Fergan, thinking only of the safety of his child, followed the advice of Azenor, and, thanks to the herculean strength he was endowed with, succeeded in pushing the ma.s.sive piece of furniture across the door, which, thus barricaded, could not swing open into the room. The sorceress hastily wrapped herself in a mantle; took from the cabinet whence she had extracted the casket, a little leathern bag containing precious stones, and said to the quarryman, holding the casket out to him: "Take this gold and let's flee."

"Carry your gold, yourself! I shall carry my child and my pick to defend him!" answered the serf, taking up his iron bar with one hand, and placing on his left arm little Colombaik, who held fast by his father's neck. At that very moment the fugitives heard from without the sound of the key that turned in the lock, followed by the voice of the seigneur of Plouernel: "Who is holding that door back inside? Is that one of your enchantments, accursed sorceress?"

While the Count was beating against the door, and, redoubling his imprecations, vainly sought to force it, the quarryman, his son and Azenor, gathered in the turret, prepared to flee by the secret pa.s.sage.

One of the slabs of the flooring, being swung aside by means of a counterweight and chains wound around an iron axis, exposed the first step of a ladder so narrow that it could barely allow pa.s.sage to one person at a time, and of such a slope at that spot that its first ten rungs could be cleared only by sliding down almost on the back from step to step. Azenor was the first to undertake the narrow pa.s.sage; the little Colombaik imitated her; the two were followed by Fergan, who then readjusted the counterweight. The stone slab, back again in its place, again masked the secret pa.s.sage. This steep portion of the ladder was wrought in an abutment of the turret, where its base projected beyond the wall of the donjon. Its foot connected with the narrow stone spiral, which, wrought in the ten-foot thick wall, descended to the lowest depths of the donjon. At each landing, a skilfully masked outlet opened upon this secret pa.s.sage, lighted by not a ray from without. But Fergan, equipped with his tinder box, punk and wick, of the kind that he helped himself with in the quarries, lighted the pa.s.sage, and, with his iron pick in one hand, his light in the other, preceded his son and Azenor down the stone spiral. The descent was but slowly effected.

Presently the fugitives, leaving above them the level of the landing where the hall of the stone table was located, and which was situated on the ground floor, arrived at the place that corresponded with the subterranean cells. Here the pa.s.sage served not merely as a means of retreat in case of a siege, it also afforded the chatelain an opportunity to spy upon the prisoners and overhear their confidential communications. By its construction, the cell of Bezenecq the Rich gave special facilities for such espionage. Furthermore, a slab three feet square by two inches thick, fastened in a strong oaken frame on hinges, const.i.tuted a sort of stone door, undistinguishable from the inside of the somber apartment, but easy to push open from without. Thus the seigneur reserved to himself an access to those subterraneous chambers, unknown even to the dwellers of the castle. Above the opening and within the cell was sculptured that hideous mask, whose sight had frightened the daughter of the merchant. The two eyes and the mouth of this grim figure, bored through the full thickness of the wall and exteriorly chiseled in the form of a niche, permitted the spy, posted at that place of concealment, to see the prisoners and overhear what they said.

Thus it happened a few hours before that Fergan, climbing up by the light of his wick, had overheard the conversation between the Bishop of Nantes and Jeronimo, the legate of the Pope, and then that of the bourgeois of Nantes and his daughter. The fugitives were now on a level with the cell of Bezenecq, when suddenly brilliant rays of light shot through the openings in the stone mask, proceeding from a light within.

