“Be you one of the fam’ly, sir?”

“No,” said Bertie, and then was silent in some confusion, for he bethought him that, without any shoes on, he might also be arrested at the lodge gates.

“I thought as not, ’cos you’re barefoot,” said the brown-cheeked boy, with a little contempt supplying the place of courage. “Dunno who you be, sir, but seems to I as you’ve no call to preach to me: you be a-trespassin’ too.”

Bertie colored.

“I am not doing any harm,” he said, with dignity; “you are: you have been stealing. If you are not really a wicked boy, you will take the pheasant straight to that gentleman, and beg him to forgive you, and I dare say he will give you work.”

“There’s no work for my dad’s son,” said the little poacher, half sadly, half sullenly: “the keepers are all agen us: ’tis as much as mother and me and Susie can do to git a bit o’ bread.”

“What work can you do?”

“I can make the gins,” said the little sinner, touching the trap with pride. “Mostwhiles, I never comes out o’ daylight; but all the forenoon Susie was going off her head, want o’ summat t’ eat.”

“I’m sorry for Susie and you,” said the little Earl, with sympathy. “But indeed, indeed, nothing can excuse a theft, or make God——”

“The keepers!” yelled the boy, with a scream like a hare’s, and he dashed head-foremost into the bushes, casting on to Bertie’s lap the gin and the dead bird. Bertie was so surprised that he sat perfectly mute and still: the little boy had disappeared as fast as a rabbit bolts at sight of a ferret. Two grim big men with dogs and guns burst through the hawthorn, and one of them seized the little Earl with no gentle hand.

“You little blackguard! you’ll smart for this,” yelled the big man. “Treadmill and birch rod, or I’m a Dutchman.”

Bertie was so surprised, still, that he was silent. Then, with his little air of innocent majesty, he said, simply, “You are mistaken: I did not kill the bird.”

Now, if Bertie had had his usual nicety of apparel, or if the keeper had not been in a fuming fury, the latter would have easily seen that he had accused and apprehended a little gentleman. But no one in a violent rage ever has much sense or sight left to aid him, and Big George, as this keeper was called, did not notice that his dogs were smelling in a friendly way at his prisoner, but only saw that he had to do with a pale-faced lad without shoes, and very untidy and dusty-looking, who had snares and a snared pheasant at his feet.

Before Bertie had even seen him take a bit of cord out of his pocket, he had tied the little Earl’s hands behind him, picked up the pheasant and the trap, and given some directions to his companion. The real culprit was already a quarter of a mile off, burrowing safely in the earth of an old fox killed in February,—a hiding-place with which he was very familiar.

Bertie, meanwhile, was quite silent. He was thinking to himself, “If I tell them another boy did it, they will go and look for him, and catch him, and put him in prison; and then his mother and Susie will be so miserable,—more miserable than ever. I think I ought to keep quiet. Jesus never said anything when they buffeted him.”

“Ah, you little gallows-bird, you’ll get it this time!” said the keeper, knotting the string tighter about his wrists, and speaking as if he had had the little Earl very often in such custody.

“You are a very rude man,” said Bertie, with the angry color in his cheeks; but Big George heeded him not, being engaged in swearing at one of his dogs,—a young one, who was trotting after a rabbit.

“I know who this youngster is, Bob,” he said to his companion: “he’s the Radley shaver over from Blackgang.”

Bertie wondered who the Radley shaver was that resembled him.

“He has the looks on him,” said the other, prudently.

“Sir Henry’s dining at Chigwell to-night, and he’ll have started afore we get there,” continued Big George. “Go you on through spinney far as Edge Pool, and I’ll take and lock this here Radley up till morning. Blast his impudence,—a pheasant! think of the likes of it! A pheasant! If ’t had been a rabbit, ’t had been bad enough.”

Then he shook his little captive vigorously.

Bertie did not say anything. He was not in trepidation for himself, but he was in an agony of fear lest the other boy should be found in the spinney.

“March along afore me,” said Big George, with much savageness. “And if you tries to bolt, I’ll blow your brains out and nail you to a barn-door along o’ the owls.”

The little Earl looked at him with eyes of scorn and horror.

“How dare you touch Athene’s bird?”

“How dare I what, you little saucy blackguard?” thundered Big George, and fetched him a great box on the ears which made Bertie stagger.

