CHAPTER XIV.
It may well be conceived that the first few miles of my return were travelled without any particular observation on my part of the objects around me. Moric Endem was not with me to call my attention to this thing or that, and to inspire me with the same remarking and commenting spirit as himself; and, busy with the thoughts and feelings of my own bosom, I rode on, seeing, perhaps, the things that I passed with the mere corporeal eye, but with the communication between the organ of sight and the reasoning brain altogether cut off for the time.
I had gone on thus for about five miles, when the distant sound of a trumpet caught my ear, and caused me to make an effort to shake off selfish sorrow, and turn to the business of life again. The spot at which I had then arrived was so enclosed with trees, though close to the edge of a high hill, commanding a view over a wide plain below, that I could not see any object at a distance, and, riding quickly forward to the point where the road left the wood and opened upon the bare slope, I gazed down into the plain.
My surprise was not small at seeing a very considerable body of men, perhaps three or four thousand, winding along at the distance of fully four miles. They were marching in a line rather to the left of that which the Protestant camp occupied, and seemed to me to be bending their way rapidly towards the Charente. They were easily to be distinguished from the Protestants, whose white cassocks always afforded a distinguishing mark at a great distance; and I would instantly have endeavoured to cut off some stragglers from their rear, in order to ascertain what was their object and destination, had I not been shackled by a flag of truce, and felt myself bound to return to our camp before I made any attack upon the enemy.
I rode on, therefore, as fast as possible, trusting that, as night was not far distant, the party I had seen would lodge itself in some of the neighbouring villages. As soon as I had arrived at my own quarters, I made some inquiries in regard to any movements that had taken place, and found indications of the army marching by detachments towards the Loire. Montgomery I could not find, though I sent messengers seeking for him in different directions; and I consequently made up my mind to let my men take some repose, to mount them upon fresh horses, of which my little band had now a plenty, and if there was a possibility of seeing our way after nightfall, to beat up the enemy's quarters and endeavour to gain some information.
Giving orders to this effect, I sat down to my solitary supper, and had very nearly concluded the meal when Montgomery himself entered, saying, "I have come to sup with you, De Cerons. They tell me you have been sending all over the place for me; so I suppose you have some news."
I gave him the best cheer I could, and, while we sat together, told him what I had seen and what I proposed to do.
"They are on foot again, are they?" he said, after thinking over the whole for a few minutes. "They must have got information that De Pile is moving up from Guyenne with our re-enforcements, and wish to cut him off. Yet what can be done? The orders we have received to-night are distinct, to march upon the Loire; and if we do not do so, and do so quickly, we shall never be able to effect our junction with the Germans and the Duc de Deux Ponts, or Zweibrucken, as his own people call him, and that were worse than missing be Pile. However, the only thing that can be done is what you propose yourself, to gain any intelligence that we can, to show these gentlemen that they are discovered, and to send instant information to the prince and the admiral. But, to make your reconnoissance anything at all effectual, you must have more men, De Cerons. What will you have?"
Of course I was glad to take as large a force as could easily be managed in the darkness of the night; and as the arquebusiers had proved of great use to me on my former expedition, I required their presence, together with some ten more spears, which Montgomery readily granted. From him I gained a more thorough knowledge, too, than I had hitherto acquired, of all the existing plans and circumstances of the Protestant leaders. Their forces had been so greatly weakened by the sickness which prevailed in Loudun, that re-enforcements were absolutely necessary for them to keep the field against the Catholics. De Pile had been sent some time before to gather together all the troops that he could in Gascony, and a large body of reiters, under the Duke of Dupont, was marching rapidly towards the Loire, in order to join the Protestant army.
In the mean time, the Catholics had been re-enforced by bodies of troops from every part of France, and were eager to fight the Protestants before either De Pile or the duke could come up. The task, therefore, of the Protestant leaders was a difficult one, namely, to avoid a battle in the presence of a superior army; to guard the line of the Charente, where all the bridges were in their own hands; and to aid the junction of the Gascon forces from the south, at the same time that they extended their line of operations to facilitate the junction of the Germans.
"I trust," said Montgomery, "That the princes will decide upon maintaining the Charente in preference to anything else. De Pile is not one to suffer himself easily to be outwitted, and Stuart, who is with him, will cut his way through a wall of solid iron, if need be. Once having joined the Gascons, we shall be able to detach troops to the Loire, without losing our command of the rivers, and, when the Germans have joined, we can fight the enemy with the advantage of a just cause, and no great disadvantage in point of numbers."
