The Grey Man

by S. R. Crockett

So when Auchendrayne asked for a knife, Sawny Bean himself, the ruffian kemper, low-browed, buck-toothed, and inhuman, brought it to him with a grin. He made as if he would have set it in me to the hilt. But John Mure stayed him.

'Bide,' he said, 'not so fast. There is long and sweet pleasuring to come before that—such slow, relishing delight, such covetous mouseplay of the brindled cat, such luxurious tiger-licking of the delicate skin till it be raw, such well-conceited dainty torments as when one would bite his love and be glad of it. He shall taste them all, this frolic squire of errant-dames, this gamesome player upon pipes, this curious handler of quaint love tunes. Ere we pluck the red rose of his life, he shall sate himself with new delicious experience—rarer than the handling of many maidens' tresses.'

I was moved to speak to him.

'I ask not mercy,' said I, 'for I own that I would have killed you if I could. But as you are a valiant man, give me a sword and let me make a stand for it against you all, that as I have lived so I may also die fighting.'

But he mocked me, hurrying on in his heady turmoil of words.

'"If I be a man," you say—who said that I was a man? Do I act as other men? Is my knowledge like that of other men? Do I company with other men? Call you that a man?' (He pointed to Sawny Bean, who for wantonness sat on an upturned tub, striking with a keen-edged knife at the legs of all that came by for mere delight of blood, storming at them meantime with horrid imprecations to approach nearer and be flicked.) 'Or call you these men?' (He showed me some of the younger cannibal race gnawing like kennelled dogs at horrid bones.) 'Nay, my dainty wanton, you shall not enter Hell through the brave brattle of warring blades, nor yet handling your rapier like a morris-dancer. But as the blood drains to the white from the stricken calf, so shall they whiten your flesh for the tooth, and so reluctantly shall your life drip from you drop by drop.'

And I declare that this scornful fiend telling me of tortures in choice words made me scunner more than the prick of the knife. For the abhorred invention quickened the imagination and set the nerves agate.

So that I was honestly glad when he took knife in hand—a shoemaker's curved blade with a keen cutting edge.

'Strip him naked!' he cried. And very cheerfully so they did, smiting me the meantime with the broad of their hand.

Then John Mure leaned over me delicately, and made as though he would have traced with his knife the jointing of my limbs, saying, 'Thus and thus shall the she-tribe dismember your body when the torture of the ant's nest is ended.' And again 'Here is toothsome eating, Sawny Bean, thou chief lover of dainty vivers.'