Noémi
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The wife of Gros Guillem was a dreamy, desponding woman, who paid no attention to what he said, interested herself in no way in his affairs; neither stirring him to deeds of violence nor interfering to mitigate the miseries wrought by him. She accepted her position placidly. She was fond of Guillem in her fashion without being demonstrative, and it was a marvel to everyone how it was that he was so attached to her, and that she had maintained her hold on him through so many years.
It was reported, and the report was true, that the lady had been carried off by Guillem from the Castle of Fénelon. Guillem had retained her, in defiance of the excommunication launched at him by the Bishop of Cahors, and in defiance of the more trenchant and material weapons wielded against him by the Fénelon family, which was powerful in Quercy, and had a fortress on the Dordogne above Domme, and a house and rock castle above La Roque Gageac, side by side with that belonging to the Bishop of Sarlat. In an affray with Guillem's company the husband had been killed; the widow accepted this fact as she had accepted the fact that she had been carried off by violence. She sighed, lamented, pitied herself as a veritable martyr, and acquiesced in being the wife of the man who, though he had not killed her husband with his own hand, had caused his death.
With morning Guillem was easier and his head cooler, but there was no alteration in his resolve with regard to Del' Peyra. He would deal with him in such a signal manner as would from henceforth deter any man from lifting a finger against himself.
In his fever he had racked his brain to consider in what manner he would treat him.
He sent for his lieutenant and ordered that he should himself be carried into the keep.
"And," said he, "bring up the prisoner – and call up the men, into the lower dungeon."
Noémi was walking on the terrace of the castle that same morning; she had been up late, had attended to the fevered man, her father, and now was sauntering in the cool under the shade of the lime-trees, clipped en berceau, that occupied the walk on the walls – a walk that commanded the glorious valley of the Dordogne, that wondrous river which flows through some of the most beautiful and wild scenery in Europe, and is also the most neglected by the traveller in quest of beauty and novelty.
At this time she knew something of the events of the previous day. She knew also of the taking and the destruction of l'Eglise Guillem. Twice had the Del' Peyras measured their strength against the redoubted Captain, and twice had they forced him to fly. At the head of raw peasants without rudimentary discipline they had defied and beaten the troopers of a hundred skirmishes. She was not surprised. She had seen Rossignol. Great wrongs wake corresponding forces that must expend themselves on the wrong-doers. It is but a matter of time before the thunder-cloud bursts. Every crime committed sends up its steam to swell the vaporous masses and carries with it the lightning.
Nursed though Noémi had been in an atmosphere of violence, hearing of it as matter for exultation, the ruin of households and homesteads spoken of as a matter of course, she had never been brought face to face with the wreckage till she was shown it at Ste. Soure.
And did she feel anger against the Del' Peyras for having taken up arms to revenge their wrongs? Nothing was more natural: nothing more just where the Crown and law were powerless, than that men should right themselves. She would have despised the Del' Peyras had they sat down under their wrong without any attempt to repay it.
Noémi's nature was a good one, but it was undisciplined. Her mother had allowed her to go her own way. Her father treated her with indulgence, and that precisely where she should have been checked.
In a lawless society she had learned to fear neither God nor the king. Both were too far off. The one in Heaven, the other in England; too distant to rule effectively. A certain perfunctory homage was claimed by both, neither was regarded as exercising any control over men. A feudal service was all that a bandit in those days, or indeed any baron or seigneur, thought of rendering to the Almighty. He would fight in a crusade for Him, he would do knightly homage in church, but he would no more obey the laws of the Christian religion than he would those of the realm of France.
Noémi had seen but little of Jean del' Peyra, and yet that little had surprised her, and had awoke in her thoughts that were to her strange, and yet, though strange, consonant with her instinctive sense of what was right and wrong.
Jean del' Peyra not only surprised her, but occupied her thoughts: she saw, almost for the first time, in him one of a different order from the men with whom she had been thrown. Even her cousins, the Tardes, were akin in mind and consciencelessness to the routiers.What they did that was right was done rather out of blind obedience to instinct, or allegiance to their feudal lord, the Bishop of Sarlat. They were noble, for they had escutcheons over their doors, but all their nobility was external. They were boastful, empty roysterers.
