‘It is the sting
Of death to leave that vainly precious thing
In this cold world. What would it be if thou,
With thy fond eyes, went gazing on me now?
Too keen a pang! Farewell I and yet once more
Farewell! the passion of long years I pour
Into that word: thou hear'st not, but the woe
And fervor of its tones may one day flow
To thy heart's holy place. There let them dwell—
We shall o'ersweep the grave to meet.—Farewell!’
IN the midst of the maddest whirlpool that ever lashed the seething waters into foam there is a spot of absolute calm. It is often thus in the whirlpools of life. In what seems to outsiders the very crisis of the agony there is sometimes, for the sufferers, no agony at all. We stand and see the sod fall on the coffin that holds all that is dearest to us, and the crowd around is weeping for our sorrow—but our eyes are dry. We have suffered—we shall suffer through long years—but just then we do not suffer at all. We can hear and see, we can think hazily of irrelevant trifles—only we cannot feel. God has sent upon the nerves of feeling a numbness merciful indeed, since but for such respites the spirits would fail before Him, and the souls which He has made.
Such a numbness fell upon Hubert when, after the confusion and surprise of the recapture, he found himself walking in the snow, under the escort of the victorious newly-arrived miners, who left their comrades behind, to resume if they pleased their interrupted slumbers. Hubert was bound to the unfortunate innkeeper; before him walked the two young men, and behind him the old man with his grandchildren.
It was evening now, a little after the early winter sunset. The storm had passed, the clouds had rolled eastward, the wind had dropped to a whisper, scarcely stirring the snow-laden branches of the leafless trees by the wayside. A faint light still lingered in the west, while near the horizon, pale and queen-like, the moon held unchallenged empire of the sky. The new-fallen, trackless snow which covered the wide plain seemed pure and spotless enough even for her dominion, and she touched and glorified it with the silver scepter of her rays.
Hubert saw the moonlight and the snow, and was vaguely conscious of the brightness of the one and the chill of the other, after the heated atmosphere of the inn. Then he noticed that the fur cloak which the weeping, protesting Meličia had thrown over her unfortunate husband had fallen loose and was slipping off. Although his hands were bound, he contrived, with the help of his teeth, to pull it up and fasten it for him. This appeared to arouse the poor man, who hitherto had seemed as one dazed, and he broke suddenly into sobs, mingled with complaints and protestations. It was the burden of his lamentation that the miners would not listen to Meličia, who could have explained everything, and proved to their satisfaction that he was no Hussite.
But one of the young men who was walking in front of them turned round to him and said, ‘Still, you know, you struck that fellow with the knife.'
‘I was mad—the saints know I was mad,' wailed poor Matej in his sore distress. ‘It was when he touched the girl, who is like my Ofka. See you church spire! Ofka lies buried there, and I had my place chosen beside her, and the fees paid to the priest. And now, God help me! I shall not be buried like a Christian at all, but flung into a hole like a dog.' There was another burst of tears, then he said, suddenly turning to ‘Hubert, Think you, master packman, they will let us have a priest? '
‘I think not,' answered Hubert. ‘But what does it matter? The Lord Christ Himself will be our priest.'
‘It may matter nothing at all to you, master Chapman, who, for aught I know, may have lived like a saint. But I am a sinful man—the Lord forgive me this day! I have been drunken, idle, lazy. I neglected Mass and confession, I paid the priest his tithe in mildewed corn '—and so he went on through a long catalog of sins, real and imaginary.
Hubert, who felt nothing for himself, felt a movement of pity for his companion. When life begins to return to a frozen arm the first thrill is at the finger-tips. He turned to him kindly. ‘Thy sins, belike, are many,' he said. ‘So in truth are mine. But God is good. He saith to us in the Holy Scriptures, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow"—as this snow beneath our feet, Matej.'
‘But we must confess—do penance—get forgiven by the priest.'
‘Yes, we must confess to God, and be forgiven by the Priest, who is our Lord Jesus Christ.'
‘But how can I? here in the snow, with my hands bound, neither priest nor church within call?' This came out brokenly, intermixed with sobs.
‘Listen, Matej,' Hubert said gently. ‘Thy Priest and mine, the Lord Jesus, is within call. He is nearer to thee than we are each to other, though they have bound us together. He is here. His heart will meet thine, if thou wilt only ask Him to forgive thee, and to take away thy sins. He died for thee, Matej.'
‘Died for me? '
‘On the cross. Dost thou not know it?'
‘Oh yes—the cross. Hast thou a cross?’ he moaned, his bewildered mind groping helplessly amongst signs and shadows.
‘It needs not one to look at—it is enough to think of it. Think of Him who died there—died there for thee, Matej, because He loves thee. Thou didst love thy child so as to risk thy life for another, who was but like her in thine eyes. So—but so much more that I cannot tell it—the Lord Christ loves thee. Tell Him thou art sorry for thy sins; ask Him from thy heart to forgive thee—and He will.'
