THE trial of Roger Egremont took place before a full bench, Chief Justice Holt presiding, and was among the first trials for sedition and treason resulting from the Revolution. It was memorable in another way; for from that day ceased the dreadful practice of trying prisoners in their chains. The Chief Justice, hearing a clanking when the prisoner rose to plead, said,—

“I should like to know why the prisoner is brought in ironed. If fetters were necessary for his safe custody before, there is no danger of escape or rescue here. Let them be instantly knocked off. When prisoners are tried, they should stand at their ease.”

“I thank your lordship,” replied Roger, rising with difficulty, and bowing.

When he was free from his chains and stood up, he was seen to be a young man of presence most fair, and of a cool courage.

The trial attracted a great concourse of people, and much violence of feeling was shown both for and against the prisoner. The Whigs, resenting far more than William of Orange the personal insult offered him, clamored for Roger Egremont’s blood; and truly, if any man in England deserved to be hanged for the share he took against the Dutch Prince, Roger Egremont was the man. He had endeavored to raise the county against the new-comer, and had actually succeeded in getting together a band, chiefly of his own kindred and tenantry, which pursued the Prince of Orange secretly almost to London, and were only prevented from waylaying him by the rapidity and secrecy with which he travelled. The whole Egremont connection stood firmly by King James; several of their number had followed him to St. Germains, and were openly in communication with their kinsmen in England; and Roger Egremont had publicly and frequently denounced William of Orange in a manner impossible for any government to overlook which expected to stand. On the other hand, there were a vast number of Englishmen who thought as Roger Egremont did, and expressed themselves privately as he had done publicly. Sympathy for his youth, for the gross invasion of his house, for the spirit he showed as an English gentleman impatient of the rule of foreigners, made him many friends. It was felt that the new government had a hard nut to crack in handling him so that justice would not appear cruelty, and mercy weakness.

The Chief Justice and his associates dealt with him kindly, nor was the Attorney General unduly severe. But the evidence against him was enough to hang ten men. Among the first witnesses put in the box was his half-brother, Hugo Egremont, as he was still called, in spite of the fact that no soul in England, not excepting Hugo himself, believed his mother to have been at any time the wife of John Egremont.

Hugo had not wasted the first six months in which William of Orange was on the English throne. Having concluded that King James was gone, never to return, Hugo acted accordingly. He frequented the court, and was one among the English gentlemen who stood against the wall while William and his Dutch companions sat at their ease, and ate and drank and smoked, and talked in the Dutch language concerning the English people, their conduct and affairs, and laughed loudly at things which these attendant English gentlemen heard but could not understand. Hugo Egremont, however, being a very crafty young man, learned the Dutch language, to the mingled delight and chagrin of the Dutchmen, and conversed with them affably in their own tongue. He conformed so absolutely, and went to church so often, that even William of Orange grinned a sardonic grin when he heard of it, and my Lord Halifax, the prince of trimmers, laughed outright, and made it an after-dinner joke.

At the trial, Hugo’s appearance—handsome, well dressed, sly, composed, and polished—gave rise to a groan from the spectators in the great hall. He went up to Roger and offered his hand, saying smoothly,—

“I am sorry, brother, to see you in this case.”

Roger, disdaining his hand, replied,—

“Call me not brother. Had you been loyal to your King, as all true Egremonts are, I would have forgotten that you are the child of my father’s leman. But you chose the other part, so go your way from me, Hugo Stein.” This imprudent speech was heard by many persons. Hugo winced under it, but when he came to be examined, he showed no animus against Roger, and seemed to testify unwillingly. Yet, on his evidence alone, Roger could have been hanged twice over. When he was questioned in regard to Roger Egremont’s designs in his pursuit of the Prince of Orange, he hesitated and seemed distressed. Roger, however, replied for him, addressing the judges in the following cool and daring words,—

“My lords, of your goodness permit me to say, ’tis useless to probe this man, Hugo Stein, sometime known as Hugo Egremont. My motive in pursuing His Highness was to capture him and send him out of the kingdom; and though I did not expressly seek His Highness’s life, yet had he been killed I should have felt no more regret than if I had killed a robber, coming by night to seize my goods.”

The Chief Justice at that moment was taken with a sharp coughing spell, as if he had not heard the prisoner’s rash words, and leaning forward flashed Roger a look of distinct warning. But it was of no avail—the mischief had been done. It was commonly thought that Roger had given away his life in those words, and something like a sob went around in the great assemblage. Nevertheless, when sentence came to be pronounced, he was only sentenced to the forfeiture of his estate, and imprisonment in Newgate during his Majesty’s pleasure.

