“Who the hell may you be?” he exploded.
“My name is Blood, sir—Peter Blood, at your service.”
“Aye—aye! Codso! That’s the name. You were in French service once, were you not?”
If Mr. Blood was surprised, he did not betray it.
“I was.”
“Then I remember you—five years ago, or more, you were in Tangiers.”
“That is so. I knew your colonel.”
“Faith, you may be renewing the acquaintance.” The Captain laughed unpleasantly. “What brings you here, sir?”
“This wounded gentleman. I was fetched to attend him. I am a medicus.”
“A doctor—you?” Scorn of that lie—as he conceived it—rang in the heavy, hectoring voice.
“Medicinæ baccalaureus,” said Mr. Blood.
“Don’t fling your French at me, man,” snapped Hobart. “Speak English!”
Mr. Blood’s smile annoyed him.
“I am a physician practicing my calling in the town of Bridgewater.”
The Captain sneered. “Which you reached by way of Lyme Regis in the following of your bastard Duke.”
It was Mr. Blood’s turn to sneer. “If your wit were as big as your voice, my dear, it’s the great man you’d be by this.”
For a moment the dragoon was speechless. The color deepened in his face.
“You may find me great enough to hang you.”
“Faith, yes. Ye’ve the look and the manners of a hangman. But if you practice your trade on my patient here, you may be putting a rope round your own neck. He’s not the kind you may string up and no questions asked. He has the right to trial, and the right to trial by his peers.”
“By his peers?”
The Captain was taken aback by these three words, which Mr. Blood had stressed.
“Sure, now, any but a fool or a savage would have asked his name before ordering him to the gallows. The gentleman is my Lord Gildoy.”
And then his lordship spoke for himself, in a weak voice.
“I make no concealment of my association with the Duke of Monmouth. I’ll take the consequences. But, if you please, I’ll take them after trial—by my peers, as the doctor has said.”
The feeble voice ceased, and was followed by a moment’s silence. As is common in many blustering men, there was a deal of timidity deep down in Hobart. The announcement of his lordship’s rank had touched those depths. A servile upstart, he stood in awe of titles. And he stood in awe of his colonel. Percy Kirke was not lenient with blunderers.
By a gesture he checked his men. He must consider. Mr. Blood, observing his pause, added further matter for his consideration.
“Ye’ll be remembering, Captain, that Lord Gildoy will have friends and relatives on the Tory side, who’ll have something to say to Colonel Kirke if his lordship should be handled like a common felon. You’ll go warily, Captain, or, as I’ve said, it’s a halter for your neck ye’ll be weaving this morning.”
Captain Hobart swept the warning aside with a bluster of contempt, but he acted upon it none the less. “Take up the day-bed,” said he, “and convey him on that to Bridgewater. Lodge him in the jail until I take order about him.”
“He may not survive the journey,” Blood remonstrated. “He’s in no case to be moved.”
“So much the worse for him. My affair is to round up rebels.” He confirmed his order by a gesture. Two of his men took up the day-bed, and swung to depart with it.
Gildoy made a feeble effort to put forth a hand towards Mr. Blood. “Sir,” he said, “you leave me in your debt. If I live I shall study how to discharge it.”
Mr. Blood bowed for answer; then to the men: “Bear him steadily,” he commanded. “His life depends on it.”
As his lordship was carried out, the Captain became brisk. He turned upon the yeoman.
“What other cursed rebels do you harbor?”
“None other, sir. His lordship . . .”
“We’ve dealt with his lordship for the present. We’ll deal with you in a moment when we’ve searched your house. And, by God, if you’ve lied to me . . .” He broke off, snarling, to give an order. Four of his dragoons went out. In a moment they were heard moving noisily in the adjacent room. Meanwhile, the Captain was questing about the hall, sounding the wainscoting with the butt of a pistol.
Mr. Blood saw no profit to himself in lingering.
“By your leave, it’s a very good day I’ll be wishing you,” said he.
