Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

The blows of Hippolyte’s crowbar resounded against the strong oaken panels of the door, but the massive wood-work, though it shook and groaned, resisted stoutly for a time. It was well for the inmates that Célandine’s imaginative powers had suggested the concealed gunpowder. Had it not been for their fears of an explosion the negroes would ere this have set fire to the building, when no amount of resistance could have longer delayed the fate of the two ladies. Bartoletti, intimidated by the threats of his captors, and preoccupied only with the preservation of his own life, had shown the insurgents where the rum was kept, and many of these were rapidly passing from the reckless to the stupefied stage of intoxication. The Italian, who was not deficient in cunning, encouraged their potations with all his might. He thus hoped to elude them before morning, and leaving his employers to their fate, reach Port Welcome in safety; where he doubted not he should be met by Célandine, whose influence as an Obi-woman, he rightly conjectured, would be sufficient to insure her safety. A coward rarely meets with the fate he deserves, and Bartoletti did indeed make his eventual escape in the manner he had proposed.

Plying his crowbar with vigorous strokes, Hippolyte succeeded at length in breaking through one of the door panels, a measure to be succeeded by the insertion of hand and arm for withdrawal of the bolts fastened on the inside. The Coromantee possessed, however, a considerable share of cunning mixed with the fierce cruelty of a savage. When he had torn away enough wood-work to make a considerable aperture, he turned to his lieutenant and desired him to introduce his body and unbar the door from within. It is difficult to say what he feared, since even had he been aware that his mistress possessed firearms, he could not have conceived the possibility of her using them so recklessly in a house that he had reason to believe was stored with powder. It was probably some latent dread of the white race that prompted his command to his subordinate. “You peep in, you black nigger. Ladies all in full dress now. Bow-’ticks rosined and fiddlers dry. Open um door, and ask polite company to walk in.”

Thus adjured, Achille thrust his woolly head and half his shining black body through the aperture. Madame de Montmirail, standing before her daughter, was not five paces off. She raised her white arm slowly, and covered him with steady aim. Ere his large thick hand had closed round the bolt for which it groped, there was a flash, a loud report, a cloud of smoke curling round the toilet accessories of a lady’s bed-chamber, and Achille, shot through the brain, fell back stone dead into the passage.

“A little lighter charge of powder, my dear,” said the Marquise, giving the smoking weapon to her daughter to be reloaded, while she poised its fellow carefully in her hand. “I sighted him very fine, and was a trifle over my mark even then. These pistols always throw high at so short a distance.”

Then she placed herself in readiness for another enemy, and during a short space waited in vain.

The report of her pistol had been followed by a general scramble of the negroes, who tumbled precipitately downstairs, and in some cases even out of the house, under the impression that every succeeding moment might find them all blown into the air. But the very cause of the besiegers’ panic proved, when their alarm subsided, of the utmost detriment to the garrison. Hippolyte, finding himself still in possession of his limbs and faculties, on the same side of the Sulphur Mountain as before, argued, reasonably enough, that the concealed powder was a delusion, and with considerable promptitude at once set fire to the lower part of the house; after which, once more mustering his followers, and encouraging them by his example, he ascended the staircase, and betaking himself to the crowbar with a will, soon battered in the weak defence that alone stood between the ladies and their savage enemies.

Cerise had loaded her mother’s pistol to perfection; that mother, roused out of all thought of self by her child’s danger, was even now reckoning the last frail chance by which her daughter might escape. During the short respite afforded by the panic of the negroes, they had dragged with desperate strength a heavy chest of drawers, and placed it across the doorway. Even when the latter was forced, this slight breast-work afforded an additional impediment to the assailants.

“You must drop from the window, my child,” whispered the Marquise, when the shattered door fell in at length across this last obstruction, revealing a hideous confusion of black forms, and rolling eyes, and grinning fiendish faces. “It is not a dozen feet, but mind you turn round so as to light on your hands and knees. Célandine must be outside. If you can reach her you are safe. Adieu, darling! I can keep the two foremost from following you, still!”