“Why, that is very well,” said the colonel, his smile more sinister than ever. “Trouble not yourself about that.”
And Barter, the unreasoning instrument of Fate, was not to know that the apprehending of a couple of traitorous Jack Presbyters was of small account to Colonel Penruddock by comparison with the satisfaction of the blood-feud between himself and the House of Lisle.
Meanwhile the fugitives were being entertained at Moyle’s Court, and whilst they sat at supper in a room above-stairs, Dunne being still of the party, my lady came in person to see that they had all that they required, and stayed a little while in talk with them. There was some mention of Monmouth and the battle of Sedgemoor, which was natural, that being the topic of the hour.
My lady asked no questions at the time regarding Hicks’s long, lean companion. But it occurred to her later that perhaps she should know more about him. Early next morning, therefore, she sent for Hicks as he was in the act of sitting down to breakfast, and by her direct questions elicited from him that this companion was that Richard Nelthorp outlawed for his share in the Rye House Plot. Not only was the information alarming, but it gave her a sense that she had not been dealt with fairly, as indeed she told him.
“You will see, sir,” she concluded, “that you cannot bide here. So long as I thought it was on the score of Nonconformity alone that you were suffering persecution, I was willing to take some risk in hiding you. But since your friend is what he is, the risk is greater than I should be asked to face, for my own sake and for that of my daughters. Nor can I say that I have ever held plottings and civil war in anything but abhorrence — as much in the old days as now. I am a loyal woman, and as a loyal woman I must bid you take your friend hence as soon as your fast is broken.”
The corpulent and swarthy Hicks stood dejectedly before her. He might have pleaded, but at that moment there came a loud knocking at the gates below, and instantly Carpenter flung into the room with a white, scared face and whirling gestures.
“Soldiers, my lady!” he panted in affright. “We have been betrayed. The presence of Mr. Hicks here is known. What shall we do? What shall we do?”
She stood quite still, her countenance entirely unchanged, unless it were to smile a little upon Carpenter’s terror. The mercy of her nature rose dominant now.
“Why, we must hide these poor fellows as best we can,” said she; and Hicks flung down upon one knee to kiss her hand with protestations that he would sooner be hanged than bring trouble upon her house.
But she insisted, calm and self-contained; and Carpenter carried Hicks away to bestow him, together with Dunne, in a hole in the malt-house under a heap of sacking. Nelthorp had already vanished completely on his own initiative.
Meanwhile, the insistent knocking at the gate continued. Came shouted demands to open in the name of the King, until from a window my lady’s daughters looked out to challenge those who knocked.
Colonel Penruddock, who had come in person with the soldiers to raid the house of his hereditary foe, stood forth to answer, very stiff and brave in his scarlet coat and black plumed hat.
“You have rebels in the house,” he announced, “and I require you in the King’s name to deliver them up to me.”
And then, before they could answer him, came Carpenter to unbar the door, and admit them to the court. Penruddock, standing squarely before the steward, admonished him very sternly.
“Friend,” said he, “you had best be ingenuous with me and discover who are in your lady’s house, for it is within my knowledge that some strangers came hither last night.”
The stricken Carpenter stood white-faced and trembling.
“Sir — sir—” he faltered.
But the colonel was impatient.
“Come, come, my friend. Since I know they are here, there’s an end on’t. Show me where they are hid if you would save your own neck from the halter.”
It was enough for Carpenter. The pair in the malthouse might have eluded all search but for the steward’s pusillanimity. Incontinently, he betrayed the hiding-place.
“But, sir, of your charity do not tell my mistress that I have told you. Pray, sir—”
Penruddock brushed him aside as if he had been a pestering fly, and with his men went in, and straight to the spot where Hicks and Dunne were lurking. When he had taken them, he swung round on Carpenter, who had followed.
“These be but two,” he said, “and to my knowledge three rogues came hither last night. No shufling with me, rascal. Where have you bestowed the other?”
