It was Thursday when they were condemned, and the sentence was to be
carried into effect on the Thursday following. Saturday, Sunday, and
Monday passed by without any event of consequence. On Tuesday the
under gaoler opened the door of their prison, and the sheriff entered.
Ralph stepped out face to face with him. Sim crept closer into the
shadow.
“The King's warrant has arrived,” he said abruptly.
“And is this all you come to tell us?” said Ralph, no less curtly.
“Ray, there is no love between you and me, and we need dissemble
none.”
“And no hate--at least on my part,” Ralph added.
“I had good earnest of your affections,” answered the sheriff with a
sneer; “five years' imprisonment.” Then waving his hand with a gesture
indicative of impatience, he continued, “Let that be as it may. I come
to talk of other matters.”
Resting on a bench, he added,--
“When the trial closed on Thursday, Justice Hide, who showed you more
favor than seemed to some persons of credit to be meet and seemly,
beckoned me to the antechamber. There he explained that the evidence
against you being mainly circumstantial, the sentence might perchance,
by the leniency of the King, be commuted to one of imprisonment for
life.”
A cold smile passed over Ralph's face.
“But this great mercy--whereof I would counsel you to cherish no
certain hope--would depend upon your being able and willing to render
an account of how you came by the document--the warrant for your own
arrest--which was found upon your person. Furnish a credible story of
how you came to be possessed, of that instrument, and it may occur--I
say it _may_ occur--that by our Sovereign's grace and favor this
sentence of death can yet be put aside.”
Sim had risen to his feet in obvious excitement.
Ralph calmly shook his head.
“I neither will nor can,” he said emphatically.
Sim sank back into his seat.
A look of surprise in the sheriff's face quickly gave way to a look of
content and satisfaction.
“We know each other of old, and I say there is no love between us,” he
observed, “but it is by no doing of mine that you are here.
Nevertheless, your response to this merciful tender shows but too
plainly how well you merit your position.”
“It took you five days to bring it--this merciful tender, as you term
it,” said Ralph.
“The King is now at Newcastle, and there at this moment is also
Justice Hide, in whom, had you been an innocent man, you must have
found an earnest sponsor. I bid you good day.”
The sheriff rose, and, bowing to the prisoner with a ridiculous
affectation of mingled deference and superiority, he stepped to the
door.
“Stop,” said Ralph: “you say we know each other of old. That is false!
To this hour you have never known, nor do you know now, why I stand
here condemned to die, and doomed by a harder fate to take the life of
this innocent old man. You have never known me: no, nor yourself
neither--never! But you shall know both before you leave this room.
Sit down.”
“I have no time to waste in idle disputation,” said the sheriff
testily; but he sat down, nevertheless, at his prisoner's bidding, as
meekly as if the positions had been reversed.
“That scar across your brow.” said Ralph, “you have carried since the
day I have now to speak of.”
“You know it well,” said the sheriff bitterly. “You have cause to know
it.”
“I have,” Ralph answered.
After a pause, in which he was catching the thread of a story half
forgotten, he continued: “You said I supplanted you in your captaincy.
Pehaps so; perhaps not. God will judge between us. You went over to
the Royalist camp, and you were among the garrison that had reduced
this very castle. The troops of the Parliament came up one day and
summoned you to surrender. The only answer your general gave us was to
order the tunnel guns to fire on the white flag. It went down. We lay
entrenched about you for six days. Then you sent out a dispatch
assuring us that your garrison was well prepared for a siege, and that
nothing would prevail with you to open your gates. That was a lie!”
“Well?”
“Your general lied; the man who carried your general's dispatch was a
liar too, but he told the truth for a bribe.”
“Ah! then the saints were not above warming the palm?”
“He assured our commander we might expect a mutiny in your city if we
continued before it one day longer; that your castle was garrisoned
only by a handful of horse, and two raw, undisciplined regiments of
militia; that even from these desertions occurred hourly, and that
some of your companies were left with only a score of men. This was at
night, and we were under an order to break up next morning. That order
was countermanded. Your messenger was sent back the richer by twenty
pounds.”
“How does this concern me?” asked the sheriff.
“You shall hear. I had been on the outposts that night, and, returning
to the camp, I surprised two men robbing, beating, and, as I thought,
murdering a third. One of the vagabonds escaped undetected, but with a
blow from the butt of my musket which he will carry to his grave. The
other I thrashed on the spot. He was the bailiff Scroope, whom you put
up to witness against me. Their victim was the messenger from the
castle, and he was James Wilson, otherwise Wilson Garth. You know
this? No? Then listen. Rumor of his treachery, and of the price he had
been paid for it, had already been bruited abroad, and the two
scoundrels had gone out to waylay and rob him. He was lamed in the
struggle and faint from loss of blood. I took him back and bound up
his wound. He limped to the end of his life.”
