He found her sitting listlessly by the window of her room, her hands idle in her lap. The roses had all fled from her cheeks; she looked haggard, so haggard and woebegone that even her air of intense femininity had departed from her. She raised heavy eyes to her father’s face, and he observed the dark lines under them that told the tale of sleepless nights.
“My dear!” he said. “My poor child!” He held out his arms to her, and there were tears in his old eyes.
His pity stabbed her. She did not understand it, but she understood that it was sprung from some misapprehension.
“Ah, don’t touch me, father!” she cried. “You don’t know, you don’t know!”
“I think I do,” he answered very gently.
“You do?” He saw horror in the eyes so suddenly lifted to stare fit him. At once she realised that he had no knowledge of the truth, that something very different was in his mind. He came upon her very ripe for confession, at a point where, did she not share her burden with another, she must sink under it and die, she thought. She rose, flung herself upon his breast, and there, through a storm of sudden weeping, in a voice broken by sobs, she poured out her miserable story.
He listened, frowning awhile. But when the end was reached he did not put her from him in aversion, as she had feared. Gently he stroked her golden head.
“For the unworthy thing you did, Evelyn, you have been punished enough,” he said. “Do not torment yourself with the supposition of a greater sin. It was not you who gave Captain Gaynor to the hangman, nor did Lord Pauncefort do it in consequence of what he witnessed here, nor yet did he, as you suppose, discover Captain Gaynor’s identity as a result of what you enabled him to overhear. He knew it already. He was himself a Jacobite who had betrayed his fellow-plotters. So comfort you at least with the knowledge of that.”
She comforted herself very speedily and completely, as such natures can. She slept soundly that night, and on the morrow when she made her appearance at the breakfast-table she had resumed much of her habitual air.
Nor was she any longer oppressed by the fear of meeting Damaris, since in no degree now did she account herself guilty towards her cousin. It was true that she had done a meanness in writing to Lord Pauncefort and bringing him to spy upon the lovers, but for the rest she had her father’s word for it that her action had nowise altered the inevitable course to which the events of these last days had been fore-ordained. But if she no longer feared to meet Damaris, yet she could not go the length herself of seeking Damaris, nor for that matter could Sir John, despite the urgings of his deeply sympathetic nature.
There was not, however, the need. Damaris, of her own accord, came forth on the following evening from her retirement, and sought her uncle.
He was in the library, writing to his brother, when suddenly she stood before him, almost ghostly in her intense pallor as she paused among the shadows by the door for his leave to intrude a moment. He sprang up at sight of her and went to meet her, and even as he was shocked by the change that grief had wrought in her, so was she shocked by the greyness of his face, the haggard air where joviality had ever sat and the dullness of those blue eyes that usually were so bright and smiling.
He held out his hands and she took them, her fingers tightening upon them. But for this man who had been more than father to her, her loneliness must be utter now.
“How cold you are, my child,” he murmured. Then his voice broke. “Oh, my poor Damaris!” His voice told her that — no matter how — he was informed of all, or, at least, of all that mattered.
“I came to talk to you of him,” she said quietly, her voice, as controlled as her face, like her face showing, despite her, the suffering through which she was passing.
He led her forward to a chair, and when she was seated he went to stand by the overmantel. So had he stood, she remembered, on that day when at Pauncefort’s side by the window there, she had looked upon him as her enemy, and defied him. How bitterly, now, she repented her that momentary defection! How profoundly she loved him, since today, in his affection for Harry Gaynor, she discovered a fresh and very solemn bond between them.
“He desired me to give you certain messages when he was on the point of setting out,” she said, and neither of them deemed it strange that she should find no need to mention any name. “They do not amount to very much, but he dared not write them, he said, lest his letter should miscarry. As it is, you no doubt will have guessed what he would wish to say.” And she repeated with a rare fidelity the words he had entrusted to her.
