Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

A gleam came over the dying face, like a ray of sunlight gilding the close of a bleak winter’s day.

“I have never been false,” he murmured, “never false really in my heart. I swore to save you, George, life for life, and I have kept my oath. I shall not live to see Lady Hamilton again, but—but—you will tell her that it was my body which—”

He turned fainter now, and lay half-propped against the seat he had lately occupied, holding Sir George’s hand, and effectually preventing the baronet from taking any further part in the fray.

It is not to be supposed that the two seamen in the back of the coach had been idle witnesses of a tumult which so exactly coincided with their notions of what they termed “a spree.” Protected from the fire of the horsemen by a pile of luggage on its roof, or, as Slap-Jack called it, by the deck-cargo, they had made an excellent defence, and better practice than might have been looked for with a brace of borrowed pistols, apt to hang fire and throw high. The guard, too, after a careful and protracted aim, discharged his blunderbuss, with a loud explosion; and the result of their joint efforts was, that the highwaymen, as the last-named functionary believed them, were beaten off. Blood Humphrey’s horse was shot through the flank, though the poor brute made shift to carry his rider swiftly away. Black George had his ankle-bone broken, but managed to gallop across the moor after his comrade, writhing in pain, and with his boot full of blood. Bold lay dead on the ground. There was but one of the assailants left—a well-armed man in a cassock, who had kept somewhat in the background; and his horse, too, was badly wounded behind its girths.

Sir George was occupied with Florian, but the others sprang down to take the last of their foes captive; ere they could reach him, however, he had leaped into the bay mare’s saddle, and was urging her over the heather at a pace that promised soon to place him in safety, for the bay mare was the fastest galloper in Yorkshire, and her rider knew it was a race for life and death.

“By heavens, it is Malletort!” exclaimed Sir George, looking up from his charge, at sound of the flying hoofs, to observe something in the fugitive’s seat and figure that identified him with the Abbé, and gazing after him so intently, that he did not mark the expression of satisfaction on Florian’s pain-stricken face when he learned the other had escaped. “I never thought he could ride so well,” muttered the baronet, while he watched the good bay mare speeding steadily over the open, and saw the Frenchman put her straight at a high stone wall, beyond which he knew, by his own experience, there was a considerable drop into a ravine. The mare jumped it like a deer, and after a time rose the opposite slope at a swifter pace than ever. Sir George could only make her out very indistinctly now, yet something in the headlong manner of her career caused him to fancy she was going without a rider.

He had more important matters to occupy him. It had begun to snow heavily, and Florian was growing weaker every minute. With a dying man for their freight; with the absence of other passengers; above all, with the prospect of increased difficulty in progression at every yard they advanced, for the sky had darkened, and the flakes fell thicker, guard and driver were easily persuaded to turn their horses’ heads, and make the best of their way back to Hamilton Hill.

It was but a few miles distant, and Sir George, hoping against hope, tried to persuade himself that if he could only get Florian under his own roof alive, he might be saved.

They were good nurses, that tried campaigner and his two rough, hardy seamen. Tenderly, like women, they stanched the welling life-blood, supported the nerveless, drooping figure, and wiped the froth from the dry, white lips that could no longer speak, but yet made shift to smile. Tenderly, too, they whispered soothing words, in soft, hushed voices, looking blankly in each other’s faces for the hope their hearts denied; and thus slowly, sadly, solemnly, the dark procession laboured back, taking the road they had lately travelled, passed the well-known hostelry, and so wearily climbed the long ascent to the grim, looming towers of Hamilton Hill.