Chapter XIII

The man who, as we have said, received in that part of the country the name of Silly John, stole quietly down the stairs, and finding nobody to impede his proceedings, had no sooner entered the corridor below than he was seized with a determination of descending the great staircase, thinking, as he expressed it in his commune with himself, that it would make him feel like a lord for once in his life.

We all see and know that every step which we take in our onward path through existence, whether directed by reason or prompted by caprice, whether apparently of the most trifling nature or seemingly of the utmost consequence, not only affects ourselves and the course of our own fate, but more or less influences the state, the fortunes, and the future of others, even to the most remote bounds of that vast space in which cause and effect are constantly weaving the widespread web of events. So philosophers teach us; and such was certainly the case in the present instance; for the whim which led Silly John down the grand staircase of Danemore Castle, was by no means without its effect upon Henry Langford; and might, under many circumstances, have produced consequences of very great importance. The whole house was silent, for the servants of all classes and denominations were busy at their afternoon meal; and the half-witted man, after looking round to see that no one was near, put on an air of mock dignity, stuck the cock's feather more smartly in his hat, threw out one leg and then the other with a wide stride, and saying to himself in a low tone, "Now I'm a lord!" began to descend the staircase. At that moment his eye fell upon a sword, with its belt and sword-knot, hanging up in the corridor, and in order to make his figure complete, he turned back and decorated his person therewith.

When he had got to the bottom of the stairs, however, he looked at the sword with a somewhat wistful eye, as if he would fain have retained it to ornament his person; but then muttering to himself, "No, no, I must not steal! Remember the eighth commandment, John Graves!" he unslung the sword, and looked it all over. When he had done, he burst into a laugh, exclaiming, "It is Master Harry's sword; the very sword with which he slit that fox's neck when they attacked Mistress Alice. They have taken it away from him, but I'll take it back again;" and so saying he ran hastily up to the door of the chamber in which he had left Langford, and after tapping loudly with his knuckles, laid the weapon down upon the threshold, and tripped rapidly away.

While Langford opened the door, and with some surprise took up his own sword, of which he had been deprived by the magistrates when he had been brought to the Castle, Silly John made the best of his way down the stairs, out of the front gates, across the esplanade, and into the park. The feat that he had performed seemed to have given him a sort of impetus which he could not resist; and he ran on across the park as fast as his lameness would let him, scrambled over the park paling, and never stopped till he had arrived at that point of the road where it branched into two divisions. There, however, he paused, and entered into one of those consultations with himself which were not unfrequent with him, and which formed a peculiar feature in his madness.

He suddenly remembered that he had two commissions to perform, and that he had no directions as to which was to be first executed. On all such occasions of difficulty, Silly John argued with himself on both sides of the question with the nicety of a special pleader, weighing every motive on either part, starting difficulties and solving them, seeing differences and shades of difference where none existed; and, in fact, acting the part of Hudibras and Ralpho both in one.

On the present occasion he stood discussing the question of whether he should first deliver the letter to Sir Walter Herbert, or the message to Franklin Gray, for nearly an hour; and was seen by many persons who passed, laying down to himself the reasons, _pro_ and _con_, with the forefinger of his right hand tapping the forefinger of his left, at every new argument on either side. As he found it utterly impossible to settle the matter by dint of reasoning, he fell at length upon an expedient which decided it as rationally as any other means he could have brought to bear upon it. Fixing himself firmly upon the heel of his uninjured foot, he extended the other leg and arm, and whirled himself round as if on a pivot, determining to follow that road to which his face was turned when he stopped.

It happened that the direction in which he at length found his face was towards the Manor House; and he accordingly bent his steps thither with all speed. The quantity of time which he had lost in his consultation with himself, however, and that occupied in going, rendered it very late in the day before he arrived; so that, although the servant to whom he delivered the note asked him in a kindly tone to come in and take some beer, he looked wistfully at the sky, from which the sun had just gone down; and shaking his head, walked away, turning his steps towards the moor. The distance, as we have before shown, was considerable; and as he went, the long twilight of a summer's evening grew dimmer and more dim, faded away entirely, and night succeeded. Still, however, the poor fellow toiled on up the hill, followed the road that led across the moor, and passed the very spot where Langford had seen the pistol fired on the preceding night.

