The Spanish dancer : being a translation from the original French by Henry L. Williams of Don Caesar de Bazan (17 page)

"Who are you? What want you?" said he, brutally, thinking it was one of his agents in disguise.

"Alms," was the doleful reply, "for a poor man who has lost his name and his wife 1"

"A monk lose his wife?" repeated Don Jose, mute in consternation at so bad a jest under this holy surface. "What devil of a monk is this ?"

"That ever-merry devil, your cousin!"

The cowl was tossed back with a reckless turn of the head, and the saucy face with its unquenchable eyes looked serenely into his own.

"Don Cses'ar!"

"In search of his wife!"

CHAPTER XII.

FACING THE FIRING LINE.

On the bridegroom being placed for execution before the corporal's file, he requested only one thing, to wit: that he should not be blindfolded.

"In boarding a ship, when I was fighting the Algerine Corsairs," he explained, "I often had to rush along the slippery deck into tlie gaping mouth of a pivot-gun, and to face the hand guns, that small change of cannon. I cannot bear being hoodwinked."

Without anything but his careless courage prompting him, he had, in waiving that common acquiescence in human weakness, done the finest act toward his saving. For at the instant of the soldiers taking slow aim with the improved French inventions, v^hich were still sufficiently clumsy, he caught a glimpse of Lazarillo covertly making impressive signs to him.

When a man's life is suspended on a word of command, all his senses become sharpened. He believed that the pantomime of the intelligent youngster implied that he had in some way juggled with the muskets. Considering that he was an armorer in the bud, this was significant.

So he took the hint in the most probable manner.

As soon as he saw that each lighted match, attached to a lever, was about to drop upon the pan filled with powder, he shut his eyes, and at the fizz—not the flash, which was a shade later—he dropped and was floundering on the ground as the smoke, impelled in his direction, momentarily hid his body.

He shut his eyes and set his teeth.

■But as the detonation still ran along within the walled

inclosure, he was sure that he had not been touched by anjr projectile.

"Dash me! but that httle imp has in some way rendered those firearms innocuous I"

So he curled himself up, kicked out as with the last spasm, and the rigor mortis seemed to spread over him as he becam.e stiff as a ramrod.

He had not long to wait for the natural sequel.

Three or four men, not military, came deliberately toward him from a buttress, where they had been sheltered from the shots, if any went astray.

One was the surgeon attached to the prison, the other two monks; at least, they were clad in the long robe, with hood coming to a point, slit with eyeholes, which denoted they were no doubt of the Penitential Fraternity. These usually dealt with the remains of those executed persons who had no friends to obtain the grace of interring the body in their guise.

"Unless my wife has determined to add my earthly casing to the row in the family vault," thought he, "I doubt that these good fathers will be emissaries of my cousin—• who might prefer that all traces of me should be lost in the paupers' pit!"

These charitable brethren carried a large sheet of tanned canvas which was the winding-sheet of their "customers."

They were also supplied with prayer-books, chained to their waist-girdle of rope, with beads, blessed candle and a box or unguent. They knelt down, and Don Caesar heard at his two ears a hash of Dog Latin which, perhaps, was not meant to be comprehended by the vulgar or learned.

"I suppose that is a prayer for the dead," said he to himself, very dubious.

In the meantime the surgeon took out with daintiness,

for he was a fop in his way—what they called in the town where he was a favorite, "the ladies' doctor"—a notebook, with a silver-point used as a writing implement. He proceeded to take notes, which must have been exceedingly valuable, since he kept his distance.

"What are the wounds?" asked he as soon as he believed he had given good measure to the prayers.

Luckily the fine doublet of Don Caesar had been torn open at the breast, and his underclothes had more than one hole and slit and were stained with grease and probably blood as well. So one of the monks answered with natural impulse founded on this misleading aspect:

"Why, doctor," snuffling, "the poor fellow is riddled like a folio with bookworms ! there are at least two round holes here!" and he held his fat hand over the bosom, which did not rise and fall in the least.

"Ah, wound in the super-auricular region," said the delicate son of Galen, "and another in the intercostal section ! You will accept my thanks, for I am going to a supper in the town, and this fellow, over whom was merely thrown those spruce habiliments, came out of the Jewry and, lastly, out of the cells where I lost several patients through jail fever!"

