Walladmor Volume II Part 4

Kilmary muttered a few inarticulate words; and slunk behind. Meantime the constables dismounted; and, having handcuffed Bertram, pa.s.sed a cord round his body, the two extremities of which were carried in the hands of Sampson and another, who remounted their horses and led him after them in this felonious style.

Fortunately for Bertram's comfort, Sampson's wound obliged him to ride slowly: notwithstanding which he was heartily thankful when, after advancing for some hours, they came within view of the church towers at Machynleth, distant about three miles--and found Alderman Gravesand with a barouche-and-four waiting for them at the top of the hill.

Bertram was placed in the carriage; and Sampson took his seat by his side; Kilmary mounting Sampson's horse. By this time it was four o'clock; and Alderman Gravesand directed the whole party to push forward at their utmost speed; "it was his intention to carry the prisoner to Walladmor Castle nearly thirty miles distant; and he wished to be through Machynleth before the light failed."

"Would his worship then go through the town?" asked Sampson: "might it not be better to send forward with orders for horses to meet them in the outskirts, and avoid the town by making a little circuit?"

"No:" this proposal the Alderman rejected, as he would have done any other which looked like a compromise of the magisterial dignity or a concession to the popular spirit. Mr. Gravesand was a man who doated on what he called energy and vigour; others called it tyranny and the spirit of domineering. Of Lord Chesterfield's golden maxim--_Suaviter in modo, fort.i.ter in re_--he attended so earnestly to the latter half that he generally forgot the former. And upon the present occasion he was resolved to parade his contempt for "the jacobinical populace" of Machynleth by carrying his prisoner boldly through the midst of them.

The fact is--that the populace of Machynleth were not Jacobinical, nor ever showed any disposition to insubordination unless in behalf of smuggling (which on this coast was a matter of deep interest to the poor man's comforts), or in cases where Alderman Gravesand was concerned. The Lord Lieutenant, whom they loved and reverenced, could at all times calm them by a word; and any inferior magistrate, who would take the least pains to cultivate their good will, was sure of finding them in all ordinary cases reasonable and accessible to persuasion. But for Alderman Gravesand,--who had never missed an opportunity of expressing his hatred and affected contempt for them, they were determined on showing him that there was no love lost between them: right or wrong, in every case they gave him as much trouble as they possibly could. And in the present case, which was supposed to be an arrest for some partic.i.p.ation in the smuggler's affair of the funeral, they had one motive more than was needed to sharpen the spirit of resistance to the worshipful gentleman.

CHAPTER XIV.

That when the people, which had thereabout Long wayted, saw his sudden desolation, They gan together in tumultuous rout And mutining to stirre up civil faction For certain losse of so great expectation: For well they hoped to have got great good And wondrous riches by his innovation: Therefore resolving to revenge his blood They rose in armes, and all in battell order stood.

_Faery Queene_, B. V. C. III.

Rapidly as the magisterial party moved, the news of their approach had run before them; and, on entering the north gates of Machynleth, they found nearly all the male population in the streets. Large bodies of smugglers were dispersed in the crowd, many of whom saw clearly that the magistrate was in a mistake as to the person of his prisoner: but they had good reasons for leaving him in his error. Up to the inn-door, where it was foreseen that the carriage would draw up to change horses, no particular opposition was offered to the advance of that or it's escort. Hisses indeed, groans, hooting, curses, and every variety of insult short of manual violence, continued to rise in stormy chorus all the way to the inn-door. But the attack, which was obviously in agitation, waited either for the first blow to be struck by some one more daring than the rest--or for some more favourable situation.

Just as the carriage stopped, an upper window was thrown up, and forth came the head of Mr. Dulberry the radical reformer in a perfect panic of exultation. This was the happiest moment of his existence. No longer in mere vision or prophetic rapture, but with his bodily eyes, he beheld the civil authority set at nought, insulted, threatened; and a storm rising in which he might have the honour to preside and direct.

