‘You are not stark mad?’ said Nixon, who now saw he had miscalculated in supposing Nanty’s wild ideas of honour and fidelity could be shaken even by resentment, or by his Protestant partialities. ‘You shall not go back—it is all a joke.’
‘I’ll back to Redgauntlet, and see whether it is a joke he will laugh at.’
‘My life is lost if you do,’ said Nixon—‘hear reason.’
They were in a clump or cluster of tall furze at the moment they were speaking, about half-way between the pier and the house, but not in a direct line, from which Nixon, whose object it was to gain time, had induced Ewart to diverge insensibly.
He now saw the necessity of taking a desperate resolution. ‘Hear reason,’ he said; and added, as Nanty still endeavoured to pass him, ‘Or else hear this!’ discharging a pocket-pistol into the unfortunate man’s body.
Nanty staggered, but kept his feet. ‘It has cut my back-bone asunder,’ he said; ‘you have done me the last good office, and I will not die ungrateful.’
As he uttered the last words, he collected his remaining strength, stood firm for an instant, drew his hanger, and, fetching a stroke with both hands, cut Cristal Nixon down. The blow, struck with all the energy of a desperate and dying man, exhibited a force to which Ewart’s exhausted frame might have seemed inadequate;—it cleft the hat which the wretch wore, though secured by a plate of iron within the lining, bit deep into his skull, and there left a fragment of the weapon, which was broke by the fury of the blow.
One of the seamen of the lugger, who strolled up attracted by the firing of the pistol, though being a small one the report was very trifling, found both the unfortunate men stark dead. Alarmed at what he saw, which he conceived to have been the consequence of some unsuccessful engagement betwixt his late commander and a revenue officer (for Nixon chanced not to be personally known to him) the sailor hastened back to the boat, in order to apprise his comrades of Nanty’s fate, and to advise them to take off themselves and the vessel.
Meantime Redgauntlet, having, as we have seen, dispatched Nixon for the purpose of securing a retreat for the unfortunate Charles, in case of extremity, returned to the apartment where he had left the Wanderer. He now found him alone.
‘Sir Richard Glendale,’ said the unfortunate prince, ‘with his young friend, has gone to consult their adherents now in the house. Redgauntlet, my friend, I will not blame you for the circumstances in which I find myself, though I am at once placed in danger, and rendered contemptible. But you ought to have stated to me more strongly the weight which these gentlemen attached to their insolent proposition. You should have told me that no compromise would have any effect—that they desire not a prince to govern them, but one, on the contrary, over whom they were to exercise restraint on all occasions, from the highest affairs of the state, down to the most intimate and private concerns of his own privacy, which the most ordinary men desire to keep secret and sacred from interference.’