In a Glass Darkly (16 page)

And now the charge was over, the huge chief-justice leaned back panting
and gloating on the prisoner. Every one in the court turned about, and
gazed with steadfast hatred on the man in the dock. From the jury-box
where the twelve sworn brethren were whispering together, a sound in the
general stillness like a prolonged "hiss-s-s!" was heard; and then, in
answer to the challenge of the officer, "How say you, gentlemen of the
jury, guilty or not guilty?" came in a melancholy voice the finding,
"Guilty."

The place seemed to the eyes of the prisoner to grow gradually darker
and darker, till he could discern nothing distinctly but the lumen of
the eyes that were turned upon him from every bench and side and corner
and gallery of the building. The prisoner doubtless thought that he had
quite enough to say, and conclusive, why sentence of death should not be
pronounced upon him; but the lord chief-justice puffed it contemptuously
away, like so much smoke, and proceeded to pass sentence of death upon
the prisoner, having named the tenth of the ensuing month for his
execution.

Before he had recovered the stun of this ominous farce, in obedience to
the mandate, "Remove the prisoner," he was led from the dock. The lamps
seemed all to have gone out, and there were stoves and charcoal-fires
here and there, that threw a faint crimson light on the walls of the
corridors through which he passed. The stones that composed them looked
now enormous, cracked and unhewn.

He came into a vaulted smithy, where two men, naked to the waist, with
heads like bulls, round shoulders, and the arms of giants, were welding
red-hot chains together with hammers that pelted like thunderbolts.

They looked on the prisoner with fierce red eyes, and rested on their
hammers for a minute; and said the elder to his companion, "Take out
Elijah Harbottle's gyves;" and with a pincers he plucked the end which
lay dazzling in the fire from the furnace.

"One end locks," said he, taking the cool end of the iron in one hand,
while with the grip of a vice he seized the leg of the Judge, and locked
the ring round his ankle. "The other," he said with a grin, "is welded."

The iron band that was to form the ring for the other leg lay still red
hot upon the stone floor, with briliant sparks sporting up and down its
surface.

His companion, in his gigantic hands, seized the old Judge's other leg,
and pressed his foot immovably to the stone floor; while his senior, in
a twinkling, with a masterly application of pincers and hammer, sped the
glowing bar around his ankle so tight that the skin and sinews smoked
and bubbled again, and old Judge Harbottle uttered a yell that seemed to
chill the very stones, and make the iron chains quiver on the wall.

Chains, vaults, smiths, and smithy all vanished in a moment; but the
pain continued. Mr. Justice Harbottle was suffering torture all round
the ankle on which the infernal smiths had just been operating.

His friends, Thavies and Beller, were startled by the Judge's roar in
the midst of their elegant trifling about a marriage
à-la-mode
case
which was going on. The Judge was in panic as well as pain. The street
lamps and the light of his own hall door restored him.

"I'm very bad," growled he between his set teeth; "my foot's blazing.
Who was he that hurt my foot? 'Tis the gout—'tis the gout!" he said,
awaking completely. "How many hours have we been coming from the
playhouse? 'Sblood, what has happened on the way? I've slept half the
night!"

There had been no hitch or delay, and they had driven home at a good
pace.

The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and the attack,
though very short, was sharp; and when, in about a fortnight, it
subsided, his ferocious joviality did not return. He could not get this
dream, as he chose to call it, out of his head.

People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His doctor said he
should go for a fortnight to Buxton.

Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always conning over
the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision—"in one
calendar month from the date of this day;" and then the usual form, "and
you shall be hanged by the neck till you are dead," etc. "That will be
the 10th—I'm not much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff
dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in my thoughts,
as if it forecast misfortune of some sort. I wish the day my dream gave
me were passed and over. I wish I were well purged of my gout. I wish I
were as I used to be. 'Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot."
The copy of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial with
many a snort and sneer he would read over and over again, and the
scenery and people of his dream would rise about him in places the most
unlikely, and steal him in a moment from all that surrounded him into a
world of shadows.