“Still I fail to see how this touches myself,” interrupted the
sheriff.
“Really? I shall show you. Next morning, under cover of a thick fog,
we besieged the city. We got beneath your guns and against your gates
before we were seen. Then a company of horse came out to us. _You_
were there. You remember it? Yes? At one moment we came within four
yards. I saw you struck down and reel out of the saddle. 'This man,' I
thought, 'believes in his heart that I did him a grievous wrong. I
shall now do him a signal service, though he never hear of it until
the Judgment Day.' I dismounted, lifted you up, bound a kerchief about
your head, and was about to replace you on your horse. At that instant
a musket-shot struck the poor beast, and it fell dead. At the same
instant one of our own men fell, and his riderless horse was prancing
away. I caught it, threw you on to its back, turned his head towards
the castle, and drove it hard among your troops. Do you know what
happened next?”
“Happened next--” repeated the sheriff mechanically, with astonishment
written on every feature of his face.
“No, you were insensible,” continued Ralph. “At that luckless moment
the drum beat to arms in a regiment of foot behind us. The horse knew
the call and answered it. Wheeling about, it carried you into the
heart of our own camp. There you were known, tried as a deserter, and
imprisoned. Perhaps it was natural that you should set down your ill
fortune to me.”
The sheriff's eyes were riveted on Ralph's face, and for a time he
seemed incapable of speech.
“Is this truth?” he asked at length.
“God's truth,” Ralph answered.
“The kerchief--what color was it?”
“Yellow.”
“Any name or mark on it? I have it to this day.”
“None--wait; there was a rose pricked out in worsted on one corner.”
The sheriff got up, with lips compressed and wide eyes. He made for
the door, and pulled at it with wasted violence. It was opened from
the other side by the under gaoler, and the sheriff rushed out.
Without turning to the right or left, he went direct to the common
gaol. There, in the cell which Ralph had occupied between the first
trial and the second one, Mark Garth, the perjurer, lay imprisoned.
“You hell-hound,” cried the sheriff, grasping him by the hair and
dragging him into the middle of the floor. “I have found out your
devilish treachery,” he said, speaking between gusts of breath. “Did
you not tell me that it was Ray who struck me this blow--this”
(beating with his palm the scar on his brow)? “It was a lie--a damned
lie!”
“It was,” said the man, glaring back, with eyes afire with fury.
“And did you not say it was Ray who carried me into their camp--an
insensible prisoner?”
“That was a lie also,” the man gasped, never struggling to release
himself from the grip that held him on the floor.
“And did you not set me on to compass the death of this man, but for
whom I should now myself be dead?”
“You speak with marvellous accuracy, Master Lawson,” returned the
perjurer.
The sheriff looked down at him for a moment, and then flung him away.
“Man, man! do you know what you have done?” he cried in an altered
tone. “You have charged my soul with your loathsome crime.”
The perjurer curled his lip.
“It was _I_ who gave you that blow,” he said, with a cruel smile,
pointing with his thin finger at the sheriff's forehead. It was false.
“You devil!” cried the sheriff, “and you have killed the man who saved
your brother's life, and consorted with one of two who would have been
his murderers.”
“I was myself the second,” said the man, with fiendish calmness. It
was the truth. “I carry the proof of it here,” he added, touching a
place at the back of his head where the hair, being shorn away,
disclosed a deep mark.
The sheriff staggered back with frenzied eyes and dilated nostrils.
His breast heaved; he seemed unable to catch his breath.
The man looked at him with a mocking smile struggling over clinched
teeth. As if a reptile had crossed his path, Wilfrey Lawson turned
about and passed out without another word.
He returned to the castle and ascended the Donjon tower.
“Tell me how you became possessed of the warrant,” he said. “Tell me,
I beg of you, for my soul's sake as well as for your life's sake.”
Ralph shook his head.
“It is not even yet too late. I shall take horse instantly for
Newcastle.”
Sim had crept up, and, standing behind Ralph, was plucking at his
jerkin.
Ralph turned about and looked wistfully into the old man's face. For
an instant his purpose wavered.
“For the love of God,” cried the sheriff, “for your own life's sake,
for this poor man's sake, by all that is near and dear to both, I
charge you, if you are an innocent man, give me the means to prove you
such.”
But again Ralph shook his head.
“Then you are resolved to die?”
“Yes! But for my old friend here--save him if you will and can.”
“You will give me no word as to the warrant?”
“None.”
“Then all is over.”
But going at once to the stables in the courtyard, he called to a
stableman,--
“Saddle a horse and bring it round to my quarters in half an hour.”
In less time than that Wilfrey Lawson was riding hard towards
Newcastle.