A Little Wizard Part 11

"I have told you!" the man answered flippantly, though the perspiration stood in beads on his brow, and behind that brave face which he showed the crowd was a human soul sick with fear of that which all men fear. "I am the man you want. The boy is my brother, and I told him what to do. He is a mere baby."

For the speaker was Frank Patten. There was a stir among the officers round the door, but Cromwell remained unmoved. "Where was this fellow taken?" he asked, looking him over critically.

"Between here and Settle, your excellency," Hodgson answered. "The scoutmaster found him loitering on the road and seized him on suspicion."

"He is a zealous man," Cromwell answered. "Let a note of it be made, Pownall. For you, fellow," he continued, addressing the prisoner, "say what you have to say. Your time is short."

"I have only one thing to say," the young man answered coldly--and few among the many who admired his self-control marked the tiny pulse beating madly in his cheek. "There is some gold plate hidden hard by.

My brother knows where it is. It was stolen by that craven hound yonder, and buried by night by that lying shrew there. Perhaps the man who recovers it will have a care of the child until something fall out for him. That is all."

"Wait!" said Cromwell. "Let that man stand out. Is this the man?"

But Gridley the butler saved Frank the trouble of answering. With a moan of terror he flung himself on his knees on the floor, and with tears flowing down his pale, fat face, uttered such abject entreaties for mercy as shamed the very men who heard them. Punishment had indeed fallen on the wretched creature, for while he lay there, now excusing himself and now accusing the woman--who stood by, dark and unrepentant, her face full of impotent spite--he tasted the bitterness of death a dozen times over.

"Faugh!" Cromwell exclaimed at last, spurning him from him with his booted foot; "take him away. Let him run the gauntlet of whatever regiment is first in quarters to-night! And see they lay on roundly, Hodgson. For this lying woman, your wife, man----"

"She is no longer wife of mine!" the Puritan answered, so grimly that more than one shuddered. "She shall cross my threshold once, and never again. She has sinned; let her starve."

General Cromwell shrugged his shoulders and stood a moment in thought.

Then he turned to Patten. "For you," he said harshly, "you are a soldier, and know your sentence. You can have an hour's grace.

Sergeant Joyce, retain four files, and see the sentence carried out.

Or stay, I will reduce it to writing. The boy may be with him."

The voices of the General's staff, as they mounted and rode briskly away at his heels, had long died away, and only the sobbing of the child as he lay in Frank's arms broke the silence of the ill-fated house. The guards left in charge, grave stalwart men, not without bowels of compa.s.sion, had retired outside the door and left the two to pa.s.s these last moments together; with an intimation that when the hour was up they would call their prisoner. All things, even the ray of golden light which presently pierced the window, as if to warn Frank to look his last on the sun, combined to heighten the stillness and peace, if not the solemn resignation, of this last hour. But alas, the approach of death withers life itself. The young man's blood curdled and stood at the thought of it, so that at last the moments slowly pa.s.sing in that silence grew intolerable. An hour? It seemed to him that he had sat with the child in his arms for thrice that time.

When would they come?

He grew so desperate at last that he set the boy down, and with a parting pa.s.sionate embrace hurried to the door; the sooner it was over now, the better. Desperately he opened the door and stepped out into the daylight.

For a moment after he had done so he stood confounded, staring about him with wild eyes. Before him lay the moorland, half in sunshine, half in shadow. Above him the clouds had parted, and the infinite expanse of heaven lay open to his view. But nowhere was a living creature in sight. The troop-horses, whose bits he had heard jingling a few minutes before, were gone; the troopers had melted into thin air!

[Ill.u.s.tration: He bent his head and peered at it.--Page 190.]

He clapped his hand to his forehead, and stood awhile battling to control himself. Was this a trick? If not--and then his eye, travelling dizzily round, lit on a piece of paper which some one had nailed to the outside of the door with a knife. He bent his head, and peered at it, and read:

"_To Sergeant Joyce.--Half an hour after my departure you will let the prisoner, Francis Patten, go free. And this shall be your authority_.

"_Oliver Cromwell, Lieutenant-General_."

THE END.