Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

The Jesuit seemed unconscious of his companion’s existence. Pale as death, even to the lips, his face set, his teeth clenched, his eyes fixed on the horizon before him, as his mental sight projected itself into the unknown future he had this night resolved to penetrate, there pervaded the whole bearing of the man that unearthly air of abstraction peculiar to those who are doomed, whose trial is over, whose sentence is recorded, for whom henceforth there can be neither hope nor fear.

Sir George meditated on a thousand possible contingencies. Already his mind had overleaped the immediate affairs of the night, the coming skirmish, and its possible disaster. These were but every-day matters, familiar to his old habits, and scarce worth thinking of. But there was one scene beyond which his imagination could not be forced; it seemed, as it were, to limit his future in its bounds, and afterwards there would be no aim, no purpose, no relish in life. It represented a spit of sand on the coast of Picardy, and a man with shirt-sleeves rolled up, grasping a bloody rapier in his hand, who was smiling bitterly down on a dead face white and rigid at his feet.

Florian, too, sitting by his side, had his own vision. This, also, was of blood, but blood freely offered in atonement to friendship, and expiation for love.

The night was still, and the moonlight tempered by a misty sky that denoted there would be more snow before morning. The coachman dozed over his wheelers. The guard, overcome with brandy, laid his head on a hamper, and went fast asleep. The two seamen, silently consoling themselves with tobacco, shut an eye apiece, and screwed their faces into the expression of inscrutable sagacity affected by their class when they expect bad weather of any kind. The horses, taking counsel together, as such beasts do, jogged on at the slowest possible pace that could not be stigmatised for a walk, and the heavy machine lumbered wearily up the gradual ascent, which half a mile further on, where the hill became steeper and the road worse, was known as Borrodaile Rise.

Now the Abbé, in command of his little troop, had intended to conceal them behind a clump of thorns that diversified the plain surface of the moor, almost on the summit of this acclivity, and so pounce out upon his prey at the moment it was most hampered by the difficulties of its path; but, like other good generals, he suffered his plans to be modified by circumstances, and would change them, if advisable, at the very moment of execution.

On the right of the road, if road that could be called, which was but a soft and deeply-rutted track through the heather, stood the four walls of a roofless building, uninhabited within the memory of man, about twenty paces from a deep holding slough, through which the coach must pass; this post, with the concurrence of Bold and his confederates, the Abbé seized at once. It offered them some shelter against the storms of sleet that drove at intervals across the moor, while it afforded a covert from which, though mounted, they could reconnoitre unseen, for two miles in every direction, and rush out at a moment’s notice on their unsuspecting prey.

So, behind those grey, weather-stained walls, the little party sat their horses, erect and vigilant, reins shortened, firearms primed, swords loosened in the sheath, like a picket of light-cavalry when the alarm has sounded, and its outposts have been driven in.

The advancing coach made but little noise as it crept slowly onward through the snow, nevertheless a muttered oath from Blood Humphrey, and the scowl on Black George’s brow, announced its arrival ere it came in sight. By the time it could emerge from a certain hollow at fifty yards’ distance, and gain the slough, through which it moved heavily and wearily, like a hearse, its huge black mass brought out against the dead white of the misty, moonlit sky, afforded as fair a target for close shooting as a marksman need desire.

Captain Bold had been trembling all over but a few minutes back, now he was firm as a rock, but it cost him a desperate effort thus to man himself, and even while he cocked the pistol in his right hand, gathering his mare at the same time, for a dash to the front, he wished, from the bottom of his heart, he had undertaken any job but this.

“Steady, my friend!” whispered the Abbé. “In ten more paces the whole machine must come to a halt. At the instant it stops, cover your man, and level low!”