GUSTAVUS GETS INTO TROUBLE AND OUT OF IT.
While they were thus as happy as drink and frolic could make any
of the sons or daughters of Adam, Gustavus was meditating on the
probable effects of his extraordinary remedy for drunkenness, and
enjoying already the triumph he anticipated, as the fruits of his
ingenuity. He had cooked for himself a good dinner, and, being thus
also in good spirits, he counted the hours as they passed, every
moment of which was worth to him a grain of gold, in so far as they
would purchase a relief from the thraldom and misery in which he
had been so long held. He had given her four hours of the grave,
and the increasing length of his stride seemed to indicate that
he was fast approaching some resolution, which was probably to go
and see how his Julia was faring in her dark habitation. He had
left the ropes by which she had been let down, in such a position
that he could draw her out again with the greatest certainty, so
that he was perfectly at ease on the score of her ultimate safety;
but all his efforts, he knew, would be worse than endeavouring
to make iron swim, to hold an eel by the tail, to dissect cheese
mites, or make a cod warble, or any other _opera inanis_, if she
were taken out before she awoke and experienced all the terrors of
her situation. He therefore gave her an hour or two more, and then
sallied forth as grim as Hercules when he went a bull-baiting, to
reconnoitre, and ascertain if any indications of her being awake
came from the grave (as he expected it would be) of her bad habits
and the womb of her regeneration. A very few movements of his
immense limbs brought him to the spot; but not an inch of the rope
he could find; and, though he pulled aside the bushes, and stared
with goggle eyes into the pit, not a glimpse of the coffin could he
discover. The affair was marvellous and unfathomable as the wells
of Agamemnon; and he stood and stared with mute wonder, at what
appeared to be nothing else in the world than bewitched devilry.
He looked around him to see if he could find any traces of either
the coffin or Julia Briggs; but all was still and hazy, and nothing
could he see or hear; so he tried the pit again, and, to search the
bottom of it, he took a long stick from a neighbouring tree, and
plunged it in, and groped, and sounded; but it was clear that he
never struck on wood, nor indeed upon anything but the soft brush
stuff with which the Highlanders had again closed up the aperture.
He even descended into the hole, as far as he could reach his
limbs, while he held on by the bushy side; and he thus ascertained
to a dead certainty that the never a bit of a coffin was there, or
indeed anything but furze, among which his feet became entangled.
Having got out again with difficulty, he fell to roaring and
shouting—“Julia M’Iver! Julia M’Iver!” But no answer was returned,
save by the echoing wood, which mocked him like the American bird
of many voices that laughs at the eloquence of man. No other
conclusion could he come to, but that Julia, coffin and all, had
been carried off by the prime minister of Oberon, or some other
power, that had determined to punish her for her intemperance,
or him for his cruelty; and his former love returning, now that
he had, perhaps for ever, lost the object of it, he grew frantic
as the lover of Briseis, and stamped and strode about the wood,
accusing himself as the murderer of his wife, and trembling for his
neck, which he had put in a position of jeopardy. To add to his
terrors, he sometimes thought he heard strange shouts of mirth,
coming from under the ground; and his mind still straying to the
land of the court of the pigmy king, he fancied that the thieves
were rejoicing in their subterranean abodes, over the triumph they
had achieved over a mortal creature. The strength or weakness of
superstition has nothing to do with the size of the bones, or
the strength of thews and sinews of the individuals over whom it
exercises its control; and there was no marvel at all that Gustavus
felt undefined terrors laying hold of him, as the darkness of the
night increased, and the blackness of the mystery enveloped his
brain. He had faced cannon in his day, and hewn down warriors as
gigantic as himself without a qualm; but that was no reason why
he should not quail before the powers of infernal or subterranean
agency; and so to be sure it was well proved by what followed; for
he marched home as if he had been on a retreat, with, perhaps, more
ideas in his head than ever could have been supposed to find an
entry into the impenetrable fortress which, in spite of rockets, he
had so long carried on his shoulders.
