The Deemster

by Sir Hall Caine

It was then, in that blind laboring of despair, that he asked himself why he should struggle with this last of the misfortunes that had befallen him. Was life so dear to him? Not so, or, being dear, he was willing to lay it down. Was he not about to deliver himself to the death that must be the first punishment of his crime? And what, after all, was there to choose between two forms of death? Nay, if he must die, who was no longer worthy of life, better to die there, none knowing his way of death, than to die on the gallows.

At that thought his hair rose from its roots. He had never rightly put it to himself until now that if he had to die for the death of Ewan he must die the death of hanging. That horror of hanging which all men have was stronger in Dan than in most. With the grim vision before him of a shameful and damning death it came to him to tell himself that better, a thousand times better, was death in that living tomb than the death that awaited him outside it. Then he thought of his father, and of the abasement of that good man if so great a shame overtook his son, and thereupon, at the same breath with a prayer to God that he might die where he was, a horrible blasphemy bolted from his lips. He was in higher hands than his own. God had saved him from himself. At least he was not to die on the gallows. He had but one prayer now, and it cried in its barrenness of hope, "Let me never leave this place!" His soul was crushed as the moth that will never lift wing again.

But at that his agony took another turn. He reflected that, if God's hand was keeping him from the just punishment of his crime, God was holding him back from the atonement that was to wash his crime away. At this thought he was struck with a great trembling. He wrestled with it, but it would not be overcome. Had he not parted with Mona with the firm purpose of giving himself up to the law? Yet at every hour since that parting some impediment had arisen. First, there were the men in the shed at the creek, their resolve to bury the body, and his own weak acquiescence; then came the dead calm out at sea when he stood at the tiller, and the long weary drifting on the wide waters; and now there was this last strange accident. It was as if a higher will had willed it that he should die before his atonement could be made. His spirit sank yet lower, and he was for giving up all as lost. In the anguish of despair he thought that in very deed it must be that he had committed the unpardonable sin. This terrible idea clung to him like a leech at a vein. And then it came to him to think what a mockery his dream of atonement had been. What atonement could a bad man make for spilling the blood of a good one? He could but send his own wasted life after a life well spent. Would a righteous God take that for a just balance? Mockeries of mockeries! No, no; let him die where he now was, and let his memory be blotted out, and his sin be remembered no more.

He tried to compose himself, and pressed one hand hard at his breast to quiet the laboring of his heart. He began to reckon the moments. In this he had no object, or none save only that mysterious longing of a dying man to know how the hour drags on. With the one hand that was free he took out his watch, intending to listen for the beat of its seconds; but his watch had stopped; no doubt it was full of water. His heart beat loud enough. Then he went on to count—one, two, three. But his mind was in a whirl, and he lost his reckoning. He found that he had stopped counting, and forgotten the number. Whether five minutes or fifty had passed, he could not be sure.

But time was passing. The wind began to rise. At first Dan felt nothing of it as he stood in his deep tomb. He could hear its thin hiss over the mouth of the shaft, and that was all. But presently the hiss deepened to a sough. Dan had often heard of the wind's sob. It was a reality, and no metaphor, as he listened to the wind now. The wind began to descend. With a great swoop it came down the shaft, licked the walls, gathered voice from the echoing water at the bottom, struggled for escape, roared like a caged lion, and was once more sucked up to the surface, with a noise like the breaking of a huge wave over a reef. The tumult of the wind in the shaft was hard to bear, but when it was gone it was the silence that seemed to be deafening. Then the rain began to fall. Dan knew this by the quick, monotonous patter overhead. But no rain touched him. It was driven aslant by the wind, and fell only against the uppermost part of the walls of the shaft. Sometimes a soft thin shower fell over him. It was like a spray from a cataract, except that the volume of water from which it came was above and not beneath him.

It was then in the deadly sickness of fear that there came to Dan the dread of miscarrying forever if he should die now. He seemed to see what it was to die unredeemed. Not to be forgiven, but to be forever accursed, to be cut off from the living that live in God's peace?—the dead darkness of that doom stood up before him. Life had looked very dear to him before, but what now of everlasting death? He was as one who was dead before his death came. Live he could not, die he dared not. His past life rose up in front of him, and he drank of memory's very dregs. It was all so fearsome and strange that as he recalled its lost hours one by one it was as if he were a stranger to himself. He saw himself, like Esau, who for a morsel of meat had sold his birthright, and could thereafter find no acceptance, though he sought it with tears. The Scripture leaped to his mind which says, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

And then from the past to the future his mind went on in a rapid and ceaseless whirl. He saw himself fleeing as from the face of a dreadful judge. Tossed with the terror of a dreadful doom, he saw his place in the world, cold, empty, forsaken. He saw his old father, too, the saintly Bishop, living under the burden of a thousand sorrows, while he who was the life of the good man's life, but his no longer, was a restless, wandering soul, coming as a cold blast of wind between him and his heaven. That thought was the worst terror of all, and Dan heard a cry burst from his throat that roused echoes of horror in the dark pit.

Then, as if his instinct acted without help from his mind, Dan began to contemplate measures for escape. That unexpected softness of the rock which had at first appalled him began now to give him some painful glimmerings of hope. If the sides of the shaft had been of the slate rock of the island the ledge he had laid hold of would not have crumbled in his hand. That it was soft showed that there must be a vein of sandstone running across the shaft. Dan's bewildered mind recalled the fact that Orris Head was a rift of red sand and soft sandstone. If this vein were but deep enough his safety was assured. He could cut niches into it with a knife, and so, perhaps, after infinite pain and labor, reach the surface.

Steadying himself with one hand, Dan felt in his pockets for his knife. It was not there! Now indeed his death seemed certain. He was icy cold and feverishly hot at intervals. His clothes were wet; the water still dripped from them, and fell into the hidden tarn beneath in hollow drops. But not to hope now would have been not to fear. Dan remembered that he had a pair of small scissors which he had used three days ago in scratching his name on the silver buckle of his militia belt. When searching for his knife he had felt it in his pocket, and spurned it for resembling the knife to the touch of his nervous fingers. Now, it was to be his sole instrument. He found it again, and with this paltry help he set himself to his work of escape from the dark, deep tunnel that stood upright.

The night was wearing on; hour after hour went by. The wind dropped; the rain ceased to patter overhead. Dan toiled on step over step. Resting sometimes on the largest and firmest of the projecting ledges, he looked up at the sky. The leaden gray had changed to a dark blue, studded with stars. The moon arose very late, being in its last quarter, and much beset by rain-clouds. It shone a little way down the shaft, lighting all the rest. Dan knew it must be early morning. One star, a large, full globe of light, twinkled directly above him. He sat long and watched it, and turned again and again in his toilsome journey to look at it. At one moment it crept into his heart that the star was a symbol of hope to him. Then he twisted back to his work, and when he looked again the star was gone—it had moved beyond his ken, it had passed out of the range of his narrow spot of heaven. Somehow, it had been a mute companion.