How it came about that the Nero sighted the Semiramis and pursued her I have already told; but the curious cessation of the pursuit at the moment of its seeming triumph is a mystery with the simplest solution. The vessel broke her screw-shaft when she was within an ace of victory. The huge mass of metal, rioting in the aft cabins, split skin and plates until the miracle stood that the ship continued to float. She was brought to Bordeaux with the utmost difficulty, and thence she sent home news of her work, though that was known already at the Admiralty, and other cruisers searched the French coast and the northern shore of Spain. It was one of these, as we have seen, which anchored ultimately in the very bay where the fugitives were harboured; and although its men came at length upon the wreckage in the cradle of the reef, they did not do so until the money was ashore, and the Englishmen were hid in the shelter of the castle.
From this moment the scent was, as goes the schoolboy saying, hot to excitement. The authorities in London waited to hear every day of the capture of the bullion and of the missing crew. Capel, Martingale & Co., who had recently negotiated a Spanish loan, brought pressure to bear at Madrid; and companies of soldiers were sent up from Vivero and Finisterre. With each of these there was an English detective, and for the better purposes of identification no less an agent than Mike Brennan, the former mate of the Admiral, was sent with the company of infantry which watched the burning of the bridge. He it was who had heard the daft lad Billy calling in the hills, and he had recognized the voice and answered the cry, to the fear and panic of the doomed muleteers.
When the end of the venture came, it was the general impression among the Spanish soldiers that all, with the woman, had perished in the great fire, which is talked of to-day in hushed whispers by the peasantry, and will be tradition to their children's children. But as there was a possibility that Messenger had escaped the search was continued for some weeks. The chasm was bridged again; sentries were posted about the whole amphitheatre of hills; the silent valley was searched from end to end; and the matter ended by the officer in charge of the troops sending to Madrid his emphatic opinion that the Englishmen never crossed the bridge, since there was no way of escape over the ramparts of the hills for man or for beast. The supposition that there was a possible passage through the tunnel never entered his head. Doggedly he formed an opinion, as Spaniards do, and no human argument would have turned him from it.
Thus it happened that London heaved a sigh of disappointment in the belief that a prince of rogues would not figure in her law Courts, and began to ask, What of the money? And it was consoled as, almost ingot by ingot, the bullion was restored to the firm from whom it had been stolen. Some of it was found in the inner lagoon of the woman's house; much in the valley below the goat-track, where the peril of the flight had begun; and the remaining cases—or rather their contents, for the cases were shivered to splinters—in the ravine and among the embers of the fallen bridge. When the amount thus regained was estimated at its value, the firm considered themselves the losers of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Of this sum a great part had been pillaged by the Spanish soldiers; the servants of the woman had not neglected to snap up what they could; Messenger had a fraction; the peasantry slyly pocketed many a sovereign, and continued for the best part of a year after the tragedy to spend their leisure in the valley of the disaster taming logs and cutting grasses in the hope that gold would be found. But the soldiers were sent to their quarters in the month following the supreme disaster, and they went willingly, as men who had accomplished a great work, and must recreate long, lest their strength should fail them or their energy become chronic.
XXX. THE END OF THE RECORD
When Fisher awoke by the banks of the silent pool, it was with a start and an exclamation upon his lips. A hand had touched him gently upon the shoulder, and he sprang to his feet, thinking that the soldiers had entrapped him while he slept. But he met the gaze only of a white-haired old man, whose cassock and bands proclaimed him to be a priest; and he heard a gentle voice speaking quickly in bad French.
"Ne vous dérangez pas," cried the old fellow, as he put his hand upon the lad's shoulder; "et taisez vous. I did know Madame—sans doute; sans doute." And then, with an attempt, exceedingly poor, to speak English, he continued: "Trust upon me, I come for friend—the soldiers, ah, no good, no good, no good!" and he shook his head as though the conviction was painful to him.
Messenger had started up at the first word he spoke; and when he found that Fisher was not near him his distress was uncontrollable. He shouted loudly, with a very bitter cry, and when the lad ran up to him, he began to ask many questions at a breath.
"Why do you leave me?" said he savagely. "You know I can't move a hand. Who were you talking to? I heard another voice."
At this the old priest spoke for himself, much as he had done to Fisher; but he gave a cry when he saw that the man was blind, and gabbled sympathy in Spanish. To this Messenger answered in French, asking—
"Why have you come here; is it to help us?"
"I heard of the trouble at the castle, and of the presence of Englishmen there," said the priest, speaking in the same tongue. "Madame was very kind to me. Her friends are my friends. An hour ago one of my people saw you sleeping here, and came running to my house. And I am here. Consider me your servant as I was hers."
"We want food and rest, and shelter from these sharks in sandals," said Messenger none too pleasantly; "will you give us that?"
"I will do to you as I would to a son," cried the old man; "I am the servant of God and the brother of the outcast; if you trust me, you shall come out of Spain. If you stay here, the troopers will pass in a few hours, and you will go to Madrid with them. The choice must be yours. What I do is done for Madame. I have lost a great friend; no man had a greater. She was such a woman as we shall not see again, my children. God rest her soul!"
Messenger heard the tale through, and bit his nails.
"What's he like to look at?" he asked Fisher in a whisper. "Can you read him at all?"
"He seems to me to be about eighty, and has the whitest hair I ever saw. It's a face to trust. And we've no choice that I see," said he again, as the other still thought upon it. "We'll be taken here for a certainty before noon tomorrow."
"Very well; that seems sense, and we may as well face this risk as another. But keep your eyes open, and call out if you see anything. I'm just dying for want of food."
With this he turned to the old man who had appeared in their path so strangely, and he answered with less of brusqueness.
"We accept your offer," said he, "and put our lives in your hands. When you give them back to us, we shall find means to thank you substantially. If, on the other hand, you have come here with a tale, we shall be equally ready in settling the account. We are both near gone for want of food and drink, and we'll thank you to hurry."
"As I do to you, so may God do to me," said the old man with fervent benevolence; and at that he tucked his skirts about his legs, and set a brisk pace down the woodland path. A very short walk brought them to the head of the thicket; but the priest kept the shelter of its outskirts for some ten minutes before he struck across a marshy meadow, and came upon the back of a village which was almost hid in a clump of chestnuts. His own house was not a road's breadth from the little spire which stuck up among the green of the trees; and when he entered it, he did so by the garden, bringing the men ultimately to his sitting-room without observance from any one. But he showed them at the window of the apartment how much they owed to him. A company of lancers was about the door of the venta; and, at a later hour, carabineers passed through the village on the road to Ferrol.
In this old priest's house the fugitives were sheltered for three weeks, receiving from him a simple hospitality and a large sympathy. At the end of the second week, there was brought to them the girl Inez, who looked to this old man alone for shelter, and who was being sent by him to a convent at Cadiz. The child had many hours of better happiness than she had ever known as she walked with Fisher in the high-walled garden near the church;