“That was different,” said Bess coolly, but with a brighter color. “’Twas very rude of you to try and make free with me, and ’twas for that I struck you.”
Roger turned his one free eye toward her, and burst out laughing, and then said, in a voice at once gay, sweet, and earnest,—
“Fair mistress, I promise you I will never dare to make free with you again; and I swear to you I do not respect the Queen’s Majesty herself more than I do you, Bess Lukens.”
“Thank you, Master Roger Egremont,” was all that Bess said in reply, but her heart was filled with joy, keen and piercing.
Roger did not long remain, but rising and saying good evening to Bess, walked steadily to his cell, and sat him down to consider. And Bess Lukens fell to work at her knitting, and was strangely lifted up into a blue and sunny heaven, as she sat alone in the twilight, and her face was quite glorified with a new softness and sweetness—until poor Diggory Hutchinson shambled in and tried awkwardly to make love to her, when she flew out against him and crossly bade him hold his tongue.
Roger Egremont spent that night and many succeeding nights and days in a self-examination which brought him to extreme anguish. And the natural vigor and clearness of his understanding coming to his aid to show him where he stood, he perceived that he was a very ignorant man, and that his ignorance had done much to land him where he was. All this came to him in the days after his rencounter with Bess, when he spent his time in silence in his room, looking fixedly at the little slip of blue sky to be seen through his one narrow window, and thinking how the hawthorn buds were swelling at Egremont, and that the tiny young of the game birds were hopping about fearlessly in the ferny thickets of the park, and the fish were flashing their silvery backs in the still and shadowed pools where the river ceased its brawling for a time. At night he lay wide-awake all night long, asking himself a thousand questions he had never asked before, his mind groping like a blind Samson, and crying out for light. And at last light came. He was ignorant, and he swore he would be so no longer.
Like most unlettered men, he knew little of the scope and power of learning. It represented to him then some vast unknown force with which other men ruled him. He jumped to the conclusion that only his own illiterateness and Hugo’s book-learning had put him in Newgate prison, and he determined to remedy it as soon as possible.
This determination came to him in the dead of night, and by sunrise he was knocking at Lukens the turnkey’s door, with a plan to carry his resolve into effect.
Bess was already up and hard at work when she opened the door to Roger.
“Bess,” cried he, eagerly, “I must have books, pens, and paper. Go you into the city this morning, and bring them to me;” for Roger had still much the habit of command, instead of asking.