“Down with ye both asquat on grass bank yonder, and move so much as an eyelid at your peril!”
Trembling and distraught, the Queen dragged the boy to a place beside her on the turf, and so, clasped together, they cowered, awaiting the end.
Despair was in her heart. So remote, so utterly unfriended, she knew not where to look for hope or remedy. Cursed and proscribed in the thick of enemies, no self-confession that she might venture but must prove her worst damnation. Outlawed herself, she was the natural prey to outlaws. To reveal her identity were to forgo the smallest consideration a threat of vengeful justice might otherwise perhaps enforce—were to unmuzzle these ravening beasts finally and effectively. And yet she dared not threaten justice, lest passions so reckless should be fired thereby to instant retaliation.
She could only pray to her gods in a dumb agony of supplication to contrive some means for their escape; for herself she could think of no possible way, unless at the last to snatch death from some ill-guarded weapon.
What long torture of mind she endured while sitting there facing her brutal captors, awaiting the Cuckoo’s return and thereafter the final struggle, one may imagine in a measure. A suffocating lump seemed to rise in her throat when at length she heard his footsteps on the twig-strewn turf, and her arm tightened convulsively about her boy.
The returned ruffian, when he hove into sight, had been obviously priming himself for the affray. He was not drunk, but his huge cheeks were blistered red and a fire blinked in his eyes. He carried over his shoulder a net containing a jar of sack and a couple of curved drinking-horns, and, striding across to his comrades, he bent, with a fierce inquiring oath, to sling his burden to the grass. As he thus stooped, Jake and the Kite, standing on either side of him, drove each a sudden knife, handle-deep, into the thick of his neck. The monster, with one slobbering choke, heaved forward and went down like an ox. His fingers raked, his legs jerked for a little, and then the whole welter relaxed and subsided. Simultaneously with its cessation of movement the two murderers, as if by one impulse, made for the wine-jar. Their hands were shaking, their cheeks spotted with white. They spilled as much as they gained, but each in the end succeeded in gulping a hornful between his chattering teeth. And then!——
The woods echoed with their screeches; they writhed like scalded snakes upon the grass. For the Cuckoo, coveting not a half but the whole of the spoil, had gone even a step further than his confederates, and had poisoned the wine he brought them with some swift corrosive acid snatched up from the “Chequers” harness-room.
Was the biter bit ever mangled with a longer tooth? The pale Queen, risen throughout this bloody drama, watching half-paralysed its course, with but reason enough left to hold the child’s face hidden from it, was even minutes in guessing the truth. But when at length she realised it, with a sob of thankfulness she seized her boy’s hand, and, avoiding those prostrate, faintly-gasping horrors, fled deep and deeper into the forest, until, as history relates, she found that chivalrous one whose generosity was to obtain her means to cross the water.
“KING COLLEY”
“We will now, my dear people,” said Mr. Cibber, “proceed to investigate the ecclesiastical Phœnix which has reared its giant head from the ashes of the conflagration, and to criticise its claims to a greatness commensurate with its bulk.”