As he went by the beeches, he thought he heard a rustling sound beneath them; and though accustomed to go at all hours through the wildest and least frequented paths, either fatigue and want of food, or some other cause, had unnerved him, and the sound made him start. He ran on upon the road as fast as he could, and then turned to look behind him. There was no moon--the night was sultry and dark, and it was difficult to distinguish any object distinctly; but he saw, or believed he saw, two men come out from the beeches as if to follow him, and he again ran on with all speed, taking his way across the moor. After he had gone about half a mile, he cast himself flat down amongst some fern and heath, and lay there for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour; after which he arose again, and hurried on towards the dwelling of Franklin Gray. Twice he thought he heard steps behind him; and his heart rejoiced when he saw the gate in the wall that surrounded the court. The gate was locked, however; the whole house looked dark and untenanted; not a window in the tower, or in the large building by the side, showed the slightest ray of light; and as he stood and shook the gate, he distinctly heard quick steps coming on the very path he had pursued.

A degree of terror which he had seldom before felt now took possession of him; and he ran round the wall as fast as he could, seeking for some entrance at the back. The first gate that he met with resisted like the other; but a second, fifty or sixty yards further on, opened at once, and he hurried on towards the part of the building before him. He still seemed to hear the steps behind him: and with fear that amounted almost to agony, he felt along the wall for a bell or some other means of making himself heard. As he did so, his hand came against a door, which gave way beneath his touch, and he had almost fallen headlong down some steps. He caught, however, by the lintel in time, and glad of any entrance, went down slowly, feeling his way with his foot and hands till he reached a level pavement. The air was cooler than it had been above; and a small square aperture at a considerable distance before him, while it gave admission to the wind, also showed the sort of faint dim light which yet lingered in the sky. Towards it he took his way, after having listened for a moment with a beating heart, to ascertain whether he was pursued, and made himself sure that he was not.

For a few paces, nothing interrupted his progress; but the next moment, he stumbled over some object on the ground; and as he attempted to raise himself, his hand came in contact with something that felt like cloth. He instantly drew it back, but, after pausing a moment and hesitating, he stretched it out slowly again, and it lighted upon the cold clammy features of a dead man's face. Starting back, he again fell over the object which had thrown him down before, and which he now found to be a coffin.

Although all these circumstances were in themselves horrible, they served in some degree to relieve the mind of poor John Graves, who now remembered the ruins of the old church, which stood near, and naturally concluded that he had got into the vaults. The confusion of his brain prevented him from remembering that the place had been long unused for its original and legitimate purposes, and he was not one of those who feel any horror at the mere presence of the dead. On the contrary, the sight of the clay after the spirit had departed, seemed to offer to his madness a curious matter of speculation, and he was fond of visiting the chamber of death amongst all the cottages in the neighbourhood.

After he had a little recovered himself, then, he muttered, "It's a corpse! I wonder if it's a man or a woman;" and he put out his hand again towards the face, and ran it over the jaw and lips, to feel for the beard.

"It must be a gentleman, to be put in the vault," he continued; "his hand will tell that! Poor men's hands are hard; and the rich keep their palms soft. I wonder if it is gold makes men's palms soft? Yes, it is a gentleman," he continued, as he slid his hand down the arm to the cold palm of the dead man.

But at that moment a light began to stream through the door by which he had entered, and his terror was once more renewed. "If they catch me here," he muttered, "they will think I am come to steal the coffin plates;" and as the increasing light showed him some of the objects around, he perceived a broken part of the wall which separated that vault from the next, and which lay in ruin amidst the remains of former generations, with many a coffin, stripped of all its idle finery by the hand of time, piled up against it, together with dust and rubbish, and the crumbling vestiges of mortality.

