The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 18

This person is a kinsman of yours--a Captain Alan McNeill."

I stepped back a pace and eyed him. "Then," said I, "your story will certainly not suffice; for I know it to be impossible. It was only last April that I took leave of Captain Alan McNeill on the road to Bayonne and close to the frontier. He was then a prisoner under escort, with a letter from Marmont ordering the Governor of Bayonne to clap him in irons and forward him to Paris, where (the Marshal hinted) no harm would be done by shooting him."

"Then he must have escaped."

"Pardon me, that again is impossible; for I should add that he was under some kind of parole."

"A prisoner under escort, in irons--condemned, or at least intended, to be shot--and all the while under parole! My friend, that must surely have been a strange kind of parole!"

"It was, and, saving your reverence, a cursed dirty kind. But it sufficed for my kinsman, as I know to my cost. For with the help of the _partidas_ I rescued him, close to the frontier; and he--like the fool, or like the n.o.ble gentleman he was--declined his salvation, released the escort (which we had overpowered), shook hands with us, and rode forward to his death."

"A brave story."

"You would say so, did you know the whole of it. There is no man alive whose hand I could grasp as proudly as I grasped his at the last: and no other, alive or dead, of whom I could say, with the same conviction, that he made me at once think worse of myself and better of human nature."

"He seems, then, to have a mania for improving his fellow-men; for,"

said my guide, still pausing with the candle aloft and twinkling on his spectacles, "I a.s.sure you he has been trying to make a Lutheran of _me!_"

Wholly incredulous as I was, this took me fairly between wind and water.

"Did he," I stammered, "did he happen to mention the Scarlet Woman?"

"Several times: though (in justice to his delicacy, I must say it) only in his delirium."

"His delirium?"

"He has been ill; almost desperately ill. A case of sunstroke, I believe. Do I understand that you believe sufficiently to follow me?"

"I cannot say that I believe. Yet if it be not Captain Alan McNeill, and if for some purpose which--to be frank with you--I cannot guess, I am being walked into a trap, you may take credit to yourself that it has been well, nay excellently, invented. I pay you that compliment beforehand, and for my kinsman's sake, or for the sake of his memory, I accept the risk."

"There is no risk," answered the reverend father, at once leading the way: "none, that is to say, with me to guide you."

"There is risk, then, in some degree?"

"We skirt a labyrinth," he answered quietly. "You will have observed, of course, that no one has pa.s.sed us or disturbed our talk. To be sure, the archway under which you found me is one of the 'false entrances,' as they are called, of Rueda cellars. There are a dozen between this and the summit, and perhaps half a dozen below, which give easy access to the wine-vaults, and in any of which a crowd of goers and comers would have incommoded us. For the soldiers would seem--and very wisely, I must allow--to follow a chart and confine themselves to the easier outskirts of these caves. Wisely, because the few cellars they visit contain Val de Penas enough to keep two armies drunk until either Wellington enters Madrid or Marmont recaptures Salamanca. But they are not adventurous: and the few who dare, though no doubt they penetrate to better wine, are not in the end to be envied. . . . Now this pa.s.sage of ours is popularly, but quite erroneously, supposed to lead nowhere, and is therefore by consent avoided."

"Excuse me," said I, "but it was precisely by this exit that I saw emerge three men as honestly drunk as any three I have met in my life."

For the moment he seemed to pay no heed, but stooped and held the candle low before his feet.

"The path, you perceive, here shelves downwards. By following it we should find ourselves, after ten minutes or so, at the end of a _cul de sac_. But see this narrow ledge to the right--pay particular heed to your footsteps here, I pray you: it curves to the right, broadening ever so little before it disappears around the corner: yet here lies the true path, and you shall presently own it an excellent one." He sprang forward like a goat, and turning, again held the candle low that I might plant my feet wisely. Sure enough, just around the corner the ledge widened at once, and we pa.s.sed into a new gallery.

"Ah, you were talking of those three drunkards? Well, they must have emerged by following this very path."

"Impossible."

"Excuse me, but for a scout whose fame is acknowledged, you seem fond of a word which Bonaparte (we are told) has banished from the dictionaries.

