"Well," he said, with a sort of sullen reasonableness, "and what is the matter with the trade? What is wrong with the trade, I say? I'll tell you this, my la.s.s, you would live badly without it."

"I would live honestly," she cried. "And as my father lived!"

"You drab!" he cried. "Leave that alone."

At that, and when judging from the tone of his voice I expected him to break out with fresh oaths and curses, there was instead an astonishing silence, which fell for me at an unlucky moment, for forgetting, in my desire to see as well as hear, the risk I ran, I had crept down the stairs, and now lacked but a pace of seeing into the room. The noise ceasing, I dared neither take that step nor retreat; and it was only when the silence had continued so long that curiosity overcame fear, that I ventured the advance, and looking in, saw that the girl, her fire and fury gone, was leaning against the wall beside the hearth, her face averted; while Ferguson himself, in an att.i.tude of dejection scarcely less marked, stood near her, his head bowed and his blood-shot eyes fixed on the fire.

"Ay, he lived honestly, your father," he muttered at last. "It is true, my la.s.s. I grant it. But he had a fair wind, had Alan, and a short course; and if he had lived to be sixty, G.o.d knows! We are what we are made. I mind him well, and the burn we fished and the pickle things we took out, and your mother that played with us in her cutty sark, and not a shoe between us nor a bodle of money; but the green hills round us, and all we knew of the world that it lay beyond them.

And that was all your father ever knew, my la.s.s. And well for him! Ay, well for him! But woe's me, and woe to the man who took my living, and woe to the evil King!"

His voice was beginning to rise; in a moment he would have reached his usual pitch of denunciation, of which even now some of his many writings afford a pale reflection; but at the word _King_ there came a sharp knocking at the door, and he paused. For me, I turned in a panic, and, heedless what noise I made, hurried up the stairs. The steps creaked under me, but fortunately the knocking was repeated so quickly and persistently that it covered the sound of my flight; and before I had more than ensconced myself in the old place, Ferguson, doubtless in obedience to some signal, was at the door and had opened it.

Immediately half-a-dozen men poured noisily in, breathing hard and growling in low tones, and pa.s.sed into the room below. But until the outer door was closed and secured, nothing I could catch, though fear sharpened my ears, was said. Then, as Ferguson went in after them, one of the newcomers raised his voice in answer to a question, and cried with a rattling oath, "What is up? What is up, old fox? Why, all is up! And we'll all swing for it before the month is over, if we cannot clear out to-night! You are a clever one, Mr. Ferguson, but you are caught this time, with better men. G.o.d! if I had the sneak here that peached on us, I would cut his liver out! I would----"

Two or three voices joined in to the same tune and drowned his words, one asking where Prendergast was, another where Porter was, a third indulging in threats so horrid and blasphemies so profane that I turned cold where I crouched. I began to understand what had happened, and my situation; but that nothing might be spared me Ferguson, in a quavering voice that proved all was news to him, asked again what was the matter.

"The Blues are moved," cried three or four at once. "They were marching out when we left. The guards at Kensington are doubled, and the orders for the King's hunting to-morrow are cancelled. They were hurrying to and fro calling the Council when we came away, and messengers were beginning to go round the taverns."

"And they have seized the horses at the King of Bohemia's Head," added another, "so they know a lot."

"But is it--certain?" Ferguson asked, with a break in his voice.

"Ay, as certain as that we shall hang if we do not get over!" was the brutal answer.

"And the Captain?"

"I have been at his lodgings. He has not been heard of since noon. He ordered his horse then and they say took the road; and h.e.l.l to it, if that is so, he is half way to France by this! And safe! Safe, you devils, and we are left here caught like rats!"

"Ay, we'll go farther than France!" one shrieked. "As for me I am off.

I shall----"

"No, by G.o.d, you don't!" cried another; and flung himself, as it seemed to me, between him and the door. "You don't go and sell the rest of us, and save your own neck. You----"

"Where is Porter?" a third struck in.

"And Prendergast?"

"They are not here! Nor Sir William! Nor Friend! So what is the good of talking like that?"

"He will make a fat hang, will Sir William!" said one, with a mad laugh that died in his throat. "It will cure his gout."

At that, one of the others cried with furious oaths for liquor; and I judged that Ferguson gave them of his Hollands. But it was little among so many, and was gone in a moment, and they calling for more.

"There is a keg upstairs," said he. "In the back-room. But get it for yourselves. You have hung me. To think that I should have played the game with such fools."

They laughed recklessly, a savage note in their voices. "Ay, you should have stuck to your pen, old fox," one cried. "Then it was only the printer hung. But we'll drink your health before you swing. Up, Keyes, and fetch the stuff. It may be bad, but we'll drink to the squeezing of the rotten orange once more; if it be the last toast I drink!"

CHAPTER XXVII

The terror that had gripped me on their first entrance, and driving all the blood in my body to my heart had there set it bounding madly--this terror I should vainly try to describe to persons who have never been in such a situation or within a few feet of death, as I then found myself. That, reckless and driven to the wall, the conspirators would sacrifice me to their vengeance if they discovered me I felt certain; and at any moment they might come up and discover me. Yet behind me were the confining walls of the rooms whence I knew of no exit, and before me, where alone evasion seemed to be possible, the open door of the room below, and the flood of light that issued from the doorway, forbade the attempt. I lay sweating and listening therefore, while they snarled and cursed in the black mood of men betrayed and hopeless; and yet because of the chance that after all they might go out as they had come, I could so far keep my terror within bounds.

