The fates had the blinded Ribault in their keeping. He was ferried across the stream for the last time, by the grim ferryman vouchsafed him; and the trophies which he first laid at the feet of the adelantado consisted of his own armor, a dagger, a casque of gold, curiously and beautifully wrought; his buckler, his pistolet, and a secret commission which he had received at the hands of Admiral Coligny himself. The standards of France and of the Admiral were then lowered at the feet of the Spaniard, then the banners of companies, and finally the sword of the Huguenot general. Never was submission more complete and shameful. The spirit of the veteran was utterly broken and gone. But this degradation was not thus to end. Melendez gave orders that he and the companions he had brought with him, eight in number, should be tied with their hands behind their backs. The indignity brought the blush with tenfold warmth into the cheeks of the old warrior. He foresaw the inevitable doom before him, but he felt the shame only.
“Have I lived for this? Is it thus, Monsieur Melendez, that you treat a warrior and a Christian?”
“God forbid that I should treat a Christian after this fashion. But are you a Christian, señor?”
“Of the Reformed Church, I am!” was the reply.
“I do not hold yours, señor, to be a church of Christ, but of Satan. Bind him, my comrades, and take him hence.”
A significant wave of the fatal staff, which had prescribed the line upon the spot of earth selected as the chosen place of sacrifice—the scene of a new auto-da-fé, as fearful as the preceding—finished his instructions, and as the guards led the veteran away, he commenced, in the well-known spirit of the time, to sing aloud the psalm “Domine, memento mei, &c.,” in that fearful moment well conceiving that there was left him now but one source of consolation, and none of present hope. He addressed no words of expostulation to his murderer; but as they led him away, he calmly remarked—“From the earth we came, to the earth we must return; soon or late, it is all the same; such must have been the fate. It is not what we would, but what we must.”
He renewed his psalm, the sounds of which grated offensively on the bigot ears of Melendez, falling from such lips, and he impatiently made the signal to his men to expedite the affair. The Huguenot general was led off singing. One of the accounts before us—for there is a Spanish and a French version of the history, differing in several minute, but really unimportant particulars—describes the last scene of Ribault’s career, in a brief but striking manner. The eight which constituted this party had each his assassin assigned him. Among the companions of Ribault at the moment of execution, was Lieutenant Ottigny, of whom we have heard more than once before in the history of La Caroline. They were led into the woods, out of sight and hearing of the French on the opposite side of the bay, all of whom were to be brought over, ten by ten, to the same place of sacrifice. The soldier to whom Ribault had been confided, when they had reached the spot strewn thickly with the corses of his murdered people, said to him—
“Señor, you are the general of the French?”
“I am!”
“You have always been accustomed to exact obedience, without question, from all the people under your command?”