Czytaj książkę: «The Light of Scarthey: A Romance», strona 30

The door groaned apart:

"Very sorry, mum," came the husky voice in the opening, "Time's up."

She turned a look of agony upon Captain Jack's determined figure. Was this to be the end? Was she to leave him so, without even one kind word?

Alas, poor soul! All her hopes had fallen to this – a parting word.

He was unpitying; his arms were folded; he made no sign.

She took a step away and swayed; the turnkey came forward compassionately to lead her out. But the next instant she wheeled round and stood alone and erect, braced up by the extremity of her anguish.

"I have a message," she cried, as if the words were forced from her. "I could not make her come, but I made her send you a message. She told me to say that she forgave you, freely; that she would always pray for you. She bade me tell you too that she would never be any man's bride now."

It had been like the rending of body and soul to tell him this. As she saw the condemned man's face quiver and flush at last out of its impassiveness, she thought hell itself could hold no more hideous torment.

He extended his arms:

"Now welcome death!" he exclaimed.

And she turned and fled down the passage as though driven upon this last cry.

"E-h, he be a strange one!" said the jailer afterwards to his mate. "If ye'd heard that poor lady sob as she went by! I've seen many a one in the same case, but I was sore for her, I was that. And he – as cool – joking with Robert over the hanging irons the next minute. 'New sort of tailor I've got,' says he. 'Make them smart,' he says, 'since I'm to wear them in so exalted a position.' So exalted a position, that's what he says. 'And they've got to last me some long time, you know,' says he."

"He'll be something worth looking at on Saturday. I could almost wish he could ha' got off, only that it's a fine sight to see a real gentleman go through it. Ah, it's they desperate villains has the proper pluck!"

CHAPTER XXXIII
LAUNCHED ON THE GREAT WAVE

Sir Adrian made, at first personally, then through Miss O'Donoghue, two attempts to induce his wife to return to Pulwick, or at any rate to leave Lancaster on the next day. But the contempt, then the fury, which she opposed to their reasoning rendered it worse than useless.

The very sight of her husband, indeed, seemed to exasperate the unfortunate woman to such a degree that, in spite of his anxiety concerning her, he resolved to spare her even to the consciousness of his presence, and absented himself altogether from the house.

Miss O'Donoghue, unable to cope with a state of affairs at once so distressing and so unbecoming, finally retired to her own apartment with a book of piety and some gruel, and abandoned all further endeavour to guide her unruly relations. So that Molly found herself left to her own resources, in the guardianship of René, the only company her misery could tolerate.

Three times she went to the castle, to be met each time with the announcement that, by the express wish of the prisoner, no visitors were to be admitted to him again. Then in restless wandering about the streets – once entering the little chapel where the silent tabernacle seemed, with its closed door, to offer no relenting to the stormy cry of her soul, and sent her forth uncomforted in the very midst of René's humble bead-telling, to pace the flags anew – so the terrible day wore to a close for her; and so that night came, precursor of the most terrible day of all.

The exhaustion of Lady Landale's body produced at last a fortunate torpor of mind. Flung upon her bed she fell into a heavy sleep, and Tanty who announced her intention of watching her, when René's guardianship had of necessity to cease, had the satisfaction of informing Adrian, as he crept into the house, like one who had no business there, of this consoling fact before retiring herself to the capacious arm-chair in which she heroically purposed to spend the night.

The sun was bright in the heavens, there was a clatter and bustle in the street, when Molly woke with a great start out of this sleep of exhaustion. Her heart beating with heavy strokes, she sat up in bed and gazed upon her surroundings with startled eyes. What was this strange feeling of oppression, of terror? Why was she in this sordid little room? Why was her hair cut short? Ah, my God! memory returned upon her all too swiftly. It was for to-day —to-day; and she was perhaps too late. She might never see him again!

The throbbing of her heart was suffocating, sickening, as she slipped out of bed. For a moment she hardly dared consult the little watch that lay ticking upon her dressing table. It was only a few minutes past seven; there was yet time.

The energy of her desire conquered the weakness of her overwrought nerves.

