The Spanish dancer : being a translation from the original French by Henry L. Williams of Don Caesar de Bazan (19 page)

Thief or honest, this newcomer was assuredly not his acquaintance Omfrio, for he contrived to squeeze through the ventilator, planned small to prevent such overhauling the stores without due warrant. He did it with practised skill, crawled head down till his hands met a barrel, and then he dragged the rest of his figure through the aperture.

Sliding down upon the encumbered floor, he righted himself, squatted so that his head was on the level of the captive's ?nd proceeded to whet a knife, till then carried between his teeth, on a cleared spot of the cemented floor.

Cccsar, whose views were formed entirely on conjecture upon what he heard, did not need this always nerve-exasperating sound to perch him on the ragged edge of ire.

'Tf this is a dumb man and deaf, I may die without his knowing who killed me in the dark," moaned he.

But the man had a tongue, and, as inevitably happens to a member of a community where silence is impressed on tlie inferiors, he made up with galloping garrulity when loneliness put the bit in his teeth.

He chuckled to himself as he felt the blade. It was more silly than cruel or hearty, this hilarity.

"This is an idiot," resolved the prisoner, not prone, lately, to be gentle in his judgments. "If he pleases me by his acts as much as he is pleased with his own sharps ness, we shall be well out of it."

"That mutton-head, Omfrio, was so dead-beaten and sluggish after supper, which he hogged down," said this unexpected visitor, "that he is asleep and will not hark back to this dead."

"It is our dear boy Anselmo!" thought Don Caesar. "Ah, to give him one fisticuff for every letter of his name I I could wish he had been christened as long as Asclepic^-dorusianus!"

He began to play his muscles by opening and closing his hands, as wrestlers do before seizing.

"He did not answer fully to the abbot, and so I ceased to be on tenlerliofks lest he blabbed out that we had brought the dead av^ay before the soldiers thought to strip him of his wedc ing garments."

"Upon my jvord" thought the prey of these vultures, "after the coat, the skin! I shall finally be buried, if ever, flayed to the core."

"His doublet was little stained with blood—and it v/ill fetch ten or more crowns if I can find a ]e\Y with an inch-wide patch of conscience at the South Barrier, by the Segovia Gate. Then, there are the breeches, with a gold galloon stripe which would trim a hat; the boots of the best Cordovan horsehide, with the spur-straps inlaid by fine Moorish art; the—eh? Oh, it is the rats! And the pearls were of a good size. All this means money, which

is not going to our common treasury. I will strip him, add the duds to my pack, and, hey! over the mountains in the morning!"

"I wish we could change places, brother, if that is yovm plan of campaign. I feel a sore desire to rob these de-spoilers, compared to whom my poor, maligned friends, the gypses, are unblemished saints."

"How tough this duck is!" grumbled the monk, who plied his keen whittle along the sack to cut the twine and sunder all the envelope of the don.

"Ay, loose me, and you will find this duck confusedly tough, if out of my net!" thought Caesar, whose misery (Was enhanced by his having to vent his choJer silently.

If the steel had slipped and scratched him, he wta's determined not to have let a cry slip him. For he was reviving himself for a mortal struggle. Only once had he •known such a grim resolution. After a sortie, at the siege of Pampeluna, being pinned down by his dead Ihorse, he was compelled to wait until the camp-followers, stripping the dead and finishing the wounded, approached him so nearly that his last pistol shot should not fail.

This deathlike quiet completely befogged the lay-brother. With skill, considering the glooim, he had ripped all the stitches right down the canvas where it was joined, and sundered the cord which had come off his waist at the inn, to secure the prize.

It was possible for Don Caesar to spring up quite unfettered, hke a snake bursting out of his old hide. He did so.

But it was instantly to embrace the knife-bearer, and so tightly that his ribs cracked, and he could not relax the muscles containing the knife-haft.

"A sound, and I shall fasten my teeth in your th'roat V hissed he, with the concentrated fury c^ one so agonized

during four or five hours. "A move, and I will crush your ribs into your heart!"

Terror at the supposed reanimation of the dead had converted the man into that semblance of death which the victor was rapidly casting off. He let himself be disarmed as if he were petrified.

Tliis captive was supine, as if his bones had been melted.