Fergan was in advance of his child and Azenor. He halted at the sound of rawkish peals of laughter--frightful, like those of a maniac. The serf peeped through the holes pierced in the eyes of the mask, and this was what he saw by the light of a lantern placed upon the ground. Two naked corpses, the one suspended by the neck from the iron gibbet fastened in the wall, the other by the groins from the iron p.r.o.ng. The former, rigid, horribly distended and dislocated by the enormous weight of the stone attached to his feet; the latter, hooked by the flesh upon the sharp p.r.o.ng that penetrated his entrails, was bent backwards with his arms dangling against his legs. These victims, captured shortly before, from a new troop of travelers on the territory of the seigneur of Plouernel and taken to this cell, better fitted out than the others with instruments of torture, did not survive the experience. The corpse of Bezenecq the Rich was chained to the gridiron above the dying embers of the coal fire. The agonies of that unhappy man had been so excruciating that his members, held fast by the iron bands, had been convulsively distended. Undoubtedly at the moment of expiring he had made a supreme effort to turn his head towards his daughter, so as to die with her in sight. The face of the merchant, blackened, frightful to behold, retained the expression of his agony. A few steps from the corpse of her father, cowering upon the straw bed, her knees held in her arms, Isoline swayed to and fro, emitting at intervals rythmic peals of maniacal laughter. She had gone crazy. Fergan, moved with pity, was considering how to deliver the daughter of Bezenecq, when the door of the cell opened and Gonthram, the eldest son of Neroweg, stepped in, a torch in his hands and his cheeks of purple. His eyes, his unsteady walk, all announced a high stage of inebriety. Approaching Isoline, he struck against the gridiron, where lay the corpse of the bourgeois of Nantes.

Unmoved by that spectacle, Gonthram stepped towards the young girl, seized her rudely by the arm, and said in a maudlin voice: "Come, follow me!" The demented girl seemed not to hear, she did not even raise her eyes, and continued swaying to and fro and to laugh. "You are quite gay," observed the whelp; "I also am gay. Come upstairs. We shall laugh together!"

"Oh, traitor!" broke in a new personage, precipitating himself out of breath into the cell. "I made no doubt what you had in your mind when I saw you leave the table the moment my father went up to the sorceress!"

And throwing himself upon his brother, Guy, the second son of Neroweg, cried out: "If you want the girl, you will have to pay for her with your blood!"

"Vile b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You, the son of my mother's chaplain! You dare to threaten me!" In his rage, increased by intoxication, Gonthram raised his burning torch, struck his brother with it in the face and drew his sword. Guy, uttering a furious imprecation, also drew his sword. The struggle was short. Guy fell lifeless at the feet of his brother, who exclaimed: "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d is dead. I am the better man. The girl is mine!"

and rushing back to Isoline: "Now, you are mine!"

"No!" resounded a menacing voice, and before Gonthram, who had taken up the daughter of Bezenecq in his arms, had time to turn around, he received over his head a crushing blow with an iron bar, throwing him down upon his brother's body. From the place of concealment, where Fergan had stood, he saw the commencement of the fratricidal strife and had entered the cell by the secret opening when the fight was at its height between the two sons of Neroweg. Time was pa.s.sing. Some of the men of the seigneur of Plouernel, observing the prolonged absence of the two whelps, might at any moment come down. Fergan took the poor maniac by the hand and led her to the secret opening. "Now, stoop, dear child, and get through the aperture." Isoline remained motionless. Renouncing all hope of being understood by her, Fergan pressed his two hands with force upon the shoulders of the child. "Woman," the serf cried out to Azenor the Pale, who had remained outside of the cell, contemplating the two bleeding bodies of the sons of Neroweg, "take the hand of this poor girl and try to draw her out."

"Why take this insane woman along?" said Azenor to Fergan. "She will r.e.t.a.r.d our march and increase the difficulties of our flight."

"I wish to save this unfortunate being."

Sustained by Fergan, who preceded Colombaik, carrying the lighted wick, Isoline descended with difficulty the steps of the staircase.

Penetrating ever deeper into the bowels of the earth, the fugitives arrived at the bottom of the stone spiral that connected with a tunnel, bored through the living rock at such a depth that, pa.s.sing under the sheet of water of the gigantic pit, from the midst of which the donjon rose, it issued out into the open half a league away from the castle at a place concealed amid tumbling bowlders and brushwood.

CHAPTER X.

CUCKOO PETER.

Day was slowly breaking upon the fateful night during which the fugitives effected their escape from the manor of Plouernel. Joan the Hunchback, seated at the threshold of her hut, which lay at the extremity of the village, incessantly turned her eyes, red with weeping, towards the road by which Fergan, absent since the previous morning in quest of Colombaik, was expected. Suddenly the female serf heard from afar a great tumult, caused by the approach of a large crowd of people.

At intervals confused and prolonged clamors were heard rising above the din, frantically crying out: "G.o.d wills it! G.o.d wills it!" Finally Joan saw a crowd of people turning a road that led to the village. At the head marched a monk mounted on a white mule, whose bones protruded from its skin, together with a man-at-arms astride of a small black horse, not less lean than the mule of his companion.