Noiselessly, so as to avoid awakening the slumbering watcher in the arm-chair, but steadily, she clothed herself, wrapt the dark mantle round her; and then, pausing for a moment to gaze with a fierce disdain at the unconscious face of Miss O'Donoghue, which, with snores emerging energetically and regularly from the great hooked nose, presented a weird and witchlike vision in the frame of a nightcap, fearfully and wonderfully befrilled, crept from the room and down the stairs.

At René's door she paused and knocked.

He opened on the instant. From his worn face she guessed that he had been up all night. He put his finger to his lips as he saw her, and glanced meaningly towards the bed.

The words she would have spoken expired in a quick-drawn breath. Her husband, with face of deathlike pallor and silvered hair abroad upon the pillow, lay upon the poor couch, still in his yesterday attire, but covered carefully with a cloak. His breast rose and fell peacefully with his regular breath.

The scorn with which she had looked at Miss O'Donoghue now shot forth a thousand times intensified from Molly's circled eyes upon the prostrate figure.

"Asleep!" she cried.

And then with that incongruity with which things trivial and irrelevant come upon us, even in the supremest moments of life, the thought struck her sharply how old a man he was. Her lip curved.

"Yes, My Lady – asleep," answered René steadily – it seemed as if the faithful peasant had read her to her soul. "Thank God, asleep. It is enough to have to lose one good gentleman from the world this day. If his honour were not sleeping at last, I should not answer for him – I who speak to you. I took upon myself to put some of the medicine, that he has had to take now and again, when his sorrows come upon him and he cannot rest, into his soup last night. It has had a good effect. His honour will sleep three or four hours still, and that, My Lady, must be. His honour has suffered enough these last days, God knows!"

The wife turned away with an impatient gesture.

"Look, Madame, at his white hairs. All white now – they that were of a brown so beautiful, all but a few locks, only a few months past! Well may he look old. When was ever any one made to suffer as he has been, in only forty years of life? Ah, My Lady, we were at least tranquil upon our island!"

There was a volume of reproach in the quiet simplicity of the words, though Lady Landale was too bent on her own purpose to heed them. But she felt that they lodged in her mind, that she would find them there later; but not now – not now.

"It is to be for nine o'clock, you know," she said, with desperate calmness. "I must see him again. I must see him well. Alone I shall not be able to get a good place in the crowd. Oh, I would see all!" she added, with a terrible laugh.

René cast a glance at his master's placid face.

"I am ready to come with My Lady," he said then, and took his hat.

A turbulent, tender April day it was. Gusts of west wind, balmy and sweet with all the sweet budding life of the fields beyond, came eddying up the dusty streets and blowing merrily into the faces of the holiday crowd that already pressed in a steady stream towards the castle courtyard to see the hanging. In those days there were hangings so many after assizes that an execution could hardly be said to possess the interest of novelty. But there were circumstances enough attending the forthcoming show to give it quite a piquancy of its own in the eyes of the worthy Lancastrian burghers, who hurried with wives and children to the place of doom, anxious to secure sitting or standing room with a good view of the gallows-tree.

It was not every day, indeed, that a gentleman was hanged. So handsome a man, too, as the rumours went, and so dare-devil a fellow; friend of the noble family of Landale, and a murderer of its most respected member. Could justice ever have served up a spicier dish whereon to regale the multitude?

First the courtyard, then, the walls, the roofs of the adjoining houses, swarmed with an eager crowd. Every space of ground and slate and tile, every ledge and window, was occupied. As thick as bees they hung – men, women, and children; a sea of white faces pressed together, each still, yet all as instinct with tremulous movement as a field of corn in the wind; while the hoarse, indescribable murmur that seizes one with so strange and fearsome an impression, the voice of the multitude, rose and fell with a mighty pulsation, broken here and there by the shriller cry of a child.

Overhead the sky, a delicious spring blue sky, flecked with tiny white clouds, looked down like a great smile upon the crowd that laughed and joked beneath.

No pity in heaven or on earth.

But as the felon came out into the air, which, warm and fickle, puffed against his cheek, he cast one steady glance around upon the black human hive and then looked up into the white flecked ether, without the quiver of a nerve.

He drew the spring breath into his lungs with a grateful expansion of his deep chest. How fresh it was! And the sky, how fair and blue!

