CHAPTER XVIICHAPTER XVIIThe Landlord
CHAPTER XVII
GAMALIEL closed the door upon the last of his visitors. Gradually their slow footsteps receded into the roar of the sea. He listened, and fancied he could hear them long after he had ceased to do so. Insensibly his mind lingered on their sound, for when they should die away he knew that his life was at an end.
As one who has suffered the tortures and paroxysms of a disease may lose his agonies as soon as it develops mortal symptoms, so the landlord, possessed with the knowledge that his own life was the price he must pay for his weakness, sat down in his chair by the fire with a clear mind. There was no longer any need for him to torment himself. He foresaw the issue as plainly as the man in the cart when he looks upon the scaffold.
He had lost all. Events had been too great for his second-rate character. They had called for a strong man—a man of courage, of indomitable spirit and tenacity of purpose—to grapple with them. For such a one there had been a fortune. The landlord, self-deceived because all his life he had never been put to the test, had attempted to bend them to his own purposes. But they had proved too great and unwieldy; he had not had the physical strength to overcome them. Instead they had overcome him.
The landlord did not give himself up to despair. He was too far gone for that. Hewas bitterly afraid of death. A death by violence would still have the power to revolt him; but the thing uppermost in his mind was his humiliation. It was so fierce and overpowering, that it became an anodyne to lull and allay all the passions of his soul. It took the sting out of death itself. He had been tried and found wanting. At the age of sixty the supreme moment of a laborious and fairly successful life had come. He had failed; let him perish.
“Finis” was about to be written to his history. He had no longer to fear that awful suspense which had the power to overthrow the firmest intelligence. As plainly as he could hear the roar of the sea, he saw his doom. He sat still and thought upon it, almost calmly. Right at the very last he had emerged from the furnace, and had come out strong.
He would bare his neck, and they should do their worst. He would welcome it. He had no desire to live now; he had ceased to be swayed by his animal passions. All his life, when he could escape a moment from his greedand his sensuality, he had been a philosopher. He had warmed both hands at the fire of his own egotism. He had flattered himself that he had known his own strength and his own weakness. He knew nothing of the sort. Just as in one direction he had overestimated his resolution, he was now to prove that he had underestimated it in another.
A day ago he would probably have writhed on the ground in a fit had he been confronted by a death by violence. By now, however, he had got beyond all that. There were things a man occasionally had to submit to, which made such a thing almost a luxury. He had spent that day upon the rack. The sharp rending asunder of his body and his soul would be a merciful release. His eyeballs would no longer start from their sockets; his limbs would no longer crack; nor would his blood burst through the walls of his arteries. His shuddering frame would be at peace.
The clock struck twelve. The landlord clenched his hands as he sat in his chair; a smile crept stealthily upon the dead white of hischeeks. It was the last touch of irony that he, Gamaliel Hooker, should be sitting there so calmly looking a death by violence full in the face. To think that his old pampered flesh, cossetted and cushioned for sixty winters, should accept it without a murmur! The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb: Nature has her marvellous compensations; she takes the grossness from the animal spirit, that it may be insensible to the throes of death.
About one o’clock of the wintry morning the landlord rose from his chair, and had recourse to paper, a pen, and ink. He solemnly made his will. For the keeper of a sea tavern on a lonely coast, the home of the pirate and the smuggler, he had done excellently well in trade. He had added thrift to a natural aptitude. His money had not all been come by honestly, as the world interpreted that word. But that did not irk the landlord. All his life he had never pretended to a conscience. To him it was the hallmark of a superficial mind. And now in his last extremity he would not pretend to one. It was to be the great triumphof his life, that in his last hour he should prove to be stronger than he had ever judged himself to be. He would yield up his life calmly, without a snuffle, a whine, or a prayer.
About two o’clock he had signed his name with controlled fingers to this document. He sanded it carefully and put it by. He had hardly done so, when he jumped up suddenly from his chair. An old stab returned upon him; he felt a twinge of the old agony. After all, there was a chance of life. Suppose the pursuing soldiers retook the King! They would be then in a mood to overlook all, and they might permit him to live! The landlord cursed himself for the thought. God! was he going to be tortured again before he was allowed to perish? No, it was only the last twinge of an expiring nerve. The pain passed almost in an instant. He need not be afraid.
Towards three, the old man grew very cold. He had forgotten to replenish the fire. It had gone out hours ago, leaving the ashes grey. He was getting tired; the soldiers were a long time coming; he would try to go to sleep. Soona pleasant lassitude stole upon his weariness. He had never been so exquisitely tired in his life before. It had been a heavy day; he had taken a lot out of himself; he deserved a rest. He fell asleep.