"Depend upon it," I said, after hearing this explanation, "since such is our situation and that of the enemy, the Catholics I have seen are thrown forward to gain possession of some place in the heart of our position. But I will soon bring you farther intelligence if possible; and, in the mean time, were it not better to send off at once a messenger to the prince and the admiral, to inform them of what has been already observed, and of the direction which the Catholics are taking?"
Montgomery agreed immediately to do so, and in less than an hour after I was once more in the saddle, and advancing with a force sufficient for all that I proposed towards the villages in which I calculated the enemy would lodge that night. I need not enter into all the particulars of my expedition: suffice it to say, that about one o'clock in the morning I found forty or fifty poor peasants in a barn not far from the village, who had been driven out of their habitations by the enemy, on account of adhering to the Protestant faith, and who thought themselves not a little fortunate to have escaped with only a few strokes from the staff of a lance to make them give up their dwellings more quickly to the royal troops. I learned little from them, however, except that the commander of the Catholics lodged in one of the houses at the end of the village; and thinking that it would be an excellent consummation if I could carry him off, I bent my way thither, guided by one of the young labourers.
Before we came near, however, I caused my men either to strip off their white cassocks altogether, or, when they were lined with any other colour, to turn them inside out, in order, as far as possible, to escape attention. I did not succeed, however, so well this time as I had done before. There were men on watch at both sides of the house; and though we approached somewhat near without being seen, we were at length challenged in a loud voice. The sentry would not let the false word I gave pass current, but instantly fired his arquebus; and, as had been arranged before, while my arquebusiers remained drawn up in a line to support us, I dismounted with my men-at-arms, and rushed forward to attack the house. Moric Endem shot the unfortunate sentry through the head with a pistol; the door and one of the windows were burst open in a moment, and we poured into the lower rooms, in which we found ten or twelve men who had been sleeping in their arms, on the floor. Taken by surprise, and in confusion, their resistance was not very great, but it was sufficient to give time for the commander himself to make his escape out of one of the back windows in his shirt.
We did not, however, discover this till afterward; for, by the following circumstance, I was mistakenly led to imagine, for more than an hour, that he had fallen into our hands. I had just cut down one fellow who opposed my progress up the stairs, and had nearly reached the top, when out of a room on the right hand rushed a gay-looking youth, in a furred dressing-gown embroidered with gold. He bore a taper in one hand and a sword in the other: but a pistol at his head, with an order to surrender, rescue or no rescue, soon brought his weapon into my hand; and, passing him down the stairs to those who came behind, I entered the different rooms above, and, with Moric Endem and two or three others, swept the table that I found there of a number of papers and parchments, with cases for writing and other things, which I doubted not would give us full information respecting the object of the enemy's movement.
As I was looking at the title of one of these papers, a sharp fire opened by the arquebusiers, whom I had left without, announced that the enemy were prepared to make us pay for our intrusion; and, clearing the house as fast as possible, I effected my retreat, though I found the garden half full of Catholic troopers on foot. It was now, however, that the stratagem of making my men quit or turn their cassocks procured us great advantages which I had not foreseen. In issuing forth form the house in some disarray, the enemy could not tell whether each man was of their own party or not; and in the confusion that followed--we being very certain of what we were to do, and they quite uncertain--we forced our way through and regained our horses, carrying with us the gentleman in the furred dressing-gown and three other prisoners.
Of the men who accompanied me, two only were missing; one of my own band, whom I had seen fall by a pistol shot in the head, and one of the men-at-arms that Montgomery had given me, who, not so well accustomed to such expeditions as we were, lingered behind and was taken prisoner.
We now made the best of our way over the hill, the enemy mounting as fast as horses could be brought out, and pursuing us; but I had ridden over the ground several times before, and knew every inch of it, so that they gained little but their labour, till at length I reached the spot whence I had first discovered them on the preceding morning, when, seeing by a strong glare in the sky, the cause of which I did not at the moment discover, that I was followed by some thirty or forty horse, I ordered my men-at-arms to wheel about and give them a taste of our spear points. As there was no one to support them, they did not make any great resistance, but were driven down the hill in a very short space of time.
I pursued them no farther than the shoulder of the heights, whence I could see the village which we had attacked, and, to my surprise, beheld it all in flames. How it happened I do not know; our people were inclined to believe that the Catholics themselves had set it on fire, in their indignation at the peasants for having guided us thither; but this opinion was evidently founded upon party animosity; and I am inclined to believe that, in the confusion attending our attack upon the farmhouse, some light must accidentally have dropped and set fire to the building.
