“Why?” asked Bess, quietly. “I’m a freeborn Briton. I can speak my mind, can’t I, if I say no evil of the powers? And I tell you, Diggory Hutchinson, that nothing on earth can make me say anything but the truth when I am asked about Mr. Richard Egremont!”
Then there was a faint and distant roar,—the sound of many voices. The victim was approaching; and that menacing shout, ever growing nearer and louder, was a cry for blood.
The man who had questioned Bess then began again:
“But I say, mistress—”
“Hold your tongue!” cried a woman near to him. “Have you no heart in your body, man, that you can keep tormenting this poor soul as is in trouble enough, God knows?”
The man slunk off at this, and the people near Bess kept a respectful silence.
The roar swelled deeper and louder and nearer, as the streets leading from the Newgate quarter became black with approaching people. The howl for blood echoed to the heavens and again to the earth beneath; and when it seemed to fill the universe, the crowd parted, showing the cart, and in it Dicky Egremont and one of his gaolers.
Bess Lukens’s keen eyes sought Dicky’s face, thinking it would be strange and glorified, as she had seen it the night before; but instead he looked exactly the same pleasant-faced, boyish Dicky she had seen playing the fiddle in Madame Michot’s garden, singing Jacobite songs and laughing with her and Roger at St. Germains. His face had its usual ruddy hue; his few days of confinement had not robbed him of either flesh or color. He was seen to be pleasantly conversing with his companion, Ketch, who sat on the bench beside him. He wore his cassock and beretta; his hands were tied together behind him.
As he came into full view, something like a groan and shudder went around among a part of the crowd,—he was so young, so fresh-colored, so full of life. He turned around, and his eyes fell upon the gallows and all the other gruesome preparations for his death, but he did not show so much as by the flicker of an eyelash the least fear or shrinking.
The cart was now driven up close, the sheriff’s men closed around it, and the gaoler, getting out himself, prepared to aid the prisoner to descend. But Dicky, always agile, jumped lightly out of the cart, hampered as he was.