Mrs. Netterville waited until the echo of his retreating
footsteps had died away in the corridor, and then fastening the
door so as to secure herself from any further interruption from
the outside, she once more fell on her knees before the crucifix,
and buried her face in both her hands. How long she remained thus
she never knew exactly; but the shades of a short January evening
were already gathering in the room, when, with a start and a look
as if her conscience smote her, she rose suddenly from her knees.
"Christ pardon me!" she muttered half aloud, "that, in my own
selfish sorrows, I have forgotten others! Poor wretch! By this
time he must be well-nigh famished, if, indeed, (though I trust
it will not,) the delay has not worked him deeper mischief."
As these thoughts passed rapidly through her mind, she opened a
cupboard close at hand, and drew from thence a bottle of wine,
with some other articles of delicate food, packed carefully in a
wicker-basket, and evidently left there for some especial
purpose. She then sought through the gloom for a cloak, which she
threw upon her shoulders, and, drawing the hood down over her
face, and taking the basket on her arm, she hastily left the
room. Not, however, by the door through which Hamish and the
servants had retreated, but by another at the opposite end, and
which was almost invisible, in consequence of its forming one of
the panels in the black oak wainscoting of the chamber. It led
her directly by a short stone passage to another door or low
wicket, on opening which she found herself in the private grounds
of the castle. Before her at no great distance, stood an old
ivy-covered church, half hidden in a group of tall Irish trees,
which sheltered its little cemetery.
{181}
This was not the parish church, but a private chapel, built by
the Netterville family for their own particular use; and here
their infants had been baptized, their daughters married, and
their old men and women laid reverently to their last slumbers,
ever since they had established their existence in the land.
Mrs. Netterville could not resist a sigh as she glanced toward
its venerable walls. It seemed as if it were only yesterday that
she had gone there to lay down her husband in his lowly grave,
hoping and praying, out of the depths of her own great grief,
that she might soon be permitted to sleep quietly beside him. And
now, even this sad hope was to be hers no longer; this poor
possession of six feet of earth was to be wrested from her;
strangers would lay her in a distant grave, and even in death she
would be separated from her husband. The thought was too painful
to bear much lingering upon it, and turning her back upon the
church, Mrs. Netterville followed a path which lay close under
the castle walls, and led to a court-yard at a considerable
distance. Round this court-yard were grouped stables and other
offices, which, having been built at different periods and
without any consecutive idea as a whole, presented rather the
appearance of a collection of stunted farm-houses, than of the
regular out-buildings of an important mansion.
Each of these houses had a private entrance of its own; and
opening the door of one of them, Mrs. Netterville looked in
quietly and entered. The interior was a room, poorly but yet
decently furnished, and on a low settle-bed at the farther end
lay a young man, who, with his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, had
all the look of a person just rescued from the jaws of death. A
knapsack on the floor, a pike and musket in one corner of the
room, and a steel cap and buff coat in another, seemed to
announce him as one of the band of successful soldiers who were
even then in possession of the castle.
Poor fellow! he lay, with closed eyes, wan and weary, on his bed,
looking, at that moment, like anything rather than like a
successful soldier; but he lifted his head as he caught the noise
of the door creaking on its hinges, and his face brightened into
an expression of joy and gratitude pleasant to behold when he
discovered Mrs. Netterville standing on the threshold.
"Can you ever forgive me?" she said, going up to him at once. "I
cannot easily forgive myself for having left you so long alone.
In the grief and anguish in which I have been plunged all day, I
had well-nigh forgotten your existence, and you must be faint, I
fear me, for want of nourishment."
"Nay, madam," he answered, gently, indeed, but yet with a good
deal of that comfortable self-assurance in spiritual matters
which seems to have been an especial inheritance of "Cromwell's
saints." "If _you_ have forgotten, the Lord at least hath
been mindful of his servant, and hath cast so deep a slumber on
my senses, that I have been altogether unconscious of the lapse
of time, or of the absence of those carnal comforts which,
however the spirit may rebel against them, are nevertheless not
altogether to be despised, as being the means by which we receive
strength to do the bidding of our Master."
