were laughing, and bantering, and sparring after their wont.
The carriage swayed and jerked, as one got in, and then again
as the other followed. The door clapped, and the coach was
now jogging and rumbling over the pavement. The Judge was
a little bit sulky. He did not care to sit up and open his eyes.
Let them suppose he was asleep. He heard them laugh with
more malice than good-humour, he thought, as they observed
it. He would give them a d-----d hard knock or two when they
got to his door, and till then he would counterfeit his nap.
The clocks were chiming twelve. Beller and Thavies were
silent as tombstones. They were generally loquacious and
merry rascals.
The Judge suddenly felt himself roughly seized and thrust
from his comer into the middle of the seat, and opening his
eyes, instantly he found himself between his two companions.
Before he could blurt out the oath that was at his lips, he
saw that they were two strangers—evil-looking fellows, each
with a pistol in his hand, and dressed like Bow Street officers.
The Judge clutched at the check-string. The coach pulled
up. He stared about him. They were not among houses; but
through the windows, under a broad moonlight, he saw a
black moor stretching lifelessly from right to left, with rotting
trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air, standing here and
there in groups, as if they held up their arms and twigs like
fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge’s coming.
A footman came to the window. He knew his long face
and sunken eyes. He knew it was Dingly Chuff, fifteen years
ago a footman in his service, whom he had turned off at a
moment’s notice, in a burst of jealousy, and indicted for a
missing spoon. The man had died in prison of the jail-fever.
Mr. Justice Harbottle
239
The Judge drew back in utter amazement. His armed companions signed mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor.
The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror considered
the question of resistance. But his athletic days were long
over. This moor was a desert. There was no help to be had.
He was in the hands of strange servants, even if his recognition turned out to be a delusion, and they were under the command of his captors. There was nothing for it but submission, for the present.
Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so
that the prisoner saw an omnious sight from the window.
It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-
sided, and from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away, leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay
bones.
On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from
which, as from the other two completing the triangle of death,
dangled a row of these unfortunates in chains, a hangman,
with a pipe in his mouth, much as we see him in the famous
print of the “ Idle Apprentice,’’ though here his perch was
ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly
shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons
that hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a
hand, now half a leg. A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean; and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over which, in
another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin
were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous
grotesque.
This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the
coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his
beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice
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high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet,
“ A rope for Judge Harbottle!”
The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.
So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his
most hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought he must be
raving. And the dead footman! He shook his ears and strained
his eyelids; but if he was dreaming, he was unable to awake
himself.
There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A bru-
tum fulm en might bring a real one on his head.
Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven
and earth he would move to unearth and hunt them down.
Suddenly they drove round a comer of a vast white building, and under a porte-cochere.
VII Chief J u s tic e Twofold
The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy
oil lamps, the walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in
a prison. His guards placed him in the hands of other people.
Here and there he saw bony and gigantic soldiers passing to
and fro, with muskets over their shoulders. They looked
straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury, with
no noise but the clank of their shoes. He saw these by
glimpses, round comers, and at the ends of passages, but he
did not actually pass them by.
And now, passing under a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock, confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There was nothing to elevate this Temple
of Themis above its vulgar kind elsewhere. Dingy enough it
looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent abundance. A
case had just closed, and the last juror’s back was seen escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. There were some dozen barristers, some fiddling with pen and ink,
others buried in briefs, some beckoning, with the plumes of
their pens, to their attorneys, of whom there were no lack;
Mr. Justice Harbottle
241
there were clerks to-ing and fro-ing, and the officers of the
court, and the registrar, who was handing up a paper to the
judge; and the tipstaff, who was presenting a note at the end
of his wand to a king’s counsel over the heads of the crowd
between. If this was the High Court of Appeal, which never
rose day or night, it might account for the pale and jaded
aspect of everybody in it. An air of indescribable gloom hung
upon the pallid features of all the people here; no one ever
smiled; all looked more or less secretly suffering.
“ The King against Elijah Harbottle!” shouted the officer.
“ Is the appellant Lewis Pyneweck in court?” asked Chief-
Justice Twofold, in a voice of thunder, that shook the woodwork
of the court, and boomed down the corridors.
