“Yes, happiness!” rejoined the tempter. “You and Madelon love each other, and in every station, from the highest to the lowest, love is the salt of life, the balm and cordial of existence. My office descends from generation to generation; it insures to the holder not only a good house and landed property, but an income of no mean amount. Every traveller who passes my house pays me a toll, because fifty years since an inundation compelled the town to cut a high-road through my grandfather’s garden. Of all these benefits I shall be deprived, when old and disabled, if my children disdain to follow my vocation; and if Madelon were to marry within the pale of that society which regards her father with abhorrence, my house and vineyard would be destroyed by the bigoted and furious populace, and too probably my innocent child along with them. Have you the heart, Florian, to hazard her destruction and your own, in preference to an office essential to the existence of civil society, and from which that obedience to the laws, which is the first duty of a good citizen, removes all self-reproach? With a due sense of the importance of your official duties, you will find yourself sustained in the performance of them; and a practised hand will soon give you firmness enough to follow a vocation attended with no personal risk; but if you determine to leave me, where will you find resolution to face the perils which surround you? and if you escape them, how are you to compete in the race of life with the daring and the fleet?”
The appalling alternatives held out to Florian by the politic headsman, and the consciousness of his own inability either to escape the police, or to steer his way successfully through the shoals and quicksands of life, rendered him incapable of argument or reply. He had for some months been cut off from all that freedom has to bestow—he had neither relations nor friends on whose interposition he could firmly rely—he recollected with agony that every heart beyond the limits of his present home was steeled against him—that every hand was ready to seize and betray him. Should he quit this safe asylum, and even establish his innocence of the imputed murder, his ignorance of the world, and his invincible timidity and self-distrust, would make him the prey of any plausible knavery. Bewildered and stupified by contending emotions, his mind became palsied by despair, and his powers of resistance began to fail him. The headsman saw his advantage; but, satisfied with the impression he had made upon his hapless victim, he ceased to press any immediate decision, told him to consider of the proposal, and went to his vineyard; while Florian, hastening to his Madelon, was assailed by all the witchery of sighs and tears; by looks, which alternately pleaded and upbraided; and by inspiriting and cogent arguments, which shamed him into temporary resolution. Thus alternately intimidated by the deep tones and stern denunciations of the father, encouraged by the specious reasonings of the daughter, or soothed by her resistless fascinations; assured, too, by the headsman, that for some years sentences of decapitation, with rare exceptions, had been commuted for the galleys, his power to contend with his tempter abandoned him: he dropped, like the fascinated bird, into the jaws of the serpent; and, yielding to his destiny, he commenced his training in a vocation from which every feeling in his nature, and every dictate of his understanding, recoiled with abhorrence.
It was no sacrifice, to one of his timid and fastidious habits, to abandon a world in which he had ever found himself an alien, and which he now thought confederated to persecute and destroy him. He submitted in uncomplaining resignation to his fate, and ere long found relief in the growing attachment of the headsman and his daughter. His pure and affectionate heart, and the undeviating rectitude of his principles and conduct, soon won the entire esteem of the old man, whose better feelings had not been blunted by his official duties; while the light-hearted and bewitching Madelon, who now loved almost to idolatry a man so incomparably superior to any she had hitherto known, delighted to cheer his hours of sadness, and watched his every wish with intense and unwearied solicitude. Meanwhile, the old man had quietly made every requisite preparation, and a month after the assent of Florian to his proposal, the lovers were united. The official appointment of Florian, as adopted successor to the headsman, took place some days before the marriage, and it was stipulated by the town authorities that, on the next ensuing condemnation of a criminal to death, he should prove on the scaffold his competency to succeed the executioner.
For many months after this appointment, every arrival of a criminal in the town prison struck terror into the heart of Florian. Happily, however, the assertion of the headsman that it was a growing practice of the judicial authorities to substitute the galleys for decapitation, was verified by the fact, and Florian enjoyed several years of domestic happiness, disturbed only by apprehensions which he could never subdue, that sooner or later the evil he so much dreaded would certainly befall him. Meanwhile his beloved Madelon had made him the happy father of three promising boys, and he began to experience a degree of tranquillity to which he had long been a stranger; when, at a period in which the town-prison was untenanted, the long-dreaded calamity burst upon his devoted head like a bolt of lightning from a cloudless sky.