‘I'll try,' said poor Matej. He began to hurry over Ayes and Paternosters, but Hubert stopped him.
‘Ask Him in thine own words, friend,' he said, ‘as thou wouldest have wished thy child to ask thy forgiveness if perchance she had angered thee in aught.'
There was a long silence; then suddenly the lamentations broke out afresh. ‘There's the boy! Who's to see to him, and to carry him about? The mother has no patience with his helpless ways, and his crying for this and that when she is busy. As for the house and land, they will get on well enough. Meličia will manage all that, and twice as well as I. Ay, a brave woman she is—a brave woman; and a proud lad was I when she married me—she that could have had the pick and choice of three villages round. Eighteen years ago come Michaelmas—eighteen years! We have had words now and then, like other Christians-and my fault too, and the fault of the wine-cup, that I could not keep my lips from. But level and true we were ever, and loved one another as man and wife should. And now I shall never see her face again, God pity me! '
The tide of life swept back now to the frozen heart of Hubert, with a fierce passion of pain, the maddening pain of envy. How he envied the poor, weak, half-besotted creature by his side! Those eighteen years of his past, what a priceless treasure they looked to Hubert! Eighteen years! This man, so poor in all else, at least was rich in life; he had lived. He was not going out of the world—God's world that, after all, looked so fair and was so full of sweetness—without tasting the best it had to give. He did not leave behind him lips he loved, yet on which he had never pressed a kiss—a heart that knew his own, and yet had never answered him. In that bitter hour Hubert's fate would have seemed a thousand times more tolerable if he could have been but as Frantisek, the betrothed of Aninka. To lose is terrible; never to have had is infinitely worse and sadder.
Should he be wept and mourned for, as Frantisek, in like case, would so surely be? In spite of all, his inmost heart whispered the assurance—was it comfort, or was it new pain? —that he would. That would be a sorrowful day when the news of this night's work came to Melnik. If, indeed, it ever came;—but he hoped it would, since long uncertainty and vain watching are harder to be born than the knowledge of the truth.
A vision came to him of Zedenka moving among her handmaidens sad and pale, with silent lips and aching heart, looking as she used to look after her mother's death. He knew well what she would do. She would minister to her father while he lived, then she would go to Prague, dwell in Palma Oneshka's house, have béguines with her there, and do works of charity and mercy. She would never marry, that he knew full well.
Perhaps the tide of persecution might rise higher still, and sweep away the peaceful habitations of Pánna Oneshka and the other ladies who had gathered round the Church of Bethlehem. It was but too likely. God only knew the perils, the sufferings, that awaited those who held His truth in Bohemia. Was not death rather to be chosen for them than life amidst these? Were it not well—very well—for both of them if Zedenka were now by his side, and he could take her with him to God, out of all earth's snares and perils, as the old man behind him was taking those he loved?
No; no! Not thus! Not by this path of terror and of anguish. When he thought, for her, of the horrible pit, he shuddered as he had not shuddered for himself. What would it all be like? he wondered. To fall—fall—fall into darkness; then to meet a shock and agony; then, perhaps, to know no more—and that would be well. Perhaps? Only perhaps, for a lingering death might follow, of hunger and misery and the anguish of broken limbs, there in the dark. None to know, none to pity; no ear to catch the last faint words, the dying moan. No, no! In the midst of all his pain he thanked God in his heart that Zedenka was not with him now.
‘Eighteen years' had Matej said. More than eighteen years ago his mother died, and he was sent, still almost a babe, to the monastery at Rouen. Before another eighteen years, what might not come and go? There was one thing, he thought, almost sure to take place—that coming of the Lord, of which he heard at Tabor, which he looked for ever since.
Why need the wheels of His chariot tarry even so long as that? The Lord might come at any time; yes, even this very night. What was there to hinder? Hubert knew not anything. He looked up from the snowclad earth to the trackless sky, where the moon was walking in brightness, and on his lips there trembled the passionate prayer, ‘Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down! O King of Glory, our King for whom we wait, appear for us—help us—save us—we are Thine! '
But the awful silence of the heavens and the earth, which the sobs and wailings of a hundred generations have failed to break, was not to be broken now by the feeble cry of Hubert Bohun.
The silence fell upon him, closed around him like a pall, sank into his heart like lead. For the first time since the days in Constance before ‘he knew the Lord,' it seemed as if his prayer had failed to pierce the vault of blue, had never reached the Throne of the Most High. There came over him, first a cloud of doubt, then a horror of great darkness. What if he and the rest were but throwing their lives away? What if it did not matter who was in the right,—or whether there was any right at all?
