The Sword of Gideon

by John Bloundelle-Burton

Not hear! Nay, what hearing was necessary--to him, a soldier; to him who had ere now seen the place marked out where a condemned man was to stand while, at another place, the spot was marked where the platoon that should despatch him was to be drawn up! A million words uttered trumpet-tongued could have told him no more than those significant actions of the dragoon had done.

Now that Bevill knew the worst all tremors, all trepidations were gone, even as every warm glow of hope was gone too. The end was close at hand, and he knew it. Therefore, all bitterness was past. He was a soldier, he told himself, an Englishman who had faced thousands of bullets: a dozen could not fright him now.

Calmly, as though watching curiously the actions of strangers who interested him but disturbed him not at all, he leant against the window frame looking down at the preparations for his death and that of the others. Counting indifferently, too, the distance between the scratches on the stones and those on the wall, and endeavouring to decide whether the muzzles of the muskets would be fourteen or sixteen paces from his heart as the soldiers presented them!

Then, suddenly, he saw the men below draw themselves up stiffly to an attitude of attention, and perceived that De Violaine, enveloped in a long blue cavalry cloak, had entered the courtyard, and was regarding the scaffold. Also, he appeared to be giving some directions about one of the gallows supports, judging by the manner in which he pointed with his gloved hand to it and by the fact that, a moment later, one of the men mounted the scaffold and began to make the post more firm in the socket below it. Next, De Violaine gazed at the marks on the stones and on the wall, after which he shrugged his shoulders, said a word to the sergeant, and turned away and left the place. The moment he was gone Bevill saw that the soldiers had gathered round the sergeant and seemed to be asking him questions, and that they all gesticulated earnestly.

"It will be to-morrow, at dawn," he said to himself as he saw the men retiring with the almost burnt-out torches in their hands, leaving the courtyard in darkness. "To-morrow. Ah! I have still six hours or so left," as now he heard the clock of St. Lambert boom out ten over the city--the clock he had grown so accustomed to listening to--and listening for--during his long period of imprisonment. "Six hours in which to make my peace with God, to humbly fit myself to go before Him. Hours in which to pray for her who sits at home wondering what may have befallen me and whether I live or am dead and gone before her."

For now, as his hour of death drew near, his thoughts turned not to the girl whom he had but lately known and learnt to love, but to his grey-haired mother whose love had been his from the moment of his birth; at whose knees he had learned to lisp his first prayer.

Yet still there was not absent from his mind the stately form, the beautiful face of Sylvia--the latter ever present to him as he had seen it last--bedashed with tears and piteous in its sorrow. Of her he could think, too, and would think as the order to the platoon was given, as the flints fell, and, a second later, the bullets found his heart.

"Sylvia! Mother!" he murmured. "The two I had in the world to love me and to love; the two who will mourn my end. The one but for a short time, since now she is grown old and feeble; but the other--ah! God, it may be for years."

In the darkness he had reached his pallet, intent on casting himself on his knees by it and so passing his last few hours--later, there would be a long sleep!--when he heard a sound he had grown well accustomed to in the last few weeks--the sound of a soldier's tread, of the keys jangling in his hand as he came on.

"Is it now?" Bevill whispered. "Now? At once? If so, be brave. A soldier. And--remember. Their names the last upon your lips, their memories the last in your thoughts."