"Oh, but I would like to see you in the boot!" he said. "It would be the finest sight! It would not need a turn of the screw to make you cry out! And mind you," he continued, suddenly seizing my ear in his great hand, and twisting it until I screamed, "in a boot of some kind or other I shall have you--if you play me false! Do yon understand, eh? Do you understand, you sheep in wolf's clothing?"
"Yes!" I cried. "Yes, yes!" He had forced me to my knees, and brought his cruel sneering face close to mine.
"Very well. Then get up--if you have learned your lesson. You have had one proof that I know more than others. Do not seek another. But, umph--where have I seen you before. Master Trembler?"
I said humbly, my spirit quite broken, that I did not know.
"No?" he answered, staring at me with his face puckered up. "Yet somewhere I have. And some day I shall call it to mind. In the meantime--remember that you are my slave, my dog, my turnspit, to fetch or carry, cry or be merry at my will. You will sleep or wake, go or come as I bid you. And so long as you do that--Richard Price, you shall live. But on the day you play me false, or whisper my name to living soul--on that day, or within the week, you will hang! Do you hear, hang, you Erastian dog! Hang, and be carrion: with Ayloffe, and many another good man, that would stint me, and take no warning!"
[CHAPTER XIV]
Alas, the secret subjection into which I fell from that day onwards, to a man who knew neither pity nor scruple--and wielded his power with the greater enjoyment and the less remorse for the piquant contrast it afforded to his position, as a proscribed and hunted traitor, in hiding for his life--exceeded all the anticipations of it which I had entertained. Having his favourite lodging in the rooms opposite mine, he was ready, when the cruel humour seized him, to sally forth and mock and torment me; while the privacy of his movements and the number of his disguises (whence it arose that I never knew until I saw him whether he was there or not) kept me in a state of suspense and misery well nigh intolerable. Yet such was the spell of fear under which he had contrived to lay me--he being a violent and dangerous man and I no soldier--and so crafty were the means, no less than the art, by which he gradually wound a chain about me, that in spite of my hatred I found resistance vain; and for a long time, and until a deus ex machinâ, as the ancients say, appeared on the scene, saw no resource but to bear the yoke and do his bidding.
He had one principal mode of strengthening his hold upon me; which stood the higher in his favour, as besides effecting that object and rendering me serviceable, it amused him with the spectacle of my alarms. This consisted in the employing me in his treasonable designs: as by sending me with letters and messages to Sam's Coffeehouse, or to the Dog in Drury Lane, or to more private places where the Jacobites congregated; by making me a go-between to arrange meetings with those of his kidney who dared not stir abroad in daylight, and came and went between London and the coast of France under cover of night; or lastly, by using me to drop treasonable papers in the streets, or fetch the same from the secret press, in a court off St. James's, where they were printed.
He took especial delight in imposing this last task upon me, and in depicting, when I returned fresh from performing it, the penalties to which I had rendered myself liable. It may occur to some that when I passed through the streets with such papers in my hands I had an easy way out of my troubles; and could at any moment by conveying the letters to the Secretary's office procure the tyrant's arrest, and my own freedom. But besides the fact that his frequent change of lodging, his excellent information, and the legion of spies who served him, rendered it doubtful whether with the best will in the world the messengers would find him where I had left him, he frequently boasted--and the boast, if unfounded, added to my distrust of all with whom I came into contact--that the very tipsters and officers were in his pay, and that Cutts himself dared not arrest him! Besides, I more than suspected that often the letters he gave me were blank, and the errands harmless: and that the one and the other were feigned only for the purpose of trying me, or out of pure cruelty--to the end that when I returned he might describe with gusto the process of hanging, drawing, and quartering, and gloat over the horror with which I listened to his relation; a practice which he carried to such an extent as more than once to reduce me to tears of rage and anguish.
Such was my life at home, where if my tyrant was not always at my elbow I was every hour obnoxious to his appearance; for early in our connection he forbade me to lock my door. Abroad I was scarcely more easy, seeing that, besides an impression I had that wherever I went I was dogged, there was scarcely an item of news which it fell to my lot to record that did not throw me into a panic. One day it would be Mr. Bear arrested on a charge of high treason, and in possession of I knew not what compromising letters: another, the suicide in the Temple of a gentleman to whom I myself had a week earlier taken a letter, and who had in my presence let fall expressions which led me to think him in the same evil case with me. Another day it would be an announcement that the Government had discovered a new Conspiracy; or that letters going for France had been seized in Romney Marshes; or that the Lancashire witnesses were speaking more candidly; or that Dr. Oates had been taken up and held to bail for a misdemeanour. All these and many other rumours punished me in turn; and filling my mind with the keenest apprehensions, must in a short time have rendered my life intolerable.