This ducal waggishness gave me time to observe that the sergeant's
uneasiness was icy coldness in comparison with his lordship's. He was
uncertain of speech; his face was the colour of pea-soup; he looked
anxiously, almost affrightedly, at me. He grew plainly more comfortable as
the Duke failed to get any information out of me beyond the fact that the
weather was cold. Finally, when the sergeant was ordered to keep me at his
peril till such time as I could be lodged in Carlisle jail, Brocton
greedily tossed off a bumper of wine and laughed aloud at some vulgar
sally from a lady in a green paduasoy. On leaving I bowed to the Duke. He
was a vigorous, able man with the manners and morals of a bull.
Brocton followed the sergeant out. There was a consultation between them
of which I heard nothing, but the result was that the sergeant picked up a
man as guide who was waiting at the front door, obviously for the purpose,
and took me through and beyond the village to a house on the roadside. The
place was of fair size, built of rough slabs of stone, and evidently a
farm-house. The owner was a lumpish, ungainly fellow, astonishingly
bow-legged. He had a little yapping dog, which jumped backwards and
forwards between his knees like a trick-dog through a hoop.
Preparations had been made for my coming, "by his lordship," as the
farmer blabbed out. I was taken upstairs to a back room, ironed, in the
way I have described, by the parish constable, who had been prayed in aid
for the job, and locked in in the dark. I heard a sentry posted without
the door and another beneath the window. It was some consolation, and I
needed all I could get, to know I was so prized. There was a rough bed in
the room. I tumbled on it, wondered for a few minutes what Margaret would
be thinking of it all, and then went to sleep.
Next morning I made her acquaintance to this extent that she brought me a
jug of thin ale, a lump of horse-bread and a slab of cheese. Her looks
froze my affability, but she does not become important till she smiled,
and I need say no more about her at present.
I saw no other person till nightfall of the third day, when the door
opened and the little dog hopped through his accustomed gap into the room,
and was followed by his master carrying a lighted tallow candle in a rusty
iron candlestick. This imported something unusual, as I was not allowed a
light, and it turned out to be a visit from my Lord Brocton. He ordered
the sentry to follow the farmer downstairs, and examined the door
carefully to see if it was closed thoroughly. I sat on the edge of the bed
and hummed a brisk air with a fine pretence of indifference.
He sat down on the one chair there was, placed his hat on the table, and
said, "I am sorry to see you in this place and condition, Mr. Wheatman."
"Thank you," said I.
"Of course you know there's only one end of it."
"Yes," I replied, and hummed a stave of "Lillibullero."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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