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Mistress Wilding, a novel by Rafael Sabatini |
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Chapter 22. The Execution |
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_ CHAPTER XXII. THE EXECUTION Captain Wentworth clicked his heels together and saluted. Blake, in the background, drew a deep breath--unmistakably of satisfaction, and his eyes glittered. A muffled cry broke from Ruth, who rose instantly from her chair, her hand on her bosom. Richard stood with fallen jaw, amazed, a trifle troubled even, whilst Mr. Wilding started more in surprise than actual fear, and approached the table. "You heard, sir," said Captain Wentworth. "I heard," answered Mr. Wilding quietly. "But surely not aright. One moment, sir," and he waved his hand so compellingly that, despite the order he had received, the phlegmatic captain hesitated. Feversham, who had taken the cravat--a yard of priceless Dutch lace--from the hands of his valet, and was standing with his back to the company at a small and very faulty mirror that hung by the overmantel, looked peevishly over his shoulder. "My lord," said Wilding, and Blake, for all his hatred of this man, marvelled at a composure that did not forsake him even now, "you are surely not proposing to deal with me in this fashion--not seriously, my lord?" "Ah, ca!" said the Frenchman. "T'ink it a jest if you please. What for you come 'ere?" "Assuredly not for the purpose of being shot," said Wilding, and actually smiled. Then, in the tones of one discussing a matter that is grave but not of surpassing gravity, he continued: "It is not that I fail to recognize that I may seem to have incurred the rigour of the law; but these matters must be formally proved against me. I have affairs to set in order against such a consummation." "Ta, ta!" snapped Feversham. "T'at not regard me. Weutwort', you 'ave 'eard my order." And he returned to his mirror and the nice adjustment of his neckwear. "But, my lord," insisted Wilding, "you have not the right--you have not the power so to proceed against me. A man of my quality is not to be shot without a trial." "You can 'ang if you prefer," said Feversham indifferently, drawing out the ends of his cravat and smoothing them down upon his breast. He faced about briskly. "Give me t'at coat, Belmont. His Majesty 'ave empower me to 'ang or shoot any gentlemens of t'e partie of t'e Duc t'e Monmoot' on t'e spot. I say t'at for your satisfaction. And look, I am desolate' to be so quick wit' you, but please to consider t'e circumstance. T'e enemy go to attack. Wentwort' must go to his regimen', and my ot'er officers are all occupi'. You comprehen' I 'ave not t'e time to spare you--n'est-ce-pas?"--Wentworth's hand touched Wilding on the shoulder. He was standing with head slightly bowed, his brows knit in thought. He looked round at the touch, sighed and smiled. Belmont held the coat for his master, who slipped into it, and flung at Wilding what was intended for a consolatory sop. "It is fortune de guerre, Mistaire Wilding. I am desolate'; but it is fortune of t'e war." "May it be less fortunate for your lordship, then," said Wilding dryly, and was on the point of turning, when Ruth's voice came in a loud cry to startle him and to quicken his pulses. "My lord!" It was a cry of utter anguish. Feversham, settling his gold-laced coat comfortably to his figure, looked at her. "Madame?" said he. But she had nothing to say. She stood, deathly white, slightly bent forward, one hand wringing the other, her eyes almost wild, her bosom heaving frantically. "Hum!" said Feversham, and he loosened and removed the scarf from his head. He shrugged slightly and looked at Wentworth. "Finissons!" said he. The word and the look snapped the trammels that bound Ruth's speech. "Five minutes, my lord!" she cried imploringly. "Give him five minutes--and me, my lord!" Wilding, deeply shaken, trembled now as he awaited Feversham's reply. The Frenchman seemed to waver. "Bien," he began, spreading his hands. And in that moment a shot rang out in the night and startled the whole company. Feversham threw back his head; the signs of yielding left his face. "Ha!" he cried. "T'ey are arrive." He snatched his wig from his lacquey's hands, donned it, and turned again an instant to the mirror to adjust the great curls. "Quick, Wentwort'! T'ere is no more time now. Make Mistaire Wilding be shot at once. T'en to your regimen'." He faced about and took the sword his valet proffered. "Au revoir, messieurs!" "Serviteur, madame!" And, buckling his sword-belt as he went, he swept out, leaving the door wide open, Belmont following, Wentworth saluting and the guards presenting arms. "Come, sir," said the captain in a subdued voice, his eyes avoiding Ruth's face. "I am ready," answered Wilding firmly, and he turned to glance at his wife. She was bending towards him, her hands held out, such a look on her face as almost drove him mad with despair, reading it as he did. He made a sound deep in his throat before he found words. "Give me one minute, sir--one minute," he begged Wentworth. "I ask no more than that." Wentworth was a gentleman and not ill-natured. But he was a soldier and had received his orders. He hesitated between the instincts of the two conditions. And what time he did so there came a clatter of hoofs without to resolve him. It was Feversham