A little after four o’clock he awoke suddenly out of a dreamless slumber, as one startled. He lifted up his ears and listened. Horses! He rubbed his eyes in bewilderment. Why should he be sleeping there, and why should these signs invade the middle of the night? Ah yes, to be sure, he remembered! The soldiers were coming back.
His first thought was, had they caught the King? He banished it instantly. He had got past all that before he went to sleep. He would not go back, otherwise the last twenty-four hours had been lived in vain. He listened calmly for their near approach, but he still kept his chair by the side of the dead embers. There was no need for him to rise to let them in, as he remembered that he had not considered it necessary to secure the door before he went to sleep. What a transcendentthing it was to have a heart utterly without bodily fear! It was rather hard, though, that he should only be allowed to experience that pleasure for so short a period in his long life. However, it was very excellent even to have known it at all. He could hardly be said to have lived in vain.
The landlord, still in his chair by the dead fire, watched the kitchen door. He saw it open. He saw Captain Culpeper appear, stiff and cold with riding, and very morose. His men, stiff and cold and morose too, crowded in behind him. The landlord neither moved nor spoke; he seemed wholly indifferent to their entrance.
“The King is escaped!” said Captain Culpeper, eyeing him savagely.
“I knew it,” said the landlord, a little wearily. He closed his eyes; almost a smile came upon his white lips.
“Oh, you knew it!” said Captain Culpeper, with a grim satisfaction. “You knew it, did you! And how did you know it, fool and poltroon as you are?”
“Poltroon I am,” said the landlord, “a thousand times a poltroon; but I am no fool. I knew it because I knew it.”
“Bah!” said the soldier, “I have not the patience to talk with you. But I trust the man and the woman are still upstairs in their chamber.”
“They are not,” said the landlord; there was a note of triumph in his voice. “A company of smugglers bore them away half an hour after your departure.”
“And you allowed them to leave your inn, after what I had said to you?” said Culpeper, striving to control the fury that was shaking him from head to foot.
“I could not help myself,” said the landlord, indifferently.
“And you could not help the King’s going, I suppose,” said the soldier, “even when he went past your very nose?”
“No, I could not help myself,” said the landlord again.
“And wherefore could you not?”
The soldier’s rage was giving place now to aself-contained harshness which did not distress the landlord to observe.
“I do not know why I could not stay the King’s going,” said the landlord.
“What do you mean?” said the soldier.
“When the King went,” said the landlord, “I was not the master of myself; but, thank God, I am master of myself now.”
“You will soon cease to be,” said the soldier, regarding him with a grim surprise.
“That is as maybe,” said the landlord.
The soldiers crowded about the landlord with sinister intention upon their faces. Captain Culpeper briefly told two of them to procure a rope.
“You will find plenty in the stable,” said the landlord.
Several of the soldiers chuckled.
“Do you know for what purpose we require it, good Master Innkeeper?” said Culpeper, laughingly.
“The signboard will suit your purpose best,” said the landlord.
“You oblige us vastly,” said the soldier.
The landlord astonished them vastly too. They had not looked for this demeanour in one who was about to undergo the penalty of death. They had never encountered such an indifference in the face of it before.
However, when the two men returned bearing a stout piece of hemp, an evidence was furnished of the price at which the landlord’s newly-acquired fortitude had been purchased. When his bloodshot eyes fell on the rope, a cord appeared to snap in the middle of his brain; his head revolved slowly on his neck; and he pitched heavily on to the kitchen floor.
They turned him over on his back, but all attempts to restore the landlord to sensibility failed. After a while he appeared to grow dimly conscious of his surroundings; but he was bereft of speech, and he had not the power to move. It mattered not what remedies they had recourse to, the horrible, convulsed white face still had the vacancy and the inanimation of death without the repose of it.
“’Tis a pity we could not hang the old rogue more prettily,” said Captain Culpeper,when all their exertions had failed of their effect. “For if ever a man did merit a hanging, here he lies. He hath played a double game all through. But what he could have hoped to gain by it, for the life of me I cannot see. He must have been a sanguine fellow to think that he could run with the hare, and hunt with the dogs. He must have known that he went in danger of being torn to pieces. But why he should first betray the King, and then promote his escape, passes me completely. A queer old rogue, this landlord. Now then, lift him up, lads, and set him in the place he himself did choose.”
They placed the noose around the landlord’s neck and bore him out into the shrewd air of the morning. It was still as dark as pitch; never a star looked out of the sky; mercifully the moon had hidden her face; and thus the body of the landlord was unregarded, as it swung in the wintry darkness from the signboard of the “Sea Rover.”
THE END.