The Complete Simon Iff (17 page)

The cottage was perched upon the edge of a cliff; they could see the path winding away below. But access to it seemed to be cut off. Glass it was who reasoned out the situation. There must be a way through some cellar. Quickly he searched the cottage. A trap-door was found. Glass descended the ladder. All was well. He found himself in a large room, half filled with barrels of gunpowder. A narrow door gave exit to the path below. “Come on!” cried Fortescue.

“We shall be caught, sir,” answered Glass. “Let me stay here; I can delay them long enough to let you get away.” The officer saw the good sense of this; his first duty was to deliver the dispatches. He wrung Glass by the hand, and ran out.

The sergeant of marines knew that he had barely an hour; but he had a plan in his mind. His first action was to twist a long match from the gunpowder to that window of the cottage which looked over the cliff; his next to strip himself and the dead sentinel of uniform, and to dress the corpse in his own. He then found a piece of rope and hanged the body in the doorway.

He dressed himself in the brigand’s best clothes; but, not content with masculine adornment, he covered himself with the all-sufficing mantilla. He was a smooth-faced good-looking boy; with the shawl, he made a quite passable Spanish girl — to the waist.

He then took up his position at the window by the door, so that the lower part of his body was hidden, and awaited the pursuers. It was near twilight when they arrived. Their leader grasped what he thought to be the situation. “Where is the other?” he cried. Glass smiled divinely. Unluckily for him, he knew only a few words of any tongue but English. But a finger to his lips, and the sign of beckoning, reassured the others; they filed down the path, and crowded into the cottage. “Where’s the girl?” cried the leader, “are we in a trap? Look to your arms, men!” Before he had ended, Glass, who had run upstairs to the other room, had touched fire to the match. “Let Samson perish with the Philistines!” he roared, and at the same moment leaped from the window.

The cottage sprang into the air, killing every man in it; Glass lay fifty feet below upon a thorn-bush, with one arm broken and many bruises, but good for many another day’s adventure.

A day later he had scrambled to the valley, where a shepherd showed him kindness, and led him by a circuitous route to the British lines.

Here he found himself a hero; for Fortescue had seen the explosion, and given all due credit to his companion. But the sergeant’s arm went ill; for default of treatment, it had begun to mortify; the same night the surgeon removed it at the shoulder.

Sir Arthur Wellesley himself came to the hospital to salute the gallant lad. “Be glad it is the left arm;” he said brusquely: “Nelson lost his right. And for you, we’ll salve you with a commission as lieutenant in the regular army.” Glass was overjoyed; the loss of his arm seemed little, if he could have a sword at his side, epaulets on his shoulder, and the rank of an officer and a gentleman thenceforward.

II

Lieutenant Glass, obtaining six months leave, at the end of the campaign of 1805, returned to his ancestral croft on the northwest side of Loch Ness to find that both his father and mother were dead. A friend in Inverness had warned him as he passed through; but piety made him persist in his journey; he might as well spend his leave there as elsewhere.

It was a stone cottage of two rooms, set high above the loch upon the moor. Away westward stretched the desolate slopes of Meallfavournie; below, the gloomy waters of the loch growled with the cold anger of the Highland winter.

There was no other habitation for a couple of miles. Around the croft was a niggard space of cultivated land, yielding with bitter toil a few oats and a few potatoes; nothing more.

The laird, Grant of Glenmoriston, had sent a man to take possession of the croft, pending instructions from Glass. He was a sturdy lad of sixteen years, self-reliant and secretive; he had kept the cottage in excellent order, and tilled the soil as well as may be in that inhospitable country. Glass kept him on as permanent gardener and servant; but he was rather an accentuation than an alleviation of the loneliness. However, on the first Sunday, when the lieutenant walked down to Strath Errick to church, he found himself the apple of the congregational eye. Even Chisholm, the minister, a dour narrow Calvinist of the oldest school, was moved to make a complimentary reference in his sermon; and, after kirk was over, carried away the officer in triumph to the manse, there to share the miserable substitute for a meal which is all that any Scot dare eat on Sunday, in apprehension of the Divine displeasure.