Up stood Pyneweck from his place at the table.
“ Arraign the prisoner!” roared the Chief: and Judge Harbottle felt the panels of the dock round him, and the floor, and the rails quiver in the vibrations of that tremendous voice.
The prisoner, in limine, objected to this pretended court,
as being a sham, and non-existent in point of law; and then,
that, even if it were a court constituted by law (the Judge was
growing dazed), it had not and could not have any jurisdiction to try him for his conduct on the bench.
Whereupon the chief-ju
stice laughed suddenly, and every
one in court, turning round upon the prisoner, laughed also,
till the laugh grew and roared all round like a deafening acclamation; he saw nothing but glittering eyes and teeth, a universal stare and grin; but though all the voices laughed,
not a single face of all those that concentrated their gaze upon
him looked like a laughing face. The mirth subsided as suddenly as it began.
The indictment was read. Judge Harbottle actually pleaded!
He pleaded “ Not Guilty.” A jury were sworn. The trial proceeded. Judge Harbottle was bewildered. This could not be real. He must be either mad, or going mad, he thought.
One thing could not fail to strike even him. This Chief-
Justice Twofold, who was knocking him about at every turn
with sneer and gibe, and roaring him down with his tremen
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dous voice, was a dilated effigy of himself; an image of Mr.
Justice Harbottle, at least double his size, and with all his
fierce colouring, and his ferocity of eye and visage, enhanced
awfully.
Nothing the prisoner could argue, cite, or state, was permitted to retard for a moment the march of the case towards its catastrophe.
The chief-justice seemed to feel his power over the jury,
and to exult and riot in the display of it. He glared at them,
he nodded at them; he seemed to have established an understanding with them. The lights were faint in that part of the court. The jurors were mere shadows, sitting in rows; the
prisoner could see a dozen pair of white eyes shining, coldly,
out of the darkness; and whenever the judge in his charge,
which was contemptuously brief, nodded and grinned and
gibed, the prisoner could see, in the obscurity, by the dip of
all these rows of eyes together, that the jury nodded in acquiescence.
And now the charge was over, the huge chief-justice leaned
back panting and gloating on the prisoner. Every one in the
court turned about, and gazed with steadfast hatred on the
man in the dock. From the jury-box where the twelve sworn
brethren were whispering together, a sound in the general
stillness like a prolonged “ hiss-s-s!” was heard; and then,
in answer to the challenge of the officer, “ How say you,
gentlemen of the jury, guilty or not guilty?” came in a
melancholy voice the finding, “ Guilty.”
The place seemed to the eyes of the prisoner to grow gradually darker and darker, till he could discern nothing distinctly but the lumen of the eyes that were turned upon him from every bench and side and corner and gallery of the
building. The prisoner doubtless thought that he had quite
enough to say, and conclusive, why sentence of death should
not be pronounced upon him; but the lord chief-justice puffed
it contemptuously away, like so much smoke, and proceeded
to pass sentence of death upon the prisoner, having named
the tenth of the ensuing month for his execution.
Mr. Justice Harbottle
243
Before he had recovered the stun of this ominous farce, in
obedience to the mandate, “ Remove the prisoner,” he was
led from the dock. The lamps seemed all to have gone out,
and there were stoves and charcoal-fires here and there, that
threw a faint crimson light on the walls of the corridors
through which he passed. The stones that composed them
looked now enormous, cracked and unhewn.
He came into a vaulted smithy, where two men, naked to
the waist, with heads like bulls, round shoulders, and the
arms of giants, were welding red-hot chains together with
hammers that pelted like thunderbolts.
They looked on the prisoner with fierce red eyes, and rested
on their hammers for a minute; and said the elder to his
companion, “ Take out Elijah Harbottle’s gyves” ; and with a
pincers he plucked the end which lay dazzling in the fire from
the furnace.
“ One end locks,” said he, taking the cool end of the iron
in one hand, while with the grip of a vice he seized the leg
of the Judge, and locked the ring round his ankle. “ The
other,” he said with a grin, “ is welded.”
The iron band that was to form the ring for the other leg
lay still red hot upon the stone floor, with brilliant sparks
sporting up and down its surface.
