Chapter IV.

Mrs. Netterville waited until the echo of his retreating footsteps had died away in the corridor, and then fastening the door so as to secure herself from any further interruption from the outside, she once more fell on her knees before the crucifix, and buried her face in both her hands. How long she remained thus she never knew exactly; but the shades of a short January evening were already gathering in the room, when, with a start and a look as if her conscience smote her, she rose suddenly from her knees. "Christ pardon me!" she muttered half aloud, "that, in my own selfish sorrows, I have forgotten others! Poor wretch! By this time he must be well-nigh famished, if, indeed, (though I trust it will not,) the delay has not worked him deeper mischief."

As these thoughts passed rapidly through her mind, she opened a cupboard close at hand, and drew from thence a bottle of wine, with some other articles of delicate food, packed carefully in a wicker-basket, and evidently left there for some especial purpose. She then sought through the gloom for a cloak, which she threw upon her shoulders, and, drawing the hood down over her face, and taking the basket on her arm, she hastily left the room. Not, however, by the door through which Hamish and the servants had retreated, but by another at the opposite end, and which was almost invisible, in consequence of its forming one of the panels in the black oak wainscoting of the chamber. It led her directly by a short stone passage to another door or low wicket, on opening which she found herself in the private grounds of the castle. Before her at no great distance, stood an old ivy-covered church, half hidden in a group of tall Irish trees, which sheltered its little cemetery. {181} This was not the parish church, but a private chapel, built by the Netterville family for their own particular use; and here their infants had been baptized, their daughters married, and their old men and women laid reverently to their last slumbers, ever since they had established their existence in the land.

Mrs. Netterville could not resist a sigh as she glanced toward its venerable walls. It seemed as if it were only yesterday that she had gone there to lay down her husband in his lowly grave, hoping and praying, out of the depths of her own great grief, that she might soon be permitted to sleep quietly beside him. And now, even this sad hope was to be hers no longer; this poor possession of six feet of earth was to be wrested from her; strangers would lay her in a distant grave, and even in death she would be separated from her husband. The thought was too painful to bear much lingering upon it, and turning her back upon the church, Mrs. Netterville followed a path which lay close under the castle walls, and led to a court-yard at a considerable distance. Round this court-yard were grouped stables and other offices, which, having been built at different periods and without any consecutive idea as a whole, presented rather the appearance of a collection of stunted farm-houses, than of the regular out-buildings of an important mansion.

Each of these houses had a private entrance of its own; and opening the door of one of them, Mrs. Netterville looked in quietly and entered. The interior was a room, poorly but yet decently furnished, and on a low settle-bed at the farther end lay a young man, who, with his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, had all the look of a person just rescued from the jaws of death. A knapsack on the floor, a pike and musket in one corner of the room, and a steel cap and buff coat in another, seemed to announce him as one of the band of successful soldiers who were even then in possession of the castle.

Poor fellow! he lay, with closed eyes, wan and weary, on his bed, looking, at that moment, like anything rather than like a successful soldier; but he lifted his head as he caught the noise of the door creaking on its hinges, and his face brightened into an expression of joy and gratitude pleasant to behold when he discovered Mrs. Netterville standing on the threshold.

"Can you ever forgive me?" she said, going up to him at once. "I cannot easily forgive myself for having left you so long alone. In the grief and anguish in which I have been plunged all day, I had well-nigh forgotten your existence, and you must be faint, I fear me, for want of nourishment."

"Nay, madam," he answered, gently, indeed, but yet with a good deal of that comfortable self-assurance in spiritual matters which seems to have been an especial inheritance of "Cromwell's saints." "If _you_ have forgotten, the Lord at least hath been mindful of his servant, and hath cast so deep a slumber on my senses, that I have been altogether unconscious of the lapse of time, or of the absence of those carnal comforts which, however the spirit may rebel against them, are nevertheless not altogether to be despised, as being the means by which we receive strength to do the bidding of our Master."

