Chapter Twenty Seven.
Company in distress.
“Now then, stir up, Mistress Benden! You are to be shifted to the Castle.”
Alice Benden looked up as the keeper approached her with that news. The words sounded rough, but the tone was not unkind. There was even a slight tinge of pity in it.
What that transfer meant, both the keeper and the prisoner knew. It was the preparatory step to a sentence of death.
All hope for this world died out of the heart of Alice Benden. No more possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness for Edward!—no more loving counsels to Christabel—no more comforting visits from Roger. Instead of them, one awful hour of scarcely imaginable anguish, and then, from His seat on the right hand of God, Christ would rise to receive His faithful witness—the Tree of Life would shade her, and the Water of Life would refresh her, and no more would the sun light upon her, nor any heat: she should be comforted for evermore. The better hope was to be made way for by the extinction of the lower. She lifted up her heart unto the Lord, and said silently within herself the ancient Christian formula of the early Church—
“Amen, Lord Christ!—so let it be.”
In a chair, for she was too crippled to walk, Alice was carried by two of the gaoler’s men outside the Cathedral precincts. She had not been in the open air for a month. They carried her out eastwards, across Burgate Street (which dates from the days of King Ethelred), down by the city wall, past Saint George’s Gate and the Grey Friars, up Sheepshank’s Lane, and so to the old Norman Castle, the keep of which is the third largest of Norman keeps in England, and is now, to the glory of all the Huns and Vandals, converted into a gasometer! In the barbican sat several prisoners in chains, begging their bread. But Alice was borne past this, and up the north-east staircase, from the walls of which looked out at her verses of the Psalms in Hebrew—silent, yet eloquent witnesses of the dispersion and suffering of Judah—and into a small chamber, where she was laid down on a rude bed, merely a frame with sacking and a couple of blankets upon it.
“Nights be cold yet,” said the more humane of her two bearers. “The poor soul ’ll suffer here, I’m feared.”
“She’ll be warm enough anon,” said the other and more brutal of the pair. “I reckon the faggots be chopped by now that shall warm her.”
Alice knew what he meant. He passed out of the door without another word, but the first man lingered to say in a friendly tone—“Good even to you, Mistress!” It was his little cup of cold water to Christ’s servant.
“Good even, friend,” replied Alice; “and may our Saviour Christ one day say to thee, ‘Inasmuch’!”
Yes, she would be warm enough by-and-by. There should be no more pain nor toil, no more tears nor terrors, whither she was going. The King’s “Well done, good and faithful servant!” would mark the entrance on a new life from which the former things had passed away.
She lay there alone till the evening, when the gaoler’s man brought her supper. It consisted of a flat cake of bread, a bundle of small onions, and a pint of weak ale. As he set it down, he said—“There’ll be company for you to-morrow.”
“I thank you for showing it to me,” said Alice courteously; “pray you, who is it?”
“’Tis a woman from somewhere down your way,” he answered, as he went out; “but her name I know not.”
Alice’s hopes sprang up. She felt cheered by the prospect of the company of any human creature, after her long lonely imprisonment; and it would be a comfort to have somebody who would help her to turn on her bed, which, unaided, it gave her acute pain to do. Beside, there was great reason to expect that her new companion would be a fellow-witness for the truth. Alice earnestly hoped that they would not—whether out of intended torture or mere carelessness—place a criminal with her. Deep down in her heart, almost unacknowledged to herself, lay a further hope. If it should be Rachel Potkin!
Of the apprehension of the batch of prisoners from Staplehurst Alice had heard nothing. She had therefore no reason to imagine that the woman “from somewhere down her way” was likely to be a personal friend. The south-western quarter of Kent was rather too large an area to rouse expectations of that kind.
It was growing dusk on the following evening before the “company” arrived. Alice had sung her evening Psalms—a cheering custom which she had kept up through all the changes and sufferings of her imprisonment—and was beginning to feel rather drowsy when the sound of footsteps roused her, stopping at her door.
“Now, Mistress! here you be!” said the not unpleasant voice of the Castle gaoler.
“Eh, deary me!” answered another voice, which struck Alice’s ear as not altogether strange.
“Good even, friend!” she hastened to say.
“Nay, you’d best say ‘ill even,’ I’m sure,” returned the newcomer. “I’ve ne’er had a good even these many weeks past.”
Alice felt certain now that she recognised the voice of an old acquaintance, whom she little expected to behold in those circumstances.
“Why, Sens Bradbridge, is that you?”
“Nay, sure, ’tis never Mistress Benden? Well, I’m as glad to see you again as I can be of aught wi’ all these troubles on me. Is’t me? Well, I don’t justly know whether it be or no; I keep reckoning I shall wake up one o’ these days, and find me in the blue bed in my own little chamber at home. Eh deary, Mistress Benden, but this is an ill look-out! So many of us took off all of a blow belike—”
“Have there been more arrests, then, at Staplehurst? Be my brethren taken?”