“Yes,” he said heavily, when she had done. “All that I understood.”
“I — I have since had a letter from him,” she said.
“He wrote to me from Newgate, on the eve of — on Thursday last. You — you were with him — at the end?” she asked.
“I was there,” replied Sir John. “But he did not see me.”
She swayed on her chair. She passed a hand over her brow, her face strained with the effort of self-control. “How — how did he die?” she asked at last.
“Happily, I think,” Sir John replied. “He was smiling at the end, when — when he stood up. What had he to fear?” cried the baronet, a sudden vigour returning to his voice, a defiance almost. “What had he to fear? He was as brave and gallant a gentleman as ever drew the breath of life, a man whom all honoured and loved, and he died a martyr to truth and right. What then, had he to fear in death?” The tears ran down the old man’s cheeks, and his voice sank again, as he concluded: “Had the poor lad been my own son I should have been as proud of him as I was of the affection with which his father honoured me.”
She rose and came to him. She reached up to put her arms about his neck, drew down his head, and very gently kissed him. And so, quietly, her sorrow ever silent and contained, she left him.
Chapter 16. RESURRECTION
For almost all the matter contained in this chapter I acknowledge an indebtedness that will presently be apparent to that memoir of Dr Blizzard which I have mentioned, and upon which already I have drawn for those dream-sensations experienced by Captain Gaynor when he was turned off and left swinging after the cart had drawn away from under him.
I closely followed that portion of the memoir up to the point at which the Captain lost consciousness, or — to adhere strictly to his own impressions — at which he sank to sleep, his head pillowed upon the bosom of Damaris.
When next he awakened it was in surroundings vastly different from those under which he had sunk to slumber, as he believed. Here was no sunlit garden, but a square, whitewashed chamber, lighted not only by a window in one of its walls, but also from another — and a very large one this — in the ceiling immediately above him.
Someone was bending over him, and a face was peering into his. But it was not the lovely, beloved face of Damaris. Instead, it was a keen, lean, almost wolfish face, with leathern cheeks and very piercing little eyes that were considering him through horn-rimmed spectacles.
He lay quite still and only half conscious as yet, looking up into that face, and neither wondering nor caring to whom it might belong. Then, as his awakening proceeded, he was conscious that his body was cold and stiff and that there was a strong taste of brandy in his mouth. His left wrist, he discovered, was in the grip of this wizened-faced man; but it was a very gentle grip, with a finger pressing lightly upon his pulse.
Then, quite suddenly, memory like a flood poured in upon his consciousness, and his awakening was complete.
He attempted to rise from his recumbent position, and the effort set a thousand hammers swinging in his brain. His head, he found, was just an ache, a globe of pain, no more. The window above him appeared to slide to and fro, the couch upon which he lay heaved under him, and the wizened face of his companion dilated and contracted horribly as he watched it. He groaned and closed his eyes. The pain spread downwards through his body, which lay stark there upon a table — for such was the nature of his couch. Then, at last, the tide of torment slowly ebbed aga
in, leaving him bedewed from head to foot with sweat.
He opened his eyes once more. He attempted to speak, and this fresh effort centralised the pain in his throat and tongue. They seemed swollen to elephantine proportions.
The leathern mask of a face above him appeared suddenly to crack across. A very wide and quite lipless mouth had opened, and from it issued a queer, clucking sound.
“Tut, tut! Tut tut! Better keep still! Better keep still!”
The hand had already left his wrist, and now the figure turned and moved away a little to another table under the window in the wall. Captain Gaynor was able to follow it with his eyes without moving his head. He observed the man to be of middle height and very thin. He wore black velvet breeches, black silk stockings and shoes with steel buckles. He was without a coat, and the sleeves of his waistcoat and shirt were rolled up to the elbows of two long, thin, sinewy arms. His waistcoat itself was concealed by a coarse, yellowish apron in which there were several dull, brown patches. This apron covered him in front from chin to waist; the remainder of it had been rolled into a rope and was twisted round his middle. The table to which he had moved was of a good size and of plain deal. Part of it was encumbered by phials of all forms and sizes; but in a clear space in the middle, upon a spread cloth, was an array of very bright instruments of queer shapes, whose purpose the Captain could not have guessed had his mind been in a condition to attempt the task.
