“One more chance,” cried the voice of his arch-tormentor. “Will you do what you have no option but to do? Remember, this is no swift death—no beheading at one blow—as you have seen. A nasty sort of butchering death for a man of your birth and breeding to end up with, eh?”
“Do your butcher work; my mind is unchanged.”
At a sign the demon with the knife lowered it. Wagram felt a slash upon his throat, and the blood flowed. In reality it was but a skin cut. The black fiend, instructed by the white arch-fiend, was but playing with him; yet the mind acting upon the strained nerves rendered the torture actual, horrible. Except a quick gasp no sound escaped the sufferer. In the concentration of the suspense every detail was stamped upon the retina of his brain—the bestial, black faces, staring and bloodthirsty; the scarcely less repulsive countenance of his—fellow-countryman, and a strange, vivid scar round the outside of the right eye defacing this. Detail is curiously to the front in moments of extreme tensity. The willing executioner looked again at his superior for the final signal. After a moment of deathly silence—to the sufferer a very lifetime of suspense—it came.
But, what was this? He had been quickly unbound, and rolled to the ground, and as he lay there, dazed with the sudden revulsion, the voice of his arch-tormentor fell once more upon his ears.
“That’ll do for to-day, Wagram. You’ve gone through hell—yes, hell—in the last few minutes, but it’s nothing to what’s sticking out for you. You thought you’d have been in heaven by now, but, no fear. Moreover, you’ll never get there, for before I’ve done with you you’re going to blaspheme Heaven in such a manner that even it’ll have nothing to do with you at the end, in spite of your life of piety and sanctimoniousness. Wait a bit. You haven’t felt any real pain yet—don’t know what it is. To-morrow you shall begin. A little roasting, you understand; not too much—enough to keep you wriggling for an hour or so. You shall have the whole night to think of it.”
“You are wrong, devil,” was the answer. “Whatever might escape me through weakness under your hellish treatment will not count, rest assured. And the Heaven which you blaspheme has a longer arm than you think.”
“All right. It can’t reach as far as this,” returned the other, with a hideous laugh.
The sufferer was roughly seized, jerked to his feet, and dragged back to the hut; but even this gloomy prison-house was no longer to be his undisturbed, for now the two black horrors entered it with him, and disposed themselves in such wise as to render it evident they meant to spend the night there. He himself was secured by thongs in such wise as to render any attempt at escape impossible.
And there in the black darkness—with loathsome insects creeping over him, the close, stuffy air rendered absolutely poisonous by the rancid stench exhaling from the musky bodies of his guards—Wagram underwent to the full all the trials of the martyrs destined for the Coliseum of old. He had passed through, as it were, the very extremity of death that day, and had been put back that he might die many deaths. He knew that the words of the white savage had been no empty threat, for among the awful sights he had been forced to witness in that hell-centre had been that of a human being done to death over a slow fire in exactly the manner that had been promised for himself. Well, if that were so, and he were called upon to suffer the fiery ordeal, he trusted that strength might be given him as to the martyrs of old, the prayers of all of whom he fervently invoked, including those of his martyred relative—the recollection of whom turned back his thoughts to Hilversea, and those he had left there; and it was with deep thankfulness that he realised that no flaw existed in the provisions he had made before leaving in the event of accident to himself. These had been effected with business-like foresight and accuracy. All who had claims upon him had been remembered, and Gerard had been left under the joint guardianship of Haldane and the family solicitor. Even Delia Calmour he had not omitted to provide for, by reason of the interest he and his father had taken in the girl, and the disadvantages under which she was placed. Perhaps she would bless his memory and pray for him, and the recollection of her bright young beauty was pleasant now in the gloomy hour of his bondage and the horrible fate which impended. Yvonne, too—she would not forget him, and the prayers of the young and the pure seemed as though they must be tenfold precious and efficacious.
Hour by hour his thoughts ran on, interluded by snatches of sleep, begotten of sheer mental exhaustion, haunted, however, by gusty, disturbing dreams, in which the horrors he had witnessed and gone through would rise up to mock and distress him, as though instigated by the malice of the powers of hell. The same sun which would rise upon Hilversea, and its joyous, peaceful English life, would rise upon him and the drear abode of blood-stained heathendom; would witness his death amid horrible torment, and that not at the word of merciless, ruthless barbarians but at the bidding of a fellow-countryman—a white man. The situation seemed so impossible, so grotesque, as to wear the aspect of a veritable nightmare. It was incredible.