Shrewsbury: A Romance

All this time, and while my fate was being decided, I listened to one and another in a dull despair, which deprived me of the power to defend myself; and from which nothing less than Mrs. D-'s atrocious proposal to flog me, until I gave up the money, could draw me, and that only for a moment. Conscious of my guilt, and seized in the act and on the scene of my crime, I beheld only the near and certain prospect of punishment; while I had not the temptation to tell all, and inform against my crafty accomplice, to which a knowledge of her destination must have exposed me. Besides-and I think a great part of my apathy was due to this-I still felt the stunning effects of the blow which her cruel treachery had dealt me. I saw her in her true light; and as I sat, weeping silently, and seeming to those who watched me, little moved, I was thinking at least as much of the past and my love, and her craft, as of the fate that lay before me.

Though this was presently brought vividly before me, and of all persons by Mrs. Harris. Mrs. D- of herself would have given me neither bit nor sup in the house; but the constable insisting that the King's prisoner must be fed, Mrs. Harris, tearful and shaking, was allowed to bring me some broken victuals. These set before me, the good soul, instead of retiring, pottered aimlessly about the room; and by and by got behind me; on which, or rather a moment later, I felt something cold and sharp at the nape of my neck and started up. Bursting into a flood of tears she plumped down on a seat, and I saw that she had a pair of scissors and a scrap of my hair in her hand.

"Good Lord!" I said.

Doubtless the tone in which I spoke betrayed me, for the constable's man who was in charge of me laughed brutally. "Gad, if he does not think she did it out of love!" he cried, speaking to a friend who was sitting with him. "When all the old dame wants is a charm for the rheumatics; and she thinks the chance too good to be lost."

Then I remembered that the hair of a hanged man is in that part held to be sovereign for the rheumatics; and I sat down feeling cold and faint.

CHAPTER VIII

That saying, though a small thing, and a foolish one, brought my state home to me; and, moreover, filled me with so grisly a foreboding of the gibbet, that henceforth I gave my treacherous mistress no more thought than she deserved-which was little; but I became wholly taken up with my own fate, and especially with the recollection of a man, whom I had once seen, pitched and hanging in chains, at Much Hadham Crossroads. The horrible spectacle he had become, ten days dead, grew on my mind, until I grovelled and sweated in a green terror, and that not so much at the prospect of death-though this sent me hot and cold in the same instant-as of the harsh rope about my neck, and the sacking bands, and the dreadful apparatus, and the grinning loathsome thing I must become.

Near swooning at these thoughts, I sank huddled into the chair; and was presently plucked up by the constable's assistant, who, seeing my state, came forward, and though he was naturally a coarse fellow, strove to hearten me, saying that there was always hope until the cart moved, and that many a man cast for death was drinking the King's health in the Plantations. With an oath or two and in a loud voice.

On that a last flicker of pride came to my aid, and trying to meet his eye I muttered that it was not that; that I was not afraid, and that at worst I should be burned in the hand.

"To be sure!" he said nodding, and looking at me curiously. "To be sure. It is well to be a scholar!"

I was athirst, however, to get some further and better assurance from him; and fixing my eyes on his face, I asked hoarsely, "You think that it is certain? You think there is no doubt?"

"Certain sure, my Toby!" he answered. But I saw that, as he moved away, he winked to his comrade, and I heard the latter ask him softly, as he took his seat again, "Is't so? Will the lad cheat the hangman?"

"Not he!" was the reply, uttered in a whisper-but terror sharpened my ears. "There was so long a list at the last Assizes, and half of them legit, that it was given out they would override it this time, and make examples. And ten to one he will swing, Ben."

"But is it the law?"

I did not hear the answer for the drumming in my ears and the dreadful confusion in my brain; which were such that I was not aware of the constable's entrance or of anything that happened after that, until I found myself in the road climbing clumsily on the back of a pony, in the middle of a throng of staring curious faces. My feet being secured under the beast's belly-at which some gave a hand, while others stood off, whispering and looking strangely at me-the constable mounted himself, and shouting to his wife that he should take me on to Hertford gaol, and should not be back until late, led me out of the crowd, Mr. D- and Mr. Jenkins bringing up the rear. The last I saw of the school the boys were hanging out of the windows to see me go; and Mrs. D- was standing in the doorway, and unappeased by my misery, was shrilly denouncing me-hands and tongue, all going-to a group of her gossips.