It was night—a soft May night, following the day of his conviction—when Roger entered Newgate prison. Hitherto he had borne up manfully, and jested and laughed with his gaolers. But at the moment of passing under the dark and dreadful archway a panic seized his soul. Fear was new to him, and he was more frightened at being afraid than at anything else whatever. As he, with Lukens, the turnkey, to whom he had been handed over, passed along one of the great corridors, they heard a great shout of laughter and crying out, and clatter of drinking, and presently they came to an open door, and within were more than fifty persons, carousing, drinking, and playing with greasy cards and rude dice.

Now, Roger Egremont was no Puritan, nor was he given to low company, but, scared by the spectre of Fear which stalked through his mind, he would have welcomed a company of gallows-birds at that moment. Therefore, with a wink to Lukens, and slipping a couple of shillings in his hand,—for Roger still had some money,—he walked into the dim, foul, and noisy room, and making a low bow said,—

“Gentlemen, may I be allowed to be of your company?”

Huzzas arose, and a great black fellow, with a patch over his eye, replied,—

“Certainly, sir, if you will make your footing good.” Which meant paying for liquor wherewith all could get fuddled.

Roger threw some money to the turnkey, and the liquor being brought, sat and boozed and sang and gambled and cursed with the motley crew until the day looked pallidly in at the barred windows.

A prisoner with money, in Newgate, could have all he wanted and do as he listed, except he could not escape. And the reason of this was plain. Every prisoner became a source of revenue to his gaolers, and to let him go was to part with the goose that laid the golden egg; and consequently never was there such liberty within the walls of a prison, and never was prison better watched.

The assemblage in which Roger Egremont found himself was made up of all sorts and conditions of men. His friend with the patch over his eye was a highwayman.

There were thieves and counterfeiters, Jacobite gentlemen and recusant curates; nearly all trades and professions were represented. No one present, not even the highwayman, drank and swore and talked so recklessly as Roger Egremont. For to fear had succeeded despair. He shouted and sang and drank, because had he stopped for one moment to think he would have dashed his brains out against the stone wall. His head was steady and his nerves strong, so that it took much liquor and extreme brawling to bring him to the point where physical fatigue overcame mental anguish. But soon after daylight he was carried like a log to his cell, by Lukens and his assistant, Diggory Hutchinson, a brawny fellow, and new to the gaoler’s business.

“They be often like this, at first,” said Lukens, with a grin, as they threw Roger, limp and maudlin, on his rude bed. “’Tis apt to take gentlemen and clergymen this a-way. Sometimes they gits over it—sometimes they don’t.”

Roger fell into a deep sleep, which lasted until the afternoon. He waked, his vigorous frame recovered entirely from his debauch, but in an instant the horror of his situation returned upon him so that he rose, dressed himself quickly, and finding some money that he had concealed upon his person, coolly took out what seemed enough for him to get drunk on, and put the other away, and then sallied forth from his miserable room in search of the hell he had found the night before. He was not familiar with his surroundings, and, following a blind corridor, he heard the sound of a woman’s voice, singing very sweetly. Presently he came upon an open door, leading to the quarters of Lukens, the turnkey, and there, in a room clean and bright, sat, spinning, Bess Lukens, the turnkey’s niece, otherwise known as Red Bess from the warm color of her auburn hair.

She was tall, well formed, and vigorous beyond the common for a woman. Her complexion had retained its original fairness from the usual darkness of the abode in which she dwelt, but it had not robbed her cheek of its ruddy bloom, nor her lips of their scarlet tint. Her large, liquid eyes were of a reddish-brown, with black lashes and eyebrows, and when she opened her wide handsome mouth she showed teeth as white and regular as Roger’s own.

She was about twenty years of age, and dressed in a plain brown stuff gown and a spotless linen cap, and she was spinning industriously and singing in a loud, sweet, rich voice as she spun. Had Roger Egremont been his natural and normal self, the sight of her sumptuous beauty would have warmed and interested him; but to all intent, he was not Roger Egremont at that moment, but a devil of despair and wickedness who had cast out Roger’s identity and was masquerading in his body.