He was suffocated with joy; and for a minute found himself too much affected to speak.

Whilst he was yet speechless, and distracted by the choice amongst ten thousand varieties of argument and advice for the better nursing of the infant riot,--a drunken man advanced from the inn and laid himself across the street immediately before the feet of the horses which were at this moment harnessing to the carriage, loudly protesting that they should pa.s.s over his body before he would see them carry off to a dungeon so n.o.ble a martyr to the freedom of trade. Alderman Gravesand directed the constables to remove the man by force. This fired the train of Dulberry's pent-up eloquence. He "adjured the mob by those who met at Runnymead to resist such an act of lawless power; applauded the heaven-born suggestion of the drunkard; called upon them all to follow his example; by Magna Charta every Englishman was ent.i.tled to stretch himself at length in the mud when and where he would; and at the Alderman's peril be it, if he should presume to drive over them."

Meantime the constables had seized the man, and tossed him into the gutter. So far the system of vigour seemed to carry the day. But either this act or the urgency of the time (the horses being now harnessed and the postillions on the point of mounting) was the signal for the universal explosion of the popular wrath. Stones, coals, brickbats, whizzed on every side: the traces of the barouche were cut: the constables were knocked down: those of them, who were seated in the carriage, were collared and pulled out; excepting only Sampson who, being a powerful and determined man, still kept his hold of Bertram: and the Alderman, who was the main cause of the whole disturbance, was happy to make a precipitate retreat into the inn; at an upper window of which he soon appeared with the Riot Act in his hand.

At this crisis, however, from some indications which he observed below of the state of temper in regard to himself just now prevailing amongst the mob he thought it prudent to lay aside his first intentions; and, putting the Riot Act into his pocket, he began to bow; most awkwardly attempted the new part of gracious conciliator; expostulated gently; laid his hand on his heart; and endeavoured to explain that the prisoner was not arrested for any offence against the revenue laws, but for high treason. Not a syllable of what he said was heard. At the adjoining window stood Mr. Dulberry, labouring with a zeal as ineffectual to heighten and to guide the storm which the Alderman was labouring to lay. Like two rival candidates on the hustings, both stood making a dumb show of grimaces, rhetorical gestures, and pa.s.sionate appeals; blowing hot and cold like Boreas and Phoebus in their contest for the traveller; the one striving to sow, the other to extirpate sedition: the reformer blowing the bellows and fanning the fire which the magistrate was labouring to extinguish.

Fortunately perhaps for both, and possibly for all the parties concerned, arguments were now at hand more efficacious than those of either. At this moment a trampling of horses was heard; words of command could be distinguished in military language; and amidst a general cry of "The red coats! the red coats!" a squadron of dragoons was seen advancing rapidly along the street. The mob gave way immediately, and retired into the houses and side alleys. Just as the dragoons came up, a bold fellow had knocked the wounded constable backwards, and was in the act of seizing firm hold of Bertram,--when the commanding officer rode up and with the flat of his sabre struck him so violently over the head and shoulders that he rolled into the mud, but retained however presence of mind enough to retire within a party of his friends.

In a few minutes the officer had succeeded in restoring order: he now took the prisoner from the carriage and mounted him behind a dragoon.