“By my leave, you’ll remain awhile,” the Captain ordered him.
Mr. Blood shrugged, and sat down. “You’re tiresome,” he said. “I wonder your colonel hasn’t discovered it yet.”
But the Captain did not heed him. He was stooping to pick up a soiled and dusty hat in which there was pinned a little bunch of oak leaves. It had been lying near the clothes-press in which the unfortunate Pitt had taken refuge. The Captain smiled malevolently. His eyes raked the room, resting first sardonically on the yeoman, then on the two women in the background, and finally on Mr. Blood, who sat with one leg thrown over the other in an attitude of indifference that was far from reflecting his mind.
Then the Captain stepped to the press, and pulled open one of the wings of its massive oaken door. He took the huddled inmate by the collar of his doublet, and lugged him out into the open.
“And who the devil’s this?” quoth he. “Another nobleman?”
Mr. Blood had a vision of those gallows of which Captain Hobart had spoken, and of this unfortunate young shipmaster going to adorn one of them, strung up without trial, in the place of the other victim of whom the Captain had been cheated. On the spot he invented not only a title but a whole family for the young rebel.
“Faith, ye’ve said it, Captain. This is Viscount Pitt, first cousin to Sir Thomas Vernon, who’s married to that slut Moll Kirke, sister to your own colonel, and sometime lady in waiting upon King James’s queen.”
Both the Captain and his prisoner gasped. But whereas thereafter young Pitt discreetly held his peace, the Captain rapped out a nasty oath. He considered his prisoner again.
“He’s lying, is he not?” he demanded, seizing the lad by the shoulder, and glaring into his face. “He’s rallying me, by God!”
“If ye believe that,” said Blood, “hang him, and see what happens to you.”
The dragoon glared at the doctor and then at his prisoner. “Pah!” He thrust the lad into the hands of his men. “Fetch him along to Bridgewater. And make fast that fellow also,” he pointed to Baynes. “We’ll show him what it means to harbor and comfort rebels.”
There was a moment of confusion. Baynes struggled in the grip of the troopers, protesting vehemently. The terrified women screamed until silenced by a greater terror. The Captain strode across to them. He took the girl by the shoulders. She was a pretty, golden-headed creature, with soft blue eyes that looked up entreatingly, piteously into the face of the dragoon. He leered upon her, his eyes aglow, took her chin in his hand, and set her shuddering by his brutal kiss.
“It’s an earnest,” he said, smiling grimly. “Let that quiet you, little rebel, till I’ve done with these rogues.”
And he swung away again, leaving her faint and trembling in the arms of her anguished mother. His men stood, grinning, awaiting orders, the two prisoners now fast pinioned.
“Take them away. Let Cornet Drake have charge of them.” His smoldering eye again sought the cowering girl. “I’ll stay awhile—to search out this place. There may be other rebels hidden here.” As an afterthought, he added: “And take this fellow with you.” He pointed to Mr. Blood. “Bestir!”
Mr. Blood started out of his musings. He had been considering that in his case of instruments there was a lancet with which he might perform on Captain Hobart a beneficial operation. Beneficial, that is, to humanity. In any case, the dragoon was obviously plethoric and would be the better for a blood-letting. The difficulty lay in making the opportunity. He was beginning to wonder if he could lure the Cap
tain aside with some tale of hidden treasure, when this untimely interruption set a term to that interesting speculation.
He sought to temporize.
“Faith it will suit me very well,” said he. “For Bridgewater is my destination, and but that ye detained me I’d have been on my way thither now.”
“Your destination there will be the jail.”
“Ah, bah! Ye’re surely joking!”
“There’s a gallows for you if you prefer it. It’s merely a question of now or later.”
Rude hands seized Mr. Blood, and that precious lancet was in the case on the table out of reach. He twisted out of the grip of the dragoons, for he was strong and agile, but they closed with him again immediately, and bore him down. Pinning him to the ground, they tied his wrists behind his back, then roughly pulled him to his feet again.
