Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  A sutler or two passed presently below him, some straggling horsemen, a few knots of yokels bent on satisfying their curiosity. But the day was four hours old before the measured tramp of hoofs and the murmur of many voices, the clang of steel, and hoarse cries of command thrilled the child with the consciousness that the time was come. Trembling with excitement, he peered over the edge of the mound. The rain had ceased for a while. There was some show of clearing in the air. The sun which had broken through the clouds struck full on the head of the column, as it came on slowly and majestically, in a frame of steaming mist; cuirass and helmet, spur and scabbard, flashing and sparkling in the white glare.

  These were the horsemen who had stemmed the pride of Rupert and shattered the Cavaliers. The boy looked and looked at them, looked until the last man — a grave sergeant with a book at his belt — had ridden by him. Then he remembered himself with a sigh, and quickly drawing out his cross, cut six nicks upon it, for the six troops of horse which had formed the column.

  After these, three regiments of foot passed; stern, war-worn men, muddy and travel-stained, in buff coats, and with long pikes trailing behind them. Then more troops of horse, whom he duly nicked, and then some tumbrils, which at first the boy took for guns, but afterwards perceived to be laden with ammunition. On all these the sun shone, not cheerfully but with a stern glare, which seemed confined to that part of the moor, so that they passed before the boy in a vision as it were, and he notched them off in a dream. It was strange to stand so near these thousands of marching men, to hear the murmur of their multitudinous voices, and the tramp of their feet, and yet to be apart from them and unheeded by them. For they passed in perfect order, no man stepping out of the ranks; so that at last the boy took courage and rose to his feet under their eyes.

  When the tumbrils had passed the sun went in, and three regiments of musketeers came up, marching on one another’s heels, with the rain and storm gathering about them, and the men grumbling at the weather. The boy notched them off, and watching for the great guns (of which none had passed), walked from end to end of his little platform, scanning the road. More than one of the men who plashed along beneath him noticed the strange figure of the boy moving against the sky.

  For the fog, through which he loomed larger than life, distorted his gestures. He seemed at times to be cursing the men below him, and at times to be raising his hands to heaven in their behalf. The troopers who remarked his strange figure perched above them, looked on indifferently, neither heeding nor understanding. Not so all who had their eyes at that moment upon him. The watcher was also the watched; and presently, when the rain had set in steadily once more, and the mist had grown so thick that he despaired of finishing his count where he was, and thought of descending into the road, a sudden end was put to his calculations. Something rose up behind him and dashed him violently to the ground. Stunned and terrified, the child clung, even in his fall, to the precious cross; in a moment it was wrenched from him. He cried out wildly for help, but instantly a cloak was flung over his head, and blind, and breathless, he felt himself raised from the ground. Some one tied his hands at the wrists and his feet at the ankles; then he felt himself carried hastily off. He could scarcely breathe, he could not struggle, he could not see. He could not even guess what had happened to him.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  A STRANGE TRIAL.

  For some distance he felt himself carried across a man’s shoulder. Then another man took him up and carried him on more briskly. His head hung down, the cloak covered his face tightly; he felt himself at times far on the way to suffocation. But, gagged and bound as he was, he could neither cry out nor help himself.

  The shortest journey taken under such circumstances must needs seem endless, and so this one seemed to the child. He long remembered it; but at last it did come to an end, with all its misery and terror — things not to be described in words. His bearer stopped. He heard voices, and the hollow sound of steps on a stone floor. He was set on his feet, and the cloak roughly removed from his head. He looked about him dazed. To his intense surprise and astonishment he found himself standing in the middle of the kitchen at the farmhouse. There was the settle; there was the table at which he had eaten his morning porridge!

  For a moment the sight filled him with excess of joy. In the instant of recognition the familiar surroundings, the things and faces to which, meagre and harsh as they were, he had grown accustomed, brought blessed relief to the child’s mind. He uttered Gridley’s name with a sob of joy, and tried to move towards him. But his hands and feet were still bound, and he lost his balance and fell forward on the floor.