Our road took us past the Rose Inn, and through a great part of the town, but no impression of either remains with me, my only recollection being of the sunshine that lay over the country, and of the happiness that all creation, all living things, save my doomed self, enjoyed. The bitterness of the thought that yesterday I had been as these, free to move and live and breathe, caused great tears to roll down my cheeks; but my companions, whose thoughts had already gone forward to the Steward's Room at Sir Winston's, and the entertainment they expected there, took little notice of me; and less after the porter at the lodge told them that there were grand doings at the house, and a great company, including a lord, come unexpectedly from London.

"I don't think ye'll be welcome," the porter added, looking curiously at me.

"Justice's business," the constable replied sturdily. "The King must be served."

"Ay, that is what you all say when you've something to gain by it," the porter retorted; and went in.

All which I heard idly; not supposing that it meant to me the difference between life and death, fortune and misery; or that in the company come unexpectedly from London lurked my salvation. If I dwelt on the news at all it was only as it might affect me by adding to the shame I felt. But in this I deceived myself; for when the ordeal of waiting in the servants' hall-where the maids pitied me and would have fed me if I could have eaten-was over, and we were ushered into the parlour in which Sir Winston, who had newly risen from dinner, would see us, we found only one gentleman with him.

The two stood at the farther end of a long narrow room, in the bay of a large window, that, open to the ground, permitted a view of cool sward and yew hedges. That they had had companions, lately withdrawn, was clear; and this, not only from the length of the table, which, bestrewn with plates and glasses and half-empty flagons, stretched up the room from us to them, but from two chairs, thrown down in the hurry of rising, and six or seven others thrust back, haphazard, against the panels. In the side of the room were four tall straight windows that allowed the sunshine to fall in regular bars on the table; and these, displaying here a little pool of spilled claret, and there a broken tobacco pipe, the ash still smouldering, gave a touch of grimness to the luxurious disorder.

The same incongruity was to be observed in the appearance of the elder and stouter of the two men; who had hung his periwig on the back of a chair, and showed a bald head and flushed face that agreed very ill with his laced cravat and embroidered coat. Standing with his feet apart and his arm outstretched, he was not immediately aware of our entrance; but continued to address his companion in words that were coherent, yet betrayed how he had been employed.

"Crop-eared knaves, my lord, half of them, and I one!" he cried, as we came to a halt a little within the door, to await his pleasure-I with shaking knees and sinking heart. "And ready to become the same again if the times call for it. For why? Because it was only so we could keep or get, my lord. And martyrs have been few in my time, though fools plenty."

"I should be sorry to deny the last, Sir Winston," his companion answered, smiling; for whom at the moment, blind bat as I was, I had no eyes, seeing in him only a noble youth, handsomely dressed and periwigged, and two, or it might be three years older than myself; whereas I hung on the Justice's nod. "But here is your case," the young man continued, turning to me, and speaking in a pleasant voice.

"And a hard case one of them is," the Justice answered jollily, as he turned to us, and singled out the constable. "That is you, Dyson!" he continued, "one of those of whom I have been telling you, my lord. A psalm-singer in the troubles, sergeant in Lord Grey's regiment, a roundhead, and ran away, with better men than himself, at Cropredy Bridge. To-day he damns a Whig, and goes to bed drunk every twenty-ninth of May."

"Having a good example, your honour!" the constable answered grinning.

"Ay, to be sure. And why don't you follow it also?" Sir Winston continued, turning to the schoolmaster. "But crop-eared you were and crop-eared you are; one of Shaftesbury's brisk boys, my lord! And ought to be fined for a ranter every Monday morning, if all had their deserts!"

"Then I am afraid that your theory does not apply to him, Sir Winston," the young man said with a smile. "Here is one martyr already; and if one martyr, why not many?"

"Martyr?" the Justice answered, with half-a-dozen oaths. "He? No one less! He goes to church as you and I do, and does not smart to the tune of a penny! It is true he pulls a solemn face and abhors mince-pies and plum-porridge. But why? Because he keeps a school, and the righteous, or what are left of them, who are just such hypocrites as himself, resort unto his company with boys and guineas! Resort unto his company, eh, D-?" the Justice repeated gleefully, addressing the schoolmaster. "That is the phrase, isn't it? Oh, I have chopped Scripture with old Noll in my time. And so it pays, do you see, my lord? When it does not, he'll damn the Whigs and turn Tantivy or Abhorrer, or something that does. And so it is with all; they are loyal. Never were Englishmen more loyal; but to what are they loyal? Themselves, my lord!"

"Yet there are Whigs who do not keep schools," the young lord said, after a hearty laugh.

