“Is this cavern one of their haunts?” said Aram.
“Sometimes: but they sleep the other side of the Devil’s Crag to-night. Nothing like a change of quarters for longevity—eh?”
“And they easily spare you.”
“Yes, if it be only on rare occasions, and on the plea of family business. Now then, your hand, as before. Jesu! how it rains—lightning too—I could look with less fear on a naked sword, than those red, forked, blinding flashes—Hark! thunder.”
The night had now, indeed, suddenly changed its aspect; the rain descended in torrents, even more impetuously than on the former night, while the thunder burst over their very heads, as they wound upward through the brake. With every instant, the lightning broke from the riven chasm of the blackness that seemed suspended as in a solid substance above, brightened the whole heaven into one livid and terrific flame, and showed to the two men the faces of each other, rendered deathlike and ghastly by the glare. Houseman was evidently affected by the fear that sometimes seizes even the sturdiest criminals, when exposed to those more fearful phenomena of the Heavens, which seem to humble into nothing the power and the wrath of man. His teeth chattered, and he muttered broken words about the peril of wandering near trees when the lightning was of that forked character, accelerating his pace at every sentence, and sometimes interrupting himself with an ejaculation, half oath, half prayer, or a congratulation that the rain at least diminished the danger. They soon cleared the thicket, and a few minutes brought them once more to the banks of the stream, and the increased roar of the cataract. No earthly scene perhaps could surpass the appalling sublimity of that which they beheld;—every instant the lightning, which became more and more frequent, converting the black waters into billows of living fire, or wreathing itself in lurid spires around the huge crag that now rose in sight; and again, as the thunder rolled onward, darting its vain fury upon the rushing cataract, and the tortured breast of the gulf that raved below low. And the sounds that filled the air were even more fraught with terror and menace than the scene;—the waving, the groans, the crash of the pines on the hill, the impetuous force of the rain upon the whirling river, and the everlasting roar of the cataract, answered anon by the yet more awful voice that burst above it from the clouds.
They halted while yet sufficiently distant from the cataract to be heard by each other. “My path,” said Aram, as the lightning now paused upon the scene, and seemed literally to wrap in a lurid shroud the dark figure of the Student, as he stood, with his hand calmly raised, and his cheek pale, but dauntless and composed; “My path now lies yonder: in a week we shall meet again.”
“By the fiend,” said Houseman, shuddering, “I would not, for a full hundred, ride alone through the moor you will pass. There stands a gibbet by the road, on which a parricide was hanged in chains. Pray Heaven this night be no omen of the success of our present compact!”
“A steady heart, Houseman,” answered Aram, striking into the separate path, “is its own omen.”
The Student soon gained the spot in which he had left his horse; the animal had not attempted to break the bridle, but stood trembling from limb to limb, and testified by a quick short neigh the satisfaction with which it hailed the approach of its master, and found itself no longer alone.
Aram remounted, and hastened once more into the main road. He scarcely felt the rain, though the fierce wind drove it right against his path; he scarcely marked the lightning, though at times it seemed to dart its arrows on his very form; his heart was absorbed in the success of his schemes.