“I swear, as Heaven’s my witness, I do not know where he is,” protested the afflicted steward, truly enough.
Penruddock turned to his men.
“Make search,” he bade them; and search was made in the ruthless manner of such searches.
The brutal soldiers passed from room to room beating the wainscoting with pike and musket-butts, splintering and smashing heedlessly. Presses were burst open and their contents scattered; chests were broken into and emptied, the searchers appropriating such objects as took their fancy, with true military cynicism. A mirror was shattered, and some boards of the floor were torn up because a sergeant conceived that the blows of his halbert rang hollow.
When the tumult was at its height, came her ladyship at last into the room, where Colonel Penruddock stood watching the operations of his men. She stood in the doorway leaning upon her ebony cane, her faded eyes considering the gaunt soldier with reproachful question.
“Sir,” she asked him with gentle irony, masking her agitation, “has my house been given over to pillage?”
He bowed, doffing his plumed hat with an almost excessive courtesy.
“To search, madame,” he corrected her. And added: “In the King’s name.”
“The King,” she answered, “may give you authority to search my house, but not to plunder it. Your men are robbing and destroying.”
He shrugged. It was the way of soldiers. Fine manners, he suggested, were not to be expected of their kind. And he harangued her upon the wrong she had done in harbouring rebels and giving entertainment to the King’s enemies.
“That is not true,” said she. “I know of no King’s enemies.”
He smiled darkly upon her from his great height. She was so frail a body and so old that surely it was not worth a man’s while to sacrifice her on the altar of revenge. But not so thought Colonel Penruddock. Therefore he smiled.
“Two of them, a snivelling Jack Presbyter named Hicks and a rascal named Dunne, are taken already. Pray, madame, be so free and ingenuous with me aye, and so kind to yourself — as if there be any other person concealed in your house — and I am sure there is somebody else — to deliver him up, and you shall come to no further trouble.”
She looked up at him, and returned him smile for smile.
“I know nothing,” she said, “of what you tell me, or of what you ask.”
His countenance hardened.
“Then, mistress, the search must go on.”
But a shout from the adjoining room announced that it was at an end. Nelthorp had been discovered and dragged from the chimney into which he had crept.
Almost exactly a month later — on August 27th the Lady Alice Lisle was brought to the bar of the court-house at Winchester upon a charge of high treason.
The indictment ran that secretly, wickedly, and traitorously she did entertain, conceal, comfort, uphold, and maintain John Hicks, knowing him to be a false traitor, against the duty of her allegiance and against the peace of “our sovereign lord the King that now is.”
Demurely dressed in grey, the little white-haired lady calmly faced the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and the four judges of oyer and terminer who sat with him, and confidently made her plea of “Not Guilty.”
It was inconceivable that Christian men should deal harshly with her for a technical offence amounting to an act of Christian charity. And the judge, sitting there in his robe of scarlet reversed with ermine, looked a gentle, kindly man; his
handsome, oval, youthful face — Jeffreys was in his thirty-sixth year — set in the heavy black periwig, was so pale that the mouth made a vivid line of scarlet; and the eyes that now surveyed her were large and liquid and compassionate, as it seemed to her.
She was not to know that the pallor which gave him so interesting an air, and the dark stains which lent his eyes that gentle wistfulness, were the advertisements at once of the debauch that had kept him from his bed until after two o’clock that morning and of the inexorable disease that slowly gnawed away his life and enraged him out of all humanity.
And the confidence his gentle countenance inspired was confirmed by the first words he had occasion to address to her. She had interrupted counsel to the Crown when, in his opening address to the jury — composed of some of the most considerable gentlemen of Hampshire — he seemed to imply that she had been in sympathy with Monmouth’s cause. She was, of course, without counsel, and must look herself to her defence.
“My lord,” she cried, “I abhorred that rebellion as much as any woman in the world!”
Jeffreys leaned forward with a restraining gesture.
