A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 4. by Mark Twain (free novels TXT) 📗

half-wild and hunted look in her eyes, and in her lap lay a little child asleep.  Just as we stepped across the threshold the executioner gave his machine a slight turn, which wrung a cry from both the prisoner and the woman; but I shouted, and the executioner released the strain without waiting to see who spoke. I could not let this horror go on; it would have killed me to see it.  I asked the queen to let me clear the place and speak to the prisoner privately; and when she was going to object I spoke in a low voice and said I did not want to make a scene before her servants, but I must have my way; for I was King Arthur's representative, and was speaking in his name.  She saw she had to yield.  I asked her to indorse me to these people, and then leave me.  It was not pleasant for her, but she took the pill; and even went further than I was meaning to require.  I only wanted the backing of her own authority; but she said:

"Ye will do in all things as this lord shall command.  It is The Boss."

It was certainly a good word to conjure with:  you could see it by the squirming of these rats.  The queen's guards fell into line, and she and they marched away, with their torch-bearers, and woke the echoes of the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of their retreating footfalls.  I had the prisoner taken from the rack and placed upon his bed, and medicaments applied to his hurts, and wine given him to drink.  The woman crept near and looked on, eagerly, lovingly, but timorously,—like one who fears a repulse; indeed, she tried furtively to touch the man's forehead, and jumped back, the picture of fright, when I turned unconsciously toward her.  It was pitiful to see.

"Lord," I said, "stroke him, lass, if you want to.  Do anything you're a mind to; don't mind me."

Why, her eyes were as grateful as an animal's, when you do it a kindness that it understands.  The baby was out of her way and she had her cheek against the man's in a minute and her hands fondling his hair, and her happy tears running down.  The man revived and caressed his wife with his eyes, which was all he could do.  I judged I might clear the den, now, and I did; cleared it of all but the family and myself.  Then I said:

"Now, my friend, tell me your side of this matter; I know the other side."

The man moved his head in sign of refusal.  But the woman looked pleased—as it seemed to me—pleased with my suggestion.  I went on—

"You know of me?"

"Yes.  All do, in Arthur's realms."

"If my reputation has come to you right and straight, you should not be afraid to speak."

The woman broke in, eagerly:

"Ah, fair my lord, do thou persuade him!  Thou canst an thou wilt. Ah, he suffereth so; and it is for me—for me !  And how can I bear it? I would I might see him die—a sweet, swift death; oh, my Hugo, I cannot bear this one!"

And she fell to sobbing and grovelling about my feet, and still imploring.  Imploring what?  The man's death?  I could not quite get the bearings of the thing.  But Hugo interrupted her and said:

"Peace!  Ye wit not what ye ask.  Shall I starve whom I love, to win a gentle death?  I wend thou knewest me better."

"Well," I said, "I can't quite make this out.  It is a puzzle.  Now—"

"Ah, dear my lord, an ye will but persuade him!  Consider how these his tortures wound me!  Oh, and he will not speak!—whereas, the healing, the solace that lie in a blessed swift death—"

"What are you maundering about?  He's going out from here a free man and whole—he's not going to die."

The man's white face lit up, and the woman flung herself at me in a most surprising explosion of joy, and cried out:

"He is saved!—for it is the king's word by the mouth of the king's servant—Arthur, the king whose word is gold!"

"Well, then you do believe I can be trusted, after all.  Why didn't you before?"

"Who doubted?  Not I, indeed; and not she."

"Well, why wouldn't you tell me your story, then?"

"Ye had made no promise; else had it been otherwise."

"I see, I see....  And yet I believe I don't quite see, after all. You stood the torture and refused to confess; which shows plain enough to even the dullest understanding that you had nothing to confess—"

"I, my lord?  How so?  It was I that killed the deer!"

"You did ?  Oh, dear, this is the most mixed-up business that ever—"

"Dear lord, I begged him on my knees to confess, but—"

"You did !  It gets thicker and thicker.  What did you want him to do that for?"

"Sith it would bring him a quick death and save him all this cruel pain."

"Well—yes, there is reason in that.  But he didn't want the quick death."

"He?  Why, of a surety he did ."

"Well, then, why in the world didn't he confess?"

"Ah, sweet sir, and leave my wife and chick without bread and shelter?"

