looked melancholy--that her visits had been less frequent to Moorside;
and one person in the crowd said, that a few weeks ago she had come upon
them suddenly in a retired place, when Margaret was weeping bitterly,
and Ludovic tossing his arms, seemingly in wrath and distraction. All
agreed that of late he had led a disturbed and reckless life--and that
something dark and suspicious had hung about him, wherever he went, as
if he were haunted by an evil conscience. But did not strange men
sometimes pass through the Moor--squalid mendicants, robber-like, from
the far-off city--one by one, yet seemingly belonging to the same
gang--with bludgeons in their hands--half-naked, and often drunken in
their hunger, as at the doors of lonesome houses they demanded alms; or
more like footpads than beggars, with stern gestures, rising up from the
ditches on the wayside, stopped the frightened women and children going
upon errands, and thanklessly received pence from the poor? One of them
must have been the murderer! But then, again, the whole tide of
suspicion would set in upon Ludovic--her lover; for the darker and more
dreadful the guilt, the more welcome is it to the fears of the
imagination when its waking dreams are floating in blood.
A tall figure came forward from the porch, and all was silence when the
congregation beheld the Father of the suspected criminal. He stood still
as a tree in a calm day--trunk, limbs, moved not--and his grey head was
uncovered. He then stretched out his arm, not in an imploring, but in a
commanding attitude, and essayed to speak; but his white lips quivered,
and his tongue refused its office. At last, almost fiercely, he uttered,
"Who dares denounce my son?" and like the growling thunder the crowd
cried, "All--all--he is the murderer!" Some said that the old man
smiled; but it could have been but a convulsion of the features--outraged
nature's wrung-out and writhing expression of disdain, to show how a
father's love brooks the cruelty of foolish falsehood and injustice.
Men, women, and children--all whom grief and horror had not made
helpless--moved away towards the Moor--the woman who had seen the sight
leading the way; for now her whole strength had returned to her, and she
was drawn and driven by an irresistible passion to look again at what
had almost destroyed her judgment. Now they were miles from the kirk,
and over some brushwood, at the edge of a morass some distance from the
common footpath, crows were seen diving and careering in the air, and a
raven, flapping suddenly out of the covert, sailed away with a savage
croak along a range of cliffs. The whole multitude stood stock-still at
that carrion-sound. The guide said shudderingly, in a low hurried voice,
"See, see--that is her mantle"--and there indeed Margaret lay, all in a
heap, maimed, mangled, murdered, with a hundred gashes. The corpse
seemed as if it had been baked in frost, and was imbedded in coagulated
blood. Shreds and patches of her dress, torn away from her bosom,
bestrewed the bushes--for many yards round about, there had been the
trampling of feet, and a long lock of hair that had been torn from her
temples, with the dews yet unmelted on it, was lying upon a plant of
broom, a little way from the corpse. The first to lift the body from the
horrid bed was Gilbert Adamson. He had been long familiar with death in
all its ghastliness, and all had now looked to him--forgetting for the
moment that he was the father of the murderer--to perform the task from
which they recoiled in horror. Resting on one knee, he placed the corpse
on the other--and who could have believed, that even the most violent
and cruel death could have wrought such a change on a face once so
beautiful! All was distortion--and terrible it was to see the dim glazed
eyes, fixedly open, and the orbs insensible to the strong sun that smote
her face white as snow among the streaks as if left by bloody fingers!
Her throat was all discoloured--and a silk handkerchief twisted into a
cord, that had manifestly been used in the murder, was of a redder hue
than when it had veiled her breast. No one knows what horror his eyes
are able to look on, till they are tried. A circle of stupefied gazers
was drawn by a horrid fascination closer and closer round the
corpse--and women stood there holding children by the hands, and fainted
not, but observed the sight, and shuddered without shrieking, and stood
there all dumb as ghosts. But the body was now borne along by many
hands--at first none knew in what direction, till many voices muttered,
"To Moorside--to Moorside"--and in an hour it was laid on the bed in
which Margaret Burnside had so often slept with her beloved little Ann
in her bosom.
The hand of some one had thrown a cloth over the corpse. The room was
filled with people--but all their power and capacity of horror had been
exhausted--and the silence was now almost like that which attends a
natural death, when all the neighbours are assembled for the funeral.
