THE JUDGES
In the absence of any woman into whose care they might entrust her,
Lord Henry, Sir John, and Master Tobias, the ship’s surgeon, had
amongst them tended Rosamund as best they could when numbed and
half-dazed she was brought aboard the Silver Heron.
Master Tobias had applied such rude restoratives as he commanded, and
having made her as comfortable as possible upon a couch in the spacious
cabin astern, he had suggested that she should be allowed the rest of
which she appeared so sorely to stand in need. He had ushered out the
commander and the Queen’s Lieutenant, and himself had gone below to a
still more urgent case that was demanding his attention—that of Lionel
Tressilian, who had been brought limp and unconscious from the galeasse
together with some four other wounded members of the Silver Heron’s
crew.
At dawn Sir John had come below, seeking news of his wounded friend. He
found the surgeon kneeling over Lionel.
As he entered, Master Tobias turned aside, rinsed his hands in a metal
basin placed upon the floor, and rose wiping them on a napkin.
“I can do no more, Sir John,” he muttered in a desponding voice. “He is
sped.”
“Dead, d’ye mean?” cried Sir John, a catch in his voice.
The surgeon tossed aside the napkin, and slowly drew down the upturned
sleeves of his black doublet. “All but dead,” he answered. “The wonder
is that any spark of life should still linger in a body with that hole
in it. He is bleeding inwardly, and his pulse is steadily weakening. It
must continue so until imperceptibly he passes away. You may count him
dead already, Sir John.” He paused. “A merciful, painless end,” he
added, and sighed perfunctorily, his pale shaven face decently grave,
for all that such scenes as these were commonplaces in his life. “Of
the other four,” he continued, “Blair is dead; the other three should
all recover.”
But Sir John gave little heed to the matter of those others. His grief
and dismay at this quenching of all hope for his friend precluded any
other consideration at the moment.
“And he will not even recover consciousness?” he asked insisting,
although already he had been answered.
“As I have said, you may count him dead already, Sir John. My skill can
do nothing for him.”
Sir John’s head drooped, his countenance drawn and grave. “Nor can my
justice,” he added gloomily. “Though it avenge him, it cannot give me
back my friend.” He looked at the surgeon. “Vengeance, sir, is the
hollowest of all the mockeries that go to make up life.”
“Your task, Sir John,” replied the surgeon, “is one of justice, not
vengeance.”
“A quibble, when all is said.” He stepped to Lionel’s side, and looked
down at the pale handsome face over which the dark shadows of death
were already creeping. “If he would but speak in the interests of this
justice that is to do! If we might but have the evidence of his own
words, lest I should ever be asked to justify the hanging of Oliver
Tressilian.”
“Surely, sir,” the surgeon ventured, “there can be no such question
ever. Mistress Rosamund’s word alone should suffice, if indeed so much
as that even were required.”
“Ay! His offenses against God and man are too notorious to leave
grounds upon which any should ever question my right to deal with him
out of hand.”
There was a tap at the door and Sir John’s own body servant entered
with the announcement that Mistress Rosamund was asking urgently to see
him.
“She will be impatient for news of him,” Sir John concluded, and he
groaned. “My God! How am I to tell her? To crush her in the very hour
of her deliverance with such news as this! Was ever irony so cruel?” He
turned, and stepped heavily to the door. There he paused. “You will
remain by him to the end?” he bade the surgeon interrogatively.
Master Tobias bowed. “Of course, Sir John.” And he added, “’Twill not
be long.”
Sir John looked across at Lionel again—a glance of valediction. “God
rest him!” he said hoarsely, and passed out.
In the waist he paused a moment, turned to a knot of lounging seamen,
and bade them throw a halter over the yard-arm, and hale the renegade
Oliver Tressilian from his prison. Then with slow heavy step and
heavier heart he went up the companion to the vessel’s castellated
poop.
The sun, new risen in a faint golden haze, shone over a sea faintly
rippled by the fresh clean winds of dawn to which their every stitch of
canvas was now spread. Away on the larboard quarter, a faint cloudy
outline, was the coast of Spain.
Sir John’s long sallow face was preternaturally grave when he entered
the cabin, where Rosamund awaited him. He bowed to her with a grave
courtesy, doffing his hat and casting it upon a chair. The last five
years had brought some strands of white into his thick black hair, and
at the temples in particular it showed very grey, giving him an
appearance of age to which the deep lines in his brow contributed.
He advanced towards her, as she rose to receive him. “Rosamund, my
dear!” he said gently, and took both her hands. He looked with eyes of
sorrow and concern into her white, agitated face.
“Are you sufficiently rested, child?”
“Rested?” she echoed on a note of wonder that he should suppose it.
“Poor lamb, poor lamb!” he murmured, as a mother might have done, and
drew her towards him, stroking that gleaming auburn head. “We’ll speed
us back to England with every stitch of canvas spread. Take heart then,
and....”
But she broke in impetuously, drawing away from him as she spoke, and
his heart sank with foreboding of the thing she was about to inquire.
“I overheard a sailor just now saying to another that it is your intent
to hang Sir Oliver Tressilian out of hand—this morning.”
