Romance

pirate, and then talk.'

I was the one they were going to hang, to consolidate the bond with the old island. The cement wanted a little blood in the mixing. Damn them! I was going to make a fight; they had torn me from Seraphina, to fulfill their own accursed ends. I felt myself grow harsh and strong, as a tree feels itself grow gnarled by winter storms. I said to the turnkey again and again:

'Man, I will promise you a thousand pounds or a pension for life, if you will get a letter through to my mother or Squire Rooksby of Horton.'

He said he daren't do it; enough was known of him to hang him if he gave offence. His flabby fingers trembled, and his eyes grew large with successive shocks of cupidity. He became afraid of coming near me; of the strain of the temptation. On the next day he did not speak a word, nor the next, nor the next. I began to grow horribly afraid of being hung. The day before the trial arrived. Towards noon he flung the door open.

'Here's paper, here's pens,' he said. 'You can prepare your defence. You may write letters. Oh, hell! why did not they let it come sooner, I'd have had your thousand pounds. I'll run a letter down to your people fast as the devil could take it. I know a man, a gentleman of the road. For twenty pun promised, split between us, he'll travel faster'n Turpin did to York.' He was waving a large sheet of newspaper agitatedly.

'What does it mean?' I asked. My head was whirling.

'Radical papers got a-holt of it,' he said. 'Trust them for nosing out. And the Government's answering them. They say you're going to suffer for your crimes. Hark to this... um, um... 'The wretched felon now in Newgate will incur the just penalty...' Then they slaps the West Indies in the face. 'When the planters threaten to recur to some other power for protection, they, of course, believe that the loss of the colonies would be severely felt. But...''

'The Lion's home,' I said.

It burst upon me that she was—that she must be. Williams—or Sebright—he was the man, had been speaking up for me. Or Seraphina had been to the Spanish ambassador.

She was back; I should see her. I started up.

'The Lion's home,' I repeated.

The turnkey snarled, 'She was posted as overdue three days ago.'

I couldn't believe it was true.

'I saw it in the papers,' he grumbled on. 'I dursn't tell you.' He continued violently, 'Blow my dickey. It would make a cat sick.'

My sudden exaltation, my sudden despair, gave way to indifference.

'Oh, coming, coming!' he shouted, in answer to an immense bellowing cry that loomed down the passage without.

I heard him grumble, 'Of course, of course. I shan't make a penny.' Then he caught hold of my arm. 'Here, come along, someone to see you in the press-yard.'

He pulled me along the noisome, black warren of passages, slamming the inner door viciously behind him.

The press-yard—the exercising ground for the condemned—was empty; the last batch had gone out, my batch would be the next to come in, the turnkey said suddenly. It was a well of a place, high black walls going up into the desolate, weeping sky, and quite tiny. At one end was a sort of slit in the wall, closed with tall, immense windows. From there a faint sort of rabbit's squeak was going up through the immense roll and rumble of traffic on the other side of the wall. The turnkey pushed me towards it.

'Go on,' he said. 'I'll not listen; I ought to. But, curse me, I'm not a bad sort,' he added gloomily; 'I dare say you'll make it worth my while.'

I went and peered through the bars at a faint object pressed against other bars in just another slit across a black passage.

'What, Jackie, boy; what, Jackie?' Blinking his eyes, as if the dim light were too strong for them, a thin, bent man stood there in a brilliant new court coat. His face was meagre in the extreme, the nose and cheekbones polished and transparent like a bigaroon cherry. A thin tuft of reddish hair was brushed back from his high, shining forehead. It was my father. He exclaimed:

'What, Jackie, boy! How old you look!' then waved his arm towards me. 'In trouble?' he said. 'You in trouble?'

He rubbed his thin hands together, and looked round the place with a cultured man's air of disgust. I said, 'Father!' and he suddenly began to talk very fast and agitatedly of what he had been doing for me. My mother, he said, was crippled with rheumatism, and Rooksby and Veronica on the preceding Thursday had set sail for Jamaica. He had read to my mother, beside her bed, the newspaper containing an account of my case; and she had given him money, and he had started with violent haste for London. The haste and the rush were still dazing him. He had lived down there in the farmhouse beneath the downs, with the stackyards under his eyes, with his books of verse and his few prints on the wall———My God, how it all came back to me.

In his disjointed speeches, I could see how exactly the same it all remained. The same old surly man with a squint had driven him along the muddy roads in the same ancient gig, past the bare elms, to meet the coach. And my father had never been in London since he had walked the streets with the Prince Regent's friends.

Whilst he talked to me there, lines of verse kept coming to his lips; and, after the habitual pleasure of the apt quotation, he felt acutely shocked at the inappropriateness of the place, the press-yard, with the dim light weeping downwards between immensely high walls, and the desultory snowflakes that dropped between us. And he had tried so hard, in his emergency, to be practical. When he had reached London, before even attempting to see me, he had run from minister to minister trying to influence them in my favour—and he reached me in Newgate with nothing at all effected.

I seemed to know him then, so intimately, so much better than anything else in the world.

He began, 'I had my idea in the up-coach last night. I thought, 'A very great personage was indebted to me in the old days (more indebted than you are aware of, Johnnie). I will intercede with him.' That was why my first step was to my old tailor's in Conduit Street. Because... what is fit for a farm for a palace were low.' He stopped, reflected, then said, 'What is fit for the farm for the palace were low.'