Dr Emanuel Blizzard — for this was the identity of the man — took up a short-stemmed lily-shaped glass, and held it up in one of his enormous, bony hands. From one of the phials he poured into it a ruby-coloured liquid; from another he added something else that was quite colourless, and he did this with great care, pausing, adding another drop or two, pausing again, and yet again adding a drop. Then he set the phial down, and carrying the glass he once more approached the table where the Captain lay.
He thrust his left hand under his patient’s head, and raised it very slowly and gently. But for all his gentleness those great hammers were set to swing again, and they crashed forward and backward in Harry Gaynor’s brain. The rim of the glass was brought to his lips.
“Drink this,” said the gruff voice, and obediently, without any will of his own, the Captain painfully swallowed the fluid. He was not conscious of any flavour in it at the time. But afterwards, when his head had been lowered once more, and the room had ceased to swing about him like the cabin of a ship, he became aware of a fresh pungency in his mouth, soothing and cooling and seeming to reduce its inflammation.
In the moment that his head had been raised, he had perceived in a subconscious way that he was quite naked, that there was blood on his left leg, that a ribbon of this blood ran to the little puddle reaching to the table’s edge. Now, as he lay back once more, he noticed a faint dripping sound, recurring at very brief and very regular intervals. Dimly, and without much interest, he connected this sound with the puddle he had observed.
The events of the morning were coming back to him now in detail. He remembered the cart, the crowd, his pinioned wrists, the parson who had ridden with him, the glimpse he had of the gallows when he had turned his head as they were going down the hill. What happened afterwards, he could not remember until he came to that point where he had found himself in the open country, still in the cart at first, and later crossing a bridge over a great expanse of glaring water to find Damaris awaiting him.
He could not distinguish between the real and the imagined. That all this had happened to him he never doubted; but he could not explain it, any more than he could explain how he came to be lying stark naked upon a deal table with blood flowing from his leg and dripping into some vessel on the floor whilst a stranger tended him.
It would seem as if he had not been hanged after all, and he wondered why was this. But he did not wonder with any great activity; there was no vigorous mental effort to resolve this mystery. His brain was too tired and indolent for the exertion. The indolence gained upon him; it became a torpor, and very gently he sank once more into oblivion.
His next awakening was very different. It took place some twelve hours later, early in the morning of the following day. He was abed now in a solid furnished room that was full of sunlight, and for some moments he lay still, staring up at the white, flat canopy overhead. Then quite suddenly he sat up. Pain shot through his head once more, to bring back a dim memory of his last awakening. But it was endurable now, though still acute.
His sudden movement had been answered by another. From a chintz-covered settle ranged against the wall on his right sprang now the slender figure of the doctor. An arm went round the Captain to support him in his sitting posture; the little piercing eyes considered him again through those spectacles with their great horn rims, and Gaynor observed that, for all its wolfishness, the face was genial and kindly.
The wide lipless mouth opened, and as before it emitted that clucking sound; but the leathery, close-shaven countenance was wrinkled in a smile.
“Eh, and how do we feel now, eh? Better?” And as he spoke, the professor stamped his foot three times upon the floor — an obvious signal to someone below.
“Who are you?” the bewildered patient asked him.
“Eh? My name is Blizzard — Doctor Emanuel Blizzard, professor of anatomy, eh. And you’re safe and snug in my house.”
“In your house, Doctor—”
“Blizzard, sir — Emanuel Blizzard.”
“And how came I here?” the Captain asked, his wonder and bewilderment increasing. His voice was so husky that he could not speak above a whisper, and he was conscious still of a numbness of tongue and throat.