“Let the storm without howl on,” thought he, “that within hath a respite at last. Amidst the winds and rains I can breathe more freely than I have done on the smoothest summer day. By the charm of a deeper mind and a subtler tongue, I have then conquered this desperate foe; I have silenced this inveterate spy: and, Heaven be praised, he too has human ties; and by those ties I hold him! Now, then, I hasten to London—I arrange this annuity—see that the law tightens every cord of the compact; and when all is done, and this dangerous man fairly departed on his exile, I return to Madeline, and devote to her a life no longer the vassal of accident and the hour: but I have been taught caution. Secure as my own prudence may have made me from farther apprehension of Houseman, I will yet place myself wholly beyond his power: I will still consummate my former purpose, adopt a new name, and seek a new retreat; Madeline may not know the real cause; but this brain is not barren of excuse. Ah!” as drawing his cloak closer round him, he felt the purse hid within his breast which contained the order he had obtained from Lester; “Ah! this will now add its quota to purchase, not a momentary relief, but the stipend of perpetual silence. I have passed through the ordeal easier than I had hoped for. Had the devil at his heart been more difficult to lay, so necessary is his absence, that I must have purchased it at any cost. Courage, Eugene Aram! thy mind, for which thou hast lived, and for which thou hast hazarded thy soul—if soul and mind be distinct from each other—thy mind can support thee yet through every peril: not till thou art stricken into idiotcy, shalt thou behold thyself defenceless. How cheerfully,” muttered he, after a momentary pause, “how cheerfully, for safety, and to breathe with a quiet heart, the air of Madeline’s presence, shall I rid myself of all save enough to defy want. And want can never now come to me, as of old. He who knows the sources of every science from which wealth is wrought holds even wealth at his will.”
Breaking at every interval into these soliloquies, Aram continued to breast the storm until he had won half his journey, and had come upon a long and bleak moor, which was the entrance to that beautiful line of country in which the valleys around Grassdale are embosomed: faster and faster came the rain; and though the thunder-clouds were now behind, they yet followed loweringly, in their black array, the path of the lonely horseman.
But now he heard the sound of hoofs making towards him; he drew his horse on one side of the road, and at that instant a broad flash of lightning illumining the space around, he beheld four horsemen speeding along at a rapid gallop; they were armed, and conversing loudly—their oaths were heard jarringly and distinctly amidst all the more solemn and terrific sounds of the night. They came on, sweeping by the Student, whose hand was on his pistol, for he recognised in one of the riders the man who had escaped unwounded from Lester’s house. He and his comrades were evidently, then, Houseman’s desperate associates; and they too, though they were borne too rapidly by Aram to be able to rein in their horses on the spot, had seen the solitary traveller, and already wheeled round, and called upon him to halt!
The lightning was again gone, and the darkness snatched the robbers and their intended victim from the sight of each other. But Aram had not lost a moment; fast fled his horse across the moor, and when, with the next flash, he looked back, he saw the ruffians, unwilling even for booty to encounter the horrors of the night, had followed him but a few paces, and again turned round; still he dashed on, and had now nearly passed the moor; the thunder rolled fainter and fainter from behind, and the lightning only broke forth at prolonged intervals, when suddenly, after a pause of unusual duration, it brought the whole scene into a light, if less intolerable, even more livid than before. The horse, that had hitherto sped on without start or stumble, now recoiled in abrupt affright; and the horseman, looking up at the cause, beheld the Gibbet of which Houseman had spoken immediately fronting his path, with its ghastly tenant waving to and fro, as the winds rattled through the parched and arid bones; and the inexpressible grin of the skull fixed, as in mockery, upon his countenance.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I.
IN WHICH WE RETURN TO WALTER.—HIS DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO
MR. PERTINAX FILLGRAVE.—THE CORPORAL’S ADVICE,
AND THE CORPORAL’S VICTORY
Let a Physician be ever so excellent, there will be those that censure him.
—Gil Blas.
We left Walter in a situation of that critical nature, that it would be inhuman to delay our return to him any longer. The blow by which he had been felled, stunned him for an instant; but his frame was of no common strength and hardihood, and the imminent peril in which he was placed, served to recall him from the momentary insensibility. On recovering himself, he felt that the ruffians were dragging him towards the hedge, and the thought flashed upon him that their object was murder. Nerved by this idea, he collected his strength, and suddenly wresting himself from the grasp of one of the ruffians who had seized him by the collar, he had already gained his knee, and now his feet, when a second blow once more deprived him of sense.
When a dim and struggling consciousness recurred to him; he found that the villains had dragged him to the opposite side of the hedge and were deliberately robbing him. He was on the point of renewing an useless and dangerous struggle, when one of the ruffians said, “I think he stirs, I had better draw my knife across his throat.”
