The Bondman: A New Saga

by Sir Hall Caine

"Can't you see he's ill?" she was saying, and they were laughing lustily.

He turned towards the sea, and there, with only the black beach before his eyes and the monotonous beat of the waves in his ears, his faculties grew clearer. "Oh God!" he thought, "am I to strike him down before her face and at the very foot of the altar? It is terrible. It must be true that I am ill—or perhaps mad—or both."

But he wrestled with his irresolute spirit and overcame it. One by one he marshalled his reasons and bit by bit he justified himself. When his anger wavered against the man who had twice supplanted him, he recalled his vow to execute judgment, and when his vow seemed horrible he remembered that Greeba herself had wronged him.

Thus he had juggled with himself night after night, and if morning after morning peace had come with the coming of light, it was gone forever now. He rehearsed everything in his mind and saw it all as he meant it to be. To-morrow while the bells were ringing he would go into the Cathedral. His old landlady, the caretaker, would put him in the front seat before the altar-rail. The pews would already be thronged, and there would be whispering behind him, and little light fits of suppressed laughter. Presently the old Bishop would come, halting along in his surplice, holding the big book in his trembling hands. Then the bridegroom would step forward, and he should see him and mark him and know him. The bride herself would come next in a dazzling cloud of her bridesmaids, all dressed in white. Then as the two stood together—he and she, hand in hand, glancing softly at each other, and with all other eyes upon them, he himself would rise up—and do it. Suddenly there would be a wild cry, and she would turn towards him, and see him, and understand him, and fall fainting before him. Then while both lay at his feet he would turn to those about him and say, very calmly, "Take me. It was I." All being done, he would not shrink, and when his time came he would meet his fate without flinching, and in the awful hereafter he would stand before the white throne and say, "It would have been an evil thing if God's ways had not been justified before men: so I have executed on earth His judgment who has said in His Holy Writ that the wrongdoer shall surely suffer vengeance, even to the third and fourth generation of [his] children."

Thinking so, in the mad tangle of his poor, disordered brain, yet with a great awe upon him as of one laden with a mission from on high, Jason went back to his lodging, threw himself down, without undressing, upon the bed, and fell into a heavy sleep.

When he awoke next morning the bells in the turret overhead were jangling in his ears, and his deaf old landlady was leaning over him and calling to him.

"Get up, love, get up: it's late, love; you'll miss it all, love; it's time to go in, love," she was saying; and a little later she led him by a side door into the Cathedral.

He took a seat where he had decided to take it, in a corner of the pew before the altar-rail, and all seemed the same as he had pictured. The throngs of people were behind him, and he could hear their whispering and light laughter while they waited. There was the door at which the venerable Bishop would soon enter, carrying his big book, and there was the path, kept free and strewn with flowers, down which the bride and her train would pass on to the red form before him. Ah! the flowers—blood red and purple—how sweetly they trailed over altar-rail, and pulpit, and the tablet of the ten commandments! Following them with his eyes, while with his hands he fumbled his belt for that which he had concluded to carry there, suddenly he was smitten with an awful dread. One line of the printed words before him seemed to come floating through the air down to his face in a vapor of the same blood-red.

Thou shalt do no murder!

Jason started to his feet. Why was he there? What had he come to do? He must go. The place was stifling him. In another moment he was crushing his way out of the Cathedral. He felt like a man sentenced to death.