The Light of Scarthey Part 57

Sir Adrian's weary brow contracted. He paused and looked at her with profoundest sorrow.

Then she asked, hoa.r.s.ely:

"Where have they taken him to?"

"To Lancaster, I believe."

"Will they hang him?"

"I pray G.o.d not."

"There is no use of praying to G.o.d, G.o.d is merciless. What will they do to him?"

"He will be tried, Molly, in due course, and then, according to the sentence of the judges.... My poor child, control yourself, he shall be defended by the best lawyers that money can get. All a man can do for another I shall do for him."

She shot the sombre fire of her glance at him.

"You know that I love him," she said, with a terrible composure.

A sudden whiteness spread round Sir Adrian's lips.

"Poor child!" he said again beneath his breath.

"Yes, I love him. I always wanted to see him. I was sick and tired of life at Pulwick, and that was why I went on board his ship. I went deliberately because I could not bear the dulness of it all. He mistook me for Madeleine in the dark--he kissed me. Afterwards I told him that I loved him. I begged him to take me away with him, for ever.

I love him still, I would go with him still--it is as well that you should know. Nothing can alter it now. But he did not want me. He loves Madeleine."

The words fell from her lips with a steady, cruel, deliberateness. She kept her eyes upon him as she spoke, unpityingly, uncaring what anguish she inflicted; nay, it seemed from some strange perversity, glad to make him suffer.

But hard upon a man as it must be to hear such a confession from his wife's lips, doubly hard to such a one as Adrian, whose heart bled for her pain as well as for his own, he held himself without departing for a second from his wonted quiet dignity. Only in his earnest gaze upon her there was perhaps, if possible, an added tenderness.

But she, to see him so unmoved, was moved herself to a sudden scorn.

What manner of man was this, that not love, nor jealousy, nor anger had power to stir?

"And now what will you do with me?" she asked him again, with superb contempt on eye and lip. "For a guilty wife I am to you, as far as the will could make me, and I have no claim upon you any more."

"No claim upon me!" he repeated, with a wonder of grief in his voice.

"Ah, Molly, hush child! You are my wife. The child of the woman I loved--the woman I love for her own sake. You can no more put yourself out of my life now than you can out of my heart; had you been as guilty in deed as you may have been in purpose my words would be the same. Your husband's home is your home, my only wish to cherish and shelter you. You cannot escape my care, poor child, and some day you may be glad of it. My protection, my countenance you will always have.

G.o.d! who am I that I should judge you? Is there any sin of human frailty that a human being dare condemn? Guilty? What is your guilt compared to mine for bringing you to this, allying my melancholy age with your bright youth?"

He fell into the chair opposite to her and covered his face with his hands. As, for a minute's s.p.a.ce, his self-control wavered, she watched him, wearily. Her heat of temper had fallen from her very quickly; she broke into a moan.

"Oh, what does it matter? What does anything matter now? I love him and I have ruined him--had it not been for me he would be safe!"

After a little silence Sir Adrian rose. "I must leave you now, I must go to Pulwick," he said. His heart was yearning to her, he would have gathered her to his arms as a father his erring child, but he refrained from even touching her. "And you--what would you do? It shall be as you like."

"I would go to Lancaster," she said.

"The carriage shall be sent for you in the morning and Renny and his wife shall go with you. I will see to it. After Rupert's funeral--my G.o.d, what a night this has been!--I will join you, and together we shall work to save his life."

He paused, hesitated, and was about to turn away when suddenly she caught his hand and kissed it.

He knew she would as readily have kissed Rene's hand for a like promise; that her grat.i.tude was a pitiable thing for him, her husband, to bear; and yet, all the way, on his sad and solitary journey to Pulwick, the touch of her lips went with him, bringing a strange sweetness to his heart.

There was a vast deal of wonder in the county generally, and among the old friends of his father's house in particular, when it became known that Sir Adrian Landale had engaged a noted counsel to defend his brother's murderer and was doing all he could to avert his probable doom. In lowered tones were whispered strange tales of Lady Landale's escapade. People wagged wise and virtuous heads and breathed scandalous hints of her power upon her infatuated husband; and then they would tap their foreheads significantly. Indeed it needed all the master of Pulwick's wide-spread reputation for mental unsoundness to enable him to carry through such proceedings without rousing more violent feelings. As it was, it is to be doubted whether his interference had any other effect than that of helping to inflame the public mind against the prisoner.

The jury's verdict was a foregone conclusion; and though the learned lawyer duly prepared a very fine speech and pocketed some monstrous fees with a great deal of complaisance, he was honest enough not to hold out the smallest hope of being able to save his client.

The conviction was too clear, the "crimes" the prisoner had committed were of "too horrible and b.l.o.o.d.y a character, threatening the very foundations of society," to admit of a merciful view of the case.