“Take him away,” said Hobart shortly, and turned to issue his orders to the other waiting troopers. “Go search the house, from attic to cellar; then report to me here.”
The soldiers trailed out by the door leading to the interior. Mr. Blood was thrust by his guards into the courtyard, where Pitt and Baynes already waited. From the threshold of the hall, he looked back at Captain Hobart, and his sapphire eyes were blazing. On his lips trembled a threat of what he would do to Hobart if he should happen to survive this business. Betimes he remembered that to utter it were probably to extinguish his chance of living to execute it. For to-day the King’s men were masters in the West, and the West was regarded as enemy country, to be subjected to the worst horror of war by the victorious side. Here a captain of horse was for the moment lord of life and death.
Under the appletrees in the orchard Mr. Blood and his companions in misfortune were made fast each to a trooper’s stirrup leather. Then at the sharp order of the cornet, the little troop started for Bridgewater. As they set out there was the fullest confirmation of Mr. Blood’s hideous assumption that to the dragoons this was a conquered enemy country. There were sounds of rending timbers, of furniture smashed and overthrown, the shouts and laughter of brutal men, to announce that this hunt for rebels was no more than a pretext for pillage and destruction. Finally above all other sounds came the piercing screams of a woman in acutest agony.
Baynes checked in his stride, and swung round writhing, his face ashen. As a consequence he was jerked from his feet by the rope that attached him to the stirrup leather, and he was dragged helplessly a yard or two before the trooper reined in, cursing him foully, and striking him with the flat of his sword.
It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden appletrees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man—as he had long suspected—was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.
CHAPTER III
THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
It was not until two months later—on the 19th of September, if you must have the actual date—that Peter Blood was brought to trial, upon a charge of high treason. We know that he was not guilty of this; but we need not doubt that he was quite capable of it by the time he was indicted. Those two months of inhuman, unspeakable imprisonment had moved his mind to a cold and deadly hatred of King James and his representatives. It says something for his fortitude that in all the circumstances he should still have had a mind at all. Yet, terrible as was the position of this entirely innocent man, he had cause for thankfulness on two counts. The first of these was that he should have been brought to trial at all; the second, that his trial took place on the date named, and not a day earlier. In the very delay which exacerbated him lay—although he did not realize it—his only chance of avoiding the gallows.
Easily, but for the favor of Fortune, he might have been one of those haled, on the morrow of the battle, more or less haphazard from the overflowing jail at Bridgewater to be summarily hanged in the market-place by the bloodthirsty Colonel Kirke. There was about the Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might have disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as they were, but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which put an end to the drum-head courts-martial.
Even so, in that first week after Sedgemoor, Kirke and Feversham contrived between them to put to death over a hundred men after a trial so summary as to be no trial at all. They required human freights for the gibbets with which they were planting the countryside, and they little cared how they procured them or what innocent lives they took. What, after all, was the life of a clod? The executioners were kept busy with rope and chopper and cauldrons of pitch. I spare you the details of that nauseating picture. It is, after all, with the fate of Peter Blood that we are concerned rather than with that of the Monmouth rebels.
He survived to be included in one of those melancholy droves of prisoners who, chained in pairs, were marched from Bridgewater to Taunton. Those who were too sorely wounded to march were conveyed in carts, into which they were brutally crowded, their wounds undressed and festering. Many were fortunate enough to die upon the way. When Blood insisted upon his right to exercise his art so as to relieve some of this suffering, he was accounted importunate and threatened with a flogging. If he had one regret now it was that he had not been out with Monmouth. That, of course, was illogical; but you can hardly expect logic from a man in his position.
His chain companion on that dreadful march was the same Jeremy Pitt who had been the agent of his present misfortunes. The young shipmaster had remained his close companion after their common arrest. Hence, fortuitously, had they been chained together in the crowded prison, where they were almost suffocated by the heat and the stench during those days of July, August, and September.