The girl caught sight of him, however, and stopped her spinning and singing. As she rose and advanced toward him, the light of a May afternoon falling on her supple figure, he could not but note, dull as his senses were, the natural grace of her movements, and her rich voice in speaking as in singing. She showed not a particle of bashfulness or coquetry in speaking to the haggard young gentleman before her, but said pleasantly,—

“You’ve missed your way, sir. This is where my uncle, Mr. Lukens lives, and the prisoners go not beyond the turn in the corridor, where the lantern hangs against the wall.”

“I know it, mistress; I have missed my way. Will you please to conduct me to the common room of the prisoners?”

“Now, look here, young gentleman,” said Bess, suddenly adopting an authoritative tone, “you’d best keep away from that gang. You’re new to it,—that I see with half an eye,—and if it’s going with those people in the common room you are, you’ll soon be in a bad way.”

“Mistress,” replied Roger, with great respect, “May I ask if you are head nurse in this little nursery? And what will you do with me in case I do not obey you? Give me a switching, perhaps.”

The ever-ready blood poured into Bess’s smooth cheek, and sparks flew from her red-brown eyes. She seemed about to speak impetuously, but checked herself, and then said, pointing with a contemptuous finger,—

“Go back to where the lantern hangs, then turn to the right, and straight ahead.”

She scudded back to her wheel, began to turn it violently, and burst into a song by way of showing her indifference. But, singing, she turned her head stealthily, and saw Roger’s graceful figure, with his light-brown curls floating over his shapely shoulders, disappearing rapidly into the gloom of the corridor, where not even the May sunshine could penetrate.

As soon as he was out of sight and sound she stopped spinning and singing, and resting her chin on her hand thought,—

“Poor young gentleman. That is the very gentleman they brought in yesterday, and who got so drunk last night.”

Bess Lukens was reckoned hard-hearted toward the other sex, although willing enough to do them a kindness provided she could hector over them in the act of doing it; but a strange softness came into her heart as she thought about Roger Egremont. He looked a man, every inch; and the saucy reply he gave Bess she secretly liked. But Bess had no time to waste in sentimental reflections. She was by nature one of the most energetic of mortals, with a passion for clean linen, order, and industry. Soon her wheel began to buzz again; but she could still see Roger Egremont’s figure standing in the doorway, against the blackness of the corridor behind him, with the light shining full on his debonair face. As for Roger, he sped toward the scene of his degradation of the night before as if a thousand devils were after him, and gave not one thought to Red Bess, the turnkey’s niece.

The second night was spent as was the first; and so, for one whole week, did Roger Egremont give himself up to liquor and cards and dice and the lowest company accessible in Newgate prison. At the end of that time even his strong, country-bred frame began to show the effects of his long debauch, and his mind, too, experienced the benefit of being turned from the consideration of its misery into the channel of cards and drink.

One night—the eighth after he entered the prison—Roger’s strength gave out temporarily. Bess, passing along the corridor beyond her uncle’s quarters, saw a figure lying prone, and going up to it found it to be Roger Egremont, not only drunk, but ill,—the Roger Egremont who had said so haughtily to William of Orange at their first meeting, “I am an English gentleman, by God!”

Bess looked at him, with pity and contempt struggling in her breast. She was as strong as any man, and leaning down, she actually managed to raise Roger to his feet, and to lead him to his dismal little room, where he fell, groaning, upon the bed.

Something in his face, something in his fate would have touched even a hard heart, and Bess Lukens had one of the softest of hearts, along with a turbulent tongue and a warm temper. She covered him up with a thick quilt brought from her own quarters,—for he was shivering with cold,—rubbed his throbbing head, and at last soothed him into quietness and sleep. Then she went after Diggory Hutchinson, and commanded him to watch by Roger during the night; and Diggory, being a slave to her, did it.

Next morning early, Bess was at Roger’s bedside. He was himself then, as far as liquor went, but the devil still possessed him.

“Why did you not let me die?” he said sullenly. “It’s better than being in prison.”

“Now, that’s because you are a countryman,” replied Bess, briskly. “They always take on worse than any others. They want to be out in the fields, a-hunting and what not. But you’ll be out yet; some day, they’ll get tired of keeping you. Haven’t you got some relations or friends in London that might come to see you?”

Roger shook his head.

“I know scarce any one in London, and all my relations and friends that I care anything about are in the South, or with the King in France.”

Bess nodded her head gravely, and, the two being alone, she said,—

“And they’re right. I’m no papist, nor dissenter neither, but I don’t like the Whigs. They’re a low-born crew, and that’s why I don’t like ’em.”

