the foundling’s secrets not erroneous, then must he have been hopelessly
infected with the craziest chimeras of his age, far outgoing Albert Magus
and Cornelius Agrippa. But the contrary was averred. However marvellous
his design, however apparently transcending not alone the bounds of human
invention, but those of divine creation, yet the proposed means to be
employed were alleged to have been confined within the sober forms of
sober reason. It was affirmed that, to a degree of more than sceptic
scorn, Bannadonna had been without sympathy for any of the vainglorious
irrationalities of his time. For example, he had not concluded, with the
visionaries among the metaphysicians, that between the finer mechanic
forces and the ruder animal vitality some germ of correspondence might
prove discoverable. As little did his scheme partake of the enthusiasm
of some natural philosophers, who hoped, by physiological and chemical
inductions, to arrive at a knowledge of the source of life, and so
qualify themselves to manufacture and improve upon it. Much less had he
aught in common with the tribe of alchemists, who sought, by a species
of incantations, to evoke some surprising vitality from the laboratory.
Neither had he imagined, with certain sanguine theosophists, that, by
faithful adoration of the Highest, unheard-of powers would be vouchsafed
to man. A practical materialist, what Bannadonna had aimed at was to have
been reached, not by logic, not by crucible, not by conjuration, not by
altars; but by plain vice-bench and hammer. In short, to solve Nature,
to steal into her, to intrigue beyond her, to procure some one else to
bind her to his hand,—these, one and all, had not been his objects; but,
asking no favors from any element or any being, of himself to rival her,
outstrip her, and rule her. He stooped to conquer. With him, common-sense
was theurgy; machinery, miracle; Prometheus, the heroic name for
machinist; man, the true God.
Nevertheless, in his initial step, so far as the experimental automaton
for the belfry was concerned, he allowed fancy some little play; or,
perhaps, what seemed his fancifulness was but his utilitarian ambition
collaterally extended. In figure, the creature for the belfry should
not be likened after the human pattern, nor any animal one, nor after
the ideals, however wild, of ancient fable, but equally in aspect as in
organism be an original production; the more terrible to behold, the
better.
Such, then, were the suppositions as to the present scheme, and
the reserved intent. How, at the very threshold, so unlooked-for a
catastrophe overturned all, or rather, what was the conjecture here, is
now to be set forth.
It was thought that on the day preceding the fatality, his visitors
having left him, Bannadonna had unpacked the belfry image, adjusted it,
and placed it in the retreat provided,—a sort of sentry-box in one corner
of the belfry; in short, throughout the night, and for some part of the
ensuing morning, he had been engaged in arranging everything connected
with the domino: the issuing from the sentry-box each sixty minutes;
sliding along a grooved way, like a railway; advancing to the clock-bell,
with uplifted manacles; striking it at one of the twelve junctions of the
four-and-twenty hands; then wheeling, circling the bell, and retiring to
its post, there to bide for another sixty minutes, when the same process
was to be repeated; the bell, by a cunning mechanism, meantime turning on
its vertical axis, so as to present, to the descending mace, the clasped
hands of the next two figures, when it would strike two, three, and so
on, to the end. The musical metal in this time-bell was so managed in
the fusion, by some art, perishing with its originator, that each of the
clasps of the four-and-twenty hands should give forth its own peculiar
resonance when parted.
But on the magic metal, the magic and metallic stranger never struck but
that one stroke, drove but that one nail, severed but that one clasp,
by which Bannadonna clung to his ambitious life. For, after winding up
the creature in the sentry-box, so that, for the present, skipping the
intervening hours, it should not emerge till the hour of one, but should
then infallibly emerge, and, after deftly oiling the grooves whereon it
was to slide, it was surmised that the mechanician must then have hurried
to the bell, to give his final touches to its sculpture. True artist, he
here became absorbed,—an absorption still further intensified, it may be,
by his striving to abate that strange look of Una; which, though before
others he had treated it with such unconcern, might not, in secret, have
been without its thorn.
And so, for the interval, he was oblivious of his creature; which, not
oblivious of him, and true to its creation, and true to its heedful
winding up, left its post precisely at the given moment; along its
well-oiled route, slid noiselessly toward its mark; and, aiming at the
hand of Una, to ring one clangorous note, dully smote the intervening
brain of Bannadonna, turned backward to it; the manacled arms then
instantly upspringing to their hovering poise. The falling body clogged
the thing’s return; so there it stood, still impending over Bannadonna,
as if whispering some post-mortem terror. The chisel lay dropped from the
hand, but beside the hand; the oil-flask spilled across the iron track.
