CHAPTER VII.

THE CONFESSION OF THE BLACK PENITENT.

Carl Benzel found himself on horseback, his legs strapped together beneath the animal's belly, and his arms fastened round the waist of a gendarme who rode before him. On raising his head from the man's shoulder, he at first imagined that he was in a dream, in which things and persons were whimsically, and yet distressingly confounded. He was not even sure of his own personal identity; but had some suspicion that he had changed selfs with Magdalene, and that his obliging conductor was the actual minstrel, still engaged in piloting their way through the wilderness.

By degrees, however, his wandering senses returned, and the transactions of the last hour arose one by one, like spectres, on his memory. He remembered the hor

ror of old Moritz when he found that he had been slaughtering the French police; the discharge of musketry that followed from the infuriated gendarmes; the shrieks and imprecations of the wounded; and the desperate but momentary resistance they offered to the victors in the madness of pain and indignation.

Mingling with the more stirring parts of the drama, he saw again the two Hebrew women, insensible to the scene around them, still bewailing their dead; their kerchiefs rent in fragments, lying upon the floor; and their hair, as black as night, hanging in torn tresses upon their uncovered bosoms. Then came, as if to make him doubt the truth of the impression he had received of the triumph of the gendarmes, the fantastic exhibition of Peter the Black dancing wildly round the mourners, a dag

ger glittering between his teeth, an ocean of Cognac blazing in his eyes, and the fatal hatchet of old Moritz whirling round his head. This vision, however, was accounted for by a faint recollection rising the next moment of his having observed the bandit burning asunder the cords with which his hands were fastened; and by the more vivid idea of one of the police, after having yielded for some time to the terror which beset the spectators, rushing forward, at the instant his back was turned, and felling him to the earth with a musket.

There was one other form in the strange pageant that floated before the eyes of Carl Benzel, which, although it came the latest, and mingled the least in the business of the scene, lingered the longest in his meditations.

When the gendarmes entered the mill, with Peter the Black, and another prisoner in custody, his attention was immediately drawn to the former of the two as to an acquaintance; and it was not for some minutes after that he observed the other gazing in his face with an expression which he could not comprehend. This prisoner was a young man, tall, well-shaped, and of rather lofty demeanour ; but his face was so disguised, apparently with black chalk, that it was impossible to distinguish the features. Carl, notwithstanding, was haunted by an impression that he had seen him before, nay, that he knew him intimately; that his own destiny was some way or other connected with his; and that the circle of fate which bound them both, comprehended Ida Dallheimer, the peasant Liese, Magdalene-every human being with whom he was connected by the ties either of habit or sympathy! As he looked more intently at the stranger, he at length began to detect a resemblance between his features and those of the sleeping guest of Kunz Weiner which he had not seen; and Carl, in sudden alarm, passed his hand before his eyes, as if to drive away some phantom of the brain, the presence of which seemed to indicate a derangement of mind almost amounting to insanity.

When he looked round again, the stranger had shifted his place, and Carl's eye sought unconsciously the only

I

other present and tangible link in the chain of thought which had passed through his mind. When it rested on Magdalene, she was no longer a spectator, but an actor in the drama. A ruffian's arm was round her waist, and, without waiting to observe whether it was that of a gendarme or a bandit, or whether applied in insult or support, our impetuous adventurer rushed towards her. The action was perhaps misunderstood; for the next moment he felt himself struck down by a blow on the back of the head, from the stunning effects of which he did not quite recover till he had left the mill more than one league behind him.

The result of his recollections, after they had all been put together, was obvious. The authorities, it appearad, had sent out a force against the banditti on the very night on which the latter had intended to attack the stronghold of old Moritz; and the firing that had been heard in the distance was not an expedient of Schinderhannes to terrify the inmates of the mill, but arose from the actual conflict of the two parties. This conflict had terminated in the defeat of the freebooters, the capture of two prisoners, and the flight of the rest; and after exploring, no doubt, the recesses of the Fig-Tree, the military police had directed their arms against the mill, as a suspected place of refuge.