He could not think this, really, for a moment. He could not, and did not, doubt in his inmost heart that John Huss and those who followed him had the truth. Still, this conviction did not help him just then. He might know there was light, but he could not see it. Rather was he as one who groped in thick darkness, stretching out his hand to the hand of a friend, which yet, with all his groping, he could not find.
Then he seemed already to be falling into the dark deep pit—falling, falling, falling—clutching vainly at the sides, and falling still—
‘Through nothing to no place.'
Terror swept over him. Was God not there at all? Could not the voice of his agony come before Him? ‘O God!’ he cried, and unconsciously he cried aloud, ‘O God! why hast Thou forsaken me?'
He did not hear the voice of Matej, who turned to him and said, ‘Poor lad, don't lose heart, thou, after comforting me; ' nor yet the whisper of the old man, as he bent forward towards him: ‘"Hope thou in God, for thou shalt yet praise Him." '
What he heard was the echo of his own words; what he realized with a sudden shock was that another had uttered them before: ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me?' Suddenly, before his eyes the cross rose up, with the form of Him that hung upon it. That was agony, worse than the worst, to which every step he took in the soft pure snow was bringing him nearer. But it was much more than agony. Could it be that He—even He—felt Himself forsaken? It must have been, else why did He send up that brokenhearted cry through the darkened heavens? ‘He has passed through all Himself, He knows all,' thought Hubert. ‘He has borne it for me, and oh, mystery of mysteries! He bears it now with me lie is here.'
So Christ came to him that night. It was not the victorious Christ, who rent the heavens and came down in answer to his cry; it was the suffering Christ—
‘The manifest in secrecy,
Yet of his own soul partaker,'
who came to share his anguish, and, so sharing, transformed it into something brighter than glory, better than joy. Like another martyr on his way to death, to whom thus suddenly and wondrously Christ revealed Himself, he cried aloud in the gladness of his heart—'He has come! He has come! '
A great longing swept over him to tell Zedenka of it all. If she and the others could know how Christ had come to him, they would be able to bear it; they would even learn in' time to be glad for him. More than that, could He not come to them, to her—just as really as He had done to him? He knew the need and the pain would be as great, or greater. And He remembered, not only the hurt of bleeding hands and feet, but the fall of tear-drops over graves.
Hubert knew it would comfort Zedenka to think that he died a martyr. Christ was giving him this great honor. He had chosen him to die for Him, as Master John died for Him in Constance. It was glory beyond any earth could give. Never now might he win the golden spurs of knighthood. What of that, when God was setting upon his head a crown of pure gold? That crown Christ would give him—oh, did he dare to think it? Then he thought no more of the glory and the crown; he thought only of His pierced hand, only of the joy of seeing His face. ‘Perhaps in two hours, perhaps in less,' he said to himself. ‘Surely ere you moon now climbing the sky has dropped again to the horizon.' That joy contained and consummated all the rest. His heart grew still and quiet in the intensity of his rapture, as it had done before in the numbness of his grief. After the earthquake, the fire, and the storm, had come the still small voice, and God was there.
‘Master packman,' said Matej, ‘I have been praying as you told me, and I think the good God has heard me. Somehow I feel comforted. And I'm sure Meličia will carry on the business better than I.'
‘Look, master,' said one of the young men, turning round to him, ‘there is the town—we shall soon be in it. Thou hast a good German tongue in thy head. Speak for us like a man, for God's sake, and let it be known we are no Hussites.'
Hubert's own joy touched his heart with compassion for these unwilling victims, who knew not the joy, though they shared the suffering. ‘I will do all I can,' he said, ‘although I have little hope of the result.'
Thus they came to Kuttenberg. It was not much more than eight o'clock, though the winter night had fallen long ago. The city gate opened readily to the miners, whose errand was well known, and they marched their captives through long narrow streets to the Market Place, a triangular space on the slope of a hill. There stands now in the midst of it a rude and ancient statue, said to represent St. John Nepomuck, the patron saint of Bohemia; but antiquarians tell us that, like other statues of the kind, it was originally dedicated, not to the legendary martyr of the Moldau, but to the historic martyr of Constance.
Across the spot now occupied thus Hubert and his companions were driven, like sheep appointed to the slaughter, towards a building which Hubert supposed to be the Town Hall. After some knocking, and a good deal of wrangling, both amongst themselves and with those that kept the door, certain of the miners were allowed to enter, and to bring their captives with them. They found themselves in a spacious hall, hung with tapestry, and lit with torches. At a table near the upper end two or three men in long robes, with pens, parchment, and inkhorns, were sitting. Here they were kept waiting for what seemed a considerable time; but at last a side-door opened, and there entered, first a servant bearing some sort of mace or staff of office, then an imposing personage in a furred robe and gold chain. He looked in very ill-humor; he had probably been called from his `rear supper,' if not actually out of his bed: for in those days men kept early hours. The miners came forward, told their tale in rapid German, and exhibited their captives. Then Hubert, the only one among them, except Matej, who knew the language, asked permission to speak for them all.
