Vassall Morton Part 30

He returned to the priest's apartment, and in the doorway stood the athletic corporal, like the statue of a modern Mars.

"_Mio figlio! Mio caro figlio!_" faltered Padre Luca, laying a tremulous hand on the young man's shoulder. The kindly accents of the melodious Italian fell on his ear like a strain of music.

"You must not die now; you are not prepared. I will go to the commissioner. He will grant time."

He was pus.h.i.+ng past the corporal, when Morton gently checked him.

"I thank you, father, a thousand times; but if I must die, there is no mercy in a half hour's delay. Let me go. This sentence may be, after all, a kindness."

The corporal took him into custody; and, with three soldiers before and three behind, he moved towards his place of execution. He seemed to himself like one not fully awake; the stern reality would not come home to his thoughts, until, as he was mounting a flight of steps leading to the rampart, a vivid remembrance glowed upon him of that summer evening when, in her father's garden, Edith Leslie had accepted his love. It was with a desperate effort of pride and resolution that he quelled the emotion which rose choking to his throat, and murmuring a pet.i.tion for her safety, walked forward with an unchanged face.

A light shone in upon the pa.s.sage, and they stood in a moment upon the rampart, whence a panorama of sunny mountains opened on the view. It was a s.p.a.ce of some extent, paved with flag-stones, and compa.s.sed with battlements and walls. On one side stood, leaning on their muskets, a file of Bohemian soldiers, in their close frogged uniforms and long mustaches. These, with their officer, Corporal Kubitski, with his six men, a sub-official acting for the commissioner, and Padre Luca, were the only persons present, besides the prisoner. The latter was placed before the Bohemians, at the distance of twelve or fourteen paces. The corporal and his men drew aside.

"Now," demanded the deputy, "will you confess what you know, or will you die?"

"I have told you, once and again, that I have nothing to confess."

"Then take the consequence of your obstinacy."

He motioned to the officer. A word of command was given. Each soldier loaded with ball, and the ramrods rattled as they sent home the charge. Another command, and the c.o.c.ked muskets rose to the level, concentrating their aim against the prisoner's breast.

"If you will speak, speak now. You have a quarter of a minute to save yourself." And the deputy took out his watch.

Morton turned his head slowly, and looked at him for an instant in silence.

"Speak, speak," cried Padre Luca, pressing towards him; "tell him what you know."

The sharp voice of the officer warned him back.

Morton stood with compressed lips, and every nerve at its tension, in instant expectation of the volley; already, in fancy, he felt the bullets plunging through his breast; but not a muscle flinched, and he fronted the deadly muzzles with an unblenching eye. The deputy scrutinized his face, and turned away, muttering. At that moment a man, who through the whole scene had stood hidden in the entrance of a pa.s.sage, ran out with a pretence of great haste and earnestness, and called to stop the execution, since the commissioner had granted a reprieve. In fact, the whole affair was a sham, played off upon the prisoner to terrify him into confession.

The Bohemians recovered their muskets, and the bewildered Morton was once more in custody of the corporal, who led him, guarded as before, back towards his cell. Padre Luca, who thought that an interposition of the Virgin had softened the commissioner's heart, hastened to his oratory to pray for the heretic's conversion. Faint and heartsick, Morton scarcely knew what was pa.s.sing, till he was thrust in at his narrow door. The jailer was there, but the corporal entered also, to aid in taking the handcuffs from his wrists.

One might have looked in vain among ten thousand to find a n.o.bler model of masculine proportion than this soldier. He stood more than six feet high, and Morton, who loved to look upon a man, had often, even in his distress, admired his martial bearing and the powerful symmetry of his frame. His face, too, was singularly fine in its way, and though the discipline of long habit usually banished from it any distinct expression, yet the cast of the features, and the manly curve of the lip, which the thick brown mustache could not wholly hide, seemed to augur a brave, generous, and loyal nature.

More stupefied than cheered at being s.n.a.t.c.hed, as he supposed, from the jaws of death, Morton stood pa.s.sive while his hands were released.

