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Prisoners of Hope: A Tale of Colonial Virginia, a novel by Mary Johnston |
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Chapter 27. Morning |
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_ CHAPTER XXVII. MORNING The women crouched in a far corner of the room behind a barricade of chairs and tables; the men stood between them and the thirsters for blood, and fought coolly, desperately, with such effect that, fearful as were the odds, a glimmering of hope came to them. The ammunition on both sides was exhausted, and it had become a hand to hand struggle in which the advantage of position and weapons was with the assailed. "Damme, but we will beat them yet!" cried Laramore, panting, and leaning heavily upon his rapier. "They're drawing off; we've tired them out!" "They'll never tire while that hellhound of an Indian whoops them on and that yellow devil, Luiz Sebastian, backs him up," said the overseer. "They are gathering for a rush," said Landless. The assailants had fallen back to the opposite wall, leaving a space, cumbered with the dead and slippery with blood, between them and the defenders of the house. In this space now appeared the lithe figure, and the watchful, large-eyed, amber countenance of Luiz Sebastian. "Ohè!" he cried, "slaves, all of you! Ashantees, Popoes, Angolans, Fidas, Malimbe, Ambrice! you who are all black! think of the jungle and the village; think of the wives and the children! think of the slaver and the slave ship! You from the Indies, you who are like me, Luiz Sebastian, think of the blood which is the white man's blood and yet the blood of a slave--and hate the white man as I, Luiz Sebastian, hate him! Kill them and take the women!" The swollen figure and dreadful face of Roach appeared at his side. "Ay!" cried the murderer, with a tremendous oath. "Kill them! Smash them, batter them, hear them scream! In the old man's pocket is the key of his money chest. It is filled with bright yellow gold. Kill him and get the money, and away to turn pirate and get more!" "It grows late!" cried Trail. "We must up sail, and away before the dawn!" The gigantic, horribly painted form of the Ricahecrian chief stalked into the open space and commenced a harangue in his own tongue. It was short, but effective. "God!" said the Colonel, under his breath, and grasped his bloodstained sword more closely. With one shrill and horrible cry Indians, negroes, mulattoes, and villainous whites were upon them, breaking their line, forcing them apart into knots of two and three away from the frail barrier, behind which cowered the screaming women, striking with knife and tomahawk, axe and club. Two of the Colonel's men fell, one under the knife of the seven-year-captive Ricahecrian, the other beaten down by the jagged and knotted club with which Roach, foaming at the mouth, and swearing horribly, struck madly to left and right. The Ricahecrian, drawing the knife from the heart of his victim, rushed on to where Landless and Sir Charles still maintained, by dint of desperate fighting, their position before the women, but Luiz Sebastian with Roach and half a dozen negroes swept between him and his prey. He swerved aside, and, bounding into the midst of the women, seized the one who chanced to be in his path,--a young and beautiful girl, newly come over from Plymouth, and a favorite with the ladies of Verney Manor. The despairing scream which the poor child uttered rang out above all the tumult. Landless turned, saw, and darted to her aid--but too late. With one hand the savage gathered up the loosened hair, with the other he passed the scalping knife around the young head--when Landless reached them, she who so short time before had been so fair to see, lay a shocking spectacle, writhing in her death agony. With white lips and burning eyes Landless swung his gun above his head, and brought it down upon the shaven crown of Grey Wolf. It cracked like an egg shell, and the Indian dropped across the body of his victim. Landless, springing back to the post he had quitted, found Sir Charles in desperate case, but as coolly composed as ever, and with the air of the Court still about him despite his bared head and torn and bloodstained clothing, treating those who came against him to an exhibition of swordsmanship such as the New World had probably rarely witnessed. Landless, striking down a cutpurse from Tyburn, saw him run the Turk through, and saw behind him the nightmare visage and the raised club of Roach. He uttered a warning cry, but the club descended, and the handsome, careless face fell backwards, and the