  Simon Gridley, amid perfect silence, advanced and took him up and set him in a chair. The other five, four men and a woman, stood round the table looking at him. Each held a bible.

  Between fright and perplexity, and the hurt of his fall, the boy began to cry. Still, no one spoke to him. He stopped crying.

  Then at last the strange way they looked at him, the strange silence they kept, went to the boy’s heart. He cried no longer, but he looked from one to the other, terrified by the fierce glare in their eyes. “Gridley,” he said faintly; “Gridley, what is it, please?”

  The butler, at the sound of his voice, sank down pale and trembling on the meal chest. The woman shrank before his eye. But the four men met his look with stern, pitiless faces and set lips. It was Simon who spoke. “We have taken him in the act,” he said, in a low, impassive voice. “What shall we do with him?”

  “Ye shall make him to cease!” Luke answered, in the monotonous tone of one repeating a form. “He comes of an accursed brood, and he is in league with the father of curses, whose child he is! He would have bewitched the Lord General and his army with his enchantments. We have seen it with our eyes. What need have we of further evidence?”

  But Simon Gridley thought otherwise. “Stand forward, woman,” he said, disregarding his brother’s last remark. “Say what you saw yesterday.”

  The woman, amid that strange silence, began to speak in a low voice. The rain was still falling, and the eaves dripped outside. The cold light which found its way into the room showed her white to the lips. But she told without faltering her tale of the storm which had fallen on the moor when the child rubbed the cross; and no one doubted it, any more than, to do her justice, she doubted it herself. For was she not confirmed by the presence of the cross itself, which lay in the middle of the table for all to see! They looked at it with horror, never doubting that the knots were devil’s knots, that the wood of which it was formed came from no earthly tree.

  Meantime the child, terrified by the stern, harsh faces and the glances of unintelligible abhorrence which met him wherever he looked, had no wit to understand the charge made against him. He knew only that the cross had something to do with it — that it was the cross at which they all looked; and he supposed from this that his brother was in danger. For his simple soul this was enough. He seemed to be in a dreadful dream. He cried and trembled, sobbing, while they spoke, like the child he was. But his mind was made up. He would be cut to pieces, but he would never let Frank’s name pass his lips.

  Hence, when one of the Edgingtons, who had met Master Matthew Hopkins, the great witch-finder, and would fain have probed the matter further with such skill as he fancied he had acquired, adjured him solemnly to speak and say where he got the cross, the child was silent; so obstinately silent that it was plain he could have told something if he would.

  “He is mute of malice,” Simon said.

  “He is mute of the devil!” Luke answered fiercely. “What need of talk when we saw him with our own eyes rule the storm? And it rains still. It rains, and will ‘rain,’ until his power is broken.”

  This monstrous idea seemed to his hearers in no way incredible. The belief in witchcraft and in demoniacal possession of every kind had reached its height in England about this time, when men’s minds, released from the wholesome leading-strings of custom and the church, evinced a natura
l proneness to run into all manner of extremes. Had the child been a woman, his fate had been sealed on the spot, the popular fancy attributing the black art to that sex in particular. But the fact that he was a boy was so far abnormal, that it stuck in the throat of the Edgington who had spoken before. “Has he any mark upon him?” he asked.

  He is mute of malice. — Page 156.

  The woman replied, almost in a whisper, that he had a black mole on his left shoulder.

  “Is it a common mark?”

  She shook her head without speaking.

  Luke waited for no more. “This is folly!” he cried wildly. “What need have we of signs? We have seen. Bolts and bars will not hold him, nor will water receive him.”

  “That is to be seen!” Edgington answered quickly. “There is a pool below. Let us make trial of him there, Master Gridley. If the lad sinks, well and good. If he will not sink, well and good also. We shall know what to do with him.”