His companion, in his gigantic hands, seized the old
Judge’s other leg, and pressed his foot immovably to the stone
floor; while his senior, in a twinkling, with a masterly application of pincers and hammer, sped the glowing bar round his ankle so tight that the skin and sinews smoked and bubbled again, and old Judge Harbottle uttered a yell that seemed to chill the very stones, and make the iron chains quiver on
the wall.
Chains, vaults, smiths, and smithy all vanished in a moment; but the pain continued. Mr. Justice Harbottle was suffering torture all round the ankle on which the infernal smiths had just been operating.
His friends, Thavies and Beller were startled by the Judge’s
roar in the midst of their elegant trifling about a marriage
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J. Sheridan Le Fanu
d-la-mode case which was going on. The Judge was in panic
as well as pain. The street lamps and the light of his own
hall door restored him.
“ I ’m very bad,” growled he between his set teeth; “ my
foot’s blazing. Who was he that hurt my foot? ’Tis the gout—
*tis the gout!” he said, awaking completely. “ How many
hours have we been coming from the playhouse? ’Sblood,
what has happened on the way? I ’ve slept half the night!”
There had been no hitch or delay, and they had driven
home at a good pace.
The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and
the attack, though veiy short, was sharp; and when, in about
a fortnight, it subsided, his ferocious joviality did not return.
He could not get this dream, as he chose to call it, out of his
head.
VIII Som ebody Has Got Into th e House
People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His
doctor said he should go for a fortnight to Buxton.
Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always
conning over the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him
in his vision—“ in one calendar month from the date of this
day” ; and then the usual form, “ and you shall be hanged by
the neck till you are dead,” etc. “ That will be the 10th—I ’m
not much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff
dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in
my thoughts, as if it forecast misfortune of some sort. I wish
the day my dream gave me were passed and over. I wish I
were well purged of my gout. I wish I were as I used to be.
’Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot.” The copy
of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial
with many a snort and sneer he would read over and over
again, and the scenery and people of his dream would rise
about him in places the most unlikely, and steal him in a
Mr. Justice Harbottle
245
moment from all that surrounded him into a world of shadows.
The Judge had lost his iro
n energy and banter. He was
growing taciturn and morose. The Bar remarked the change,
as well they might. His friends thought him ill. The doctor
said he was troubled with hypochondria, and that his gout
was still lurking in his system, and ordered him to that ancient haunt of crutches and chalk-stones, Buxton.
The Judge's spirits were very low; he was frightened about
himself; and he described to his housekeeper, having sent for
her to his study to drink a dish of tea, his strange dream in
his drive home from Drury Lane Playhouse. He was sinking
into the state of nervous dejection in which men lose their
faith in orthodox advice, and in despair consult quacks, astrologers, and nursery story-tellers. Could such a dream mean that he was to have a fit, and so die on the 10th? She did not
think so. On the contrary, it was certain some good luck must
happen on that day.
The Judge kindled; and for the first time for many days,
he looked for a minute or two like himself, and he tapped
her on the cheek with the hand that was not in flannel.
“ Odsbud! odsheart! you dear rogue! I had forgot. There is
young Tom—yellow Tom, my nephew, you know, lies sick at
Harrogate; why shouldn’t he go that day as well as another,
and if he does, I get an estate by it? Why, lookee, I asked
Doctor Hedstone yesterday if I was like to take a fit any time,
and he laughed, and swore I was the last man in town to go
off that way.”
The Judge sent most of his servants down to Buxton to
make his lodgings and all things comfortable for him. He
was to follow in a day or two.
It was now the 9th; and the next day well over, he might
laugh at his visions and auguries.
On the evening of the 9th, Dr. Hedstone’s footman knocked
at the Judge’s door. The Doctor ran up the dusky stairs to the
drawing-room. It was a March evening, near the hour of sunset, with an east wind whistling sharply through the chimney-
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stacks. A wood fire blazed cheerily on the hearth. And Judge
Harbottle, in what was then called a brigadier-wig, with his
red roquelaure on, helped the glowing effect of the darkened
chamber, which looked red all over like a room on fire.
The Judge had his feet on a stool, and his huge grim purple
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 30
