Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/715

over that the old man had sold himself to the devil for the love of the “lady.”

The consequences of these wild ravings, working as they did upon minds darkened with superstition and ignorance, were likely to be serious enough; when matters were brought to a crisis: a young, weak-headed girl, frightened by the woman's words, went off in a fit, and therein denounced the stranger, as having bewitched her, for selling him butter with a cross upon it.

This news spread like wildfire, and the credit of every illness, loss, or misfortune that had occurred in the neighbourhood during the year, was laid at the stranger's door; the people gathered in crowds, exciting each other by their mutual superstition. They rushed up the green hill to the cottage, a mad, infuriated mob, thirsting for vengeance, and demanding of the old man to come out and heal those he had stricken.

The door, however, resisted their efforts, and they were surging wildly about seeking another entrance, when the owner himself appeared, and, pointing to the trampled flower beds, asked what they meant by it. The answer was a yell of derision and rage; and some of the maddest seized the old man, swearing they would find out whether the devil was his master or no. Up the cliffs they scrambled, scarcely knowing what the end was to be, or how the test was to be given, but ere they had gone far a very spirit of hell must have broken loose among them; they pressed round upon the old man; one wretch made a blow at him with a stone and knocked him down; then, like wild beasts at the sight of blood, they grew drunk with it, and literally stoned and beat the hapless old man to atoms, bathing and strewing the cliff side with his blood and flesh.

The deed was barely over,—a few were looking pale and shuddering at the red stains upon their guilty hands—when a terrible cry rang up the hill, and immediately after the “lady” was among them. “My father? my father?” she cried. ”What have you done with my poor old father?”

No one answered, but many grew pale, and a shudder ran through the crowd as the girl stooped down, and lifted a mass of grey hair from the blood-stained grass.

“O my God!” she said, in a low, fierce tone, as she turned upon them. “You call yourselves Christians, and this a Christian land.” Then springing upon a projecting rock she went on. “Listen, murderers, and hear what you have done: the blood that is crying out from the earth for vengeance is my father's; he chose his king, rather than one he called a usurper; he lost all save life in the cause, so fled. My husband too was a soldier in the king's army; he was wounded and tried to escape, but they hunted him to worse than death, they drove him mad; and it was to give us a refuge, and to let him die in peace, my father came here. When he was ready for us he signalled across the Channel, and I brought my poor mad husband over the waters in the boat you found upon the beach. The cries your children heard were those of my husband; but they would have troubled you no more, he died to-day, and is now at the footstool of the Great God, and, with the poor old man you have murdered, is crying for God's judgment on you. And now hear my curse. O Almighty God, curse these men: may they ask for rest and find toil and trouble; may they go forth beggars and branded from the land they have disgraced, driven forth by the spirits of their forefathers; dying may they find mercy neither from man nor from Heaven." As the last words were upon her lips, she threw h«self from the rock, down the sheer precipice into the foaming water now raging in a storm, and her last curse actually seemed to rise from the ocean itself.

The crowd shrank away speechless and stricken, not a word was uttered as they crept back to their homes, carrying with them the terrible burthen of the curse.

By next day the ravens and carrion crows had cleared away every trace of the deed of blood from tho cliff above; but the earth which had drunk up the red flood would not hide the witness, and, in the cave beneath, gave and still gives testimony to the murder—the dead man's blood still remaining as a memorial of his fate. I. D. Fenton

The following beautiful lines are said to have been written by Mary Queen of Scots, a few days before her death:—

The musical sweetness of the Latin is scarcely translatable into English; but, in default of a better, I subjoin an imitation:—