"Ay, my lord, and why?" Sir Winston answered, in high good humour, "because we are all trimmers to the wind, but some trim too late, and some too soon. And those are your Whigs. Never you turn Whig, my lord, whatever you do, or you will die in a Dutch garret like Tony Shiftsbury! And if anyone could have made Whiggery pay nowadays, clever Anthony would have. Here's his health, but I doubt he is in hell, these eight months."

And Sir Winston, going to the table, filled and drank off a bumper of claret. Then he filled again. "The King-God bless him-is not very well, I hear," said he, winking at the young lord. "So I will give you another toast. His Highness's health, and confusion to all who would exclude him! And now what is this business, Dyson? Who is the lad? What has he been doing?"

The constable began to explain; but before he had uttered many words, the baronet, whose last draught had more than a little fuddled him, cut him short. "Oh, come to me to-morrow!" he said. "Or stay! You are in the Commission for the county, my lord?"

"I am, but I have not acted," the young man answered.

"Rot it, man, but you shall act now! Burglary, is it? Broke and entered, eh? Then that is a hanging matter, and a young hound should be blooded. I am off! My lord will do it, Dyson. My lord will do it."

With which the Justice lurched out of the window so quickly, not to say unsteadily, that he was gone before his companion could remonstrate. The young lord, thus abandoned, looked at first at a nonplus, and seemed for a while more than half-inclined to follow. But changing his mind, and curious, I am willing to believe, to hear the case of a prisoner so much out of the common as I must have appeared to him, he turned to us, and adopting a certain stateliness, which came easily to him, young as he was, he told the constable he would hear him.

Then it was that, hanging for my life on the nods and words of intelligence that from time to time fell from him, and whereby he lifted the constable out of the slough of verbiage in which he floundered, I dared again to hope; and noting with eyes sharpened by terror the cast of his serious handsome features, and the curves of his mouth, sensitive as a woman's yet wondrously under control, saw a prospect of life. For a time indeed I had nothing more substantial on which to build than such signs, so damning seemed the tale that branded me as taken in the act and on the scene of my crimes. But when the young peer, after eyeing me gravely and pitifully, asked if they had found the money on me, and the constable answered, "No," and my lord retorted, "Then where was it?" and got no answer; and again when he enquired as to the lock on the door and the height of the window, and who had aided me to enter, and learned that a girl was suspected and no one else-then I felt the blood beat hotly in my head, and a mist come before my eyes.

"Who is his accomplice? Pooh; there must be one!" he said.

"The girl, may it pleasure your lordship," the constable answered.

"The girl? Then why should she leave him to be taken? How did he enter?"

"By a ladder, it is supposed, my lord."

"It is supposed?"

"Yes, my lord."

"But ladder or no ladder, why did she leave him?"

The constable scratched his head.

"Perhaps they were surprised, please your lordship," he ventured at last.

"But the boy was found in the room at seven, dolt. And the sun is up before four. What was he doing all those hours? Surprised, pooh!"

"Well, I don't know as to that, your worship," the man answered sturdily; "but only that the prisoner was found in the room, in which he had not ought to be, and the money was gone from the room where it had ought to be!"

"And the bureau was broken open," Mr. D- cried eagerly. "And what is more, he has never denied it, my lord! Never."

At that and at sight of the change that came over my judge's face the hope that had risen in me died suddenly; and I saw again the grim prospect of the prison and the gibbet; and to be led from one to the other, dumb, one of a drove, unregarded. And, it coming upon me strongly that in a moment it would be too late, I found my voice and cried to him, "Oh, my lord, save me!" I cried. "Help me! For the sake of God, help me!"

Whether my words moved him or he had not yet given up my case, he looked at me attentively, and with a shade as of recollection on his face. Then he asked quietly what I was.

"Usher in a school, my lord," someone answered.

"Poor devil!" he exclaimed. And then, to the others, "Here, you! Withdraw a little to the passage, if you please. I would speak with him alone."

The constable opened his mouth to demur; but the young gentleman would not suffer it; saying with a fine air that there was no resisting, "Pooh, man, I am Lord Shrewsbury. I will be responsible for him." And with that he got them out of the room.

CHAPTER IX

I know now that there never was a man in whom the natural propensity to side with the weaker party was by custom and exercise more highly developed than in my late lord, in whose presence I then stood; who, indeed, carried that virtue to such an extent that if any fault could be found with his public carriage-which I am very far from admitting, but only that such a colour might be given to some parts of it by his enemies-the flaw was attributable to this excess of generosity. Yet he has since told me that on this occasion of our first meeting, it was neither my youth nor my misery-in the main at any rate-that induced him to take so extraordinary a step as that of seeing me alone; but a strange and puzzling reminiscence, which my features aroused in him, and whereto his first words, when we were left together, bore witness. "Where, my lad," said he, staring at me, "have I seen you before?"