Roger had never expected to smile, much less laugh again; but the energy with which the turnkey’s niece reviled the Whigs on account of their low birth, made him laugh in spite of himself.

Bess, who was quick of wit, divined in a moment what he was laughing at, and flushing with anger and mortification, she told him so.

“And if I say they’re low born, who should know it any better than I?” she said, bitterly. “Don’t I know what it is to be low born? Don’t people say, ‘There goes Bess Lukens, niece of Lukens, the turnkey’? And though my uncle be an honest man, yet his calling is vile, and I know it. And I would rather be well born than to have all the money in the King’s chests—that I would!”

Unshed tears were flashing in Bess’s eyes, and her red mouth was quivering. Roger was ashamed of his thoughtlessness, but Bess was still, to him, only the handsome niece of the turnkey. His reply, therefore, was an attempt to flip her under the chin (which Bess skilfully avoided) and to say,—

“Never mind, my girl. One may be well born, and very miserable, too.”

The devil did not leave Roger Egremont at once, although he had come in full panoply at short notice; but for a little while longer he alternated, coming and going fitfully. However, Roger was no longer ill, and so no longer in need of Bess Lukens’s pity and nursing. But Bess, who treated Diggory Hutchinson—an honest lad, for all he was an under-turnkey—like a dog, and whose sharp tongue and strong arm were ample protection against any man in Newgate, could not so easily put Roger out of her mind. Oftentimes she stopped in her spinning and knitting and sweeping and dusting and bent her handsome brows to listen for the sound of his footstep, or his pleasant, courtier-like voice, as he passed to and fro at the end of the corridor. But she neither saw him nor had speech with him, until, near a fortnight later, one evening just at dusk, she met him face to face in the mouth of the corridor.

Bess had been out to buy a broom, and had brought her purchase home with her. Roger was walking along immersed in black melancholy, but as Bess came into the circle of light made by the lantern on the wall, he noticed how handsome she looked, with her hood thrown back, and her face flushed with exercise. The devil in Roger Egremont made him pretend to be tipsy, and lurching forward he fell against her. Bess, with the most innocent good-will, mingled with wrath at his supposed condition, held him up; and the return he made for this was to clasp her in his arms, crying:

“Ah, my girl, you knew I was after those sweet lips of yours!” and he kissed her furiously and insultingly.

For one moment Bess stood dazed, then, commanding all her young strength, she thrust him away from her, so violently and unexpectedly that he staggered, and a fierce and well directed shove actually threw him on the floor. Then, like an active and capable general who knows how to follow up an advantage, Bess whipped out her broom, and attacking the prostrate Roger with the handle, gave him then and there the first and last beating of his life—all the time crying out,—

“Oh, you wicked man! Is this the way to treat a respectable girl? You call yourself a gentleman! I would not give a farthing for a wagon-load of such gentlemen!” and the while she whacked him unmercifully.

Roger was so dazed and staggered by this sharp and unexpected assault that for a minute he made no resistance. Then, suddenly springing up, his forehead came in hard contact with Bess’s broom. Without a groan, he sank backward, blood gushing from his temple.

Immediately, Bess Lukens proved herself a true woman, and having only given Roger his just deserts, fell to weeping over him and reproaching herself, meanwhile tearing up her apron to make a bandage for his bleeding head.

Roger lay, half stunned by the violence of the blow, until his head was bandaged, and then he was so white and still that Bess was frightened half to death, and cried,—

“I will go for help! Sure, I have near killed him!”

“No—don’t go,” said Roger, in a quiet voice, seizing her. “There was much blood, but little hurt. Help me, rather, away from this public place.”

With the aid of Bess’s strong arm, he got up, and managed to walk as far as Lukens’s quarters, where he sank on a bench, near the open window. The air from without was cool and sweet, the room was quiet, and the blow from Bess’s broom, which had knocked the memory of all things from Roger for a moment, seemed to mark his waking into another and a better mind. Bess sat near him, fanning him anxiously, and the tears welling up into her brown eyes. In truth, Roger’s air of dejection, his bandaged head, and the sudden sadness of his manner, might have softened any woman.

“Bess,” said he after a long silence—the first time he had called her by her name—“I thank thee for that blow. I think you have beat the devil out of me with your broom, for I feel now to be myself; a thing I have not been before since I entered these walls.”