slender debonair figure swayed and fell. Landless caught him, saw that he was but stunned, and letting him drop to the floor at his feet, wrenched the sword from his hand, and stood over him, facing Roach with a stern smile. The murderer raised his club again. "We've met at last!" he cried with a taunting laugh. "Do you remember the tobacco house, and what I said? I says: 'Every dog has its day, and I'll have mine.' It's my day now!" "And I said," rejoined Landless, "'I let you go now, but one day I will kill you.' And that day has come." With an oath Roach brought down the club. Landless swerved, and the blow fell harmlessly; before the arm could be again raised, he caught it, held it with a grasp of steel, and shortened his sword. The miscreant saw his death, and screamed for mercy. "Remember Robert Godwyn!" said Landless, and drove the blade home. The sword was a more effective weapon than the gun, and with it he kept the enemy at bay, while he glanced despairingly around. There were as many dead as living within the room by this. The floor was piled with the slain; they made traps for the living who in the wild surging to and fro stumbled over them, and fell, and were slain before they could rise. Three fourths of the dead belonged to the insurgents, but the attacked had suffered severely. Of the thirty men with whom the defense had commenced there now remained but twelve, and of that number several were wounded. The Colonel was bleeding from a cut on the head, the under overseer had a ball through his arm, Sir Charles still lay without movement at Landless's feet. Forced, together with almost all of his party, by the mad rush of the assailants to the further end of the room, the master had seen with agony the women left well-nigh defenseless. Followed by Woodson, Havisham, Regulus, and young Whittington, he had all but cut his way back to them, when a fresh influx from the hall of slaves and whites who had been engaged in plundering the house, drove them apart again. The newcomers came fresh to the work, maddened, moreover, by the master's wines. They advanced upon the Colonel and his party with drunken shouts, some brandishing rude weapons, others silver salvers and tankards, the spoil of the plate chest. The voice of Luiz Sebastian rang through the room. "Quick work of them, friends; I smell the morning!" With a laugh and a scrap of Spanish song upon his lips he came at Landless with a knife, but a turn of the white man's wrist sent the weapon hurling through the air. "Curse you!" cried the mulatto, springing out of reach of the deadly point, and holding his arm from which the blood was flowing. "Mother of God! but I will have you yet!" and bounded towards his weapon. Landless, steadily watchful, and pointing that fatal sword this way or that against all comers, cleared for himself and the still senseless man at his feet a circle into which few cared to intrude, for the fame of that blade had gone through the room. "Leave him until we have dealt with the others," said the mulatto between his teeth. "Then will we give him reason to wish that he had never been born." A touch upon his arm, and Landless turned to find Patricia standing beside him. "Go back," he cried. "Go back!" "They are murdering them all over there," she said steadily. "My father is dead. I saw him fall." "Not so, madam. He did but stumble over the dead. See, Woodson fights them back from him. For God's sake, get back behind the barricade!" She shook her head. "He is dead. They will all be dead directly, my cousin and all. My father cannot help me, and he who lies here cannot help me. I will not be taken alive by these devils, and I have no knife. Will you kill me?" "My God!" "Quick!" she said in the same low, steady tones. "They are coming; they will beat us down in a moment. Kill me!" For answer Landless raised his voice until it rang high above the uproar, and arrested the attention of the combatants on both sides. "Fight with a will, men," he cried, "for help is at hand! Do you not hear the hoofs of the horses?" "By God! you are right!" cried the Colonel, suddenly struggling to his feet. "Hold out, men! Anthony Nash reached Rosemead, and has brought us aid!" "The dog priest!" the mulatto cried fiercely to Trail. "Was he here? Then they have sent for help, and Mother of God! it is here!" "And coming at the planter's pace," answered Trail. "They will be upon us before we reach the boats." The mulatto glanced at the friend with whom he had fled the Indies with a sinister smile. "Ay," he muttered to himself. "They will be upon us indeed, before we reach the boats, wherefore Luiz Sebastian goes not to