"Nay, Ben, it's right you shouldn't know the word, it's only London-town cant and means a common cutpurse, that's all he was, him and his fair talk to me about an inheritance, washed down you might say with the kissing and the sweet looks and the tumbling—marry, could I say no to the likes of him, and meself as hot and limber as a March hare, could I? Well, rest him quiet, he danced for it at Tyburn."
"Oh, I remember. You've spoke of it before, but I'd forgotten the word. Kate, you shouldn't let those old memories rise up and trouble you—not here, and the old country so far away."
It's back from the Cambridge road (he said nothing about coming to visit him), the cottage with green-painted shutters. Something discourteous the way I ran, but he did say....
"Ay, it's far. Repent?—phoo! nor they wouldn't've got him, never, only he drunk hisself blind in a tavern and talked, so you see, dearie, it was the rum that ruint him, and never took a strap to me neither except he was in the drink, and that only once or twice. Repent?—why, didn't he spit on the foot of the gallows tree and cock his head at the sky to see a shower coming, and didn't he say to the ordinary: 'Ha' done canting and go to hanging, man, can't you see it's coming on to rain and must I catch a quinsy for King Charles' sake, God bless him?'"
"Maybe he repented later, Kate—I mean in the last moment when there was no way to say the words."
How much he must know! Why not medicine? Nay, think of it, Ru Cory, why not? WHY NOT?
"Not him. Why, didn't he wave a purse that he'd h'isted from the ordinary's own pocket, that he had—waved it and throwed it to the crowd and cried: 'Here, culls, drink me a remembrancer!' That he did, anyway so a friend told me that was there and seen it all, the which I couldn't be meself, being in childbed on his account—died, the little thing, and best maybe seeing it'd've had no father, and then me for the colonies, I suppose it was a long time ago."
"Well...."
But if I am—if there be some evil, some mark of evil to make others recoil as from a leper—but it can't be so, it can't. Would that man know (could I ask him?) why so often I—why—why——
"But do you know, dearie, I had another friend in the crowd that day to see him die, and she told me the tale different, I can't understand how it could be so different, how that my Jem was leaden-faced, and fought the rope, nor spoke nothing at all but some mumbling about former times, and how his life should be an example—example, with a pox! That wasn't never his way of talk, but—but maybe he did and all. No purse for the crowd, she said, nothing like that."