Behind the screen thus formed the half-witted man crept, and lay trembling with a vague dread of he did not well know what; while the light, which by this time had approached close to the door, remained stationary for a moment; and two or three voices were heard speaking in a low tone. The next moment three men descended into the vault, one of whom bore a flambeau in his hand; but for the first two or three minutes after they entered, Silly John could only hear without seeing, as his terror prevented him from making the slightest movement.

"You may as well wipe the blood from off his face before you put him into the box," said one, as he and his companions seemed to stand by the corpse and gaze upon it with curious and speculating eyes.

"That was a deadly shot," said the other. "Poor devil! he never spoke a word after."

"He well deserved it," said a third voice, "that's my opinion; and when that's the case, the deadlier the shot the better. But let us make haste, Master Hardie; though I do not see why he should be buried with that smart belt on. Come, let us toss up for it. Here is a crown-piece. You toss, Hardie."

While this conversation had been going on, the poor half-witted man had remained ensconced behind the coffins and broken wall, trembling in every limb. This tremor assuredly proceeded from fear, and not from cold, for the air, which had been sultry all day, had now grown oppressively hot; and the heavy clouds, which had been rolling up during the evening, like a vast curtain between earth and the free breath of heaven, had by this time covered the whole sky; while a few large drops of rain, pattering amongst the ruins of the church and the broken stones and long grass without, formed no unmusical prelude to the storm that was about soon to descend.

Scarcely had Doveton spoken (for he it was who took the lead upon the present occasion) when a faint blue gleam suddenly lighted up the inside of the vault, proceeding from the small square window, and flashing round upon all the grim and sombre features of the place, coffins, and sculls, and bones, and broken and disjointed stones, and high piles of mouldy earth, consisting chiefly of the dust of the dead. It came like the clear and searching glance of eternal truth, making dark secrets bright, and bringing forth from their obscurity all the dim hidden things of earth. That gleam flashed upon the countenances of the three robbers, as they stood around the corpse, unmoved, unshaken by the solemn aspect of death, by the awful picture of their own mortality. The sudden glance of the lightning, however, made them each start involuntarily. He who held the crown-piece in his hand let it drop. No thunder followed the first flash, but another far more bright and vivid succeeded, playing round the buckles and clasps of the very sword-belt that one of them was in the act of removing from the corpse. A crash, which could not have been louder had the fragments of a mountain been poured upon their heads, came instantly after, shaking the whole building as if it would have cast down the last stone of the ruin.

"By ----," cried one of the robbers, uttering a horrid imprecation, "what a peal!"

"Ay, and what a flash!" said another, "but come, take off the belt, for fear he gets up off the trestles and stops us!"

"Ay, if we let him," said Doveton; "but may I never speak again, if I did not think I saw his lips move! There! there!" he continued, as another flash of lightning shone again upon the features of the dead man, reversing all the lights which the flambeau had cast upon it, and making the whole features, without any real change, assume an expression entirely different. "There! there! I told you so! Look, he is grinning at us!"

"Pooh, nonsense!" cried another; "the man's dead! he'll never grin again. Yet, by my life, there is the blood running!" And so far he spoke truth; for the jerk which had been given to the body in order to detach the sword-belt, had caused a stream of dark gore to well slowly down and drop upon the ground.

"Let the belt be! let the belt be!" cried Hardcastle. "Hold the torch to his face and see if he does move! No, no; he is still enough! But, after all, one does not like dragging him out in such a night as this, to bury him upon the cold moor. It would not matter if he were alive; but let us stay here till the storm is over, and you, Harvey, run and get us some drink. It's neither a nice night, nor a nice place, nor a nice business; so we may as well have something to cheer us."

"I have no objection to the flagon," said Doveton, as Harvey left them to obtain the peculiar sort of liquid cheerfulness to which men engaged in not the most legitimate callings generally have recourse; "I have no objection to the flagon; but you know we must have done the job before morning, Hardie, and the grave is not dug yet."