“You are a very bad man,” he said, breathlessly. “You are a very mean man. You are big, and so you are cruel: that is very mean indeed.”

“You’ve the gift of the gab, little devil of a Radley,” said the keeper, wrathfully; “but you’ll pipe another tune when you feel the birch and pick oakum.”

Bertie set his teeth tight to keep his words in: he walked on mute.

“You’ve stole some little gemman’s togs as well as my pheasant,” said Big George, surveying him. “Why didn’t you steal a pair of boots when you was about it?”

Bertie was still mute.

“I will not say anything to this bad man,” he thought, “or else he will find out that it was not I.”

The sun had set by this time, leaving only a silvery light above the sea and the downs: the pale long twilight of an English day had come upon the earth.

Bertie was very white, and his heart beat fast, and he was growing very hungry; but he managed to stumble on, though very painfully, for his courage would not let him repine before this savage man, who was mixed up in his mind with Bluebeard, and Thor, and Croquemitaine, and Richard III., and Nero, and all the ogres that he had ever met with in his reading, and who seemed to grow larger and larger and larger as the sky and earth grew darker.

Happily for his shoeless feet, the way lay all over grass-lands and mossy paths; but he limped so that the keeper swore at him many times, and the little Earl felt the desperate resignation of the martyr.

At last they came in sight of the keeper’s cottage, standing on the edge of the preserves,—a thatched and gabled little building, with a light glimmering in its lattice window.

At the sound of Big George’s heavy tread, a woman and some children ran out.

“Lord ha’ mercy! George!” cried the wife. “What scarecrow have you been and got?”

“A Radley boy,” growled George,—“one of the cussed Radley boys at last,—and a pheasant snared took in his very hand!”

“You don’t mean it!” cried his wife; and the small children yelled and jumped. “What’ll be done with him, dad?” cried the eldest of them.

“I’ll put him in fowl-house to-night,” said Big George, “and up he’ll go afore Sir Henry fust thing to-morrow. Clear off, young uns, and let me run him in.”

Bertie looked up in Big George’s face.

“I had nothing to do with killing the bird,” he said, in a firm though a faint voice. “You quite mistake. I am Lord Avillion.”

“Stop your pipe, or I’ll choke yer,” swore Big George, enraged by what he termed the “darned cheek” of a Radley boy; and without more ado he laid hold of the little Earl’s collar and lifted him into the fowl-house, the door of which was held open eagerly by his eldest girl.

There was a great flapping of wings, screeching of hens, and piping of chicks at the interruption, where all the inmates were gone to roost, and one cock set up his usual salutation to the dawn.

“That’s better nor you’ll sleep to-morrow night,” said Big George, as he tumbled Bertie on to a truss of straw that lay there, when he went out himself, slammed the door, and both locked and barred it on the outside.

Bertie fell back on the straw, sobbing bitterly: his feet were cut and bleeding, his whole body ached like one great bruise, and he was sick and faint with hunger. “If the world be as difficult as this to live in,” he thought, “how ever do some people manage to live almost to a hundred years in it?” and to his eight-year-old little soul the prospect of a long life seemed so horrible that he sobbed again at the very thought of it. It was quite dark in the fowl-house; the rustling and fluttering of the poultry all around sounded mysterious and unearthly; the strong, unpleasant smell made him faint, and the pain in his feet grew greater every moment. He did not scream or go into convulsions; he was a brave little man, and proud; but he felt as if the long, lonely night there would kill him.

Half an hour, perhaps, had gone by when a woman’s voice at the little square window said, softly, “Here is bread and water for you, poor boy; and I’ve put some milk and cheese, too, only my man mustn’t know it.”

Bertie with great effort raised himself, and took what was pushed through the tiny window; a mug of milk being lowered to him last by a large red fat hand, on which the light of a candle held without was glowing.

“Thanks very much,” said the little Earl, feebly. “But, madam, I did not kill that bird, and indeed I am Lord Avillion.”

The good woman went within to her lord, and said timidly to him, “George, are you sartin sure that there’s a Radley boy? He do look and speak like a little gemman, and he do say as how he is one.”

Big George called her bad names.

