"I shall escape and proclaim you."
"Pardieu! you won't, my beauty; because I shall kill you, and your disappearance will, like the king's ships, be set down to the score of these pestilent English, who have come hither to turn our Brittany upside down. Besides, who knows that I have carried you off?"
"And you will kill me—I, who never harmed you in thought, in word, or deed?" said she, with a shudder.
"Yes," he hissed through his clenched teeth.
"Oh, horror! Will no one rescue me?"
"Oui! Sacré! Kill you quietly and secretly, even as I killed quietly and surely the English captain of the Chevaux Legers in the wood near Cancalle yesterday."
I started on hearing this, for the assassin of poor Captain Brook of the 11th was now covered by the muzzle of my weapon. The speaker was a tall, rawboned fellow, whose form exhibited great strength and stature; he had a shambling gait, and a dirty visage of a very bilious complexion. His hair was black and shaggy; he had dark lacklustre eyes and large, fierce, blubberlike lips, yellowed as his broken fangs were by coarse tobacco juice. I had somewhere before seen this hideous face, the features of which gradually came to view as the increasing light stole gradually through the mulberry wood. How was it that this countenance, so pale and repulsive, the forehead which receded like that of a hound, the immense frontal bones, and the square jaw like that of a tiger, were in some sort not unfamiliar to me?
Though torn and in wild disorder, the dress of his prisoner, grey silk brocaded with white, evinced that she was of some rank, and her arms, which her tattered sleeves displayed almost to the shoulder, were beautiful in form and of exceeding delicacy.
"Nombril de Belzebub!" said he, suddenly, as he ground his teeth. "Come, come, we've had enough of this. Let us begone, lest those English wolves return."
Then the girl uttered a pitiful cry, as his huge knotty hand grasped her slender wrists.