By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson (large ebook reader txt) 📖

It was so easy to provoke him; he was so simple and passionate that they could get almost anything they wanted out of him by a little adroit baiting; and more than once his examination formed a welcome and humorous entr'acte between two real tragedies. Sir Nicholas, of course, never suspected for a moment that he was affording any amusement to any one. He thought their weary laughter to be sardonic and ironical, and he looked upon himself as a very desperate fellow indeed; and wrote glowing accounts of it all to his wife, full of apostrophic praises to God and the saints, in a hand that shook with excitement and awe at the thought of the important scenes in which he played so prominent a part.

But there was no atmosphere of humour about Mr. Stewart. He had disappeared from Sir Nicholas' sight on their arrival at the Marshalsea, and they had not set eyes on one another since; nor could all the knight's persuasion and offer of bribes make his gaoler consent to take any message or scrap of paper between them. He would not even answer more than the simplest inquiries about him,--that he was alive and in the Tower, and so forth; and Sir Nicholas prayed often and earnestly for that deliberate and vivacious young man who had so charmed and interested them all down at Great Keynes, and who had been so mysteriously engulfed by the sombre majesty of the law.

"I fear," he wrote to Lady Maxwell, "I fear that our friend must be sick or dying. But I can hear no news of him; when I am allowed sometimes to walk in the court or on the leads he is never there. My attendant Mr. Jakes looks glum and says nothing when I ask him how my friend does. My dearest, do not forget him in your prayers nor your old loving husband either."

One evening late in October Mr. Jakes did not come as usual to bring Sir Nicholas his supper at five o'clock; the time passed and still he did not come. This was very unusual. Presently Mrs. Jakes appeared instead, carrying the food which she set down at the door while she turned the key behind her. Sir Nicholas rallied her on having turned gaoler; but she turned on him a face with red eyes and lined with weeping.

"O Sir Nicholas," she said, for these two were good friends, "what a wicked place this is! God forgive me for saying so; but they've had that young man down there since two o'clock; and Jakes is with them to help; and he told me to come up to you, Sir Nicholas, with your supper, if they weren't done by five; and if the young gentleman hadn't said what they wanted."

Sir Nicholas felt sick.

"Who is it?" he asked.

"Why, who but Mr. Stewart?" she said; and then fell weeping again, and went out forgetting to lock the door behind her in her grief. Sir Nicholas sat still a moment, sick and shaken; he knew what it meant; but it had never come so close to him before. He got up presently and went to the door to listen for he knew not what. But there was no sound but the moan of the wind up the draughty staircase, and the sound of a prisoner singing somewhere above him a snatch of a song. He looked out presently, but there was nothing but the dark well of the staircase disappearing round to the left, and the glimmer of an oil lamp somewhere from the depths below him, with wavering shadows as the light was blown about by the gusts that came up from outside. There was nothing to be done of course; he closed the door, went back and prayed with all his might for the young man who was somewhere in this huge building, in his agony.

Mr. Jakes came up himself within half an hour to see if all was well; but said nothing of his dreadful employment or of Mr. Stewart; and Sir Nicholas did not like to ask for fear of getting Mrs. Jakes into trouble. The gaoler took away the supper things, wished him good-night, went out and locked the door, apparently without noticing it had been left undone before. Possibly his mind was too much occupied with what he had been seeing and doing. And the faithful account of all this went down in due time to Great Keynes.

The arrival of the courier at the Hall on Wednesday and Saturday was a great affair both to the household and to the village. Sir Nicholas sent his letter generally by the Saturday courier, and the other brought a kind of bulletin from Mr. Boyd, with sometimes a message or two from his master. These letters were taken by the ladies first to the study, as if to an oratory, and Lady Maxwell would read them slowly over to her sister. And in the evening, when Isabel generally came up for an hour or two, the girl would be asked to read them slowly all over again to the two ladies who sat over their embroidery on either side of her, and who interrupted for the sheer joy of prolonging it. And they would discuss together the exact significance of all his marks of emphasis and irony; and the girl would have all she could do sometimes not to feel a disloyal amusement at the transparency of the devices and the simplicity of the loving hearts that marvelled at the writer's depth and ingenuity. But she was none the less deeply impressed by his courageous cheerfulness, and by the power of a religion that in spite of its obvious weaknesses and improbabilities yet inspired an old man like Sir Nicholas with so much fortitude.

