CHAPTER VIII.

GUSTAVUS GETS INTO TROUBLE AND OUT OF IT.

While they were thus as happy as drink and frolic could make any of the sons or daughters of Adam, Gustavus was meditating on the probable effects of his extraordinary remedy for drunkenness, and enjoying already the triumph he anticipated, as the fruits of his ingenuity. He had cooked for himself a good dinner, and, being thus also in good spirits, he counted the hours as they passed, every moment of which was worth to him a grain of gold, in so far as they would purchase a relief from the thraldom and misery in which he had been so long held. He had given her four hours of the grave, and the increasing length of his stride seemed to indicate that he was fast approaching some resolution, which was probably to go and see how his Julia was faring in her dark habitation. He had left the ropes by which she had been let down, in such a position that he could draw her out again with the greatest certainty, so that he was perfectly at ease on the score of her ultimate safety; but all his efforts, he knew, would be worse than endeavouring to make iron swim, to hold an eel by the tail, to dissect cheese mites, or make a cod warble, or any other _opera inanis_, if she were taken out before she awoke and experienced all the terrors of her situation. He therefore gave her an hour or two more, and then sallied forth as grim as Hercules when he went a bull-baiting, to reconnoitre, and ascertain if any indications of her being awake came from the grave (as he expected it would be) of her bad habits and the womb of her regeneration. A very few movements of his immense limbs brought him to the spot; but not an inch of the rope he could find; and, though he pulled aside the bushes, and stared with goggle eyes into the pit, not a glimpse of the coffin could he discover. The affair was marvellous and unfathomable as the wells of Agamemnon; and he stood and stared with mute wonder, at what appeared to be nothing else in the world than bewitched devilry. He looked around him to see if he could find any traces of either the coffin or Julia Briggs; but all was still and hazy, and nothing could he see or hear; so he tried the pit again, and, to search the bottom of it, he took a long stick from a neighbouring tree, and plunged it in, and groped, and sounded; but it was clear that he never struck on wood, nor indeed upon anything but the soft brush stuff with which the Highlanders had again closed up the aperture. He even descended into the hole, as far as he could reach his limbs, while he held on by the bushy side; and he thus ascertained to a dead certainty that the never a bit of a coffin was there, or indeed anything but furze, among which his feet became entangled. Having got out again with difficulty, he fell to roaring and shouting—“Julia M’Iver! Julia M’Iver!” But no answer was returned, save by the echoing wood, which mocked him like the American bird of many voices that laughs at the eloquence of man. No other conclusion could he come to, but that Julia, coffin and all, had been carried off by the prime minister of Oberon, or some other power, that had determined to punish her for her intemperance, or him for his cruelty; and his former love returning, now that he had, perhaps for ever, lost the object of it, he grew frantic as the lover of Briseis, and stamped and strode about the wood, accusing himself as the murderer of his wife, and trembling for his neck, which he had put in a position of jeopardy. To add to his terrors, he sometimes thought he heard strange shouts of mirth, coming from under the ground; and his mind still straying to the land of the court of the pigmy king, he fancied that the thieves were rejoicing in their subterranean abodes, over the triumph they had achieved over a mortal creature. The strength or weakness of superstition has nothing to do with the size of the bones, or the strength of thews and sinews of the individuals over whom it exercises its control; and there was no marvel at all that Gustavus felt undefined terrors laying hold of him, as the darkness of the night increased, and the blackness of the mystery enveloped his brain. He had faced cannon in his day, and hewn down warriors as gigantic as himself without a qualm; but that was no reason why he should not quail before the powers of infernal or subterranean agency; and so to be sure it was well proved by what followed; for he marched home as if he had been on a retreat, with, perhaps, more ideas in his head than ever could have been supposed to find an entry into the impenetrable fortress which, in spite of rockets, he had so long carried on his shoulders.

