I held a lieutenant’s commission in his Majesty’s army, and served abroad
in the campaigns of 1677 and 1678. The treaty of Nimeguen being
concluded, I returned home, and retiring from the service, withdrew to a
small estate lying a few miles east of London, which I had recently
acquired in right of my wife.
This is the last night I have to live, and I will set down the naked
truth without disguise. I was never a brave man, and had always been
from my childhood of a secret, sullen, distrustful nature. I speak of
myself as if I had passed from the world; for while I write this, my
grave is digging, and my name is written in the black-book of death.
Soon after my return to England, my only brother was seized with mortal
illness. This circumstance gave me slight or no pain; for since we had
been men, we had associated but very little together. He was
open-hearted and generous, handsomer than I, more accomplished, and
generally beloved. Those who sought my acquaintance abroad or at home,
because they were friends of his, seldom attached themselves to me long,
and would usually say, in our first conversation, that they were
surprised to find two brothers so unlike in their manners and appearance.
It was my habit to lead them on to this avowal; for I knew what
comparisons they must draw between us; and having a rankling envy in my
heart, I sought to justify it to myself.
We had married two sisters. This additional tie between us, as it may
appear to some, only estranged us the more. His wife knew me well. I
never struggled with any secret jealousy or gall when she was present but
that woman knew it as well as I did. I never raised my eyes at such
times but I found hers fixed upon me; I never bent them on the ground or
looked another way but I felt that she overlooked me always. It was an
inexpressible relief to me when we quarrelled, and a greater relief still
when I heard abroad that she was dead. It seems to me now as if some
strange and terrible foreshadowing of what has happened since must have
hung over us then. I was afraid of her; she haunted me; her fixed and
steady look comes back upon me now, like the memory of a dark dream, and
makes my blood run cold.
She died shortly after giving birth to a child—a boy. When my brother
knew that all hope of his own recovery was past, he called my wife to his
bedside, and confided this orphan, a child of four years old, to her
protection. He bequeathed to him all the property he had, and willed
that, in case of his child’s death, it should pass to my wife, as the
only acknowledgment he could make her for her care and love. He
exchanged a few brotherly words with me, deploring our long separation;
and being exhausted, fell into a slumber, from which he never awoke.
We had no children; and as there had been a strong affection between the
sisters, and my wife had almost supplied the place of a mother to this
boy, she loved him as if he had been her own. The child was ardently
attached to her; but he was his mother’s image in face and spirit, and
always mistrusted me.
I can scarcely fix the date when the feeling first came upon me; but I
soon began to be uneasy when this child was by. I never roused myself
from some moody train of thought but I marked him looking at me; not with
mere childish wonder, but with something of the purpose and meaning that
I had so often noted in his mother. It was no effort of my fancy,
founded on close resemblance of feature and expression. I never could
look the boy down. He feared me, but seemed by some instinct to despise
me while he did so; and even when he drew back beneath my gaze—as he
would when we were alone, to get nearer to the door—he would keep his
bright eyes upon me still.
Perhaps I hide the truth from myself, but I do not think that, when this
began, I meditated to do him any wrong. I may have thought how
serviceable his inheritance would be to us, and may have wished him dead;
but I believe I had no thought of compassing his death. Neither did the
idea come upon me at once, but by very slow degrees, presenting itself at
first in dim shapes at a very great distance, as men may think of an
earthquake or the last day; then drawing nearer and nearer, and losing
something of its horror and improbability; then coming to be part and
parcel—nay nearly the whole sum and substance—of my daily thoughts, and
resolving itself into a question of means and safety; not of doing or
abstaining from the deed.
While this was going on within me, I never could bear that the child
should see me looking at him, and yet I was under a fascination which
made it a kind of business with me to contemplate his slight and fragile
figure and think how easily it might be done. Sometimes I would steal
up-stairs and watch him as he slept; but usually I hovered in the garden
near the window of the room in which he learnt his little tasks; and
there, as he sat upon a low seat beside my wife, I would peer at him for
hours together from behind a tree; starting, like the guilty wretch I
was, at every rustling of a leaf, and still gliding back to look and
start again.