"Oh, we'll soon dig the grave," replied Hardcastle; "the ground is soft upon the moor, and it need not be very deep. Do you think, Doveton, that when folks are dead they can see us? I have often thought that very likely they can see and hear just as well as ever, but can't move or speak."

"I hope not! I hope not!" cried his companion; and at that moment came another flash of lightning, gleaming round and round the vault, followed by the tremendous roar of the thunder, and the rushing and the pattering of the big rain.

The whole scene was so awful; the corpse, the robbers, the vault, the thunder-storm, their speculations upon the dead, the mixture of superstition and impious daring which they displayed, the revel that they were preparing to hold by the side of a murdered body, and the images of the flagon and the grave, formed altogether a whole so terrible and so extraordinary, that the poor man who lay concealed and witnessed the strange and dreadful proceeding, could endure it no longer; but starting up in a fit of desperation, he darted forward, overthrowing the pile of coffins before him, and rushing with the countenance of a risen corpse towards the stone steps which led into the vault. Surprised and terrified, the two robbers started back, the flambeau fell and nearly extinguished itself upon the ground; the body of the dead man was overthrown at their feet; and rushing on without pause, John Graves had gained the stairs and effected his exit, before they knew who or what it was that had so suddenly broken in upon their conference.

Running as if a whole legion of fiends had been behind him, heeding not the deluge of rain that was now falling from the sky, but staggering and putting his hand to his eyes when the bright gleam of the lightning flashed across his path, the half-witted man hurried back again with all speed towards the moor, nor ceased for a moment the rapid steps which carried him forward, till he had reached the beeches by Upwater-mere. There sitting down and clasping his hands over his knees, he remained with his whole thoughts cast into a state of greater confusion than ever, watching the liquid fire as it glanced over the water, and talking to himself whenever the thunder would let him hear his own voice.

It seemed, however, as if the same ghastly objects were destined to pursue him through that night; for the storm had scarcely in a slight degree abated, and a faint grey streak just made its appearance through the clouds, marking where the dim moon lay veiled behind them, when he heard coming steps; and, as his only resource, he clambered into one of the beech-trees, and sat watching what took place below. The only objects that he could distinguish were the forms of three men carrying a burthen between them. They laid it down under the trees; and for the space of about half an hour there was the busy sound of the pickaxe and the spade, the shovelfuls of earth cast forth, and the slow delving noise when the heavy foot pressed the edge into the ground. At the end of that time the burden was lifted up, deposited in the pit, and the earth piled in again. It was done with haste, for the grey dawn was beginning to appear; and John Graves could clearly distinguish the forms of Doveton, Hardcastle, and Harvey, as, each taking up a part of the tools they had employed, they hurried away to escape the clear eye of day.

When they were gone, the half-witted man came down from the tree, and stood gazing upon the spot where the fresh grey earth of the moor, mingling with the thin green grass under the beech-trees, showed the place where they had concealed the body.

"And liest thou there, Harold?" he said, speaking aloud, though there was nobody to hear, as was very much his custom; "and liest thou there, poor boy? with nothing around thee but the cold damp earth, and the grey morning of a storm shining upon thy last bed? And did they nurse thee so tenderly for this? Did thy father spend wealth, and care, and thought--did he wrong others, and endanger his chance of Heaven, and squander hope and fear, and passion and cunning, all for this? that thou shouldest lie here, without his knowing where thou restest--that thou shouldest lie here, like the daisy which his proud horse's feet cut off as he galloped along, without his knowing that it was broken? Alack and a-well-a-day! Alack and a-well-a-day! Poor boy, though thou hadst something of thy father's fire, and something of thy mother's weakness, thou wert good and generous, and tender and compassionate. I know not how it is, Harold, but I am more sorry for thee than for people that I have loved better, and I cannot bear to think that thou shouldest lie here, on this gloomy moor. Nor shalt thou, if I should dig thee out with my own hands! But then they'll say I killed thee," he added, after a moment's thought, "as they have said already of one who would as soon have killed himself. So I'll go and tell thy father, my poor boy; but no, I forgot, I must first go back to that man, for I promised, and I always keep my promise. It could not be Gray that killed thee. No, no, I do not think that; he's not fond of blood. He spared my life, so why should he take thine? I do not half like to go to him; yet I must, because I promised."