“Pooh, no!” replied another voice, “never kill if it can be helped: trust me ‘tis an ugly thing to think of afterwards. Besides, what use is it? A robbery, in these parts, is done and forgotten; but a murder rouses the whole country.”
“Damnation, man! why, the deed’s done already, he’s as dead as a door-nail.”
“Dead!” said the other in a startled voice; “no, no!” and leaning down, the ruffian placed his hand on Walter’s heart. The unfortunate traveller felt his flesh creep as the hand touched him, but prudently abstained from motion or exclamation. He thought, however, as with dizzy and half-shut eyes he caught the shadowy and dusk outline of the face that bent over him, so closely that he felt the breath of its lips, that it was one that he had seen before; and as the man now rose, and the wan light of the skies gave a somewhat clearer view of his features, the supposition was heightened, though not absolutely confirmed. But Walter had no farther power to observe his plunderers: again his brain reeled; the dark trees, the grim shadows of human forms, swam before his glazing eye; and he sunk once more into a profound insensibility.
Meanwhile, the doughty Corporal had at the first sight of his master’s fall, halted abruptly at the spot to which his steed had carried him; and coming rapidly to the conclusion that three men were best encountered at a distance, he fired his two pistols, and without staying to see if they took effect, which, indeed, they did not, galloped down the precipitous hill with as much despatch, as if it had been the last stage to “Lunnun.”
“My poor young master!” muttered he: “But if the worst comes to the worst, the chief part of the money’s in the saddle-bags any how; and so, messieurs thieves, you’re bit—baugh!”
The Corporal was not long in reaching the town, and alarming the loungers at the inn-door. A posse comitatus was soon formed; and, armed as if they were to have encountered all the robbers between Hounslow and the Apennine, a band of heroes, with the Corporal, who had first deliberately reloaded his pistols, at their head, set off to succour “the poor gentleman what was already murdered.”
They had not got far before they found Walter’s horse, which had luckily broke from the robbers, and was now quietly regaling himself on a patch of grass by the roadside. “He can get his supper, the beast,” grunted the Corporal, thinking of his own; and bid one of the party try to catch the animal, which, however, would have declined all such proffers, had not a long neigh of recognition from the roman nose of the Corporal’s steed, striking familiarly on the straggler’s ear, called it forthwith, to the Corporal’s side; and (while the two chargers exchanged greeting) the Corporal seized its rein.
When they came to the spot from which the robbers had made their sally, all was still and tranquil; no Walter was to be seen: the Corporal cautiously dismounted, and searched about with as much minuteness as if he were looking for a pin; but the host of the inn at which the travellers had dined the day before, stumbled at once on the right track. Gouts of blood on the white chalky soil directed him to the hedge, and creeping through a small and recent gap, he discovered the yet breathing body of the young traveller.
Walter was now conducted with much care to the inn; a Surgeon was already in attendance; for having heard that a gentleman had been murdered without his knowledge, Mr. Pertinax Fillgrave had rushed from his house, and placed himself on the road, that the poor creature might not, at least, be buried without his assistance. So eager was he to begin, that he scarce suffered the unfortunate Walter to be taken within, before he whipped out his instruments, and set to work with the smack of an amateur.
Although the Surgeon declared his patient to be in the greatest possible danger, the sagacious Corporal, who thought himself more privileged to know about wounds than any man of peace, by profession, however destructive by practice, could possibly be, had himself examined those his master had received, before he went down to taste his long-delayed supper; and he now confidently assured the landlord, and the rest of the good company in the kitchen, that the blows on the head had been mere fly-bites, and that his master would be as well as ever in a week at the farthest.
And, indeed, when Walter the very next morning woke from the stupor, rather than sleep, he had undergone, he felt himself surprisingly better than the Surgeon, producing his probe, hastened to assure him he possibly could be.