The monk, called by some Peter the Hermit, but by most Cuckoo Peter, wore a tattered brown frock, on the left sleeve of which near the shoulder was sewn a cross of red material, the rallying sign of the Crusaders on the holy march of the Crusade. A rope served him for a belt. His unhosed feet, shod in worn-out sandals, rested on wooden stirrups. His cowl, pushed back, exposed a bald head, boney and grimy like the rest of his face, bronzed by the hot sun of Palestine. His hollow eyes, glistening with a somber fire, flamed from the depths of their orbits. His haggard looks expressed savage fanaticism. In one hand he held a cross of rude wood, hardly planed, with which ever and anon he smote the crupper of his mule to quicken its pace.

The companion of Cuckoo Peter was a Gascon knight surnamed Walter the Pennyless. Of a physiognomy as grotesque and jovial as that of the monk was savage and funereal, the mere sight of the knight provoked a smile.

His eyes, sparkling with mischief, his inordinately long nose, that almost kissed the chin, his rakish mouth, slit from ear to ear, his features hinged on a perpetual grin, amused from the start, and when he spoke, his buffoonery and his mirthful sallies, delivered with southern spirit, carried hilarity to its highest pitch. Wearing on his head a rusty, cracked and knocked-in casque, ornamented with a bunch of goose feathers, his chest covered with a breast-plate no less rusty, no less cracked and no less knocked in than his casque, Walter the Pennyless also wore the red cross on the left sleeve of his patched cloak. Shod in cowhides, fastened with cords around his long heron legs, he bore himself with as triumphant an air on his lean black hirsute horse, that he named the "Sun of Glory," as if he bestrode a mettlesome charger. His long sword, sheathed in wood, named by him the "Sweetheart of the Faith," hung from his leathern shoulder belt. On his left arm he bore a shield of tin, covered with vulgar pictures. One of these, filling the upper part, represented a man clad in rags, knapsack on back and pilgrim staff in hand, departing on the Crusade, as indicated by the cross of red stuff painted on his shoulder. The lower picture represented the same man, no longer wan and haggard, no longer dressed in tatters, but splendidly fitted out, bursting with fat, and spread upon a bed, covered with purple cloth, beside a beautiful Saracen woman, with nothing on but collar and bracelets. A Saracen, wearing a turban and humbly kneeling, poured out the contents of a coffer full of gold at the foot of the bed where the Crusader was frolicking with his female bedfellow in an obscene posture. The very crudity of the idea expressed by these vulgar pictures was calculated to make a lively impression upon the childish imagination of the mult.i.tude.

At the heels of Cuckoo Peter and Walter the Pennyless followed a mob of men, women and children, serfs and villeins, mendicants and vagabonds, prost.i.tutes and professional thieves, the latter distinguishable by their cropped ears, as well as the murderers, some of whom, in a spirit of sanguinary ostentation, bedecked their b.r.e.a.s.t.s with pieces of black cloth bearing in white one, or two, sometimes three skulls--a sinister emblem, denoting that the holy Crusade gave absolution for murder, however frequently committed by the criminal. All bore the red cross on the left sleeve. Women carried on their backs their children too young to walk, or too tired to proceed on the route. Other women, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, leaned on the arms of their husbands, loaded with a bag containing all their havings. The least poor of the Crusaders traveled on donkeys, on mules or in wagons. They carried all their belongings with them, even to their pigs and chickens. The latter, fastened by the legs to the rails of the wagons, kept up a deafening cackle. Other poor people dragged their milk goats after them, or a loaded sheep, or even one or more cows.

Contrasting with this tattered mult.i.tude, here and there some couples were seen, the cavalier in the saddle, his paramour on the crupper, happy to escape through that holy pilgrimage the jealous or disturbing surveillance of a father or a husband. These runaways also took the route of the Orient. Among them was Eucher with the handsome Yolande, dispossessed of her father's heritage by the seigneur of Plouernel. They had sold a few jewels, given one-half the proceeds to Yolande's mother, and with the rest the lovers bought a mule on which to follow the Crusaders to Jerusalem.