Hurrying on as fast as possible, we reached my quarters about five in the morning, and then, for the first time, I had an opportunity of speaking with, and showing some civility to my principal prisoner. He was conducted up stairs to my own apartments by two of the soldiers, while I remained for a minute or two below, to see my men properly disposed of. On entering my room, I found him standing shivering by the fire, and approached him, saying, "I fear, sir, you have had a very cold ride?"
"I never had so cold or so disagreeable a one in my life," he replied.
"I was sure that such must be the case," I answered. "But we must try to make you more comfortable as soon as possible.
"Pray, sir," he said, gazing at me somewhat superciliously from head to foot, and sticking out from under his furred dressing-gown a bare leg and a foot only covered with a slipper, "can you procure me such a thing in your camp as a wooden leg? for I am quite sure that this thing, which used to help me through the world, must be frozen of by this time."
"No," I answered, "I do not know that we can do that; but, at all events, I think we can bring some life into the one that you have; and, if you will take my advice, you will get into a warm bed again as fast as possible, drink as large a portion as you can swallow of hot wine, and keep yourself warm for half an hour or so, by telling me who you are, and what is the object of the expedition, whereof you were, I suppose, the commander."
"Sir, you do me a great deal too much honour," said the young gentleman. "However, as you are a very civil person, I will first take possession of the bed you talk of, if you will show me where it is; I will then drink the wine, if anybody will bring it to me; and, having done that, hold myself bound to reply to any questions that you think right to ask, that are not wrong for me to answer."
Calling to Andriot, I caused my prisoner to be placed in the room which had been occupied by good La Tour, and the warm wine to be procured for him, together with some spices and comfits; and, having thus made him as comfortable as I could, I questioned him as to his rank, station, &c. To my mortification, I now found that he was not the commander; that the expedition was destined to attack Jarnac, and was led by the celebrated Count de la Rivière Puitaillé. The young gentleman whom I had taken proved to be one of the gay gallants of the court, called Gersay, and my only consolation for having missed the commander was the prospect of a large ransom for his friend and companion. My men were more satisfied, indeed, than I was; for Moric and the rest had stumbled upon various articles of value, and a considerable sum of money, so that the prize to be divided was considerable. Gersay's ransom was soon arranged and soon paid, and I once more found my military chest overflowing.
In the mean time, the absence of the princes at Niort, though absolutely necessary, in order to obtain money and to treat with the Queen of England; was sadly detrimental to our military prospects.
Before full information of all that I had discovered could be conveyed to the Prince de Condé, before the troops could be recalled from their movements towards the Loire, or others marched to defend Jarnac, La Rivière had made himself master of that place, thus occupying an important point on the Charente, and breathing nothing but vengeance for the attack upon the village, in retaliation for which he made desperate excursions on every side.
The burning of the village, indeed, which must have been purely accidental, led to consequences of a very terrible kind. The house occupied by a Captain Lespinette had been the second or third which took fire, and some of his effects had been burned therein; and, on the first expedition which La Rivière intrusted to him, he vowed he would retaliate upon the Protestants.
He accordingly attacked a village, swept away all that it contained, and some women and children having taken refuge in one of the houses, while their husbands and fathers escaped into the fields, he brutally, we were assured, set fire to the place, and burned them to death therein.
An awful retribution fell upon him. As soon as a sufficient force could be collected, the admiral commanded the Marquis de Briquemont to attack La Rivière in Jarnac. The town was taken by assault; but, as the inhabitants were our own people, no outrages were committed. The Catholics who surrendered received quarter, and many made their escape; but Lespinette and his band took refuge in the old keep, declaring they would hold it to the last: but, almost at the same moment that they were making this declaration, the lower part took fire. Unable to find any other means of escape, he and two of his companions determined to leap from the loopholes, which were large. But the corbels which hung over impeded them, and, in the effort to force themselves through, their armour was so tightly jammed in the stonework that no human power could remove them, and in this horrible situation they were actually burned to death in their arms.
At this period, the situation of the Protestant army became every day more and more critical. The Catholic army, nearly double in force that which we could oppose to it, was now approaching nearer and nearer, and interposing between us and the troops coming from Gascony, with the purpose of forcing us to an immediate battle. The most important points of the Charente were, it is true, in our hands; the admiral and the Prince de Condé were once more at the head of their troops; and, had their tactical skill been as well seconded by the zeal and obedience of the officers under their command, we might have set the enemy at defiance till sufficient re-enforcements had arrived to enable us to fight them.