“I knew you were not yourself, Master Roger,” replied Bess, tearfully. “I knew it was just rage and misery and the like that had you by the throat and would not let you go.”

“Pity you thought not of that when you belabored me,” replied Roger, with the ghost of a smile.

“That was different,” said Bess coolly, but with a brighter color. “’Twas very rude of you to try and make free with me, and ’twas for that I struck you.”

Roger turned his one free eye toward her, and burst out laughing, and then said, in a voice at once gay, sweet, and earnest,—

“Fair mistress, I promise you I will never dare to make free with you again; and I swear to you I do not respect the Queen’s Majesty herself more than I do you, Bess Lukens.”

“Thank you, Master Roger Egremont,” was all that Bess said in reply, but her heart was filled with joy, keen and piercing.

Roger did not long remain, but rising and saying good evening to Bess, walked steadily to his cell, and sat him down to consider. And Bess Lukens fell to work at her knitting, and was strangely lifted up into a blue and sunny heaven, as she sat alone in the twilight, and her face was quite glorified with a new softness and sweetness—until poor Diggory Hutchinson shambled in and tried awkwardly to make love to her, when she flew out against him and crossly bade him hold his tongue.

Roger Egremont spent that night and many succeeding nights and days in a self-examination which brought him to extreme anguish. And the natural vigor and clearness of his understanding coming to his aid to show him where he stood, he perceived that he was a very ignorant man, and that his ignorance had done much to land him where he was. All this came to him in the days after his rencounter with Bess, when he spent his time in silence in his room, looking fixedly at the little slip of blue sky to be seen through his one narrow window, and thinking how the hawthorn buds were swelling at Egremont, and that the tiny young of the game birds were hopping about fearlessly in the ferny thickets of the park, and the fish were flashing their silvery backs in the still and shadowed pools where the river ceased its brawling for a time. At night he lay wide-awake all night long, asking himself a thousand questions he had never asked before, his mind groping like a blind Samson, and crying out for light. And at last light came. He was ignorant, and he swore he would be so no longer.

Like most unlettered men, he knew little of the scope and power of learning. It represented to him then some vast unknown force with which other men ruled him. He jumped to the conclusion that only his own illiterateness and Hugo’s book-learning had put him in Newgate prison, and he determined to remedy it as soon as possible.

This determination came to him in the dead of night, and by sunrise he was knocking at Lukens the turnkey’s door, with a plan to carry his resolve into effect.

Bess was already up and hard at work when she opened the door to Roger.

“Bess,” cried he, eagerly, “I must have books, pens, and paper. Go you into the city this morning, and bring them to me;” for Roger had still much the habit of command, instead of asking.

“Here are pens, ink, and paper,” replied Bess, producing a few inferior specimens of each; “and as for reading, here are five or six books—one, of sermons; a good thing for a papist to read.”

Roger knew so little that he regarded even these things with respect. However, he recalled the names of some of the books in the library at Egremont, and it struck him they would be more useful to him than sermons; so, taking some of the coarse paper Bess offered him, he made out, in a slovenly, ill-spelled way, a list of what he wanted. Bess was in no haste to get him things so useless as she considered books and pens and paper, and it was two whole days before he got what he wished. Meanwhile he avoided his late friends in the gaol—of whom most were rascals of a very black type—and sickened at the thought of his late carouses. And he struggled manfully, if awkwardly, with such literary appliances as the Lukens’s household possessed. In those two days so great was the illumination of his mind that he found out the length, the breadth, the depth, and the height of his ignorance. He discerned that he could scarcely read his own writing, that he knew no arithmetic, no history, no geography,—nothing, in short, except what he had examined with his hands and seen with his eyes.

Bess brought him a miscellaneous collection, bought, not on the recommendation of the shop-keeper, for it was a principle with her never to take a shopman’s opinion of his own wares, but with a view chiefly to getting the worth of Roger’s money in the size of the books. To poor Roger then all books were alike, and he fell upon them ravenously. Nor did this book hunger abate during the days he stayed in prison. In time—in six short months—he got a very true notion of what he wished to learn, and after that he continued his fierce pursuit of knowledge with order and system. He studied history, poetry, and belles-lettres, and made headway in French and Latin, of which he acquired a scholastic knowledge. He practised much with his pen, and from writing like a footman he acquired the most beautiful handwriting imaginable. He spent every waking hour with a book or a pen in his hand,—even the hour allotted him for exercise in the prison yard; and often he rose in the night to study and to write. His mind, naturally powerful, had been forced by his early ignorance to depend upon its own powers of observation entirely,—a thing commonly neglected by what are called educated men. But when on this noble superstructure of natural talents and keen observation was reared a knowledge of letters and tongues, Roger Egremont was mentally the full stature of a man. In short, the greatest benefactor he ever had was William of Orange, who returned the affront given him by making Roger Egremont twice the man he was before, or was likely ever to be.