On the other hand, the Del' Peyras were quiet, made no pretence to being more than they were, and were inspired with a moral sense and a regard for their fellow-men.
She saw how far greater was the influence exerted by the old man and his son than was exercised by that remorseless man of war, Guillem, or the braggart Jacques Tarde. Her father controlled men by fear; Ogier del' Peyra moved men by respect. The Captain was a destructive, and only a destructive element. Solely by means of men like the Del' Peyras could human happiness and well-being be built up.
Noémi was a thoughtful girl.
At first, somewhat contemptuously, she had set down Jean del' Peyra as a milksop; from what she had heard, his father was but a country clown. But the country clown and the milksop had revealed in themselves a force, an energy quite unexpected. Noémi laughed as her busy mind worked. She laughed to think of the discomfiture of professional fighting men, accustomed to arms from their youth, by a parcel of inexperienced peasants and charcoal-burners.
She was glad that these oppressed beings had risen. It showed that there was in them a nature above that of rabbits. She had seen a thousand times the holes into which they ran at the glint of a spearhead, at the jangle of a spur. But now they had issued from their holes and had hunted like wolves.
But these poor, ignorant timid peasants would never have done this had they not been led. It was the moral character, the true nobility of the Del' Peyras that had rallied the people around them, given them courage, and directed their blind impulse of revenge into proper forms of retaliation.
Was the execution of those ten men of her father's band to be accounted a wanton act of cruelty?
Noémi could not admit this. Some such rude administration of justice was rendered necessary by the times. The men who had suffered had merited their death by a hundred deeds of barbarity.
It was as though a spell had fallen on the girl. She was exultant, her heart was bounding with pride, and that because her father and his ruffians had been put to rout by their adversaries.
The girl was unable to explain to herself the reason of this, but, indeed, she did not admit to herself that it was as has been described. Yet she was sensible that some spell was on her. She had proposed to cast one on Jean. That kiss she had given him had been intended to work the charm. But, alack! there are dangerous spells which a witch may weave that affect herself as much as her victim, and of such was even this.
As Noémi paced the terrace, her mind in a ferment, she was accosted by Roger, the good-natured, somewhat impudent fellow who had attended her on her expedition to the Devil's Table.
He had torn off his red cross, but he had not left Domme, nor, indeed, the castle. He would no longer share in an expedition against Ste. Soure, but he was not unwilling to do any other service for the Captain.
He could now exult over his comrades who had returned from such an expedition with diminished numbers, defeated.
He approached the girl and accosted her.
Noémi answered curtly that she did not desire to speak to him. She disliked the forwardness of the man.
"But," said he, "I would save his life – he saved mine."
"Save whom?"
"The Seigneur del' Peyra."
"What of him?"
"He was taken yesterday."
"The Seigneur – taken!"
"And the Captain is now with him – in the dungeon under the keep."
"Doing what?" asked Noémi in breathless alarm.
"There is none in the world can save him but yourself; the Captain would listen to no one else."
"Save him – from what?"
"The oubliette."
CHAPTER XVI.
VADE IN PACE
The thought of undefined horror conveyed by that word "oubliette" for a moment held Noémi as though it had paralysed her. But this was for a moment only, and then she bounded in the direction of the keep.
A word must be said as to what an oubliette was. In almost every mediæval castle in France and Germany the visitor is shown holes, usually in the floor, that descend to a considerable depth, and which are said to be oubliettes– that is to say, places down which prisoners were dropped when it was to the interest of the lord of the castle to sink them in oblivion.
Sometimes these places communicate with a river or a lake, as at Chillon, and this passage is set with irons, presumably to cut in pieces the body of the man cast down it.
In the vast majority of cases these so-called oubliettes are nothing but openings connected with the drainage of the castle or else are the well-mouths of cisterns in which the rain-water from the roofs was collected and stored.