In his unhappy end, not unmindful of the rare genius of the mechanician,
the republic decreed him a stately funeral. It was resolved that the
great bell—the one whose casting had been jeopardized through the
timidity of the ill-starred workman—should be rung upon the entrance of
the bier into the cathedral. The most robust man of the country round was
assigned the office of bell-ringer.
But as the pall-bearers entered the cathedral porch, naught but a broken
and disastrous sound, like that of some lone Alpine land-slide, fell
from the tower upon their ears. And then, all was hushed.
Glancing backward, they saw the groined belfry crushed sidewise in. It
afterward appeared that the powerful peasant who had the bell-rope in
charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed
down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking metal,
too ponderous for its frame, and strangely feeble somewhere at its top,
loosed from its fastening, tore sidewise down, and tumbling in one sheer
fall, three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried itself inverted
and half out of sight.
Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started
from a small spot in the ear; which, being scraped, revealed a defect,
deceptively minute, in the casting; which defect must subsequently have
been pasted over with some unknown compound.
The re-molten metal soon reassumed its place in the tower’s repaired
superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically
in its belfry-boughwork of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the
first anniversary of the tower’s completion,—at early dawn, before the
concourse had surrounded it,—an earthquake came; one loud crash was
heard. The stone-pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown
upon the plain.
So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew him.
So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for
the tower. So the bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood had flawed
it. And so pride went before the fall.
[Illustration]
THE KATHAYAN SLAVE.
BY EMILY C. JUDSON.
At the commencement of the English and Burmese war of 1824, all the
Christians (called “hat-wearers,” in contradistinction from the turbaned
heads of the Orientals) residing at Ava were thrown unceremoniously into
the death-prison. Among them were both Protestant and Roman Catholic
missionaries; some few reputable European traders; and criminals shadowed
from the laws of Christendom “under the sole of the golden foot.” These,
Americans, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, and Armenian, were
all huddled together in one prison, with villains of every grade,—the
thief, the assassin, the bandit, or all three in one; constituting, in
connection with countless other crimes, a blacker character than the
inhabitant of a civilized land can picture. Sometimes stript of their
clothing, sometimes nearly starved, loaded with heavy irons, thrust
into a hot, filthy, noisome apartment, with criminals for companions
and criminals for guards, compelled to see the daily torture, to hear
the shriek of anguish from writhing victims, with death, death in some
terribly detestable form, always before them, a severer state of
suffering can scarcely be imagined.
The Burmese had never been known to spare the lives of their
war-captives; and though the little band of foreigners could scarcely be
called prisoners of war, yet this well-known custom, together with their
having been thrust into the death-prison, from which there was no escape,
except by a pardon from the king, cut off nearly every reasonable hope
of rescue. But (quite a new thing in the annals of Burmese history),
although some died from the intensity of their sufferings, no foreigner
was wantonly put to death. Of those who were claimed by the English at
the close of the war, some one or two are yet living, with anklets and
bracelets which they will carry to the grave with them, wrought in their
flesh by the heavy iron. It may well be imagined that these men might
unfold to us scenes of horror, incidents daily occurring under their own
shuddering gaze, in comparison with which the hair-elevating legends of
Ann Radcliff would become simple fairy tales.
The death-prison at Ava was at that time a single large room, built
of rough boards, without either window or door, and with but a thinly
thatched roof to protect the wretched inmates from the blaze of a
tropical sun. It was entered by slipping aside a single board, which
constituted a sort of sliding-door. Around the prison, inside the yard,
were ranged the huts of the under-jailers, or Children of the Prison,
and outside of the yard, close at hand, that of the head-jailer. These
jailers must necessarily be condemned criminals, with a ring, the sign of
outlawry, traced in the skin of the cheek, and the name of their crime
engraved in the same manner upon the breast. The head-jailer was a tall,
bony man, with sinews of iron; wearing, when speaking, a malicious smirk,
and given at times to a most revolting kind of jocoseness. When silent
and quiet, he had a jaded, careworn look; but it was at the torture
that he was in his proper element. Then his face lighted up,—became
glad, furious, demoniac. His small black eyes glittered like those of
a serpent; his thin lips rolled back, displaying his toothless gums
in front, with a long, protruding tusk on either side, stained black
as ebony; his hollow, ringed cheeks seemed to contract more and more,
and his breast heaved with convulsive delight beneath the fearful word
MAN-KILLER. The prisoners called him _father_, when he was present to
enforce this expression of affectionate familiarity; but among themselves
he was irreverently christened the Tiger-cat.