“Look you, Mrs. Lisle,” he admonished her sweetly, “because we must observe the common and usual methods of trial in your case I must interrupt you now.” And upon that he promised that she should be fully heard in her own defence at the proper time, and that himself he would instruct her in the forms of law to her advantage. He reassured her by reverent allusions to the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, in whose sight they stood, that she should have justice. “And as to what you say concerning yourself,” he concluded, “I pray God with all my heart you may be innocent.”
He was benign and reassuring. But she had the first taste of his true quality in the examination of Dunne — a most unwilling witness.
Reluctantly, under the pressure put upon him, did Dunne yield up the tale of how he had conducted the two absconders to my lady’s house with her consent, and it was sought to prove that she was aware of their connection with the rebellion. The stubbornly evasive Dunne was asked at last:
“Do you believe that she knew Mr. Hicks before?”
He returned the answer that already he had returned to many questions of the sort.
“I cannot tell truly.”
Jeffreys stirred in his scarlet robes, and his wistful eyes grew terrible as they bent from under beetling brows upon the witness.
“Why,” he asked, “dost thou think that she would entertain any one she had no knowledge of merely upon thy message? Mr. Dunne, Mr. Dunne! Have a care. It may be more is known to me of this matter than you think for.”
“My lord, I speak nothing but the truth!” bleated the terrified Dunne.
“I only bid you have a care,” Jeffreys smiled; and his smile was more terrible than his frown. “Truth never wants a subterfuge; it always loves to appear naked; it needs no enamel nor any covering. But lying and snivelling and canting and Hicksing always appear in masquerade. Come, go on with your evidence.”
But Dunne was reluctant to go on, and out of his reluctance he lied foolishly, and pretended that both Hicks and Nelthorp were unknown to him. When pressed to say why he should have served two men whom he had never seen before, he answered:
“All the reason that induced me to it was that they said they were men in debt, and desired to be concealed for a while.”
Then the thunder was heard in Jeffreys’ voice.
“Dost thou believe that any one here believes thee? Prithee, what trade art thou?”
“My lord,” stammered the unfortunate, “I — I am a baker by trade.”
“And wilt thou bake thy bread at such easy rates? Upon my word, then, thou art very kind. Prithee, tell me. I believe thou dost use to bake on Sundays, dost thou not?”
“No, my lord, I do not!” cried Dunne indignantly.
“Alackaday! Art precise in that,” sneered the judge. “But thou canst travel on Sundays to lead rogues into lurking-holes.”
Later, when to implicate the prisoner, it was sought to draw from Dunne a full account of the reception she had given his companions, his terror under the bullying to which he was subjected made him contradict himself more flagrantly than ever. Jeffreys addressed the jury.
“You see, gentlemen, what a precious fellow this is; a very pretty tool to be employed upon such an errand; a knave that nobody would trust for half a crown. A Turk has more title to an eternity of bliss than these pretenders to Christianity.”
And as there was no more to be got from Dunne just then, he was presently dismissed, and Barter’s damning evidence was taken. Thereafter the wretched Dunne was recalled, to be bullied by Jeffreys in blasphemous terms that may not be printed here.
Barter had told the Court how my lady had come into the kitchen with Dunne, and how, when he had afterwards questioned Dunne as to why they had whispered and laughed together, Dunne told him she had asked “If he knew aught of the business.” Jeffreys sought now to wring from Dunne what was this business to which he had so mysteriously alluded — this with the object of establishing Lady Lisle’s knowledge of Hicks’s treason.
Dunne resisted more stubbornly than ever. Jeffreys, exasperated — since without the admission it would be difficult to convict her ladyship — invited the jury to take notice of the strange, horrible carriage of the fellow, and heaped abuse upon the snivelling, canting sect of which he was a member. Finally, he reminded Dunne of his oath to tell the truth, and addressed him with a sort of loving ferocity.
