The first opinion given to me regarding Jacob Settle was a simple
descriptive statement, “He’s a down-in-the-mouth chap”: but I found
that it embodied the thoughts and ideas of all his fellow-workmen.
There was in the phrase a certain easy tolerance, an absence of
positive feeling of any kind, rather than any complete opinion, which
marked pretty accurately the man’s place in public esteem. Still, there
was some dissimilarity between this and his appearance which
unconsciously set me thinking, and by degrees, as I saw more of the
place and the workmen, I came to have a special interest in him. He
was, I found, for ever doing kindnesses, not involving money expenses
beyond his humble means, but in the manifold ways of forethought and
forbearance and self-repression which are of the truer charities of
life. Women and children trusted him implicitly, though, strangely
enough, he rather shunned them, except when anyone was sick, and then
he made his appearance to help if he could, timidly and awkwardly. He
led a very solitary life, keeping house by himself in a tiny cottage,
or rather hut, of one room, far on the edge of the moorland. His
existence seemed so sad and solitary that I wished to cheer it up, and
for the purpose took the occasion when we had both been sitting up with
a child, injured by me through accident, to offer to lend him books. He
gladly accepted, and as we parted in the grey of the dawn I felt that
something of mutual confidence had been established between us.
The books were always most carefully and punctually returned, and in
time Jacob Settle and I became quite friends. Once or twice as I
crossed the moorland on Sundays I looked in on him; but on such
occasions he was shy and ill at ease so that I felt diffident about
calling to see him. He would never under any circumstances come into my
own lodgings.
One Sunday afternoon, I was coming back from a long walk beyond the
moor, and as I passed Settle’s cottage stopped at the door to say “How
do you do?” to him. As the door was shut, I thought that he was out,
and merely knocked for form’s sake, or through habit, not expecting to
get any answer. To my surprise, I heard a feeble voice from within,
though what was said I could not hear. I entered at once, and found
Jacob lying half-dressed upon his bed. He was as pale as death, and the
sweat was simply rolling off his face. His hands were unconsciously
gripping the bedclothes as a drowning man holds on to whatever he may
grasp. As I came in he half arose, with a wild, hunted look in his
eyes, which were wide open and staring, as though something of horror
had come before him; but when he recognised me he sank back on the
couch with a smothered sob of relief and closed his eyes. I stood by
him for a while, quite a minute or two, while he gasped. Then he opened
his eyes and looked at me, but with such a despairing, woeful
expression that, as I am a living man, I would have rather seen that
frozen look of horror. I sat down beside him and asked after his
health. For a while he would not answer me except to say that he was
not ill; but then, after scrutinising me closely, he half arose on his
elbow and said:
“I thank you kindly, sir, but I’m simply telling you the truth. I am
not ill, as men call it, though God knows whether there be not worse
sicknesses than doctors know of. I’ll tell you, as you are so kind, but
I trust that you won’t even mention such a thing to a living soul, for
it might work me more and greater woe. I am suffering from a bad
dream.”
“A bad dream!” I said, hoping to cheer him; “but dreams pass away with
the light—even with waking.” There I stopped, for before he spoke I saw
the answer in his desolate look round the little place.
“No! no! that’s all well for people that live in comfort and with those
they love around them. It is a thousand times worse for those who live
alone and have to do so. What cheer is there for me, waking here in the
silence of the night, with the wide moor around me full of voices and
full of faces that make my waking a worse dream than my sleep? Ah,
young sir, you have no past that can send its legions to people the
darkness and the empty space, and I pray the good God that you may
never have!” As he spoke, there was such an almost irresistible gravity
of conviction in his manner that I abandoned my remonstrance about his
solitary life. I felt that I was in the presence of some secret
influence which I could not fathom. To my relief, for I knew not what
to say, he went on:
“Two nights past have I dreamed it. It was hard enough the first night,
but I came through it. Last night the expectation was in itself almost
worse than the dream—until the dream came, and then it swept away every
remembrance of lesser pain. I stayed awake till just before the dawn,
and then it came again, and ever since I have been in such an agony as
I am sure the dying feel, and with it all the dread of tonight.” Before
he had got to the end of the sentence my mind was made up, and I felt
that I could speak to him more cheerfully.
“Try and get to sleep early tonight—in fact, before the evening has
passed away. The sleep will refresh you, and I promise you there will
not be any bad dreams after tonight.” He shook his head hopelessly, so
I sat a little longer and then left him.