Nevertheless, the fact that skeletons have been found in some of the closed subterranean vaults, and that a percentage of them cannot be explained as having been anything else but receptacles for prisoners thrown in, to die a languishing death, and lastly, the historic certainty that some poor wretches have so perished, shows that popular belief is not wholly unfounded. The writer has himself been let down by ropes into one in which four skeletons were entombed, and it is well known that in 1403 one of the Counts of Armagnac so disposed of his cousin, who lingered on thus immured for eight days. The son would have shared his father's fate but that out of horror at the notion of being flung down the well on the corpse of his father, the poor lad dropped dead on the brink.
Moreover, under the title of vade in pace, the oubliette was used, not in castles only, but in convents as well, and was there introduced by Matthew, Prior of St. Martin des Prés, in Languedoc, in the middle of the fourteenth century, when the Archbishop of Toulouse interfered to forbid the employment of this inhuman mode of execution. A prelate might step in to check the barbarity of a prior, but who was there to hold the hand of a noble?
Noémi saw a cluster of men outside the door that led into the dungeon, and forced her way through them. The dungeon was not large, it would not admit more than a dozen men. It opened on to a platform of rock on the outside of the castle, not into the inner court. Access to it was obtained by a doorway in the basement of the keep, where the wall was ten feet thick. The chamber was vaulted, and only near the middle sufficiently lofty to admit of anyone standing upright in it. There was no window by which light and air could penetrate. When the door was shut, both were excluded. The walls, the floor, the vault were of square-cut limestone.
At the further end, immediately opposite the door was a recess, conchoidal, and in this recess what seemed to be a well. There was a stone step in the floor, and above that a circular coped wall, precisely such as may be seen where there is a well; with this difference, that the orifice was not two feet in diameter, a very inconvenient size for a bucket to pass up or down.
In the dungeon sat Le Gros Guillem on a pallet, with his feet raised and bandaged. Before him, bound, with his hands behind his back, was Ogier del' Peyra, between two jailers. The old man had concluded that his head would be struck off, at the worst that he would be hanged. The sight of the vade in pace, and the knowledge that he was to be cast down alive and left to a lingering agony, had blanched his cheek, but did not make him tremble.
Ogier did not know, he could not guess, the depth of the oubliette.But he was aware that such were sometimes not so profound but that he who was flung in broke some of his bones, and thus died of a combination of miseries. Happy he who, falling on his head, was reduced at once to unconsciousness.
"Well, Del' Peyra," cried Guillem, in his harsh tones, rendered harsher by the feverishness and weariness of the past night, "will you not stoop to beg of me your life?"
"It is of no use," answered Ogier.
"Hold the lights, that I may see him!" ordered the Captain.
Two of his men brought torches that emitted as much smoke as light. In the dungeon, darkened by the men crowding the door, artificial illumination was necessary.
"You are right there!" shouted Guillem, in response to the words of Ogier. "I shall not spare your life. But what think you of the mode of death? Come, kneel, kiss my foot – wounded through you; and I may consent to have you hanged instead of thrown down yonder!" He indicated the well-like opening.
The glare of the torches was on Guillem's face as much as on that of his prisoner. He was haggard with pain and mortified pride. He was but half-dressed, was in his shirt, and his shirt was open over his red, hairy breast. His tall, polished head shone like copper in the lurid flicker of the links. His great mouth, half open with a grim laugh, revealed the teeth, pointed as though to bite and tear. He was very thin, but muscular, and his limbs were long. As already said, it was but in jest that he was entitled "Le Gros."
It may be questioned whether in the heart of a single ruffian present there stirred the smallest emotion of pity for the man who was to be sent to so horrible a fate, for all had been humbled by Ogier, and all angrily resented their humiliation. Moreover, all desired to avenge their ten companions.
"Hold up the light, that I may see how he relishes it!" ordered Guillem, brutally. Then he said: "Pull off his boots, strip him to his shirt."
But immediately he countermanded the order.
"Nay," said he, "leave him his leather belt and boots; he may satisfy his cravings on them. And, Sieur Ogier, when you want more leather, call for my boots. They have been cut to pieces, and are useless to me. They may make a meal for you."