Hard by our cottage, but quite out of sight, and (if there were any wind
astir) of hearing too, was a deep sheet of water. I spent days in
shaping with my pocket-knife a rough model of a boat, which I finished at
last and dropped in the child’s way. Then I withdrew to a secret place,
which he must pass if he stole away alone to swim this bauble, and lurked
there for his coming. He came neither that day nor the next, though I
waited from noon till nightfall. I was sure that I had him in my net,
for I had heard him prattling of the toy, and knew that in his infant
pleasure he kept it by his side in bed. I felt no weariness or fatigue,
but waited patiently, and on the third day he passed me, running joyously
along, with his silken hair streaming in the wind, and he singing—God
have mercy upon me!—singing a merry ballad,—who could hardly lisp the
words.
I stole down after him, creeping under certain shrubs which grow in that
place, and none but devils know with what terror I, a strong, full-grown
man, tracked the footsteps of that baby as he approached the water’s
brink. I was close upon him, had sunk upon my knee and raised my hand to
thrust him in, when he saw my shadow in the stream and turned him round.
His mother’s ghost was looking from his eyes. The sun burst forth from
behind a cloud; it shone in the bright sky, the glistening earth, the
clear water, the sparkling drops of rain upon the leaves. There were
eyes in everything. The whole great universe of light was there to see
the murder done. I know not what he said; he came of bold and manly
blood, and, child as he was, he did not crouch or fawn upon me. I heard
him cry that he would try to love me,—not that he did,—and then I saw him
running back towards the house. The next I saw was my own sword naked in
my hand, and he lying at my feet stark dead,—dabbled here and there with
blood, but otherwise no different from what I had seen him in his
sleep—in the same attitude too, with his cheek resting upon his little
hand.
I took him in my arms and laid him—very gently now that he was dead—in a
thicket. My wife was from home that day, and would not return until the
next. Our bedroom window, the only sleeping-room on that side of the
house, was but a few feet from the ground, and I resolved to descend from
it at night and bury him in the garden. I had no thought that I had
failed in my design, no thought that the water would be dragged and
nothing found, that the money must now lie waste, since I must encourage
the idea that the child was lost or stolen. All my thoughts were bound
up and knotted together in the one absorbing necessity of hiding what I
had done.
How I felt when they came to tell me that the child was missing, when I
ordered scouts in all directions, when I gasped and trembled at every
one’s approach, no tongue can tell or mind of man conceive. I buried him
that night. When I parted the boughs and looked into the dark thicket,
there was a glow-worm shining like the visible spirit of God upon the
murdered child. I glanced down into his grave when I had placed him
there, and still it gleamed upon his breast; an eye of fire looking up to
Heaven in supplication to the stars that watched me at my work.
I had to meet my wife, and break the news, and give her hope that the
child would soon be found. All this I did,—with some appearance, I
suppose, of being sincere, for I was the object of no suspicion. This
done, I sat at the bedroom window all day long, and watched the spot
where the dreadful secret lay.
It was in a piece of ground which had been dug up to be newly turfed, and
which I had chosen on that account, as the traces of my spade were less
likely to attract attention. The men who laid down the grass must have
thought me mad. I called to them continually to expedite their work, ran
out and worked beside them, trod down the earth with my feet, and hurried
them with frantic eagerness. They had finished their task before night,
and then I thought myself comparatively safe.
I slept,—not as men do who awake refreshed and cheerful, but I did sleep,
passing from vague and shadowy dreams of being hunted down, to visions of
the plot of grass, through which now a hand, and now a foot, and now the
head itself was starting out. At this point I always woke and stole to
the window, to make sure that it was not really so. That done, I crept
to bed again; and thus I spent the night in fits and starts, getting up
and lying down full twenty times, and dreaming the same dream over and
over again,—which was far worse than lying awake, for every dream had a
whole night’s suffering of its own. Once I thought the child was alive,
and that I had never tried to kill him. To wake from that dream was the
most dreadful agony of all.