Mrs. Netterville could not help thinking that the posset-cup and soothing draught, which she had administered the night before, might have had as much as any especial interposition of Providence to say to his seasonable slumbers; but the times were too much out of joint to permit of her making, however reverently, such an observation, so she merely touched his brow and hand, and said:

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"I am right glad, at all events, that you seem in nowise to have suffered from my neglect. Eat now and drink, I pray you; for I perceive by this refreshing moisture on your skin that all danger has passed away, and that you need at present no worse physic than good food and wine to restore you to your former strength."

"Nay, madam," said the soldier, with great and hardly repressed feeling in his voice and manner. "Eat or drink I cannot, or in any way refresh myself, until I have poured forth my song of gratitude, first to the Lord of hosts, who hath delivered me from this great danger, and then to you, who have tended me (even as the widow of Sarepta might have waited on Elias) through the perils of a sickness from which my very comrades and fellow-laborers in the vineyard fled, trembling and afraid."

"You must pardon them, good Jackson," said Mrs. Netterville, "and all the more readily, because this disease, from which you have so marvellously recovered, is, men say, in its rapid progress and almost sure mortality, akin, if not indeed wholly similar, to that terrible malady the plague, which is the scourge of the Eastern nations, and leaves crowded cities, once it has entered in, as silent and deserted as the sepulchres of the dead. You cannot therefore wonder, and you need not feel aggrieved, if men who would have risked their lives for you on the battle-field, yet shrunk from its unseen, and therefore, to poor human nature, its more awful dangers."

"Nay, madam, I blame them not; perhaps even in their place I should have done the same. Nevertheless--and though I have no ill feeling toward them--I cannot forget that you, a Popish woman and an enemy, have done that for me which the very children of my own household have shrunk from doing, and I would fain show my gratitude if I could."

"You can show it, and that right easily, if you will," she answered kindly, "by eating and drinking heartily of the provisions I have brought, and so regaining strength to wait all the sooner on yourself. For I shall soon, as you doubtless know already, have work in hand which will compel me to make my visits fewer; and yet I shall not like to risk other lives by sending any of the household to wait on you in my stead."

"Alas! madam, I fear I have been but a troublesome and unprofitable, though not altogether, I do assure you, a thankless guest," the man answered, in a somewhat sad and deprecatory manner.

"Nay; but now you mistake me altogether," she answered earnestly. "You have been a most patient sufferer, and that trouble--which is altogether unavoidable in any sickness--has been, you may believe me, a pleasure rather than an uneasiness to me. I only meant to say that, though I shall still continue to visit you morning and evening, I shall not be able to come so often in the daytime as I have been used to do; for all matters in this sad affair of the transplantation having fallen into my hands, you may well imagine it is as much or more than one poor woman can well accomplish by her own unaided efforts."

"Would that I could aid you," he answered fervently--"would that I could comfort you! But, alas! in this matter of the transplantation, I can do naught, seeing that it is the Lord himself who hath girded on our swords, bidding us to smite and spare not. {183} Nevertheless, lady, I am not ungrateful, and in the long, sleepless nights of my weary malady I have wrestled for you in prayer, striving exceedingly and being much exercised on your account; nor gave I over until I had received the comfortable assurance that, as the Lord sent angels to Lot to deliver him out of Sodom, so he would some day make of me a shield and a defence, whereby you might be snatched from the woes that he is about to rain down on this land, because 'the cry of its idolatry is waxen great before his face,' and he hath sworn to destroy it."

"Well, well!" she answered a little impatiently, "I thank you for your good-will, at all events; but for the present we will discourse no further on this matter. God will one day judge between us, and by his fiat I am content to stand or fall, in all those matters of religion on which, unhappily, we differ. See, I have trimmed the lamp so that it will burn brightly until morning, and there is food and wine on this little table. I will put it close to the bed, so that when you need nourishment, you will have but to put forth your hand to take it. And now I must say good-night--to-morrow I will be with you by the early dawn."

