“Turn our governor out of this jail? Now hark to that. You might as well try to move a mountain; and look at you lying there scarce able to move yourself, and talking like that.”
“Pour me out a cup of tea, Mr. Faintheart; I am in great pain—thank you.”
He took the cup, and as he stirred it he said coolly, “Did you ever read of Marshal Saxe, Mr. Faintheart? He fought the battle of Fontenoy as he lay a dying. He had himself carried on his bed of death from one part of the field to another; at first the fight went against him, but he spurned craven counsels with his expiring heart; he saw the enemy's blunder with his dying eye, and waved his troops on to victory with his dying hand. This is one of the great feats of earth. But the soldiers of Christ are as stout-hearted as any man that ever carried a marshal's baton or a sergeant's pike. Yes! I am ill, and I feel as if I were dying, Evans; but living or dying I am the Lord's. I will fight for Him to the last gasp, and I will thrust this malefactor from his high office with the last action of my hand—Will you help me, or will you not?”
“I will, sir! I will! What on earth can I do?”
“You can turn the balanced scale and win the day!”
“Can I, sir?” cried Evans, greatly puzzled.
“You will find some wine in that cupboard, my man; fill yourself a tumbler. I will sip my tea, and explain myself. You think this Hawes is a mountain;—no! he is a large pumpkin hollow at the core. You think him strong;—no! he but seems so, because some of the many at whose mercy he is are so weak. There is a flaw in Hawes, which must break him sooner or later. He is a felon. The law hangs over his head by a single hair; he has forfeited his office, and will be turned out of it the moment we can find among his many superiors one man with one grain either of honesty or intelligence.”
“But how shall we find that, sir?”
“By looking for it everywhere, till we find it somewhere. Mr. Hawes tells me, in other words, that the visiting justices do not possess the one grain we require. I profit by the intelligence the enemy was weak enough to give me, and I go—not to the visiting justices. To-morrow, if my case is ready, I send a memorial to the Home-Office, accuse Hawes of felonious practices, and demand an inquiry.”
Evans's eye sparkled; he began to gather strength from the broken man.