This mob, consisting of three or four thousand persons, moving from Angers and surrounding localities, recruited its forces all along the route with new pilgrims. The faces of the serfs and villeins breathed joy. For the first time in their lives they left an accursed land, soaked in the sweat of their brow and in their blood, and to which, from generation to generation, they and their fathers had been chained down by the will of the seigneurs. At last they tasted a day of freedom, an inestimable happiness to the slave. Their joyous cries, their disorderly songs, gross, licentious, resounded far and wide, and ever and anon they repeated with frenzy the words, hurled out by Cuckoo Peter in a hoa.r.s.e voice: "Death to the Saracens! Let's march to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre! G.o.d wills it!" At other times they echoed the Gascon cavalier, Walter the Pennyless: "To Jerusalem, the city of marvels! Ours is Jerusalem, the city of pleasures, of good wine, of beautiful women, of gold and of sunshine! Ours is the Promised Land!"

Singing, dancing, uproarious with gladness, the troop crossed the village and pa.s.sed by the hut of Fergan. The serfs, instead of betaking themselves to the fields for their hard day's labor, ran ahead of the train, shut in at that moment between two lines of ruined houses that bordered the road. Joan, standing at the threshold of her door, looked at this mob as it pa.s.sed, with a mixture of astonishment and fear. A big scamp of a gallows bird, nicknamed by his companions Corentin the Gibbet-cheater, was giving his arm to a young wench that went by the name of Perrette the Ribald. She noticed poor Joan the Hunchback at her door and cried out to her, alluding to her deformity: "Halloa, you there, who carry your baggage on your back, come with us to Jerusalem; you will be admired there as one of the prodigies among the other marvels!"

"By the navel of the Pope! By the b.u.t.tocks of Satan! You are right, my ribald!" cried the Gibbet-cheater. "There can be no hunchbacks in Jerusalem, a land of beautiful Saracen women, according to our friend Walter the Pennyless. We shall exhibit this hunchback for money. Come on!" said the bandit, seizing Joan by the arm, "follow us, you camel!"

"Yes, yes," added Perrette the Ribald, laughing loudly and seizing the other arm of the quarryman's wife, "come to Jerusalem; come to the land of marvels!"

"Leave me alone!" said the poor woman, struggling to disengage herself.

"For pity's sake, leave me! I am expecting my husband and my child!"

Forced to follow her persecutors, and carried, despite herself, by the stream of the Crusaders, Joan, fearing to be stifled or crushed under foot by the crowd, sought no longer to struggle against the current.

Suddenly, instead of proceeding onward, the mob swayed back, and these words ran from mouth to mouth: "Silence! Cuckoo Peter and Walter the Pennyless are going to speak! Silence!" A deep silence ensued. Halting in the middle of a large open s.p.a.ce, where, gaping with curiosity, the serfs of the village stood gathered together, the monk and his companion prepared themselves to harangue these poor rustic plebs. Cuckoo Peter reined in his white mule and rising in his stirrups, he screamed in a hoa.r.s.e yet penetrating voice, addressing the serfs of the seigniory of Plouernel: "Do you, Christian folks, know what is going on in Palestine?

The divine tomb of the Saviour is in the hands of the Saracens! The Holy Sepulchre of our Lord is in the power of the infidels! Woe is us! Woe!

Malediction! Malediction!" And the monk struck his chest, tore his frock, rolled his hollow eyes in their sockets, ground his teeth, foamed at the mouth, went through a thousand contortions on his mule, and resumed with increased fury: "The infidel is lord in Jerusalem, the Holy City! The miscreant insults the tomb of Christ with his presence! And you, Christians, my brothers, you remain indifferent before so horrible a sacrilege! Before such an abomination----"

"No, no!" cried back with one voice the mob of the Crusaders. "Death to the infidels! Let's deliver the tomb! Let's march to Jerusalem, the city of marvels and of beauty! G.o.d wills it! G.o.d wills it!"

The serfs of the village, ignorant, besotted, timid, opened wide their eyes and ears, and looked at one another, never before having heard the name of Jerusalem or of the Saracens mentioned, and unable to explain the fury and contortions of the monk. Accordingly, Martin the Prudent, the same who, two days before, had ventured to depict to the bailiff the sufferings of his fellows, timidly said to Cuckoo Peter: "Holy patron, seeing that our Lord Jesus Christ sits on his throne in heaven, together with G.o.d the Father in eternal glory, what can it be to him whether his tomb be in the hands of the people whom you call Saracens? Kindly enlighten us."

