“I was here before it fell dark,” she answered.
“Where do you come from?”
“From Harwich.”
“You have not walked from Harwich?”
“I came by water to Margate, and have walked from Margate. Oh, take him down—oh, take him down!” she cried, stretching her arms up at the body. “Think of him helpless there! Jimmy, my Jimmy! He is innocent—he is a murdered man!” she sobbed; and then continued, speaking swiftly, and drawing closer to me: “He was my only son. His wife does not come to him. Oh, my Jim, mother is with thee, thy poor old mother is with thee, and will not leave thee. Oh, kind, dear Christian sir”—and she extended her hand and put it upon the sleeve of my coat—“take him down and help me to bury him, and the God of Heaven, the friend of the widow, shall bless thee, and I will watch, but at a distance from his grave, until there shall be no fear of his body being found.”
“I can do nothing,” said I. “If I had the will, I have not the means. I should need a ladder, and we should need a spade, and we have neither. Come you along with me to Deal; come you away out of this wet and from this sight. You have little strength. If you linger here, you’ll die. I will get you housed for the night, and,” cried I, raising my voice, that she might hear me above a sudden roll of thunder, “if my ship does not sail out of the Downs to-morrow, I may so work it for you as to get your son’s body unhooked, and removed, and buried, where it will not be found. Come away from this,” and I grasped her soaking sleeve.
Now at this instant, there happened that which makes this experience the most awful and astonishing of any that I have encountered, in a life that, Heaven knows, has not been wanting in adventure. I am not a believer in latter-day miracles; I am not a fool—not that I would quarrel with a man for believing in latter-day miracles. We are all locked up in a dark room, and I blame no man for believing that he—and perhaps he only—knows the way out. I do not believe in latter-day miracles; but I believe in the finger of God. I believe that often He will answer the cry of the broken heart. This is what now happened, and you may credit my relation or not, as you please.
I have said that I grasped the woman’s soaking sleeve, intending to draw her away from the gibbet; and it was at that moment that the body and the gibbet were struck by lightning; they were clothed with a flash of sunbright flame. In the same instant of the flash, there was a burst and shock of thunder, the most deafening and frightful explosion I have ever heard. The motionless atmosphere was thick, sickening, choking with the smell of sulphur. I was hurled backward, but not so as to fall; it was as though I had been struck by the wind of a cannon-ball. For some time the blackness stood like a wall against my vision; more lightning there was at that time, one or two of the flashes tolerably vivid, but the play on my balls of sight, temporarily blinded, glanced dim as sheet lightning when it winks palely past the rim of the sea.
Presently I could see. I looked for the woman, scarce knowing whether I might behold her dead in a heap on the sand. No; she stood at a little distance from me. Like me, she was unable to get her sight. She stood with her white face turned toward Sandwich—that is to say, away from the gibbet; but even as I regained my vision so hers returned to her. She looked around, uttered an extraordinary cry, and, in a moment, was under the gibbet, kneeling, fondling, clasping, hugging, wildly talking to the chained and lifeless figure, whose metal fastening had been sheared through by the burning edge of the terrific scythe of fire!
Yes; the eye or the hook by which the corpse had hung had been melted, and there lay the body, ghastly in its chains, but how much ghastlier had there been light to yield a full revelation of feature and of such injury as the stroke of flame may have dealt it! There it lay in its mother’s arms! She held its head with the iron collar about its neck to her breast; she rocked it; she talked to it; she blessed God for giving her son to her.