Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu
Page 64
“It doesn’t matther, your honour,” responded the corporal, obeying, however, the order, and drawing the rudely-fashioned skean, with its rough wooden handle, from among the wretched man’s rags, and laving it upon the table; “it doesn’t matther, for his arms is fast enough with a halther.”
And, as if to make assurance doubly sure, the burly corporal drew the rope which bound his arms behind with an additional wrench, which amounted nearly to dislocation, and sent a flush of pain into the wretch’s pallid face.
“Ask him for what use he designed that knife,” continued the officer.
“He says, your honour, it’s to help you to rip up the Sassenachs’ bodies,” responded the interpreter, with a chuckle, while the red-haired savage grinned with a ferocious scowl, as he glanced quickly from man to man.
“How are we to deal with these brigands, these savages?” said the colonel, throwing himself into a chair and addressing himself to the officer beside him, as he pointed carelessly toward the prisoner. “How restrain and bridle their enormities and violence, except with a strong arm and a high hand; their burnings, and their plunderings, and their butcheries, these wretches lay to the account of the king’s service, and those who suffer by their outrages and rapine, charge, and naturally so, their wrongs and losses upon the royal cause. This must be mended — the king’s army must not he involved in the guilt and disgrace of such proceedings; we must deal strictly with their perpetrators, and by conspicuous examples of present severity, rescue the character of the army and the government from every imputation of favouring or tolerating these enormities; this duty I at least will steadily perform. Remove the prisoner to the yard,” continued he, with stern tranquillity. “Are your men loaded?” he added, turning to the officer at the head of the guard, the subaltern replied in the affirmative.
“Send out a corporal with six men, and let them fire upon that dog,” continued the colonel; “and stay — we must give these murderous freebooters a lesson — let the body be kept, and choose a high spot of ground to hang it upon tomorrow morning.”
Though the unfortunate man, whose sentence was thus pronounced, knew not one word of the language in which it was spoken, he gathered something of its purport from the looks of those who surrounded him, and from the movement of the guard at the door. Faint with loss of blood, and stiff from his wounds, the wretched prisoner appeared to acquire new strength with the frenzy of despair; bound as he was he flung himself on the ground, and though overpowered in an instant, and lifted up, and dragged, and hustled forward toward the door, he still struggled frantically, and clung to every object on which he could clutch his fingers, shrieking, in his native tongue, alternate defiances, curses, and entreaties, alike fruitless as the idle wind, gnashing his teeth and tugging and hissing till the white flakes hung upon his red bristly beard. Thus was he heaved, thrust, and jostled forward; and as he passed the door, one last look of such inexpressible imploring, despairing terror, he cast behind him, as might have smitten many a heart less stoically inflexible with its mute appeal; and then with something between a scream and a burst of sobs and wailing, the struggling and wounded prisoner was hurried into the outer space, and at the same time the words— “Shoulder your carbines — right face — quick march,” brought half a dozen dragoons, with faces in whose sombre and lowering expression was legible their inward revulsion from the dreadful duty they were called upon to perform, in a double file after them into the yard.
A few moments more and a sharp, ringing volley from without announced that the wild and reckless existence of the rapparee was over; and now began the clatter and bustle, the uproar and swearing, to-ing and fro-ing of the soldiery, as with such order as could be maintained amid a scene of hurry and confusion, they proceeded to distribute their horses in the stabling of the castle; the ungirthing and wisping down of steeds, snorting and neighing; the ringing of spurs, and the clang of sabres on the pavement, and the occasional blast ot the shrilly trumpet, and the harsh voice of command, all commingling, rose in a strange Babel chorus of martial tumult to the sky, and made meet music for the hurry-scurry movements of the soldiers, some stripped to their shirtsleeves, crossing this way and that with buckets of water, or hats-full of corn; others in their buff coats and cocked hats, taking the matter easily, and smoking their pipes as they stood in little knots with their horses’ bridles hanging on their arms; while they laughed, and swore, and puffed together in high good humour; and all this motley and exciting scene, lighted up, now here and now there, by the red torches which passed hither and thither among the crowd.