‘Make it short, then,' said the magistrate, if magistrate he were. ‘The hour is late, and you Bohemians lie like Egyptians.'
‘Good master,' began Hubert, ‘you appear to forget, the Truce of God, made and sworn to in Prague, wherein it was enacted that no man throughout the land should be troubled on account of religion.'
‘It is a far cry from. Prague to Kuttenberg,' said one of the scribes at the table, with a scornful laugh.
But the judge or magistrate silenced him with a look, and said to Hubert, ‘If thou hast not heard ere this that the truce is torn in fragments, hear it now. Man forbids no longer what God commands—the destruction of His enemies. If thou hast no more to say than that, better say thy prayers instead.'
‘I have more to say, master councilor—or whatever may be the title of your office. There be seven of us here to-night, and of that seven three at least have never received the Communion of the Cup, and are no Hussites. If people may be torn thus from their homes, and condemned and executed without a hearing, no man's life in the whole country will be worth a silver groschen.'
This pleading availed so far that a few hasty questions were asked of Matej and the young men, Hubert acting as interpreter. But the miners, determined not to lose their reward, swore that the two young men had been taken at a meeting of Hussites; and the fact that Matej had struck one of them with a knife told fatally against him. They were all condemned.
Then Hubert said, ‘Masters, you owe it to us, whose voices so soon may be silent forever, to hear us yet once more. We will not keep you long. As for me, though I wear this dress, I am by birth noble, by calling a squire. I serve the knight and baron Ján z Chlum, lord of Pihel and other places, and at present castellan of Melnik. Still, I have put my life to hazard, and I do not complain of the result. I die willingly for my faith and my God. All I ask is, that you will report truly to my lord at Melnik that which has been done with me.'
His judge heard his story, without for a moment believing it. ‘Is that all thou hast to say, master squire or chapman?’ he asked scornfully; and one of the scribes added, ‘We will send thee to seek thy silver spurs at the bottom of the mine they were dug from.'
‘God's will be done,' said Hubert. ‘But,' he added, addressing himself to the judge, ‘I beseech you to look upon the case of this old man and these children. It may be you have an aged father still left to you, and it would go hard with you to have his gray hairs brought down to the grave with blood. Children, perhaps, you have too, whom you love; I pray you for their dear sakes to have compassion upon these, who are weak and helpless, and guilty of no crime.'
But here he was cut short. ‘We cannot sit here all night,' said the impatient magistrate. ‘Master notary '—he turned to the man on his left hand— ‘pay the miners their money and let them go. A ducat each for the men, and a half-ducat for the boy and the girl. Six in all.'
Some altercation ensued, the miners claiming more for Hubert. Heavy silver pieces were counted out; and the notary put on his great horn-spectacles, and made certain entries in a book before him. Pausing for a moment, he looked up and asked his fellow, ‘Canst tell me, prithee, what day of the month it is? I have forgotten.'
‘The twenty-ninth day of February, this being Leap Year,' was the answer.
Hubert at the moment was trying to comfort Matej, who had broken again into bitter weeping. But the words Leap year' struck upon his ear, and brought back to him suddenly the recollection of the Jewish doctor and his prophecy. ‘The very night,' thought Hubert, ‘that he told me the moon was to be darkened. Now I suppose I shall not know if he was right. Before the hour comes I shall be beyond sun, or moon, or star.'
He turned to go along with his companions, but the old man leant over and said a few words to him in Bohemian. He turned back again, and spoke once more to his judges. ‘My friend here,' he said, ‘bids me tell you, on behalf of himself and his grandchildren, I also agreeing, that we forgive you, who have adjudged us unto death, and these men who have wrongfully taken, and are now about to slay us;—and we pray God to forgive them and you.'
The prayer was not heeded at the moment, but it may have afterward recurred to the memories of some who heard it.
Another minute, and they passed out of the lighted hall, and began their march to the place of execution. The streets through which they went were for the most part silent and empty. Such a procession was evidently too common to attract notice. But here and there a burgher, returning late to his home, stopped to look at them with pity or with curiosity, or to exchange a word or two with the miners. One spoke thus to the man who walked at Hubert's right hand.
‘How hast thou sped, Max? '
‘Ill enough, friend. A sorry lot; only six ducats for the whole. My share of that won't do to marry on.'
There were some other words, followed by a laugh, but Hubert did not heed—indeed, he scarcely heard them.
Presently they went but by another gate, and turned into the desolate snow-white road which stretched onwards from the town to the hill of the fatal mine.