SECTION XVIII. I. 64. THE BROTHERS. UGH and the lieutenant landed at Westminster; and, still engrossed by his own thick-coming fancies, the former followed his guide without a question or remark until they stood opposite the Gatehouse. There the lieutenant paused; and scârcely had Hugh looked upon the building, ere all his bright dreams vanished, and a cold shudder ran through his frame. The present was before him in all its dull reality of woe; and he felt instinctively that the house which he was about to enter was a place where, unchecked by public opinion, the rack might work its will, and murder be done with impunity at midday. 2. And so indeed it might; for within the Gatehouse was that abode of Topcliffe,1 to which mōre than one unhappy victim had been sent by order of the Council, for the purpose of wreaking upon them in secret such a measure of torture as would, even in those days of rack and cord, have raised a cry of indignation throughout the land if it had been perpetrated in public. 3. Something of all this Hugh knew, of course, already; and, feeling that he was about to be placed at the mercy of the most cruel and bloodthirsty of his foes, he tried to nerve himself to the worst. Signing him to follow, the lieutenant passed by a private entrance into the house, and walking down a narrow and ill-lighted passage, paused at a door at the further end, and knocked cautiously for admittance. 4. Hugh almost gasped for breath, and the cold drops stood upon his brow, as the conviction flashed suddenly upon his mind that he was about to behold his brother Amedée, and 1 Topcliffe was a real personage, and the cruelties attributed to him, even to his mode of private and illegal torture, were really perpetrated by him; as any one may see who consults the State Trials, or Topcliffe's own private confidential letters, in which he describes his proceedings. 2 Nerve, to steady; to make firm. that the latter had probably been brought to this house directly after their separation on the road to London, in order to be dealt with at Topcliffe's pleasure. Alas! and if it were so indeed, how had he fared in those long, dreary weeks which, even under the authorized torture of the Tower, had told so fearfully upon his own stalwart frame. 5. Could it be that he had been brought hither but to see that fair young brother, whom, for the saintly gentleness of his character, Hugh had ever loved rather with the tenderness he would have given to a sister than with the more careless affection one man offers to another-had he been brought hither but to see him die? Or, by such a refinement of cruelty as he fancied Topcliffe to be capable of, had he but permitted them once mōre to meet in order that they might be tortured side by side, and within sight and hearing of each other? 6. "Sir Hugh," said the lieutenant compassionately, observing his emotion, "may I pray you to compose yourself ere the eyes of others are upon you ?”. "What doth the room contain then?" cried Hugh in his fierce uneasiness. "If but the rack and cord-what then? I have endured already; of a surety I can endure again? What mōre than these can that room contain ?" 7. "Alas! I fear me it containeth that which you will find far more grievous to endure than aught of suffering inflicted on your own person," the other answered sadly. The door opened, and Hugh followed in passive silence until he stood on the threshold; but he went no farther. 8. In the one brief glance which he cast into the space beyond, he had seen that which rendered him for the moment literally incapable of farther movement. Before him was a long dark room, rendered yet more dark and sad by heavy curtains drawn carefully before the windows. At a table, not far from the spot where Hugh was standing, sat certain members of the Council, most of whom he recognized as having presided at his own examination in the Tower, and at a little distance from them was a clerk to record proceedings. 9. All this Hugh saw as though he saw it not, for his whōle soul and all the faculties of his mind and body were engrossed and well-nigh suspended in the fearful vision which loomed upon him from the farther end of the apartment. Was that a living thing, a human form suspended 1 from, and almost, as it seemed, impaled upon the wall beyond? And was it-could it be his brother? 10. The wrists were bound with cords and fastened to pegs, placed so high above the head that the entire weight of the body necessarily depended on them; and as the victim was tall and the apartment low, his legs had been forcibly bent backwards and tied round the thighs, in order that he might hang more completely suspended. Terrible was the agony produced by this position-so terrible indeed, that one, a poet and a gentleman, who himself had endured it for hours without yielding to its anguish, thought it afterwards a duty which he owed to humanity to remonstrate warmly with the Council on the wickedness of permitting Topcliffe to inflict a species of torture which he assured them was worse and more difficult to face than a hundred deaths. 11. The sufferer in the present instance had evidently been enduring it for some time. The veins in his forehead were swollen thick as ropes, his eyes were starting from his head, his face was darkened, his tongue protruding, black and hard, in the agony of a thirst than which none greater had been endured since the days of Calvary, and the whole form was so still and rigid that Hugh might have deemed him already dead if an almost imperceptible quiver of the eyelids as he entered the room had not warned him that he was recognized. 