“What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” bellowed that terrible judge, his eyes aflame. “Is not this the voice of Scripture itself? And wilt thou hazard so dear and precious a thing as thy soul for a lie? Thou wretch! All the mountains and hills of the world heaped upon one another will not cover thee from the vengeance of the Great God for this transgression of false-witness bearing.”
“I cannot tell what to say, my lord,” gasped Dunne.
In his rage to see all efforts vain, the judge’s language became that of the cockpit. Recovering at last, he tried gentleness again, and very elaborately invited Dunne, in my lady’s own interest, to tell him what was the business to which he had referred to Barter.
“She asked me whether I did not know that Hicks was a Nonconformist.”
“That cannot be all. There must be something more in it.”
“Yes, my lord,” Dunne protested, “it is all. I know nothing more.”
“Was there ever such an impudent rascal?” roared the judge. “Dolt think that, after all the pains I have been at to get an answer, thou canst banter me with such sham stuff as this? Hold the candle to his brazen face, that we may see it clearly.”
Dunne stood terrified and trembling under the glance of those terrible eyes.
“My lord,” he cried, “I am so baulked, I am cluttered out of my senses.”
Again he was put down whilst Colonel Penruddock gave his evidence of the apprehension of the rebels. When he had told how he found Hicks and Dunne concealed under some stuff in the malt-house, Dunne was brought back yet again, that Jeffreys might resume his cross-examination.
“Dunne, how came you to hide yourself in the malthouse?”
“My lord,” said Dunne foolishly, “I was frighted by the noise.”
“Prithee, what needest thou be afraid of, for thou didst not know Hicks nor Nelthorp; and my lady only asked thee whether Hicks were a Nonconformist parson. Surely, so very innocent a soul needed no occasion to be afraid. I doubt there was something in the case of that business we were talking of before. If we could but get out of thee what it was.”
But Dunne continued to evade.
“My lord, I heard a great noise in the house, and did not know what it meant. So I went and hid myself.”
“It is very strange thou shouldst hide thyself for a little noise, when thou knewest nothing of the business.”
Again the witness, with a candle still held close to his nose, complained that he was quit
e cluttered out of his senses, and did not know what he was saying.
“But to tell the truth would not rob thee of any of thy senses, if ever thou hadst any,” Jeffreys told him angrily. “But it would seem that neither thou nor thy mistress, the prisoner, had any; for she knew nothing of it either, though she had sent for them thither.”
“My lord,” cried her ladyship at that, “I hope I shall not be condemned without being heard.”
“No, God forbid, Mrs. Lisle,” he answered; and then viciously flashed forth a hint of the true forces of Nemesis at work against her. “That was a sort of practice in your late husband’s time — you know very well what I mean — but God be thanked it is not so now.”
Came next the reluctant evidence of Carpenter and his wife, and after that there was yet a fourth equally futile attempt to drag from Dunne an admission that her ladyship was acquainted with Hicks’s share in the rebellion. But if stupid, Dunne at least was staunch, and so, with a wealth of valedictory invective, Jeffreys dismissed him, and addressed at last the prisoner, inviting her to speak in her own defence.
She rose to do so, fearlessly yet gently.
“My lord, what I have to say is this. I knew of nobody’s coming to my house but Mr. Hicks, and for him I was informed that he did abscond by reason of warrants that were out against him for preaching in private meetings; for that reason I sent to him to come by night. But I had never heard that Nelthorp was to come with him, nor what name Nelthorp had till after he had come to my house. I could die upon it. As for Mr. Hicks, I did not in the least suspect that he had been in the army, being a Presbyterian minister that used to preach and not to fight.”
“But I will tell you,” Jeffreys interrupted her, “that there is not one of those lying, snivelling, canting Presbyterian rascals but one way or the other had a hand in the late horrid conspiracy and rebellion.”
“My lord, I abhorred both the principles and the practices of the late rebellion,” she protested; adding that if she had been tried in London, my Lady Abergavenny and many other persons of quality could have testified with what detestation she had spoken of the rebellion, and that she had been in London until Monmouth had been beheaded.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 669