“A barefoot gemman!” he said, with a sneer. “You thunderin’ fool! it’s weazened-faced Vic Radley, as have been in our woods a hundred times if wunce, though never could I slap eyes on him quick enough to pin him.”

The good housewife took up her stocking-mending and said no more. Big George’s arguments were sometimes enforced with the fist, and even with the pewter pot or the poker.

Meanwhile, the little Earl in the hen-house was so hungry that he drank the milk and ate the bread and cheese. Both were harder and rougher things than any he had ever tasted; but he had now that hunger which had made the boy on the stile relish the turnip, and, besides, another incident had occurred to give him relish for the food.

At the moment when he had sat down to drink the milk, there had tumbled out from behind the straw a round black-and-white object, unsteady on its legs, and having a very broad nose and a very woolly coat. The moon had risen by this time, and was shining in through the little square window, and by its beams Bertie could see this thing was a puppy,—a Newfoundland puppy some four months old. He welcomed it with as much rapture as ever Robert Bruce did the spider. It had evidently been awakened from its sleep by the smell of the food. It was a pleasant, companionable, warm and kindly creature; it knocked the bread out of his hand, and thrust its square mouth into his milk, but he shared it willingly, and had a hearty cry over it that did him good.

He did not feel all alone, now that this blundering, toppling, shapeless, amiable baby-dog had found its way to him. He caressed it in his arms and kissed it a great many times, and it responded much more gratefully than the human baby had done in Jim Bracken’s cottage, and finally, despite his bleeding feet and his tired limbs, he fell asleep with his face against the pup’s woolly body.

When he awoke, he could not remember what had happened. He called for Deborah, but no Deborah was there. The moon, now full, was shining still through the queer little dusky place; the figures of the fowls, rolled up in balls of feathers and stuck upon one leg, were all that met his straining eyes. He pulled the puppy closer and closer to him: for the first time in his life he felt really frightened.

“I never touched the pheasant,” he cried, as loud as he could. “I am Lord Avillion! You have no right to keep me here. Let me out! let me out! let me out!”

The fowls woke up, and then cried and cackled and crowed, and the poor pup whined and yelped dolefully, but he got no other answer. Everybody in Big George’s cottage was asleep, except Big George himself, who, with his revolver, his fowling-piece, and a couple of bull-dogs, was gone out again into the woods.

At home, Bertie in his pretty bed, that had belonged to the little Roi de Rome, had always had a soft light burning in a porcelain shade, and his nurse within easy call, and Ralph on the mat by the door. He had never been in the dark before, and he could hear unseen things moving and rustling in the straw, and he felt afraid of the white moonbeams shifting hither and thither and shining on the shape of the big Brahma cock till the great bird looked like a vulture. Once a rat ran swiftly across, and then the fowls shrieked, and Bertie could not help screaming with them; but in a minute or two he felt ashamed of himself, for he thought, “A rat is God’s creature as much as I am; and, as I have not done anything wrong, I do not think they will be allowed to hurt me.”

Nevertheless, the night was very terrible. Without the presence of the puppy, no doubt, the little Earl would have frightened himself into convulsions and delirium; but the pup was so comforting to him, so natural, so positively a thing real and in no wise of the outer world, that Bertie kept down, though with many a sob, the panics of unreasoning terror which assailed him as the moon sailed away past the square loop-hole, and a great darkness seemed to wrap him up in it as though some giant were stifling him in a magic cloak.

The pup had not long been taken from its mother, and had been teased all day by the keeper’s children, and was frightened, and whimpered a good deal, and cuddled itself close to the little Earl, who hugged it and kissed it in paroxysms of loneliness and longing for comfort.

With these long, horrible black hours, all sorts of notions and terrors assailed him; all he had ever read of dungeons, of enchanted castles, of entrapped princes, of Prince Arthur and the Duke of Rothsay, of the prisoner of Chillon and the Iron Mask, of every kind of hero, martyr, and wizard-bewitched captive, crowded into his mind with horrifying clearness, thronging on him with a host of fearful images and memories.

But this was only in his weaker moments. When he clasped the puppy and felt its warm wet tongue lick his hair, he gathered up his courage: after all, he thought, Big George was certainly only a keeper,—not an ogre, or an astrologer, or a tyrant of Athens or of Rome.

