Shrewsbury Part 30

What the girl answered I did not catch, for as she raised her head again to reply, my ear caught the sound of rising danger. Ferguson was speaking, his words, no longer coherent, a mere frothing of oaths and calling of hideous fates on his head if he had ever betrayed, if he had ever sold, if he had ever deceived, now ran in a steady current of wrathful denunciation. And the men listened; he had their ears again; he was no longer on his trial. Afterwards I learned that while my attention was astray with the women. Smith, by stating what I had stated to him--namely, that the Secretary had used Ferguson as the intermediary through whom to warn Berwick--had confirmed the plotter's story, and at a stroke had restored his position. Whereon, full of spite, and desperately certain that however exposed he lay on other sides I at any rate knew enough to hang him, the wretched man had set himself anew to compa.s.s my destruction. Deterred neither by the check he had received, nor by the gloomy looks of the conspirators, who responded but sluggishly to his appeal, he drove home again and again, and with wild words and wilder oaths, the one point on which he relied, the one point that was so dear to him that he could not understand their hesitation.

"Waste of time?" he cried. "We would be better employed looking to ourselves and slipping away to Romney, would we? But you are fools!

You are babes! There is the evidence that can swear to you all! There is the evidence keen to do it! There is the evidence in your hands!

And you will let him escape?"

"There is evidence without him," said King sulkily. "Where is Prendergast?"

"Oh, he is honest."

"But where is he? And where is Porter?"

"Where is Sir John Fenwick for that matter?" replied the man who had answered for Prendergast. "He is too high and mighty to mix with us, and will only eat the chestnut when we have got it out of the fire.

For that matter, where are Friend and Parkyns? They are not here."

"Pshaw!" Ferguson cried, in a rage at the digression. "Why will you be thinking of them? Cannot you see that they are tainted, they are in it? They cannot if they will! And they are gentlemen besides, and not dirty knaves like this fellow."

"For the matter of that," said Ca.s.sel, bluntly, "Preston was a lord.

But he sold Ashton."

The words brought a kind of cold breath of suspicion into the room, at the chill touch of which each looked stealthily at his neighbour, as if he said, "Is it he? Or he?" Ferguson seeing on this that he made little progress, and that the men, though they looked at me vengefully, were not to be kindled, grew furious and more furious, and began to storm and rave. But Charnock in a moment cut him short.

"Mr. Ferguson is so far right," said he, "that if we let this person go to perfect his evidence against us, we shall be very foolish.

Clearly, it is to set a premium on treason."

"Then let Mr. Ferguson deal with him," Ca.s.sel answered, curtly. "He is his man, and it is his business. I don't lay a hand on him, and that is flat."

"Nor I! Nor I!" cried several, with eagerness. G.o.d knows if they thought in their hearts to curry favour with me.

"You are all mad!" Ferguson cried, beating the air.

"And you are a coward!" Ca.s.sel retorted. "I'd as soon trust him as you. If you are taken you'll peach, Ferguson! G-- ---- you! I know you will. You will peach! You are as white-livered a cur as ever lived!"

Then, seeing them divided, and the most b.l.o.o.d.y-minded of them--for such Ca.s.sel had been a short time before--taking up my cause, I thought that for certain the bitterness of death was past; and I took courage, discerning for the first time solid land beyond the deeps and black suffocating fears through which I had pa.s.sed. For the first time I allowed my thoughts to dwell on the future, and myself to hope and plan. But the warm current of returning life had scarcely coursed through my veins and set my heart beating, before Charnock's cold voice, taking up the tale, smote on my ear, and in a moment dashed my jubilation. There was that in his tone gripped my heart afresh.

"Peace, man," he said. "Peace! Is this a time to be bickering? Let us be clear before we separate, what is to be done with this man. For my part, I am not for letting him go."

"Nor I," said Smith, speaking almost for the first time.

The others, lately so hot and impa.s.sioned, looked at the speakers and at one another with a sort of apathy.

Only Ferguson cried violently, "Nor I, by----! Nor I. We are many, and what is one life?"

"Quite so, Mr. Ferguson," Charnock retorted. "But will you take the life?"

The plotter drew back as he had drawn back before. "It is everybody's business," he muttered.

"Then will you take part in it? You are the first to condemn. Will you be one to execute?"

Ferguson moistened his lips with his tongue, and, swallowing with an effort, looked s.h.i.+ftily at me and away again. The sweat stood on his face. For me, I watched him, fascinated; watched him, and still he did not answer.