Alice, with little Ann beside her, kneeled at the bed, nor feared to lay
her head close to the covered corpse--sobbing out syllables that showed
how passionately she prayed--and that she and her little niece--and, oh!
for that unhappy father--were delivering themselves up into the hands of
God. That father knelt not--neither did he sit down--nor move--nor
groan--but stood at the foot of the bed, with arms folded almost
sternly--and with his eyes fixed on the sheet, in which there seemed to
be neither ruth nor dread--but only an austere composure, which, were it
indeed but resignation to that dismal decree of Providence, had been
most sublime--but who can see into the heart of a man either righteous
or wicked, and know what may be passing there, breathed from the gates
of heaven or of hell!
Soon as the body had been found, shepherds and herdsmen, fleet of foot
as the deer, had set off to scour the country far and wide, hill and
glen, mountain and morass, moor and wood, for the murderer. If he be on
the face of the earth, and not self-plunged in despairing suicide into
some quagmire, he will be found--for all the population of many
districts are now afoot, and precipices are clomb till now brushed but
by the falcons. A figure, like that of a man, is seen by some of the
hunters from a hill-top, lying among the stones by the side of a
solitary loch. They separate, and descend upon him, and then, gathering
in, they behold the man whom they seek--Ludovic Adamson, the murderer.
His face is pale and haggard, yet flushed as if by a fever centred in
his heart. That is no dress for the Sabbath-day--soiled and
savage-looking, and giving to the eyes that search an assurance of
guilt. He starts to his feet, as they think, like some wild beast
surprised in his lair, and gathering itself up to fight or fly.
But--strange enormity--a Bible is in his hand! And the shepherd who
first seized him, taking the book out of his grasp, looks into the page,
and reads, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
On a leaf is written, in her own well-known hand, "The gift of Margaret
Burnside!" Not a word is said by his captors--they offer no needless
violence--no indignities--but answer all inquiries of surprise and
astonishment (O! can one so young be so hardened in wickedness!) by a
stern silence and upbraiding eyes, that like daggers must stab his
heart. At last he walks doggedly and sullenly along, and refuses to
speak; yet his tread is firm--there is no want of composure in his face,
now that the first passion of fear or anger has left it; and now that
they have the murderer in their clutch, some begin almost to pity him,
and others to believe, or at least to hope, that he may be innocent. As
yet they have said not a word of the crime of which they accuse him; but
let him try to master the expression of his voice and his eyes as he
may, guilt is in those stealthy glances--guilt is in those reckless
tones. And why does he seek to hide his right hand in his bosom? And
whatever he may affect to say--they ask him not--most certainly that
stain on his shirt-collar is blood. But now they are at Moorside.
There is still a great crowd all round about the house--in the
garden--and at the door--and a troubled cry announces that the criminal
has been taken, and is close at hand. His father meets him at the gate;
and, kneeling down, holds up his clasped hands, and says, "My son, if
thou art guilty, confess, and die." The criminal angrily waves his
father aside, and walks towards the door. "Fools! fools! what mean ye by
this? What crime has been committed? And how dare ye to think me the
criminal? Am I like a murderer?"--"We never spoke to him of the
murder--we never spoke to him of the murder!" cried one of the men who
now held him by the arm; and all assembled then exclaimed, "Guilty,
guilty--that one word will hang him! O, pity, pity, for his father and
poor sister--this will break their hearts!" Appalled, yet firm of foot,
the prisoner forced his way into the house; and turning, in his
confusion, into the chamber on the left, there he beheld the corpse of
the murdered on the bed--for the sheet had been removed--as yet not laid
out, and disfigured and deformed just as she had been found on the moor,
in the same misshapen heap of death! One long insane glare--one shriek,
as if all his heartstrings at once had burst--and then down fell the
strong man on the floor like lead. One trial was past which no human
hardihood could endure--another, and yet another, awaits him; but them
he will bear as the guilty brave have often borne them, and the most
searching eye shall not see him quail at the bar or on the scaffold.