He passed the night in pacing his apartment, expecting every moment that Julia, who was occupied according to her heart’s desire, would return to her home—but no Julia came; and in the morning he was saluted by the carrier, who asked him, with a knowing look, what had become of Mrs M’Iver, and to what use he had applied the coffin he (the carrier) had seen through the window when he last passed the house. Gustavus stared at him in amazement, without deigning one word of reply; but, the man being gone, he saw, with as much light as his brain was capable of reflecting, something like a foundation for a charge of murder against him, in the event of his wife not making her appearance. This conclusion wound up the evils that he had entailed upon himself by entering into the fearful state of matrimony; and there can be little doubt that, if he had known the Greek of the woman-hater, Simonides, of which of course he knew never a syllable, he would have thundered forth the whole epithets of his poem in a voice of thunder. Another day passed, and no Julia was yet to be seen; and on the second day, straggling individuals began to pry about the house, just as if a murder had been committed there, and they were looking for blood-spots. He grew every moment more terrified, was unable to cook, or even to eat, and roamed about with the muscles of his face hanging over the maxillary bones like flaps of leather, and sunken eyes that seemed to look inwards, where there was in fact nothing to be seen worth looking at. Every step frightened him, and every sound startled him, from reveries of trials and interrogations, and hanging and dissecting; for he looked every hour for a visit from the authorities. He had sense enough to see that everything was against him—the disappearance of Julia—their endless quarrels—the coffin—all arrayed against a drivelling, idiot statement about trying to wean his wife from the quaich by pretending to bury her alive.

Things were fast progressing to being just as bad as there is any occasion for them to be when a sinful man is the victim; for, some time afterwards, the mother of Julia herself, with two friends from the Canongate, came to see the married pair. Now, Gustavus saw them at a long distance, and, knowing that he could not account for his wife, he resolved upon sneaking away into the woods, after locking the door; and this accordingly he did in double quick time; but he had not got far away, when, upon turning to look behind him, he saw the carrier again returning, and very soon stop at his door, and enter into conversation with the three women. He watched all their motions, and it was apparent to him that the very affair of the murder they supposed he had committed was alone the subject of their conversation.

Nay, he saw them begin to try to force open the door and able to contain himself no longer, he said to himself—

“Shall Gustavus M’Iver, who has killed a dozen of Frenchmen in one day, be afraid of three women? The never will he, by Saint Sebastian!”

So he went back to the house; and when the three women and the carrier saw him coming out of the planting, they set up such a loud scream as had never been heard in these woods since the reign of the wolves, and ran up to him, crying out, that he was a base and a bloody murderer, and demanding to see the body of the sacrificed Julia, who, as her mother ejaculated, was never intended by nature to be the wife of such a fearful ogre.

“Give me the body of my daughter,” she said, “dead or alive. Where is the coffin that the carrier saw standing in the house? It is gone, and Julia is in it—buried, no doubt, in some hole of the woods. Why will you not speak, Gustavus M’Iver?”

Now, the very best reason on earth could be assigned for Gustavus saying nothing—and that was, that he had of a real truth nothing in the wide extent of his brain to say, that any one in the world, far less the mother of his wife, would believe for one instant of time. So he stood and rolled over the three women his large eyes, just, as the mother said, as if he would have eaten them all three, as she suspected he had done her daughter; but the never a vocable escaped from his lips.

“Why will you not speak, Gustavus?” cried the mother.

“Why will you not speak, man?” cried another of the women.

“Why will you not speak?” cried they all together in one question, so loud that no question since the time when all the Barons of England asked, in one cry, King John to give them their rights, had ever exceeded it in intensity and vociferation.

But it was clear this could last no longer than the patience of the women; and every one knows that the time comprehended by the longevity of that feminine virtue, is not so long as the life of Methuselah; so, in a minute, they fell on him with their nails, and rugged his hair, and scratched his face, and pulled him to the earth, and trampled upon him, till he who had fought in the Peninsula began to think that it was time for him to call up his old courage, and fight once again in his advanced years. So, rising up, he placed himself in an attitude which he knew had produced terrible effects in former times; and, to be sure, so it might, for he gnashed his teeth, and held out his yard-long arms, and rolled his eyes in such a manner, yet saying not a word all the while, that the women got alarmed, and cried to the carrier to assist them; but the man was off the moment he saw there was a chance of battle. So the women gave in, and began to try the soothing system with him—an effort in which they were as successful as their sex ever is when a man is to be humbugged; and Gustavus was on the instant mollified into softness, and even lugubrious sentimentality.