“Then I resign the chaplaincy I hold, sir.”
“Resign and be d——d!” the naval captain answered. The day had cruelly tried his temper.
“Your words to me,” Mr. Sutton retorted furiously, “and your conduct to her are of a piece!” And white with passion, his limbs trembling with excitement, he strode to the door. He halted on the threshold, bowed low, and went out.
CHAPTER XXIII
IN KENDAL GAOL
Bishop, in his corner of the chaise, made his burly person as small as he could. He tried his best to hide his brown tops and square-toed boots. In her corner Henrietta sat upright, staring rigidly before her. For just one moment, as she passed from the house to the carriage, under a score of staring eyes, a scarlet flush had risen to her very hair, and she had shrunk back. But the colour had faded as quickly as it had risen; she had restrained herself, and taken her seat. And now the screes of Bow Fell, flecked with snow, were not more cold and hard than her face as she gazed at the postilion’s moving back and saw it not. She knew that she was down now without hope of rising; that, the prison doors once closed on her, their shadow would rest on her always. And her heart was numbed by despair. The burning sense of injustice, of unfairness, which sears and hardens the human heart more quickly and more completely than any other emotion, would awaken presently. But for the time she sat stunned and hopeless; dazed and confounded by the astonishing thing which had happened to her. To be sent to prison! To be sent to herd—she remembered his very words—with such vile creatures as prisons hold! To be at the beck and call of such a man as this who sat beside her. To have to obey; and to belong no longer to herself, but to others! As she thought of all this, and of the ordeal before her, fraught with humiliations yet unknown, a hunted look grew in her eyes, and for a few minutes she glanced wildly first out of this window, then out of that. To prison! She was going to prison!
Fortunately her native courage came to her aid in her extremity. And Bishop, who was not blind to her emotion, spoke.
“Don’t you be over-frightened, miss,” he said soothingly. “There’s naught to be scared about. I’ll speak to them, and they’ll treat you well. Not that a gaol is a comfortable place,” he continued, remembering his duty to his employer; “and if you could see your way to speaking—even now, miss—I’d take it on me to turn the horses.”
“I have nothing to say,” she answered, with a shudder and an effort—for her throat was dry. But the mere act of speaking broke the spell and relieved her of some of her fears.
“It’s the little boy I’m thinking of,” Bishop continued in a tone of apology. “Captain Clyne thinks the world of him. The world of him! But, lord, miss!” abruptly changing his tone, as his eyes alighted on her wrist, “what have you done to your arm?”
She hid her wrist quickly, and with her face averted said that it was nothing, nothing.