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Now all is quiet — the sentinels have mounted guard, and with shouldered carbines, pace and re-pace the echoing archway where the great gate stood, singing as they march, from time to time, snatches of old Irish minstrelsy, that borne on the sighing wind fall soothingly upon the ears of those whom anxious thoughts keep sadly waking, and mingle sweetly in the far off dreams of many a slumberer.
Torlogh O’Brien walks, alone, with slow and mournful steps, through the great hall of his ancestral home. What associations, what memories, what traditions, gather around him; like the wild harping of a thousand minstrels, resounding in heart-stirring swell — the deeds, the glories, the ruin of his house, ring in proud wails and martial dirges, through the silent chamber, and giant forms of other times rise in majestic pageant, and people its darkness. To him the still void is teeming with all the grandeur and thunders of the fiercest life; but amid the sable throng — dark spectres of murder, pealing dire menace in his ear, and beckoning the last of the ancient race to vengeance — glides one bright form, radiant with heavenly beauty, before whose soft effulgence the murky phantoms glide back and vanish — while her low voice of silvery music, with magic power, swells through the conflicting uproar of infernal clamour, and prevails in plaintive and celestial harmony. Angelic form — spirit of heart-subduing music! — clothed in such victorious gentleness and lovely might, he sees in thee the form of her whom his brave arm has rescued — thy music is her voice. Grace Willoughby! thy beautiful phantom stills and rebukes the tumult of his fierce hereditary hate.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE SLASHER — THE BLACK GUEST OF DRUMGUNNIOL — THE ALARM.
WE need not stop to tell how, early in the morning, ere the cold grey of the coming dawn had warmed into a blush before the rising god of day — amid the shrilly clangour of trumpets, and the ringing and jingling of accoutrements, and the neighing and thundering tramp of war-steeds — several successive detachments left the castle, until the body of the king’s cavalry who occupied that fortress had dwindled down to two companies, about two hundred men, together with their colonel and other officers, now occupying Glindarragh, and destined, perhaps, for some time to do so, as the headquarters of the regiment.
The noise and bustle of departure, and all those stirring sounds of military preparation and movements, fell heavily and painfully upon the fevered ear of Percy Neville, who lay, with throbbing temples and parched lips, weak and in sore anguish, upon his hot and sleepless bed. The roll of the kettledrums and the swell of the trumpet seemed, in his distempered fancy, somehow identified with the fiery heat and pain which tormented him — a part of his own fevered and agonized sensations; and these sensations in turn seemed again something no longer within himself, but rather, as it were, so many external influences, perplexing and tormenting — moving with the moving soldiers, and waxing more oppressive and thrilling with the wearisome clatter, and laughter, and shrilly trumpet sounds, which vexed his sick head: the dulness and stupor of dreaming were upon him, with all the reality of pain — an anxious, restless helplessness — which seemed always prompting the monotonous idea that some slight adjustment of the tossed and crumpled bedclothes, or some new arrangement of his weary and burning limbs, if he could but achieve it, would assuage all his torment, and refresh and relieve effectually his aching head and harassing fancies.
Let us glance for a moment at another chamber, blessed with a
very different tenant. We left Mr. Richard Goslin, a gentleman who had an invincible repugnance to doing any thing but precisely what he was hired to do, coiled, for double assurance alike against the troublesome importunities of his friends and the more troublesome molestations of his enemies, securely in the bottom of a huge iron caldron, in a sequestered apartment, the orifice in the boiler being covered over with much dexterity, as we have described, by the cautious contrivance of its interesting tenant.
