least all the gashes inflicted--for there were also finger-marks of
strangulation--with a bill-hook, such as foresters use in lopping trees;
and several witnesses swore that the bill-hook which was shown them,
stained with blood, and with hair sticking on the haft, belonged to
Ludovic Adamson. It was also given in evidence--though some doubts
rested on the nature of the precise words--that on that day, in the room
with the corpse, he had given a wild and incoherent denial to the
question then put to him in the din, "What he had done with the
bill-hook?" Nobody had seen it in his possession since the spring
before; but it had been found, after several weeks' search, in a hag in
the moss, in the direction that he would have most probably taken--had
he been the murderer--when flying from the spot to the loch where he was
seized. The shoes which he had on when taken, fitted the footmarks on
the ground, not far from the place of the murder, but not so perfectly
as another pair which were found in the house. But that other pair, it
was proved, belonged to the old man; and therefore the correspondence
between the footmarks and the prisoner's shoes, though not perfect, was
a circumstance of much suspicion. But a far stronger fact, in this part
of the evidence, was sworn to against the prisoner. Though there was no
blood on his shoes, when apprehended his legs were bare--though that
circumstance, strange as it may seem, had never been noticed till he was
on the way to prison! His stockings had been next day found lying on the
sward, near the shore of the loch, manifestly after having been washed,
and laid out to dry in the sun. At mention of this circumstance a cold
shudder ran through the court; but neither that, nor indeed any other
circumstance in the evidence--not even the account of the appearance
which the murdered body exhibited when found on the moor, or when
afterwards laid on the bed--extorted from the prisoner one groan--one
sigh--or touched the imperturbable deathliness of his countenance. It
was proved, that when searched--in prison, and not before (for the
agitation that reigned over all assembled in the room at Moorside that
dreadful day, had confounded even those accustomed to deal with
suspected criminals)--there were found in his pocket a small French gold
watch, and also a gold brooch, which the Ladies of the Castle had given
to Margaret Burnside. On these being taken from him, he had said
nothing, but looked aghast. A piece of torn and bloody paper, which had
been picked up near the body, was sworn to be in his handwriting; and
though the meaning of the words--yet legible--was obscure, they seemed
to express a request that Margaret would meet him on the moor on that
Saturday afternoon she was murdered. The words "Saturday"--"meet
me"--"last time"--were not indistinct, and the paper was of the same
quality and colour with some found in a drawer in his bedroom at
Moorside. It was proved that he had been drinking with some dissolute
persons--poachers and the like--in a public-house in a neighbouring
parish all Saturday, till well on in the afternoon, when he left them in
a state of intoxication--and was then seen running along the hill-side
in the direction of the moor. Where he passed the night between the
Saturday and the Sabbath, he could give no account, except once when
unasked, and as if speaking to himself, he was overheard by the jailor
to mutter, "Oh! that fatal night--that fatal night!" And then, when
suddenly interrogated, "Where were you?" he answered, "Asleep on the
hill;" and immediately relapsed into a state of mental abstraction.