They lifted the stricken wretch from the floor, placed him in a chair,
and held him upright, till he should revive from the fit. And he soon
did revive; for health flowed in all his veins, and he had the strength
of a giant. But when his senses returned, there was none to pity him;
for the shock had given an expression of guilty horror to all his looks,
and, like a man walking in his sleep under the temptation of some
dreadful dream, he moved with fixed eyes towards the bed, and looking at
the corpse, gabbled in hideous laughter, and then wept and tore his hair
like a distracted woman or a child. Then he stooped down as he would
kiss the face, but staggered back, and, covering his eyes with his
hands, uttered such a groan as is sometimes heard rending the sinner's
breast when the avenging Furies are upon him in his dreams. All who
heard it felt that he was guilty; and there was a fierce cry through the
room of, "Make him touch the body, and if he be the murderer, it will
bleed!"--"Fear not, Ludovic, to touch it, my boy," said his father;
"bleed afresh it will not, for thou art innocent; and savage though now
they be who once were proud to be thy friends, even they will believe
thee guiltless when the corpse refuses to bear witness against thee, and
not a drop leaves its quiet heart!" But his son spake not a word, nor
did he seem to know that his father had spoken; but he suffered himself
to be led passively towards the bed. One of the bystanders took his hand
and placed it on the naked breast, when out of the corners of the
teeth-clenched mouth, and out of the swollen nostrils, two or three
blood-drops visibly oozed; and a sort of shrieking shout declared the
sacred faith of all the crowd in the dreadful ordeal. "What body is
this? 'tis all over blood!" said the prisoner, looking with an idiot
vacancy on the faces that surrounded him. But now the sheriff of the
county entered the room, along with some officers of justice, and he was
spared any further shocks from that old saving superstition. His wrists
soon after were manacled. These were all the words he had uttered since
he recovered from the fit; and he seemed now in a state of stupor.
Ludovic Adamson, after examination of witnesses who crowded against him
from many unexpected quarters, was committed that very Sabbath night to
prison on a charge of murder. On the Tuesday following, the remains of
Margaret Burnside were interred. All the parish were at the funeral. In
Scotland it is not customary for females to join in the last simple
ceremonies of death. But in this case they did; and all her scholars, in
the same white dresses in which they used to walk with her at their head
into the kirk on Sabbaths, followed the bier. Alice and little Ann were
there, nearest the coffin, and the father of him who had wrought all
this woe was one of its supporters. The head of the murdered girl
rested, it might be said, on his shoulder--but none can know the
strength which God gives to his servants--and all present felt for him,
as he walked steadily under that dismal burden, a pity, and even an
affection, which they had been unable to yield to him ere he had been so
sorely tried. The Ladies from the Castle were among the other mourners,
and stood by the open grave. A sunnier day had never shone from heaven,
and that very grave itself partook of the brightness, as the
coffin--with the gilt letters, "Margaret Burnside, Aged 18"--was let
down, and in the darkness below disappeared. No flowers were sprinkled
there, nor afterwards planted on the turf--vain offerings, of unavailing
sorrow! But in that nook--beside the bodies of her poor parents--she was
left for the grass to grow over her, as over the other humble dead; and
nothing but the very simplest headstone was placed there, with a
sentence from Scripture below the name. There was less weeping, less
sobbing, than at many other funerals; for as sure as Mercy ruled the
skies, all believed that she was there--all knew it, just as if the
gates of heaven had opened and showed her a white-robed spirit at the
right hand of the throne. And why should any rueful lamentation have
been wailed over the senseless dust? But on the way home over the hills,
and in the hush of evening beside their hearths, and in the stillness of
night on their beds--all--young and old--all did nothing but weep.
For weeks--such was the pity, grief, and awe inspired by this portentous
crime and lamentable calamity, that all the domestic ongoings in all the
houses far and wide, were melancholy and mournful, as if the country had
been fearing a visitation of the plague. Sin, it was felt, had brought
not only sorrow on the parish, but shame that ages would not wipe away;
and strangers, as they travelled through the moor, would point the place
where the foulest murder had been committed in all the annals of crime.
As for the family at Moorside, the daughter had their boundless
compassion, though no eye had seen her since the funeral; but people, in
speaking of the father, would still shake their heads, and put their
fingers to their lips, and say to one another in whispers, that Gilbert
Adamson had once been a bold, bad man--that his religion, in spite of
all his repulsive austerity, wore not the aspect of truth--and that, had
he held a stricter and a stronger hand on the errors of his misguided
son, this foul deed had not been perpetrated, nor that wretched sinner's
soul given to perdition. Yet others had gentler and humaner thoughts.