"Oh, heart of gold, now I see it!  The bitter law takes the convicted man's estate and beggars his widow and his orphans.  They could torture you to death, but without conviction or confession they could not rob your wife and baby.  You stood by them like a man; and you—true wife and the woman that you are—you would have bought him release from torture at cost to yourself of slow starvation and death—well, it humbles a body to think what your sex can do when it comes to self-sacrifice.  I'll book you both for my colony; you'll like it there; it's a Factory where I'm going to turn groping and grubbing automata into men ."

CHAPTER XVIII

IN THE QUEEN'S DUNGEONS

Well, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent to his home. I had a great desire to rack the executioner; not because he was a good, painstaking and paingiving official,—for surely it was not to his discredit that he performed his functions well—but to pay him back for wantonly cuffing and otherwise distressing that young woman.  The priests told me about this, and were generously hot to have him punished.  Something of this disagreeable sort was turning up every now and then.  I mean, episodes that showed that not all priests were frauds and self-seekers, but that many, even the great majority, of these that were down on the ground among the common people, were sincere and right-hearted, and devoted to the alleviation of human troubles and sufferings. Well, it was a thing which could not be helped, so I seldom fretted about it, and never many minutes at a time; it has never been my way to bother much about things which you can't cure.  But I did not like it, for it was just the sort of thing to keep people reconciled to an Established Church.  We must have a religion—it goes without saying—but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time.  Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.  That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel:  it was only an opinion—my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any more than the pope's—or any less, for that matter.

Well, I couldn't rack the executioner, neither would I overlook the just complaint of the priests.  The man must be punished somehow or other, so I degraded him from his office and made him leader of the band—the new one that was to be started.  He begged hard, and said he couldn't play—a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country that could.

The queen was a good deal outraged, next morning when she found she was going to have neither Hugo's life nor his property.  But I told her she must bear this cross; that while by law and custom she certainly was entitled to both the man's life and his property, there were extenuating circumstances, and so in Arthur the king's name I had pardoned him.  The deer was ravaging the man's fields, and he had killed it in sudden passion, and not for gain; and he had carried it into the royal forest in the hope that that might make detection of the misdoer impossible.  Confound her, I couldn't make her see that sudden passion is an extenuating circumstance in the killing of venison—or of a person—so I gave it up and let her sulk it out.  I did think I was going to make her see it by remarking that her own sudden passion in the case of the page modified that crime.

"Crime!" she exclaimed.  "How thou talkest!  Crime, forsooth! Man, I am going to pay for him!"

Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her.  Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person.  We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.  All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.  And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me :  the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.

No, confound her, her intellect was good, she had brains enough, but her training made her an ass—that is, from a many-centuries-later point of view.  To kill the page was no crime—it was her right; and upon her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of offense. She was a result of generations of training in the unexamined and unassailed belief that the law which permitted her to kill a subject when she chose was a perfectly right and righteous one.

Well, we must give even Satan his due.  She deserved a compliment for one thing; and I tried to pay it, but the words stuck in my throat.  She had a right to kill the boy, but she was in no wise obliged to pay for him.  That was law for some other people, but not for her.  She knew quite well that she was doing a large and generous thing to pay for that lad, and that I ought in common fairness to come out with something handsome about it, but I couldn't—my mouth refused.  I couldn't help seeing, in my fancy, that poor old grandma with the broken heart, and that fair young creature lying butchered, his little silken pomps and vanities laced with his golden blood.  How could she pay for him!  Whom could she pay?  And so, well knowing that this woman, trained as she had been, deserved praise, even adulation, I was yet not able to utter it, trained as I had been.  The best I could do was to fish up a compliment from outside, so to speak—and the pity of it was, that it was true:

"Madame, your people will adore you for this."

Quite true, but I meant to hang her for it some day if I lived. Some of those laws were too bad, altogether too bad.  A master might kill his slave for nothing—for mere spite, malice, or to pass the time—just as we have seen that the crowned head could do it with his slave, that is to say, anybody.  A gentleman could kill a free commoner, and pay for him—cash or garden-truck. A noble could kill a noble without expense, as far as the law was concerned, but reprisals in kind were to be expected.  Any body could kill some body, except the commoner and the slave; these had no privileges.  If