  Simon nodded sternly. “Good,” he said; “let it be so.”

  But this the boy had still the sense to understand. A vision of the dark bog pool sullenly lipping the rocks which fringed its shores flashed before his childish eyes. In a second the full horror of the fate which threatened him burst upon him, and those eyes grew large with terror. The color left his face. He tried to rise, he tried to frame the word Gridley, he tried to ask for mercy. He could not. Fear had deprived him of the power of speech, and he could only look. But his look was one to melt the heart of any save a fanatic.

  Gridley the butler was no fanatic, and though he was a bad man he was not inhuman. Something in the boy’s piteous look went straight to his heart. He alone of those present, though he never doubted the existence of witchcraft, doubted the boy’s guilt, for he alone had known him all his life, and could see nothing unfamiliar in him. He remembered him a baby, prattling and crawling, and playing like any other baby; and despite himself — for there was nothing noble or brave in the man — he stepped forward and interposed between Simon and his victim.

  “I have known the child all his life,” he said hoarsely. “He has been as other children, Simon.”

  His brother looked at him coldly. “Is he as other children to-day?” he said, and he pointed to the cross on the table.

  The butler, thus challenged, made as if he would take up the talisman. But at the last moment, when his hand was near it, his heart failed him. He doubted, he was a coward, and he drew back. “He was always as other children,” he muttered again, hopelessly, helplessly. “I have known him from his birth.”

  “Very well,” Simon answered, with pitiless logic. “We shall see presently if he is as other children now. The water will show.”

  He stepped towards the boy as he spoke, but Jack saw him coming, and reading his fate in the grim, unrelenting looks which everywhere met his eyes, screamed loudly. The child was fast bound, and could not fly, but bound as he was he managed to fling himself on the floor, and lay there screaming. Simon plucked him up roughly, and looked round for something to muffle his cries. “The cloak!” he said hurriedly — the noise discomposed him. “The cloak!”

  Luke went to fetch it from the dresser on which it had been laid, but before he could bring it, the boy on a sudden stopped screaming, and stiffened himself in Simon’s arms. “I will tell,” he cried wildly. “Let me go! Let me go, and I will tell.”

  The man was astonished, as were they all. But he set the boy back in the chair, and took his hands off him, and stood waiting, with a stern light in his eyes, to hear this devil’s tale.

  For a moment the boy lay huddled up and panting, with his lips apart, and the sweat on his flushed brow. He had said — with the man’s hands, on him and the black water before his eyes — that he would tell. But as he crouched there, getting his breath, and looking from one to another like a frightened animal, thoughts of his brother whom he must betray, thoughts of devotion and love, all childish but all living, surged through his brain. The men and the woman waited, some sternly curious, and some in fear; but the boy remained dumb. He had conquered his terror. He was learning that what men suffer for others is no suffering.

  Simon lost patience at last. “Speak!” he cried, “or to the water!”

  The boy eyed him trembling, but remained silent. “Give him a little more time,” said one of the other men.

  “Ay, hurry him not,” said Luke.

  “He has had time enough,” Simon retorted. “He is but playing with us.”

  Yet he left him a little longer, while all stood round and looked, greedy to hear with their own ears one of those strange confessions of witchcraft, which, whether they had their origin in delusion or in some interested motive, were not uncommon in the England of that day. But the child, though his breath came quick and fast, and his heart throbbed like the heart of a little bird, and he feared unspeakably, remained obstinately silent.

  “Enough!” Simon cried at last, his patience utterly exhausted; “he is dumb. We shall get nothing from him here. Let us see what the water will do for him. Luke, the cloak!”

  Jack controlled his fears until the man’s hands were actually upon him. Then instinct prevailed, and in despair he gave way to shriek upon shriek, so that the house rang with the pitiful outcry. “The cloak!” Simon cried impatiently, looking this way and that for it, while the butler turned pale at the sounds. “That is better; now open the door.”