The Duke of Anjou was advancing daily, but still his progress was delayed far more than might otherwise have been the case by the continual skirmishes which D'Andelot and the Prince de Condé contrived to treat him on his advance. Scarcely a day passed without some hundreds, sometimes thousands, of our troops being thrown unexpectedly upon some vulnerable point of the enemy's position; sometimes we advanced absolutely into the quarters of the Duke of Montpensier, and once we were actually in the lodgings of the Duke of Anjou himself.
On the latter occasion, under the command of Puiviaud, we encountered close to Auville, where the duke had established his quarters, a body of seventy or eighty gentlemen of the court, and obstinately maintaining our ground for some time till we were re-enforced, large bodies of men began to come up on either side, till it became absolutely necessary for the Protestants to withdraw, lest the skirmish should end in a general battle when neither party was prepared.
Nothing, however, could stop the progress of the enemy; and, early in March, the Duke of Anjou made himself master of Chateauneuf on the Charente. The bridge, however, was in our possession, and we had various small cars pushed across the river in different directions, in order to guard against surprise. I myself, no longer acting as a mere partisan, but attending implicitly to the orders I received as a soldier, was stationed some little way in advance of Cognac, with orders to obtain every information that I could regarding the enemy's movements, and communicate them immediately to the admiral or the Prince de Condé; and at three o'clock on the very day of my arrival, I perceived a large body of the enemy marching down towards me. The continual noise they made, the sounding of trumpets and beating of drums, made me suspect at once that their appearance was a mere feint; and, having ridden to a rising ground, which gave me a view over the country beyond, I clearly perceived that they were followed by no sufficient force to attempt the passage of the river at that point, and sent immediate intelligence of what I had observed to the admiral, in order to make sure that he was not deceived by any stratagem of the enemy. Coligny sent me down thanks in return, telling me that he was not deceived, and that, after maintaining my ground as well as I could, I might come round to join the Count de Montgomery at the village of Triac. The affair at Cognac lasted scarcely half an hour; but it was past midnight before I could bring my men, fatigued with a long march, to the quarters appointed me.
The house seemed pretty comfortable, and the stables for the horses good, with room in a granary above for the greater part of the men, and plenty of room in the house for the rest. Not a truss of straw, however, was to be found; no forage of any kind; and while I was endeavouring to obtain some in the village by sending hither and thither, I saw a head put out from one of the up-stairs windows of the house, and heard a voice call me by name. "Monsieur de Cerons, Monsieur de Cerons," said the voice, "I give you good-evening; it is long since we met."
The tones were not unfamiliar to my ear, but yet I could not recollect where I had heard them; and I merely replied, "I will come up in a minute, when I have seen the horses fed."
"Morbleu!" said Moric Endem, "you may think yourself lucky if you get a straw a horse, seigneur. These are one of the nights, I take it, which teach cavalry horses to be crib-biters, seeing that they can get nothing else to bite."
"Moric," I said, "as we passed the day before yesterday, there was a large farm I saw about a quarter of a mile out there to the right. The man would neither say whether he was Catholic or Protestant, Chemille told me. But I must have forage, whichever he is. The admiral says we must have no plunder; so take ten men with you, go to his house, and with your sword in one hand and this purse in the other, tell him you come from the Seigneur de Cerons for the forage he wants for his horses. Give him his choice of the gold or the steel, and bring back the forage at all events."
"Bravo! bravo!" cried the voice from the window above, though I certainly did not know I had been listened to; "justice and equity both together Monsieur de Cerons;" and, leaving Moric to fulfil his orders, which he did with pre-eminent success, I entered the house and mounted the creaking staircase, which seemed as if two men at a time would have brought it to the ground.
There were lights and a blazing fire on the right hand, and I entered that room, when I saw before me a tall, powerful man sitting in the window-seat, with a page busily taking off the various pieces of his armour. He turned round his head as I entered, though bestowing no very soft benediction on the page for pinching his leg with the genouillère, and exclaimed, "Welcome, welcome, De Cerons; so I find you, as I hoped to find you, changed from little David the shepherd's boy into a mighty man of war. And who shall say what will come of it next?"
The face that was turned towards me was that of my first military friend and counsellor, Stuart; and with equal joy and gratitude I grasped his hand, and welcomed him to the army.
