"Sir Julian, my master," he gasped, and stopped dead.
"Well, what of him?" I asked eagerly.
But he answered never a word; he stood mopping his brows with a great blue handkerchief, which hid his face from us. 'Tis strange how clearly I remember that handkerchief. It was embroidered at the corners with anchors in white cotton, and it recurred to me with a quaint irrelevancy that the man had been a sailor in his youth.
"Well, what of him?" I asked again with some sharpness. "Speak, man! You had words and to spare below."
"He lies in Bristol gaol," at last he said, heaving great breaths between his words, "and none but you can serve his turn."
With that he tore at his shirt above his heart, and made a little tripping run to the table. He clutched at its edge and swayed forward above it, his head loosely swinging between his shoulders.
"Hurry!" he said in a thick, strangled voice. "Assizes--twenty-first--Jeffries."
And with a sudden convulsion he straightened himself, stood for a second on the tips of his toes, with the veins ridged on his livid face like purple weals, and then fell in a huddled lump upon the floor. I sprang to the stair-head and shouted for some one to run for a doctor. Jack was already loosening the man's shirt.
"It is a fit," he said, clasping a hand to his heart.
Luckily my bedroom gave onto the parlour, and between us we carried him within and laid him gently on my bed. His eyelids were open and his eyes fixed, but turned inwards, so that one saw but the whites of them, while a light froth oozed through his locked teeth.