As the eagerly expected group emerged from the prison door and was greeted by a roar that curdled the blood in at least one woman's heart there, an old Irish hag, who sat in a coign of vantage, hugging her knees and crooning, a little black pipe held in her toothless jaws, ceased her dismal hum to concentrate all her attention upon the condemned man.

The creature was well known for miles around as a constant attendant at such spectacles, and had become in the course of time a privileged spectator. No one would have dreamt of disputing the first place to old Judy. Since the day when, still a young woman, she had seen her two sons, mere lads, hanged, the one for sheep-stealing, the other for harbouring the booty, she had, by a strange freak of nature, taken a taste for the spectacle of justice at work, and what had been the cause of her greatest sorrow became the only solace of her life. Judy and her pipe had become as familiar a figure at the periodical entertainment as the executioner himself – more so, indeed, for she had seen many generations of these latter, and could compare their styles with the judgment of a connoisseur.

But as Captain Jack advanced, the pallor of his clean shorn, handsome face illumined not so much by the morning sun without it seemed as by the shining of the bright spirit within; as gallantly clad as he had ever been, even in the old Bath days when he had been courting fair Madeleine de Savenaye; his head proudly uplifted, his tread firm, strong of soul, strong of body – some chord was struck in the perverted old heart that had so long revelled in unholy and gruesome pleasure. She drew the pipe from her lips, and broke out into screeching lamentations.

"Oh, me boy, me boy, me beautiful boy! Is it hang him they will, and he so beautiful and brave? The murthering villains, my curse on them – a mother's curse – God's curse on them – the black murtherers!"

She scrambled to her feet, and shook her fist wildly in the face of one of the sheriff's men.

A woman in the crowd, standing rigid and motionless, enveloped in mourning robes, here suddenly caught up the words with a muttering lip.

"Murderers, who said murderers? Don't they know who murdered him? Murdering Moll, Murdering Moll!"

"For heaven's love, Madam," cried a man beside her, who seemed in such anxiety concerning her as to pay little heed to the solemn procession which was now attracting universal attention, "let me take you away!"

But she looked at him with a distraught, unseeing eye, and pulled at the collar of her dress as if she were choking.

Old Judy's sudden expression of opinion created a small disturbance. The procession had to halt; a couple of officials good-naturedly elbowed her on one side.

But she thrust a withered hand expanded in protest over their shoulders, as the prisoner came forward again.

"God bless ye, honey, God bless ye: it's a wicked world."

He turned towards her; for the last time the old sweet smile sprang to lip and eye.

"Thank you, mother," he said, and raised his hand to his bare head with courteous gesture.

The crowd howled and swayed. He passed on.

And now the end! There is the cart; the officers draw back to make way for the man who is to help him with his final toilet. The chaplain, too, falls away after wringing his hand again and again. Good man, he weeps and cannot speak the sacred words he would. Why weep? We must all die! How blue the sky is: he will look once more before drawing down the cap upon his eyes. His hands are free, for he is to die as like a gentleman as may be. Just the old blue that used to smile down at him upon his merry Peregrine, and up at him from the dancing waves. He had always thought he would have liked to die upon the sea, in the cool fresh water … a clean, brave death.

It is hard to die in a crowd. Even the very beasts would creep into cave or bush to die decently – unwatched.

A last puff of sweeping wind in his face; then darkness, blind, suffocating…

Ah, God is good! Here is the old ship giving and rising under his feet like the living creature he always thought her, and here is dazzling brilliant sunshine all around, so bright he scarce can see the free white-crested waves that are dashing down upon him; but he is upon the sea indeed, upon the sea alone, and the waves are coming. Hark how they roar, see how they gather! The brave Peregrine she dips and springs, she will weather the breakers with him at the helm no matter how they rear. On, on they come, mountain high, overwhelming, bitter drenching.

A great wave in very truth, it gathers and breaks and onward rolls, and carries the soul of Hubert Cochrane with it.

The woman in the black cloak falls as if she had been struck, and as those around her draw apart to let her companion and another man lift her and carry her away, they note with horror that her face is dark and swollen, as if the cord that had just done its evil work yonder had been tightened also round her slender throat.