Scraps of news filtered into the jail from the outside world. Some may have been deliberately allowed to penetrate. Of these was the tale of Monmouth’s execution. It created profoundest dismay amongst those men who were suffering for the Duke and for the religious cause he had professed to champion. Many refused utterly to believe it. A wild story began to circulate that a man resembling Monmouth had offered himself up in the Duke’s stead, and that Monmouth survived to come again in glory to deliver Zion and make war upon Babylon.
Mr. Blood heard that tale with the same indifference with which he had received the news of Monmouth’s death. But one shameful thing he heard in connection with this which left him not quite so unmoved, and served to nourish the contempt he was forming for King James. His Majesty had consented to see Monmouth. To have done so unless he intended to pardon him was a thing execrable and damnable beyond belief; for the only other object in granting that interview could be the evilly mean satisfaction of spurning the abject penitence of his unfortunate nephew.
Later they heard that Lord Grey, who after the Duke—indeed, perhaps, before him—was the main leader of the rebellion, had purchased his own pardon for forty thousand pounds. Peter Blood found this of a piece with the rest. His contempt for King James blazed out at last.
“Why, here’s a filthy mean creature to sit on a throne. If I had known as much of him before as I know to-day, I don’t doubt I should have given cause to be where I am now.” And then on a sudden thought: “And where will Lord Gildoy be, do you suppose?” he asked.
Young Pitt, whom he addressed, turned towards him a face from which the ruddy tan of the sea had faded almost completely during those months of captivity. His gray eyes were round and questioning. Blood answered him.
“Sure, now, we’ve never seen his lordship since that day at Oglethorpe’s. And where are the other gentry that were taken?—the real leaders of this plaguey rebellion. Grey’s case explains their absence, I think. They are wealthy men that can ransom themselves. Here awaiting the gallows are none but the unfortunates who followed; those who had the honor to lead them go free. It’s a curious and instructive reversal of the usual way of these things. Faith, it’s an uncertain world entirely!”
He laughed, and settled down into that spirit of scorn, wrapped in which he stepp
ed later into the great hall of Taunton Castle to take his trial. With him went Pitt and the yeoman Baynes. The three of them were to be tried together, and their case was to open the proceedings of that ghastly day.
The hall, even to the galleries—thronged with spectators, most of whom were ladies—was hung in scarlet; a pleasant conceit, this, of the Lord Chief Justice’s, who naturally enough preferred the color that should reflect his own bloody mind.
At the upper end, on a raised dais, sat the Lords Commissioners, the five judges in their scarlet robes and heavy dark periwigs, Baron Jeffreys of Wem enthroned in the middle place.
The prisoners filed in under guard. The crier called for silence under pain of imprisonment, and as the hum of voices gradually became hushed, Mr. Blood considered with interest the twelve good men and true that composed the jury. Neither good nor true did they look. They were scared, uneasy, and hangdog as any set of thieves caught with their hands in the pockets of their neighbors. They were twelve shaken men, each of whom stood between the sword of the Lord Chief Justice’s recent bloodthirsty charge and the wall of his own conscience.
From them Mr. Blood’s calm, deliberate glance passed on to consider the Lords Commissioners, and particularly the presiding Judge, that Lord Jeffreys, whose terrible fame had come ahead of him from Dorchester.
He beheld a tall, slight man on the young side of forty, with an oval face that was delicately beautiful. There were dark stains of suffering or sleeplessness under the low-lidded eyes, heightening their brilliance and their gentle melancholy. The face was very pale, save for the vivid color of the full lips and the hectic flush on the rather high but inconspicuous cheek-bones. It was something in those lips that marred the perfection of that countenance; a fault, elusive but undeniable, lurked there to belie the fine sensitiveness of those nostrils, the tenderness of those dark, liquid eyes and the noble calm of that pale brow.
The physician in Mr. Blood regarded the man with peculiar interest knowing as he did the agonizing malady from which his lordship suffered, and the amazingly irregular, debauched life that he led in spite of it—perhaps because of it.
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