He passed the night in pacing his apartment, expecting every moment
that Julia, who was occupied according to her heart’s desire, would
return to her home—but no Julia came; and in the morning he was
saluted by the carrier, who asked him, with a knowing look, what
had become of Mrs M’Iver, and to what use he had applied the coffin
he (the carrier) had seen through the window when he last passed
the house. Gustavus stared at him in amazement, without deigning
one word of reply; but, the man being gone, he saw, with as much
light as his brain was capable of reflecting, something like a
foundation for a charge of murder against him, in the event of his
wife not making her appearance. This conclusion wound up the evils
that he had entailed upon himself by entering into the fearful
state of matrimony; and there can be little doubt that, if he had
known the Greek of the woman-hater, Simonides, of which of course
he knew never a syllable, he would have thundered forth the whole
epithets of his poem in a voice of thunder. Another day passed,
and no Julia was yet to be seen; and on the second day, straggling
individuals began to pry about the house, just as if a murder had
been committed there, and they were looking for blood-spots. He
grew every moment more terrified, was unable to cook, or even to
eat, and roamed about with the muscles of his face hanging over the
maxillary bones like flaps of leather, and sunken eyes that seemed
to look inwards, where there was in fact nothing to be seen worth
looking at. Every step frightened him, and every sound startled
him, from reveries of trials and interrogations, and hanging
and dissecting; for he looked every hour for a visit from the
authorities. He had sense enough to see that everything was against
him—the disappearance of Julia—their endless quarrels—the
coffin—all arrayed against a drivelling, idiot statement about
trying to wean his wife from the quaich by pretending to bury her
alive.
Things were fast progressing to being just as bad as there is any
occasion for them to be when a sinful man is the victim; for, some
time afterwards, the mother of Julia herself, with two friends from
the Canongate, came to see the married pair. Now, Gustavus saw them
at a long distance, and, knowing that he could not account for his
wife, he resolved upon sneaking away into the woods, after locking
the door; and this accordingly he did in double quick time; but he
had not got far away, when, upon turning to look behind him, he
saw the carrier again returning, and very soon stop at his door,
and enter into conversation with the three women. He watched all
their motions, and it was apparent to him that the very affair of
the murder they supposed he had committed was alone the subject of
their conversation.
Nay, he saw them begin to try to force open the door and able to
contain himself no longer, he said to himself—
“Shall Gustavus M’Iver, who has killed a dozen of Frenchmen in
one day, be afraid of three women? The never will he, by Saint
Sebastian!”
So he went back to the house; and when the three women and the
carrier saw him coming out of the planting, they set up such a loud
scream as had never been heard in these woods since the reign of
the wolves, and ran up to him, crying out, that he was a base and
a bloody murderer, and demanding to see the body of the sacrificed
Julia, who, as her mother ejaculated, was never intended by nature
to be the wife of such a fearful ogre.
“Give me the body of my daughter,” she said, “dead or alive. Where
is the coffin that the carrier saw standing in the house? It is
gone, and Julia is in it—buried, no doubt, in some hole of the
woods. Why will you not speak, Gustavus M’Iver?”
Now, the very best reason on earth could be assigned for Gustavus
saying nothing—and that was, that he had of a real truth nothing
in the wide extent of his brain to say, that any one in the world,
far less the mother of his wife, would believe for one instant of
time. So he stood and rolled over the three women his large eyes,
just, as the mother said, as if he would have eaten them all three,
as she suspected he had done her daughter; but the never a vocable
escaped from his lips.
“Why will you not speak, Gustavus?” cried the mother.
“Why will you not speak, man?” cried another of the women.
“Why will you not speak?” cried they all together in one question,
so loud that no question since the time when all the Barons of
England asked, in one cry, King John to give them their rights, had
ever exceeded it in intensity and vociferation.
But it was clear this could last no longer than the patience of
the women; and every one knows that the time comprehended by the
longevity of that feminine virtue, is not so long as the life of
Methuselah; so, in a minute, they fell on him with their nails,
and rugged his hair, and scratched his face, and pulled him to
the earth, and trampled upon him, till he who had fought in the
Peninsula began to think that it was time for him to call up his
old courage, and fight once again in his advanced years. So, rising
up, he placed himself in an attitude which he knew had produced
terrible effects in former times; and, to be sure, so it might, for
he gnashed his teeth, and held out his yard-long arms, and rolled
his eyes in such a manner, yet saying not a word all the while,
that the women got alarmed, and cried to the carrier to assist
them; but the man was off the moment he saw there was a chance of
battle. So the women gave in, and began to try the soothing system
with him—an effort in which they were as successful as their sex
ever is when a man is to be humbugged; and Gustavus was on the
instant mollified into softness, and even lugubrious sentimentality.