“Dang me!” cried the driver, greatly excited, “but they do mean business! It’s in knee in neck with ’em! Never thought it would come to this. And who is’t they’ve got, Miss?”
Certainly there was something out of the common on foot. Moving to meet the gig, and filling the road from ditch to ditch, appeared a disorderly crowd of two or three hundred persons. Cheering, hooting, and brandishing sticks, they came on at something between a walk and a run, although in the heart of the mass there was a something that now and again checked the movement, and once brought it to a stand. When this happened the crowd eddied and flowed about the object in its centre and presently swept on again with the same hooting and laughter.
But in the laughter, as in the hooting, there was, after each of these pauses, a more savage note.
“What is it?” Mary cried, as the driver, scared by the sight, pulled up his horse. “What is it?”
“D—n me,” the man replied, forgetting his manners, “if I don’t think it’s Ben Bosham they’ve got! It is Ben! And they’re for ducking him! It’s mortal deep by the bridge there, and s’help me, if it’s not ten to one they drown him!”
“Ben Bosham?” Mary repeated. Then she recalled the name. She remembered what Mrs. Toft had said of him—that the man had a wife and would bring her to ruin. The crowd was not fifty yards from them now and was still coming on. To the left a track ran down to the towing-path and the canal, and already the leaders of the mob were swerving in that direction. As they did so—and were once more checked for a moment—Mary espied among them a man’s bald head twisting this way and that, as he strove to escape. The man was struggling desperately, his clothes almost torn from his back, but he was helpless in the hands of a knot of stout fellows, and after a brief resistance he was hauled forcibly on. A hundred jeering voices rose about him, and a something cruel in the sound chilled Mary’s blood. The dreary scene, the sluggish canal, the flat meadows, the rising mist, all pressed on her mind and deepened the note of tragedy.
But on that she broke the spell. The blood in her spoke. She clutched the driver’s arm and shook it. “Go on!” she cried. “Go on! Drive into them!”
The man hesitated—he saw that the crowd was in no jesting mood. But the old horse felt the twitch on the reins and started, and having the slope with him, trotted gently forward as if the road were empty before him. The crowd waved and shouted, and cursed the driver. But the horse, thinking perhaps that this was some new form of parade, only cocked his ears and ambled on till he reached the foremost. Then a man seized the rein, jerked it, and stopped him.
In a moment Mary sprang down, heedless of the fact that she was one woman among a hundred men. She faced the crowd, her eyes bright with indignation. “Let that man go,” she cried. “Do you hear? Do you want to murder him?” And, advancing a step, she laid her hand on Ben Bosham’s ragged, filthy sleeve—he had been down more than once and been rolled in the mud. “Let him go!” she continued imperiously. “Do you know who I am, you cowards? Let him go!”
“Yah!” shouted the crowd, and drowned her voice and pressed roughly about her, threatened her. One of the foremost asked her what she would do, another cried that she had best make herself scarce! Furious faces surrounded her, fists were shaken at her. But Mary was not daunted. “If you don’t let him go, I shall go to Lord Audley!” she said.