Whereupon, shutting his book with a snap and sniffing at a handkerchief dipped in aromatic vinegar, he nodded "good-by" to the subject so briefly dismissed, and trotted off to where the governor would receive his official statement that the dead prisoner was duly removed from his charge.

"Was it likely," observed the fatter monk of the pair to his companion, across the body, "that I would, if possible, let him cut and snip with his scissors this lovely satin ? I •have a buyer for it, Omfrio, d'ye see !"

"A buyer!" thought the pretended corpse, "Lord be-

tween us! suppose they have a buyer for my flesh-and-bones as well!"

Unfortunately, he could not indulge even in the mild relief of a shudder. But the monks, with a celerity born of practice, proceeded to roll him up in the sheet so that he could imagine what the mummies of his friends, the Egyptians, must have felt, presuming there is post-mortem sensation.

While working, they continued their dialogue, coolly professional, in a tone and with a frankness altogether too elucidatory to warm the blood of their patient.

Never was dialogue more calculated to enchain the subject, and he did not lose a syllable.

"So, so," crackled one voice, "we are again to deprive the common pit of the corpse? Is it to go into the catacomb of Our Good Works Church ?"

"My dear old Anselmo, this hapless mortal is to stay, like the body of Mahomet, whose name be cursed thrice, seven times and even nine, by the way, as a misleading prophet! in suspense ?"

"Do you mean we are to hang it up?"

"Metaphorically, my brother! But what a blessing— this time, we can take away the body openly and above-board."

"Yes, Omfrio, we have the pass verified, I suppose it was obtained through the insistance of his relatives, for this is no common wastrel "

"He is a scion, by the side of some noble house, who assumed the family name only to disgrace it! This is seen every day, considering that families put all the good members in the Church and cast the others into the army, or to loiter through life in bad company!"

"Oh, I am not the lawful heir to Garofa? Ah ! this is a story set afloat by that hanged Don Jose!" thought the "Dead One."

"And the family have redeemed the excrescence?" "They want to do so. But there are other claimants!" '"H-'allioa"' thought the subject under discussion, wincing mentally, "I am more in request dead than alive!"

"Where do we take him, then? I heard that his patrimonial estates were dissipated into thin air!"

"Sclah! it is so!" spoke Caesar, so low under his breath that he did not hear the sound himself.

"They are buried under an avalanche of mortgages, post-obits, repudiated notes of hand, protests et cctcrae!" A soldier who stood a little way off, to guard the dead until out of the prison yard, crossed himself at this scrap of Latin which, in his innocence^ he took for a pious adjuration.

"Go on," said he apologetically. "I do not follow you '—I scarce know my Credo!"

"Anselmo," continued the monk, but so as not to be overheard by the sentinel, "we have but to convey it to the chapel of our convent— • —" "The Good Works?"

"Where he is to rest pro-tempore, until his destination is settled upon. Mark, his cousin is no less than the Marquis of Santarem, raised to the premiership yesterday, and he will for the name's sake have him fitly disposed of!"

"He shall be handled tenderly, for he ha's become more precious since he cast off his mortal integuments than ever before!"

"Amen! Ah, what a leap-frog game life is! Down goes one cousin, making a back, and over goes the other with a skip, and rises into the foremost office Oif the kingdom ! A clod, here—there, a diamond out of its shell!" "Fine old family!" reflectively pursued the monk, who ■was securing the sheet by its frayed edges supplying the lihread. "I was, when 'rusticated' once, down amongi

the Garofas! It was said, whenever a Barefoot stubbed his toe on a stone, that the stone was not there when the, Garofas first were lords!"

"Holy brother, we know sometimes where we were born, but seldom where we will die and be buried This Garofa, granting he is Garofa, may never rest beneath his ancestral stones."

"No, not with his cousin so powerful as to draw his corse from the pauper grave ?"

"I intimated, dull pate that you are! that there was another bidder?"

"So you did!"

"You forget that, though it is forbidden to mutilate the casket of the soul, even to discover secrets useful to the race, the 'prentice 'sawbones' of the university, as well of Salamanca as of Saragossa, or of Segovia, which is only a step over the sierra, and, consequently, nearer home, give its weight in copper for that human pasty which they like to carve up in the dissecting-room."

