The Light of Scarthey: A Romance

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."