Chisholm was a widower. He had one daughter, skinny and frosty, with a straight back, thin lips, a peaked nose, bad teeth, and greedy eyes. But her flat chest almost burst as the idea came to her, as it did in a flash, to become Mrs. Lieutenant Glass. It was a way out of her horrible environment; despite the lost arm, he was a fine figure of a man; he was a hero, had been mentioned twice in despatches since he had gained his commission; he would get his company very soon. Promotion was quick in those days. Captain, major, colonel — possibly even General Glass! She saw Strath Errick left far north; instead, presentation at Court, social advancement of every kind; possibly a stately visit or so later on, and a snubbing of the local gentry who had always looked down upon the minister’s daughter. She soon discovered that she had four clear months to catch her fish; poor and plain as she was, she had no rivals in the district; Glass, the crofter’s son, for all his epaulets, had no more chance to marry into the local aristocracy than she had. She went to work with infinite thoroughness and persistence; she enlisted her father’s aid; she laid siege to Glass in every known form.

The lieutenant, for his part, knew that he might do much better. The salons of London were full of better matches; and his peasant ancestry would not be known there. All Highlanders of rank were “gentry” to the average London mother. But the same instinct that led him to live in the deserted croft made him now hesitate to transplant himself to London; the soil gripped him; he soon determined to throw out a new anchor in the granite; and in March, 1807, he was married to Ada Chisholm in the kirk of Strath Errick. A month later he rejoined his regiment; he had taken his wife to Edinburgh for the honeymoon, and she left him at Leith to return to her father’s house, while he set sail for the new campaign in Europe.

He gained his captaincy the same year; two years more elapsed before he saw his wife again. In the summer of 1809 he again distinguished himself in the field, and obtained his majority. A severe wound left him in hospital for three months; and on recovery he asked, and was granted, six months’ sick leave.

His wife was enthusiastic; she had traveled all the way to London to meet him; and he arranged to have her presented at Court. Her head was completely turned by its splendor; and she resolutely opposed the spending of the six months in Scotland. They went accordingly to Bath instead, and she revelled in the social glories of the place.

Glass was not at all in love with his wife; and she had no more sex than one of the oatmeal scones; but he was an extraordinarily simple soul, with rigid ideas of honesty. He had accordingly been faithful to her in his absence, while she would no more have thought of deceiving him than of eating grass.

They left Bath in December, 1809. They had been extravagant; and, nolens volens, she was obliged to go back to her father’s manse to live. Probably her husband would get his regiment in a year or so; the war might be over too, by then; and they could live pleasantly enough in London, or a jolly garrison town, for the rest of their lives.

In June, 1810, Glass had a letter from his wife, apprising him of the birth of a son. She proposed to call him Joshua, as his father was so great a captain.

The arrival of Joshua changed Glass as completely as a drug- habit or an access of insanity. He knew that he would have to wait a long time for his colonelcy. Short of capturing Napoleon single-handed, he had no chance in the world. His quick rise from the ranks had made him hated by snobbish and incompetent fellow-officers; and the extreme modesty of his manner was no protection. They hated him, as birth without worth always hates worth without birth. Even Wellington — who had never lost sight of him — could not do every thing against so bitter an opposition. His fellow-officers had even laid trap after trap for him, and it had needed all his Scottish caution to avoid them.

These reflections settled him in one momentous decision. He must save ten thousand pounds. Joshua must go to Eton, and start on fair terms, if human determination could secure it. He consequently, from an open-handed, free and easy man, became a miser. Instead of increasing his wife’s allowance, he cut it down. And he sent every penny he could save from his pay to a friendly banker in Edinburgh, who promised to double it in five years. I may tell you at once, lest you start the wrong hare, that he kept his word.

III

That is not such a horrible story, so far, is it? And there seem few elements of tragedy. Well, we go on.

After the banishment of Napoleon to Elba, Major Glass rejoined his wife. This time there was no trip to Bath. The cottage was furnished with just the extra things needed for Joshua; Glass himself helped to till his own land, and market the produce.