The Judge had lost his iron energy and banter. He was growing taciturn
and morose. The Bar remarked the change, as well they might. His friends
thought him ill. The doctor said he was troubled with hypochondria, and
that his gout was still lurking in his system, and ordered him to that
ancient haunt of crutches and chalk-stones, Buxton.

The Judge's spirits were very low; he was frightened about himself; and
he described to his housekeeper, having sent for her to his study to
drink a dish of tea, his strange dream in his drive home from Drury Lane
Playhouse. He was sinking into the state of nervous dejection in which
men lose their faith in orthodox advice, and in despair consult quacks,
astrologers, and nursery storytellers. Could such a dream mean that he
was to have a fit, and so die on the both? She did not think so. On the
contrary, it was certain some good luck must happen on that day.

The Judge kindled; and for the first time for many days, he looked for a
minute or two like himself, and he tapped her on the cheek with the hand
that was not in flannel.

"Odsbud! odsheart! you dear rogue! I had forgot. There is young
Tom—yellow Tom, my nephew, you know, lies sick at Harrogate; why shouldn't
he go that day as well as another, and if he does, I get an estate by
it? Why, lookee, I asked Doctor Hedstone yesterday if I was like to take
a fit any time, and he laughed, and swore I was the last man in town to
go off that way."

The Judge sent most of his servants down to Buxton to make his lodgings
and all things comfortable for him. He was to follow in a day or two.

It was now the 9th; and the next day well over, he might laugh at his
visions and auguries.

On the evening of the 9th, Dr. Hedstone's footman knocked at the
Judge's door. The Doctor ran up the dusky stairs to the drawing-room. It
was a March evening, near the hour of sunset, with an east wind
whistling sharply through the chimney-stacks. A wood fire blazed
cheerily on the hearth. And Judge Harbottle, in what was then called a
brigadier-wig, with his red roquelaure on, helped the glowing effect of
the darkened chamber, which looked red all over like a room on fire.

The Judge had his feet on a stool, and his huge grim purple face
confronted the fire, and seemed to pant and swell, as the blaze
alternately spread upward and collapsed. He had fallen again among his
blue devils, and was thinking of retiring from the Bench, and of fifty
other gloomy things.

But the Doctor, who was an energetic son of Aesculapius, would listen to
no croaking, told the Judge he was full of gout, and in his present
condition no judge even of his own case, but promised him leave to
pronounce on all those melancholy questions, a fortnight later.

In the meantime the Judge must be very careful. He was overcharged with
gout, and he must not provoke an attack, till the waters of Buxton
should do that office for him, in their own salutary way.

The Doctor did not think him perhaps quite so well as he pretended, for
he told him he wanted rest, and would be better if he went forthwith to
his bed.

Mr. Gerningham, his valet, assisted him, and gave him his drops; and the
Judge told him to wait in his bedroom till he should go to sleep.

Three persons that night had specially odd stories to tell.

The housekeeper had got rid of the trouble of amusing her little girl at
this anxious time, by giving her leave to run about the sitting-rooms
and look at the pictures and china, on the usual condition of touching
nothing. It was not until the last gleam of sunset had for some time
faded, and the twilight had so deepened that she could no longer discern
the colours on the china figures on the chimneypiece or in the cabinets,
that the child returned to the housekeeper's room to find her mother.

To her she related, after some prattle about the china, and the
pictures, and the Judge's two grand wigs in the dressing-room off the
library, an adventure of an extraordinary kind.

In the hall was placed, as was customary in those times, the sedan-chair
which the master of the house occasionally used, covered with stamped
leather, and studded with gilt nails, and with its red silk blinds down.
In this case, the doors of this old-fashioned conveyance were locked,
the windows up, and, as I said, the blinds down, but not so closely that
the curious child could not peep underneath one of them, and see into
the interior.

