Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 264
The woman moaned audibly.
“Don’t be afraid, my poor girl. Nobody shall harm you here. Take courage and look around. Is there anybody in court who can speak for you — who can tell us how you came to the place where you are now standing?”
The woman let fall her hands, raised her head, and looked up at the Deemster, face to face and eye to eye.
“Yes,” she said, “there is one.”
The Deemster’s countenance became pale, his eyes glistened, his look wandered, his lips trembled — he was biting them, they were bleeding.
“Remove her in custody,” he muttered; “let her be well cared for.”
There was a tumult in a moment. Everybody had recognised the prisoner as she was being taken out, though shame and privation had so altered her. “Peter Quilliam’s wife!”— “Cæsar Cregeen’s daughter — where’s the man himself?”— “Then it’s truth they’re telling — it’s not dead she is at all, but worse.”— “Lor-a-massy!”— “What a trouble for the Dempster!”
When Kate was gone, the court ought to have adjourned instantly, yet the Deemster remained in his seat. There was a mist before his eyes which dazzled him. He had a look at once wild and timid. His limbs pained although they were swelling to enormous size. He felt as if a heavy, invisible hand had been laid on the top of his head.
The clerk caught his eye, and then he rose with an apologetic air, took hold of the rail, and made an effort to cross the dais. At the next moment his servant, Jem-y-Lord, had leapt up to his side, but he made an impatient gesture as if declining help.
There are three steps going down to the floor of the court, and a handrail on one side of them. Coming to these steps, he stumbled, muttered some confused words, and fell forward on to his face. The people were on their feet by this time, and there was a rush to the place.
“Stand back! He has only fainted,” cried Jem-y-Lord.
“Worse than that,” said the sergeant. “Get him to bed, and send for Dr. Mylechreest instantly.”
“Where can we take him?” said somebody.
“They keep a room for him at Elm Cottage,” said somebody else.
“No, not there,” said Jem-y-Lord.
“It’s nearest, and there’s no time to lose,” said the sergeant.
Then they lifted Philip, and carried him as he lay, in his wig and gown as Deemster, to the house of Pete.
IX.
There is a kind of mental shock which, like an earthquake under a prison, bursts open every cell and lets the inmates escape. After a time, Pete remembered that he was sitting in the dark, and he got up to light a candle. Looking for candlestick and matches, he went from table to dresser, from dresser to table, and from table back to dresser, doing the same thing over and over again, and not perceiving that he was going round and round. When at length the candle was lighted, he took it in his hand and went into the parlour like a sleepwalker. He set it on the mantelpiece, and sat down on the stool. In his blurred vision confused forms floated about him. “Ah! my tools,” he thought, and picked up the mallet and two of the chisels. He was sitting with these in his hands when his eyes fell on the other candlestick, the one in which the candle had gone out “I meant to light a candle,” he thought, and he got up and took the empty candlestick into the hall. When he came back with another lighted candle, he perceived that there were two. “I’m going stupid,” he thought, and he blew out the first one. A moment afterwards he forgot that he had done so, and seeing the second still burning, he blew that out also.
So dull were his senses that he did not realise that anything was amiss. His eyes were seeing objects everywhere about — they were growing to awful size and threatening him. His ears were hearing noises — they were making a fearful tumult inside his head.
The room was not entirely dark. A shaft of bleared moonlight came and went at intervals. The moon was scudding through an angry sky, sometimes appearing, sometimes disappearing. Pete returned to the stool, and then he was in the light, but the nameless stone, leaning against the wall, was in the shade. He took up the mallet and chisels again, intending to work. “Hush!” he said as he began. The clamour in his brain was so loud that he thought some one was making a noise in the house. This task was sacred. He always worked at it in silence.