"Just so," said Charnock, at last. "You will not. And that being so, is there anyone else who will? If not, what is to be done?"

"Put him in a lugger," Keyes cried, "at the bridge; and by morning----"

"He wall be taken off at the Nore," Ca.s.sel answered scornfully. "And you too if you think to get off that way. There are more Billops in the Pool than the Billop who gave up Ashton."

"Gag him and leave him here."

"And have him found by the messengers to-morrow morning?" Ca.s.sel answered. "As well and better, call a chair, and pay the chairmen, and bid them take him to the Secretary's office with our compliments."

"Well, if not here, in one of the other pens. Ferguson knows plenty."

The woman who had come in with Smith laughed. "That might answer," she said, "if his sweetheart were not here. Do you think she would leave him to starve?"

There was a general stir and muttering as the men turned to the girl.

"Pooh," said one, "it is Ferguson's girl."

"And your spy's sweetheart," the woman repeated.

The girl lifted her head and showed the room a face pale, weary, and dull-eyed. "He is nothing to me," she said.

And the men would have believed her; but the woman, with a swift, cat-like movement, seized her wrist and held it. "Nothing to you, my girl, isn't he?" she cried. "Then you have the fever or the small-pox on you! One, two, three----"

Her face flaming, the girl sprang up and s.n.a.t.c.hed away her hand.

The woman laughed--and how I hated her! "He is nothing to you, isn't he?" she said in a mocking tone. "Yet what will you not give me to save him, my chick? What will you not give me to see him safe out of this house? What----?"

"Peace, peace!" cried Charnock. "Time is everything, and we are wasting it. Unless we would be taken, every man of us, we should be half-way to Romney Marsh by morning."

"Will you leave him to me!" said Smith suddenly.

"Leave him?"

"Ay. Or better, let me have two minutes' talk with him here, and if he comes to my way of thinking, I will answer for him."

"Answer for him?" cried Ferguson, with a sneer. "If you answer for him no better than I did, you will give us small surety."

"Ay, but I am not you, Mr. Ferguson," Smith retorted, in a tone of contempt, whereat the older man writhed impotently.

"This person--Mr. Taylor or Mr. Price--or whatever his name is--knows me and that what I say I do."

"Well, do--what you like with him," Charnock answered peevishly, "so that you stop his mouth."

To my great joy the other men a.s.sented in the same tone, being glad to be rid of the burden. It may seem strange to some that those who had prepared an hour before to take my life, should now be as ready to let me go; but there are few men who are eager to take life in cold blood, and kill a man as they would a sheep. Moreover, in favour of these men--on whose memory the a.s.sa.s.sination Plot has cast obloquy not altogether deserved, since few of them were a.s.sa.s.sins in the strict sense, and the worst of all, Ferguson, escaped his just fate--in their favour I say, it is to be observed that the fact which they designed, however horrid in the eyes of good citizens, and certainly not to be defended by me, was not in their sight so much a murder as an act of private warfare carried into the enemy's country. So fully I am persuaded was this the case, that had it been a question of stabbing the King in the back, or shooting him from a window, I believe not one would have volunteered. Let this stand to their credit: to the credit of men whom I saw and have described at their worst, drunken, reckless, ill-combined, and worse governed; whose illegal design had it been accomplished, must have postponed the Protestant succession in these realms; but who, misguided and betrayed as they were by leaders more evil than themselves, evinced some spark of chivalry in their lives--for all did it in a measure for a cause--and in their sufferings a fort.i.tude that would have become better men and a n.o.bler effort.

So much of them. One released my hands, and another at Smith's request found him a light; and my new protector bidding me follow him, and leading the way upstairs to the bare room at the back whence I had broken out, those we left were deep in muttered plans and whisperings of the Marsh, and Hunt's house, and Harrison's Inn at Dimchurch, before we were out of hearing.

Smith's first act, when we reached the room above, was to close the door upon us. This done, he set his candle on the floor--whence its flame threw dark wavering outlines of our figures on the ceiling--and moved to the hearth. Here, while I stared, wondering at his silence, he searched for some spring or handle, and finding it, caused a large piece of the wainscot to fall out and reveal a cavity about three feet deep and six long. He beckoned me to bring the candle and look in, and supposing it to be a secret way out, I did so. However, outlet there was none. The place was nothing more than a concealed cupboard.