Ada resented this bitterly; there was no open quarrel, but she hid poison in her heart. “I have six thousand pounds in bank,” he had said, “but there’s no hope of a regiment now the war’s over; let us play safe a year or two until we have ten thousand; then we can live where we like, as gentlefolk, and make a greater career for the boy.” She saw the prudence of the plan, and could not argue against it; but she really hungered for social pleasures, as only those do who are not born with the right to them.

The boy himself gave no concern on the score of health; he was hardy as a Highland lad should be; but his disposition troubled his father. He was silent and morose, was very long in learning to speak, and he seemed lacking in affection. He would lie or sit, and watch his parents, in preference to playing. When he did play, he did not do so simply and aimlessly, as most children do. Even when he broke his toys, he neither cried nor laughed; he sat and watched them.

Major Glass went back to his regiment at the end of 1814; his wife once again took shelter with her father. But a month later the minister fell ill; in March he died. Another minister occupied the manse; and there was nothing for Mrs. Glass but to go back to the croft on the moor. The boy still worked on the little apology for a farm; and his sister came to help tend Joshua, and assist in the housework.

In 1815 Major Glass was present at the decisive battles in Belgium. And here befell the fate that transformed this simple career into the tragedy of horror which you have insisted that I should relate to you. The major was in command of the last party that held the shot-swept walls of Hougomont; and he rallied his men for their successful stand against Napoleon’s final and desperate effort to regain that critical point. The British were flooded at one spot; Glass, with a handful of reserves, led a rally, and broke the head of the French dagger-thrust. And then it was that a sabre-stroke beat down his guard; a second blow severed his sword-arm. He was carried hastily to the ruins of the farm, and his wound bandaged; but Napoleon, seeing his troops flung back, ordered another artillery attack; and a cannon-ball, breaking a rafter of the building, brought down the remains of the roof. A heavy beam fell across the Major’s legs, and crushed them.

Such, however, was the prime soundness of his constitution that he did not die. It was a helpless, but perfectly healthy, torso which was carried some months later into the little croft above Loch Ness. His wife recoiled in horror — natural horror, no doubt. It was only when he told her that the surgeon said that he might live fifty years that she realized what infinite disaster had befallen her. All her schemes of life had gone to wreck; she was tied to that living corpse, in that wretched cottage, probably for the rest of her life. “Half-pay,” she thought; “how long will it take now to make up the ten thousand pounds?”

IV

If Ada Glass had been a woman of intelligence, either good or evil, she would have found some quick solution. But her thoughts were slow and dull; and she was blinded by the senseless hate in her heart. Her days had been infinitely dull, ever since her father’s death; now, in that emptiness, a monster slowly grew. And her husband understood her before she did herself. One day he found it in his mind that she might murder him; she had dismissed the girl who had helped her, saying that now they must save money more carefully than ever. His quick wit devised a protection for himself. Calling the boy Andrew, now a stout fellow of twenty-six years old, he sent him into Inverness for a lawyer.

With this man he had a long private interview, during which several papers and memoranda were selected by the lawyer from the Major’s portfolio, in accordance with his instructions.

That evening the lawyer returned to the croft with the new minister of Strath Errick, thus disposing of the difficulty caused by the inability of the soldier to sign papers.

Later that night, Mrs. Glass having returned from Glenmoriston, where she had been sent so as to have her out of the way, the major told her what he had done.

I have placed my money, he explained, in the hands of two excellent trustees. If I should die before Joshua comes of age, the whole will be left to accumulate at the bank, and you must live upon the pension you will receive as my widow. The capital will then be transferred to him at his majority, under certain restrictions. But if I live, I shall be able to bring the boy up under my own eye, and therefore as soon as the capital amounts to ten thousand pounds, we shall not only be able to educate him properly, but to bring him, while yet a child, into those social connections which seem desirable.

Once again the wife could raise no protest; but once again her heart sank within her.

Yet, as the days went by, the hate devoured her vitals, began to eat her up like some foul cancer. She began at last, deliberately, to pass from thought to action, to make her husband’s life, hideous at the best, into a most exquisite hell.