Mrs. Netterville could not help thinking that the posset-cup and
soothing draught, which she had administered the night before,
might have had as much as any especial interposition of
Providence to say to his seasonable slumbers; but the times were
too much out of joint to permit of her making, however
reverently, such an observation, so she merely touched his brow
and hand, and said:
{182}
"I am right glad, at all events, that you seem in nowise to have
suffered from my neglect. Eat now and drink, I pray you; for I
perceive by this refreshing moisture on your skin that all danger
has passed away, and that you need at present no worse physic
than good food and wine to restore you to your former strength."
"Nay, madam," said the soldier, with great and hardly repressed
feeling in his voice and manner. "Eat or drink I cannot, or in
any way refresh myself, until I have poured forth my song of
gratitude, first to the Lord of hosts, who hath delivered me from
this great danger, and then to you, who have tended me (even as
the widow of Sarepta might have waited on Elias) through the
perils of a sickness from which my very comrades and
fellow-laborers in the vineyard fled, trembling and afraid."
"You must pardon them, good Jackson," said Mrs. Netterville, "and
all the more readily, because this disease, from which you have
so marvellously recovered, is, men say, in its rapid progress and
almost sure mortality, akin, if not indeed wholly similar, to
that terrible malady the plague, which is the scourge of the
Eastern nations, and leaves crowded cities, once it has entered
in, as silent and deserted as the sepulchres of the dead. You
cannot therefore wonder, and you need not feel aggrieved, if men
who would have risked their lives for you on the battle-field,
yet shrunk from its unseen, and therefore, to poor human nature,
its more awful dangers."
"Nay, madam, I blame them not; perhaps even in their place I
should have done the same. Nevertheless--and though I have no
ill feeling toward them--I cannot forget that you, a Popish woman
and an enemy, have done that for me which the very children of my
own household have shrunk from doing, and I would fain show my
gratitude if I could."
"You can show it, and that right easily, if you will," she
answered kindly, "by eating and drinking heartily of the
provisions I have brought, and so regaining strength to wait all
the sooner on yourself. For I shall soon, as you doubtless know
already, have work in hand which will compel me to make my visits
fewer; and yet I shall not like to risk other lives by sending
any of the household to wait on you in my stead."
"Alas! madam, I fear I have been but a troublesome and
unprofitable, though not altogether, I do assure you, a thankless
guest," the man answered, in a somewhat sad and deprecatory
manner.
"Nay; but now you mistake me altogether," she answered earnestly.
"You have been a most patient sufferer, and that trouble--which
is altogether unavoidable in any sickness--has been, you may
believe me, a pleasure rather than an uneasiness to me. I only
meant to say that, though I shall still continue to visit you
morning and evening, I shall not be able to come so often in the
daytime as I have been used to do; for all matters in this sad
affair of the transplantation having fallen into my hands, you
may well imagine it is as much or more than one poor woman can
well accomplish by her own unaided efforts."
"Would that I could aid you," he answered fervently--"would that
I could comfort you! But, alas! in this matter of the
transplantation, I can do naught, seeing that it is the Lord
himself who hath girded on our swords, bidding us to smite and
spare not.
{183}
Nevertheless, lady, I am not ungrateful, and in the long,
sleepless nights of my weary malady I have wrestled for you in
prayer, striving exceedingly and being much exercised on your
account; nor gave I over until I had received the comfortable
assurance that, as the Lord sent angels to Lot to deliver him out
of Sodom, so he would some day make of me a shield and a defence,
whereby you might be snatched from the woes that he is about to
rain down on this land, because 'the cry of its idolatry is waxen
great before his face,' and he hath sworn to destroy it."
"Well, well!" she answered a little impatiently, "I thank you for
your good-will, at all events; but for the present we will
discourse no further on this matter. God will one day judge
between us, and by his fiat I am content to stand or fall, in all
those matters of religion on which, unhappily, we differ. See, I
have trimmed the lamp so that it will burn brightly until
morning, and there is food and wine on this little table. I will
put it close to the bed, so that when you need nourishment, you
will have but to put forth your hand to take it. And now I must
say good-night--to-morrow I will be with you by the early dawn."
