CHAPTER XX
“HUGO STEIN IS MY ENEMY, AND I AM HIS, AS LONG AS WE BOTH SHALL LIVE”
FOUR days after Dicky Egremont’s execution there was a great stir in the village of Egremont at nightfall. A cart, with a long box in it, had halted on the edge of the one straggling street. At the head of the tired horse was a stolid-looking boy, and close by stood Bess Lukens. She wore her black gown and hood, and her pale face showed the stress of the dreadful emotions she had passed through and the travel from London by day and night.
It was yet broad daylight in the fragrant July evening. Afar off the many windows of Egremont glittered in the dying glow of the sun, and there was a still sweetness over all the land. Toil was no more for that day. Scarcely had the cart stopped when the village people began to collect about it, curious to know what the long box contained, and what business brought the strange, pale, handsome young woman to Egremont at that hour.
Among the first to arrive was Hodge the shoemaker. The windows of his cottage overlooked the spot.
“Good people,” asked Bess, in a voice so weary that she scarcely knew it for her own, and looking about among the assembled villagers, “can you tell me if one Hodge, a shoemaker, lives nigh?”
“Here I be, mistress,” answered Hodge; “and yonder is my house, and my dame is within.”
“Then have I found the man I want. In this box is the body of Mr. Richard Egremont, executed in London last Thursday.”
A shudder and a murmur ran through the crowd. All of them had known Dicky as a bright-eyed, fair-haired lad, roaming about Egremont; many of them had seen him but three weeks before, and a few of them were among those he had given his life to serve.
Bess continued, the people hanging breathless upon her words: “I have brought his poor body—no matter how I came by it—here to rest, for I know he could never lie quiet anywhere but at Egremont. The bastard who sits yonder”—Bess pointed to the gables and chimneys and roofs of Egremont, shining in the purple light of evening—“the bastard, I say, would deny a true Egremont six feet by two of their own land, and so I come to ask of you a little piece of earth wherein to lay Mr. Richard until Mr. Roger comes to his own, and can lay Mr. Richard in the family vault.”
“I have a bit of land, freehold, mistress,” spoke up Hodge, quickly. “It cuts like a tooth into the park just at the Dark Pool, by the willow bank, a place both Mr. Roger and Mr. Dicky ever loved, and used to fish, when they were little lads.”