At first, too, a kind of bulletin was always issued on the Sunday and Thursday mornings, and nailed upon the outside of the gatehouse, so that any who pleased could come there and get first-hand information; and an interpreter stood there sometimes, one of the educated younger sons of Mr. Piers, and read out to the groups from Lady Maxwell's sprawling old handwriting, news of the master.

"Sir Nicholas has been had before the Council," he read out one day in a high complacent voice to the awed listeners, "and has been sent to the Tower of London." This caused consternation in the village, as it was supposed by the country-folk, not without excuse, that the Tower was the antechamber of death; but confidence was restored by the further announcement a few lines down that "he was well and cheerful."

Great interest, too, was aroused by more domestic matters.

"Sir Nicholas," it was proclaimed, "is in a little separate chamber of his own. Mr. Jakes, his gaoler, seems an honest fellow. Sir Nicholas hath a little mattress from a friend that Mr. Boyd fetched for him. He has dinner at eleven and supper at five. Sir Nicholas hopes that all are well in the village."

But other changes had followed the old knight's arrest. The furious indignation in the village against the part that the Rectory had played in the matter, made it impossible for the Dents to remain there. That the minister's wife should have been publicly ducked, and that not by a few blackguards but by the solid fathers and sons with the applause of the wives and daughters, made her husband's position intolerable, and further evidence was forthcoming in the behaviour of the people towards the Rector himself; some boys had guffawed during his sermon on the following Sunday, when he had ventured on a word or two of penitence as to his share in the matter, and he was shouted after on his way home.

Mrs. Dent seemed strangely changed and broken during her stay at the Hall. She had received a terrible shock, and it was not safe to move her back to her own house. For the first two or three nights, she would start from sleep again and again screaming for help and mercy and nothing would quiet her till she was wide awake and saw in the fire-light the curtained windows and the bolted door, and the kindly face of an old servant or Mistress Margaret with her beads in her hand. Isabel, who came up to see her two or three times, was both startled and affected by the change in her; and by the extraordinary mood of humility which seemed to have taken possession of the hard self-righteous Puritan.

"I begged pardon," she whispered to the girl one evening, sitting up in bed and staring at her with wide, hard eyes, "I begged pardon of Lady Maxwell, though I am not fit to speak to her. Do you think she can ever forgive me? Do you think she can? It was I, you know, who wrought all the mischief, as I have wrought all the mischief in the village all these years. She said she did, and she kissed me, and said that our Saviour had forgiven her much more. But--but do you think she has forgiven me?" And then again, another night, a day or two before they left the place, she spoke to Isabel again.

"Look after the poor bodies," she said, "teach them a little charity; I have taught them nought but bitterness and malice, so they have but given me my own back again. I have reaped what I have sown."

So the Dents slipped off early one morning before the folk were up; and by the following Sunday, young Mr. Bodder, of whom the Bishop entertained a high opinion, occupied the little desk outside the chancel arch; and Great Keynes once more had to thank God and the diocesan that it possessed a proper minister of its own, and not a mere unordained reader, which was all that many parishes could obtain.

Towards the end of September further hints began to arrive, very much underlined, in the knight's letters, of Mr. Stewart and his sufferings.

"You remember our friend," Isabel read out one Saturday evening, "not Mr. Stewart." (This puzzled the old ladies sorely till Isabel explained their lord's artfulness.) "My dearest, I fear the worst for him. I do not mean apostacy, thank God. But I fear that these wolves have torn him sadly, in their dens." Then followed the story of Mrs. Jakes, with all its horror, all the greater from the obscurity of the details.

Isabel put the paper down trembling, as she sat on the rug before the fire in the parlour upstairs, and thought of the bright-eyed, red-haired man with his steady mouth and low laugh whom Anthony had described to her.

Lady Maxwell posted upon the gatehouse:

"Sir Nicholas fears that a friend is in sore trouble; he hopes he may not yield."

Then, after a few days more, a brief notice with a black-line drawn round it, that ran, in Mr. Bodder's despite:

"Our friend has passed away. Pray for his soul."

Sir Nicholas had written in great agitation to this effect.

"My sweetheart, I have heavy news to-day. There was a great company of folks below my window to-day, in the Inner Ward, where the road runs up below the Bloody Tower. It was about nine of the clock. And there was a horse there whose head I could see; and presently from the Beauchamp Tower came, as I thought, an old man between two warders; and then I could not very well see; the men were in my way; but soon the horse went off, and the men after him; and I could hear the groaning of the crowd that were waiting for them outside. And when Mr. Jakes brought