Now, it so happened that, early in the morning, hot water being in great request, two of the handmaidens of Glindarragh bethought themselves of the identical caldron in which our friend had enshrined himself with such admirable providence and profound mystery; and — one with a lighted candle and a bundle of bog-fir, the other with a mighty hamper of good dry turf — they both entered the little chamber together, neither caring to visit it alone, for sundry fearful considerations — to wit, the generally accredited reports which stated that a certain quondam servitor in the castle, whose pugnacious and daredevil dispositions had earned for him, while in life, the expressive appellative of “The Slasher,” was wont, for lack of better employment in his disembodied state, to frequent that uninviting apartment, and there, under divers strange disguises, varying in an ascending scale, from tom-cats and black rabbits up to full-sized men in armour, to play all manner of unmeaning and unmanly pranks upon defenceless females, and occasionally, as they expressed it, even going so far as to take a rise out of the men. Not caring, therefore, to loiter unnecessarily in these haunted premises, the two wenches hurried through their task with all possible dispatch; and just as they had completed the arrangements of the turf, and applied the light, so that the thin blaze began to writhe and curl through the crisp sods and crackling wood, they heard, or thought they heard, a strange, unearthly sound, whether proceeding from above, or below, or behind them, or before, they neither could devise. This was no trick of fancy; their senses had not played them false; they had heard, in truth, a long-drawn grunt, which proceeded in an uneasy movement from the slumbering tenant of the caldron, and boomed in cavernous reverberation and half-stifled echoes from the metallic inclosure. The girls clung to one another as they gazed around them; but nothing met their search; and as the sound was not repeated, they took courage, blessed themselves, and hurried to complete their labours, by drawing water at the well in the castleyard. While they were thus employed, the fire beneath the caldron began to act, the air within became gradually rarified and heated, like that of an oven; and its temperature at last reached such a pitch, that Dick Goslin awakened slowly from a dream, in which the great fire of London, and other images of a like glowing kind, were awfully combined, and found himself in a perspiration so profuse, and in a state of impotence so absolutely helpless, that he almost fancied himself neither more nor less than a given number of quarts of some simmering liquid, a sort of conscious soup, steaming away at the mercy of the cook, and only to be extricated by the assistance of a ladle. With no distinct recollection of where he was, or how he had come there, and enveloped in total darkness, he yet wanted energy to rouse his faculties, or to move a single muscle. The heat became momentarily more oppressive; a faint, half painful, half luxurious languor overpowered him, from which he would not, if he could, have released himself; and thus gradually dissolving into brine and vapour, the grosser elements of what had once been Dick Goslin lay passively in his enervating retreat.
Meanwhile, the two strapping wenches returned with a mighty tub of pure cold water between them. With marvellous strength, and almost apoplectic struggles, it was lifted, by their united efforts, to the brink; and while one of them slipped aside the cover of the boiler, the other, in a twinkling, soused the sparkling, ponderous torrent full into the caldron. What language can describe the shock, the astounding revulsion which seemed at that instant to reverse all the functions of Dick Goslin’s corporeal system, and, as it were, to turn him inside out and upside down, and drive him ten thousand ages backward into a preexistent state! With something between a sob and a shriek, he started up madly from his lair. The maidens responded with a piercing squall; and she who held the tub, in her terror, dashed it down on him as he rose, with such Amazonian force, that one plank started from the bottom, his head came through, and the tub spun round on his shoulders, and hung there like a gigantic suit of armour — back-piece, breast-plate, and gorget, all in one. Without trying to extricate himself, he rushed in a state of frenzy after the terrified girls, who careered along the passages, shrieking— “The Slasher! the Slasher!” — an ejaculation which Mr. Goslin believed to be elicited by some object of terror behind himself, and which, therefore, lent but new wings to his pursuit. In their terrified flight, several other maids, who, peeping from other chambers, beheld the mysterious figure rushing onward in the background, were quickly involved, and with new energy swelled the chorus of alarm, until every passage rang with the terrific soubriquet of “the Slasher.” To stem this torrent, however, the valorous butler and adventurous Tim Dwyer started forth in various athletic attitudes; but being neither of them quite so steady as they might have been, had they confined their morning’s potations to the pure fluid of which their Saxon comrade had had so much, they were instantly overborne, and, along with the foremost of the female fugitives, rolled upon the floor; and so, one over the other, higgledy-piggledy, the whole troop shrieking and yelling, tumbled and bowled, and Dick Goslin, last of all, with a crash which staved in the tub; and when they arose, full half a dozen persons, all of unquestionable veracity, among whom was Dick Goslin himself, were prepared to swear, if required so to do, that they had themselves, with “their own good-looking eyes,” beheld a gigantic form in black armour, in full pursuit of the party, and that having flung the tub among them, he had vanished with a terrific roar. It is, of course, needless to observe, that henceforth even the most sceptical among the servants looked grave, and forebore to sneer when the subject of “the Slasher” was upon the tapis.
