“Nought else, good sir—I tell thee ’twas but a jest.”
“I do begin to believe thee,” said Hendon, with a perplexing mixture of mockery and half-conviction in his tone; “but tarry thou here a moment whilst I run and ask his worship—for nathless, he being a man experienced in law, in jests, in—”
He was moving away, still talking; the constable hesitated, fidgeted, spat out an oath or two, then cried out—
“Hold, hold, good sir—prithee wait a little—the judge! Why, man, he hath no more sympathy with a jest than hath a dead corpse!—come, and we will speak further. Ods body! I seem to be in evil case—and all for an innocent and thoughtless pleasantry. I am a man of family; and my wife and little ones—List to reason, good your worship: what wouldst thou of me?”
“Only that thou be blind and dumb and paralytic whilst one may count a hundred thousand—counting slowly,” said Hendon, with the expression of a man who asks but a reasonable favour, and that a very little one.
“It is my destruction!” said the constable despairingly. "Ah, be reasonable, good sir; only look at this matter, on all its sides, and see how mere a jest it is—how manifestly and how plainly it is so. And even if one granted it were not a jest, it is a fault so small that e’en the grimmest penalty it could call forth would be but a rebuke and warning from the judge’s lips.”
Hendon replied with a solemnity which chilled the air about him—
“This jest of thine hath a name, in law,—wot you what it is?”