One of the most active of the Children of the Prison was a short,
broad-faced man, labelled THIEF, who, as well as the Tiger, had a
peculiar talent in the way of torturing; and so fond was he of the use
of the whip, that he often missed his count, and zealously exceeded the
number of lashes ordered by the city governor. The wife of this man was
a most odious creature, filthy, bold, impudent, cruel, and, like her
husband, delighting in torture. Her face was not only deeply pitted with
smallpox, but so deformed with leprosy, that the white cartilage of the
nose was laid entirely bare; from her large mouth shone rows of irregular
teeth, black as ink; her hair, which was left entirely to the care of
nature, was matted in large black masses about her head; and her manner,
under all this hideous ugliness, was insolent and vicious. They had two
children,—little vipers, well loaded with venom; and by their vexatious
mode of annoyance, trying the tempers of the prisoners more than was in
the power of the mature torturers.
As will readily be perceived, the security of this prison was not in the
strength of the structure, but in the heavy manacles, and the living
wall. The lives of the jailers depended entirely on their fidelity;
and fidelity involved strict obedience to orders, however ferocious.
As for themselves, they could not escape; they had nowhere to go;
certain death awaited them everywhere, for they bore on cheek and
breast the ineffaceable proof of their outlawry. Their only safety was
at their post; and there was no safety there in humanity, even if it
were possible for such degraded creatures to have a spark of humanity
left. So inclination united with interest to make them what they really
were,—demons.
The arrival of a new prisoner was an incident calculated to excite but
little interest in the hat-wearers, provided he came in turban and
waistcloth. But one morning there was brought in a young man, speaking
the Burmese brokenly, and with the soft accent of the North, who at
once attracted universal attention. He was tall and erect, with a
mild, handsome face, bearing the impress of inexpressible suffering; a
complexion slightly tinted with the rich brown of the East; a fine, manly
carriage, and a manner which, even there, was both graceful and dignified.
“Who is he?” was the interpretation of the inquiring glances exchanged
among those who had no liberty to speak; and then eye asked of eye,
“What can he have done?—he, so gentle, so mild, so manly, that even these
wretches, who scarcely know the name of pity and respect, seem to feel
both for him?” There was, in truth, something in the countenance of the
new prisoner which, without asking for sympathy, involuntarily enforced
it. It was not amiability, though his dark, soft, beautiful eye was
full of a noble sweetness; it was not resignation; it was not apathy;
it was hopelessness, deep, utter, immovable, suffering hopelessness.
Very young, and apparently not ambitious or revengeful, what crime could
this interesting stranger have committed to draw down “the golden foot”
with such crushing weight upon his devoted head? He seemed utterly
friendless, and without even the means of obtaining food; for, as the day
advanced, no one came to see him; and the officer who brought him had
left no directions. He did not, however, suffer from this neglect, for
Madam Thief (most wonderful to relate!) actually shared so deeply in the
universal sympathy, as to bring him a small quantity of boiled rice and
water.
Toward evening, the Woon-bai, a governor, or rather Mayor of the city,
entered the prison, his bold, lion-like face as open and unconcerned as
ever, but with something of unusual bustling in his manner.
“Where is he?” he cried sternly,—“where is he? this son of Kathay? this
dog, villain, traitor! where is he? Aha! only one pair of irons? Put on
five! do you hear? five!”
The Woon-bai remained till his orders were executed, and the poor
Kathayan was loaded with five pairs of fetters; and then he went out,
frowning on one and smiling on another; while the Children of the Prison
watched his countenance and manner, as significant of what was expected
of them. The prisoners looked at each other, and shook their heads in
commiseration.
The next day the feet of the young Kathayan, in obedience to some new
order, were placed in the stocks, which raised them about eighteen inches
from the ground; and the five pairs of fetters were all disposed on
the outer side of the plank, so that their entire weight fell upon the
ankles. The position was so painful that each prisoner, some from memory,
some from sympathetic apprehension, shared in the pain when he looked at
the sufferer.