Meanwhile, in this cold dreary twilight of coming morning, Jeremiah Tisdal, with aching eyes and swollen face, scarce half recovered from his last night’s strangulation, and with his sombre and sad coloured vesture, but yesterday so quaint, precise, and saintly, now all torn and soiled — stole from the castle gate, and, like a troubled spirit speeding toward the scene of its earthly sins and habitation, glided darkly along the shadowy pathway, through the wild trees and brushwood, among which the damps and darkness of night were still lingering. With trembling knees and quickened respiration he approached his ruined dwelling; there stood the tall gables, gray and wan as gigantic spectres, and through the roofless summit and the sashless apertures of the windows, the cold faint light was staring; the reek of fire still filled the air, and the floating wreaths of smoke rolled lazily about its base, and clung to the damp grass and weeds around. With a gaze of dull despair, he stared for several minutes upon the ruined dwelling-place. He walked toward the yard door mechanically. The sight of a spade, lying in its usual place, however, recalled him for a moment to himself; he snatched it up, and hurried with faltering steps to the spot where his gold had been concealed. Some one had anticipated him, the earth was thrown up around it, the treasure was gone.
“Oh! God of my hope, it is gone,” cried the puritan, finding voice in the extremity of his agony— “gone, gone — spoiled — plundered,” he continued, frantically, as he threw himself upon his knees, and with his bare fingers delved and rummaged among the loosened earth. “Bligh has robbed me — robbed me of all — the villain robbed his master! — not a chance coin left — the wretch — the robber — the treacherous dog — the villain — may the curse of Gehazi overtake and cling to him!”
While Jeremiah Tisdal thus railed and cursed in hoarse accents, as he burrowed with his crooked fingers among the upturned earth, he might not inappositely have presented to the fancy of the spectator the image of a famished ghoul cowering over some open grave, and searching for the fragments of his unclean feast.
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bsp; “Gone, gone, gone,” he cried, in a voice of almost childish rage and grief, as he sat down in despair upon the cold earth beside the spot, and smote his clenched hands sometimes upon his breast, and sometimes upon the dull soil, until gradually this frantic energy of woe subsided into a sullen, black moroseness, from which, however, after the lapse of some ten minutes, he on a sudden started up —
“Aye, aye,” he exclaimed, with a new and fiercer interest, “let’s see how Deveril has fared.”
With this exclamation, he hurried toward the ruined walls; the lower windows had all been secured with iron bars, which had of course survived the flames, and now showed in sharp black lines against the grey light of morning which streamed through the building. Passing the corner of the still reeking ruin, Tisdal stopped short, with a shuddering ejaculation which had a strange mixture of joy and horror in its intonation —
“Then it is done! — ha, ha! — the hunter caught in his own toils, the robber bereft of his spoil, the murderer of his precious life.”
The spectacle which elicited these words was one of sufficient horror. Through the bars of a window, within a few yards of which the speaker stood, were thrust the knee and the head of a figure, whose escape had been rendered impracticable by two transverse bars which, deeply sunk in the side walls, secured the rest. The head, and one arm and shoulder, as well as one knee, were thrust through the iron stanchions, and all was black and shrunk, the clothes burned entirely away, and the body roasted and shrivelled to a horrible tenuity; the lips dried up and drawn, so that the white teeth grinned and glittered in hideous mockery, and thus the whole form, arrested in the very attitude of frenzied and desperate exertion, showed more like the hideous, blackened effigy of some grinning ape, than anything human.