For the Term of His Natural Life Part 76

"What is it, mam?" he asked, scarcely able to believe his eyes.

"I want to see the prisoner Dawes."

Troke's jaw fell.

"See Dawes?" he repeated.

"Yes. Where is he?"

Troke was preparing a lie. The imperious voice, and the clear, steady gaze, confused him.

"He's here."

"Let me see him."

"He's--he's under punishment, mam."

"What do you mean? Are they flogging him?"

"No; but he's dangerous, mam. The Commandant--"

"Do you mean to open the door or not, Mr. Troke?"

Troke grew more confused. It was evident that he was most unwilling to open the door. "The Commandant has given strict orders--"

"Do you wish me to complain to the Commandant?" cries Sylvia, with a touch of her old spirit, and jumped hastily at the conclusion that the gaolers were, perhaps, torturing the convict for their own entertainment. "Open the door at once!--at once!"

Thus commanded, Troke, with a hasty growl of its "being no affair of his, and he hoped Mrs. Frere would tell the captain how it happened"

flung open the door of a cell on the right hand of the doorway. It was so dark that, at first, Sylvia could distinguish nothing but the outline of a framework, with something stretched upon it that resembled a human body. Her first thought was that the man was dead, but this was not so--he groaned. Her eyes, accustoming themselves to the gloom, began to see what the "punishment" was. Upon the floor was placed an iron frame about six feet long, and two and a half feet wide, with round iron bars, placed transversely, about twelve inches apart. The man she came to seek was bound in a horizontal position upon this frame, with his neck projecting over the end of it. If he allowed his head to hang, the blood rushed to his brain, and suffocated him, while the effort to keep it raised strained every muscle to agony pitch. His face was purple, and he foamed at the mouth. Sylvia uttered a cry. "This is no punishment; it's murder! Who ordered this?"

"The Commandant," said Troke sullenly.

"I don't believe it. Loose him!"

"I daren't mam," said Troke.

"Loose him, I say! Hailey!--you, sir, there!" The noise had brought several warders to the spot. "Do you hear me? Do you know who I am?

Loose him, I say!" In her eagerness and compa.s.sion she was on her knees by the side of the infernal machine, plucking at the ropes with her delicate fingers. "Wretches, you have cut his flesh! He is dying! Help!

You have killed him!" The prisoner, in fact, seeing this angel of mercy stooping over him, and hearing close to him the tones of a voice that for seven years he had heard but in his dreams, had fainted. Troke and Hailey, alarmed by her vehemence, dragged the stretcher out into the light, and hastily cut the lashings. Dawes rolled off like a log, and his head fell against Mrs. Frere. Troke roughly pulled him aside, and called for water. Sylvia, trembling with sympathy and pale with pa.s.sion, turned upon the crew. "How long has he been like this?"

"An hour," said Troke.

"A lie!" said a stern voice at the door. "He has been there nine hours!"

"Wretches!" cried Sylvia, "you shall hear more of this. Oh, oh! I am sick!"--she felt for the wall--"I--I--" North watched her with agony on his face, but did not move. "I faint. I--"--she uttered a despairing cry that was not without a touch of anger. "Mr. North! do you not see? Oh!

Take me home--take me home!" and she would have fallen across the body of the tortured prisoner had not North caught her in his arms.

Rufus Dawes, awaking from his stupor, saw, in the midst of a sunbeam which penetrated a window in the corridor, the woman who came to save his body supported by the priest who came to save his soul; and staggering to his knees, he stretched out his hands with a hoa.r.s.e cry.

Perhaps something in the action brought back to the dimmed remembrance of the Commandant's wife the image of a similar figure stretching forth its hands to a frightened child in the mysterious far-off time. She started, and pushing back her hair, bent a wistful, terrified gaze upon the face of the kneeling man, as though she would fain read there an explanation of the shadowy memory which haunted her. It is possible that she would have spoken, but North--thinking the excitement had produced one of those hysterical crises which were common to her--gently drew her, still gazing, back towards the gate. The convict's arms fell, and an undefinable presentiment of evil chilled him as he beheld the priest--emotion pallid in his cheeks--slowly draw the fair young creature from out the sunlight into the grim shadow of the heavy archway. For an instant the gloom swallowed them, and it seemed to Dawes that the strange wild man of G.o.d had in that instant become a man of Evil--blighting the brightness and the beauty of the innocence that clung to him. For an instant--and then they pa.s.sed out of the prison archway into the free air of heaven--and the sunlight glowed golden on their faces.

"You are ill," said North. "You will faint. Why do you look so wildly?"

"What is it?" she whispered, more in answer to her own thoughts than to his question--"what is it that links me to that man? What deed--what terror--what memory? I tremble with crowding thoughts, that die ere they can whisper to me. Oh, that prison!"

"Look up; we are in the sunshine."

She pa.s.sed her hand across her brow, sighing heavily, as one awaking from a disturbed slumber--shuddered, and withdrew her arm from his.

North interpreted the action correctly, and the blood rushed to his face. "Pardon me, you cannot walk alone; you will fall. I will leave you at the gate."