Having thus done all that either charity or hospitality could ask
at her hands, Mrs. Netterville retired from the room, sooner,
probably, than she would have done if the soldier's last words
had not grated on her ear, and roused more angry passions than
she wished to yield to in her breast.
"He has a good heart, poor wretch," she thought, as she took her
way back to the castle; "but strange and fearful is it to see how
pride, in him, as in all his comrades, usurps the place of true
humility and religion."
The sudden sound of a pistol going off disturbed her in the midst
of her cogitations; and with a pang of indescribable fear and
presentiment of evil at her heart, she stood still. It seemed to
come from the grove of yew-trees round the church, and was not
repeated. Having ascertained this fact, she walked rapidly
forward in the direction of the sound, her mind in a perfect
whirl of fear, and only able to shape itself into the one
thought, pregnant of future evil, that, either by some of her own
people, or by one of the English soldiers, a murder had been
committed. Just as she entered the grove of yew-trees, she
perceived something like the loose garb of a woman fluttering
down the path before her, and then suddenly disappearing behind
the tower of the little church. She did not dare to call out; but
feeling certain that this person must either have fired the shot
herself, or have seen it fired by some one else, she quickened
her pace in order to overtake her. Twilight was already deepening
among the yew-trees; the path, moreover, was overgrown with weeds
and brambles, and as she ran with her eyes fixed on the spot
where the figure had disappeared, she felt herself suddenly
tripped up by some object lying right before her, and fell
heavily against it. At the first touch of that unseen something,
a sense of terror, such as animals are said to be conscious of in
the presence of their own dead, seized upon her senses, and all
the blood was curdling in her veins as slowly and with difficulty
she removed herself from its contact. Gradually, as she recovered
from the stunning effects of her fall, and her eyes grew
accustomed to the gloom around her, the "thing" on the ground
shaped itself into the form of a human being--but of a human
being so still and motionless, that it seemed probable it was a
corpse already.
{184}
Very reluctantly she put forth her hand to try if life were
really extinct; but suddenly discovering that she was dabbling it
in a pool of yet warm blood, she withdrew it with a shudder.
"My God! my God!" she moaned, "what enemy hath done this? Surely
it is one of the soldiers from the castle, and they will accuse
our people of the murder! Grant Heaven, indeed, that they are
innocent! Would that Hamish were here to help me. Yet no! they
would certainly in that case try to fix the guilt on him. I will
go hence and let them discover it as they can. Yet what if I
should meet them? I am all dabbled in his gore!"
With a new and sharp terror in her heart, as this thought took
possession of it, she began hastily to rub her hands in the moss
and dry leaves around her, in order to free them from the blood
which clung to them; and she was still engaged in this rather
equivocal occupation when a sudden stream of light was cast on
her from behind, and, rising suddenly, she found herself face to
face with the officer who had been left in command of the
garrison of the castle.
Half-a-dozen of his men were at his back, and by the light of the
lantern, which he carried, she read in their faces their
conviction of her guilt. At a sign from their chief they
surrounded her in awful silence, and he himself laid his hand
heavily on her shoulder:
"Murderess!" he said, "thou art taken in thy sin!"
"I did it not," cried Mrs. Netterville, so utterly confounded by
this terrible accusation that she hardly knew what she said. "So
help me Heaven! I am innocent of this deed!"
"Innocent! sayest thou?" the officer answered firmly. "Innocent!
thou with his blood red upon thy hands! Yea, and thy very
garments clotted in his gore! If then thou art innocent, as thou
wouldst have us to believe, say what wert thou doing in this
lonely spot at an hour when none but the murderer or the wanton
would care to be abroad?"
"I was returning from a visit to the soldier Jackson--a visit
which, as thou knowest, Master Rippel, I pay him every evening at
the hour of dusk; and I had well-nigh reached the castle, when
hearing a shot in this direction, and fearing mischief either for
my own people or for thine, I came hither if possible to prevent
it."