The Captain looked steadily at his victim from under his lowering eyebrows.
"How came you to think of resisting me?" he asked.
Ogier shrugged his shoulders.
"This execution will be noised everywhere," continued Guillem. "I shall take care of that. And then every man will have a wholesome dread of me, and a fear of resisting me."
"Not my son Jean," retorted Ogier.
"Your son Jean comes next," said the Captain. "I shall deal with him presently."
"You must catch him first," said Ogier.
"Take the prisoner to the hold!" shouted Guillem.
Then the two jailers laid their hands on the shoulders of Ogier del' Peyra.
"You need not drag me. I can walk," said the old man.
Those crowding the close and narrow dungeon fell back, as well as they were able, to make a passage for the condemned man.
He was taken to the well-mouth and seated on it, with his face towards the door, through which glimpses of sunlight were visible athwart the heads that filled the opening. Ogier had been divested of his jerkin. He was in his shirt and breeches and boots. As the Captain had bidden that his belt should be left him, this had been refastened about his waist, after that his coat had been removed. In order to divest him of his outer garments it had been necessary for the jailers to remove the handcuffs that had fastened his arms behind his back.
"Cursed smoke!" said Guillem. "We are smothered in the fume. Stand aside all of you and let the fresh air enter, that we may breathe. Hearken, Ogier! Will you yet ask life of me?"
At Guillem's command the men had stepped forth and completely cleared the entrance, so that the brilliant sunlight flowed in as well as the pure air. And this light fell directly on the man who was soon to be excluded for ever from it. He was seated on the well-mouth in his white shirt. His face was as grey as the thick hair of his beard. He was conscious that he was looking for the last time at the light. He could see intense blue sky, and one fleecy cloud in it. He could see the green turf, and some yellow tansies standing against a bit of wall in shade, the tansies in full sunlight; and he could see a red admiral butterfly hovering about them. It was marvellous how, with death before him, he could yet distinguish so much. But he looked at everything with a sort of greed, because he saw all these things for the last time. For the first and only moment in his life he saw that a red admiral was beautiful, that the sky was beautiful, the grass beautiful.
"You have not answered me," said Le Gros Guillem, sneering. "Messire Ogier, will you yet ask life of me?"
"If you were in my hands, as I am in yours, would you ask that question?"
Le Gros Guillem paused one moment. Then with an oath —
"No!"
"Nor I of you," said Ogier gravely.
Guillem raised his hands. The fingers were inordinately long and thin. He made a sign to the jailers, one of whom stood back, on each side of Ogier, by the well-mouth, with his hand on the shoulder of the prisoner. Each man, as was customary, had his face covered – that is to say, a black sack was drawn over his head, in which were two holes cut, through which peered the eyes.
"Throw him down!"
At that moment, taking advantage of the avenue made for the admission of air, Noémi rushed in. A couple of men stepped forward to intercept her, but she was too nimble for them; she was within almost as soon as they thought of throwing themselves in her way, and had cast herself upon Ogier and clasped him with her arms.
"Father! Father! It cannot, it shall not be!"
The door was filled again; the men crowded in to see what new turn events would take, whether this intervention would avail.
The jailers desisted as they were raising the old man; they felt that the sight of the execution of the sentence could not be permitted to a young girl. Moreover, she held Del' Peyra fast, and he could not be extricated from her arms without the exercise of force.
"Noémi!" exclaimed Le Gros Guillem, throwing his feet off the pallet, "what is the meaning of this? Why are you here? At once away! Do you hear me?"
"I will not let go! He shall not die! Father, it cannot – it shall not be!"
"Unloose her arms," ordered Guillem, and signed to the men.
Firmly they obeyed. It was in vain that the girl clung, writhed, endeavoured to disengage her arms from their grasp, and clung to the condemned man. They held her like a vice and drew her back from the pit-mouth and interposed their persons between her and the man she was endeavouring to save.
Then, in a paroxysm of horror and pity, Noémi threw herself on her knees before her father and implored him to yield.
"What is Del' Peyra to you?" he asked sternly.
"Nothing – nothing," she gasped. "Oh, father, let him go! let him go!"
