HACKS TON OF RATH ILL

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9244, 22 December 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

HACKS TON OF RATH ILL

THE MURDER OF ARCHBISHOP SHARPE. I still see Magus Muir two hundred years ago ; a desert place, quite unenclosed ; in the midst, the Primate's carriage fleeing at the gallop ; the assassins loose reined in pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind ; not because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own ; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco box, thus clearly indicating his complicity with Satan ; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded a grateful rolief from " Ministering Children" or the "Memoirs of Mrs. Katharine Winslowe." The figure that always fixed my attention is that of Hackston of Rathillct, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience. He would take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and " that action" must be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive ; on the other hand, "that action" in itself was highly justified, he had cast in his lot with " the actors," and he must stay there, inactive but publicly sharing the responsibility. "You are a gentleman—you will protect me !" cried the wounded old man, crawling towards him." " I will never lay a hand on you," said Hackston, and put his cloak about his mouth. It is an old temptation with me to pluck away that cloak and see the face— to open that bosom and to read the heart. With incomplete romances about Hackston the drawers of my youth were lumbered. I readhimupinevery printed book that I could lay my hands on. I even dug among the Wodrow manuscript, sitting shamefaced in the very room where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted students. All was vain ; that he had passed a riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and even of military common sense, and that he figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I expiscate. But whenever I cast my eyes backwards, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains of history, sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How small a thing creates an immortality ! I do not think he can have been a man entirely commonplace ; but had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would scarce delay me for a paragraph.—R. L. Stevenson, in Scribner's.