Pat-put! pat-put! How long he worked he never knew. There are moments which are not to be measured as time. In the uncertain handling of the chisel and the irregular beat of the mallet something gave way. There was a harsh sound like a groan. A crack like a flash of forked lightning had shot across the face of the stone. He had split it in half. Its great pieces fell to the floor on either side of him. Then he remembered that the stone had been useless. “It doesn’t matter now,” he thought. Nothing mattered.
With the mallet hanging from his hand he continued to sit in the drifting moonlight, feeling as if everything in the world had been shivered to atoms. His two idols had been scattered at one blow — his wife and his friend. The golden threads that had bound him to life were broken. When poverty had come, he had met it without repining; when death had seemed to come, he had borne up against it bravely. But wifeless, friendless, deceived where he had loved, betrayed where he had worshipped, he was bankrupt, he was broken, and a boundless despair took hold of him.
When hope is entirely gone, anguish will sometimes turn a man into a monster. There was a fretful cry from the cradle, and, still in the stupor of his despair, he went out to rock it. The fire, which had only slid and smouldered, was now struggling into flame, and the child looked up at him with Philip’s eyes. A knife seemed to enter his heart at that moment. He was more desolate than he had thought. “Hush, my child, hush!” he said, without thinking. His child? He had none. That solace was gone.
Anger came to save his reason. Not to have felt anger, he must have been less than a man or more. He remembered what the child had been to him. He remembered what it was when it came, and again when he thought its mother was dead; he remembered what it was when death frowned on it, and what it had been since death passed it by. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, heart of his heart. Not his merely, but himself.
A lie, a mockery, a delusion, a deception! She has practised it. Oh, she had hidden her secret. She had thought it was safe. But the child itself had betrayed it. The secret had spoken from the child’s own face.
“Yet I’ve seen her kneel by the cot and pray, ‘God bless my baby, and its father and its mother’ — —”
Why had he not killed her? A wild vision rose before him of killing Kate, and then going to the Deemster and saying, “Take me; I have murdered her because you have dishonoured her. Condemn me to death; yet remember God lives, and He will condemn you to damnation.”
But the pity of it — the pity of it! By a quick revolt of tenderness he recalled Kate as he had just seen her, crouching at the back of the cradle, like a hunted hare with uplifted paws uttering its last pitiful cry. He remembered her altered face, so pale even in the firelight, so thin, so worn, and his anger began to smoke against Philip. The flower that he would have been proud to wear on his breast Philip had buried in the dark. Curse him! Curse him!
She had given up all for that man — husband, child, father, mother, her friends, her good name, the very light of heaven. How she must have loved him! Yet he had been ashamed of her, had hidden her away, had been in fear lest the very air should whisper of her whereabouts. Curse him! Curse him! Curse him!
In the heat of his great anger Pete thought of himself also. Jealousy was far beneath him, but, like all great souls, this simple man had known something of the grandeur of friendship. Two streams running into them and taking heaven into their bosom. But Philip had kept him apart, had banked him off, and yet drained him to the dregs. He had uncovered his nakedness — the nakedness of his soul itself.
Bit by bit Pete pieced together the history of the past months. He remembered the night of Kate’s disappearance, when he had gone to Ballure and shouted up at the lighted window, “I’ve sent her to England,” thinking to hide her fault. At that moment Philip had known all — where she was (for it was where he had sent her), why she was gone, and that she was gone for ever. Curse him! Curse him!
Pete recalled the letters — the first one that he had put into Philip’s hand, the second that he had read to him, the third that Philip had written to his dictation. The little forgeries’ to keep her poor name sweet, the little inventions to make his story plausible, the little lies of love, the little jests of a breaking heart! And then the messages! The presents to the child! The reference to the Deemster himself! And the Deemster had sat there and seen through it all as the sun sees through glass, yet he had given no sign, he had never spoken; he had held a quivering, naked heart in his hand, while his own lay within as cold as a stone. Curse him, O God! Curse him!