During this day, one of the missionaries, who had been honored with an
invitation, which it was never prudent to refuse, to the hut of the
Thief, learned something of the history of the young man, and his crime.
His home, it was told him, was among the rich hills of Kathay, as they
range far northward, where the tropic sun loses the intense fierceness of
his blaze, and makes the atmosphere soft and luxurious, as though it were
mellowing beneath the same amber sky which ripens the fruits, and gives
their glow to the flowers. What had been his rank in his own land, the
jailer’s wife did not know. Perhaps he had been a prince, chief of the
brave band conquered by the superior force of the Burmans; or a hunter
among the spicy groves and deep-wooded jungles, lithe as the tiger which
he pursued from lair to lair, and free as the flame-winged bird of the
sun that circled above him; or perhaps his destiny had been a humbler
one, and he had but followed his goats as they bounded fearlessly from
ledge to ledge, and plucked for food the herbs upon his native hills.
He had been brought away by a marauding party, and presented as a slave
to the brother of the queen. This Men-thah-gyee, the Great Prince, as
he was called, by way of pre-eminence, had risen, through the influence
of his sister, from the humble condition of a fishmonger, to be the
Richelieu of the nation. Unpopular from his mean origin, and still more
unpopular from the acts of brutality to which the intoxication of power
had given rise, the sympathy excited by the poor Kathayan in the breasts
of these wretches may easily be accounted for. It was not pity or mercy,
but hatred. Anywhere else, the sufferer’s sad, handsome face, and mild,
uncomplaining manner, would have enlisted sympathy; but here, they would
scarcely have seen the sadness, or beauty, or mildness, except through
the medium of a passion congenial to their own natures.
Among the other slaves of Men-thah-gyee was a young Kathay girl of
singular beauty. She was, so said Madam the Thief, a bundle of roses,
set round with the fragrant blossoms of the champac-tree; her breath was
like that of the breezes when they come up from their dalliance with
the spicy daughters of the islands of the south; her voice had caught
its rich cadence from the musical gush of the silver fountain, which
wakes among the green of her native hills; her hair had been braided
from the glossy raven plumage of the royal edolius; her eyes were twin
stars looking out from cool springs, all fringed with the long, tremulous
reeds of the jungle; and her step was as the free, graceful bound of
the wild antelope. On the subject of her grace, her beauty, and her
wondrous daring, the jailer’s wife could not be sufficiently eloquent.
And so this poor, proud, simple-souled maiden, this diamond from the
rich hills of Kathay, destined to glitter for an hour or two on a
prince’s bosom, unsubdued even in her desolation, had dared to bestow her
affections with the uncalculating lavishness of conscious heart-freedom.
And the poor wretch, lying upon his back in the death-prison, his feet
fast in the stocks and swelling and purpling beneath the heavy irons,
had participated in her crime; had lured her on, by tender glances
and by loving words, inexpressibly sweet in their mutual bondage, to
irretrievable destruction. What fears, what hopes winged by fears,
what tremulous joys, still hedged in by that same crowd of fears, what
despondency, what revulsions of impotent anger and daring, what weeping,
what despair, must have been theirs! Their tremblings and rejoicings,
their mad projects, growing each day wilder and more dangerous,—since
madness alone could have given rise to anything like hope,—are things
left to imagination; for there was none to relate the heart-history of
the two slaves of Men-thah-gyee. Yet there were some hints of a first
accidental meeting under the shadow of the mango and tamarind trees,
where the sun lighted up, by irregular gushes, the waters of the little
lake in the centre of the garden, and the rustle of leaves seemed
sufficient to drown the accents of their native tongues. So they looked,
spoke, their hearts bounded, paused, trembled with soft home-memories:
they whispered on, and they were lost. Poor slaves!
Then at evening, when the dark-browed maidens of the golden city
gathered, with their earthen vessels, about the well,—there, shaded by
the thick clumps of bamboo, with the free sky overhead, the green earth
beneath, and the songs and laughter of the merry girls ringing in their
ears, so like their own home, the home which they had lost forever,—O,
what a rare, sweet, dangerous meeting-place for those who should not, and
yet must be lovers!