Ask yourself, now. They were a.s.suredly drunk, and your own eyes have a.s.sured you there is no wine between us and daylight. My son, I have inhabited Rueda long enough to acquire a faith in miracles, even had I brought none with me. Along this ledge our three drunkards strolled like children out of the very womb of earth. They will never know what they escaped: should the knowledge ever come to them it ought to turn their hair grey then and there."

"Children and drunkards," said I. "You know the byword?"

"And might believe it--but for much evidence on the other side."

But I was following another thought, and for the moment did not hear him closely. "I suppose, then, the owners guard the main entrances, but leave such as this, for instance, to be defended by their own difficulty?"

"Why should any be guarded?" he asked, pausing to untie a second candle from the bunch he had suspended from his belt.

"Eh? Surely to leave all this wine exposed in a world of thieves--"

The reverend father smiled as he lit the new candle from the stump of his old one. "No doubt the wine-growers did not contemplate a visit from two armies, and such very thirsty ones. The peasants hereabouts are abstemious, and the few thieves count for no more than flies.

For the rest--"

He was stooping again, with his candle all but level with the ledge and a few inches wide of it. Held so, it cast a feeble ray into the black void below us: and down there--thirty feet down perhaps--as his talk broke in two like a snapped guitar-string, my eyes caught a blur of scarlet.

"For G.o.d's sake," I cried, "hold the light steady!"

"To what purpose?" he asked grimly. "That is one whom Providence did not lead out to light. See, he is broken to pieces--you can tell from the way he lies; and dead, too. My son, the caves of Rueda protect themselves."

He shuffled to the end of the ledge, and there, at the entrance of a dark gallery, so low that our heads almost knocked against the rock-roof, he halted again and leaned his ear against the wall on the right.

"Sometimes where the wall is thin I have heard them crying and beating on it with their fists."

I s.h.i.+vered. The reader knows me by this time for a man of fair courage: but the bravest man on earth may be caught off his own ground, and I do not mind confessing that here was a situation for which a stout parentage and a pretty severe training had somehow failed to provide.

In short, as my guide pushed forward, I followed in knock-knee'd terror.

I wanted to run. I told myself that if this indeed were a trap, and he should turn and rush upon me, I was as a child at his mercy.

And he might do worse: he might blow out the light and disappear.

As the gallery narrowed and at the same time contracted in height, so that at length we were crawling on hands and knees, this insanity grew.

Two or three times I felt for my knife, with an impulse to drive it through his back, seize the candles and escape: nor at this moment can I say what restrained me.

At length, and after crawling for at least two hundred yards, without any warning he stood erect: and this was the worst moment of all.

For as he did so the light vanished--or so nearly as to leave but the feeblest glimmer, the reason being (and I discovered it with a sob) that he stood in an ample vaulted chamber while I was yet beneath the roof of the tunnel. The first thing I saw on emerging beside him was the belly of a great wine-tun curving out above my head, its recurve hidden, lost somewhere in upper darkness: and the first thing I heard was the whip of a bat's wing by the candle. My guide beat it off.

"Better take a candle and light it from mine. These creatures breed here in thousands--hear them now above us!"

"But what is that other sound?" I asked, and together we moved towards it.

Three enormous tuns stood in the chamber, and we halted by the base of the farthest, where, with a spilt pail beside him, lay a British sergeant of the 36th Regiment tranquilly snoring! That and no other was the sound, and a blesseder I never heard. I could have kicked the fellow awake for the mere pleasure of shaking hands with him. My guide moved on.

"But we are not going to leave him here!"

"Oh, as for that, his sleep is good for hours to come. If you choose, we can pick him up on our return."

So we left him, and now I went forward with a heart strangely comforted, although on leaving the great cellar I knew myself hopelessly lost.

Hitherto I might have turned, and, fortune aiding, have found daylight: but beyond the cellar the galleries ramified by the score, and we walked so rapidly and chose between them with such apparent lack of method that I lost count. My one consolation was the memory of a burly figure in scarlet supine beneath a wine-tun.

I was thinking of him when, at the end of a pa.s.sage to me indistinguishable from any of the dozen or so we had already followed, my guide put out a hand, and, drawing aside a goatskin curtain, revealed a small chamber with a lamp hanging from the roof, and under the lamp a bed of straw, and upon the bed an emaciated man, propped and holding a book.

His eyes were on the entrance; for he had heard our footsteps.

And almost we broke into one cry of joy. It was indeed my kinsman, Captain McNeill!