When I got home I made my arrangements for the night, for I had made up
my mind to share Jacob Settle’s lonely vigil in his cottage on the
moor. I judged that if he got to sleep before sunset he would wake well
before midnight, and so, just as the bells of the city were striking
eleven, I stood opposite his door armed with a bag, in which were my
supper, an extra large flask, a couple of candles, and a book. The
moonlight was bright, and flooded the whole moor, till it was almost as
light as day; but ever and anon black clouds drove across the sky, and
made a darkness which by comparison seemed almost tangible. I opened
the door softly, and entered without waking Jacob, who lay asleep with
his white face upward. He was still, and again bathed in sweat. I tried
to imagine what visions were passing before those closed eyes which
could bring with them the misery and woe which were stamped on the
face, but fancy failed me, and I waited for the awakening. It came
suddenly, and in a fashion which touched me to the quick, for the
hollow groan that broke from the man’s white lips as he half arose and
sank back was manifestly the realisation or completion of some train of
thought which had gone before.
“If this be dreaming,” said I to myself, “then it must be based on some
very terrible reality. What can have been that unhappy fact that he
spoke of?”
While I thus spoke, he realised that I was with him. It struck me as
strange that he had no period of that doubt as to whether dream or
reality surrounded him which commonly marks an expected environment of
waking men. With a positive cry of joy, he seized my hand and held it
in his two wet, trembling hands, as a frightened child clings on to
someone whom it loves. I tried to soothe him:
“There, there! it is all right. I have come to stay with you tonight,
and together we will try to fight this evil dream.” He let go my hand
suddenly, and sank back on his bed and covered his eyes with his hands.
“Fight it?—the evil dream! Ah! no, sir, no! No mortal power can fight
that dream, for it comes from God—and is burned in here;” and he beat
upon his forehead. Then he went on:
“It is the same dream, ever the same, and yet it grows in its power to
torture me every time it comes.”
“What is the dream?” I asked, thinking that the speaking of it might
give him some relief, but he shrank away from me, and after a long
pause said:
“No, I had better not tell it. It may not come again.”
There was manifestly something to conceal from me—something that lay
behind the dream, so I answered:
“All right. I hope you have seen the last of it. But if it should come
again, you will tell me, will you not? I ask, not out of curiosity, but
because I think it may relieve you to speak.” He answered with what I
thought was almost an undue amount of solemnity:
“If it comes again, I shall tell you all.”
Then I tried to get his mind away from the subject to more mundane
things, so I produced supper, and made him share it with me, including
the contents of the flask. After a little he braced up, and when I lit
my cigar, having given him another, we smoked a full hour, and talked
of many things. Little by little the comfort of his body stole over his
mind, and I could see sleep laying her gentle hands on his eyelids. He
felt it, too, and told me that now he felt all right, and I might
safely leave him; but I told him that, right or wrong, I was going to
see in the daylight. So I lit my other candle, and began to read as he
fell asleep.
By degrees I got interested in my book, so interested that presently I
was startled by its dropping out of my hands. I looked and saw that
Jacob was still asleep, and I was rejoiced to see that there was on his
face a look of unwonted happiness, while his lips seemed to move with
unspoken words. Then I turned to my work again, and again woke, but
this time to feel chilled to my very marrow by hearing the voice from
the bed beside me:
“Not with those red hands! Never! never!” On looking at him, I found
that he was still asleep. He woke, however, in an instant, and did not
seem surprised to see me; there was again that strange apathy as to his
surroundings. Then I said:
“Settle, tell me your dream. You may speak freely, for I shall hold
your confidence sacred. While we both live I shall never mention what
you may choose to tell me.”