They remembered him walking along God-supported beneath the bier--and at
the mouth of the grave--and feared to look on that head--formerly
grizzled, but now quite grey--when on the very first Sabbath after the
murder he took his place in the elders' seat, and was able to stand up,
along with the rest of the congregation, when the minister prayed for
peace to his soul, and hoped for the deliverance out of jeopardy of him
now lying in bonds. A low Amen went all round the kirk at these words;
for the most hopeless called to mind that maxim of law, equity, and
justice--that every man under accusation of crime should be held
innocent till he is proved to be guilty. Nay, a human tribunal might
condemn him, and yet might he stand acquitted before the tribunal of
God.
There were various accounts of the behaviour of the prisoner. Some said
that he was desperately hardened--others, sunk in sullen apathy and
indifference--and one or two persons belonging to the parish who had
seen him declared that he seemed to care not for himself, but to be
plunged in profound melancholy for the fate of Margaret Burnside, whose
name he involuntarily mentioned, and then bowed his head on his knees
and wept. His guilt he neither admitted at that interview, nor denied;
but he confessed that some circumstances bore hard against him, and that
he was prepared for the event of his trial--condemnation and death. "But
if you are not guilty, Ludovic, _who can be the murderer_? Not the
slightest shade of suspicion has fallen on any other person--and did
not, alas! the body bleed when"--The unhappy wretch sprang up from the
bed, it was said, at these words, and hurried like a madman back and
forward along the stone floor of his cell. "Yea--yea!" at last he cried,
"the mouth and nostrils of my Margaret did indeed bleed when they
pressed down my hand on her cold bosom. It is God's truth!" "God's
truth?"--"Yes--God's truth, I saw first one drop, and then another,
trickle towards me--and I prayed to our Saviour to wipe them off before
other eyes might behold the dreadful witnesses against me; but at that
hour Heaven was most unmerciful--for those two small drops--as all of
you saw--soon became a very stream--and all her face, neck, and
breast--you saw it as well as I miserable--were at last drenched in
blood. Then I may have confessed that I was guilty--did I, or did I not,
confess it? Tell me--for I remember nothing distinctly;--but if I
did--the judgment of offended Heaven, then punishing me for my sins, had
made me worse than mad--and so had all your abhorrent eyes; and men, if
I did confess, it was the cruelty of God that drove me to it--and your
cruelty--which was great; for no pity had any one for me that day,
though Margaret Burnside lay before me a murdered corpse--and a hoarse
whisper came to my ear urging me to confess--I well believe from no
human lips, but from the Father of Lies, who, at that hour, was suffered
to leave the pit to ensnare my soul." Such was said to have been the
main sense of what he uttered in the presence of two or three who had
formerly been among his most intimate friends, and who knew not, on
leaving his cell and coming into the open air, whether to think him
innocent or guilty. As long as they thought they saw his eyes regarding
them, and that they heard his voice speaking, they believed him
innocent; but when the expression of the tone of his voice, and of the
look of his eyes--which they had felt belonged to innocence--died away
from their memory--then arose against him the strong, strange,
circumstantial evidence, which, wisely or unwisely, lawyers and judges
have said _cannot lie_--and then, in their hearts, one and all of them
pronounced him guilty.
But had not his father often visited the prisoner's cell? Once--and once
only; for in obedience to his son's passionate prayer, beseeching
him--if there were any mercy left either on earth or in heaven--never
more to enter that dungeon, the miserable parent had not again entered
the prison; but he had been seen one morning at dawn, by one who knew
his person, walking round and round the walls, staring up at the black
building in distraction, especially at one small grated window in the
north tower--and it is most probable that he had been pacing his rounds
there during all the night. Nobody could conjecture, however dimly, what
was the meaning of his banishment from his son's cell. Gilbert Adamson,
so stern to others, even to his own only daughter, had been always but
too indulgent to his Ludovic--and had that lost wretch's guilt, so
exceeding great, changed his heart into stone, and made the sight of his
old father's grey hairs hateful to his eyes? But then the jailor, who
had heard him imploring--beseeching--commanding his father to remain,
till after the trial, at Moorside, said, that all the while the prisoner
sobbed and wept like a child; and that when he unlocked the door of the
cell, to let the old man out, it was a hard thing to tear away the arms
and hands of Ludovic from his knees, while the father sat like a stone
image on the bed, and kept his tearless eyes fixed sternly upon the
wall, as if not a soul had been present, and he himself had been a
criminal condemned next day to die.