As the trial drew near, Sir Adrian's despondency increased; each day seemed to bring a heavier furrow to his brow, an added weight to his lagging steps. He avoided as much as possible all meetings with his wife, who, on the contrary, recovered stronger courage with the flight of time, but whose feverish interest in his exertions was now transferred to some secret plans that she was for ever discussing with Rene. The prisoner himself showed great calmness.

"They will sentence me of course," he said quietly to Adrian, "but whether they will hang me is another question. I don't think that my hour has come yet or that the cord is twisted which will hang Jack Smith."

In other moods, he would ridicule Sir Adrian's labours in his cause with the most gentle note of affectionate mockery. But, from the desire doubtless to save one so disinterested and unworldly from any accusation of complicity, he was silent upon the schemes on which he pinned his hopes of escape.

The first meeting of the friends after the scene at Scarthey had been, of course, painful to both.

When he entered the cell, Adrian had stretched out his hand in silence, but Captain Jack held his own pressed to his side.

"It is like you to come," he said gloomily, "but you cannot shake the hand that stifled your brother's life out of him. And I should do it again, Adrian! Mark you, I am not repentant!"

"Give me your hand, Jack," said Adrian steadfastly. "I am not of those who shift responsibility from the dead to the living. You were grievously treated. Oh, give me your hand, friend, can I think of anything now but your peril and your truth to me?"

For an instant still the younger man hesitated and inquiringly raised his eyes laden with anxious trouble, to the elder man's face.

"My wife has told me all," said Sir Adrian, turning his head to hide his twitching lip.

And then Jack Smith's hand leaped out to meet his friend's upon an impulse of warm sympathy, and the two faced each other, looking the words they could not utter.

The year eighteen hundred and fifteen which delivered England at last from the strain of outlandish conflict saw a revival of official activity concerning matters of more homely interest. The powers that were awoke to the necessity, among other things, of putting a stop by the most stringent means to the constant and extensive leakage in the national revenue proceeding from the organisation of free traders or smugglers.

After twenty years of almost complete supineness on the part of the authorities, the first efforts made towards a systematic "Preventive"

coast service, composed of customs, excise and naval officials in proportion varied according to the localities, remained singularly futile. And to the notorious inability of these latter to cope with the experience and the devilish daring of the old established free traders, was due no doubt to the ferocity of the inquisitional laws presently levelled against smuggling and smugglers--laws which ruthlessly trenched upon almost every element of the British subjects'

vaunted personal freedom, and which added, for the time, several new "hanging cases" to the sixty odd already in existence.

That part of the indictment against Captain Jack Smith and the other criminals still at large, which dealt with their offences against the smuggling act, would in later times have broken down infallibly from want of proper evidence: not a t.i.ttle of information was forthcoming which could support examination. But a judge of a.s.sizes and a jury in 1815, were not to be baulked of the necessary victim by mere circ.u.mstantiality when certain offences against society and against His Majesty had to be avenged; and the dispensers of justice were less concerned with strict evidence than with the desirability of making examples. Strong presumption was all that was required to them to hang their man; and indeed the hanging of Captain Jack upon the other and more serious counts than that of unlawful occupation, was, as has been said, a foregone conclusion. The triple charge of murder being but too fully corroborated.

Every specious argument that could be mooted was of course put forward by counsel for the defence, to show that the death of the preventive men and of Mr. Landale on Scarthey Island and the sinking of the revenue cutter must be looked upon, on the one hand, as simple manslaughter in self-defence, and as the result of accidental collision, on the other. But, as every one antic.i.p.ated, the charge of the judge and the finding of the jury demanded strenuously the extreme penalty of the law. Besides this the judge deemed it advisable to introduce into the sentence one of those already obsolete penalties of posthumous degradation, devised in coa.r.s.er ages for the purpose of making an awful impression upon the living.

"Prisoner at the bar," said his lordship at the conclusion of the last day's proceedings, "the sentence of the law which I am about to pa.s.s upon you and which the court awards is that you now be taken to the place whence you came, and from thence, on the day appointed, to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you be dead, dead, dead. And may G.o.d have mercy on your soul!"

Captain Jack, standing bolt upright, with his eyes fixed upon the speaker, calm as he ever had been when awaiting the enemy's broadside, hearkened without stirring a muscle. But when the judge, after p.r.o.nouncing the last words with a lingering fulness and impressiveness, continued through the heavy silence: "And that, at a subsequent time, your body, bound in irons, shall be suspended upon a gibbet erected as near as possible to the scenes of your successive crimes, and shall there remain as a lasting warning to wrong-doers of the inevitable ultimate end of such an evil life as yours," a wave of crimson flew to the prisoner's forehead, upon which every vein swelled ominously.