12. After the first pause of astonishment, he sprang with a cry of horror toward his brother; but scarcely had he done so êre two men, set there for that very purpose, stepped forward and pinioned him from behind. "Monsters!" cried Hugh, struggling violently, but vainly, with the strong arms that held him. "Call you this your English justice, butchers? Murder you thus your prisoners in secret? Cut him down, I say, cut him down! See you not that he is dying on the instant ? " 13. "Nay, and in sooth, not so indeed," said a grave person 1 Sus pěnd'ed, attached to something above, so as to hang the full weight upon it. The mode of torture here described was often used in this reign. Father John Gerard, an English Jesuit of noble birth, was subjected to it four hours at a time, as he records in his Memoirs. age in black, who, in consequence of the presence of the lords, had been brought thither to regulate the torture-a precaution Topcliffe was by no means in the habit of taking when he acted on his own responsibility. "Our patient, on the contrary, hath yet so much of strength remaining, that, provided the ratio of suffering be not increased, he shall be able, as I judge, to endure it for even two hours longer without risk of life.” 14. "Two hours!" cried Hugh furiously, "why, two minutes were enough to do it! Speak, Amedée ! how fares it with you, brother?—Cut him down, cut him down!" he reiterated wildly, and then, trying to cover his face with his imprisoned hands, he sobbed out, "O heavenly Father, spare us! for I can look upon it no longer."-" Nevertheless, you must try what you can do," said Topcliffe with brutal irony. "For see here, Sir Hugh, I have set you a chair. I must entreat you to repose yourself until such a time at least as my Lords of the Council do will you to be removed hence." 66 15. “I will sit anywhere you please," said Hugh, sinking into the chair, and well-nigh sobbing in anguish, “anywhere you please, so only that you take him down at once.”—“ By my troth, 'tis a grievous pity the sight proves so distasteful to you," said Topcliffe, slipping a cord round the chair while speaking, and fastening Hugh firmly by it; "a grievous pity, in troth, and all the more do I regret it, because it hath been decreed by my Lords of the Council here in presence, and by others of them now unavoidably absent, that you remain in this chair, and your brother upon yonder wall, until such a time 16. "As what, monster?" shouted Hugh, driven nearly frantic by this announcement." Until such a time as you shall have confessed to your evil doings with the Spaniard, with the which, indeed, we are already well enough acquainted to be able to proceed at once against you; albeit, for the better fulfillment of the ends of justice, their lordships would gladly have the particulars from your own lips. 17. Hugh saw at once that they hoped to work out his own doom through his brother's torture, and anything less than that which they demanded of him he would willingly have done to 1 Trŏth, the old way of spelling truth. 1 spare Amedée a pang. But they were calling upon him, Catholic and proud English gentleman as he was, to confess to a lie -a lie also by which they would probably contrive to involve others in the same attachment for high treason 1 to which he was about to be sacrificed himself. 18. Not even to save his brother's life could he stoop to such a meanness; and, sternly rejecting the proffered terms, he resigned himself, with a mental prayer for strength and patience, to the good pleasure of his tormentors. CECILIA CADDELL. II. 65. CHINESE CONFESSORS. Tmenced. PART FIRST. HE second ěpoeh of Christianity in China had now comFrom the hour in which Yong-Tching 2 ascended the throne to the present time, it was only by the loss of all earthly goods, and often at the loss of life itself, that a Chinese' could embrace the religion of the Cross. Our Christian forefathers of the first three centuries had endured the same trials; and men have justly deemed it a conclusive proof of the divinity of their religion, that it could survive the persecutions which would have annihilated any system or policy of human invention. The Church in China has displayed exactly the same proof of its divine origin. 2. One hundred and forty years have passed away since YongTching issued his decree, and there are more than three times as many Christians in China at this moment as when he resolved to purge the empire of their presence. Princes and 1 Trea'son, the offence of attempting to overthrow the government or state to which the offender owes allegiance. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, in whose reign scenes like those described in this lesson were of frequent occurrence, it was called high treason to deny that the queen was the head of the Catholic Church in England, to acknowledge the authority of the Pope, or to seek to persuade a Protestant to embrace the Catholic faith. 2 Yong-Tching, the fourth of the Mantcheou dynasty of Chinese emperors. He ascended the throne in 1722, and immediately began a persecution of the native Christians, whom his father, Cang-hi, had protected. |