Pete remembered the night when Philip came to tell him that Kate was dead, and how he had comforted himself with the thought that he was not altogether alone in his great trouble, because his friend was with him. He remembered the journey to the grave, the grave itself — another’s grave-how he knelt at the foot of it, and prayed aloud in Philip’s hearing, “Forgive me, my poor girl!”
“How shall I kill him?” thought Pete. Deemster too! First Deemster now, and held high in honour! Worshipped for his justice! Beloved for his mercy! O God! O God!
There are passions so overmastering that they stifle speech, and man sinks back to the animal. With an inarticulate shout Pete went to the parlour and caught up the mallet. A frantic thought had flashed on him of killing Philip as he sat on the bench which he had disgraced, administering the law which he had outraged. The wild justice of this idea made the blood to bubble in his ears. He saw himself holding the Deemster by the throat, and crying aloud to the people, “You think this man is a just judge — he is a whited sepulchre. You think he is as true as the sun — he is as false as the sea. He has robbed me of wife and child; at the very gates of heaven he has lied to me like hell. The hour of justice has struck, and thus I pay him — and thus — and thus.”
But the power of words was lost in the drunkenness of his rage. With a dismal roar he flung the mallet away, and it rolled on the ground in narrowing circles. “My hands, my hands,” he thought. He would strangle Philip, and then he would kill everybody in his way, merely for the lust of killing. Why not? The fatal line was past. Nothing sacred remained. The world was a howling wilderness of boundless license. With the savage growl of a caged beast this wild man flung himself on the door, tore it open, and bounded on to the path.
Then he stopped suddenly. There was a thunderous noise outside, such as the waves make in a cave. A company of people were coming in at the gate. Some were walking with the heavy step of men who carry a corpse. Others were bearing lanterns, and a few held high over their heads the torches which fishermen use when they are hauling the white nets at night.
“Who’s there?” cried Pete, in a voice that was like a howl.
“Your friend,” said somebody.
“My friend? I have no friend,” cried Pete, in a broken roar.
“‘Deed he’s gone, seemingly,” said a voice out of the dark.
Pete did not hear. Seeing the crowd and the lights, but only as darkness veined with fire, he thought Philip was coming again, as he had so often seen him come in his glory, in his greatness, in his triumph.
“Where is he?” he roared. “He’s here,” they answered.
And then Philip was brought up the path in the arms of four bearers, his head hanging aside and shaking at every step, his face white as the wig above it, and his gown trailing along the earth.
There was a sudden calm, and Pete dropped back in awe and horror. A bolt out of heaven seemed to have fallen at his feet, and he trembled as if lightning had blinded him.
Dead!
His anger had ebbed, his fury had dashed itself against a rock. His towering rage had shrunk to nothing in the face of this awful presence. The Dark Spirit had gone before him and snatched his victim out of his hands. He had come out to kill this man, and here he met him being brought home dead.
Dead? Then his sin was dead also. God forgive him!
God forgive him, where he was gone! Presumptuous man, stand back.
Oh, mighty and merciful Death! Death the liberator, the deliverer, the pardoner, the peace-maker! Even the shadow of thy face can quench the fires of revenge; even the gathering of thy wings can deaden the clamour of madness, and turn hatred into love and curses into prayers.
X.
In that stripped and naked house there was one room still untouched. It was the room that had been kept for the Deemster. Philip lay on the bed, motionless and apparently lifeless. Jem-y-Lord stood beating his hands at the foot. Pete sat on a low stool at the side with his face doubled on to his knees. Nancy, now back from Sulby, was blowing into the bars of the grate to kindle a fire. A little group of men stood huddled like sheep near the door.
Some one said the Deemster’s heart was beating. They brought from another room a little ivory hand-glass and held it over the mouth. When they raised it the face of the mirror was faintly blurred.
That little cloud on the glass seemed more bright than the shining tread of an angel on the sea. Jem-y-Lord took a sponge and began to moisten the cold forehead. One by one the people behind produced their old wife’s wisdom. Somebody remembered that his grandmother always put salts to the nostrils of a person seemingly dead; somebody else remembered that when, on the very day of old Iron Christian’s death, his father had been thrown by a colt and lay twelve hours unconscious, the farrier had bled him and he had opened his eyes instantly.