“Not as I knows of: but a lot of us was catched up all to oncet—Nichol White, ironmonger, and mine hostess of the White Hart, and Emmet Wilson, and Collet Pardue’s man, and Fishwick, the flesher, and me. Eh, but you may give thanks you’ve left no childre behind you! There’s my two poor little maids, that I don’t so much as know what’s come of ’em, or if they’ve got a bite to eat these hard times! Lack-a-daisy-me! but why they wanted to take a poor widow from her bits of childre, it do beat me, it do!”
“I am sorry for Collet Pardue,” said Alice gravely. “But for your maids, Sens, I am sure you may take your heart to you. The neighbours should be safe to see they lack not, be sure.”
“I haven’t got no heart to take, Mistress Benden—never a whit, believe me. Look you, Mistress Final she had ’em when poor Benedick departed: and now she’s took herself. Eh, deary me! but I cannot stay me from weeping when I think on my poor Benedick. He was that staunch, he’d sure ha’ been took if he’d ha’ lived! It makes my heart fair sore to think on’t!”
“Nay, Sens, that is rather a cause for thanksgiving.”
“You always was one for thanksgiving, Mistress Benden.”
“Surely; I were an ingrate else.”
“Well, I may be a nigrate too, though I wis not what it be without ’tis a blackamoor, and I’m not that any way, as I knows: but look you, good Mistress, that’s what I alway wasn’t. ’Tis all well and good for them as can to sing psalms in dens o’ lions; but I’m alway looking for to be ate up. I can’t do it, and that’s flat.”
“The Lord can shut the lions’ mouths, Sens.”
“Very good, Mistress; but how am I to know as they be shut?”
“‘They that trust in the Lord shall not want any good thing.’” A sudden moan escaped Alice’s lips just after she had said this, the result of an attempt to move slightly. Sens Bradbridge was on her knees beside her in a moment.
“Why, my dear heart, how’s this, now? Be you sick, or what’s took you?”
“I was kept nine weeks, Sens, on foul straw, with never a shift of clothes, and no meat save bread and water, the which has brought me to this pass, being so lame of rheumatic pains that I cannot scarce move without moaning.”
“Did ever man hear the like! Didn’t you trust in the Lord, then, Mistress, an’t like you?—or be soft beds and well-dressed meat and clean raiment not good things?”
Alice Benden’s bright little laugh struck poor desponding Sens as a very strange thing.
“Maybe a little of both, old friend. Surely there were four sore weeks when I was shut up in Satan’s prison, no less than in man’s, and I trusted not the Lord as I should have done—”
“Well, forsooth, and no marvel!”
“And as to beds and meat and raiment—well, I suppose they were not good things for me at that time, else should my Father have provided them for me.”
Poor Sens shook her head slowly and sorrowfully.
“Nay, now, Mistress Benden, I can’t climb up there, nohow.—’Tis a brave place where you be, I cast no doubt, but I shall never get up yonder.”
“But you have stood to the truth, Sens?—else should you not have been here.”
“Well, Mistress! I can’t believe black’s white, can I, to get forth o’ trouble?—nor I can’t deny the Lord, by reason ’tisn’t right comfortable to confess Him? But as for comfort—and my poor little maids all alone, wi’ never a penny—and my poor dear heart of a man as they’d ha’ took, sure as eggs is eggs, if so be he’d been there—why, ’tis enough to crush the heart out of any woman. But I can’t speak lies by reason I’m out o’ heart.”
“Well said, true heart! The Lord is God of the valleys, no less than of the hills; and if thou be sooner overwhelmed by the waters than other, He shall either carry thee through the stream, or make the waters lower when thou comest to cross.”
“I would I’d as brave a spirit as yourn, Mistress Benden.”
“Thou hast as good a God, Sens, and as strong a Saviour. And mind thou, ’tis the weak and the lambs that He carries; the strong sheep may walk alongside. ‘He knoweth our frame,’ both of body and soul. Rest thou sure, that if thine heart be true to Him, so long as He sees thou hast need to be borne of Him, He shall not put thee down to stumble by thyself.”
“Well!” said Sens, with a long sigh, “I reckon, if I’m left to myself, I sha’n’t do nought but stumble. I always was a poor creature; Benedick had to do no end o’ matters for me: and I’m poorer than ever now he’s gone, so I think the Lord’ll scarce forget me; but seems somehow as I can’t take no comfort in it.”
“‘Blessed are the poor in spirit!’” said Alice softly. “The ‘God of all comfort,’ Sens, is better than all His comforts.”