By the help of Mr. Pertinax Fillgrave, Walter was detained several days in the town; nor is it wholly improbable, but that for the dexterity of the Corporal, he might be in the town to this day; not, indeed in the comfortable shelter of the old-fashioned inn, but in the colder quarters of a certain green spot, in which, despite of its rural attractions, few persons are willing to fix a permanent habitation.
Luckily, however, one evening, the Corporal, who had been, to say truth, very regular in his attendance on his master; for, bating the selfishness, consequent, perhaps, on his knowledge of the world, Jacob Bunting was a good-natured man on the whole, and liked his master as well as he did any thing, always excepting Jacobina, and board-wages; one evening, we say, the Corporal coming into Walter’s apartment, found him sitting up in his bed, with a very melancholy and dejected expression of countenance.
“And well, Sir, what does the Doctor say?” asked the Corporal, drawing aside the curtains.
“Ah, Bunting, I fancy it’s all over with me!”
“The Lord forbid, Sir! you’re a-jesting, surely?”
“Jesting! my good fellow, ah! just get me that phial.”
“The filthy stuff!” said the Corporal, with a wry face; “Well, Sir, if I had had the dressing of you—been half way to Yorkshire by this. Man’s a worm; and when a doctor gets un on his hook, he is sure to angle for the devil with the bait—augh!”
“What! you really think that damned fellow, Fillgrave, is keeping me on in this way?”
“Is he a fool, to give up three phials a day, 4s. 6d. item, ditto, ditto?” cried the Corporal, as if astonished at the question; “but don’t you feel yourself getting a deal better every day? Don’t you feel all this ere stuff revive you?”
No, indeed, I was amazingly better the first day than I am now; I progress from worse to worse. Ah! Bunting, if Peter Dealtry were here, he might help me to an appropriate epitaph: as it is, I suppose I shall be very simply labelled. Fillgrave will do the whole business, and put it down in his bill—item, nine draughts—item, one epitaph.
“Lord-a-mercy, your honour,” said the Corporal, drawing out a little red-spotted pocket-handkerchief; “how can—jest so?—it’s quite moving.”
“I wish we were moving!” sighed the patient.
“And so we might be,” cried the Corporal; “so we might, if you’d pluck up a bit. Just let me look at your honour’s head; I knows what a confusion is better nor any of ‘em.”
The Corporal having obtained permission, now removed the bandages wherewith the Doctor had bound his intended sacrifice to Pluto, and after peering into the wounds for about a minute, he thrust out his under lip, with a contemptuous, “Pshaugh! augh! And how long,” said he, “does Master Fillgrave say you be to be under his hands,—augh!”
“He gives me hopes that I may be taken out an airing very gently, (yes, hearses always go very gently!) in about three weeks!”
The Corporal started, and broke into a long whistle. He then grinned from ear to ear, snapped his fingers, and said, “Man of the world, Sir,—man of the world every inch of him!”
“He seems resolved that I shall be a man of another world,” said Walter.
“Tell ye what, Sir—take my advice—your honour knows I be no fool—throw off them ere wrappers; let me put on scrap of plaister—pitch phials to devil—order out horses to-morrow, and when you’ve been in the air half an hour, won’t know yourself again!”
“Bunting! the horses out to-morrow?—faith, I don’t think I could walk across the room.”
“Just try, your honour.”
“Ah! I’m very weak, very weak—my dressing-gown and slippers—your arm, Bunting—well, upon my honour, I walk very stoutly, eh? I should not have thought this! leave go: why I really get on without your assistance!”
“Walk as well as ever you did.”
“Now I’m out of bed, I don’t think I shall go back again to it.”
“Would not, if I was your honour.”
“And after so much exercise, I really fancy I’ve a sort of an appetite.”
“Like a beefsteak?”
“Nothing better.”
“Pint of wine?”
“Why that would be too much—eh?”
“Not it.”
“Go, then, my good Bunting; go and make haste—stop, I say that d—d fellow—” “Good sign to swear,” interrupted the Corporal; “swore twice within last five minutes—famous symptom!”
