Yet, with no chance for their lives, the exiles fought desperately. Hanson, who had dropped on one knee behind a barrel, emptied his revolver twice and effectively before he went down, stabbed from behind in the neck. Sir John had already fallen, passing his weapon as he fell to an unarmed man behind him. Lord Charles Baringstoke was the last to go, and for a few minutes he seemed to bear a charmed life. He stood erect and smiling, his eyes alert and watchful; he never wasted a shot, and never missed a chance to reload. Possibly for the first time in his life he had realised his situation; certainly there was a nobility in his bearing that none had seen there before. His personal degradation seemed to have slipped from him, leaving only an ancestral inheritance of quiet and courage in the face of death. He was quick, quick as light; three times he swung round rapidly and dropped the native whose knife was almost on him. Then all around him came a gleam of white teeth and lean brown arms dragging at him. He was surrounded and went down. His smoke-grimed hands clutched hard at the ground. “How could I help it?” he gurgled as he died, and spoke maybe his fitting epitaph.
Now torches were lit from the burning building. The casks of liquor were set flowing, and a dense crowd gathered round them, treading the dead men under foot, stretching out cups made of the half-shell of a cokernut. The noise was terrific, and the leaders were powerless to restrain the men who had followed them. The three brothers stood apart and conferred together, quarrelling violently. So far they had won, but two of them thought that nothing further could be done with this disorganised mob. The youngest was for marching immediately on the King’s house. He had a small personal following on whom he thought he could depend. His elder brothers shrugged their shoulders. Of what use would those few be against the King and his well-armed men?
They did not know that even as they spoke the King was not a hundred yards away from them. The reckless victors had kept no watch of any kind, and the King had been able to bring his men into the orange-grove unperceived.
Suddenly into the great mob that sang and struggled round the casks on the lawn, there poured a volley from sixty-nine rifles. The noise of shout and song stopped abruptly; there were moans from the wounded on the ground and no other sound at all. Scarcely knowing what had happened, astounded and helpless, the survivors looked to their leaders. But before they could speak there came a rush of big-built men from the trees. Two of the leaders were bound hand and foot; the third, the youngest of the brothers, managed to escape.
And now the King himself rode out on to the lawn. He worked his horse in and out through the crowd, speaking to them as he went. If they wished to live, he told them, they must remain where they were. They shrank from him in shame, turning their eyes away, like unruly schoolboys caught by their master. As he passed they squatted down on the earth and watched to see what he would do. He rode to the upper end of the lawn. The building had burned low now; there was a great mass of red-hot embers over the surface of which a light flame skipped, dropping down and bobbing up again. Here, in front of the fire, the two leaders were brought to him. He dismounted and looked at them long, till they grew afraid of his eyes. Then he gave the order and four men of the patrol took one of the brothers, swung him rhythmically and hurled him into the red-hot furnace.
With the other brother the King dealt differently. As he looked at him, he began to loosen the cord on the man’s wrists, speaking softly as he did so. “See,” he said, “what has happened to you. You can no longer move except as I will it. There, your hands are no longer bound; I have taken off the cord; but one wrist clings to the other and you cannot get them apart. Your feet also are no longer bound, but they are stuck tight to the earth so that you cannot raise them. The fingers of your hands are cramped and useless—quite useless. Here is a knife to kill me; you cannot grasp it and it falls to the ground.”
The crowd watched breathlessly. They saw the proffered knife, and their leader’s failure to hold it.
The King spoke to the man again. He told him that he was a very fine man and a great house should be prepared for him. “Turn round and you will see it.”