Absorbed as Roger was in this new world of books and thought, it is not to be supposed that he was entirely forgetful of all else beside or that he became a saint as he became an educated man. He had still occasional communication with the outside world, and heard with inexpressible and ineffable rage that King William had bestowed the estate of Egremont upon Hugo, who was in the highest favor with the Whigs. The new King gave away English estates rashly, especially to his Dutch followers, and some years later the English Parliament forced a very general restitution; but no one, least of all, Roger Egremont, looked forward to the coming turn of affairs. The Egremonts, root and branch, were dispossessed, and being naturally men of adventure, were speedily heard from in various parts of Europe,—some living honorably, like decent, poor soldiers and exiles, others very basely if brilliantly. For all these was Roger concerned, but chiefly for little Dicky.

Almost a year had passed since Roger’s trial, when, in response to a letter smuggled out of prison by Bess Lukens, Roger got a letter from Dicky, smuggled in. It ran,—

As Roger’s new passion for learning did not make a cloud between him and the few he loved, so it made him not blind to the attractions of a beautiful and humbly born girl, who was now his chiefest friend and daily companion; and he could not fail to see that this girl, so capable of love, anger, softness, revenge, and devotion, was wholly attached to him. But she had a sturdy self-respect, that kept the man she loved from presuming in any way. She had not the delicate reserves of speech and manner that mark the born gentlewoman; she drudged willingly and openly for Roger, spoke her mind freely when angry with him, and did not understand why he often blushed and refused her services. Her attitude toward him was rather one of keep-your-distance-or-I’ll-make-you-sorry-for-it, but it was effective. She was already experienced in that school of temptation which must needs surround a girl of her beauty and condition. Her native honesty and a truly sublime common-sense had kept her in the right path heretofore. And when she realized, as she shortly did, that she was deeply and desperately in love with the Jacobite gentleman, the elevation of his station produced an elevation in her mind. She saw that Roger had an invincible pride, and if ever he could be brought to marry the turnkey’s niece, it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depths of the sea; and she scornfully refused to think of herself as that millstone. So she loved and drudged and sang, and if she wept and sobbed sometimes in the darkness of the night at her hard fate, she did no outward, daily fretting. As for Roger, he could not but love her, if only for her kindness to him; and however much he might doubt his own power of resistance to Bess’s charms, he had the wit to see, and the candor to acknowledge to himself, that this poor girl was the least likely to fall of any woman in the world.

After much labor in learning, at last the joy of it came to him, and then, meaning to communicate that joy, he offered to teach Bess. She readily agreed, and being complete owner of her own time, Roger came to Lukens’s rooms to play schoolmaster. No duchess in the land was more mistress of her establishment than Bess Lukens of her three rooms in Newgate. Her uncle, a watchful gaoler, but an indifferent uncle, made up his mind with great perspicacity about Bess from the first hour that she came to him, an orphan girl of sixteen or thereabouts. She was likely to go straight, but if she chose to go crooked she was not of the sort that could be stopped. And as she cooked his meals well for him, and kept his rooms clean and avoided the prisoners, as well as the other gaolers, he had no fault whatever to find with her. Latterly she had taken to keeping the earnings of her knitting and spinning to herself, and when her uncle asked for them, had flatly refused to give them up.

“I’ll make ye,” said Lukens, feebly, to this.

“Come and take ’em then,” replied Bess; but the invitation remained unheeded. Therefore Lukens had nothing to say when Bess informed him that Master Egremont was intending to teach her to write and cipher. She could already read a little, and easily made out the words in the song-books, which she studied diligently, being ever singing, very much as Dicky Egremont was ever fiddling.

Her education in reading, writing, and ciphering progressed rapidly; but when Roger would have taught her something farther, she declined.

“No,” she said. “There is no need for any more learning for me. I have enough.” As the ideas of the higher education were unknown in that age and place, Roger secretly approved her good sense.