"A likely story, truly!" replied the officer, who, unluckily for
her, was one of the fiercest, if not the saintliest, of the band
of warriors then domiciled at the castle. "Nay, woman, and for
thine own sake hold thy peace, or out of thine own mouth thou
shalt stand presently condemned. For tell me, my masters," he
added, addressing the other men, "where will you find a woman,
who, hearing a shot, and dreading mischief, would not have fled
from the danger, instead of incontinently rushing, as she would
have us to believe she did, into its very jaws?"
"Yet have I rushed into the jaws of danger more than once already
within this fortnight, and that not for the sake of my own people
but of thine; as none ought to know better than thou, Master
Rippel, and thy comrades," Mrs. Netterville, now fairly put upon
her mettle, retorted bravely.
"Nay, and that is naught but the very truth, though the father of
lies (which is Beelzebub) himself had said it," one of the men
here ventured to remark. "For surely, Captain Rippel, you cannot
have forgotten that we should have had a soldier the less in the
camp of Israel, if she had not nursed the good youth Jackson
through this black business of the plague, when we, even we, men
anointed and girded to the fight, did hesitate to go near him."
{185}
"Ha! Dost thou also venture to defend her?" cried the officer
angrily. "Nay, then, let that woman which is called Deborah be
brought forward and confronted with the prisoner. Her testimony
must decide between us."
One or two of the soldiers who had been lingering at a little
distance in the dusky twilight now advanced, half pushing before
them, half leading, the very woman who had addressed Nellie so
impudently in the morning. She came forward with a strange
mixture of eagerness and reluctance in her manner; willing
enough, it might be, to bear false testimony against her
neighbor, but very unwilling to be confronted with its object.
They placed her face to face with Mrs. Netterville, and the
captain turned his lantern so that the light fell full on the
features of the latter. They were cold and calm, and almost
disdainful in their expression, now that she knew who was her
accuser; and Deborah, spite of all her efforts to brazen out the
interview, cowered beneath her glance of scorn.
"Nay, but look well upon her, Deborah," said the captain, seeing
that her eyes fell beneath those of the woman she had accused.
"Look well upon her, and say if this be not that Moabitish woman
whom thou sawest, as thou wert lingering (for no good purpose, I
do fear me greatly) in the shadow of the trees--whom thou sawest,
say I, steal hither between light and darkness, and treacherously
do to death our brother Tomkins, who, being--as methinks you
revealed to me just now--wearied overmuch with prayer and holding
forth, (he was, as I myself can testify, a man of most precious
doctrine, and greatly favored in the gift of preaching,) had come
hither to repose himself."
"Nay," said the woman, speaking in very tolerable English, an
accomplishment she had picked up when in service in Dublin; "of
that great weariness caused by too much prayer and preaching.
Master Rippel, I said naught--my own impression being," she
added, unable even before such an audience to repress the gibe,
"that the slumberous inclinations of worthy Master Tomkins had
been caused by a somewhat too ardent devotion lately tendered to
the wine-cask."
"Peace, scoffer! peace!" cried the captain. "And if thou wouldst
have thy blasphemy against the Lord and against his saints
forgiven, in this world or the next, look once more on the face
of the prisoner, and be not shamefaced or afraid, but say out
boldly whether you can swear to her in a court of justice as
being the person whom you espied just now in the act--yea, the
very act of murder."
"I can," said the woman shortly, and avoiding the eye of Mrs.
Netterville as she spoke.
"Thou canst?" the latter said in a tone of indignant
astonishment. "And pray, if thou wert watching me so narrowly,
why didst thou not endeavor to prevent me?--why not strike up my
weapon?--why not cry out, at least, so as to rouse up the
sleeping soldier?"
"I did what I could," the woman sullenly responded. "I sought out
his comrades. It was their look-out, not mine, and to them
accordingly I left it."
{186}
"She speaks the truth, as we who so lately heard her tale can
testify," the captain answered quickly. "You see, my men," he
added, addressing the other soldiers, "Beelzebub is divided
against himself, and the very children of his kingdom bear
witness against each other. Surely the woman Netterville is
guilty. Take her, therefore, some of you, a prisoner to the
castle, while the rest prepare a decent burial for our murdered
brother. I myself must speak apart with the witness Deborah, in
order to put her testimony into a fitting shape to be laid before
the court of my lords, the high commissioners of justice."