The Long Night

by Stanley John Weyman

And still the noise that maddened him, rose. He sprang to the right-hand window, the window nearest the commotion. He tore open a panel of the small leaded panes, and thrust his head between the bars. He saw a crowd; for an instant, in the heart of the crowd and raised above it, he saw an uplifted arm and a white woman's face from which blood was flowing. He drew in his head, and laid his hands to one of the bars and flung his weight this way and that, flung it desperately, heedless of injury. But in vain. The lead that soldered the bar into the strong stone mullion held, and would have held against the strength of four. With heaving breast, and hands from which the blood was starting, he stood back, glared round him, then with a cry flung himself upon the other window, tore it open and seized a bar—the middle one of the three. It was loose he remembered. God! why had he not thought of it before? Why had he wasted time?

He wasted no more, with those shouts of cruel glee in his ears. The bar came out in his hands. He thrust himself feet first through the aperture. Slight as he was, it was small for him, and he stuck fast at the hips, and had to turn on his side. The rough edges of the bars scraped the skin, but he was through, and had dropped to his feet, the bar which he had plucked out still in his hands. For a fraction of a second, as he alighted, his eyes took in the crowd, and the girl at bay against the wall. She was raised a little above her tormentors by the steps on which she had taken refuge.

On one side her hair hung loose, and the cheek beneath it was cut and bleeding, giving her a piteous and tragic aspect. Four out of five of her assailants were women; one of these had torn her face with her nails. Streaks of mud were mingled with the blood which ran down her neck; and even as Claude recovered himself after the drop from the window, a missile, eluding the bent arm with which she strove to shield her face, struck and bespattered her throat where the collar of her frock had been torn open—perhaps by the same rough clutch which had dragged down her hair. The ring about her—like all crowds in the beginning—were strangely silent; but a yell of derision greeted this success, and a stone flew, narrowly missing her, and another, and another. A woman, holding a heavy Bible after the fashion of a shield, was stooping and striking at her knees with a stick, striving to bring her to the ground; and with the cruel laughter that hailed the hag's ungainly efforts were mingled other and more ugly sounds, low curses, execrations, and always one fatal word, "Witch! Witch!"—fatal word spat at her by writhing mouths, hissed at her by pale lips, tossed broadcast on the cold morning wind, to breed wherever it flew fear and hate and suspicion. For, even while they mocked her they feared her, and shielded themselves against her power with signs and crossings and the Holy Book.

To all, curse and blow and threat, she had only one word. Striving patiently to shield her face, "Let me go!" she wailed pitifully. "Let me go! Let me go!" Strange to say, she cried even that but softly; as who should say, "If you will not, kill me quietly, kill me without noise!" Ay, even then, with the blood running down her face, and with those eyes more cruel than men's eyes hemming her in, she was thinking of the mother whom she had sheltered so long.

"Let me go! Let me go!" she repeated.

"Witch, you shall go!" they answered ruthlessly. "To hell!"

"Ay, with her dam! To the water with her! To the water!"

"Look for the devil's mark! Search her! Again, Martha! Bring her down! Bring her down, and we'll soon see whether——"

Then he reached them. The man, one of the few present, who had bidden them search her fell headlong on his face in the gutter, struck behind as by a thunder-bolt. The great Bible flew one way, the hag's stick flew another—and in its flight felled a second woman. In a twinkling Claude was on the steps, and in the heart of the crowd stood two people, not one; in a twinkling his arm was round the girl, his pale, furious face confronted her tormentors, his blazing eyes beat down theirs! More than all, his iron bar, brandished recklessly this way and that, threatened the brains of the man or the woman who was bold enough to withstand him.

For he was beside himself with rage. He learned in that moment that he was of those who fight with joy and rejoicing, and laugh where others shake. The sight of that white, bleeding face, of that hanging hair, of that suppliant arm, above all, the sound of that patient "Let me go! Let me go!" that expected nothing and hoped nothing, had turned his blood to fire. The more numerous his opponents—if they were men—the better he would be pleased; and if they were women, such women, unsexed by hate and superstition, as he saw before him, women looking a millionfold more like witches than the girl they accused, the worse for them! His arm would not falter!