He misunderstood her utterly. “Be comforted,” he said. “My justice
shall be swift; my vengeance sure. The yard-arm is charged already with
the rope on which he shall leap to his eternal punishment.”
She caught her breath, and set a hand upon her bosom as if to repress
its sudden tumult.
“And upon what grounds,” she asked him with an air of challenge,
squarely facing him, “do you intend to do this thing?”
“Upon what grounds?” he faltered. He stared and frowned, bewildered by
her question and its tone. “Upon what grounds?” he repeated, foolishly
almost in the intensity of his amazement. Then he considered her more
closely, and the wildness of her eyes bore to him slowly an explanation
of words that at first had seemed beyond explaining.
“I see!” he said in a voice of infinite pity; for the conviction to
which he had leapt was that her poor wits were all astray after the
horrors through which she had lately travelled. “You must rest,” he
said gently, “and give no thought to such matters as these. Leave them
to me, and be very sure that I shall avenge you as is due.”
“Sir John, you mistake me, I think. I do not desire that you avenge me.
I have asked you upon what grounds you intend to do this thing, and you
have not answered me.”
In increasing amazement he continued to stare. He had been wrong, then.
She was quite sane and mistress of her wits. And yet instead of the
fond inquiries concerning Lionel which he had been dreading came this
amazing questioning of his grounds to hang his prisoner.
“Need I state to you—of all living folk—the offences which that dastard
has committed?” he asked, expressing thus the very question that he was
setting himself.
“You need to tell me,” she answered, “by what right you constitute
yourself his judge and executioner; by what right you send him to his
death in this peremptory fashion, without trial.” Her manner was as
stern as if she were invested with all the authority of a judge.
“But you,” he faltered in his ever-growing bewilderment, “you,
Rosamund, against whom he has offended so grievously, surely you should
be the last to ask me such a question! Why, it is my intention to
proceed with him as is the manner of the sea with all knaves taken as
Oliver Tressilian was taken. If your mood be merciful towards him—which
as God lives, I can scarce conceive—consider that this is the greatest
mercy he can look for.”
“You speak of mercy and vengeance in a breath, Sir John.” She was
growing calm, her agitation was quieting and a grim sternness was
replacing it.
He made a gesture of impatience. “What good purpose could it serve to
take him to England?” he demanded. “There he must stand his trial, and
the issue is foregone. It were unnecessarily to torture him.”
“The issue may be none so foregone as you suppose,” she replied. “And
that trial is his right.”
Sir John took a turn in the cabin, his wits all confused. It was
preposterous that he should stand and argue upon such a matter with
Rosamund of all people, and yet she was compelling him to it against
his every inclination, against common sense itself.
“If he so urges it, we’ll not deny him,” he said at last, deeming it
best to humour her. “We’ll take him back to England if he demands it,
and let him stand his trial there. But Oliver Tressilian must realize
too well what is in store for him to make any such demand.” He passed
before her, and held out his hands in entreaty. “Come, Rosamund, my
dear! You are distraught, you....”
“I am indeed distraught, Sir John,” she answered, and took the hands
that he extended. “Oh, have pity!” she cried with a sudden change to
utter intercession. “I implore you to have pity!”
“What pity can I show you, child? You have but to name....”
“’Tis not pity for me, but pity for him that I am beseeching of you.”
“For him?” he cried, frowning again.
“For Oliver Tressilian.”
He dropped her hands and stood away. “God’s light!” he swore. “You sue
for pity for Oliver Tressilian, for that renegade, that incarnate
devil? Oh, you are mad!” he stormed. “Mad!” and he flung away from her,
whirling his arms.
“I love him,” she said simply.
That answer smote him instantly still. Under the shock of it he just
stood and stared at her again, his jaw fallen.
“You love him!” he said at last below his breath. “You love him! You
love a man who is a pirate, a renegade, the abductor of yourself and of
Lionel, the man who murdered your brother!”
“He did not.” She was fierce in her denial of it. “I have learnt the
truth of that matter.”
“From his lips, I suppose?” said Sir John, and he was unable to repress
a sneer. “And you believed him?”
“Had I not believed him I should not have married him.”
“Married him?” Sudden horror came now to temper his bewilderment. Was
there to be no end to these astounding revelations? Had they reached
the climax yet, he wondered, or was there still more to come? “You
married that infamous villain?” he asked, and his voice was
expressionless.
“I did—in Algiers on the night we landed there.” He stood gaping at her
whilst a man might count to a dozen, and then abruptly he exploded. “It
is enough!” he roared, shaking a clenched fist at the low ceiling of
the cabin. “It is enough, as God’s my Witness. If there were no other
reason to hang him, that would be reason and to spare. You may look to
me to make an end of this infamous marriage within the hour.”
“Ah, if you will but listen to me!” she pleaded.
“Listen to you?” He paused by the door to which he had stepped in his
fury, intent upon giving the word that there and then should make an
end, and summoning Oliver Tressilian before him, announce his fate to
him and see it executed on the spot. “Listen to you?” he repeated,
scorn and anger blending in his voice. “I have heard more than enough
already!”
