Cardigan Part 93

"Oh, this is good, this is good!" muttered Mount, in ecstasy, spreading out his arms as though to take the world to his sick heart once more. "Smell the air, lad! Do you smell it? G.o.d! How sweet is this wind in my throat!"

The girl shivered; her damp, dishevelled hair blew in her face. She laid one shaking hand on Mount's wet sleeve, then the other, and bowed her head on them, sobbing convulsively.

Mount bent and kissed her.

"I swear I will use you kindly, child," he said, soberly. "Come, la.s.s, gay! gay! What care we for a brace o' dead turnkeys? Lord, how the world will laugh at Billy Bishop when they hear I stole his girl, along with the prison keys! Laugh with me, la.s.s! I mean honestly and kindly by you; I'm fit for a rope at the gibbet's top if I use you ill!"

"Would--would you truly wed me?" she stammered, raising her white face to his.

He swore roundly that he would wed her and end his days in serving her on his marrow-bones for grat.i.tude.

And, as he made his vow, a startling change pa.s.sed over her face; she laughed, turned her bright, feverish eyes on us with a reckless toss of her head, and drew the poison-flask from her bosom.

"You think," she said, "that we no longer need this little friend to sorrow? You are wrong!"

And, ere Mount or I could move, she raised the tiny flask betwixt forefinger and thumb, and dropped the dark scarlet contents between her teeth.

"I drink to your freedom, Jack," she said, blindly, reeling into Mount's arms. "Your--freedom--Jack," she gasped, smiling; "my father drank to it--in ale. He lies dead on the floor of it. All this--for--for your freedom, Jack!"

Mount was kneeling in the mud; she lay in his arms, the sleet pattering on her upturned face.

"For your freedom," she murmured, drowsily--"a maid must burn in h.e.l.l for that. I burn, I burn! Oh, the fire in me, Jack!"

Her body writhed and twisted; her great bright eyes never left his.

Presently she lay still. A moment later the prison bell broke out wildly through the storm, and a gunshot rang from the north guard-house.

We placed the dead child under a tree in the new gra.s.s, and covered her face with willow branches, all silky with the young buds of April.

Then, bending almost double, we ran south along the prison wall, turning west as the wall turned, and presently came to the wooden fence of King's Chapel.

Mount gained the top of the fence from my shoulders, and drew me up.

Then we dropped.

There were lights moving in Governor's Alley and the mews; through the sleet great snow-flakes whirled into the slush of the filthy street.

The prison bell rang frantically behind us.

"It's the alarm, Jack!" I whispered.

He gave me a dull look, then shivered in his wet buckskins.

"She can't lie out there in the sleet," he muttered, blood-shot eyes roving restlessly in the darkness. "I am going back!"

"For G.o.d's sake, don't do that!" I begged; but he cursed me and brushed me aside.

Back over the wall he dropped. I started to follow, but he shoved me roughly and bade me mind my own concerns.

I leaned against the foot of the wall; the sleet pelted me; I bared my throat to it. After a while I heard Mount's labouring breath on the other side of the wall, and I climbed up to aid him.

He held the dead child in his arms; I took the body from him; he climbed over, and received it again, bearing it as though it were but a snow-flake's weight in his great arms.

"Go you and find a pick and spade in the mews, yonder," he said. There was a fixed stare in his eyes that alarmed me. "d.a.m.n you," he said, "it is the least we can do!"

"Jack," I said, "we cannot stay here to be taken again! You cannot bury her now; the ground is frosted; people will hear us!"

He glared at me, then swung his heavy head right and left. The next moment he started running through the storm, cradling the burden in his arms. I followed, not knowing what he meant to do.

At the King's Chapel gate he turned in along a dim gravel path, hedged with dripping box. Around us lay the headstones of the dead, with here and there a heavy tomb looming up in the storm around us.

For a moment he halted, peering about him. A square white sepulchre surmounted a mound on his right; he motioned me to hold the dead child and stepped forward, laying his hands on the slab. Then, with a heave of his powerful back, he lifted the huge stone, laying open the shadowy sepulchre below.

Again he took the dead in his arms, wiped the rain-drops from the face, laid the limp form in the sepulchre, and smoothed the clothing.

Together we replaced the slab; it taxed all my strength to lift one end of it. The bell of the prison clanged frantically.

Mount stood back, breathing heavily, hands hanging. I waited in silence.

"What a little thing she was!" he muttered; "what a child--to--do--that! Do you think she will lie easy there?"

"Yes," I said.

At the sound of my voice Mount roused and turned sharply to me.

"The thief and the thief-taker's daughter!" he whispered, with a ghastly laugh. "They'll make a book of it--I warrant you!--and hawk it for a penny in Boston town!"

He touched the slab, all glistening with sleet, gripped the edge of the sepulchre, turned, and shook his fist at the prison. Then, quietly pa.s.sing his arm through mine, he led the way out of the chapel yard, guiding me between the soaking hedges to the iron gate, and so out into the black alley.

Almost immediately a man shouted: "Stop thief! Turn out the guard!"

and a soldier, in the shadow of the wall, fired at us.

Mount glared at him stupidly, hands dangling; the soldier ran up to him and presented his bayonet, calling on us to give up.

The sound of his voice appeared to rouse Mount to fury; he seized the musket, wrenched it from the soldier, and beat him into the mud. Then swinging the weapon by the barrel, he knocked down two bailiffs who were closing in on us, and started after another, with a yell of rage.

"Jack! Jack!" I cried. "Are you mad? Follow me; quick! We can't stay here, you great fool!"

He heard me, halted, hurled the musket after his flying foe, and broke out into a harsh laugh.

"Come on, lad," he said. "I did but mean to warm my blood and purge it of the prison rust. Truly I think we must make for the purlieus till they lose our trail!"

Through reeking lanes, foul alleys, and muddy mews where gaunt dogs battled over sc.r.a.ps with gaunter children, we ran, or lurked to listen, shunning the bleared lanthorn-light, shining through the storm.

At times the horror of that flight even now appalls me--that flight through the starving town o' Boston, where old women mouthed at us with their scurvy-cankered gums; where, slinking along dead walls, we stumbled over old men patiently picking with skinny fingers in the rotted herbage for roots to stay their starved stomachs' craving; where, in doorways, naked children, with bellies bloated by famine, stared at us out of hollow eyes.

The town appeared to be alive with British soldiery; mounted pickets roved through the streets; parties of officers pa.s.sed continually; squad after squad of marines crossed our path, and at first we thought that all this show of troops was due to us and our escape, the hour being late for so many troops to be abroad.

"There's something else in the wind," muttered Mount, as we hid in Belcher's Lane to avoid a party of dragoons; "all this pother is never made on our account. There's deviltry a-brewing, lad. We had best start for the 'Wild Goose.'"

Through the mud of Cow Lane, Flounder Mews, and Battery Marsh we crept on, on, along back roads and shiny lanes, then, alarmed by a galloping dragoon, we threaded the marshy alleys to the north, from Hanc.o.c.k's Wharf clear around the peninsula to Back Street and Link Alley.

From thence through Hog Alley and Frog Lane south towards the Neck, only to be frightened north once more by the mad gallop of dragoons, and so to hide in Mackerel Lane.