CHAPTER XXXIV
THE GIBBET ON THE SANDS

 
Woman! take up thy life once more
Where thou hast left it;
Nothing is changed for thee, thou art the same,
Thou who didst think that all things
Would be wholly changed for thee.
 

Luteplayer's Song.

Pulwick again. The whirlwind of disaster that upon that fatal fifteenth of March had burst upon the house of Landale has passed and swept away. But it has left deep trace of its passage.

The restless head, the busy hand, the scheming brain of Rupert Landale lie now mouldering under the sod of the little churchyard where first they started the mischief that was to have such far reaching effects. Low, too, lies the proud head of the mistress of Pulwick, so stricken, indeed, so fever-tortured, that those who love her best scarce dare hope more for her than rest at last under the same earth that presses thus lightly above her enemy's eternal sleep.

There is a great stillness in the house. People go to and fro with muffled steps, the master with bent white head; Miss O'Donoghue, indefatigable sick nurse; Madeleine, who may not venture as far as the threshold of her sister's room, and awaits in prayer and tears the hour of that final bereavement which will free her to take wing towards the cloister for which her soul longs; Sophia, crushed finally by the sorrows she has played at all her days. Seemingly there is peace once more upon them all, but it is the peace of exhaustion rather than that of repose. And yet – could they but know it, as the sands run down in the hour-glass of time there are golden grains gathering still to drop into the lives of each.

But meanwhile none may read the future, and Molly fights for her life in the darkened room, the gloom of which, to the souls of the dwellers at Pulwick, seems to spread even to the sunny skies without.

When Lady Landale was brought back to her home from Lancaster, it was held by every one who saw her that Death had laid his cold finger on her forehead, and that her surrender to his call could only be a matter of hours.

The physician in attendance could point out no reasonable ground for hope. Such a case had never come within his experience or knowledge, and he was with difficulty induced to believe that it was not the result of actual violence.

"In every particular," said he, "the patient's symptoms are those of coma resulting from prolonged strangulation or asphyxia. These spectacles are very dangerous to highly sensitive organisations. Lady Landale no doubt felt for the miserable wretch in the benevolence of her heart. Imagination aiding her, she realised suddenly the horror of his death throes, and this vivid realisation was followed by the actual simulacrum of the torture. We have seen hysterical subjects simulate in the same manner diverse diseases of which they themselves are organically free, such as epilepsy, or the like. But Lady Landale's condition is otherwise serious. She is alive; more I cannot say."

According to his lights, he had bled the patient, as he would have bled, by rote, to recall to life one actually cut down from the beam. But, although the young blood did flow, bearing testimony to the fact that the heart still beat in that deathlike frame, the vitality left seemed so faint as to defy the power of human ministration.

The flame of life barely flickered; but the powers of youth were of greater strength in the unconscious body than could have been suspected, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, they asserted themselves.

With the return of animation, however, came a new danger: fever, burning, devastating, more terrible even than the almost mortal syncope; that fever of the brain which wastes like the rack, before which science stands helpless, and the watcher sinks into despair at his impotence to screen a beloved sufferer from the horrible, ever-recurring phantoms of delirium.

Had not Sir Adrian intuitively known well-nigh every act of the drama which had already been so fatal to his house, Molly's frenzied utterances would have told him all. Every secret incident of that storm of passion which had desolated her life was laid bare to his sorrowing heart: – her aspirations for an ideal, centred suddenly upon one man; her love rapture cruelly baulked at every step; the consuming of that love fire, resisting all frustration of hope, all efforts of conscience, of honour; how her whole being became merged into that of the man she loved and whom she had ruined, her life in his life, her very breath in his breath. And then the lamentable, inevitable end: the fearful confrontation with his death. Again and again, in never ceasing repetition, was that fair, most dear body, that harrowed soul, dragged step by step through every iota of the past torture, always to fall at last into the same stillness of exhaustion – appalling image of final death that wrung Adrian with untold agonies of despair.

For many days this condition of things lasted unaltered. In the physician's own words it was impossible that life could much longer resist such fierce onslaughts. But one evening a change came over the spirit of the sufferer's vision.