The father had obeyed, _religiously_, that miserable injunction, and
from religion it seemed he had found comfort. For Sabbath after Sabbath
he was at the kirk--he stood, as he had been wont to do for years, at
the poor's plate, and returned grave salutations to those who dropt
their mite into the small sacred treasury--his eyes calmly, and even
critically, regarded the pastor during prayer and sermon--and his deep
bass voice was heard, as usual, through all the house of God, in the
Psalms. On week-days he was seen by passers-by to drive his flocks
afield, and to overlook his sheep on the hill-pastures, or in the
pen-fold; and as it was still spring, and seed-time had been late this
season, he was observed holding the plough, as of yore; nor had his
skill deserted him--for the furrows were as straight as if drawn by a
rule on paper--and soon bright and beautiful was the braird on all the
low lands of his farm. The Comforter was with him, and, sorely as he had
been tried, his heart was not yet wholly broken; and it was believed
that, for years, he might outlive the blow that at first had seemed more
than a mortal man might bear and be! Yet that his woe, though hidden,
was dismal, all ere long knew, from certain tokens that intrenched his
face--cheeks shrunk and fallen; brow not so much furrowed as scarred;
eyes quenched; hair thinner and thinner far, as if he himself had torn
it away in handfuls during the solitude of midnight--and now absolutely
as white as snow; and over the whole man an indescribable ancientness
far beyond his years--though they were many, and most of them had been
passed in torrid climes--all showed how grief has its agonies as
destructive as those of guilt, and those the most wasting when they work
in the heart and in the brain, unrelieved by the shedding of one single
tear--when the very soul turns dry as dust, and life is imprisoned,
rather than mingled, in the decaying--the mouldering body!
The Day of Trial came, and all labour was suspended in the parish, as if
it had been a mourning fast. Hundreds of people from this remote
district poured into the circuit-town, and besieged the court-house.
Horsemen were in readiness, soon as the verdict should be returned, to
carry the intelligence--of life or death--to all those glens. A few
words will suffice to tell the trial, the nature of the evidence, and
its issue. The prisoner, who stood at the bar in black, appeared--though
miserably changed from a man of great muscular power and activity, a
magnificent man, into a tall thin shadow--perfectly unappalled; but in a
face so white, and wasted, and woe-begone, the most profound
physiognomist could read not one faintest symptom either of hope or
fear, trembling or trust, guilt or innocence. He hardly seemed to belong
to this world, and stood fearfully and ghastlily conspicuous between the
officers of justice, above all the crowd that devoured him with their
eyes, all leaning towards the bar to catch the first sound of his voice,
when to the indictment he should plead "Not Guilty." These words he did
utter, in a hollow voice altogether passionless, and then was suffered
to sit down, which he did in a manner destitute of all emotion. During
all the many long hours of his trial, he never moved head, limbs, or
body, except once, when he drank some water, which he had not asked for,
but which was given to him by a friend. The evidence was entirely
circumstantial, and consisted of a few damning facts, and of many of the
very slightest sort, which, taken singly, seemed to mean nothing, but
which, when considered all together, seemed to mean something against
him--how much or how little, there were among the agitated audience many
differing opinions. But slight as they were, either singly or together,
they told fearfully against the prisoner, when connected with the fatal
few which no ingenuity could ever explain away; and though ingenuity did
all it could do, when wielded by eloquence of the highest order--and as
the prisoner's counsel sat down, there went a rustle and a buzz through
the court, and a communication of looks and whispers, that seemed to
denote that there were hopes of his acquittal--yet, if such hopes there
were, they were deadened by the recollection of the calm, clear, logical
address to the jury by the counsel for the crown, and destroyed by the
judge's charge, which amounted almost to a demonstration of guilt, and
concluded with a confession due to his oath and conscience, that he saw
not how the jury could do their duty to their Creator and their
fellow-creatures, but by returning _one_ verdict. They retired to
consider it; and, during a deathlike silence, all eyes were bent on a
deathlike Image.