of your looseness. Whatever happens serves you right.”

“Whatever happens serves me right!” cried Hilary Lorraine, aloud, as he lifted his sword just a little way forth, for the last time to admire it, and into the sheath dropped a quick, hot tear. “I have done my duty as an officer badly; and as a gentleman far worse. But, Mabel, if you could see me now, I think that you would forgive me.”

He felt his heart grow warm again with the thought of his own Mabel; and in the courage of that thought, he stood before Lord Wellington.