Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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The woman approached me slowly, and halted at a little distance. There might have been two yards between us and five between me and the gibbet.

“What have you come to do?” she exclaimed in a voice that sounded raw—I can find no other word to express the noise of her speech—with famine, fatigue, fever; for these things I heard in her voice.

“I have come to do nothing; I am going to Deal,” I answered, and I made a step.

“Stop! I am the mother of that dead man. Show me how to take him down. I cannot reach his feet with my hands. You are tall, and strong and hearty, and can unhook him. For God’s sake, take him down and give him to me, sir.”

“His mother!” cried I, finding spirit, on a sudden, in the woman’s speech and dreadful avowal; “God help thee! But it is not a thing for me to meddle with.”

“He was my son, he was innocent and he has been murdered. He must not be left up there, sir. Take him down, and give him to me who am his mother, and who will bury him.”

“It is not a thing for me to meddle with,” I repeated, looking at the body, and all this time it was lightning sharply, and the thunder was frequent and heavy, and it rained pitilessly. “It would need a ladder to unhook him, and suppose you had him, what then? Where is his grave? Would you dig it here? And with what would you dig it? And if you buried him here, they would have him up again and hook him up again.”