“But, Reuben, he was mad.”
“Still—”
She flung herself upon her knees. “Reuben, you cannot hang your son. Not your son, Reuben.”
“Quiet,” he commanded. “Quiet.”
“Oh, I will be very quiet.” She lowered her voice obediently. “If there are clerks through that door, they shall not hear. No one shall ever know he is your son. You can save him and you must. He is your son and there are babies, two little boys, your grandchildren, Reuben. What can I do alone for them? Give John back to me and we can manage. It will be mortal hard, but we shall do it.”
The woman was impossible. Actually she was pleading not only for the murderer’s release, but for his return. His wife, Dorothy, lay dead at this boy’s hands, and Phoebe was assuming that nothing was to happen! But, by the Lord, things were going to happen. Crazy or not that phrase of John’s stuck in his throat—“to set the people free from a tyrant.” Where there was one man thinking that sort of thing, there were others; it was a breeding sort of thought. Well, he’d sterilize it, he’d bleed these thinkers white. Meantime, there was Phoebe, and, it seemed, there were two young encumbrances. “There is the workhouse,” he said.
“Not while I live,” said Peter Bradshaw’s daughter.
“But to live, Phoebe, you must earn, and there will be no more earning here for you.” The workhouse was a safe place for a woman with a dangerous story and anything that escaped those muffling walls could be set down as the frantic ravings of a hanged man’s mother. This side-issue of Phoebe was a triviality, but he had learned the value of looking after the pence—as well as the pounds.
“Oh, do with me what you like. You always have done. But John—John!”
He looked his unchanging answer.