departing. "You shall have your minute, sir," said he. "More I dare not give you, as you can see. "From my heart I thank you," answered Mr. Wilding, and from the gratitude of his tone you might have inferred that it was his life Wentworth had accorded him. The captain had already turned aside to address his men. "Two of you outside, guard that window," he ordered. "The rest of you, in the passage. Bestir there!" "Take your precautions, by all means, sir," said Wilding; "but I give you my word of honour I shall attempt no escape." Wentworth nodded without replying. His eye lighted on Blake--who had been seemingly forgotten in the confusion--and on Richard. A kindliness for the man who met his end so unflinchingly, a respect for so worthy an emeny, actuated the red-faced captain. "You had better take yourself off, Sir Rowland," said he. "And you, Mr. Westmacott--you can wait in the passage with my men." They obeyed him promptly enough, but when outside Sir Rowland made bold to remind the captain that he was failing in his duty, and that he should make a point of informing the General of this anon. Wentworth bade him go to the devil, and so was rid of him. Alone, inside that low-ceilinged chamber, stood Ruth and Wilding face to face. He advanced towards her, and with a shuddering sob she flung herself into his arms. Still, he mistrusted the emotion to which she was a prey--dreading lest it should have its root in pity. He patted her shoulder soothingly. "Nay, nay, little child," he whispered in her ear. "Never weep for me that have not a tear for myself. What better resolution of the difficulties my folly has created?" For only answer she clung closer, her hands locked about his neck, her slender body shaken by her silent weeping. "Don't pity me," he besought her. "I am content it should be so. It is the amend I promised you. Waste no pity on me, Ruth." She raised her face, her eyes wild and blurred with tears, looked up to his. "It is not pity!" she cried. "I want you, Anthony! I love you, Anthony, Anthony!" His face grew ashen. "It is true, then!" he asked her. "And what you said to-night was true! I thought you said it only to detain me." "Oh, it is true, it is true!" she wailed. He sighed; he disengaged a hand to stroke her face. "I am happy," he said, and strove to smile. "Had I lived, who knows...?" "No, no, no," she interrupted him passionately, her arms tightening about his neck. He bent his head. Their lips met and clung. A knock fell upon the door. They started, and Wilding raised his hands gently to disengage her pinioning arms. "I must go, sweet," he said. "God help me!" she moaned, and clung to him still. "It is I who am killing you--I and your love for me. For it was to save me you rode hither to-night, never pausing to weigh your own deadly danger. Oh, I am punished for having listened to every voice but the voice of my own heart where you were concerned. Had I loved you earlier--had I owned it earlier..." "It had still been too late," he said, more to comfort her than because he knew it to be so. "Be brave for my sake, Ruth. You can be brave, I know--so well. Listen, sweet. Your words have made me happy. Mar not this happiness of mine by sending me out in grief at your grief." Her response to his prayer was brave, indeed. Through her tears came a faint smile to overspread her face so white and pitiful. "We shall meet soon again," she said. "Aye--think on that," he bade her, and pressed her to him. "Good-bye, sweet! God keep you till we meet!" he added, his voice infinitely tender. "Mr. Wilding!" Wentworth's voice called him, and the captain thrust the door open a foot or so. "Mr. Wilding!" "I am coming," he answered steadily. He kissed her again, and on that kiss of his she sank against him, and he felt her turn all limp. He raised his voice. "Richard!" he shouted wildly. "Richard!" At the note of alarm in his voice, Wentworth flung wide the door and entered, Richard's ashen face showing over his shoulder. In her brother's care Wilding delivered his mercifully unconscious wife. "See to her, Dick," he said, and turned to go, mistrusting himself now. But he paused as he reached the door, Wentworth waxing more and more impatient at his elbow. He turned again. "Dick," he said, "we might have been better friends. I would we had been. Let us part so at least," and he held out his hand, smiling. Before so much gallantry Richard was conquered almost to the point of worship; a weak man himself, there was no virtue he could more admire than strength. He left Ruth in the high-backed chair in which Wilding's tender hands had placed her, and sprang forward, tears in his eyes. He wrung Wilding's hands in wordless passion. "Be good to her, Dick," said Wilding, and went out with Wentworth. He was marched down the street in the centre of that small party of musketeers of Dunbarton's regiment, his thoughts all behind him rather than ahead, a smile on his lips. He had conquered at the last. He thought of that other parting of theirs, nearly a month ago, on the road by Walford. Now, as then, circumstance was the fire that had melted her. But the crucible was no longer--as then of pity; it was the crucible of love. And in that same crucible, too, Anthony Wilding's nature had undergone a transmutation; his love for Ruth had been purified of that base alloy of desire which had driven him into the unworthiness of making her his own at