One told Philip Marsham that Mother Taylor was hanged; another said they let her go, to die a natural death in the shadow of the gallows that stood by the crossroads in her native town of Barnstable. Either tale is likely enough, and Phil never learned which was true.
For aught I know to the contrary, she may have found an elixir of life as good as the one discovered by the famous Count de Saint-Germain, and so be living still.
Whatever the end she came to, Phil Marsham was far away when they determined her fate. For the day he stepped out in the streets of London, a free man once more and a loyal subject of the King, he took the road to the distant inn where he was of a mind to claim fulfillment of Nell Entick's promise.
[CHAPTER XXII]
BACK TO THE INN
If this were a mere story to while away an idle hour, I, the scribe, would tie neatly every knot and leave no Irish pennants hanging from my work. But life, alas, is no pattern drawn to scale. The many interweaving threads are caught up in strange tangles, and over them, darkly and inscrutably, Atropos presides. Who cannot recall to mind names and faces still alive with the friendship of a few weeks or months,—a friendship pleasant in memory,—a friendship that promised fruitful years, but that was lost for ever when a boy or man drifted out of sight for one reason or another, and on one tide or another of the projects that go to make up life? To Philip Marsham, tramping again the high roads of England, there came, mingled with many other desires, a longing to see once more the Scottish smith who had wrought the dirk that had tasted blood for his protection in those dark adventures at sea. But when he came to the smithy beside the heath he found it open and empty. The wind blew the door on rusty hinges; brown leaves had drifted in and lay about the cold forge; the coals were dead, the bellows were broken, and the lonely man who had wrought iron on the now rusty anvil had taken his tools and gone.
The day was still young, for the wayfarer, starting early and in the fullness of his strength, had this day covered three miles in the time that one had taken him when he walked that road before. So he left the smithy and pushed on across the heath and far beyond it, marking each familiar farm and village and country house, until night had fallen and the stars had come out, when he laid him down under a hedge and slept.
He was thinking, when he fell asleep, of Nell Entick. He remembered very well her handsome face, her head held so high, her white throat and bare arms. He was going back to the inn to claim fulfillment of her promise and he pictured her as waiting for him there. In most ways he was a bold, resolute youth who had seen much of life; but in some ways, nevertheless, he was a lad of small experience, and if he thought at all that she had been a little overbold, a little overwilling, he thought only that she was as honestly frank as he.
Waking that night upon his bed of leaves, he saw far away on a hill the dancing flames of a campfire, concerning which he greatly wondered. For, having been long out of England, he had small knowledge of the ups and downs of parliaments and kings; and in the brief time since his return, of which he had spent nearly all in prison, he had heard nothing of the tumultuous state of the kingdom, save a few words dropped here or there while he was passing through hamlets and villages, and seen nothing thereof save such show of arms as in one place or another had caught his eye but not his thought. Although he knew it not, since he was a plain lad with no gift of second-sight, he lay in a country poised on the brink of war and his bed was made in the field where a great battle was to be fought.
He went on at daylight, and going through a village at high noon saw a preacher in clipped hair and sober garb, who was calling on the people to be valiant and of good courage against those wicked men who had incited riot and rebellion among the Roman Catholics in Ireland, whereby the King might find pretext for raising a vast army to devastate and enslave England. Sorely perplexed by this talk, of which he understood little, Phil besought a sneering young fellow, who stood at no great distance, for an explanation; to which the fellow replied that it was talk for them that wore short hair and long ears, and that unless a man kept watch upon his wits his own ears would grow as long from hearing it as those of any Roundhead ass in the country. At this Phil took umbrage; but the fellow cried Nay, that he would fight no such keen blade, who was, it seemed, a better man than he looked. And with a laugh he waved the matter off and strolled away.