His hands, which had been hitherto tied behind him, were for a moment unfettered--pa.s.sed round the dragoon's body--and then again confined by cords. These arrangements made,--the whole cavalcade accompanied by two constables drew off at a rapid pace to the city gates. Under this third variety in the style of his escort, Bertram began to experience great fatigue and suffering. Without any halt, or a word speaking, the cavalry proceeded at a long trot for two hours along a well-beaten road. On reaching a wretched ale-house, however, necessity obliged them to make a short halt and to take such refreshments as the place afforded. To the compa.s.sion of a dragoon Bertram was here indebted for a dram; and he was allowed to stretch himself at length on the floor of the house and to take a little sleep. From this however he was soon roused by the gingling of spurs; roughly shaken up; and mounted again in the former fashion behind the dragoon. It was now dark; a night-storm was beginning to rise; and it appeared to the prisoner as though the road were approaching the coast. The air grew colder and colder, the wind more piercing, and Bertram--whose situation made all change of posture impossible--felt as though he could not long hold out against the benumbing rigour of the frost. So much was his firmness subdued, that he could not forbear expressing his suffering by inarticulate moans. The dragoon, who rode before him, was touched with compa.s.sion and gave him a draught from his rum flask. The strength, given by spirituous liquors to a person under the action of frost, is notoriously but momentary and leaves the sufferer exposed to an immediate and more dangerous reaction of the frost. This effect Bertram experienced: a pleasant sensation began to steal over him; one limb began to stiffen after another; and his vital powers had no longer energy enough to resist the seductive approaches of sleep. At this moment an accident saved him. The whole troop pulled up abruptly; and at the same instant a piercing cry for help, and a violent trampling of horses' hoofs, roused Bertram from his stupefaction.

The accident was this: a trooper had diverged from the line of road, and was in the act of driving his horse over a precipice which overhung the sea-coast just at the very moment when his error was betrayed to him by the moving lights below. The horse however clung by his fore-feet, which had fortunately been rough-shod, to a tablet of slanting rock glazed over with an enamel of ice; and his comrades came up in time to save both the trooper and his horse. Meantime the harsh and sudden shock of this abrupt halt, together with the appalling character of the incident which led to it, had roused Bertram; and he was still further roused by the joyful prospect of a near termination to his journey as well as by the remarkable features of the road on which his eyes now opened from his brief slumber.

The road, as he now became aware, wound upwards along the extreme edge of the rocky barrier which rose abruptly from the sea-coast. In the murky depths below he saw nothing but lights tossing up and down, gleaming at intervals, and then buried in sudden darkness--the lights probably of vessels driving before wind and weather in a heavy sea. The storm was now in its strength on the sea-quarter. The clouds had parted before the wind; and a pale gleam of the moon suddenly betrayed to the prisoner the spectacle of a billowy sea below him, an iron barrier of rocky coast, and at some distance above him the gothic towers and turrets of an old castle running out as it were over the sea itself upon one of the bold prominences of the cliffs. The sharp lines of this aerial pile of building were strongly relieved upon the sky which now began to be overspread with moonlight. To this castle their route was obviously directed. But danger still threatened them: the road was narrow and steep; the wind bl.u.s.tered; and gusty squalls at intervals threatened to upset both horse and rider into the abyss. However the well-trained horses overcame all difficulties; at length the head of the troop reached the castle; and the foremost dragoon seizing a vast iron knocker struck the steel-plated gate so powerfully, that the echo on a more quiet night would have startled all the deer in the adjacent park for two miles round.

CHAPTER XV.

_Goaler._ You shall not now be stolen: you have locks upon you: So graze as you find pasture.--_Cymbeline_, Act. V.

During the two or three minutes that the cavalry and their prisoner were waiting for an answer to the summons,--Bertram, who was relapsing at every instant into a dozy slumber and then as suddenly starting awake (probably in consequence of the abrupt stillness succeeding to the severe motion of a high-trotting horse), was suddenly awakened by the noise and stir of admission into the castle, which unfolded a succession of circ.u.mstances as grand and impressive as if they had been arranged by some great artist of scenical effect. From one of the towers which flanked the gates, a question was put and immediately answered by the foremost trooper: question and answer however were alike lost to Bertram and dispersed upon the stormy ravings of the wind. Soon after was heard the clank of bars and the creaking of the gates,--gates

That were plated with iron within and without Whence an army in battle array had march'd out.[1]

They were like the gates of a cathedral, and they began slowly to swing backward on their hinges. As they opened, the dimensions and outlines of their huge valves were defined by the light within; and, when they were fully open, a beautiful spectacle was exposed of a crowd of faces with flambeaus intermingled fluctuating on the further side of the court. The gateway and the main area of the court were now cleared for the entrance of the cavalry; and the great extent of the court was expressed by the remote distance at which the crowd seemed to stand.