"I doubt your holiness, but I will give you a few min^ utes to say your prayers! Then I must kill you, to repay you for your cruelty on the road!"

"It was not I ground my weight into your marrowK* protested Anselmo. ''It was that fat wight! I should say 'great weight!' "

"W'hy, I don't dislike this knave!" exclaimed Don Caesar. "I do not rate your worthy of my—that is, your steel! But you are not lacking wit. Be useful, and I may lengthen the grace!"

"As I am not a holy man, I shall require five years* full measure and brimiming to make my peace with Heaven! Oh, merciful sir, let me make the same with your excellent lordship first!"

"Gammon! and I am sick of gammon all the rest of my life from lying on this flitch! Why do you suppose I can be merciful ?"

"On your wedding night, my lord—any boon sTnould be granted!"

"Still witty; but jest less and tell me what kind of friars are you?"

"We are White Friars, sir, so Called by a paradox, because we are gowned in black!"

"Still that vein—I must keep you on its edge, fellow, if You are of all colors?"

"White, gray and black! After the sun goes down and (before the moon comes up, seen on the roads, you might

take us for contrabandistas, smugglers, by your leave, dealers in varied goods "

"Venders of dead bodies—augh! I thoug'it myself in fhe Pit of Acheron in the gypsies' camp, but it appears that the Cordelers of the Cardarqua Range have in their monastery a deeper and blacker pool!"

''If-you will spare me, my lord, and let us save ourselves from this pit ?"

"Spare one who would not give the preference to one's own true friends in disposing of his corpse! how, now?"

"It was only flattering to hold your honor for the very highest bid!"

"Deuce take your trafficking! Did you look to Don Jose? If his soul were at stake, he would haggle tO' redeem it cheaper!''

"The abbot will take the biggest purse—it is his custom !"

"Surgeon, gypsy, my cousiui—three furies who would rend me among them!"

"In your well-founded indignation, sir, you graze me with that knife! Steady hand means hale mind, my lord!"

"Excuses—I only should kill you with it!"

"What for? you are not dead yet! I ought to be rewarded for getting you out of the House of Correction! It is not so easy in a prisoner of your rank, believe me, count!"

"These rogues ihave been assisting prisoner's of the state to evade their doom all along!"

"But your knife is inflaming the scratch it already established in the sub-clavian section!"

"BJood and wounds! have we the illustrious Dr. Tor-rerosi here, from Padua, who will locate a bullet buried out of sight with the magic lantern ray !"

"My good lord, it was while waiting for my money fot!

stiff-ones at the backstairs of the Medical Acfademy, that I picked up a little surgical lore !"

"Mind your own anatomy! Disclose! is this abbot more sanctified than you and your brothers ?"

"He was, but he was defrocked for tipsiness. That claused them to appoint him director of our works."

"I would hear of his good works—carnal rather than, spiritual, for a hundred!"

"Your honor is wrong—for we are spirituous above all! Abbot Scampedro is the guiding spirit, he directs, ■measures, compounds, presides over the brew "

"What is your diabolical brew?"

"Why, sir! you who have a liquorish tooth, or common fame belies you, must have heard, if not tasted, no doubt, of the famous cordial of the Franciscans? That is how it'comes the irreverent jesters call this 'the habitation of the cordial-heroes,' instead of the Cordilleroes, which meaneth the whipped of St. Frank!"

"Oh, this monastery is the cordial distillery?" cried Don Caesar, aghast. "By all that is delicious, I I'hought I was dreaming in Elysium, but there did come to me in the yard, an appetizing whifif of—out of the Persian rose gardens!"

"That is our brew! it will soften the savage! May it melt your lordship's obdurate bosom !"

CHAPTER XIV.

THE fugitive's FLIGHT.

"I could do with a quart of it," observed the recent captive, beginning to beUeve that he was near the end of this strait. "If it were not straining your cordiaHty too much, I would fain sample your concoctions !"

"My lord, it is hard to get at," replied the distillers* man, taking him in earnest, "for it is made for the Pope and the Princes of the Church, who—sworn not to partake of it, give it away to the hard-drinking kings and potentates!"

"That is why, not being vended, the Crown does not skim your vats ?"

"Quite right, sir—no duty on us!"

"Does no preventive officer come noising about?"