As well as I could, for the dread of him in which I stood, I essayed to clear my brain and think; and in me also, as I looked at him, the attempt awoke a recollection, as if I had somewhere met him. But I could conceive one place only where it was possible I might have seen a man of his rank; and so stammered that perhaps at the Rose Inn, at Ware, in the gaming-room I might have met him.

His lip curled, "No," he said coldly, "I have honoured the Groom-Porter at Whitehall once and again by leaving my guineas with him. But at the Rose Inn, at Ware-never! And heavens, man," he continued in a tone of contemptuous wonder, "what brought such as you in that place?"

In shame, and aware, now that it was too late, that I had said the worst thing in the world to commend myself to him, I stammered that I had gone thither-that I had gone thither with a friend.

"A woman?" he said quickly.

I allowed that it was so.

"The same that led you into this?" he continued sharply.

But to that I made no answer: whereon, with kindly sternness he bade me remember where I stood, and that in a few minutes it would be too late to speak.

"You can trust me, I suppose?" he continued with a fine scorn, "that I shall not give evidence against you. By being candid, therefore, you may make things better, but can hardly make them worse."

Whereon I have every reason to be thankful, nay, it has been matter for a life's rejoicing that I was not proof against his kindness; but without more ado, sobbing over some parts of my tale, and whispering others, I told him my whole story from the first meeting with my temptress-so I may truly call her-to the final moment when, the money gone, and the ladder removed, I was rudely awakened, to find myself a prisoner. I told it, I have reason to believe, with feeling, and in words that carried conviction; the more as, though skilled in literary composition, and in writing secundum artem, I have little imagination. At any rate, when I had done, and quavered off reluctantly into a half coherent and wholly piteous appeal for mercy, I found my young judge gazing at me with a heat of indignation in cheek and eye, that strangely altered him.

"Good G-!" he cried, "what a Jezebel!" And in words which I will not here repeat, he said what he thought of her.

True as the words were (and I knew that, after what I had told him, nothing else was true of her), they forced a groan from me.

"Poor devil," he said at that. And then again, "Poor devil, it is a shame! It is a black shame, my lad," he continued warmly, "and I would like to see Madam at the cart-tail; and that is where I shall see her before all is done! I never heard of such a vixen! But for you," and on the word he paused and looked at me, "you did it, my friend, and I do not see your way out of it."

"Then must I hang?" I cried desperately.

He did not answer.

"My lord! My lord!" I urged, for I began to see whither he was tending, and I could have shrieked in terror, "you can do anything."

"I?" he said.

"You! If you would speak to the judge, my lord."

He laughed, without mirth. "He would whip you instead of hanging you," he said contemptuously.

"To the King, then."

"You would thank me for nothing," he answered; and then with a kind of contemptuous suavity, "My friend, in your Ware Academy-where nevertheless you seem to have had your diversions-you do not know these things. But you may take it from me, that I am more than suspected of belonging to the party whose existence Sir Baldwin denies-I mean to the Whigs; and the suspicion alone is enough to damn any request of mine."

On that, after staring at him a moment, I did a thing that surprised him; and had he known me better a thing that would have surprised him more. For the courage to do it, and to show myself in colours unlike my own, I had to thank neither despair nor fear, though both were present; but a kind of rage that seized me, on hearing him speak in a tone above me, and as if, having heard my story, he was satisfied with the curiosity of it, and would dismiss the subject, and I might go to the gallows. I know now that in so speaking he had not that intent, but that brought up short by the certainty of my guilt, and the impasse as to helping me, in which he stood, he chose that mode of repressing the emotion he felt. I did not understand this however: and with a bitterness born of the misconception, and in a voice that sounded harsh, and anyone's rather than mine, I burst into a furious torrent of reproaches, asking him if it was only for this he had seen me alone, and to make a tale. "To make a tale," I cried, "and a jest? One that with the same face with which you send me out to be strangled and to rot, and with the same smile, you'll tell, my lord, after supper to Sir Baldwin and your like. Oh, for shame, my lord, for shame!" I cried, passionately, and losing all fear of him in my indignation. "As you may some day be in trouble yourself-for great heads fall as well as low ones in these days, and as little pitied-if you have bowels of compassion, my lord, and a mother to love you-"

He turned on me so swiftly at that word, that my anger quailed before his. "Silence!" he cried, fiercely. "How dare you, such as you, mention-. But there, fellow-be silent!"