all costs; there was no carnal grossness in his present passion; it was pure as a religion--the love that takes no account of self, the love that makes for joyous and grateful martyrdom. And a joyous and grateful martyr would Anthony Wilding have been could he have thought that his death would bring her happiness or peace. In such a faith as that he had marched--or so he thought blithely to his end, and the smile on his lips had been less wistful than it was. Thinking of the agony in which he had left her, he almost came to wish--so pure was his love grown--that he had not conquered. The joy that at first was his was now all dashed. His death would cause her pain. His death! O God! It is an easy thing to be a martyr; but this was not martyrdom; having done what he had done he had not the right to die. The last vestige of the smile that he had worn faded from his tight-pressed lips tight-pressed as though to endure some physical suffering. His face greyed, and deep lines furrowed his brow. Thus he marched on, mechanically, amid his marching escort, through the murky, fog-laden night, taking no heed of the stir about them, for all Weston Zoyland was aroused by now. Ahead of them, and over to the east, the firing blazed and crackled, volley upon volley, to tell them that already battle had been joined in earnest. Monmouth's surprise had aborted, and it passed through Wilding's mind that to a great extent he was to blame for this. But it gave him little care. At least his indiscretion had served the purpose of rescuing Ruth from Lord Feversham's unclean clutches. For the rest, knowing that Monmouth's army by far outnumbered Feversham's, he had no doubt that the advantage must still lie with the Duke, in spite of Feversham's having been warned in the eleventh hour. Louder grew the sounds of battle. Above the din of firing a swelling chorus rose upon the night, startling and weird in such a time and place. Monmouth's pious infantry went into action singing hymns, and Wentworth, impatient to be at his post, bade his men go faster. The night was by now growing faintly luminous, and the deathly grey light of approaching dawn hung in the mists upon the moor. Objects grew visible in bulk at least, if not in form and shape, by the time the little company had reached the end of Weston village and come upon the deep mud dyke which had been Wentworth's objective--a ditch that communicated with the great rhine that served the King's forces so well on that night of Sedgemoor. Within some twenty paces of this Wentworth called a halt, and would have had Wilding's hands pinioned behind him, and his eyes blindfolded, but that Wilding begged him this might not be done. Wentworth was, as we know, impatient; and between impatience and kindliness, perhaps, he acceded to Wilding's prayer. He even hesitated a moment at the last. It was in his mind to speak some word of comfort to the doomed man. Then a sudden volley, more terrific than any that had preceded it, followed by hoarse cheering away to eastward, quickened his impatience. He bade the sergeant lead Mr. Wilding forward and stand him on the edge of the ditch. His object was that thus the man's body would be disposed of without waste of time. This Wilding realized, his soul rebelling against this fate which had come upon him in the very hour when he most desired to live. Mad thoughts of escape crossed his mind--of a leap across the dyke, and a wild dash through the fog. But the futility of it was too appalling. The musketeers were already blowing their matches. He would suffer the ignominy of being shot in the back, like a coward, if he made any such attempt. And so, despairing but not resigned, he took his stand on the very edge of the ditch. In an irony of obligingness he set half of his heels over the void, so that he was nicely balanced upon the edge of the cutting, and must go backwards and down into the mud when hit. It was this position he had taken that gave him an inspiration in that last moment. The sergeant had moved away out of the line of fire, and he stood there alone, waiting, erect and with his head held high, his eyes upon the grey mass of musketeers--blurred alike by mist and semi-darkness--some twenty paces distant along the line of which glowed eight red fuses. Wentworth's voice rang out with the words of command. "Blow your matches!" Brighter gleamed the points of light, and under their steel pots the faces of the musketeers, suffused by a dull red glow, sprang for a moment out of the grey mass, to fade once more into the general greyness at the word, "Cock your matches!" "Guard your pans!" came a second later the captain's voice, and then: "Present!" There was a stir and rattle, and the dark, indistinct figure standing on the lip of the ditch was covered by the eight muskets. To the eyes of the firing-party he was no more than a blurred shadowy form, showing a little darker than the encompassing dark grey. "Give fire!" On the word Mr. Wilding lost the delicate, precarious balance he had been sustaining on the edge of the ditch, and went over backwards, at the imminent risk--as he afterwards related--of breaking his neck. At the same instant a jagged, eight-pointed line of flame slashed the darkness, and the thunder of the volley pealed forth to lose itself in the greater din of battle on Penzoy Pound, hard by. _ |
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