'"Legs short and figure stumpy,"' repeated the Sergeant reading.
'That is so set down is it? Then,' said Barnaby, looking down at his limbs, ''twas a pity that, with such legs as these, I did not deny my name. Call these short, brother?'
CHAPTER XXV.
ILMINSTER CLINK.
How can I tell—oh! how can I sit down to tell in cold blood the story of all that followed? Some parts of it for very pity I must pass over. All that has been told or written of the Bloody Assize is most true, and yet not half that happened can be told. There are things, I mean, which the historian cannot, for the sake of pity, decency, and consideration for living people, relate, even if he hath seen them. You who read the printed page may learn how in one place so many were hanged; in another place so many; how some were hung in gemmaces, so that at every cross-road there was a frightful gibbet with a dead man on it; how some died of small-pox in the crowded prisons, and some of fever; and how Judge Jeffreys rode from town to town, followed by gangs of miserable prisoners driven after him to stand their trial in towns where they would be known; how the wretched sufferers were drawn and quartered, and their limbs seethed in pitch, and stuck up over the whole country; how the women and boys of tender years were flogged through market-towns—you, I say, who read these things on the cold page presently (even if you be a stickler for the Right Divine and hold rebellion as a mortal sin) feel your blood to boil with righteous wrath. The hand of the Lord was afterwards heavy upon those who ordered these things; nay, at the very time (this is a most remarkable Judgment, and one little known) when this inhuman Judge was thundering at his victims—so that some went mad and even dropped down dead with fear—he was himself, as Humphrey hath assured me, suffering the most horrible pain from a dire disease; so that the terrors of his voice and of his fiery eyes were partly due to the agony of his disease, and he was enduring all through that Assize, in his own body, pangs greater than any that he ordered! As for his miserable end, and the fate that overtook his master, that we know; and candid souls cannot but confess that here were truly Judgments of God, visible for all to see and acknowledge. But no pen can truly depict what the eye saw and the ear heard during that terrible time. And, think you, if it was a terrible and a wretched time for those who had no relations among the rebels, and only looked on and saw these bloody executions and heard the lamentations of the poor women who lost their lovers or their husbands, what must it have been for me, and those like me, whose friends and all whom they loved—yea, all, all!—were overwhelmed in one common ruin, and expected nothing but death?
Our own misery I cannot truly set forth. Sometimes the memory of it comes back to me, and it is as if long afterwards one should feel again the sharpness of the surgeon's knife. Oh! since I must write down what happened, let me be brief. And you who read it, if you find the words cold where you would have looked for fire; if you find no tears where there should have been weeping and wailing, remember that in the mere writing have been shed again (but these you cannot see) the tears which belonged to that time, and in the writing have been renewed (but these you cannot hear) the sobbings and wailings and terrors of that dreadful autumn.
The soldiers belonged to a company of Grenadiers of Trelawny's Regiment, stationed at Ilminster, whither they carried the prisoners. First they handcuffed Barnaby, but, on his giving his parole not to escape, they let him go free; and he proved useful in the handling of the cart on which my unhappy father lay. And, though the soldiers' talk was ribald, their jests unseemly, and their cursing and swearing seemed verily to invite the wrath of God, yet they proved honest fellows in the main. They offered no rudeness to us, nor did they object to our going with the prisoners; nay, they even gave us bread and meat and cider from their own provisions when they halted for dinner at noon. Barnaby walked sometimes with the soldiers, and sometimes with us; with them he talked freely, and as if he were their comrade and not their prisoner: with us he put in a word of encouragement or consolation, such as 'Mother, we shall find a way out of this coil yet;' or 'Sister, we shall cheat Tom Hangman. Look not so gloomy upon it;' or, again, he reminded us that many a shipwrecked sailor gets safe ashore, and that where there are so many they cannot hang all. 'Would the King,' he asked, 'hang up the whole county of Somerset?' But he had already told me too much. In his heart I knew he had small hope of escape; yet he preserved his cheerfulness, and walked towards his prison (to outward seeming) as insensible of fear, and with as unconcerned a countenance as if he were going to a banquet or a wedding. This cheerfulness of his was due to a happy confidence in the ordering of things rather than to insensibility. A sailor sees men die in many ways, yet himself remains alive. This gives him something of the disposition of the Oriental, who accepts his fate with outward unconcern, whatever it may be. Perhaps (I know not) there may have been in his mind that religious Assurance of which he had told me. Did Barnaby at this period, when death was very near unto him, really believe that there was one religion for landsmen and another for sailors—one way to heaven for ministers, another for seamen? Indeed, I cannot tell; yet how otherwise account for his courage and cheerfulness at all times—even in the very presence of death?