Here Barnaby looked about him carefully to make sure that no one was observing us, and then, finding that no one was within sight, he turned to the right down a grassy lane between hedges.
''Tis this way that I brought him,' he said. 'Poor old Dad! he can now move neither hand nor foot; and his legs will no more be any use to him. Yet he seemed in no pain, though the jolting of the cart must have shaken him more than a bit.'
The lane led into a field, and that field into another and a smaller one, with a plantation of larches on two sides and a brook shaded with alders on a third side. In one corner was a linney, with a thatched roof supported on wooden pillars in front and closed in at back and sides. It was such a meadow as is used for the pasture of cattle and the keeping of a bull.
At the entrance of this meadow Barnaby stopped and looked about him with approbation.
'Here,' he said slowly, 'is a hiding-place fit for King Monmouth himself. A road unfrequented; the rustics all gone off to the wars—though now, I doubt not, having had their bellyfull of fighting. I suppose there were once cattle in the meadow, but they are either driven away by the clubmen for safety, or they have been stolen by the gipsies. No troopers will this day come prying along this road, or if they do search the wood, which is unlikely, they will not look in the linney; here can we be snug until we make up our minds what course is best.'
'Barnaby,' I said, 'take us to my father without more speech.'
'I have laid him,' he went on, 'upon the bare ground in the linney; but it is soft and dry lying, and the air is warm, though last night it rained and was cold. He looks happy, mother, and I doubt if he hath any feeling left in his limbs. Once I saw a man shot in the backbone and never move afterwards, but he lived for a bit. Here he is.'
Alas! lying motionless on his back, his head bare, his white hair lying over his face, his eyes closed, his cheek white, and no sign of life in him except that his breast gently heaved, was my father. Then certain words which he had uttered came back to my memory. 'What matters the end,' were the words he said, 'if I have freedom of speech for a single day?'
He had enjoyed that freedom for three weeks.
My mother threw herself on her knees beside him and raised his head.