"That's what we would like to know," joined another serf, a young fellow who looked less stupid than the others. "We want to know that first."

"Oh, oh!" exclaimed Walter the Pennyless. "By my valiant sword, the Sweetheart of the Faith! Here have we a rude questioner. What's your name, my brave lad?"

"My name is Colas the Bacon-cutter."

"As surely as ham is the friend of wine, you must be a relative of my friend Simon the Porkrind-sc.r.a.per," replied the Gascon knight, amidst peals of laughter from the serfs, who were delighted by this sally. "So, then, you would like to know, my worthy Colas the Bacon-cutter, what it can matter to Jesus Christ, enthroned in heaven with the Eternal Father and the sweet dove, the Holy Ghost, if his sepulchre is held by the Saracens?"

"Yes, seigneur," rejoined the serf; "because, if that displeases him, how is it that, seeing he is G.o.d and omnipotent, he does not exterminate them? Why does he not turn those Saracens into pulp at a single wafture of his hand?"

"Woe is us! Abomination! Desolation of the world!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Cuckoo Peter, breaking in upon the Gascon adventurer, who was about to answer.

"Oh, ye people without faith, ingrates, impious and rebellious children!

Jesus Christ gave his blood to redeem you. Is that so or not?"

"Serfs were our fathers, serfs are we, serfs will our children be,"

retorted Colas the Bacon-cutter. "We have not been redeemed, holy father, as you claim."

The answer of young Colas unquestionably embarra.s.sed the monk; he shot at him threatening glances, writhed on his mule and resumed in a thundering voice: "Malediction! Desolation! Oh, ye of little faith!

Jesus has given you his blood to redeem you, and you, in return, refuse to shed the blood of those accursed Saracens, who every day outrage his sepulchre! This is what the divine Saviour has said.... Do you hear?...

Here is what he said.... Listen...."

Walter the Pennyless here broke in with his own harangue: "Those accursed Saracens are gorged with gold, with precious stones, with silver vessels; they inhabit a marvelous country where there is a profusion without the trouble of cultivation: Golden wheat fields, delicious fruits, exquisite wines, sweethearts of all complexions! One must go there to believe it! Think of it! Winter is unknown, spring eternal. The poorest of those infidel dogs have homes of white marble and enchanting gardens, embellished with limpid fountains. The beggars, clad in silk, play tennis with rubies and diamonds." A murmur of astonishment, then of admiration ran through the serfs. Their eyes fixed, their mouths agape, their hands clasped, they listened with increasing avidity to the Gascon adventurer. "Such is the miraculous country inhabited by those infidel dogs, and the Christians, the beloved children of the holy Catholic Church, inhabit dens, eat black bread, drink brackish water, shiver under a sky frozen in winter and rainy in summer. No, let all the devils take it! Let my beloved brothers come to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, exterminate the infidels, and then they will have for their reward the prodigious lands of Palestine!

Theirs be Jerusalem, the city of silver ramparts, with golden gates, studded with carbuncles! Theirs be the wines, the beautiful maids, the riches of the accursed Saracens! If you wish all that, good people, it is yours!" Then, turning to Peter the Hermit, "Not so, holy man?"

"It is the truth," answered Cuckoo Peter; "it is the truth. _The goods of the sinner are reserved for the just_."

In the measure that the adroit lieutenant of Cuckoo Peter had held up to the dazzled eyes of the poor villagers the ravishing picture of the delights and riches of Palestine, a good number of those famished serfs, clad in tatters and who all their lives had not crossed the boundaries of the seigniory of Plouernel, began to tremble with ardent covetousness and feverish hope. Others, more timid or less credulous, hesitated in believing those marvels. Of these old Martin the Prudent was the organ.

Turning to his fellows: "My friends, that knight, on the back of that little black horse that looks like an a.s.s, has said to you: 'One must go to that country to believe these marvels by seeing them with his own eyes.' Now, then, it is my opinion that it is better to believe them than to go and see them. It is not enough to depart for those regions.

One must be certain of provisions on the route, and to return from such a distance."

"Old Martin is right," put in several serfs. "Let's take his advice and stay home."