Poor Silly John lingered for some time beside the grave after he had finished this soliloquy, and then turned his steps back again with some degree of confidence gained from the open daylight, towards the abode of Franklin Gray. He still hesitated, however, and apprehensions of some kind made him wander at a distance from the house for several hours before he could make up his mind to approach it. He even went to a small alehouse, and strengthened his resolution with beer, and bread and cheese; but what, perhaps, afforded him more courage than anything, was the act of paying for his morning's meal with part of the money which Franklin Gray himself had given him.

As we have before seen, the conclusions at which the poor man arrived were very often just, and his madness consisted rather in a kind of wandering, an occasional want of the power of seizing and holding anything firmly, than in folly. In the present instance, then, he inferred from the sight of the money given him by Franklin Gray, that a person who had treated him so kindly would not ill-use him or suffer him to be ill-used; and, accordingly, he gained courage from the contemplation, and set out for the tower. Although he had been twice there before, since Franklin Gray had been the tenant thereof, yet, on both those occasions his visits had been after dark; but, as he approached at present the scenes of all the horrors of the preceding night, he could scarcely believe his eyes, so different was the whole when displayed in the broad sunshine from that which it appeared under the shadow. In this instance, however, the face that it wore in the open day was the deceptive one, and is but too common through the world, and in life; and in the human heart. The tower, and the large building by its side, and the court within its walls, were converted into a farm-house, with its barns and its yard full of straw, and ploughshares, and farming implements, while carts stood around bearing the name of "Franklin Gray, Farmer," though the name of the place which followed was that of a distant part of the country, where probably he had exercised the same kind of farming which he now carried on. There were two or three stout men in farming habiliments about the yard too, whose faces were not unfamiliar to the eye of John Graves, and an honest watch-dog stood chained near the stable-door, as if the good farmer was in fear of nightly depredators. A flaxen-headed plough-boy whistled gaily in the court; and at the moment that Silly John approached, a very lovely creature, habited in plain white garments, and carrying a beautiful child of little more than a year old in her arms, was crossing on tiptoe the dirty yard, wet and muddy with the storm of the preceding night.

"A dainty farmer's dame, indeed!" said the half-witted man to himself; "but I'll speak to her rather than to any of the foxes. Women are always kindest."

His singular appearance had already attracted the attention of the person who was the subject of his contemplation, and she seemed at once to comprehend his character, and the nature of the affliction under which he laboured.

"He is one of the happy," she said, speaking low, and to herself. "What would you, poor man?" she added, with her sweet-toned voice and foreign accent. "Do you seek money or food?"

The half-witted man did not reply directly to her question, but, caught by her appearance and by her accent, his mind seemed to wander far away to other things, and he answered, "Ay, pretty lady, there have been others such as you. Many a one quits her own land and marries a stranger, and is soon taught to repent, as women always will repent, when they have trusted those they knew not, and forgotten their own friends, and cast their country behind them."

She whom he addressed answered first by a smile, and then said, "Not always! My husband will never make me repent: he never has made me repent, though long ago I did all you said, trusted a stranger, forgot my own friends, and cast my country behind me. But what would you, poor man? Can I help you?"

"Only tell Franklin Gray," replied the other, "that Henry Langford has been taken up on the charge of killing Lord Harold, and that they keep him a prisoner in Danemore Castle; so that now's the time to help him. I want nothing more, lady, but God's blessing upon your beautiful face;" and so saying, he hurried away and left her, while a slight degree of colour came up into the cheek of Mona Gray, as much at the earnestness of the look which he gave her, as at the allusion to her beauty.