“Do you choose to hear me? That d—d fellow, Fillgrave, is coming back in an hour to bleed me: do you mount guard—refuse to let him in—pay him his bill—you have the money. And harkye, don’t be rude to the rascal.”
“Rude, your honour! not I—been in the Forty-second—knows discipline—only rude to the privates!”
The Corporal, having seen his master conduct himself respectably toward the viands with which he supplied him—having set his room to rights, brought him the candles, borrowed him a book, and left him for the present in extremely good spirits, and prepared for the flight of the morrow; the Corporal, I say, now lighting his pipe, stationed himself at the door of the inn, and waited for Mr. Pertinax Fillgrave. Presently the Doctor, who was a little thin man, came bustling across the street, and was about, with a familiar “Good evening,” to pass by the Corporal, when that worthy, dropping his pipe, said respectfully, “Beg pardon, Sir—want to speak to you—a little favour. Will your honour walk in the back-parlour?”
“Oh! another patient,” thought the Doctor; “these soldiers are careless fellows—often get into scrapes. Yes, friend, I’m at your service.”
The Corporal showed the man of phials into the back-parlour, and, hemming thrice, looked sheepish, as if in doubt how to begin. It was the Doctor’s business to encourage the bashful.
“Well, my good man,” said he, brushing off, with the arm of his coat, some dust that had settled on his inexpressibles, “so you want to consult me?”
“Indeed, your honour, I do; but—feel a little awkward in doing so—a stranger and all.”
“Pooh!—medical men are never strangers. I am the friend of every man who requires my assistance.”
“Augh!—and I do require your honour’s assistance very sadly.”
“Well—well—speak out. Any thing of long standing?”
“Why, only since we have been here, Sir.”
“Oh, that’s all! Well.”
“Your honour’s so good—that—won’t scruple in telling you all. You sees as how we were robbed—master at least was—had some little in my pockets—but we poor servants are never too rich. You seems such a kind gentleman—so attentive to master—though you must have felt how disinterested it was to ‘tend a man what had been robbed—that I have no hesitation in making bold to ask you to lend us a few guineas, just to help us out with the bill here,—bother!”
“Fellow!” said the Doctor, rising, “I don’t know what you mean; but I’d have you to learn that I am not to be cheated out of my time and property. I shall insist upon being paid my bill instantly, before I dress your master’s wound once more.”
“Augh!” said the Corporal, who was delighted to find the Doctor come so immediately into the snare;—“won’t be so cruel surely,—why, you’ll leave us without a shiner to pay my host here.”
“Nonsense!—Your master, if he’s a gentleman, can write home for money.”
“Ah, Sir, all very well to say so;—but, between you and me and the bed-post—young master’s quarrelled with old master—old master won’t give him a rap,—so I’m sure, since your honour’s a friend to every man who requires your assistance—noble saying, Sir!—you won’t refuse us a few guineas;—and as for your bill—why—” “Sir, you’re an impudent vagabond!” cried the Doctor, as red as a rose-draught, and flinging out of the room; “and I warn you, that I shall bring in my bill, and expect to be paid within ten minutes.”
The Doctor waited for no answer—he hurried home, scratched off his account, and flew back with it in as much haste as if his patient had been a month longer under his care, and was consequently on the brink of that happier world, where, since the inhabitants are immortal, it is very evident that doctors, as being useless, are never admitted.
The Corporal met him as before.
“There, Sir,” cried the Doctor, breathlessly, and then putting his arms akimbo, “take that to your master, and desire him to pay me instantly.”
“Augh! and shall do no such thing.”
“You won’t?”
“No, for shall pay you myself. Where’s your wee stamp—eh?”
And with great composure the Corporal drew out a well-filled purse, and discharged the bill. The Doctor was so thunderstricken, that he pocketed the money without uttering a word. He consoled himself, however, with the belief that Walter, whom he had tamed into a becoming hypochondria, would be sure to send for him the next morning. Alas, for mortal expectations!—the next morning Walter was once more on the road.