When they were talking thus, they sat, as usual, in Lukens’s main room. It was May again, and Roger had been a year in Newgate. In spite of his mind and heart being given over to the new empire of thought, he had strong and strange yearnings after his home. As Bess had said, he was a countryman, blood and bone of him, and sometimes the longing for Egremont and the whole bright world of out-of-doors came over him with a sharpness of pain for which he had no words. This fit had been on him for several days, and after Bess had announced that her education was finished his thoughts fled away to Egremont.

“Do you know,” he said, “I can feel the grass growing at Egremont. ’Tis very green now; I think there is not, in England or anywhere else, such emerald green as we have there. And there are a couple of doves in an old rose tree near the fish pond, that have come every year for four years past; I wonder if they are there now. You’d be charmed to hear their sweet complaining, Bess; they sing as sweetly as you.”

Bess smiled one of her broad, bright smiles at this, and continued to knit, for she was never idle a waking moment.

“I thought much of my hunting and fowling in the winter time,” Roger kept on, “but at this time of year I did not think of killing any living thing. If I could but lay my leg on a good horse once more, and clap my boot heels into him, and have one good gallop through the park and over the hills— You should see the roll of the hills; ’tis beautiful at this hour in the day, they are so calm, with the sheep nibbling the young grass that grows in the sheltered places. And the oaks, the best in England—oh, you may laugh—I would not take St. James’s in exchange for Egremont. Not that it is so costly; there are many estates worth more,—but it is Egremont, ’tis all I had to love, except little Dicky, and that is why I play the fool about it.”

As he spoke he threw back wearily from his forehead his curling light hair, and his dark eyes had such a look of misery that it went to Bess’s heart. And she saw, besides, a small red scar on Roger’s temple, which she had never noticed before.

“Roger,” she said, leaning forward eagerly,—for they called each other frankly by their names then,—“what scar is that? I never noted it before.”

Roger smiled in the midst of his low spirits.

“I’m sure you ought to know it, as you gave it me with your broom-handle. By combing my hair over it, though, no one can see it.”

A passion of pity and remorse swept over poor Bess’s soul. Although small, the scar was very disfiguring, and Roger’s endeavor to conceal it showed that he was sorry to have it.

Bess laid down her knitting, and leaned closer toward him, her liquid eyes filling with tears, and her red mouth quivering. Some strange weakness possessed her; she would, at that moment, have given her right hand to have spared Roger that blow. The stress of her feeling went like an arrow in its flight to Roger’s soul. His glance met here, and they gazed, like ones enchanted, into each other’s speaking eyes. Bess, scarce knowing what she did, laid her lips upon the scar, and two bright tears dropped from her eyes upon Roger’s face. And then, her dark head rested against Roger’s cheek, and their lips met. Time was no more for them.

They were roused from their dream in Paradise by a vast and thunderous sound, that rolled and reverberated through the hollow arches of the prison, and was like the roar of the heavens and the earth coming together. It was only the firing of the cannon at nightfall, to close the prison for the night, but to Bess Lukens and Roger Egremont, in their exaltation, it was like the crack of doom. They started apart, and each rose at the same moment, and looked at the other with a pale face. Bess spoke first, very calmly and quietly.

“I was to blame. I know I never can be your wife, not because of my fault, but because of my uncle’s vile calling. But, Roger, neither one of us is of the stuff of which philanderers are made, and we must be on our guard lest harm come; and let there never be any more of this. For I tell you truly that love, in my mind, is mighty near to death, and I could kill myself if shamed, and kill the man that shamed me, albeit I loved him better than ten thousand lives.”

“And love and death are near in my mind too,” replied Roger, with the same quiet tone in which Bess spoke. “It will be death to any man who speaks an ill word against the woman I love, and death to her if she betrays me; and in every way my love will be guarded by my life. You are right; we are made of sterner stuff than most, and—”

“We must beware. But know this: if this moment you should offer to make me your wife, I have the courage to say nay, for I know ’twould mean life-long shame for you, and I am not the woman to make so evil a return for honorable love. And so, I say, let us not again so forget ourselves, and remember rather the gulf between us.”

“Bess Lukens,” said Roger, taking her hand as if he were taking that of a princess, “I have not the words to tell you how much I hold you in honor,—the more so that you have had no shield in this stormy life but your own born goodness, and I love you from the bottom of my heart. You have said there is a gulf between us, but that need not prevent us from being loving friends, and I hold you as the dearest friend I have on earth.”