Bertie set his teeth tight to keep his words in: he walked on mute.
“You’ve stole some little gemman’s togs as well as my pheasant,” said Big George, surveying him. “Why didn’t you steal a pair of boots when you was about it?”
Bertie was still mute.
“I will not say anything to this bad man,” he thought, “or else he will find out that it was not I.”
The sun had set by this time, leaving only a silvery light above the sea and the downs: the pale long twilight of an English day had come upon the earth.
Bertie was very white, and his heart beat fast, and he was growing very hungry; but he managed to stumble on, though very painfully, for his courage would not let him repine before this savage man, who was mixed up in his mind with Bluebeard, and Thor, and Croquemitaine, and Richard III., and Nero, and all the ogres that he had ever met with in his reading, and who seemed to grow larger and larger and larger as the sky and earth grew darker.
Happily for his shoeless feet, the way lay all over grass-lands and mossy paths; but he limped so that the keeper swore at him many times, and the little Earl felt the desperate resignation of the martyr.
At last they came in sight of the keeper’s cottage, standing on the edge of the preserves,—a thatched and gabled little building, with a light glimmering in its lattice window.
At the sound of Big George’s heavy tread, a woman and some children ran out.
“Lord ha’ mercy! George!” cried the wife. “What scarecrow have you been and got?”