The jailer left him for a moment, and crossed over to the opposite corner of the cell. His back was turned as he did so. The corporal's six soldiers were all in the pa.s.sage without. At that instant, Morton felt a warm breath at his ear, and heard whispered in a barbarous accent,--

"_Courage, mon ami! Vive la liberte! Vive l'Amerique!_"

He turned; but the martial visage of the corporal was unmoved as bronze; and, in a moment more, the iron door clanged behind him as he disappeared.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

O Death, why now so slow art thou? why fearest thou to smite?

_Lamentation of Don Roderick_.

When all the blandishments of life are gone, The coward sneaks to death, the brave live on.--_Sewell_.

The whispered words of the corporal kindled a spark of hope in Morton's breast; but it was destined to fade and die. Once he was sure that he heard the tones of his voice in the pa.s.sage without his cell; but weeks pa.s.sed, months pa.s.sed, and he did not see him again.

And now let the curtain drop for a s.p.a.ce of three years.

Morton was still a prisoner. Despair was at hand. He longed to die.

His longing at length seemed near its accomplishment. A raging fever seized him, and for days he lay delirious, balanced on the brink of death. But his const.i.tution endured the shock; and late one night he lay on his pallet, exhausted, worn to a skeleton, yet fully conscious of his situation.

The locks clashed, the hinges jarred, and a physician of the prison, a bulky German, stood at his side.

He felt his patient's pulse.

"Shall I die, or not?" demanded the sick man.

"Die!" echoed the German, a laugh gurgling within him, like the first symptom of an earthquake; "all men die, but this sickness will never kill you. It would have killed ninety-nine out of a hundred; but you are as tough as a rhinoceros."

Morton turned to the wall, and cursed the hour when he was born.

The German gave a prescription to his attendant; the locks clashed again behind him, and Morton was left alone with his misery.

The lamp in the pa.s.sage without shone through the grated opening above the door, and shed a square of yellow light on the black, damp stones of the dungeon. They sweated and trickled with a clammy moisture; and the brick pavement was wet, as if the clouds had rained upon it.

Morton lay motionless as a dead man. The crisis of his disorder was past; but its effects were heavy upon him, and his mind shared the deep exhaustion of his body. Perilous thoughts rose upon him, spectral and hollow-eyed.

"By what right am I doomed to this protracted misery? By what justice, when a refuge is at hand, am I forbidden to fly to it? I have only to drag myself from this bed, and rest for a few moments on those wet, cold bricks, and all the medicines in Austria could not keep me many days a prisoner. And who could blame me? Who could say that I destroyed myself? It is not suicide. It is but aiding kindly nature to do a deed of mercy."

He repelled the thought; but it returned. He repelled it again, but still it returned. The insidious demon was again and again at his ear, stealing back with a noiseless gliding, smoothly commending her poison to his lips, soothing his worn spirit as the vampire fans its slumbering victim with its wings. But his better nature, not without a higher appeal, fortified itself against her, and struggled to hold its ground.

When the French besieged Saragossa; when her walls crumbled before their batteries; when, day by day, through secret mine or open a.s.sault, foot by foot, they won their way inward towards her heart; when treason within aided force without, and famine and pestilence leagued against her,--still her undespairing children refused to yield. Sick men dragged themselves to the barricades, women and boys pointed the cannon, and her heroic banner still floated above the wreck.

Thus, spent with disease, gnawed with pertinacious miseries, a.s.sailed by black memories of the past, and blacker forebodings of the future, did Morton maintain his weary battle with despair.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

Who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, These thoughts that wander through eternity?

To be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering.--_Paradise Lost_.

Morton recovered slowly. The influences about him were any thing but favorable to a quick convalescence, and it was months before he was himself again. Even then, though his health seemed confirmed, a deeper cloud remained upon his spirits: his dungeon seemed more dark and gloomy, his prospects more desperate.

One day he paced his cell in a mood of more than usual depression.

"Fools and knaves are at large; robbery and murder have full scope; vanity and profligacy run their free career; then why is honest effort paralyzed, and buried here alive? There are those in these vaults,--men innocent of crime as I,--men who would have been an honor to their race,--who have pa.s.sed a score of years in this living death.