As his voice fell, the Alderman was looking sadly into the red embers of the fire with the music of a deep sadness and regret in his voice. He wasn't an emotional man at all—by nature that is—Johnnie saw it at once. But he saw also that his host was very deeply moved. Johnnie rose from his chair.
"You are telling me no news at all, Mr. Alderman," he said. "I had orders, and I was one of those who rode with Sir John Shelton and the Sheriff to take Dr. Taylor to the stake at Aldham Common."
Mr. Cressemer started violently.
"Mother of God!" he said, "did you see that done?"
Johnnie nodded. He could not trust himself to speak.
The Alderman's cry of horror brought home to him almost for the first time not the terror of what he had seen—that he had realised long ago—but a sense of personal guilt, a disgust with himself that he should have been a participator in such a deed, a spectator, however pitying.
He felt unclean.
Then he said in a low voice: "What I tell you, Mr. Cressemer, will, I know, remain as a secret between us. I feel I am not betraying any trust in telling you. I am, as you know, attached to the person of His Majesty, and I have been admitted into great confidence both by him and Her Grace the Queen. The King rode to Hadley disguised as a simple cavalier, and I was with him as his attendant."
He stopped short, feeling that the explanation was bald and unsufficing.
The Alderman stepped up to Johnnie and put his hand upon his arm. "Poor lad, poor lad," he said in tones of deepest pity. "I grieve in that thou hadst to witness such a thing in the following of thy duty."