He replied:
“I said I would; but I had better tell you first what goes before the
dream, that you may understand. I was a schoolmaster when I was a very
young man; it was only a parish school in a little village in the West
Country. No need to mention any names. Better not. I was engaged to be
married to a young girl whom I loved and almost reverenced. It was the
old story. While we were waiting for the time when we could afford to
set up house together, another man came along. He was nearly as young
as I was, and handsome, and a gentleman, with all a gentleman’s
attractive ways for a woman of our class. He would go fishing, and she
would meet him while I was at my work in school. I reasoned with her
and implored her to give him up. I offered to get married at once and
go away and begin the world in a strange country; but she would not
listen to anything I could say, and I could see that she was infatuated
with him. Then I took it on myself to meet the man and ask him to deal
well with the girl, for I thought he might mean honestly by her, so
that there might be no talk or chance of talk on the part of others. I
went where I should meet him with none by, and we met!” Here Jacob
Settle had to pause, for something seemed to rise in his throat, and he
almost gasped for breath. Then he went on:
“Sir, as God is above us, there was no selfish thought in my heart that
day, I loved my pretty Mabel too well to be content with a part of her
love, and I had thought of my own unhappiness too often not to have
come to realise that, whatever might come to her, my hope was gone. He
was insolent to me—you, sir, who are a gentleman, cannot know, perhaps,
how galling can be the insolence of one who is above you in station—but
I bore with that. I implored him to deal well with the girl, for what
might be only a pastime of an idle hour with him might be the breaking
of her heart. For I never had a thought of her truth, or that the worst
of harm could come to her—it was only the unhappiness to her heart I
feared. But when I asked him when he intended to marry her his laughter
galled me so that I lost my temper and told him that I would not stand
by and see her life made unhappy. Then he grew angry too, and in his
anger said such cruel things of her that then and there I swore he
should not live to do her harm. God knows how it came about, for in
such moments of passion it is hard to remember the steps from a word to
a blow, but I found myself standing over his dead body, with my hands
crimson with the blood that welled from his torn throat. We were alone
and he was a stranger, with none of his kin to seek for him and murder
does not always out—not all at once. His bones may be whitening still,
for all I know, in the pool of the river where I left him. No one
suspected his absence, or why it was, except my poor Mabel, and she
dared not speak. But it was all in vain, for when I came back again
after an absence of months—for I could not live in the place—I learned
that her shame had come and that she had died in it. Hitherto I had
been borne up by the thought that my ill deed had saved her future, but
now, when I learned that I had been too late, and that my poor love was
smirched with that man’s sin, I fled away with the sense of my useless
guilt upon me more heavily than I could bear. Ah! sir, you that have
not done such a sin don’t know what it is to carry it with you. You may
think that custom makes it easy to you, but it is not so. It grows and
grows with every hour, till it becomes intolerable, and with it
growing, too, the feeling that you must for ever stand outside Heaven.
You don’t know what that means, and I pray God that you never may.
Ordinary men, to whom all things are possible, don’t often, if ever,
think of Heaven. It is a name, and nothing more, and they are content
to wait and let things be, but to those who are doomed to be shut out
for ever you cannot think what it means, you cannot guess or measure
the terrible endless longing to see the gates opened, and to be able to
join the white figures within.
“And this brings me to my dream. It seemed that the portal was before
me, with great gates of massive steel with bars of the thickness of a
mast, rising to the very clouds, and so close that between them was
just a glimpse of a crystal grotto, on whose shining walls were figured
many white-clad forms with faces radiant with joy. When I stood before
the gate my heart and my soul were so full of rapture and longing that
I forgot. And there stood at the gate two mighty angels with sweeping
wings, and, oh! so stern of countenance. They held each in one hand a
flaming sword, and in the other the latchet, which moved to and fro at
their lightest touch. Nearer were figures all draped in black, with
heads covered so that only the eyes were seen, and they handed to each
who came white garments such as the angels wear. A low murmur came that
told that all should put on their own robes, and without soil, or the
angels would not pass them in, but would smite them down with the
flaming swords. I was eager to don my own garment, and hurriedly threw
it over me and stepped swiftly to the gate; but it moved not, and the
angels, loosing the latchet, pointed to my dress, I looked down, and
was aghast, for the whole robe was smeared with blood. My hands were
red; they glittered with the blood that dripped from them as on that
day by the river bank. And then the angels raised their flaming swords
to smite me down, and the horror was complete—I awoke. Again, and
again, and again, that awful dream comes to me. I never learn from the
experience, I never remember, but at the beginning the hope is ever
there to make the end more appalling; and I know that the dream does
not come out of the common darkness where the dreams abide, but that it
is sent from God as a punishment! Never, never shall I be able to pass
the gate, for the soil on the angel garments must ever come from these
bloody hands!”
I listened as in a spell as Jacob Settle spoke. There was something so
far away in the tone of his voice—something so dreamy and mystic in the
eyes that looked as if through me at some spirit beyond—something so
lofty in his very diction and in such marked contrast to his workworn
clothes and his poor surroundings that I wondered if the whole thing
were not a dream.