Finally came a day fraught with illimitable consequences,—the day when
the young slave, not yet admitted to the royal harem, should become more
than ever the property of her master. And now deeper grew their agony,
more uncontrollable their madness, wilder and more daring their hopes,
with every passing moment. Not a man in Ava, but would have told them
that escape was impossible; and yet, goaded on by love and despair, they
attempted the impossibility. They had countrymen in the city, and, under
cover of night, they fled to them. Immediately the minister sent out his
myrmidons; they were tracked, captured, and brought back to the palace.
“And what became of the poor girl?” inquired the missionary with much
interest.
The woman shuddered, and beneath her scars and the swarthiness of her
skin she became deadly pale.
“There is a cellar, Tsayah,” at last she whispered, still shuddering,
“a deep cellar, that no one has seen, but horrible cries come from it
sometimes, and two nights ago, for three hours, three long hours—such
shrieks! Amai-ai! what shrieks! And they say that he was there, Tsayah,
and saw and heard it all. That is the reason that his eyes are blinded
and his ears benumbed. A great many go into that cellar, but none ever
come out again,—none but the doomed like him. It is—_it is like the
West Prison_,” she added, sinking her voice still lower, and casting an
eager, alarmed look about her. The missionary too shuddered, as much at
the mention of this prison, as at the recital of the woman; for it shut
within its walls deep mysteries, which even his jailers, accustomed as
they were to torture and death, shrank from babbling of.
The next day a cord was passed around the wrists of the young Kathayan,
his arms jerked up into a position perpendicular with his prostrate body,
and the end of the cord fastened to a beam overhead. Still, though faint
from the lack of food, parched with thirst, and racked with pain, for his
feet were swollen and livid, not a murmur of complaint escaped his lips.
And yet this patient endurance seemed scarcely the result of fortitude
or heroism; an observer would have said that the inner suffering was so
great as to render that of the mere physical frame unheeded. There was
the same expression of hopelessness, the same unvarying wretchedness, too
deep, too real, to think of giving itself utterance on the face as at his
first entrance into the prison; and except that he now and then fixed on
one of the hopeless beings who regarded him in silent pity a mournful,
half-beseeching, half-vacant stare, this was all.
That day passed away as others had passed; then came another night of
dreams, in which loved ones gathered around the hearth-stone of a dear,
distant home; dreams broken by the clanking of chains and the groans
of the suffering; and then morning broke. There still hung the poor
Kathayan; his face slightly distorted with the agony he was suffering,
his lips dry and parched, his cheek pallid and sunken, and his eyes wild
and glaring. His breast swelled and heaved, and now and then a sob-like
sigh burst forth involuntarily. When the Tiger entered, the eye of the
young man immediately fastened on him, and a shiver passed through his
frame. The old murderer went his usual rounds with great nonchalance;
gave an order here, a blow there, and cracked a malicious joke with a
third; smiling all the time that dark, sinister smile, which made him so
much more hideous in the midst of his wickedness. At last he approached
the Kathayan, who, with a convulsive movement, half raised himself from
the ground at his touch, and seemed to contract like a shrivelled leaf.
“Right! right, my son!” said the old man, chuckling. “You are expert at
helping yourself, to be sure; but then you need assistance. So,—so,—so!”
and giving the cord three successive jerks, he succeeded, by means of
his immense strength, in raising the Kathayan so that but the back of
his head, as it fell downward, could touch the floor. There was a quick,
short crackling of joints, and a groan escaped the prisoner. Another
groan followed, and then another,—and another,—a heaving of the chest, a
convulsive shiver, and for a moment he seemed lost. Human hearts glanced
heavenward. “God grant it! Father of mercies, spare him further agony!”
It could not be. Gaspingly came the lost breath back again, quiveringly
the soft eyes unclosed; and the young Kathayan captive was fully awake to
his misery.
“I cannot die so,—I cannot,—so slow,—so slow,—so slow!” Hunger gnawed,
thirst burned, fever revelled in his veins; the cord upon his wrists cut
to the bone; corruption had already commenced upon his swollen, livid
feet; the most frightful, torturing pains distorted his body, and wrung
from him groans and murmurings so pitiful, so harrowing, so full of
anguish, that the unwilling listeners could only turn away their heads,
or lift their eyes to each other’s faces in mute horror. Not a word was
exchanged among them,—not a lip had power to give it utterance.
“I cannot die so! I cannot die so! I cannot die so!” came the words, at
first moaningly, and then prolonged to a terrible howl. And so passed
another day, and another night, and still the wretch lived on.