“That, if you like.”
For nearly half a century the old man had found few to oppose him; and now by good luck he had not time to reply. A man running out of the darkness in the direction of Unity Street—the open space was full of moving groups, of alarms and confusion—caught sight of Vaughan’s face, checked himself and addressed him.
“Mr. Vaughan!” he said. “They are coming! They are making for the Palace! The Bishop must be got away, if he’s not gone! I am fetching the Colonel! The Mayor is following with all he can get together. If you will give warning at the Palace, there will be time for his lordship to escape.”
“Right!” Vaughan cried, glad to leave his company. And he started without the loss of a moment. Even so, he had not gone twenty paces down the Green before the head of the mob entered it from St. Augustine’s, and passed, with hoarse shouts, along the south side, towards the ancient Archway which led to the Lower Green. It was a question whether he or they reached the Archway first; but he won the race by a score of yards.
The view from the Lower Green, which embraced the burning gaol, as well as all Queen’s Square and the Floating Basin that islanded it, had drawn together a number of gazers. These impeded Vaughan’s progress, but he got through them at last, and as the mob burst into the Lower Green he entered the paved passage leading to the Precincts, hurried along it, turned the dark elbow near the inner end, and halted before the high gates which shut off the Cloisters. The Palace door was in the innermost or southeast corner of the Cloisters.
It was very dark at the end of the passage; and fortunately! For the gates were fast closed, and before he could, groping, find the knocker, the rabble had entered the passage behind him and cut off his retreat. The high wall which rose on either side made escape impossible. Nor was this all. As he awoke to the trap in which he had placed himself, a voice at his elbow muttered, “My God, we shall be murdered!” And he learned that Sir Robert had followed him.
He had no time to remonstrate, nor thought of remonstrance. “Stand flat against the wall!” he muttered, his fingers closing upon the staff in his pocket. “It is our only chance!”
He had basely spoken before the leaders of the mob swept round the elbow. They had one light, a flare borne above them, which shone on their tarpaulins and white smocks, and on the huge ship-hammers they carried. There was a single moment of great peril, and instinctively Vaughan stepped before the older man. He could not have made a happier movement, for it seemed—to the crowd who caught a glimpse of the two and took them for some of their own party—as if he advanced against the gates along with their leaders.
The peril indeed, or the worst of it, was over the moment they fell into the ranks. “Hammers to the front!” was the cry. And Sir Robert and Vaughan were thrust back into the second line, that those who wielded the hammers might have room. Vaughan tipped his hat over his face, and the villains who pressed upon the two and jostled them, and whose cries of “Burn him out! Burn the old devil out!” were dictated by greed rather than by hate, were too full of the work in hand to regard their neighbours closely. In three or four minutes—long minutes they seemed to the two inclosed in that unsavoury company—the bars gave way, the gates were thrown open, and Vaughan and Sir Robert, hardly keeping their feet in the rush, were borne into the Cloisters.
The rabble, with cries of triumph, raced across the dark court to the Palace door and began to use their hammers on that. Vaughan hoped that the Bishop had had warning—as a fact he had escaped some hours earlier. At any rate he and his companion could do no more, and under cover of the darkness they retreated to the porch of a smaller house which opened on the Cloisters. Here they were safe for the time; and, his heart opened and his tongue loosed by the danger through which they had passed, he turned to his companion and remonstrated with him.