His father-in-law received one morning at breakfast an order from the town authorities to repair early on the following day to a city at ten leagues distance, and there to behead a criminal whose execution had been delayed by the illness and death of the resident headsman. At this unexpected intelligence, the features of Florian were blanched with horror, but the iron visage of the old executioner betrayed not the slightest emotion. Regardless of his son-in-law’s terrors, he viewed this unexpected summons as a fortunate incident, and maintained that any unskilfulness in decapitation would be of less importance at a distance than in his native town. He regarded also this brief summons as much more favourable to Florian’s success than a longer foreknowledge, and urged in strong and decisive terms the necessity of submission to the call of duty. The blood of Florian froze as he listened, but he acquiesced, as usual, in timid silence. In the afternoon he yielded to the old man’s wish, that he should give what the headsman termed a master-proof of his skill in the science of decapitation, and with cold sweat on his brow severed a number of cabbage-heads to the satisfaction of his teacher. Meanwhile the sympathising but energetic Madelon prepared a palatable meal, and endeavoured, more successfully than her uncompromising parent, to sustain and cheer the drooping spirits of the husband she so entirely loved. She could not, however, always suppress her starting tears; and as the night approached, even the firm nature of the old headsman betrayed symptoms of growing anxiety, notwithstanding his endeavours to exhilarate himself by deep potations of his favourite wine.
After a night of wearying vigilance and internal conflict, the miserable Florian entered at daybreak the vehicle which awaited him and his father-in-law under the arched gateway. With a view to prevent his trembling substitute from witnessing all the preparations for the approaching catastrophe, the old man so measured his progress as to enter the city a few minutes before the appointed hour, and drove immediately to the scene of action, without pausing at the church, to attend, as customary, the mass then performing in presence of the criminal. Soon after their arrival, the melancholy procession approached, and Florian, unable to face the criminal, turned hastily away, ascended the ladder with unsteady steps, and concealed himself behind the massive person of the old headsman, as the victim of offended justice, with a firm and measured step, mounted the scaffold. The old man felt for his shrinking son-in-law, but kept a stern eye upon him, in hopes to counteract the disabling effects of his rising agony. When, however, the decisive moment approached, he whispered to him encouragingly—“Be a man, Florian! Beware of looking at the criminal before you strike; but when his head is lifted, look him boldly in the face, or the people will doubt your courage.”
Florian fixed on him a vacant stare, but these kindly-meant instructions reached not his inward ear. The remembrance of the execution he had witnessed with his friend Bartholdy had flashed upon him, and he recollected the taunting prediction—that he might himself be condemned to the scaffold. His agony rose almost to suffocation; he compared his own destiny with that of the being whom he was about to deprive of life, and he felt that he could not unwillingly have taken his place. At this moment his attention was caught by the admiring comments of the crowd upon the courageous bearing and firm unflinching features of the criminal. Roused by these exclamations to a stinging consciousness of his own unmanly timidity, he made a powerful effort, and rallied his expiring energies into temporary life and action. The headsman now approached him with the broad axe, and whispered, “Courage, my son! ’tis nothing but a cabbage-head.”
With a desperate effort, Florian seized the weapon, fixed his dim gaze upon the white neck of the criminal, and, guided more by long practice than by any estimate of place and distance, he struck the death-stroke. The head fell upon the hollow flooring of the scaffold with an appalling bounce, which petrified the unfortunate executioner. The consciousness that he had deprived a fellow-creature of life now smote him with a withering power, which for some moments deprived him of all volition, and he stood in passive stupor, gazing wildly upon the blood which streamed in torrents from the headless trunk. Immediately, however, his father-in-law again approached him, with a whisper. “Admirably done, my son! I give you joy! But recollect my warning, and look boldly at your work, or the mob will hoot you as a craven headsman from the scaffold.”
The old man was obliged to repeat his admonition before it reached the senses of his unconscious son-in-law. Long accustomed to yield unresisting obedience, Florian slowly raised his eyes, at the moment when the executioner’s assistant, after showing the criminal’s head to the multitude, turned round and held out to him the bleeding and ghastly object.—Gracious Heaven! what were his feelings when he encountered a well-known face—when he saw the yellow pock-marked visage of Bartholdy, whose widely-opened milk-blue eyes were fixed upon him in the glassy, dim, and vacant stare of death!
Paralysed with sudden and overwhelming horror, he fell senseless into the arms of the headsman, who had watched this critical moment, and, with ready self-possession, loudly attributed to recent illness an incident so puzzling to the spectators. He succeeded ere long in rousing Florian to an imperfect sense of his critical situation, and, supporting his tottering frame, led him to the house of the deceased executioner. For an hour after their arrival, the unhappy youth sat mute and motionless—the living image of despair. Agony in him had passed its wildest paroxysm, and settled down into a blind and mechanical unconsciousness. The old man, who began to suspect some extraordinary reason for emotion so excessive, compelled him to swallow several glasses of wine, and anxiously besought him to explain the cause of his impassioned deportment. It was long, however, before the disconsolate Florian regained the power of utterance. At length a burst of tears relieved him. “I knew him!” he began, in a voice broken by convulsive sobs. “He was once my friend. Oh, my father! there is no hope for me! I am a doomed man—a murderer! He stands before me ever, and demands my blood in atonement for his destruction. How can I justify such guilt? I never knew his crime—I cannot even fancy him a criminal—but I well remember that he loved and cherished me. Away, my father, if you love me, to the judges! I must know his crime, or the pangs I feel will never depart from me.”