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 natural 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.
[Illustration: 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!"
An officer replied that there was; adding that the young man was
supposed to be in Duke Hamilton's army.
"Very well! We will deal with him when we catch him," Cromwell
answered sharply. "But, in the name of sense, what has that to do with
this boy? Why, 'tis a child! His mother's milk is hardly dry on his
lips! Why have you bound him, man?"
Simon Gridley strove to give back look for look, and to make the
outward countenance answer to the inward innocence. But the General's
sharp questions, and the astonished and indignant faces which filled
the room, made this difficult. A sudden doubt springing up in his own
mind, thus untimely, lent additional gloom to his manner, as he
answered: "He is no child. He is a witch!"
"A witch!" Cromwell cried, his voice drowning a dozen exclamations of
astonishment. "Why, mercy on us, a witch is a woman! And 'tis a boy!"
"Ay, but 'tis a witch too," Simon answered stubbornly.