"Nor nosing! This monastery, which has become a distillery, is advantageously situated: one half is church property, where the Crown officers have no footing, and the other half is Peculiar "

"I should think so! a pest on it!" .

"In ecclesiastical phrase, a Peculiar Establishment is one over whose foundation the Episcopacy has no jurisdiction i"

"Fine, this arrangement! I am sorry in the murk that you cannot see the smile of approval this arrangement brings out on my face! I see, when the excise gangers come here, if they ever come, you move the goods upon the sacred land; when the prelate sends an Investigator, shocked at the worldly manufacture, you shift them on the mundane side. My brother, your abbot will reach a high

dignity! Pontiffs have been elected who were not half as ingenious as he!"

"He is pretty sharp!"

"I engage that he allows no leakage. For example, the drink you shared with your brother at the Httle inn, that would not be your invention?"

"Oh, I do not say there is no spoil—no spirits slightly off col'or or scorched! That excess avoids amy cess by— but it is a mystery!"

"No doubt, when you are despatching a consignment to ■Rome, a barrel or two never gets mislaid on the road!"

"The muleteers, like that rascally Pedro, may execute little vagaries of that sort!"

*T am edified! I doubt not that France and Holland know the Cordial by—reputation! I see my duty to my king quite clearly," went on Don Caesar, with a strong voice, quite himself with warmth at this wrongful exclusion of the public of topers from the quintessence. "I shall travel post-haste to my sovereign, who sorely prays for cash to prosecute the war a-foot v/ith Germany and, eke, France, and I shall acquaint his majesty with the interesting fact that a call of his treasurer at the Moo-astery of Good Works will line his bags with the wherewithal to raise and equip a regiment "

"More, too ! And a train of artillery in supplement!"

"Of course, our pious monarch would not heed mie if the Mother Church made this milk with her own hands for her own babes and sucklings, but as it is made by lay hands "

"Fie! You would not do this, my lord !"

"The d'evil I would not! It is not you who can stay me!"

"I am a lam^b in your hands, yet "

"I distrust Iambs who have steel teeth six or seven inches long—but, master lamb, I am a wolf—we have a

&'

traditional man-wolf in the Garofa family, like all g"cnuine old families!"

"It is because you are a Garofa, a peer, a knight, that it ill beseems you to play the revealer—the informer— there, the despicable word is out!"

"There is something in that! I am poor, but I do not hanker after head-money!"

"Ah, my lord but I do I"

"Oho, you would, by the little I see—that is, know of you "

"Pledrre me "

"Nothing but my word to pledge!"

"Tliat suffices; let me receive the informer's pay, and I will not only assist you to escape, but guide you to the gentlemen of the Royal Excise Board, and, as you make a clean breast of mine by kindly removing your knee from it, I will do the same by the king!"

"But your friends, your dear brothers, would be troubled for this illicit distilling—some would be whipped with their own cords, some burnt in the hand, some ear-cropped! And the true monks would be exiled into the Indies or China!"

"They would deserve their doom, sir I It is heinous to cheat the good, trustful king, when he wants to defend the realm; it would be letting in the foreigner by withholding the taxes on spirits! I see that if I was not pricked by remorse for my error, I ought to denounce out of pure patiiotism!"

"But for the dark I should see this glory of a consummate patriotic knave! We will see about terms when you show some loyalty to me, at present the arbiter of your fate. Rise, and come on—I mean, take the lead out of this rats' run !"

He pricked him between the shoulders with the knife.

"But it is because this is a rats' run that I cannot lead!

ft was as much as I could do to pinch in at that airhole. You cannot follow, with your trunks bombasted in the fashion!"

"Then there is a wider outlet! For while you often slip in there, thin and long as a sausage-skin, you go out like the same stuffed!"

"You are an incontrovertible logician, my admirable lord! Sometimes, in order to comfort a brother, who has been put on short rations, I have taken out a little sack of delicacies!"

He removed, with the familiarity which dispensed with h'ght, a large corn-chest in one angle and disclosed a considerable gap.

The two left the buttery by this hole, compelled to assume the ignoble attitude of reptiles; but, soon, they could stand up without the head brushing the ceiling or the elbows knocking the sides, in a tunnel, mostly earth, but protected by stonework where there might be a cav-ing-in.