The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson: The Dream Of X & Other Fantastic Visions by William Hope Hodgson Read Free Book Online Page B

a solitary oak; and so had view of a painful and dreadful sight—Justice, the Fetish of all perfect man, about to accept a victim.
    There was a group of men under a great bough of the oak, and one of the men was trying to throw a rope up over the branch; and even as the old Judge and his wife ran across the clearing, he succeeded; whereupon several of the men ran and caught hold of the dangling end, and proceeded to haul the slack over the branch. Mrs Judge Barclay saw then, all in a moment, as it were, that the other end of the rope was fast about the neck of a man who had his back turned to her, and she experienced a peculiar little sick feeling, as Nature began to have birth in her. She was still hastening towards the group as she discovered these details, and in almost the same instant she discovered that the screaming came from a woman who was held by a couple of the men.
    Her glance went again to the others. Several of them had stepped back a little from the noosed man, and had their Smith and Wessons in their hands. She recognised the sheriff, and knew that the man with the rope about his neck was Jem Turrill. She did not know that they were going to shoot poor Jem full up with lead as soon as he should have swung sufficiently to get the “taste of the hangin’ into his heart.” Nor, if she had realised the fact, would she have understood that mercy was really at the back of the men’s intention —mercy with the cestus, instead of the gentle fingers of woman, but mercy nevertheless. And so came Mrs Judge Barclay to the group of men intent about their work.
    The condemned lad (for he was scarcely more) stood pale and grimly silent, swallowing constantly and dreadfully at the dryness that seemed to fill his throat, and looking with wild eyes at the woman held by the two men, for it was his old mother.
    “Help! Help!” she would scream, and fall into a sudden, trembling silence, quivering so that her quivering shook the two brawny men who held her, so callously determined. And again her scream would ring out madly, “Help! Help!” crying to any god that might be listening.
    Mrs Judge Barclay stood a moment, looking at it all with wider eyes than she had ever opened before—seeing it, and at last beginning, with a horrible sickness in all her being, to understand something of what old Judge Barclay, her husband, had never been given words or skill to “make seen” to her.
    The mother’s crying broke out again, fierce and terrible in its white-hot intensity:—“Help! Help!” And she began to struggle like a maniac, with the two big men who held her. The dreadfulness of it all! … It was she, his own mother, who had innocently led the posse to where her son was hid. They had watched her, as I have told, and had followed her, secretly, as she slipped away quietly through the woods, taking a towelful of damper and tinned goods to Jem’s hiding-place. She it was who had managed the escape for him by conveying drink to the man on guard, and she it was who had found the hiding-place for him, and she it was who had brought him food; and now she had brought him to his death. She began to scream incoherent words and to give out scarcely human sounds, and her struggles became so fierce that her clothing was ripped literally into ribbons of cloth and cotton in the hands of the two unemotional, almost casually determined men who had held her off from going to her son.
    Old Mrs Barclay stared, suffering at last in understanding of the stern and deathly intention that informed the group of men “about their business”; and with her heart sick with the horror of pain that seemed suddenly to emanate from that one plague-spot of tragedy, and fill all the earth. Her grim old face had grown ghastly under its pale tan colour…. This was Justice, the Justice that she had so constantly hammered into her husband the need of dealing, without shrinking…. This madly desperate mother, and this lad, barely out of his teens (she