The doctor had been half an hour gone to Ballaugh, and a man had been put on a horse and sent after him. But it was a twelve-miles’ journey; the night was dark; it would be a good hour before he could be back.
They touched Pete on the shoulder and suggested something.
“Eh?” he answered vacantly.
“Dazed,” they told themselves. The poor man could not give a wise-like answer. He had had a shock, and there was worse before him. They talked in low voices of Kate and of Ross Christian; they were sorry for Pete; they were still more sorry for the Deemster.
The Deemster’s wig had been taken off and tossed on to the dressing-table. It lay mouth upwards like any old woman’s night-cap. His hair had dragged after it on the pillow. The black gown had not been removed, but it was torn open at the neck so that the throat might be free. One of Philip’s arms had dropped over the side of the bed, and the long, thin hand was cold and green and ethereal as marble.
Pete was crouching on his low stool beside this hand. He needed no softening to touch it now. The chill fingers were in his palm, and his hot tears were falling on them. Remembering the crime that he had so nearly committed, he was holding himself in horror. His friend! His life-long friend! His only friend! The Deemster no longer, but only the man. Not the man either, but the child. The cruel years had rolled back with all their burden of trouble. Forgotten days were come again — days long buried under the débris of memory. They were boys together again. A little, sunny fellow in velvet, and a bigger lad in a stocking-cap; the little one talking, always talking; the big one listening, always listening; the little one proposing, the big one agreeing; the little one leading, the big one following; the little one looking up and yet a little down, the big one looking down and yet a little up. Oh, the happy, happy times, before anger and jealousy and rage and the mad impulse of murder had darkened their sun shine!
The memories that brought the tenderest throb to Pete as he sat there fingering the lifeless hand were of the great deeds that he had done for Philip — how he had fought for him, and been licked for him, and taken bloody noses for him, and got thrashed for it by Black Tom. But there were others only less tender. Philip was leaving home for King William’s, and Pete was cudgelling his dull head what to give him for a parting gift. Decision was the more difficult because he had nothing to give. At length he had hit on making a whistle — the only thing his clumsy fingers had ever been deft at. With his clasp-knife he had cut a wondrous big one from the bough of a willow; he had pared it; he had turned it; it blew a blast like a fog-horn. The morning was frosty, and his feet were bare, but he didn’t mind the cold; he didn’t feel it — no, not a ha’p’orth. He was behind the hedge by the gate at Ballure, waiting for the coach that was to take up Philip, and passing the time by polishing the whistle on the leg of his shining breeches, and testing its tone with just one more blow. Then up came Crow, and out came Philip in his new peaked cap and leggings. Whoop! Gee-up! Away! Off they went without ever seeing him, without once looking back, and he was left in the prickly hedge with his blue feet on the frost, a look of dejection about his mouth, and the top of the foolish whistle peeping out of his jacket-pocket.
The thick sob that came of these memories was interrupted by a faint sound from the bed. It was a murmur of delirium, as soft as the hum of bees, yet Pete heard it.
“Cover me up, Pete, cover me up!” said Philip, dreaming aloud.
Philip was a living man! Thank God! Thank God!
A whisper goes farther than a shout. The people behind whispered the news to the passage, the passage to the stairs, the stairs to the hall, and the hall to the garden, where a crowd had gathered in the darkness to look up at the house over which the angel of death was hovering.
In a moment the room was croaking like a frog-pond. “Praise the Lord!” cried one. “His mercy endureth for ever,” cried another. “What’s he saying?” said a third. “Rambling in his head, poor thing,” said a fourth.
Pete turned them out — all except Jem-y-Lord, who was still moistening the Deemster’s face and opening his hands, which were now twitching and tightening.
