The Historical Nights' Entertainment by Rafael Sabatini (most important books to read .txt) 📖

>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 malthouse,

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 quite 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