These were the chief circumstances against him, which his counsel had
striven to explain away. That most eloquent person dwelt with affecting
earnestness on the wickedness of putting any evil construction on the
distracted behaviour of the wretched man when brought without warning
upon the sudden sight of the mangled corpse of the beautiful girl, whom
all allowed he had most passionately and tenderly loved; and he strove
to prove--as he did prove to the conviction of many--that such behaviour
was incompatible with such guilt, and almost of itself established his
innocence. All that was sworn to _against_ him, as having passed in that
dreadful room, was in truth _for_ him--unless all our knowledge of the
best and of the worst of human nature were not, as folly, to be given to
the winds. He beseeched the jury, therefore, to look at all the other
circumstances that did indeed seem to bear hard upon the prisoner, in
the light of his innocence, and not of his guilt, and that they would
all fade into nothing. What mattered his possession of the watch and
other trinkets? Lovers as they were, might not the unhappy girl have
given them to him for temporary keepsakes? Or might he not have taken
them from her in some playful mood, or received them--(and the brooch
was cracked, and the mainspring of the watch broken, though the glass
was whole)--to get them repaired in the town, which he often visited,
and she never? Could human credulity for one moment believe, that such a
man as the prisoner at the bar had been sworn to be by a host of
witnesses--and especially by that witness, who, with such overwhelming
solemnity, had declared he loved him as his own son, and would have been
proud if Heaven had given him such a son--he who had baptised him, and
known him well ever since a child--that such a man could _rob_ the body
of her whom he had violated and murdered? If, under the instigation of
the devil, he had violated and murdered her, and for a moment were made
the hideous supposition, did vast hell hold that demon whose voice would
have tempted the violator and murderer--suppose him both--yea, that man
at the bar--sworn to by all the parish, if need were, as a man of
tenderest charities, and generosity unbounded--in the lust of lucre,
consequent on the satiating of another lust--to rob his victim of a few
trinkets! Let loose the wildest imagination into the realms of wildest
wickedness, and yet they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for a
moment the union of such appalling and such paltry guilt, _in that man_
who now trembled not before them, but who seemed cut off from all the
sensibilities of this life by the scythe of Misery that had shorn him
down! But why try to recount, however feebly, the line of defence taken
by the speaker, who on that day seemed all but inspired? The sea may
overturn rocks, or fire consume them till they split in pieces; but a
crisis there sometimes is in man's destiny, which all the powers ever
lodged in the lips of man, were they touched with a coal from heaven,
cannot avert, and when even he who strives to save, feels and knows that
he is striving all in vain--ay, vain as a worm--to arrest the tread of
Fate about to trample down its victim into the dust. All hoped--many
almost believed--that the prisoner would be acquitted--that a verdict of
"Not Proven," at least, if not of "Not Guilty," would be returned; but
_they_ had not been sworn to do justice before man and before God--and,
if need were, to seal up even the fountains of mercy in their
hearts--flowing, and easily set a-flowing, by such a spectacle as that
bar presented--a man already seeming to belong unto the dead!
In about a quarter of an hour the jury returned to the box--and the
verdict, having been sealed with black wax, was handed up to the Judge,
who read, "We unanimously find the prisoner Guilty." He then stood up to
receive sentence of death. Not a dry eye was in the court during the
Judge's solemn and affecting address to the criminal--except those of
the Shadow on whom had been pronounced the doom. "Your body will be hung
in chains on the moor--on a gibbet erected on the spot where you
murdered the victim of your unhallowed lust, and there will your bones
bleach in the sun, and rattle in the wind, after the insects and the
birds of the air have devoured your flesh; and in all future times, the
spot on which, God-forsaking and God-forsaken, you perpetrated that
double crime, at which all humanity shudders, will be looked on from
afar by the traveller passing through that lonesome wild with a sacred
horror!" Here the voice of the Judge faltered, and he covered his face
with his hands; but the prisoner stood unmoved in figure, and in face
untroubled and when all was closed, was removed from the bar, the same
ghostlike and unearthly phantom, seemingly unconscious of what had
passed, or even of his own existence.
Surely now he will suffer his old father to visit him in his cell! "Once
more only--only once more let me see him before I die!" were his words
to the clergyman of the parish, whose Manse he had so often visited when
a young and happy boy. That servant of Christ had not forsaken him whom
now all the world had forsaken. As free from sin himself as might be
mortal and fallen man--mortal because fallen--he knew from Scripture and
from nature, that in "the lowest deep there is still a lower deep" in
wickedness, into which all of woman born may fall, unless held back by
the arm of the Almighty Being, whom they must serve steadfastly in
holiness and truth. He knew, too, from the same source, that man cannot
sin beyond the reach of God's mercy--if the worst of all imaginable
sinners seek, in a Bible-breathed spirit at last, that mercy through the
Atonement of the Redeemer. Daily--and nightly--he visited that cell; nor
did he fear to touch the hand, now wasted to the bone, which, at the
temptation of the Prince of the Air--who is mysteriously suffered to
enter in at the gates of every human heart that is guarded not by the
flaming sword of God's own Seraphim--was lately drenched in the blood of
the most innocent creature that ever looked on the day. Yet a sore trial
it was to his Christianity to find the criminal so obdurate. He would
make no confession. Yet said that it was fit--that it was far best he
should die--that he deserved death! But ever when the deed without a
name was alluded to, his tongue was tied; and once in the midst of an
impassioned prayer, beseeching him to listen to conscience and
confess--he that prayed shuddered to behold him frown, and to hear
bursting out in terrible energy, "Cease--cease to torment me, or you
will drive me to deny my God!"