Then came the entrance of the dragoons, which was a superb expression of animal power. The ground continued to ascend even through the gateway and into the very court itself; and to the surprise of Bertram who had never until this day seen the magnificent cavalry of the English army, the leading trooper reined up tightly, and spurred his horse, who started off with the bounding ramp of a leopard through the archway. Bertram's horse was the sixtieth in the file; and, as the course of the road between him and the gates lay in a bold curve, he had the pleasure of watching this movement as it spread like a train of gun-powder, or like a race of sun-beams over a corn-field through the whole line a-head of him: it neared and neared: in a moment he himself was carried away and absorbed into the vortex: the whole train swept like a hurricane through the gloomy gateway into the s.p.a.cious court flashing with unsteady lights, wheeled round with beautiful precision into line, halted, and dressed.

What followed pa.s.sed as in a dream to Bertram: for he was by this time seriously ill; and would have fallen off horseback, if unsupported. The lights, the tumult, and his previous exhaustion, all contributed to confuse him: and, like one who rises from his bed in the delirium of a fever, he saw nothing but a turbulent vision of torches, men, horses'

heads, glittering arms; windows that reverberated the uncertain gleams of the torches; and overhead an army of clouds driving before the wind; and here and there a pencil of moonlight that played upon the upper windows of an antique castle with a tremulous and dreamy light. To his bewildered senses the objects of sight were all blended and the sounds all dead and m.u.f.fled: he distinguished faintly the voice of an officer giving the word of command: he heard as if from some great distance the word--"Dismount:" he felt himself lifted off horseback; and then he lost all consciousness of what pa.s.sed until he found himself sitting in the arms of a soldier, and an old man in livery administering a cordial. On looking round, he perceived many others in the same dress, which he recognised as the Walladmor livery; and he now became aware that he was in Walladmor Castle.

"Is the Lord Lieutenant at home, Maxwell?" said the officer, addressing the old man who bore the office of warden in the castle.

"No, Sir Charles: he dines at Vaughan house--about twenty miles off.

But he will return by midnight. And he left orders that the prisoner should be confined in the Falcon's tower."

Bertram here stood up, and signified that he was able to walk: upon which Sir Charles Davenant, the officer who had commanded the party of dragoons, directed the two constables to go before the prisoner and two dragoons behind--whilst the old warden showed the way.

Raising his head as they crossed the extensive court, Bertram saw amongst the vast range of windows three or four which were open and crowded by female heads as he inferred from the number of white caps.

Under other circ.u.mstances he would have been apt to smile at such a spectacle as a pleasant expression of female curiosity: but at present, when he was taking his leave of social happiness--for how long a time his ignorance of the English laws would not allow him to guess, the sight was felt rather as a pathetic memento of the household charities under their tenderest aspect--and as suggesting the gentleness of female hands in painful contrast to the stern deportment of the agents of police and martial power by whom he was now surrounded. "Let all cynical women-haters," thought he, "be reduced for a month or two to my situation--and they will learn the blessed influences on human happiness of what they idly affect to despise." His own indiscretion however, as he could not disguise from himself, had reduced him to this situation: and however disturbed at the prospect before him he submitted with an air of cheerfulness and followed his guides with as firm a step as his bodily weakness would allow. Pa.s.sing from the great court, at one corner, through a long and winding gateway feebly illuminated by two lanthorns, they found themselves at the edge of a deep abyss. It was apparently a chasm in the rock that had been turned to account by the original founder of the castle, as a natural and impa.s.sable moat; far beyond it rose a lofty wall pierced with loop-holes and belted with towers--that necessarily overlooked and commanded the whole outer works through which they had pa.s.sed. At a signal from the old man a draw-bridge was dropped with a jarring sound over the chasm. Crossing this they entered a small court--surrounded by a large but shapeless pile of buildings, which gave little sign externally of much intercourse with the living world: here and there however from its small and lofty windows, sunk in the ma.s.sy stonework, a dull light was seen to twinkle; and, as far as the lanthorn would allow him to see, Bertram observed every where the marks of h.o.a.ry antiquity. At this point the officer quitted them, having first given his orders to the two dragoons in an under voice.