A parting beam from the setting sun, admitted through the window of a
back room, shot obliquely through the open door, and lighting on the
chair, shone with a dull transparency through the crimson blind.

To her surprise, the child saw in the shadow a thin man, dressed in
black, seated in it; he had sharp dark features; his nose, she fancied,
a little awry, and his brown eyes were looking straight before him; his
hand was on his thigh, and he stirred no more than the waxen figure she
had seen at Southwark fair.

A child is so often lectured for asking questions, and on the propriety
of silence, and the superior wisdom of its elders, that it accepts most
things at last in good faith; and the little girl acquiesced
respectfully in the occupation of the chair by this mahogany-faced
person as being all right and proper.

It was not until she asked her mother who this man was, and observed her
scared face as she questioned her more minutely upon the appearance of
the stranger, that she began to understand that she had seen something
unaccountable.

Mrs. Carwell took the key of the chair from its nail over the footman's
shelf, and led the child by the hand up to the hall, having a lighted
candle in her other hand. She stopped at a distance from the chair, and
placed the candlestick in the child's hand.

"Peep in, Margery, again, and try if there's anything there," she
whispered; "hold the candle near the blind so as to throw its light
through the curtain."

The child peeped, this time with a very solemn face, and intimated at
once that he was gone.

"Look again, and be sure," urged her mother.

The little girl was quite certain; and Mrs. Carwell, with her mob-cap of
lace and cherry-coloured ribbons, and her dark brown hair, not yet
powdered, over a very pale face, unlocked the door, looked in, and
beheld emptiness.

"All a mistake, child, you see."

"
There!
ma'am! see there! He's gone round the corner," said the child.

"Where?" said Mrs. Carwell, stepping backward a step.

"Into that room."

"Tut, child! 'twas the shadow," cried Mrs. Carwell, angrily, because she
was frightened. "I moved the candle." But she clutched one of the poles
of the chair, which leant against the wall in the corner, and pounded
the floor furiously with one end of it, being afraid to pass the open
door the child had pointed to.

The cook and two kitchen-maids came running upstairs, not knowing what
to make of this unwonted alarm.

They all searched the room; but it was still and empty, and no sign of
any one's having been there.

Some people may suppose that the direction given to her thoughts by this
odd little incident will account for a very strange illusion which Mrs.
Carwell herself experienced about two hours later.

Mrs. Flora Carwell was going up the great staircase with a posset for
the Judge in a china bowl, on a little silver tray.

Across the top of the well-staircase there runs a massive oak rail; and,
raising her eyes accidentally, she saw an extremely odd-looking
stranger, slim and long, leaning carelessly over with a pipe between his
finger and thumb. Nose, lips, and chin seemed all to droop downward into
extraordinary length, as he leant his odd peering face over the
banister. In his other hand he held a coil of rope, one end of which
escaped from under his elbow and hung over the rail.

Mrs. Carwell, who had no suspicion at the moment, that he was not a real
person, and fancied that he was some one employed in cording the Judge's
luggage, called to know what he was doing there.

Instead of answering, he turned about, and walked across the lobby, at
about the same leisurely pace at which she was ascending, and entered a
room, into which she followed him. It was an uncarpeted and unfurnished
chamber. An open trunk lay upon the floor empty, and beside it the coil
of rope; but except herself there her. Perhaps, when she was able to
think it over, it was a relief to was no one in the room.

Mrs. Carwell was very much frightened, and now concluded that the child
must have seen the same ghost that had just appeared to believe so; for
the face, figure, and dress described by the child were awfully like
Pyneweck; and this certainly was not he.

Very much scared and very hysterical, Mrs. Carwell ran down to her room,
afraid to look over her shoulder, and got some companions about her, and
wept, and talked, and drank more than one cordial, and talked and wept
again, and so on, until, in those early days, it was ten o'clock, and
time to go to bed.