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Updated: September 26, 2025
She had been one of the night-watches, and never before showed me any particular kindness. She did not indeed go into detail concerning the transactions to which she alluded, but told me that some nuns had been murdered under great aggravations of cruelty, by being gagged, and left to starve in the cells, or having their flesh burnt off their bones with red-hot irons.
"No more for me," I soliloquized, "of presiding magisterially at the odious dinner-table, at which not a whisper is tolerated, and even the irrepressible chuckle over some accident to the earthenware is accounted a crime; no more of solemn marching in procession on Sunday morning and evening to some fantastic, farcical 'High Church, whose funereal-mummeries served only to mask the furtive deviltries of the brisker members of my charge; no more onsets at tea-time, when returned home with the boys from an exhausting walk, of infuriated farmers demanding vengeance for rifled orchards and shattered fences; no more morning calls from elderly maiden ladies in neighboring summer boarding-houses, reporting a hail of shot from ubiquitous catapults during the night-watches; no more sitting up o' nights, when on duty for the day, reading with the drones against the approaching Oxford or Cambridge 'local, and rushing stealthily up stairs every now and then to pounce upon the perpetrators of hideous catcalls."
But while Ethel was occupied only with the sufferer, Dudley, in the long night-watches, had seen at last what manner of woman it was he had passed by for the pretty, shallow, selfish little sister. Ever since the elopement, three months ago, he had been changing. It had been the bitter blow that had stabbed him awake.
To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences.
For this Ushant was an old man, of strong natural sense, who had seen nearly the whole terraqueous globe, and could reason of civilized and savage, of Gentile and Jew, of Christian and Moslem. The long night-watches of the sailor are eminently adapted to draw out the reflective faculties of any serious-minded man, however humble or uneducated.
The moon had passed on, and darkness, which is allied to fear, closed her in the fear of unthinking youth who knows not that the grave is full of peace; the fear of abundant life for senile death; the cold agony that comes in the night-watches, when the business of the day is but a dream and Reality visits the couch. Deeper burrowed Sara Juke, trembling with chill and night-sweat.
"It is absolutely essential, or we shall have the whole trouble over again. I shall have to give him a sedative and leave him to you. I can't possibly look in again to-night, so it will be useless to send for me. You will have to manage as best you can." He departed, and Stella arranged to divide the night-watches with Peter the Great.
There had been banners spread to the breeze, songs and bells in the night-watches, mock caucuses and conventions, campaign speeches, and Australian balloting, before election time. But the parade was of Madeline's invention. It was about eight o'clock on the evening after election day that she appeared in Mary Brooks's door she had made friends with Mary almost as easily as Betty had.
"She's not. I don't believe it," he answered, on a toneless note of decision. And the other knew that only the slow torture of the night-watches could brand the truth into his brain. With a gesture of weariness, infinitely pathetic, he turned back to the bed, and bending down, mechanically rearranged the sheet, and smoothed a crease or two out of the pillow.
As of old, in the Breton marshes, in the woods of Toulven, or at sea in the night-watches, we talk of all those things to which thoughts naturally revert in darkness; of ghosts, of spirits, of eternity, of the great hereafter, of chaos and we entirely forget little Chrysantheme!
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