turn pirate this time. He throws in his lot with the Ricahecrians whose canoes are close at hand in the inlet that winds into the Pamunkey. They are very swift, and in the Blue Mountains there is safety. But one thing first." He gave a shrill and peculiar whistle which brought to him half a dozen Indians. He pointed to the body of Grey Wolf and then to Landless. A yell burst from the lips of the savages, and they rushed upon the latter. He met them, ran his sword through the heart of the first, of the second: Sir Charles moaned, stirred, and struggled to his knees. A third raised his knife; it would have descended, but Landless darted between the savage and the half-dazed, utterly helpless man at whom the blow was aimed, struck up the arm, and plunged his sword into the dark breast. A broken oar, snatched from the floor by the mulatto, descended upon his head, and with a woman's scream sounding in his ear, he fell heavily to the floor, and lay as one dead. When he came to himself, it was to find the great room still crowded with men, and filled with noise and confusion, but the thronging figures and the excited voices were those of friends--of servants from the neighboring plantations, of small planters and tenants of Colonels Ludwell and Fitzhugh, the Surveyor-General, and Dr. Anthony Nash. He saw the master, panting, bleeding, but exultant, seize Dr. Nash's hands in his own. He saw Sir Charles smile and extend his box of richly scented snuff to Colonel Ludwell, and the women leaving their corner of refuge with hysterical laughter and tears; saw Betty Carrington in her father's arms, and Mistress Lettice being helped across a heap of dead by Captain Laramore. Indians, negroes, mulatto, scoundrel whites, were gone. "They got off clear--the d--d villains," said Dick Whittington, appearing beside him, "just before the horses came up. But Woodson has gone after the slaves and the convicts with a party of Carrington's men. He'll catch them, I'm thinking, and they'll come to a pirate's end--that's all the pirating they'll get. The Indians will get clean away; they're most to the Pamunkey by now, I reckon." Landless staggered to his feet, and put his hand to his head, which was bleeding. "The women are all safe?" he demanded. "All but poor Annis," said the boy. "When I saw the poor maid fall, I thanked the Lord that Joyce Whitbread was safe in her mother's cottage at Banbury. But none of the others were hurt. There is Mistress Lettice and Mistress Betty Carrington--I do not see Mistress Patricia." The master of Verney Manor, pouring forth a rapid account of the late affair to the gentlemen who crowded around him, was brought to a dead stop by the appearance of a man who had burst through the throng, and now stood before him, half naked, bleeding, with white, drawn face and wild eyes. "What is it? Speak!" cried the master, terror of he knew not what growing in his eyes. "Your daughter, Colonel Verney!" cried Landless. "She is not here. The Ricahecrians have carried her off." With a sound between a groan and a scream the Colonel staggered, and would have fallen had not Carrington caught him. "Gone! Impossible!" cried Sir Charles vehemently, all his studied insouciance thrown to the winds. "She was with the women behind the barrier that we made. She is here." He began to call her by name, loudly, appealingly, but there came no answering voice. "She will not answer," said Landless hoarsely. "She is not here. She was with the women until just before the last. She saw her father fall, and thought him dead, and you dead, too, Sir Charles Carew, and she came to me, and prayed me to kill her. Then we heard the sound of the horses, and six Indians--Ricahecrians--with Luiz Sebastian, came against me. She stood at my side while I killed three. Then I was struck down, and I heard her scream as I fell." The master freed himself from Carrington's supporting arm, and raised from his hands a face that had suddenly become that of an old man. But the voice was steady with which he said quietly,-- "Let them search the room thoroughly, for the child may be laying in a faint beneath these dead, though my soul doth tell me that it is as this man says, and that she is gone. But we will after them at once, and, please God, we will have her back, safe and sound. They have but an hour's start." "Ay," muttered young Whittington to Havisham. "Only an hour. But the Chickahominies build the swiftest canoes in this corner of the world, and I have heard that the canoes of the Ricahecrians are to the canoes of the Chickahominies as swallows are to cranes." _ |
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