“For a wonder, madame, he did not say a word, and seems very sulky. They are all sorely vexed at the cutting out of the Vengeance. I am going directly to Dame Moret, and very probably I shall see her son, and he surely will be able to tell us all the particulars; for the English did not touch or injure the fishing luggers, but put all the prisoners and wounded into them. I overheard one of the gendarmes saying to Sergeant Perrin, that the English crew and their leader that boarded the Vengeance, under a frightful fire from on board and on shore, were diables. That they were only about fifteen or sixteen men at first, that they cut down all before them, and that their leader—Lieutenant Thornton, I fancy—burst through all opposition and seized Captain Gaudet, who would otherwise have perished, and dragged him off, throwing him into the boats alongside, so that he might swim ashore or get on board the nearest boat.”
“That officer was surely our own dear friend,” said Mabel; “he said if ever he captured the Vengeance he would spare Captain Gaudet, though he did treat him and Bill Saunders most cruelly.”
“We may expect this Monsieur Gramont here to-day,” said Madame Coulancourt.
“Yes, madame,” said Julia; “so Sergeant Perrin tells me.”
“Then I will take very good care to keep out of his way,” said Mabel: “for I am sure it is owing to his schemes that we have been molested.”
Leaving the inmates of Château Coulancourt in a rather troubled and apprehensive state of mind, we beg our readers to follow us into an apartment of the mansion inhabited by Monsieur Gramont.
Stretched on a bed, in a remote chamber of the house, lay Augustine Vadier; his right eye had been knocked out by a splinter of rock, and although the piece had been extracted, and the wound bound up by a surgeon from Havre, the eye was gone for ever, and there was considerable danger from inflammation. Notwithstanding this severe visitation and suffering, Augustine Vadier showed no kind of remorse for his past crimes, or evinced any symptoms of regret; on the contrary, his passion and vexation at being the only one wounded, and the escape of the person he intended to entrap, rendered the fever much worse.
“Has Monsieur Gramont arrived?” demanded Vadier of the sulky domestic that attended to his wants.
“He has not,” returned the man, “but he will be here before mid-day; he slept at Havre.”
“So those sacre Anglais have cut out the vessels in Palos Creek,” muttered Vadier, with a smothered execration; “this would not have occurred if that lazy rascal, the coast-guard, had followed my directions. We should have entrapped that English spy, who was here amongst those traitors at the Château Coulancourt, for the purpose of prying into the situation of the Vengeance. If, instead of watching the movements of the corvette, they had posted themselves on the sand-hills, they would have secured them all. Curse them! I am the only sufferer.”