But Mistress Gridley, though she had had scant notice of the occasion, was of a harder kind. Relieved of ghostly fears, her mind quickly regained its balance, and instinctively took refuge in the falseness which had become second nature. Her shrewdish face wore a flush as she came forward, and there was a flicker of secret fear in her eye. But the tone in which she denied that she had ever left her house on the night in question was even and composed, and "As for a man," she added scornfully, "what man is there within three miles of us?"
"The man who taught this lad to spy!" Cromwell retorted, swiftly and severely. "That man, woman! Do you know him?"
She could say No to that with a good conscience, and she did so.
Cromwell signed to her stand back. "Very well," he said, "then the boy shall tell us." He turned to Jack, and after glaring at him for a moment, cried in a loud voice: "Hark ye, sirrah! who gave you this cross? What is his name, and where is he?"
That voice, at which so many men had trembled and were to tremble, made the very marrow in Jack's bones quiver. That fierce red face with its fiery eyes seemed to grow before Jack's gaze until the child saw nothing else save that and a dancing haze which framed it. "Hark ye, sirrah!" He heard the words repeated again and again, and his soul melted within him for fear. But he remained dumb.
"Come!" Cromwell said grimly when he had thrice bidden him to speak in vain. "This is what I expected. But I will find a means to open your lips. Pownall, bid one of the guard bring a rope!"
A movement in the room seemed to indicate that the order caused emotion of some kind, and Captain Hodgson, a bluff North-countryman, high in the General's favor, stepped forward as if to interpose. But apparently he thought better of it, and in a moment a rope was brought. "Now," Cromwell thundered, "will you speak?"
But Jack, whose white face and straining eyes, as he stood alone in the middle of the kitchen, a child among men, were pitiful to behold, remained silent. Only one idea, and that was rather an instinct than a conscious determination, remained with him--to shelter Frank.
"Tie him up!" said Cromwell, in a hard voice. "Sergeant," he continued, "take two files and the boy outside, and if he does not speak in five minutes, string him up." No one spoke or interposed, and the child, half led and half carried by the burly sergeant, had almost reached the threshold, when a voice close by exclaimed suddenly: "Enough, you cowards! Shame on you! Let the child go!"
"Who spoke?" Cromwell cried, wheeling round from the map he was scanning.