So he fell off again, after a long and dreadful waking-time, into a fitful slumber, in which his feet ached and his nerves jumped, and the frightful visions assailed him just as much as when he was awake; and how that ghastly night passed by him, he never knew very well.

When he again opened his eyes there was a dim gray light in the fowl-house, and sharp in his ear was ringing the good-morrow of the Brahma chanticleer.

It was daybreak.

A round red face looked in at the square hole, and the voice of the keeper’s wife said, “Little gemman, Big George will be arter ye come eight o’clock, and ’t ’ll go hard wi’ yer. Say now, yer didn’t snare the bird?”

“No,” said Bertie, languidly, lying full length on the straw; he felt shivery and chilly, and very stiff and very miserable in all ways.

“But yer know who did!” persisted the woman. “Now, jist you tell me, and I’ll make it all square with George, and he’ll let you out, and we’ll gie ye porridge, and we’ll take ye home on the donkey.”

The little Earl was silent.

“Now, drat ye for a obstinate! I can’t abide a obstinate,” said the woman, angrily. “Who did snare the bird? jist say that; ’tis all, and mighty little.”

“I will not say that,” said Bertie; and the woman slammed a wooden door that there was to the loop-hole, and told him he was a mule and a pig, and that she was not going to waste any more words about him; she should let the birds out by the bars. What she called the bars, which were two movable lengths of wood at the bottom of one of the walls, did in point of fact soon slip aside, and the fowls all cackled and strutted and fluttered after their different manners, and bustled through the opening towards the daylight and the scattered corn, the Brahma cock having much ado to squeeze his plumage where his wives had passed.

“The puppy’s hungry,” said Bertie, timidly.

“Drat the puppy!” said the woman outside; and no more compassion was wrung out of her. The little Earl felt very languid, light-headed, and strange; he was faint, and a little feverish.

“Oh, dear, pup! what a night!” he murmured, with a burst of sobbing.

Yet it never occurred to him to purchase his liberty by giving up little guilty Dan.

Some more hours rolled on,—slow, empty, desolate,—filled with the whine of the pup for its mother, and the chirping of unseen martins going in and out of the roof above-head.

“I suppose they mean to starve me to death,” thought Bertie, his thoughts clinging to the Duke of Rothsay’s story.

He heard the tread of Big George on the ground outside, and his deep voice cursing and swearing, and the children running to and fro, and the hens cackling. Then the little Earl remembered that he was born of brave men, and must not be unworthy of them; and he rose, though unsteadily, and tried to pull his disordered dress together, and tried, too, not to look afraid.

He recalled Casabianca on the burning ship: Casabianca had not been so very much older than he.

The door was thrust open violently, and that big grim black man looked in. “Come, varmint!” he cried out; “come out and get your merits: birch and bread-and-water and Scripture-readin’ for a good month, I’ll go bail; and ’t ’ud be a year if I wur the beak.”

Then Bertie, on his little shaky shivering limbs, walked quite haughtily towards him and the open air, the puppy waddling after him. “You should not be so very rough and rude,” he said: “I will go with you. But the puppy wants some milk.”

Big George’s only answer was to clutch wildly at Bertie’s clothes and hurl him anyhow, head first, into a little pony-cart that stood ready. “Such tarnation cheek I never seed,” he swore; “but all them Radley imps are as like one to t’ other as so many ribston-pippins,—all the gift o’ the gab and tallow-faces!”

Bertie, lying very sick and dizzy in the bottom of the cart, managed to find breath to call out to the woman on the door-step, “Please do give the puppy something; it has been so hungry all night.”

“That’s no Radley boy,” said the keeper’s wife to her eldest girl as the cart drove away. “Only a little gemman ’ud ha’ thought of the pup. Strikes me, lass, your daddy’s put a rod in pickle for hisself along o’ his tantrums and tivies.”

It was but a mile and a half from the keeper’s cottage to the mansion of the Sir Henry who was owner of these lands; and the pony spun along at a swing trot, and Big George, smoking and rattling along, never deigned to look at his prisoner.

“Another poachin’ boy, Mr. Mason?” said the woman who opened the lodge gates; and Big George answered, heartily,—

“Ay, ay, a Radley imp caught at last. Got the bird on him, and the gin too. What d’ye call that?”

“I call it like your vigilance, Mr. Mason,” said the lodge-keeper. “But, lawks! he do look a mite!”