It was the Killigrew way, Lord Henry Goade assures us, pausing here at
long length for one of those digressions into the history of families
whose members chance to impinge upon his chronicle. “They were,” he
says, “ever an impetuous, short-reasoning folk, honest and upright
enough so far as their judgment carried them, but hampered by a lack of
penetration in that judgment.”
Sir John, as much in his earlier commerce with the Tressilians as in
this pregnant hour, certainly appears to justify his lordship of that
criticism. There were a score of questions a man of perspicuity would
not have asked, not one of which appears to have occurred to the knight
of Arwenack. If anything arrested him upon the cabin’s threshold,
delayed him in the execution of the thing he had resolved upon, no
doubt it was sheer curiosity as to what further extravagances Rosamund
might yet have it in her mind to utter.
“This man has suffered,” she told him, and was not put off by the hard
laugh with which he mocked that statement. “God alone knows what he has
suffered in body and in soul for sins which he never committed. Much of
that suffering came to him through me. I know to-day that he did not
murder Peter. I know that but for a disloyal act of mine he would be in
a position incontestably to prove it without the aid of any man. I know
that he was carried off, kidnapped before ever he could clear himself
of the accusation, and that as a consequence no life remained him but
the life of a renegade which he chose. Mine was the chief fault. And I
must make amends. Spare him to me! If you love me....”
But he had heard enough. His sallow face was flushed to a flaming
purple.
“Not another word!” he blazed at her. “It is because I do love you—love
and pity you from my heart—that I will not listen. It seems I must save
you not only from that knave, but from yourself. I were false to my
duty by you, false to your dead father and murdered brother else. Anon,
you shall thank me, Rosamund.” And again he turned to depart.
“Thank you?” she cried in a ringing voice. “I shall curse you. All my
life I shall loathe and hate you, holding you in horror for a murderer
if you do this thing. You fool! Can you not see? You fool!”
He recoiled. Being a man of position and importance, quick, fearless,
and vindictive of temperament—and also, it would seem, extremely
fortunate—it had never happened to him in all his life to be so
uncompromisingly and frankly judged. She was by no means the first to
account him a fool, but she was certainly the first to call him one to
his face; and whilst to the general it might have proved her extreme
sanity, to him it was no more than the culminating proof of her mental
distemper.
“Pish!” he said, between anger and pity, “you are mad, stark mad! Your
mind’s unhinged, your vision’s all distorted. This fiend incarnate is
become a poor victim of the evil of others; and I am become a murderer
in your sight—a murderer and a fool. God’s Life! Bah! Anon when you are
rested, when you are restored, I pray that things may once again assume
their proper aspect.”
He turned, all aquiver still with indignation, and was barely in time
to avoid being struck by the door which opened suddenly from without.
Lord Henry Goade, dressed—as he tells us—entirely in black, and with
his gold chain of office—an ominous sign could they have read it—upon
his broad chest, stood in the doorway, silhouetted sharply against the
flood of morning sunlight at his back. His benign face would, no doubt,
be extremely grave to match the suit he had put on, but its expression
will have lightened somewhat when his glance fell upon Rosamund
standing there by the table’s edge.
“I was overjoyed,” he writes, “to find her so far recovered, and
seeming so much herself again, and I expressed my satisfaction.”
“She were better abed,” snapped Sir John, two hectic spots burning
still in his sallow cheeks. “She is distempered, quite.”
“Sir John is mistaken, my lord,” was her calm assurance, “I am very far
from suffering as he conceives.”
“I rejoice therein, my dear,” said his lordship, and I imagine his
questing eyes speeding from one to the other of them, and marking the
evidences of Sir John’s temper, wondering what could have passed. “It
happens,” he added sombrely, “that we may require your testimony in
this grave matter that is toward.” He turned to Sir John. “I have
bidden them bring up the prisoner for sentence. Is the ordeal too much
for you, Rosamund?”
“Indeed, no, my lord,” she replied readily. “I welcome it.” And threw
back her head as one who braces herself for a trial of endurance.
“No, no,” cut in Sir John, protesting fiercely. “Do not heed her,
Harry. She....”
“Considering,” she interrupted, “that the chief count against the
prisoner must concern his... his dealings with myself, surely the
matter is one upon which I should be heard.”
“Surely, indeed,” Lord Henry agreed, a little bewildered, he confesses,
“always provided you are certain it will not overtax your endurance and
distress you overmuch. We could perhaps dispense with your testimony.”
“In that, my lord, I assure you that you are mistaken,” she answered.
“You cannot dispense with it.”
“Be it so, then,” said Sir John grimly, and he strode back to the
table, prepared to take his place there.
Lord Henry’s twinkling blue eyes were still considering Rosamund
somewhat searchingly, his fingers tugging thoughtfully at his short
tuft of ashen-coloured beard. Then he turned to the door. “Come in,
gentlemen,” he said, “and bid them bring up the prisoner.”
Steps clanked upon the deck, and three of Sir John’s officers made
their appearance to complete the court that was to sit in judgment upon
the renegade corsair, a judgment whose issue was foregone.