  One of the Edgingtons went towards it, but when he was close to it, stopped on a sudden and held up his hand. The gesture was one of warning, but it came too late; for before those behind could profit by it, or do more than surmise what it meant, the door shook under a heavy knock, and a hand outside lifted the latch. The neighing of horses and the sound of hoofs trampling the stones of the fold gave the party some idea what they had to expect; but late also, for ere Simon could lay down the child, or Edgington move from his position, the door was thrown wide open. Half a dozen figures appeared on the threshold, and one detatching itself from the crowd strode in with an air of sturdy authority.

  The person who thus put himself forward was a middle-aged man of good height, strongly and squarely made. His reddish face and broad, massive features were shaded by a wide-leaved hat, in the band of which a little roll of papers was stuck. He wore a buff coat and breastplate, and a heavy sword, and had, besides, a pistol and a leather glove thrust through his girdle. For a second after his entrance, he looked from one face to another with quick, searching glances which nothing escaped. Then he spoke.

  “Tut-tut-tut-tut!” he said. “What is this? Have we honest, God-fearing soldiers here, halting by the way, whether such halting is in the way or not, or in the morning orders? Or have we ramping, roystering, babe-killing free-companions? — eh, man? Speak!” he continued rapidly, his utterance somewhat thick. “What have you here? Unfasten this cloak, some one!”

  Thunderstruck, and taken completely by surprise — for the doorway was filled with faces — the party in the room fell back a step. Simon mechanically laid the boy down, but still maintained his position by him. Nor did the Puritan, though he found himself thus abruptly challenged by one who seemed to be able to make good his words, lose a jot of his grim aspect. He was aware of no wrong he had done. His conscience was clear.

  “They are not soldiers, your excellency,” one of the persons in the doorway said briskly. “Four of them live here, and the other two are honest men from Bradford.”

  “That man has worn the bandoliers,” the first speaker retorted, in a voice which brooked no denial. “Sirrah, find your tongue,” he continued sternly, bending a brow which was never of the lightest. “Have you not served?”

  “I was in the forlorn of horse at Naseby,” Simon answered sullenly.

  “In what troop?”

  “Captain Rawlins’s.”

  “Is it so?” his excellency answered, dropping his voice at once to a more genial note. “Well, friend, you had for commander a good man and serviceable. You could no better. And who are these with
you?”

  “Two are his brothers,” the voice in the doorway explained. “They were very forward against Langdale’s horse in the skirmish at Settle three days ago, your excellency.”

  “Good, good, all this is good,” Cromwell answered briskly; for that redoubtable man, Lieutenant-General at this time of the armies of the Parliament, it was. “Then why were you backward to answer my questions, friend, being questions it lay in me to put, I being at the head of this poor army and in authority? But there, you were modest. Here, Pownall,” he continued, “lay the maps on the table. We can examine them here in shelter. ’Twas a happy thought of yours. And let the prisoners be brought here also. Yet, stay,” he added, feeing round once more, his brow dark. “Methinks there comes a strange whimpering from that cloak! Is’t a dog? To it, Pownall, and see what it is.”

  The officer he addressed sprang zealously forward, and whipping up the cloak disclosed the child lying bound on the floor. Terror and the exertion of screaming had reduced the boy to the last stage of consciousness. He lay motionless, his face pale, and his eyes half closed; his little bound hands appealing powerfully to the feelings of the spectators. Even the presence of so many strangers failed to rouse him, or move him to a last appeal. He appeared to be unconscious of their entrance, or of any change in his surroundings.

  The sight was one to awaken indignation in a man, and Cromwell was a man. “What!” he exclaimed roundly, and with something like an oath; “what is this? Why have you bound him? Who is he? Is he your son?”

  “No,” Simon answered, scowling.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Patten.”

  “Patten, Patten, Patten? Where have I heard the name?” Cromwell answered. “Ho, I remember! There is a young malignant of that name on the black list, is there not? For this county, too!”