No father came to visit him in his cell. On the day of trial he had been
missing from Moorside, and was seen next morning--(where he had been all
night never was known, though it was afterwards rumoured that one like
him had been seen sitting, as the gloaming darkened, on the very spot of
the murder)--wandering about the hills, hither and thither, and round
and round about, like a man stricken with blindness, and vainly seeking
to find his home. When brought into the house, his senses were gone, and
he had lost the power of speech. All he could do was to mutter some
disjointed syllables, which he did continually, without one moment's
cessation, one unintelligible and most rueful moan! The figure of his
daughter seemed to cast no image on his eyes--blind and dumb he sat
where he had been placed, perpetually wringing his hands, with his
shaggy eyebrows drawn high up his forehead, and the fixed orbs--though
stone-blind at least to all real things--beneath them flashing fire. He
had borne up bravely--almost to the last--but had some tongue syllabled
his son's doom in the solitude, and at that instant had insanity smitten
him?
Such utter prostration of intellect had been expected by none; for the
old man, up to the very night before the Trial, had expressed the most
confident trust of his son's acquittal. Nothing had ever served to shake
his conviction of his innocence--though he had always forborne speaking
about the circumstances of the murder--and had communicated to nobody
any of the grounds on which he more than hoped in a case so hopeless;
and though a trouble in his eyes often gave the lie to his lips, when he
used to say to the silent neighbours, "We shall soon see him back at
Moorside." Had his belief in his Ludovic's innocence, and his trust in
God that that innocence would be established and set free, been so
sacred, that the blow, when it did come, struck him like a hammer, and
felled him to the ground, from which he had risen with a riven brain? In
whatever way the shock had been given, it had been terrible; for old
Gilbert Adamson was now a confirmed lunatic, and keepers were in
Moorside--not keepers from a mad-house, for his daughter could not
afford such tendence--but two of her brother's friends, who sat up with
him alternately, night and day, while the arms of the old man, in his
distraction, had to be bound with cords. That dreadful moaning was at an
end now; but the echoes of the hills responded to his yells and shrieks;
and people were afraid to go near the house. It was proposed among the
neighbours to take Alice and little Ann out of it, and an asylum for
them was in the Manse; but Alice would not stir at all their entreaties;
and as, in such a case, it would have been too shocking to tear her away
by violence, she was suffered to remain with him who knew her not, but
who often--it was said--stared distractedly upon her, as if she had been
some fiend sent in upon his insanity from the place of punishment. Weeks
passed on, and still she was there--hiding herself at times from those
terrifying eyes; and from her watching corner, waiting from morn till
night, and from night till morn--for she seldom lay down to sleep, and
had never undressed herself since that fatal sentence--for some moment
of exhausted horror, when she might steal out, and carry some slight
gleam of comfort, however evanescent, to the glimmer or the gloom in
which the brain of her father swam through a dream of blood. But there
were no lucid intervals; and ever as she moved towards him, like a
pitying angel, did he furiously rage against her, as if she had been a
fiend. At last, she who, though yet so young, had lived to see the
murdered corpse of her dearest friend--murdered by her own only brother,
whom, in secret, that murdered maiden had most tenderly loved--that
murderous brother loaded with prison-chains, and condemned to the gibbet
for inexpiable and unpardonable crimes--her father raving like a demon,
self-murderous were his hands but free, nor visited by one glimpse of
mercy from Him who rules the skies--after having borne more than, as she
meekly said, had ever poor girl borne, she took to her bed quite
heart-broken, and, the night before the day of execution, died. As for
poor little Ann, she had been wiled away some weeks before; and in the
blessed thoughtlessness of childhood, was not without hours of happiness
among her playmates on the braes.
