I had followed, speechless and like one in a dream; but when the portal closed behind them and I was left standing without, I heard a voice in my ear saying in accents of mock sorrow,—
"Alas, good Dicon, that one so young and fair and highly born should be a rebel! The best grace the young lord can hope to win from the great Lord Justice is the axe instead of the halter. His would be a pretty head to set up over the gateway here! Alack! what will Mistress Mary say? Methinks she had a maid's passing fancy for the fair face of our young warrior."
The speaker was Mr. Blewer. With a sense of sickening loathing I turned away from the man and rushed homewards, putting the saddle upon Blackbird as quickly as I could, and scarce drawing rein till I stood before the house of my uncle Robert in Bridgewater.
I found my aunt in tears, and I had no need to put a question before she burst out with the tale.
"Dicon, we could not help it. We breathed no word of his being here; and when the soldiers had done their hanging and had gone—at least some of them, and the rest were more for carousing and feasting than anything else—we felt able to breathe once more. But there was an evil-faced man for ever prying about, habited like a clergyman, but with little of the nature that befits that office. He asked so many questions from one or another about a maiden he had seen here, that we could not hide from him that Mistress Mary Mead had been a guest here for a while; but not a word did we breathe of the young lord upstairs—I give you my word we did not!"
"I am sure of it, good aunt; I know you had learned to love him right well. None could fail to do so who came into his presence."
"Indeed thou speakest sooth, Dicon," she answered. "I waited on and tended him myself; and never have I seen a gentler and more perfect gentleman, so patient, so grateful, so anxious to avoid giving any trouble—as though we grudged what we did for him—and he paying for all like a prince! I loved him as a son, if I may say it. And yet that evil man, by hook or by crook, and by dint of ceaseless spying and prying, got scent of his being here; and to-day there came a troop of soldiers with an order to search the house for a rebel who was known to be sheltering here in disguise. Dicon, when that befell us, what could we do? To have resisted would not have saved the poor young gentleman, but would have brought all the rest of us to the gallows."
Her tears broke forth afresh, and I could almost have joined with her in weeping, had it not been that my heart so burned within me in hot indignation against the miscreant who had spied and betrayed us. As it was, the tears would not come to my relief, and all I said was,—