"Twice have you interfered between me and him. Why is that?"
She could not answer his question; she did not attempt to do so. She persisted in her entreaties. In her anguish she caught hold of one of his injured feet and made him cry out with pain.
"Father! If I have ever done anything for you! If you have any love for me – any thought to do what I wish – grant me this. Spare him! Spare him!"
"Never!" answered Le Gros Guillem. Then he waved his long hand and said, "Remove this silly girl."
But when Noémi felt hands laid on her, she leaped to her feet, shook herself free, and said, panting —
"Let be! Do not touch me! I ask his life, no more."
"You do well, child," sneered the Captain. "You then run no more risk of disappointment."
"Yet – if that be denied me, there is one thing I do ask," gasped Noémi.
Her breath came as though she had been running up hill. She put her hands to her head, and held it, till she had recovered sufficiently to proceed.
"There is one thing I do ask," she repeated. "Do not cast him down – let him down gently."
A harsh laugh from Le Gros Guillem.
"You are a silly child, a fool, who know not what you ask. You will prolong his torture, not shorten it – but you shall have your wish. Be it so."
He waved to the jailers.
"Go, child, go!" said he to his daughter.
"I will stay and see it done," she said. "I will not ask another thing."
She stood erect and looked at the old man; her mouth quivered, and her eyes were as though fixed hard in their sockets like stones in a setting.
And the sight was one to freeze the blood.
The jailers raised Ogier, who offered no resistance, but fixed his eyes strainingly on a spot of light above a man's head in the doorway.
He was lifted till his feet were above the well, and then he was let down by ropes passed under his arms, slowly, deliberately.
Those holding the torches raised them, and the smoke described cabalistic devices on the roof. The glare was on the sinking man.
He went down below his knees, then his waist disappeared. Involuntarily he put forth his arms to arrest his descent, by gripping the well-breast, but recollected that resistance was in vain, and lowered his arms to his sides.
Then his breast was hidden, then his shoulders went under. For a moment all visible was the ghastly grey face with the glittering eyes, and then – that also was gone.
He uttered no cry, no groan, he went down like a dead man, into profound darkness, into his living tomb.
All was still in the dungeon, save for the labouring breath of those who looked on. The jailers lowered till the ropes became slack. Then they knew the poor wretch was on the floor of the vault below. Each man threw down one end of his rope and drew at the other, even as at a funeral the ropes are withdrawn when the dead has been lowered.
In the stillness, Guillem laughed – silently – showing all his fangs, and waving his arms in the direction of the oubliette mouth, and extending his lean fingers said —
"Vade in pace!"
CHAPTER XVII.
IN THE RAVEN'S NEST
When Le Gros Guillem was carried back to his room, he said to his wife, "Where is Noémi?"
"I believe – that is, I suppose she is going to her Aunt Tarde at La Roque. She said something about it. Something has occurred and she is not herself. I don't know what it is."
"I dare say!" laughed the Captain. "Noémi has witnessed this day what has been seen by few girls. She stood it manfully – at the last."
"I dare say. I know nothing about it," said his wife.
"If she is going to La Roque, then Roger and Amanieu shall accompany her. I have a letter to transmit to Ste. Soure."
He sent for writing materials, and wrote in a scrawling hand:
"Dear and most valiant friend, Seigneur Jean del' Peyra at Le Peuch Ste. Soure. – Please you to know that your father is let down into oblivion. Dear and well-loved Sir, God have you ever in guard.
"Written at Domme, Wednesday, and sent by the hands of Roger and Amanieu."
That was the fashion of epistolary correspondence as conducted in those times. "Dear friend" was the salutation to a deadly foe, "God have you ever in guard," when the writer would like to cut the throat of him he addressed.
Such was the letter received by Jean del' Peyra. It was not explicit. He had been in the greatest anxiety relative to his father. That he would be put to ransom was his hope, but not his expectation.
He looked to the bearer of the epistle for explanation, and then for the first time saw Noémi, her face rigid and ghastly, as though she had seen a ghost, and could not shake off the impression.