The Morning of that Day arose, and the Moor was all blackened with
people round the tall gibbet, that seemed to have grown, with its horrid
arms, out of the ground during the night. No sound of axes or hammers
had been heard clinking during the dark hours--nothing had been seen
passing along the road; for the windows of all the houses from which
anything could have been seen, had been shut fast against all horrid
sights--and the horses' hoofs and the wheels must have been muffled that
had brought that hideous Framework to the Moor. But there it now
stood--a dreadful Tree! The sun moved higher and higher up the sky, and
all the eyes of that congregation were at once turned towards the east,
for a dull sound, as of rumbling wheels and trampling feet, seemed
shaking the Moor in that direction; and lo! surrounded with armed men on
horseback, and environed with halberds, came on a cart, in which three
persons seemed to be sitting, he in the middle all dressed in white--the
death-clothes of the murderer--the unpitying shedder of most innocent
blood.
There was no bell to toll there--but at the very moment he was ascending
the scaffold, a black cloud knelled thunder, and many hundreds of people
all at once fell down upon their knees. The man in white lifted up his
eyes, and said, "O Lord God of Heaven! and Thou his blessed Son, who
died to save sinners! accept this sacrifice!"
Not one in all that immense crowd could have known that that white
apparition was Ludovic Adamson. His hair, that had been almost
jet-black, was now white as his face--as his figure, dressed, as it
seemed, for the grave. Are they going to execute the murderer in his
shroud? Stone-blind, and stone-deaf, there he stood--yet had he, without
help, walked up the steps of the scaffold. A hymn of several voices
arose--the man of God close beside the criminal, with the Bible in his
uplifted hands; but those bloodless lips had no motion--with him this
world was not, though yet he was in life--in life, and no more! And was
this the man who, a few months ago, flinging the fear of death from him,
as a flash of sunshine flings aside the shades, had descended into that
pit which an hour before had been bellowing, as the foul vapours
exploded like cannons, and brought up the bodies of them who had
perished in the womb of the earth? Was this he who once leapt into the
devouring fire, and reappeared, after all had given over for lost the
glorious boy, with an infant in his arms, while the flames seemed to
eddy back, that they might scathe not the head of the deliverer, and a
shower of blessings fell upon him as he laid it in its mother's bosom,
and made the heart of the widow to sing for joy? It is he. And now the
executioner pulls down the cord from the beam, and fastens it round the
criminal's neck. His face is already covered, and that fatal
handkerchief is in his hand. The whole crowd are now kneeling, and one
multitudinous sob convulses the air;--when wild outcries, and shrieks,
and yells, are at that moment heard from the distant gloom of the glen
that opens up to Moorside, and three figures, one far in advance of the
others, come flying, as on the wings of the wind, towards the gibbet.
Hundreds started to their feet, and "'Tis the maniac--'tis the lunatic!"
was the cry. Precipitating himself down a rocky hill-side, that seemed
hardly accessible but to the goats, the maniac, the lunatic, at a few
desperate leaps and bounds, just as it was expected he would have been
dashed in pieces, alighted unstunned upon the level greensward; and now,
far ahead of his keepers, with incredible swiftness neared the
scaffold--and, the dense crowd making a lane for him in their fear and
astonishment, he flew up the ladder to the horrid platform, and,
grasping his son in his arms, howled dreadfully over him; and then with
a loud voice cried, "Saved--saved--saved!"
So sudden had been that wild rush, that all the officers of justice--the
very executioner--stood aghast; and now the prisoner's neck is free from
that accursed cord--his face is once more visible without that hideous
shroud--and he sinks down senseless on the scaffold. "Seize him--seize
him!" and he was seized--but no maniac, no lunatic, was the father now;
for during the night, and during the dawn, and during the morn, and on
to mid-day--on to the HOUR OF ONE--when all rueful preparations were to
be completed--had Providence been clearing and calming the tumult in
that troubled brain; and as the cottage clock struck ONE, memory
brightened at the chime into a perfect knowledge of the past, and
prophetic imagination saw the future lowering upon the dismal present.