In truth she would have fallen had he not again a.s.sisted her. She turned upon him eyes whose reproachful sorrow had almost forced him to a confession, but he bowed his head and held silence. They reached the house, and he placed her tenderly in a chair. "Now you are safe, madam, I will leave you."

She burst into tears. "Why do you treat me thus, Mr. North? What have I done to make you hate me?"

"Hate you!" said North, with trembling lips. "Oh, no, I do not--do not hate you. I am rude in my speech, abrupt in my manner. You must forget it, and--and me." A horse's feet crashed upon the gravel, and an instant after Maurice Frere burst into the room. Returning from the Cascades, he had met Troke, and learned the release of the prisoner. Furious at this usurpation of authority by his wife, his self-esteem wounded by the thought that she had witnessed his mean revenge upon the man he had so infamously wronged, and his natural brutality enhanced by brandy, he had made for the house at full gallop, determined to a.s.sert his authority.

Blind with rage, he saw no one but his wife. "What the devil's this I hear? You have been meddling in my business! You release prisoners!

You--"

"Captain Frere!" said North, stepping forward to a.s.sert the restraining presence of a stranger. Frere started, astonished at the intrusion of the chaplain. Here was another outrage of his dignity, another insult to his supreme authority. In its pa.s.sion, his gross mind leapt to the worst conclusion. "You here, too! What do you want here--with my wife! This is your quarrel, is it?" His eyes glanced wrathfully from one to the other; and he strode towards North. "You infernal hypocritical lying scoundrel, if it wasn't for your black coat, I'd--"

"Maurice!" cried Sylvia, in an agony of shame and terror, striving to place a restraining hand upon his arm. He turned upon her with so fiercely infamous a curse that North, pale with righteous rage, seemed prompted to strike the burly ruffian to the earth. For a moment, the two men faced each other, and then Frere, muttering threats of vengeance against each and all--convicts, gaolers, wife, and priest--flung the suppliant woman violently from him, and rushed from the room. She fell heavily against the wall, and as the chaplain raised her, he heard the hoof-strokes of the departing horse.

"Oh," cried Sylvia, covering her face with trembling hands, "let me leave this place!"

North, enfolding her in his arms, strove to soothe her with incoherent words of comfort. Dizzy with the blow she had received, she clung to him sobbing. Twice he tried to tear himself away, but had he loosed his hold she would have fallen. He could not hold her--bruised, suffering, and in tears--thus against his heart, and keep silence. In a torrent of agonized eloquence the story of his love burst from his lips. "Why should you be thus tortured?" he cried. "Heaven never willed you to be mated to that boor--you, whose life should be all sunshine. Leave him--leave him. He has cast you off. We have both suffered. Let us leave this dreadful place--this isthmus between earth and h.e.l.l! I will give you happiness."

"I am going," she said faintly. "I have already arranged to go."

North trembled. "It was not of my seeking. Fate has willed it. We go together!"

They looked at each other--she felt the fever of his blood, she read his pa.s.sion in his eyes, she comprehended the "hatred" he had affected for her, and, deadly pale, drew back the cold hand he held.

"Go!" she murmured. "If you love me, leave me--leave me! Do not see me or speak to me again--" her silence added the words she could not utter, "till then."

CHAPTER XIV. GETTING READY FOR SEA.

Maurice Frere's pa.s.sion had spent itself in that last act of violence.

He did not return to the prison, as he promised himself, but turned into the road that led to the Cascades. He repented him of his suspicions.

There was nothing strange in the presence of the chaplain. Sylvia had always liked the man, and an apology for his conduct had doubtless removed her anger. To make a mountain out of a molehill was the act of an idiot. It was natural that she should release Dawes--women were so tender-hearted. A few well-chosen, calmly-uttered plat.i.tudes anent the necessity for the treatment that, to those unaccustomed to the desperate wickedness of convicts, must appear harsh, would have served his turn far better than bl.u.s.ter and abuse. Moreover, North was to sail in the Lady Franklin, and might put in execution his threats of official complaint, unless he was carefully dealt with. To put Dawes again to the torture would be to show to Troke and his friends that the "Commandant's wife" had acted without the "Commandant's authority", and that must not be shown. He would now return and patch up a peace. His wife would sail in the same vessel with North, and he would in a few days be left alone on the island to pursue his "discipline" unchecked. With this intent he returned to the prison, and gravely informed poor Troke that he was astonished at his barbarity. "Mrs. Frere, who most luckily had appointed to meet me this evening at the prison, tells me that the poor devil Dawes had been on the stretcher since seven o'clock this morning."

"You ordered it fust thing, yer honour," said Troke.

"Yes, you fool, but I didn't order you to keep the man there for nine hours, did I? Why, you scoundrel, you might have killed him!" Troke scratched his head in bewilderment. "Take his irons off, and put him in a separate cell in the old gaol. If a man is a murderer, that is no reason you should take the law into your own hands, is it? You'd better take care, Mr. Troke." On the way back he met the chaplain, who, seeing him, made for a by-path in curious haste. "Halloo!" roared Frere. "Hi!

Mr. North!" Mr. North paused, and the Commandant made at him abruptly.