Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 13

by Unknown

"You say that you were about three years old," he said, "when you were found clinging to the breast of your mother; have you no remembrance of her—no recollection of the name by which you were then called?"

"None! none!" answered the other. "I sometimes fancy that, as the vague remembrance of a dream, I recollect clinging around my mother's neck, and kissing her cold lips; but whether it indeed be remembrance, or merely the tale that has been often told me, I am uncertain. I often imagine, also, that her beautiful features yet live in my memory, though with the indistinctness of an ethereal being—like a vapour that is dying away on the far horizon; and I am uncertain, also, whether the fair vision that haunts me be indeed a dim remembrance of what my mother was, or a creation of my brain."

The interest of the scene was heightened by the resemblance which Major Ferguson and the young serjeant bore to each other. All observed it—all expressed their surprise—and the major, in his turn, began his tale.

"Your features, young man," said he, "and your story, have drawn tears to the eyes of an old soldier. Thirty years ago I was in this country, and became an inmate in the house of a rich merchant in Madrid. His name was Valdez, and he had an only daughter called Maria. When I first beheld her, she was about nineteen, and a being more beautiful I had never seen—I have not seen. Affection sprang up between us; for it was impossible to look on her and not love. Her father, though he at first expressed some opposition to our wishes, on the ground of my being a Protestant, at length gave his consent, and Maria became my wife. For several months our happiness was as a dream—as a summer sky where there is no cloud. But our days of felicity were of short continuance. We have all heard of the revengeful disposition of the Spanish people, and it was our lot to be its victims. I have said that it was impossible to look upon the face of Maria, and not love; and many of the grandees and wealthiest citizens of Madrid sought her hand. Amongst the former was a nephew of an Inquisitor. He vowed to have his revenge—and he has had it. In the dead of night, a band of ruffians burst into the bedchamber of Maria's father, and dragged him to the dungeons of the Inquisition. For several weeks, and we could learn nothing of what had become of him; but his property was seized and confiscated, as though he had been a common felon. My wife was then the mother of an infant son, and I endeavoured to effect our concealment, until an opportunity of escaping to England might be found. We had approached within a hundred yards of the vessel, when a band of armed men rushed upon us. They overpowered me; and while one party bore away my wife and child, others dragged me into a carriage, one holding a pistol to my breast, while another tied a bandage over my eyes. They continued to drive with furious rapidity for about six hours, when I was torn from the carriage, and dragged between the ruffians through numerous winding passages. I heard the grating of locks and the creaking of bolts, as they proceeded. Door succeeded door, groaning on their unwilling hinges, as they ascended stairs, and descended others, in an interminable labyrinth. Still the men who hurried me onward maintained a sullen silence; and no sound was heard, save the clashing of prison doors, and the sepulchral echo of their footsteps ringing through the surrounding dungeons. They at length stopped. A cord, suspended from a block in the roof was fastened round my waist; and, when one, turning a sort of windlass, which communicated with the other end of the cord, raised me several feet from the ground, his comrade drew a knife, and cut asunder the fastenings that bound my arms. While one, holding the handle of the machine, kept me hanging in the air, other two applied a key to a large, square stone in the floor, which, aided by a spring, they with some difficulty raised, and revealed a yawning opening to a dungeon, yet deeper and more dismal than that which formed its entrance. The moment my hands were at liberty, I tore the bandage from my eyes, and perceiving, through the aid of a dim lamp that flickered in a corner of the vault, the horror of my situation, I struggled in desperation. But my threatenings and my groans were answered only by their hollow echoes, or the more dismal laughter of my assassins.

"Down—down!" vociferated both voices to their companion, as the stone was raised; and, in a moment, I was plunged into the dark mouth of the dungeon. I uttered a cry of agony louder and longer than the rest; and, as my body sunk into the abyss, I clutched its edge in despair. One of the ruffians sprang forward, and, blaspheming as he raised his foot, dashed his iron heels upon my fingers. Mine was the grasp of a dying man; and, thrusting forward my right hand, I seized the ankle of the monster, who attempted to kick me in the face. With my left I strengthened my hold, and my body plunging downward with the movement, dragged after me the wretch, who, uttering a piercing shriek, as his head dashed on the brink of the fearful dungeon, escaped instantly from my grasp, and with an imprecation on his tongue, he was plunged headlong into darkness many fathoms deep. Startled by the cry of his comrade, the other sprang from the machine by which he was lowering me into the vault, and I in consequence descended with the violence of a stone driven from a strong arm. But, before I reached the bottom, the cord by which I hung was expended, and I swung in torture between the sides of the dungeon. In this state of agony I remained for several minutes, till one of the miscreants cutting the rope, I fell with my face upon the bloody and mangled body of their accomplice; and the huge stone was placed over us, enveloping both in darkness, solid and substantial as the pit of wrath itself.