"I have expected to see you long," I said, "but certainly did not expect to see you this night, and in my own quarters."
"Why, it so happens," replied Stuart, "That they are mine too; for the house, and yard, and stables were to be shared between us. Heaven knows how we should have managed if I had brought on my band. But I left the greater number of them some way back, for men and horses were absolutely exhausted by hard riding and starvation. Though the prince would very willingly have kept me at Jarnac, to sup with him to-night and dine with him to-morrow, yet I came on with two or three of my servants only, to see what was doing out here at the advance guard; for I have a strange notion that we sha'n't be four-and-twenty hours without a battle. I wanted to see you, too, and have got a good supper ready for you, as there wants no food for men's mouths here, though all the forage I could get was a bushel of oats and a handful of straw for six horses."
I followed Stuart's example as soon as possible in disencumbering myself of my armour, for I never had the casque off my head for more than twenty hours, nor had anything passed my lips but a cup of cold water during the whole of that time; so that the sight of a huge piece of roasted pork, and a dish of pig's ears and feet strewed with crayfish, was, I must acknowledge, one of the pleasantest prospects that my eyes had lighted upon for some time. For my poor men's sakes, too, I was glad to hear that provisions were to be had in abundance, and, before I ate myself, I took care to send out the means to purchase everything that was necessary, although my expeditions had been so successful as to leave the purses of my troop better stored than those of any other in the army.
During supper, Stuart and I talked over all that had happened to us both since we parted in Bordeaux; and, although my first intercourse with him had been but of a few hours' duration, yet, when we met, we felt as if we had been old and intimate friends for many years. He told me all that had befallen him to delay his journey to join the army, the difficulty in getting his Scotch companions over from his native country, or raising others fitted for his band: the necessity which then presented itself of joining his forces to those of De Pile, and of labouring with that commander to induce the Protestant noblemen of Higher and Lower Gascony to come forward in arms, and risk something for the common cause; then the obstacles which the Catholics had thrown in his way, to prevent his junction with the Protestant army; and he ended by telling me that he had at length been obliged to leave De Pile behind with the greater part of the troops, and, with only sixty helmets, to make his way on to join the Prince de Condé, having a sort of presentiment in his mind, which, he said, had never failed him hitherto, that a battle was on the eve of taking place between the two contending parties.
To me he put a thousand questions concerning my state and prospects, although it was evident enough that he had heard news of me from time to time, and was not a little proud of his military neophyte. I told him all the military part of my history, as I have told it here, and met his approbation of all my proceedings.
In pursuing these subjects, however, the conversation naturally turned to good Martin Vern, his journey to Bordeaux, and the redemption of my dagger; and, as soon as the subject was mentioned, he exclaimed, "Oh! by-the-way, it is true I did what was, perhaps, not very justifiable on my part, and made good Solomon Ahar do what was not quite right upon his. But, having seen how much you regretted the loss of your weapon; and also having received an unexpected sum, which gave me a few crowns to spare, I went and insisted upon redeeming it, thinking that in a day or two I should join you. I have been forced to wander far enough since," he continued, "but your dagger is quite safe, and with my baggage at Jarnac. One thing, however, I must tell you of, which happened in the redemption of it, and which made me very glad that I had got it out of the Jew's hands, who has now moved from Bordeaux to Paris, as I dare say you have heard."
"No," I replied, "I did not hear of his removal. But I can easily conceive that he was not much to your taste. Yet tell me, what was this circumstance which made you glad?"
"Doubtless you know the fact yourself already," replied Stuart, "but I discovered it from the Jew. When, much against his will, I had driven him to give it up, good Solomon said, 'Ha! do you know it is hollow, Seigneur Stuart?' And he then showed me, by weighing it against another dagger, with a smaller hilt than it had, that the haft is hollow, and, through a hole where one of the old jewels had fallen out, we clearly saw some folded parchment within. It may be a matter of some consequence, or of none to you, for aught I know. Were you aware of the fact?"
I replied in the negative; and, after some farther conversation on the subject, it was determined that, if military operations did not prevent us, we should ride together to Jarnac on the following morning, where I should redeem my dagger, and ascertain what the hilt contained.
After that we separated, Stuart retiring to his bed and I to mine; and though for the last five or six days I had borne up with scarcely any rest or repose, I now fell into a profound and heavy slumber, still, motionless, dreamless, more like death itself than sleep.