There had been a somewhat longer interval between the paroxysms; Sir Adrian seated as usual by the bed, waiting now with a sinking heart for the wonted return of the frenzy, clamouring in his soul to heaven for pity on one whom seemingly no human aid could succour, dared yet draw no shadow of hope from the more prolonged stillness of the patient. Presently indeed, she grew restless, tossed her arms, muttered with parched lips. Then she suddenly sat up and listened as if to some deeply annoying and disquieting sound, fell back again under his gentle hands, rolling her little black head wearily from side to side, only however to start again, and again listen. Thus it went on for a while until the haunted, weary eyes grew suddenly distraught with terror and loathing. Straining them into space as if seeking something she ought to see but could not, she began to speak in a quick yet distinct whisper:

"How it creaks, creaks – creaks! Will no one stop that creaking! What is it that creaks so? Will no one stop that creaking!" And again she placed her cheek on the pillow, covering her ear with her little, wasted hand, and for a while remained motionless, moaning like a child. But it was only to spring up again, this time with a cry which brought the physician from the adjacent sleeping room in alarm to her bedside.

"Ah, God," she shrieked, her eyes distended and staring as if into the far distance through walls and outlying darkness. "I see it! They have done it, they have done it! It is hanging on the sands – how it creaks and sways in the wind! It will creak for ever, for ever… Now it spins round, it looks this way – the black face! It looks at me!" She gave another piercing cry, then her frame grew rigid. With mouth open and fixed eyeballs she seemed lost in the frightful fascination of the image before her brain.

As, distracted by the sight of her torments, Adrian hung over her, racking his mind in the endeavour to soothe her, her words struck a chill into his very soul. He cast a terrified glance at the doctor who was ominously feeling her pulse.

"There is a change," he faltered.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"I have told you before," he retorted irritably, "that you should attach no more importance to the substance of these delirious wanderings than you would to the ravings of madness. It is the fact of the delirium itself which must alarm us. She is less and less able to bear it."

The patient moaned and shuddered, resisting the gentle force that would have pressed her down on her pillow.

"Oh the creaking, the creaking! Will no one stop that creaking! Must I hear it go on creak, creak, creak for ever, and see it sway and sway… Will no one ever stop it!"

Sir Adrian took a sudden resolution. "I will," he said, low and clear into her ear. She sank down on the instant and looked at him, back from her far distance, almost as if she understood him and the pitiful cry for the help he would have given his heart's blood to procure for her, was silent for the moment upon her lips.

"I will prepare an opiate," said the physician in a whisper.

"And I," said Sir Adrian to him, with a strange expression upon his pale face, "am going to stop that creaking."

The man of medicine gazed after him with a look of intense astonishment which rapidly changed to one of professional interest.

"It is evident that I shall soon have another mentally deranged patient to see to," he remarked to himself as he rose to seek the drugs he meant to administer.

Downstairs, Sir Adrian immediately called for René, and being informed that he had left for the island early in the afternoon and had announced his return before night, cast a cloak over his shoulders and hurried forth in the hope of meeting him upon his homeward way. His pulses were beating well-nigh as wildly as those of the fever stricken woman upstairs in the house. He dared not pause to reflect on his purpose, or seek to disentangle the confusion of his thoughts, for fear of being confronted with the hopelessness of their folly. But the exquisite serenity of the night sky, where swam the moon, "a silver splendour;" the freshness of the sweeping breeze that dashed, keen from the east, over the sea against his face; all the glorious distance, the unconsciousness and detachment of nature from the fume and misery of life, brought him unwittingly to a calmer mood.

He had reached the extreme confine of the pine wood, when, across the sands that stretched unbroken to the lips of the sea, a figure advanced towards him.

"Renny!" called Sir Adrian.

"Your honour!" cried the man, breaking into a run to meet him. O God! how ghostly white looked the master's face in the moon-flood!

"My Lady – ?"

"Not worse; yet not better – and that means worse now. But there is a change. Renny," sinking his voice and clasping the man's sturdy arm with clammy hand, "is it true they have placed him on the sands to-day?"

The man stared.

"How did your honour know? Yes – they have done so. It is true: the swine! not more than an hour, in verity. How could it have come so soon to your honour's ears? This morning, indeed, they came from the town in a cart, and planted the great gibbet on Scarthey Point, at low water. And to-night they brought the body, all bound in irons, and from a boat, for it was high tide, they riveted it on the chain. And it is to remain for ever, your honour – so they say."