All night long, with the cunning of a madman--for all night long he had
still been mad--the miserable old man had been disengaging his hands
from the manacles, and that done, springing like a wild beast from his
cage, he flew out of the open door, nor could a horse's speed on that
fearful road have overtaken him before he reached the scaffold.
No need was there to hold the miserable man. He who had been so furious
in his manacles at Moorside, seemed now, to the people at a distance,
calm as when he used to sit in the elders' seat beneath the pulpit in
that small kirk. But they who were on or near the scaffold saw something
horrid in the fixedness of his countenance. "Let go your hold of me, ye
fools!" he muttered to some of the mean wretches of the law, who still
had him in their clutch--and tossing his hands on high, cried with a
loud voice, "Give ear, ye Heavens! and hear, O Earth! I am the
Violator--I am the Murderer!"
The moor groaned as in earthquake--and then all that congregation bowed
their heads with a rustling noise, like a wood smitten by the wind. Had
they heard aright the unimaginable confession? His head had long been
grey--he had reached the term allotted to man's mortal life here
below--threescore and ten. Morning and evening, never had the Bible been
out of his hands at the hour set apart for family worship. And who so
eloquent as he in expounding its most dreadful mysteries? The
unregenerate heart of man, he had ever said--in scriptural phrase--was
"desperately wicked." Desperately wicked indeed! And now again he tossed
his arms wrathfully--so the wild motion looked--in the wrathful skies.
"I ravished--I murdered her--ye know it, ye evil spirits in the depths
of hell!" Consternation now fell on the minds of all--and the truth was
clear as light--and all eyes knew at once that now indeed they looked on
the murderer. The dreadful delusion under which all their understandings
had been brought by the power of circumstances, was by that voice
destroyed--the obduracy of him who had been about to die was now seen to
have been the most heroic virtue--the self-sacrifice of a son, to save a
father from ignominy and death.
"O monster, beyond the reach of redemption! and the very day after the
murder, while the corpse was lying in blood on the Moor, he was with us
in the House of God! Tear him in pieces--rend him limb from limb--tear
him into a thousand pieces!"--"The Evil One had power given him to
prevail against me, and I fell under the temptation. It was so written
in the Book of Predestination, and the deed lies at the door of
God!"--"Tear the blasphemer into pieces! Let the scaffold drink his
blood!"--"So let it be, if it be so written, good people! Satan never
left me since the murder till this day--he sat by my side in the
kirk--when I was ploughing in the field--there--ever as I came back from
the other end of the furrow--he stood on the head-rig in the shape of a
black shadow. But now I see him not--he has returned to his den in the
pit. I cannot imagine what I have been doing, or what has been done to
me, all the time between the day of trial and this of execution. Was I
mad? No matter. But you shall not hang Ludovic--he, poor boy, is
innocent;--here, look at him--here--I tell you again--is the Violator
and the Murderer!"
But shall the men in authority dare to stay the execution at a maniac's
words? If they dare not--that multitude will, now all rising together
like the waves of the sea. "Cut the cords asunder that bind our
Ludovic's arms"--a thousand voices cried; and the murderer, unclasping a
knife, that, all unknown to his keepers, he had worn in his breast when
a maniac, sheared them asunder as the sickle shears the corn. But his
son stirred not--and on being lifted _up_ by his father, gave not so
much as a groan. His heart had burst--and he was dead. No one touched
the grey-headed murderer, who knelt down--not to pray, but to look into
his son's eyes--and to examine his lips--and to feel his left
breast--and to search out all the symptoms of a fainting-fit, or to
assure himself--and many a corpse had the plunderer handled on the field
after hush of the noise of battle--that this was death. He rose; and
standing forward on the edge of the scaffold, said, with a voice that
shook not, deep, strong, hollow, and hoarse--"Good people! I am
_likewise_ now the murderer of my daughter and of my son! and of
myself!" Next moment, the knife was in his heart--and he fell down a
corpse on the corpse of his Ludovic. All round the sultry horizon the
black clouds had for hours been gathering--and now came the thunder and
the lightning--and the storm. Again the whole multitude prostrated
themselves on the moor--and the Pastor, bending over the dead bodies,
said,
"THIS IS EXPIATION!"
MORNING MONOLOGUE.