So sang to me night and day, for many nights and days, the thin small
voice that always went piping inside me, now to one tune, now to
another, but always the same words--that terrible refrain that used to
haunt me so when I was a school-boy at Bluefriars!
Oh, to be a school-boy again in a long gray coat and ridiculous pink
stockings--innocent and free--with Esmeralda for my only love, and Athos
and Porthos and D'Artagnan for my bosom friends, and no worse
tribulation than to be told on a Saturday afternoon that the third
volume was in hand--_volume trois en lecture_'.
* * * * *
Sometimes, I remember, I could hardly sleep on a Sunday night, for pity
of the poor wretch who was to be hanged close by on Monday morning, and
it has come to that with _me_!
* * * * *
Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and
love of my life, what must you think of me now?
* * * * *
How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and
heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but
innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one
cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme
terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked
through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off
one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere,
anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count.
What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for
whoever owns it!
* * * * *
They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo,
was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared
he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the
French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a
light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.
For the honor of Sicily his confessor told him, in the strictest
confidence, that his sentence was a mock one, and that he would be fired
at with blank cartridges.
It was a pious fraud. All but two of the twelve cartridges had bullets,
and he fell, riddled through and through. No Frenchman ever died with a
lighter heart, a better grace. He was superb, and the national honor
was saved.
Thrice happy Sicilian drum-major, if the story be true! That trust in
blank cartridges was his paradise.
* * * * *
Oh, it is uphill work to be a stoic when the moment comes and the tug!
But when the tug lasts for more than a moment--days and nights, days and
nights! Oh, happy Sicilian drum-major!
* * * * *
Pray? Yes, I will pray night and morning, and all day long, to whatever
there is left of inherited strength and courage in that luckless,
misbegotten waif, Peter Ibbetson; that it may bear him up a little while
yet; that he may not disgrace himself in the dock or on the gallows.
* * * * *
Repent? Yes, of many things. But of the thing for which I am here?
Never!
* * * * *
It is a ghastly thing to be judge and jury and executioner all in one,
and for a private and personal wrong--to condemn and strike and kill.
Pity comes after--when it is too late, fortunately--the wretched
weakness of pity! Pooh! no Calcraft will ever pity _me_, and I do not
want him to.
* * * * *
He had his long, snaky knife against my stick; he, too, was a big strong
man, well skilled in self-defence! Down he went, and I struck him again
and again. "O my God! O Christ!" he shrieked....
"It will ring in my heart and my ears till I die--till I die!"
* * * * *
There was no time to lose--no time to think for the best. It is all for
the best as it is. What might he not have said if he had lived!
* * * * *
Thank Heaven, pity is not remorse or shame; and what crime could well
be worse than his? To rob one's dearly beloved dead of their fair shame!
* * * * *
He might have been mad, perhaps, and have grown in time to believe the
lies he told himself. Such things have been. But such a madman should no
more be suffered to live than a mad dog. The only way to kill the lie
was to kill the liar--that is, if one _can_ ever kill a lie!
* * * * *
Poor worm! after all, he could not help it, I suppose! he was _built_
like that! and _I_ was built to kill him for it, and be hanged.'
[Greek: Anagkae]!