"Strange," murmured Sir Adrian to himself, gazing seaward with awestruck eyes. "And did you," he asked, "hear its creaking, Renny, as it swayed in the wind?"

Again René cast a quick glance of alarm at his master. The master had a singular manner with him to-night! Then edging closer to him he whispered in his ear:

"They say it is to hang for ever. There is a warning to those who would interfere with this justice of theirs. But, your honour, there came one to the island to-day, I do not know if your honour knows him, the captain's second on that vessel of misfortune. And I believe, your honour, the dawn will never see that poor, black body hanging over yonder like a scarecrow, to spoil our view. This man, this brave mariner, Curwen is his name, he is mad furious with us all! He has just but come from hearing of his captain's fate, and he is ready to kill us, that we let him be murdered without breaking some heads for him. Faith, if it could have done any good, it is not I that would have balanced about it! But, as I told him, there was no use running one's own head into a loop of rope when that would please nobody but Mr. the Judge. But he is not to be reasoned with. He is like a wild animal. When I left him," said René, dropping his voice still lower, "he was knocking a coffin together out of the old sea wood on Scarthey. He said his captain would rest better in those boards that were seasoned with salt water. And when I went away, your honour, and left him hammering there – faith, I thought that the coffin was like to be seasoned by another kind of salt water too."

His face twitched and the ready tears sprang to his own eyes which, unashamed, he now wiped with his sleeve after his custom. But Sir Adrian's mind was still drifting in distant ghastly companionship.

"How the wind blows!" he said, and shuddered a little. "How the poor body must sway in the wind, and the chains creak."

"If it can make any difference to the poor captain he will lie in peace to-night, please God," said René.

"Ay," said Sir Adrian, "and you and I, friend, will go too, and help this good fellow in his task. I hope, I believe, that I should have done this thing of my own thought, had I had time to think at all. But now, more hangs upon those creaking chains than you can dream of. This is a strange world – and it is full of ghosts to-night. But we must hurry, Renny."

Bound even to the tips of her burning little fingers by the spell of the opiate, Lady Landale lay in the shadowed room as one dead, yet in her sick brain fearfully awake, keenly alive.

At first it was as if she too was manacled in chains till she could not move a muscle, could not breathe or cry because of the ring round her breast; and she was hanging with the black figure, swaying, while the rusty iron links went creak, creak, creak, with every swing to and fro. Then suddenly she seemed to stand, as it were, out of herself and to be seeing with the naked soul alone. And what she saw was the great stretch of beach and sea, white, white, white, in the moonlight and spreading, it seemed, for leagues and leagues, spreading till all the world was only beach and sea.

But close to her in the whitest moonlight rose the great gibbet, gaunt and black, cutting the pale sky in two and athwart; and hanging from it was the black figure that swayed and swung. And though the winds muttered and the waves growled, she could not hear them with the ears of the soul, for that the whole of this great world of sea and sand was filled with the creaking of the chains.

But now, across the bleak and pallid spaces came three black figures. And, as she looked and watched and they drew nearer, the dreadful burthen of the gibbet swung round as if to greet them, and she too, felt in her soul that she knew them all three, though not by names, as creatures of earth know each other, but by the kinship of the soul. This man with hair as white as the white beach, hair that seemed to shine silver as he came; and him yonder who followed him as a dog his master; and yonder again the third, in the seaman's dress, with hard face hewn into such rugged lines of grief and fury – she knew them all. And next they reached the gibbet: and one swarmed up the black post, and hammered and filed and prised, and then, oh merciful God! the creaking stopped at last!

Now she could hear the wash of the waves, the rush of the wholesome wind!

A mist came across her vision; faintly she saw the stiffened disfigured corpse which yet she felt had once been something she had loved with passion, laid reverently upon a stretcher, its irons loosened and cast away, and then covered with a great cloak. Then the sea, the beach, the white moon faded and waved and receded. Molly's soul went back to her body again, while blessed tears fell one by one from her hot eyes. She breathed; her limbs relaxed; round the tired brain came, with a soft hush like that of gentle wings, dark oblivion.