Having thus done all that either charity or hospitality could ask at her hands, Mrs. Netterville retired from the room, sooner, probably, than she would have done if the soldier's last words had not grated on her ear, and roused more angry passions than she wished to yield to in her breast.

"He has a good heart, poor wretch," she thought, as she took her way back to the castle; "but strange and fearful is it to see how pride, in him, as in all his comrades, usurps the place of true humility and religion."

The sudden sound of a pistol going off disturbed her in the midst of her cogitations; and with a pang of indescribable fear and presentiment of evil at her heart, she stood still. It seemed to come from the grove of yew-trees round the church, and was not repeated. Having ascertained this fact, she walked rapidly forward in the direction of the sound, her mind in a perfect whirl of fear, and only able to shape itself into the one thought, pregnant of future evil, that, either by some of her own people, or by one of the English soldiers, a murder had been committed. Just as she entered the grove of yew-trees, she perceived something like the loose garb of a woman fluttering down the path before her, and then suddenly disappearing behind the tower of the little church. She did not dare to call out; but feeling certain that this person must either have fired the shot herself, or have seen it fired by some one else, she quickened her pace in order to overtake her. Twilight was already deepening among the yew-trees; the path, moreover, was overgrown with weeds and brambles, and as she ran with her eyes fixed on the spot where the figure had disappeared, she felt herself suddenly tripped up by some object lying right before her, and fell heavily against it. At the first touch of that unseen something, a sense of terror, such as animals are said to be conscious of in the presence of their own dead, seized upon her senses, and all the blood was curdling in her veins as slowly and with difficulty she removed herself from its contact. Gradually, as she recovered from the stunning effects of her fall, and her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom around her, the "thing" on the ground shaped itself into the form of a human being--but of a human being so still and motionless, that it seemed probable it was a corpse already. {184} Very reluctantly she put forth her hand to try if life were really extinct; but suddenly discovering that she was dabbling it in a pool of yet warm blood, she withdrew it with a shudder.

"My God! my God!" she moaned, "what enemy hath done this? Surely it is one of the soldiers from the castle, and they will accuse our people of the murder! Grant Heaven, indeed, that they are innocent! Would that Hamish were here to help me. Yet no! they would certainly in that case try to fix the guilt on him. I will go hence and let them discover it as they can. Yet what if I should meet them? I am all dabbled in his gore!"

With a new and sharp terror in her heart, as this thought took possession of it, she began hastily to rub her hands in the moss and dry leaves around her, in order to free them from the blood which clung to them; and she was still engaged in this rather equivocal occupation when a sudden stream of light was cast on her from behind, and, rising suddenly, she found herself face to face with the officer who had been left in command of the garrison of the castle.

Half-a-dozen of his men were at his back, and by the light of the lantern, which he carried, she read in their faces their conviction of her guilt. At a sign from their chief they surrounded her in awful silence, and he himself laid his hand heavily on her shoulder:

"Murderess!" he said, "thou art taken in thy sin!"

"I did it not," cried Mrs. Netterville, so utterly confounded by this terrible accusation that she hardly knew what she said. "So help me Heaven! I am innocent of this deed!"

"Innocent! sayest thou?" the officer answered firmly. "Innocent! thou with his blood red upon thy hands! Yea, and thy very garments clotted in his gore! If then thou art innocent, as thou wouldst have us to believe, say what wert thou doing in this lonely spot at an hour when none but the murderer or the wanton would care to be abroad?"

"I was returning from a visit to the soldier Jackson--a visit which, as thou knowest, Master Rippel, I pay him every evening at the hour of dusk; and I had well-nigh reached the castle, when hearing a shot in this direction, and fearing mischief either for my own people or for thine, I came hither if possible to prevent it."