I caught the ring of pain as well as anger in his tone, and obeyed him; though I could not discern what I had said to touch him so sorely. He on his side glowered at me a moment; and so we stood, while hope died within me, and I grew afraid of him again, and a shadow fell on the room as it had already fallen on his face. I waited for nothing now but the word that should send me from his presence, and thought nothing so certain as that I had flung away what slender chance remained to me. It was with a start that when he broke the silence I was aware of a new sound in his voice.

"Listen, my lad," he said in a constrained tone-and he did not look at me. "You are right in one thing. If I meant to do nothing for you, I had no right to your confidence. I do not know what it was in your face induced me to see you. I wish I had not. But since I have I must do what I can to save you: and there is only one way. Mind you," he continued in a sudden burst of anger, "I do not like it! And I do it out of regard for myself, not for you, my lad! Mind you that!"

"Oh, my lord!" I cried, ready to fall down and worship him.

"Be silent," he answered, coldly, "and when my back is turned go through that window. Do you understand? It is all I can do for you. The alley on the left leads to the stables. Pass through them boldly; if you are not stopped you will in a minute be on the high road. The turn, to the left at the cross-roads, leads to Tottenham and London. That on the right will take you to Little Parndon and Epping. That is all I have to say; while I look for a piece of paper to sign your commitment, you would do well to go. Only remember, my man, if you are retaken-do not look to me."

He suited the action to the words by turning his back on me, and beginning to search in a bureau that stood beside him. But so sudden and so unexpected was the proposal he had made, that though he had said distinctly "Go!" I doubt if, apart from the open window, I should have understood his purpose. As it was I came to it slowly-so slowly that he lost patience, and with his head still buried among the pigeon-holes, swore at me.

"Are you going?" he said. "Or do you think that it is nothing I am doing for you? Do you think it is nothing that I am going to tell a lie for such as you? Either go or hang, my lad!"

I heard no more. A moment earlier nothing had been farther from my thoughts than to attempt an escape, but the impulse of his will steadied my wavering resolution, and with set teeth and a beating heart, I stepped through the window. Outside I turned to the left along a shady green alley fenced by hedges of yew, and espying the stable-yard before me, walked boldly across it. By good luck the grooms and helpers were at supper and I saw only one man standing at a door. He stared at me, mouthing a straw, but said nothing, and in a twinkling I had passed him, left the curtilage behind me, and had the park fence and gate in sight.

Until I reached this, not knowing whose eyes were on me, I had the presence of mind to walk; though cold shivers ran down my back, and my hair crept, and every second I fancied-for I was too nervous to look back-that I felt Dyson's hand on my collar. Arriving safely at the gate, however, and the road stretching before me with no one in sight, I took to my heels, and ran a quarter of a mile along it; then leaping the fence that bounded it on the right, I started recklessly across country, my aim being to strike the Little Parndon highway, to which my lord had referred, at a point beyond the cross-roads, and so to avoid passing the latter.

I am aware that this mode of escape, this walking through a window and running off unmolested, sounds bald and commonplace; and that if I could import into my story some touch of romance or womanish disguise, such as-to compare great things with small-marked my Lord Nithsdale's escape from the Tower three years ago, I should cut a better figure. Whereas in the flight across the fields on a quiet afternoon, with the sun casting long shadows on the meadows, and for my most instant alarms, the sudden whirring up before me of partridge or plover, few will find anything heroic. But let them place themselves for a moment in my skin, and remember that as I sweated and panted and stumbled and rose again, as I splashed in reckless haste through sloughs and ditches, and tore my way through great blackthorns, I had death always at my heels! Let them remember that in the long shadows that crossed my path I saw the gallows, and again the gallows, and once more the gallows; and fled more quickly; and that it needed but the distant bark of a dog, or the shout of a boy scaring birds, to persuade me that the hue and cry was coming, and to fill me with the last extremity of fear.

I believe that the adventurer, and the knight of the road, when it falls to their lot to be so hunted-as must often happen, though more commonly such an one is taken securus et ebrius in the arms of his mistress-find some mitigation of their pains in the anticipation of conflict, and in the stern joy which the resolve to sell life dearly imparts to the man of action. But I was unarmed, and worn out with my exertions; no soldier, and with no heart to fight. My flight therefore across the quiet fields was pure terror, the torture of unmitigated fear. Fear spurred me and whipped me; and yet, had I known it, I might have spared my terror. For darkness found me, weak and exhausted, but still free, in the neighbourhood of Epping in Essex, where I passed the night in the Forest; and before noon next day, believing that they would watch for me on the Tottenham Road, I had found courage to slink in to London by way of Chingford, and in the heart of that great city, whose magnitude exceeded all my expectations, had safely and effectually lost myself.