Still she scarcely dared to hope that the thing was true; that thing which her miraculous escape had suggested to a mind almost unhinged. It took her more than a minute to mount the steps and push the heavy door open, and satisfy herself that in the outer room at least all was as she had left it. A spark of fire still glowed on the hearth; she groped her way to it, and blew it into a flame; and with shaking hands she lit a spill of wood and waved it above her head, then held it.
Yes, here all was as she had left it. But in the farther room—the room? What would she find there? She stared at the door and dared not open it; then with a desperate hand tore it open, and stood on the threshold.
Yes, and here! Here, too, all was as she had left it. She waved the little brand above her head heedless of the sparks, waved it until it flamed high and cast a light into every corner. But the searcher's eyes sought only one thing, saw only one thing, and that was the mask of brickwork that blocked the great window.
It was untouched! It was untouched! She had hoped as much for the last five minutes; for everything, the closed door, the unchanged room had pointed to it. Yet now that she was assured of it, and knew for certain that she had not done the thing—that guilty as she had been in will, not one life lost that night lay at her door, not one outrage, she fell on her face and wept—wept, though it was the sweetest moment of her life, prayed though she sought nothing but to thank God—prayed and wept with childish cries of gratitude, until the light at her side went out and left her in darkness, and through a rift in the masonry a single star peered in at her.
In Huymonde there was wailing enough that night; ruin and loss, and a broadcasting of lifelong sentences of penury. One fell to the Burgomaster's lot; and had she still aught against him—but she had not—the score was paid. And many prayed, and a few, when morning came, and showed their roofs still standing, gave thanks. But to this woman prostrate through the hours on the floor of the forsaken House on the Wall, all that night was one long prayer and thanksgiving. For she had passed through the fire, the smell of the singeing was on her garments, and yet she was saved.
HUNT, THE OWLER
(1696)
Something more than two centuries ago—and just two years after Queen Mary's death—when William the Third had been eight years on the throne, and the pendulum of public sentiment, accelerated by the brusqueness of his manners and no longer retarded by his consort's good nature, was swinging surely and steadily to the Stuart side, the discovery of a Jacobite plot to assassinate the King on his return from hunting set back the balance with a shock which endured to the end of his reign.
It was the King's habit to go on Saturdays in his coach to Richmond Park, returning to Kensington in the evening; and the scheme, laid bare, was to fall upon him in a narrow lane leading from the river to Turnham Green, where the miry nature of the ground rendered his progress slow. For complicity in this plot nine persons, differing much in rank, from Sir John Fenwick, who had been Colonel of King Charles's Life Guards, to Keyes, a private in the Blues, suffered on the scaffold; and for a time all England rang with it. The informers, Porter and Goodman, were viewed with an abhorrence hardly less than that which the plot itself excited in honest circles; and in this odium a man shared in some small degree, who, though he had not been a party to the plot, had stooped, under the stress of confinement and the fear of death, to give some evidence.