"I believe at last in the g'houls and the vampires 1" thought Don Csesar.

"It would not be the first time," said Omfrio, frankly, "that I have heard of bodies being diverted from the crypt to that haunt of deservation !"

"And, still, there is another bidder."

"Well, I admire this treasure!" said Omfrio, playfully patting the cased packet, luckily not where it was sensitive. "It is like the country we live in—three contestants for it—kaiser, French prince and our ovv'n Don Carlos!"

"Between the three, I am likely to be quartered," moaned Cassar, inaudibly.

"Yes, his boon companions "

"Not the cadgers, the lepers, the gypsies "

'The gypsies, through their king, not a bad fellow/

"An excellent old scoundrel! He had forced me to drink with him when I lost my way and strayed into the ward under ban."

"Forced you to drink?" incredulously.

"Well, the rogue held up a horn with one dirty paw and brandished an ugly, crooked, saw-edged poniard in the other similarly dirty, and saying that it was 'tears/ which I was vowed to drink. I was compelled to gulp it down. Happily," and he smacked his pendent lips, "it was the wine called irreverently 'lachrymae," and I was well out of it. Then he added insult to the ignominy! He gave to me, who was seeking to bestow alms on these vermin, a bag of coppers, saying it was for my Christian poor."

"Well, it is this merry Duke of Egypt who will, I doubt not, offer a bag of silver, not of gold, to our abbot for this adopted brother of theirs."

"Adopted brother?"

"Without doubt. Have you not seen him dance with the pretty girl, the prettiest of them all, who has set the courtiers dreaming? Well, the foresworn knight learned those steps on their witches' Sabbath. Dressed only in a smear of hog's fat, they dance around Behemoth, or Levi Nathan, one of their infernal deities."

"It would ill become the abbot to lodge the poor wretch in those excommunicated hands."

"Oh, that he will not, unless the bribe is overtopping."

"Still, it is a horror—profanity in person," and the monk rattled his rosary, and, in his excitement, lashed the body a little smartly v^th it.

"I honor your words," thought the body, "but I owe you one for your frantic gestures."

"But have you done? Here comes old Pedro, wnth his mule. It is good for him to bring his strongest beast, for the dead weigh heavy."

"I only wish I could fall on you with all my weight, heartless monster," thought Csesar; "ay, I would drop out of my lot in paradise to execute that judgment, you fat lump."

"With two panniers," said Anselmo; "are we to cut the body in half?"

"Cannibal—no! I shall occupy the other basket to counterbalance him."

"Heaven make it light for him!"

"His punishm.ent?"

"No, the mule's burden—the two of ye/'

"Yes, you can lead! We will exchange when we get half-way!"

The soldier looked on as the two lifted the bound body and set to placing it in one of the panniers.

"By the holy lance!" cried he, "I congratulate you, master friar, on your nerve. It is steel of the first forging. I have been soldiering, youth and man, these fourteen years, and not in the city garrisons either, and I would not, to be the constable of all the Spains, and stand with my sword of state before the king, ride cheek by cheek with only a wicker hedge betwixt, with a dead scapegrace, on a dark, rough road, infested with goblins and slain travelers."

"Oh, we are proof to Satan," rejoined Omfrio, carelessly.

After feeling the sensation of a log rolled several times, Don Csesar felt that of being taken up and inserted, luckily head up, like a candle is put in its socket, in the basket most convenient. Pedro held the mule by the head, for it twitched with its hind legs and slightly whinnied a protest. The girth squeaked, and the weight depressed the filled basket.

"Thank my patron saint—if any of the Csesars were made saints," thought he—"that they knew, in mjr

shrouding- one end from the other, and stood the human bottle neck upward. A pretty headache I should have had if they had pitched me in this wickerwork with my, heels as the Antipodeans walk!"

The mule was shaken as by a blow from a battering-ram. It was Omfrio being hoisted between his brother and the muleteer into the other basket. This operation was performed much as the famous corpulent Cardinal Aldobrandino, "the eighth hill of Rome," was insinuated into his pantaloons—by letting him gradually descend! by his own gravity.