Part 92 (2/2)
Before us was a kind of bed-place. And on that bedplace lay the figure of a man. Though it is twenty years ago since I saw it, I can remember that scene as though it were yesterday.
He lay upon a heap of tumbled blankets, with his face buried in a pillow. One leg touched the ground, and round it was a ring, connecting the limb to a long iron bar, which ran along beneath the bed. One arm also hung listlessly on the cold stone floor, and the other was thrown around his head, a head covered with short black curls, worthy of an Antinous, above a bare muscular neck, worthy of a Farnese Hercules. I advanced towards him.
The governor held me back. ”My G.o.d, sir,” he said, ”take care. Don't, as you value your life, go within length of his chain.” But at that moment the handsome head was raised from the pillow, and my eyes met George Hawker's. Oh, Lord! such a piteous wild look. I could not see the fierce desperate villain who had kept our country-side in terror so long. No, thank G.o.d, I could only see the handsome curly-headed boy who used to play with James Stockbridge and myself among the gravestones in Drumston churchyard. I saw again the merry lad who used to bathe with us in Hatherleigh water, and whom, with all his faults, I had once loved well. And seeing him, and him only, before me, in spite of a terrified gesture from the governor, I walked up to the bed, and, sitting down beside him, put my arm round his neck.
”George! George! Dear old friend!” I said. ”O George, my boy, has it come to this?”
I don't want to be instructed in my duty. I know what my duty was on that occasion as well as any man. My duty as a citizen and a magistrate was to stand at the further end of the cell, and give this hardened criminal a moral lecture, showing how honesty and virtue, as in my case, had led to wealth and honour, and how yielding to one's pa.s.sions led to disgrace and infamy, as in his. That was my duty, I allow. But then, you see, I didn't do my duty. I had a certain tender feeling about my stomach which prevented me from doing it. So I only hung there, with my arm round his neck, and said, from time to time, ”O George, George!” like a fool.
He put his two hands upon my shoulders, so that his fetters hung across my breast; and he looked me in the face. Then he said, after a time, ”What! Hamlyn? Old Jeff Hamlyn! The only man I ever knew that I didn't quarrel with! Come to see me now, eh? Jeff, old boy, I'm to be hung to-morrow.”
”I know it,” I said. ”And I came to ask you if I could do anything for you. For the sake of dear old Devon, George.”
”Anything you like, old Jeff,” he said, with a laugh, ”so long as you don't get me reprieved. If I get loose again, lad, I'd do worse than I ever did yet, believe me. I've piled up a tolerable heap of wickedness as it is, though. I've murdered my own son, Jeff. Do you know that?”
I answered--”Yes; I know that, George; but that was an accident. You did not know who he was.”
”He came at me to take my life,” said Hawker. ”And I tell you, as a man who goes out to be hung to-morrow, that, if I had guessed who he was, I'd have blown my own brains out to save him from the crime of killing me. Who is that man?”
”Don't you remember him?” I said. ”Major Buckley.”
The Major came forward, and held out his hand to George Hawker. ”You are now,” he said, ”like a dead man to me. You die to-morrow; and you know it; and face it like a man. I come to ask you to forgive me anything you may have to forgive. I have been your enemy since I first saw you: but I have been an honest and open enemy; and now I am your enemy no longer. I ask you to shake hands with me. I have been warned not to come within arm's length of you, chained as you are. But I am not afraid of you.”
The Major came and sat on the bed-place beside him.
”As for that little animal,” said George Hawker, pointing to the governor as he stood at the further end of the cell, ”if he comes within reach of me, I'll beat his useless little brains out against the wall, and he knows it. He was right to caution you not to come too near me. I nearly killed a man yesterday: and to-morrow, when they come to lead me out----But, with regard to you, Major Buckley, the case is different. Do you know I should be rather sorry to tackle you; I'm afraid you would be too heavy for me. As to my having anything to forgive, Major, I don't know that there is anything. If there is, let me tell you that I feel more kind and hearty towards you and Hamlyn for coming to me like this to-day, than I've felt towards any man this twenty year. By-the-bye; let no man go to the gallows without clearing himself as far as he may. Do you know that I set on that red-haired villain, Moody, to throttle Bill Lee, because I hadn't pluck to do it myself.”
”Poor Lee,” said the Major.
”Poor devil,” said Hawker. ”Why that man had gone through every sort of villany, from” (so and so up to so and so, he said; I shall not particularize) ”before my beard was grown. Why that man laid such plots and snares for me when I was a lad, that a bishop could not have escaped. He egged me on to forge my own father's name. He drove me on to ruin. And now, because it suited his purpose to turn honest, and act faithful domestic to my wife for twenty years, he is mourned for as an exemplary character, and I go to the gallows. He was a meaner villain than ever I was.”
”George,” I asked, ”have you any message for your wife?”
”Only this,” he said; ”tell her I always liked her pretty face, and I'm sorry I brought disgrace upon her. Through all my rascalities, old Jeff, I swear to you that I respected and liked her to the last. I tried to see her last year, only to tell her that she needn't be afraid of me, and should treat me as a dead man; but she and her blessed pig-headed lover, Tom Troubridge, made such knife and pistol work of it, that I never got the chance of saying the word I wanted. She'd have saved herself much trouble if she hadn't acted so much like a frightened fool. I never meant her any harm. You may tell her all this if you judge right, but I leave it to you. Time's up, I see. I ain't so much of a coward, am I, Jeff? Good-bye, old lad, good-bye.”
That was the last we saw of him; the next morning he was executed with four of his comrades. But now the Major and I, leaving him, went out again into the street, into the rain and the furious wind, to beat up against it for our hotel. Neither spoke a word till we came to a corner in George Street, nearest the wharf: and there the Major turned back upon me suddenly and I thought he had been unable to face the terrible gust which came sweeping up from the harbour: but it was not so. He had turned on purpose, and putting his hands upon my shoulders, he said,--
”Hamlyn, Hamlyn, you have taught me a lesson.”
”I suppose so,” I said. ”I have shown you what a fool a tender-hearted soft-headed fellow may make of himself by yielding to his impulses. But I have a defence to offer, my dear sir, the best of excuses, the only real excuse existing in this world. I couldn't help it.”
”I don't mean that, Hamlyn,” he answered. ”The lesson you have taught me is a very different one. You have taught me that there are bright points in the worst man's character, a train of good feeling which no tact can bring out, but yet which some human spark of feeling may light. Here is this man Hawker, of whom we heard that he was dangerous to approach, and whom the good chaplain was forced to pray for and exhort from a safe distance. The man for whose death, till ten minutes ago, I was rejoicing. The man I thought lost, and beyond hope. Yet you, by one burst of unpremeditated folly, by one piece of silly sentimentality; by ignoring the man's later life, and carrying him back in imagination to his old schoolboy days, have done more than our good old friend the Chaplain could have done without your a.s.sistance. There is a spark of the Divine in the worst of men, if you can only find it.”
In spite of the Major's parliamentary and didactic way of speaking, I saw there was truth at the bottom of what he said, and that he meant kindly to me, and to the poor fellow who was even now among the dead; so instead of arguing with him, I took his arm, and we fought homewards together through the driving rain.
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