"Woman," cried I, for it was the old gipsy crone, who had somehow transported herself to the spot with incredible speed, "for God's sake, go for help! There is a house yonder among those trees."
"And why should I stir a foot," replied she fiercely, "for the child of a race that has ever treated me and mine as though we were dogs?"
"Because," said I, at a venture, "you have children yourself."
"You are right," exclaimed she, clapping her skinny hands together, and seating herself calmly on the turf. "It is well that you have mentioned my kith and kin. One lad is across the seas, and will never see the green lanes and breezy commons of England more; another lies caged in yonder jail—and both for taking the wild creatures of the earth and air, to which such men as Massingberd Heath lay claim; while my little sister—ah, my Sinnamenta, my fair pearl!—may the lightning strike him in his wickedest hour! nay, let him perish, inch by inch, within reach of the aid that shall never come, ere the God of the Poor takes him into his hand!—Boy, you may talk to that flintstone, and it will rise up and get you help for that lad there—bonny as he is, and the bonnier the worse for them he sets his wilful eyes on—before you get this hand to wag a finger for him."
"Woman," said I, despairingly, "if you hate Massingberd Heath, and want to do him the worst service that lies in your power, flee, flee to that house, and bid them save this boy's life, which alone stands between his beggared uncle and untold riches."
"Is it so?" cried the old woman, rising up with an agility for which no one would have given her credit, and looking at me with furious eyes. "Is it indeed so, boy?"
"Yes, woman, upon my soul!"
Revenge accomplished what pity had failed to work. In an instant, she was with me down by Marmaduke's side; from her pocket she produced a spirit-flask in a leathern case, and applied it to his lips: after a painful attempt to swallow, he succeeded; his eyelids began tremulously to move, and the colour to return to his pallid lips.
"Keep his head up," cried she, "and give him another drop of this, if assistance does not arrive within five minutes."
Before she had finished speaking, she had lifted the latch of the gate that opened from the road into the grounds of the house in question, and in another instant I was alone—alone with what I believed to be a dying man, and surrounded with the blood that had flowed in a mingled stream from him and the dead horse, for Panther had ceased to move—alone with recollections and anticipations scarcely less horrible than the visible scene; and yet, so strangely constituted is the human mind, that I could not forbear to glance with some sort of curiosity at the flask the gipsy had left with me, and to wonder exceedingly that its worn and tarnished top of silver bore upon it a fac-simile of one of those identical griffins which guarded each side of the broad stone steps that led to Fairburn Hall.