cavalry, preceding a battalion of militiamen, in the centre of which body, ten men, bare headed, with their arms bound behind them, were conducted, each riding with his face toward the tail of a donkey, whose bridle was held by a monk of the order of Mercy; a detachment of lancers came immediately after, and closed this lugubrious procession.
At the cry of halt, given by the commander of the troops drawn up upon the Plaza, the monks separated to the right and left, without interrupting their funeral chant, and the condemned remained alone in the middle of the space left free for them. These men were patriots, who had attempted to overthrow the established government, in order to substitute another, the more broad and democratic basis of which would be, as they thought, in better accordance with ideas of progress and the welfare of the nation. These patriots belonged to the first families of the country.
The population of Santiago viewed with sullen despair the death of the men whom they considered as martyrs. It is even probable that a rising in their favour would have taken place, if General Don Poncho Bustamente, the minister at war, had not drawn out a military force capable of imposing upon the most determined, and obliging them to be silent spectators of the execution of men whom they could not save, but whom they entertained a fierce hope of avenging at a future day.
The condemned alighted; they piously knelt, and confessed themselves to the monks of Mercy nearest to them, whilst a platoon of fifty soldiers took up a position within twenty paces of them. When their confession was completed, they rose up bravely, and taking each other by the hand, ranged themselves in a single line in front of the soldiers appointed to put them to death. In spite, however, of the great numbers of troops assembled on the Plaza, an ominous fermentation prevailed among the people. The crowd rocked about in all directions. Murmurs of sinister augury and curses, pronounced aloud against the agents of power, seemed to remind the latter that they had better finish the affair at once, if they did not wish to have their victims torn from their hands.
General Bustamente, who calmly and stoically presided over this dismal ceremony, smiled with disdain at this expression of popular disapprobation. He waved his sword over his head and commanded "right about face," which was executed with the rapidity of lightning. The troops faced the insurgents on all sides; the front rank pointing their muskets at the citizens crowded together before them, whilst the others appeared to take aim at the balconies encumbered with people. This was followed by so dead a silence, that not a word was lost of the sentence read by the proper officer to the patriots – a sentence which condemned them to be shot as traitors, or accomplices in a conspiracy designed to overthrow the constituted government, and plunge their country into anarchy.
The conspirators listened to their sentence with silent firmness; but when the officer, who trembled in every limb, had finished reading it, they all cried, as with one voice,
"Viva la Patria! Viva la Libertad!"
The General gave a signal, and a loud rolling of the drums drowned the voices of the condemned. A discharge of musketry resounded like a clap of thunder, and the ten martyrs fell, once again shouting their cry of liberty, a cry doomed to find an echo in the hearts of their terrified compatriots.
The troops filed off, with shouldered arms, ensigns flying, and band at their head, past the dead bodies, and regained their barracks. When the General had disappeared with his escort, and the troops had left the Plaza, the people rushed in a mass towards the spot where the martyrs of their cause lay in a confused heap. Every one wished to offer them a last farewell, and to swear over their bodies to avenge them, or to fall in their turn.
At length, by degrees, the crowd became less compact, the groups dispersed, the last torches were extinguished, and the spot where, scarce an hour before, an awful drama had been accomplished, was left completely deserted. A considerable time elapsed before any noise disturbed the solemn silence which brooded over the Plaza Mayor.
Suddenly, a heavy sigh escaped from the heap of bodies, and a pale head, disfigured by the blood and dirt which stained it, arose slowly from this human slaughterhouse, pushing aside with difficulty the carcasses which had covered it. The victim, who, by a miracle, survived this bloody hecatomb, cast an anxious look around him, and passing his hand over his brow, which was bathed in a dark perspiration, said vehemently —
"My God! my God! grant me strength to live, that I may avenge myself and my country!"
Then, with incredible courage, this man, too weak from the blood he had lost, and was still losing, to stand, or to escape by walking away, began to crawl along upon his hands and knees, leaving behind him a long wet track, and directing his course towards the cathedral. At every yard he stopped to take breath, and to place his hands upon his wounds, which motion rendered more painful. Scarce had he left the centre of the Plaza and its horrid sacrifice fifty paces behind him, and that with immense difficulty, when, from a street which opened just before him, issued two men, who advanced with hasty steps towards him.
"Oh!" the unhappy man cried, in utter despair, "I am lost! I am lost! Heaven is not just!" – And he fainted.
The two men, on coming up to him, stopped with great surprise; they leant over him, and examined him with care and in an anxious manner.
"Well?" said one of them, at the end of a minute or two.
"He is alive!" the other replied, in a tone of conviction.
Without uttering another word, they rolled up the wounded man in a poncho, lifted him on their shoulders, and disappeared in the gloomy depths of the street by which they had come, and which led to the Canadilla suburb.
CHAPTER V
THE PASSAGE
It is a long voyage from Havre to Chili. The man accustomed to the thousand agitations and the intoxicating whirlwind of the atmosphere of Paris, necessarily finds the life on shipboard, the calm and regular life, insipid and monotonous. It is certainly tedious to remain months together in a vessel, confined to a cabin a few feet square, without air and without sun, almost without light, and to have no walk but the narrow deck of the ship, no horizon but the rolling or the tranquil sea – at all times and everywhere nothing but sea.
The transition is very trying. The Parisian, accustomed to the noise and perpetual motion of a great city, cannot at once enter into or comprehend the poetry of the sailor's life, of which he knows nothing, or the sublime pleasures and keen enjoyments which those granite-hearted men, exposed incessantly to a struggle with the elements, constantly experience; men who laugh at the tempest and brave the hurricane; who, twenty times a minute, stand face to face with death, and at last feel such a contempt for it that they end by not believing in it. The hours are of interminable length to the passenger who pines for the land; every day appears an age to him. With his eyes constantly turned toward a point which he begins to imagine he shall never gain, he sinks, in spite of himself, into a species of gloomy nostalgia, which the sight of the wished for port is alone powerful enough to dissipate.
The Count de Prébois-Crancé and Valentine Guillois had, then, undergone the dispersion of all the illusions and all the ennuis attendant upon a first sea voyage. During the first days they were employed in recalling the vivid remembrance of that other life from which they had parted for ever. They talked over the surprise which the sudden disappearance of the Count would cause in the fashionable society from which he had fled without warning, and without leaving any means of tracing him. Forgetting for awhile the distance which separated them from the America to which they were bound, they dwelt at great length upon the unknown pleasures which awaited them upon that golden soil, that land of promise for all sorts of adventurers, but which, alas! often offers those who go thither in the hope of gaining an easy fortune, nothing but disappointment and sorrow.
As every subject, however interesting it may be, must in the end grow exhausted, the two young men, to escape the fatiguing monotony