Not so, when I heard Ferguson bid the man mount and fetch the keg. Had he come without a light I might still have controlled myself and kept quiet; and holding my breath though I were suffocated, and silencing my heart though I died, might have lain and let him pa.s.s in the darkness. Nay, had I crouched low, he need not have observed me with a light; for I was a little beside the stairhead, and to enter the room whence I had broken out he need not face me. But when I heard him stumbling upwards, a sudden sense of the loneliness of the house in that far corner of town came on me; and with it, an overwhelming perception of my helplessness and of the life and death struggle to which the men below were committed--so that death seemed to be in the air; which together so far overcame me that I did the last thing I should have expected. As the man came up the stairs, the light in his hand, I rose up and stood, gasping at him.

He paused and held up the light. "The devil!" he said, staring. And then, "Who the ---- are you? Here, Ferguson! Here's your man!"

The only answer from below was a roar for liquor.

"What are you doing here?" he went on, puzzled as much by my silence as my presence.

"I am--going," I stammered; a desperate hope rising in my breast at sight of the man's perplexity. He might let me pa.s.s.

For aught I know he would have done so; and it is possible that I might have gone unseen by the open door below and gained the street.

But as he stood staring, a second man came into the pa.s.sage, and looked up and saw me. "Hallo!" he said. "Who is that?"

"Ferguson's man," Keyes answered. "But, boil me, if I know what is the matter with him!"

The other called Ferguson and he came out, and saw me; looked, and with a scream of rage, sprang up the stairs. In the fury of his wrath--he threw himself on me so suddenly and with so much violence and intention that I was a child in his hands; and but for the other's exertions, who not understanding the matter tore him from me, I must have been choked out of hand. As it was I was black in the face, dizzy, and scarcely conscious when they freed me from him: nor in much better case for the respite. For with all they could do he would not release my shoulder, but dragging me down, cried breathlessly and continuously to the others to listen--to listen! That he had the traitor! that I was the informer! the spy, the blood-seller! And with that, and as he partly forced and partly tugged me down the men thickened round me, until dragged into the lighted room I found myself hemmed in by a circle of lowering faces and gloomy eyes, a circle that, look where I might, presented no breach or chance of escape, no face that pitied or understood. He who seemed to be in highest authority among them--afterwards I knew him for Charnock, the unfrocked Fellow of Magdalen, who suffered with King and Keyes--did indeed make Ferguson let me go; thrusting him back and calling on him to tell his tale, and have done with his blasphemy. But though I turned that way in momentary hope of aid, I read no encouragement in a face as stern and relentless as it was fanatical. A lamp hooked high on one wall, and so that it threw its light downwards, obscured half the circle, and flung a bright glare on the other half; but in light or shade, seen or unseen, and whether drink flushed it, or pa.s.sion blanched it, every face that met my shrinking gaze seemed to be instinct with coming doom.

In such situations fear, which spurs some minds, paralyses others.

Vainly I tried to think, to frame a defence, to deny or avoid. The glare of the lamp dazzled and confused me. To Ferguson's pa.s.sionate iterations, "The Lord has delivered him into our hands! I tell you, the Lord has delivered him into our hands! There is your informer! I swear it! I can prove it!" I could find no answer except a feeble, "I am not! I am not!" which I continued to repeat--while one plucked me this way that he might see me better, and another that way--until Keyes struck me on the mouth, and thrusting me back bade me be silent.

"And you, too, Mr. Ferguson," Charnock said, raising his hand to still the tumult, "have done with your blasphemy. And talk plainly. Say what you know, and have no fear; if what you allege be proved, we will do justice on him."

"Ay, by----!" cried Ca.s.sel, the swearer. "A life for a life."

"But, first, what do you know?" Charnock continued brusquely. "Speak to the point. We must be gone by midnight if we are to save ourselves."

Then, and then only, I think, Ferguson, hitherto blinded by rage, became sensible of the fact that he stood himself in a dubious position; and that to tell all, and particularly to reveal the visit which the Secretary had paid to him at his lodgings, would, even with the addition of the attempt he had made on the Duke's life, place his conduct in a light far from favourable. Not only were the men before him in no mood to draw fine distinctions, or take all for granted, but it was on the credit of his name and as his tool that I had come to be mixed up in the matter and gained my knowledge of it. It took no great acuteness, therefore, to foresee that their suspicions, once roused, they would punish first and prove afterwards, and be as ready to turn on the master as the man.

These, when I came to review the scene afterwards, coolly and in safety, were, I had no doubt, the reflections that gave Ferguson pause at the last moment, and occasioned a kind of fit into which he fell at that--his eyes glaring, his jaws moving dumbly, and his hands springing out in uncouth gestures, like those of a man half-paralysed--a fit which at the time was set down to pure rage and a temper of mind always bordering on the insane. I suppose that in that moment, and under cover of that display, his crafty brain, apt in such crises, did its work, for when he found his voice he had his tale pat; and where truth and a lie most ingeniously and sometimes inexplicably mixed would scarcely serve his turn or win him credence, he imposed on them, even on Charnock, by pure scorn and an air of superior knowledge.

"What I know?" said he. "You shall have it. It is enough to blast him ten times. To-day it happened that the Secretary came to me to my lodgings."

For a moment the roar of surprise which followed this statement, silenced him. But in a moment he recovered himself.

"Ay!" he said, looking round him, defiantly. "The Secretary. What of it? Do you think that you know everything, or that everything is told to you? To-day, I say, the Duke of Shrewsbury came to my lodgings."

"Why?" cried Charnock, between his teeth. "Why?"

"Why?" Ferguson answered. "Well, if you will have it, to send a message through me to the other Duke, as he has done three times before since his Grace has been in England."

"To the Duke of Berwick?"

"What other Duke is there?" the plotter asked, scornfully.