The termination of their course was not yet reached. At the further end of the court, the old warden opened a little gate; through this, and by a narrow arched pa.s.sage which the dragoons could only pa.s.s by stooping, they reached at length a kind of guard-room which through two holes pierced in the wall received some light--at this time but feebly dispensed by the moon. This room, it was clear, lay near to the sea-sh.o.r.e; for the wind without seemed as if it would tear up the very foundations of the walls. The old man searched anxiously in his bundle of keys, and at length applied an old rusty key to the door-lock. Not without visible signs of anxiety he then proceeded to unlatch the door.

But scarce had he half performed his work, when the storm spared him the other half by driving in the door and stretching him at his length upon the floor.

Below them at an immense depth lay the raging sea--luridly illuminated by the moon which looked out from the storm-rent clouds. The surf sent upwards a deafening roar, although the raving of the wind seemed to struggle for the upper hand. This aerial gate led to a little cell which might not unjustly have been named the house of death. From the rocky wall, upon which the guard-room stood, ran out at right angles into the sea a curtain of granite--so narrow that its utmost breadth hardly amounted to five feet, and resembling an artificial terrace or corridor that had been thrown by the bold architect across the awful abyss to a mighty pile of rock that rose like a column from the very middle of the waves. About a hundred feet from the sh.o.r.e this gallery terminated in a circular tower, which--if the connecting terrace had fallen in--would have looked like the work of a magician. This small corridor appeared the more dreadful, because the raging element below had long since forced a pa.s.sage beneath it; and, the breach being continually widened by the equinoctial storms, it was at length so far undermined that it seemed to hang like an archway in the air; and the narrow causeway might now with some propriety be termed a sea-bridge.

Bertram here recognized that part of Walladmor Castle which he had seen from the deck of the _Fleurs de Lys_.[2]

The rude dragoons even looked out with awe upon the dreadful spectacle which lay before and below. One of them stepped with folded arms to the door-way, looked out in silence, and shaking his head said--"So that's the cage our bird must be carried to?"

"Aye," said the old man, (who had now raised himself from the floor;) "desperate offenders are always lodged there."

"By G---," replied the dragoon, "at Vittoria I rode down the whole line of a French battalion that was firing by platoons: there's not a straw to choose between such service as _that_ and crossing a d---d bridge in the clouds through a gale of wind like this. A man must have the devil's luck and his own to get safe over."

"What the h---ll!" said the other dragoon,--"this fellow is to be killed at any rate; so he's out of the risk: but must _we_ run the hazard of our lives for a fellow like him? I'm as bold as another when I see reason: but I'll have some hire, I'll have value down, if I am to stand this risk."

"It's impossible," cried the first constable--"no man can stand up against the wind on such a devil's gallery: what the devil? it has no bal.u.s.trade."

"Shall we pitch the fellow down below?"

said the second constable.

"I have nothing to say against it," replied one of the dragoons.

"Nor I," said the other, "but then mind--we must tell no tales."

"Oh! as to that," replied the first constable, "we shall say the wind carried him out of our hands; and I suppose there's no c.o.c.k will crow against us when the job's done."

"And besides it is no sin," observed the second; "for hang he must; that's settled; such a villain as him can do no less. So, as matters stand, I don't see but it will be doing him a good turn to toss him into the water."

Unanimous as they were in the plan, they differed about the execution; none choosing to lay hands on the prisoner first. And very seasonably a zealous friend to Bertram stepped forward in the person of the warden.