The next day I sat at the window again, never once taking my eyes from
the place, which, although it was covered by the grass, was as plain to
me—its shape, its size, its depth, its jagged sides, and all—as if it had
been open to the light of day. When a servant walked across it, I felt
as if he must sink in; when he had passed, I looked to see that his feet
had not worn the edges. If a bird lighted there, I was in terror lest by
some tremendous interposition it should be instrumental in the discovery;
if a breath of air sighed across it, to me it whispered murder. There
was not a sight or a sound—how ordinary, mean, or unimportant soever—but
was fraught with fear. And in this state of ceaseless watching I spent
three days.
On the fourth there came to the gate one who had served with me abroad,
accompanied by a brother officer of his whom I had never seen. I felt
that I could not bear to be out of sight of the place. It was a summer
evening, and I bade my people take a table and a flask of wine into the
garden. Then I sat down _with my chair upon the grave_, and being
assured that nobody could disturb it now without my knowledge, tried to
drink and talk.
They hoped that my wife was well,—that she was not obliged to keep her
chamber,—that they had not frightened her away. What could I do but tell
them with a faltering tongue about the child? The officer whom I did not
know was a down-looking man, and kept his eyes upon the ground while I
was speaking. Even that terrified me. I could not divest myself of the
idea that he saw something there which caused him to suspect the truth.
I asked him hurriedly if he supposed that—and stopped. ‘That the child
has been murdered?’ said he, looking mildly at me: ‘O no! what could a
man gain by murdering a poor child?’ _I_ could have told him what a man
gained by such a deed, no one better: but I held my peace and shivered as
with an ague.
Mistaking my emotion, they were endeavouring to cheer me with the hope
that the boy would certainly be found,—great cheer that was for me!—when
we heard a low deep howl, and presently there sprung over the wall two
great dogs, who, bounding into the garden, repeated the baying sound we
had heard before.
‘Bloodhounds!’ cried my visitors.
What need to tell me that! I had never seen one of that kind in all my
life, but I knew what they were and for what purpose they had come. I
grasped the elbows of my chair, and neither spoke nor moved.
‘They are of the genuine breed,’ said the man whom I had known abroad,
‘and being out for exercise have no doubt escaped from their keeper.’
Both he and his friend turned to look at the dogs, who with their noses
to the ground moved restlessly about, running to and fro, and up and
down, and across, and round in circles, careering about like wild things,
and all this time taking no notice of us, but ever and again repeating
the yell we had heard already, then dropping their noses to the ground
again and tracking earnestly here and there. They now began to snuff the
earth more eagerly than they had done yet, and although they were still
very restless, no longer beat about in such wide circuits, but kept near
to one spot, and constantly diminished the distance between themselves
and me.
At last they came up close to the great chair on which I sat, and raising
their frightful howl once more, tried to tear away the wooden rails that
kept them from the ground beneath. I saw how I looked, in the faces of
the two who were with me.
‘They scent some prey,’ said they, both together.
‘They scent no prey!’ cried I.
‘In Heaven’s name, move!’ said the one I knew, very earnestly, ‘or you
will be torn to pieces.’
‘Let them tear me from limb to limb, I’ll never leave this place!’ cried
I. ‘Are dogs to hurry men to shameful deaths? Hew them down, cut them
in pieces.’
‘There is some foul mystery here!’ said the officer whom I did not know,
drawing his sword. ‘In King Charles’s name, assist me to secure this
man.’
[Picture: Hunted down]
They both set upon me and forced me away, though I fought and bit and
caught at them like a madman. After a struggle, they got me quietly
between them; and then, my God! I saw the angry dogs tearing at the
earth and throwing it up into the air like water.
What more have I to tell? That I fell upon my knees, and with chattering
teeth confessed the truth, and prayed to be forgiven. That I have since
denied, and now confess to it again. That I have been tried for the
crime, found guilty, and sentenced. That I have not the courage to
anticipate my doom, or to bear up manfully against it. That I have no
compassion, no consolation, no hope, no friend. That my wife has happily
lost for the time those faculties which would enable her to know my
misery or hers. That I am alone in this stone dungeon with my evil
spirit, and that I die to-morrow. {255}