"Go!" she answered, in the same low tone. "Go! Or I will bring your death to you! And you will die! As you have lived, foul, noisome, corrupt, you will die! In eight days you will die--if you come one step nearer!"
She took a step forward herself. The man turned and fled.
CHAPTER XIX
[LADY BETTY'S FATE]
Lady Betty had left the house on the hill a mile behind, her breath came in heavy gasps, her heart seemed to be bursting through her bodice; still she panted bravely along the road that stretched before her, white under the moonbeams. Sophia had bidden her run, the moment the man's back was turned. "Give the alarm, get help," she had whispered as she thrust the diamonds into the child's hand; and acting on that instinct of obedience, prompt and unquestioning, which the imminence of peril teaches, Betty had fled on the word. She had slipped behind the man's back, passed between the houses, and escaped into the open, unseen, as she fancied.
For a time she had sped along the road, looking this way and that, expecting at each turn to discover a house, a light, the help she sought. At length, coming on none of these, she began to suspect the truth, and that Sophia had saved her at her own cost; and she paused and turned, and even in her distraction made as if she would go back. But in the end, with a sob of grief, she hurried on, seeing in this their only chance.
At length her strength began to fail. Presently she could go no farther, and with a cry of anguish came to a stand in a dark part of the road. She was alone, in an unknown country, with the night before her, with the sounds of the night round her; and commonly she was afraid of the night. But now all the child's thought was for Sophia; her heart was breaking for her friend. And by-and-by she pressed on again, her breath fluttering between sobs and exhaustion. She turned a corner--and oh, sweet, she saw a light before her!
She struggled towards it. The spark grew larger and larger; finally it became the open doorway of an alehouse, from which the company were departing. The goodman and two or three topers were on their feet having a last crack, the goodwife from her bed above was demanding lustily why they lingered, when the girl, breathless and dishevelled, her hair hanging about her face, appeared on the threshold. For a moment she could not speak; her face was white, her eyes stared wildly. The men fell back from her, as a flock of sheep crowd away from the dog.
"What beest 'ee?" the landlord bleated faintly. "Lord save us and help us! Be 'ee mortal?"
"Help!" she muttered, as she leaned almost swooning, against the doorpost. "Help! Come quickly! They'll--they'll murder her--if you don't!" And she stretched out her hands to them.