Part 31

When the tumult was at its height, came her ladyship at last into the room, where Colonel Penruddock stood watching the operations of his men. She stood in the doorway leaning upon her ebony cane, her faded eyes considering the gaunt soldier with reproachful question.

“Sir,” she asked him with gentle irony, masking her agitation, “has my house been given over to pillage?”

He bowed, doffing his plumed hat with an almost excessive courtesy.

“To search, madame,” he corrected her. And added: “In the King's name.”

“The King,” she answered, “may give you authority to search my house, but not to plunder it. Your men are robbing and destroying.”

He shrugged. It was the way of soldiers. Fine manners, he suggested, were not to be expected of their kind. And he harangued her upon the wrong she had done in harbouring rebels and giving entertainment to the King's enemies.

“That is not true,” said she. “I know of no King's enemies.”

He smiled darkly upon her from his great height. She was so frail a body and so old that surely it was not worth a man's while to sacrifice her on the altar of revenge. But not so thought Colonel Penruddock. Therefore he smiled.

“Two of them, a snivelling Jack Presbyter named Hicks and a rascal named Dunne, are taken already. Pray, madame, be so free and ingenuous with me aye, and so kind to yourself--as if there be any other person concealed in your house--and I am sure there is somebody else--to deliver him up, and you shall come to no further trouble.”

She looked up at him, and returned him smile for smile.

“I know nothing,” she said, “of what you tell me, or of what you ask.”

His countenance hardened.

“Then, mistress, the search must go on.”

But a shout from the adjoining room announced that it was at an end. Nelthorp had been discovered and dragged from the chimney into which he had crept.

Almost exactly a month later--on August 27th the Lady Alice Lisle was brought to the bar of the court-house at Winchester upon a charge of high treason.

The indictment ran that secretly, wickedly, and traitorously she did entertain, conceal, comfort, uphold, and maintain John Hicks, knowing him to be a false traitor, against the duty of her allegiance and against the peace of “our sovereign lord the King that now is.”

Demurely dressed in grey, the little white-haired lady calmly faced the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and the four judges of oyer and terminer who sat with him, and confidently made her plea of “Not Guilty.”

It was inconceivable that Christian men should deal harshly with her for a technical offence amounting to an act of Christian charity. And the judge, sitting there in his robe of scarlet reversed with ermine, looked a gentle, kindly man; his handsome, oval, youthful face--Jeffreys was in his thirty-sixth year--set in the heavy black periwig, was so pale that the mouth made a vivid line of scarlet; and the eyes that now surveyed her were large and liquid and compassionate, as it seemed to her.

She was not to know that the pallor which gave him so interesting an air, and the dark stains which lent his eyes that gentle wistfulness, were the advertisements at once of the debauch that had kept him from his bed until after two o'clock that morning and of the inexorable disease that slowly gnawed away his life and enraged him out of all humanity.

And the confidence his gentle countenance inspired was confirmed by the first words he had occasion to address to her. She had interrupted counsel to the Crown when, in his opening address to the jury--composed of some of the most considerable gentlemen of Hampshire--he seemed to imply that she had been in sympathy with Monmouth's cause. She was, of course, without counsel, and must look herself to her defence.

“My lord,” she cried, “I abhorred that rebellion as much as any woman in the world!”

Jeffreys leaned forward with a restraining gesture.

“Look you, Mrs. Lisle,” he admonished her sweetly, “because we must observe the common and usual methods of trial in your case I must interrupt you now.” And upon that he promised that she should be fully heard in her own defence at the proper time, and that himself he would instruct her in the forms of law to her advantage. He reassured her by reverent allusions to the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, in whose sight they stood, that she should have justice. “And as to what you say concerning yourself,” he concluded, “I pray God with all my heart you may be innocent.”

He was benign and reassuring. But she had the first taste of his true quality in the examination of Dunne--a most unwilling witness.

Reluctantly, under the pressure put upon him, did Dunne yield up the tale of how he had conducted the two absconders to my lady's house with her consent, and it was sought to prove that she was aware of their connection with the rebellion. The stubbornly evasive Dunne was asked at last:

“Do you believe that she knew Mr. Hicks before?”

He returned the answer that already he had returned to many questions of the sort.

“I cannot tell truly.”