“Is that the way?” said he. “Very well. James II succeeded his brother Charles in 1685. One of his first acts on coming—”
“Oh, we’re long past that,” said two or three of his delighted audience at a breath; “we’ve done to where Monmouth’s head was cut off.”
This was very uncomfortable for the new master. He coloured up, as if he had been guilty of a scandalous misdemeanour, and fumbled nervously with the book, positively dreading to make a fresh attempt. At last, however, he summoned up courage.
“The death of this ill-fated nobleman was followed by a still more terrible measure of retribution against those who had—”
“Please, sir, we can’t do such long words; we don’t know what that means. You’ve got to say it in easy words, not what’s put in the book.”
Jeffreys felt that all the sins of his youth were rising up against him that moment. Nothing that he had ever done seemed just then as bad as this latest delinquency.
“After Monmouth’s death they made it very—(hot, he was going to say, but he pulled himself up in time), they made it very (whatever was the word?)—very awkward for those who had helped him. A cruel judge named Jeffreys—”
That was a finishing stroke! The reader could have sunk through the floor as he saw the sensation which this denunciation of himself caused among his audience. There was not a shadow of doubt in the face of any one of them as to his identity with the ferocious judge in question. What followed he felt was being listened to as a chapter or autobiography, and nothing he could say could now clear his character of the awful stain that rested upon it.
“A cruel judge condemned more than three hundred persons—”
“You forgot to say his name, please, sir,” they put in.