The professor clucked again. “Tut-tut! ’Tis a long story that, and a strange. You shall hear it when you are more recovered. Ye’re weak, eh? Ye will be. I bled you very thoroughly. But we’ll soon renew what’s lost.”
A knock fell on the door. The anatomist set the pillows behind his patient so that they supported him in an upright position. Then he sped to the door, opened it, and returned with a tray on which was a bowl, a flagon of red wine and a glass. This tray he placed upon a table by the head of the bed. He took up the bowl, which was filled with steaming broth.
“Ye’ll be hungry, eh?” he said, his head on one side. The Captain nodded weakly. “Aha! ’Tis very well.”
He approached the patient, and with a horn spoon proceeded himself to feed him. Then he carefully measured him a half-glass of Burgundy, and he held it to his lips, what time the Captain slowly drained it.
“Another?” he asked. “Tut, tut! Better not. Better not, eh? We must go slowly. Piano si va sano, as the Italians say. For the present — ne quid nimis, eh?”
Gently as a woman might have done, he replaced the pillows, and induced his patient once more to lie down. Captain Gaynor obeyed him, too feeble, too utterly bewildered to resist. Something had happened to him; something altogether inordinate; but what that something might be he had no faintest conception, and least of all could he conceive how he came into the house of a professor of anatomy who treated him with such tenderness and solicitude. There was one point, however, that so plagued him that he must have enlightenment upon it. He looked up into that wolfish yet kindly countenance.
“Then — I was not hanged?” he inquired feebly.
“Hanged!” cried the other. “Tut, tut! Go to sleep. You’ll be stronger when next you wake. Go to sleep now.”
The prediction proved true enough. The broth and the wine spreading warmth through that debilitated frame bore a torpor with them, to which the Captain very shortly succumbed, notwithstanding the question with which he still plagued himself.
When next he opened his eyes upon that room, the sunshine had left it. By the mellow light and the tepid air that came through the open casement he knew it to be eventide. A stout, middle-aged woman with red polished cheeks, that gave her face the appearance of a giant apple, occupied a chair near the bed. She smiled reassuringly when she encountered his questioning gaze, and sh
e rose at once.
“Better now?” she greeted him.
Captain Gaynor was better indeed, and he was conscious of an appetite that was keen as a razor’s edge. He said so, and found his voice much stronger, whilst there was hardly any of the sensation of pain in tongue and throat. His head, too, was clearer, and it no longer ached when he moved it, as he did by way of testing its condition.
“I’ll go call the doctor,” she said. “He’s resting below.”
In a very few minutes the anatomist was at his patient’s bedside. In another few minutes there was more broth and Burgundy for the Captain, and even a few slices of capon’s breast and a little wheaten bread.
“And now,” said Captain Gaynor, reclining comfortably among his heaped-up pillows when he had consumed a meal which he found all too spare, “will you tell me how I come here, and how it befell that I was not hanged? What happened to me?”
The professor looked at him, meditatively stroking his smooth chin.
“It did not befall that you were not hanged,” he said slowly. “Ye were hanged — two days since.”
“Hanged?” The Captain started up. Horror and incredulity were blent in his countenance.
“Tut, tut, nowl” clucked Dr Blizzard. “Let us be calm, eh! Theres not the need to start and cry out. It’s over, and it’s not to do again. Nemo bis punitur pro eodem delicto, remember. That is the law, eh?”
But the impossibility of punishing a man twice for the same offence was the last thing that exercised the Captain’s thoughts just then.
“But if I was hanged,” said he, his face an utter blank, “how — how come I to be alive, for I am alive, am I not? I am not dead and dreaming, perchance?”
“Eh! Why, to be sure you’re alive, and in a week or so I make no doubt but ye’ll be about again as sound as ever you were.”
“But how — how, if I was hanged?”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 266