The stranger who had taken such hold of an imagination disordered already by long watching and uneasiness of mind, was apparently an individual of little distinction in the band; for his face was unknown to the police, and even to Moritz, who would doubtless in his present feelings have been only too happy to have had an opportunity of denouncing a leader of his enemies, however deeply they had sunk in the ruin they had prepared for him. As for Peter the Black, he was recognized by every body, and treated with the mixture of awe and insult with which the vulgar would torment a chained tiger. Both of these persons were the companions of Carl's present captivity. He was himself either supposed to be a member of the band, or at least an accomplice of old Moritz in defending his fortress. But the former was more probably the case, as he had been sepa

rated from the miller and his men, from his fellowguests, from Magdalene-and now found himself hurried along the midnight road, the comrade of banditti and the prisoner of gendarmes.

The night was dark and gusty, and he could only imperfectly see the company with whom he travelled. He could count a dozen gendarmes, notwithstanding, including the three who rode double with the prisoners; and intermixed with them there were two or three persons, apparently farmers of the neighbourhood. The police and their captives maintained a sullen silence ; but the others were loud and bitter in their execrations of that formidable hydra which was now only scotched, not killed, and entertained their neighbours, as they spurred along, with an account of the wrongs and losses they had sustained. After some time, even the gendarmes began gradually to talk, and at length the conversation became general and tumultuous.

"Benzel!" whispered the stranger, when the din was loudest, and their two horses rubbed sides accidentally.

"Who speaks?" demanded Carl, starting.

"Listen without reply. Ida Dallheimer is a prisoner in one of the strong holds of Schinderhannes."

"Merciful heaven!"

"So long as the master-bandit is at liberty she runs no risk; although the efforts of her friends for her liberation will be vain till the arrival of the ransom agreed upon for the whole Dallheimer party. If, on the other hand, Schinderhannes be taken, he will be executed on the instant; and his ferocious followers, before breaking up the band, will in all probability commit such outrage upon their captives as it is terrible to think of. Will you step in between your mistress and her fate?"

"I will."

"Will you give your life, if necessary, for hers?” "I will."

"The whole country is alarmed. Detachments of the military are called in from the surrounding districts to aid the police. Nothing can restore quiet, nothing can render it possible for the chief to escape another

week, but the intelligence that Schinderhannes is taken. You resemble him. Do you understand me ?”

"You wish me then to personate this tremendous villain !"

"I do,"

"To be torn in a thousand pieces by the rabble, or hoisted out of their clutches upon a gibbet?"

"If necessary. You refuse! That is enough. I bad mistaken your character!" and the two interlocutors were separated as accidentally as they had been thrown into contact.

Carl's brain began to reel. Fatigue and anxiety, uniting with the effects of the blow he had received on the head, almost deprived him of the faculty of thinking. The stranger's voice was familiar to his ear. He thought, for a moment, of one of the comrades of his dissipation; but no, the idea was preposterous. The figure indeed bore some resemblance; but instead of black, busky locks, a redundance of gold-coloured hair, hung in wreaths, almost like a woman's, from the stranger's uncovered head, and overflowed his shoulders. Whatever he was, he was the friend, perhaps the emissary, of Ida. At any rate, there was at least a chance of his being so; and on that chance,-slight, dim, distant though it were-would he hesitate to peril his life? "I consent!" cried he aloud, at the risk of awakening the suspicions of the guards.

"It is enough," was the reply.

"Silence in the rear!" said the commander of the march at the same moment. "Look out sharply, com

rades, for we are entering a wood, where we may meet with some of the dispersed outlaws.'

"Halt!" shouted the stranger.

"Who cries halt? Forward, I say!"

"Halt, if you be men! Your comrade is choking me -he is in the death-struggle-his wounds

"It is a lie!" cried the gendarme; "he is" laughed.

All

"Nay, nay," interrupted the farmers; "let us see fair play, even to a robber. Halt, till we inquire what is