"A paralysing feeling of horror and surprise, and the violence with which I fell upon the mangled body of my victim, for a time deprived me of all consciousness of my situation; nor was it until the convulsive groans of the bleeding wretch beneath me recalled me in some measure to a sense of other miseries than my own, that a remembrance of the past, and a feeling of the present, opened upon my mind, like the confused terror of a dismal dream. I rose slowly to my feet, and, disengaging myself from the rope by which I was suspended into the vault, endeavoured to look around the walls of my prison-house—but all was dark as the grave. Recollecting the part sustained in seizing me by the wounded man, who still groaned and writhed at my feet, I darted fiercely upon him; and hurling him from the ground, exclaimed, 'Villain!—tell me or die!—where am I? or by whom am I brought here?' A loud, long yell of terror, accompanied by violent and despairing struggles, like a wild beast tearing from the paws of a lion, was the only answer returned by the miserable being. And as the piteous and heart-piercing yell rang round the cavern, and its echoes, multiplying in darkness, at length died away, leaving silence more dolorous than ourselves, I felt as a man from the midst of a marriage-feast, suddenly thrust into the cells of Bedlam; where, instead of the music of the harp and the lute, was the shriek and the clanking chains of insanity; for bridal ornaments, the madman's straw; and for the gay dance, the convulsions of the maniac, and the sorrowful gestures of idiocy. Every feeling of indignation passed away—my blood grew cold—the skin moved upon my flesh—I again laid the wretched man on the damp earth, and fearfully groped to the opposite side of the dungeon.

"As I moved around, feeling through the dense darkness of my prison, I found it a vast square, its sides composed merely of the rude strata of earth or rock; and measuring nearly six times the length of my extended arms. As often as I moved, bones seemed to crackle beneath my feet; and a noise, like the falling of armour and the sounding of steel, accompanied the crumbling fragments. Once I stooped to ascertain the cause, and raising a heavy body, a part of it fell with a loud, hollow crash among my feet, leaving the lighter portion in my hands. It was a round bony substance, covered, and partly filled, with damp, cold dust. I was neither superstitious nor a coward; but, as I drew my hand around it, my body quivered, the hair upon my head moved, and my heart felt heavy. It was the form of a human skull. The damp dust had once been the temple of a living soul. My fingers entered the sockets of the eyes—the teeth fell in my hands—and the still fresh and dewy hair twined around it. I shuddered—it fell from my grasp—the chill of death passed over me. The horrid conviction that I was immured in a living grave absorbed every other feeling; and smiting my brow in horror, I threw myself, with a groan, amidst the dead of other years.

"I again sprang to my feet, with the undetermined and confused wildness of despair. The mournful howlings of the assassin continued to render the horrid sepulchre still more horrible, and gave to its darkness a deeper ghostliness. Dead to every emotion of sympathy, stricken with dismal realities, and more terrible imaginations, yet burning for revenge, directed by the howlings of the miserable man, and hesitating to distinguish between them and their incessant echoes, stretching my hands before me, I again approached him, to extort a confession of the cause and place of my imprisonment, or rather living burial. Vainly I raised him from the ground—threatening, soothing, and expostulation were alike unavailing. On hearing my voice, the miserable being shrieked with redoubled bitterness, plunged furiously, and gnashed his teeth, fastening them, in the extremity of his frenzy, in his own flesh. His fierce agony recalled to my bosom an emotion of pity; and, for a moment, forgetful of my own injuries and condition, I thought only of relieving his suffering; but my presence seemed to add new madness to his tortures; and he tore himself from my hold with the lamentable yells of a tormented mastiff, and the strength of a giant who, in the last throe of expiring nature, grapples with his conqueror. He reeled wildly a few paces, and fell, with a crash, upon the earth.

"Slowly and dismally the hours moved on, with no sound to measure their progress, save the audible beating of my own heart, and the death-like howling moan of my companion. As I leaned against the wall, counting these dismal divisions of time, which appeared thus fearfully to mete out the duration of my existence, through the black darkness, whose weight had become oppressive to my eyeballs, I beheld, far above me, on the opposite wall, a faint shadow, like the ghost of light, streaking its side, but so indistinct and imperfect, I knew not whether it was fancy or reality. With the earnestness of death, my eyes remained fixed on the 'gloomy light;' and it threw upon my bosom a hope dim as itself. Again I doubted its existence—deemed it a creation of my brain; and groping along the damp floor, where my hand seemed passing over the ribs of a skeleton, I threw a loose fragment in the air, towards the point from whence the doubted glimmering proceeded; and perceived, for a moment, as it fell, the shadow of a substance. Then, springing forward to the spot, I gasped to inhale, with its feeble ray, one breath that was not agony.

"Thirst burned my lips, and, to cool them, they were pressed against the damp walls of the prison; but my tongue was still dry—my throat parched—and hunger began to prey upon me. While thus suffering, a faint light streamed from a narrow opening in the roof of the vault. Slowly a feeble lamp was lowered through the aperture, and descended within two or three feet of my head. A small basket, containing a portion of bread and a pitcher of water, suspended by a cord, was let down into the vault. I seized the pitcher, as I would have rushed upon liberty; and raising it to my lips, as the pure, grateful beverage allayed the fever of my thirst, I shed a solitary tear, and, in the midst of my misery, that tear was a tear of joy—like the morning-star gilding the horizon, when the surrounding heavens are wrapped in tempest. With it the feelings of the Christian and the man met in my bosom; and, bending over my fellow-sufferer, I applied the water to his lips. The poor wretch devoured the draught to its last drop with greediness.