Big George spun on up the avenue with the air of a man who knew his own important place in the world, and the little cart was soon pulled up at the steps of a stately Italian-like building.

“See Sir Henry to wunce: poachin’ case,” said Big George to the footman lounging about the doorway.

“Of course, Mr. Mason. Sir Henry said as you was to go to him directly.”

“Step this way,” said one of the men; and Big George proceeded to haul Bertie out of the cart as unceremoniously as he had thrown him in; but the little Earl, although his head spun and his shoeless feet ached, managed to get down himself, and staggered across the hall.

“A Radley boy!” said Big George, displaying him with much pride. “All the spring and all the winter I’ve been after that weazen-faced varmint, and now I’ve got him.”

“Sir Henry waits,” said a functionary; and Big George marched into a handsome library, dragging his captive behind him, towards the central writing-table, at which a good-looking elderly gentleman was sitting.

Arrived before his master, the demeanor of Big George underwent a remarkable change; he cringed, and he pulled his lock of hair, and he scraped about with his leg in the humblest manner possible, and proceeded to lay the dead pheasant and the trap and gear upon the table.

“Took him in the ac’, Sir Henry,” he said, with triumph piercing through deference. “I been after him ages; he’s a Radley boy, the little gallows-bird; he’s been snarin’ and dodgin’ and stealin’ all the winter long, and here we’ve got him.”

“He is very small,—quite a child,” said Sir Henry, doubtingly, trying to see the culprit.

“He’s stunted in his growth along o’ wickedness, sir,” said Big George, very positively; “but he’s old in wice; that’s what he is, sir,—old in wice.”

At that moment Bertie managed to get in front of him, and lifted his little faint voice.

“He has made a mistake,” he said, feebly: “I never killed your birds at all, and I am Lord Avillion.”

“Good heavens! you thundering idiot!” shouted Sir Henry, springing to his feet. “This is the little Earl they are looking for all over the island, and all over the country! My dear little fellow, how can I ever——”

His apologies were cut short by Bertie dropping down in a dead faint at his feet, so weak was he from cold, and hunger, and exhaustion, and unwonted exposure.

It was not very long, however, before all the alarmed household, pouring in at the furious ringing of their master’s bell, had revived the little Earl, and brought him to his senses none the worse for the momentary eclipse of them.

“Please do not be angry with your man,” murmured Bertie, as he lay on one of the wide leathern couches. “He meant to do his duty; and please—will you let me buy the puppy?”

Of course Sir Henry would not allow the little Earl to wander any farther afield, and of course a horseman was sent over in hot haste to apprise his people, misled by the boat-lad, who, frightened at his own share in the little gentleman’s escape, had sworn till he was hoarse that he had seen Lord Avillion take a boat for Rye.

So Bertie’s liberty was nipped in the bud, and very sorrowfully and wistfully he strayed out on to the rose-terrace of Sir Henry’s house, awaiting the coming of his friends. The puppy had been fetched, and was tumbling and waddling solemnly beside him; yet he was very sad at heart.

“What are you thinking of, my child?” said Sir Henry, who was a gentle and learned man.

Bertie’s mouth quivered.

“I see,” he said, hesitatingly,—“I see I am nothing. It is the title they give me, and the money I have got, that make the people so good to me. When I am only me, you see how it is.”

And the tears rolled down his face, which he had heard called “wizen” and “puny” and likened to tallow.

“My dear little fellow,” said his grown-up companion, tenderly, “there comes a day when even kings are stripped of all their pomp, and lie naked and stark; it is then that which they have done, not that which they have been, that will find them grace and let them rise again.”

“But I am nothing!” said Bertie, piteously. “You see, when the people do not know who I am, they think me nothing at all.”

“I don’t fancy Peggy and Dan will think so when we tell them everything,” said the host. “We are all of us nothing in ourselves, my child; only, here and there we pluck a bit of lavender,—that is, we do some good thing or say some kind word,—and then we get a sweet savor from it. You will gather a great deal of lavender in your life, or I am mistaken.”

“I will try,” said Bertie, who understood.

So, off the downs that day, and in the pleasant hawthorn woods of the friendly little Isle, he plucked two heads of lavender,—humility and sympathy. Believe me, they are worth as much as was the moly of Ulysses.