We were both silent for a long time. I kept looking at the man before
me in growing wonderment. Now that his confession had been made, his
soul, which had been crushed to the very earth, seemed to leap back
again to uprightness with some resilient force. I suppose I ought to
have been horrified with his story, but, strange to say, I was not. It
certainly is not pleasant to be made the recipient of the confidence of
a murderer, but this poor fellow seemed to have had, not only so much
provocation, but so much self-denying purpose in his deed of blood that
I did not feel called upon to pass judgment upon him. My purpose was to
comfort, so I spoke out with what calmness I could, for my heart was
beating fast and heavily:
“You need not despair, Jacob Settle. God is very good, and His mercy is
great. Live on and work on in the hope that some day you may feel that
you have atoned for the past.” Here I paused, for I could see that
deep, natural sleep this time, was creeping upon him. “Go to sleep,” I
said; “I shall watch with you here and we shall have no more evil
dreams tonight.”
He made an effort to pull himself together, and answered:
“I don’t know how to thank you for your goodness to me this night, but
I think you had best leave me now. I’ll try and sleep this out; I feel
a weight off my mind since I have told you all. If there’s anything of
the man left in me, I must try and fight out life alone.”
“I’ll go tonight, as you wish it,” I said; “but take my advice, and do
not live in such a solitary way. Go among men and women; live among
them. Share their joys and sorrows, and it will help you to forget.
This solitude will make you melancholy mad.”
“I will!” he answered, half unconsciously, for sleep was overmastering
him.
I turned to go, and he looked after me. When I had touched the latch I
dropped it, and, coming back to the bed, held out my hand. He grasped
it with both his as he rose to a sitting posture, and I said my
goodnight, trying to cheer him:
“Heart, man, heart! There is work in the world for you to do, Jacob
Settle. You can wear those white robes yet and pass through that gate
of steel!”
Then I left him.
A week after I found his cottage deserted, and on asking at the works
was told that he had “gone north”, no one exactly knew whither.
Two years afterwards, I was staying for a few days with my friend Dr.
Munro in Glasgow. He was a busy man, and could not spare much time for
going about with me, so I spent my days in excursions to the Trossachs
and Loch Katrine and down the Clyde. On the second last evening of my
stay I came back somewhat later than I had arranged, but found that my
host was late too. The maid told me that he had been sent for to the
hospital—a case of accident at the gas-works, and the dinner was
postponed an hour; so telling her I would stroll down to find her
master and walk back with him, I went out. At the hospital I found him
washing his hands preparatory to starting for home. Casually, I asked
him what his case was.
“Oh, the usual thing! A rotten rope and men’s lives of no account. Two
men were working in a gasometer, when the rope that held their
scaffolding broke. It must have occurred just before the dinner hour,
for no one noticed their absence till the men had returned. There was
about seven feet of water in the gasometer, so they had a hard fight
for it, poor fellows. However, one of them was alive, just alive, but
we have had a hard job to pull him through. It seems that he owes his
life to his mate, for I have never heard of greater heroism. They swam
together while their strength lasted, but at the end they were so done
up that even the lights above, and the men slung with ropes, coming
down to help them, could not keep them up. But one of them stood on the
bottom and held up his comrade over his head, and those few breaths
made all the difference between life and death. They were a shocking
sight when they were taken out, for that water is like a purple dye
with the gas and the tar. The man upstairs looked as if he had been
washed in blood. Ugh!”
“And the other?”
“Oh, he’s worse still. But he must have been a very noble fellow. That
struggle under the water must have been fearful; one can see that by
the way the blood has been drawn from the extremities. It makes the
idea of the _Stigmata_ possible to look at him. Resolution like this
could, you would think, do anything in the world. Ay! it might almost
unbar the gates of Heaven. Look here, old man, it is not a very
pleasant sight, especially just before dinner, but you are a writer,
and this is an odd case. Here is something you would not like to miss,
for in all human probability you will never see anything like it
again.” While he was speaking he had brought me into the mortuary of
the hospital.
On the bier lay a body covered with a white sheet, which was wrapped
close round it.
“Looks like a chrysalis, don’t it? I say, Jack, if there be anything in
the old myth that a soul is typified by a butterfly, well, then the one
that this chrysalis sent forth was a very noble specimen and took all
the sunlight on its wings. See here!” He uncovered the face. Horrible,
indeed, it looked, as though stained with blood. But I knew him at
once, Jacob Settle! My friend pulled the winding sheet further down.
The hands were crossed on the purple breast as they had been reverently
placed by some tender-hearted person. As I saw them my heart throbbed
with a great exultation, for the memory of his harrowing dream rushed
across my mind. There was no stain now on those poor, brave hands, for
they were blanched white as snow.
And somehow as I looked I felt that the evil dream was all over. That
noble soul had won a way through the gate at last. The white robe had
now no stain from the hands that had put it on.