"A likely story, truly!" replied the officer, who, unluckily for her, was one of the fiercest, if not the saintliest, of the band of warriors then domiciled at the castle. "Nay, woman, and for thine own sake hold thy peace, or out of thine own mouth thou shalt stand presently condemned. For tell me, my masters," he added, addressing the other men, "where will you find a woman, who, hearing a shot, and dreading mischief, would not have fled from the danger, instead of incontinently rushing, as she would have us to believe she did, into its very jaws?"

"Yet have I rushed into the jaws of danger more than once already within this fortnight, and that not for the sake of my own people but of thine; as none ought to know better than thou, Master Rippel, and thy comrades," Mrs. Netterville, now fairly put upon her mettle, retorted bravely.

"Nay, and that is naught but the very truth, though the father of lies (which is Beelzebub) himself had said it," one of the men here ventured to remark. "For surely, Captain Rippel, you cannot have forgotten that we should have had a soldier the less in the camp of Israel, if she had not nursed the good youth Jackson through this black business of the plague, when we, even we, men anointed and girded to the fight, did hesitate to go near him."

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"Ha! Dost thou also venture to defend her?" cried the officer angrily. "Nay, then, let that woman which is called Deborah be brought forward and confronted with the prisoner. Her testimony must decide between us."

One or two of the soldiers who had been lingering at a little distance in the dusky twilight now advanced, half pushing before them, half leading, the very woman who had addressed Nellie so impudently in the morning. She came forward with a strange mixture of eagerness and reluctance in her manner; willing enough, it might be, to bear false testimony against her neighbor, but very unwilling to be confronted with its object.

They placed her face to face with Mrs. Netterville, and the captain turned his lantern so that the light fell full on the features of the latter. They were cold and calm, and almost disdainful in their expression, now that she knew who was her accuser; and Deborah, spite of all her efforts to brazen out the interview, cowered beneath her glance of scorn.

"Nay, but look well upon her, Deborah," said the captain, seeing that her eyes fell beneath those of the woman she had accused. "Look well upon her, and say if this be not that Moabitish woman whom thou sawest, as thou wert lingering (for no good purpose, I do fear me greatly) in the shadow of the trees--whom thou sawest, say I, steal hither between light and darkness, and treacherously do to death our brother Tomkins, who, being--as methinks you revealed to me just now--wearied overmuch with prayer and holding forth, (he was, as I myself can testify, a man of most precious doctrine, and greatly favored in the gift of preaching,) had come hither to repose himself."

"Nay," said the woman, speaking in very tolerable English, an accomplishment she had picked up when in service in Dublin; "of that great weariness caused by too much prayer and preaching. Master Rippel, I said naught--my own impression being," she added, unable even before such an audience to repress the gibe, "that the slumberous inclinations of worthy Master Tomkins had been caused by a somewhat too ardent devotion lately tendered to the wine-cask."

"Peace, scoffer! peace!" cried the captain. "And if thou wouldst have thy blasphemy against the Lord and against his saints forgiven, in this world or the next, look once more on the face of the prisoner, and be not shamefaced or afraid, but say out boldly whether you can swear to her in a court of justice as being the person whom you espied just now in the act--yea, the very act of murder."

"I can," said the woman shortly, and avoiding the eye of Mrs. Netterville as she spoke.

"Thou canst?" the latter said in a tone of indignant astonishment. "And pray, if thou wert watching me so narrowly, why didst thou not endeavor to prevent me?--why not strike up my weapon?--why not cry out, at least, so as to rouse up the sleeping soldier?"

"I did what I could," the woman sullenly responded. "I sought out his comrades. It was their look-out, not mine, and to them accordingly I left it."

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"She speaks the truth, as we who so lately heard her tale can testify," the captain answered quickly. "You see, my men," he added, addressing the other soldiers, "Beelzebub is divided against himself, and the very children of his kingdom bear witness against each other. Surely the woman Netterville is guilty. Take her, therefore, some of you, a prisoner to the castle, while the rest prepare a decent burial for our murdered brother. I myself must speak apart with the witness Deborah, in order to put her testimony into a fitting shape to be laid before the court of my lords, the high commissioners of justice."