The Courtship of Morrice Buckler. A. E. W. Mason
I remember that handkerchief. It was embroidered at the corners with anchors in white cotton, and it recurred to me with a quaint irrelevancy that the man had been a sailor in his youth.
"Well, what of him?" I asked again with some sharpness. "Speak, man! You had words and to spare below."
"He lies in Bristol gaol," at last he said, heaving great breaths between his words, "and none but you can serve his turn."
With that he tore at his shirt above his heart, and made a little tripping run to the table. He clutched at its edge and swayed forward above it, his head loosely swinging between his shoulders.
"Hurry!" he said in a thick, strangled voice. "Assizes--twenty-first--Jeffries."
And with a sudden convulsion he straightened himself, stood for a second on the tips of his toes, with the veins ridged on his livid face like purple weals, and then fell in a huddled lump upon the floor. I sprang to the stair-head and shouted for some one to run for a doctor. Jack was already loosening the man's shirt.
"It is a fit," he said, clasping a hand to his heart.
Luckily my bedroom gave onto the parlour, and between us we carried him within and laid him gently on my bed. His eyelids were open and his eyes fixed, but turned inwards, so that one saw but the whites of them, while a light froth oozed through his locked teeth.
"He will die," I cried.
A ewer of water stood by the bedside, and this I emptied over his head and shoulders, drowning the sheets, but to no other purpose. Our landlady fetched up a bottle of Dutch schnapps, which was the only spirit the house contained, but his jaws were too fast closed for us to open them. So we stood all three watching him helplessly, while those last words of his drummed at my heart. Jeffries! I knew enough of the bloody work he had taken in hand that summer to assure me there would be short shrift for Julian had he meddled in Monmouth's affairs. On the other hand, I reflected, if such indeed was my friend's case, wherein could I prove of effectual help? "None but you can serve his turn," the fellow had said. Could Julian have fallen under another charge? I was the more inclined to this conjecture, for that Julian had been always staunchly loyal to the King, and, moreover, a constant figure at the Court.
However, 'twas all idle guess-work, and there before my eyes was stretched the one man, who could have disclosed the truth, struck down in the very telling of his story! I began to fear that he would die before the surgeon came. For he breathed heavily with a horrid sound like a dog snoring.
All at once a thought flashed into my mind. He might have brought a letter from Julian's hand. I searched his pockets on the instant; they held nothing but a few English coins and some metal charms, such as the ignorant are wont to carry on their persons to preserve them from misadventure.
While I was thus engaged, the doctor was ushered into the room, very deliberate in manner, and magnificent in his dress. Erudition was marked in the very cock of his wig. I sprang towards him.
"Make him speak, Mynheer!" I implored. "He hath a message to deliver, and it cannot wait."
But he put me aside with a wave of his hand and advanced towards the bed, pursing his lips and frowning as one sunk in a profundity of thought.
"Can you make him speak?" I asked again with some impatience. But again he merely waved his hand, and taking a gilt box from his pocket, inhaled a large pinch of snuff. Then he turned to Larke, who stood holding the bottle of schnapps.
"Tell me, young gentleman," he said severely, "what time the fit took him, and the manner of his seizure!"
Larke informed him hastily of what had passed, and he listened with much sage bobbing of his head. Then to our hostess:
"My assistant is below, and hath my instruments. Send him up!"
He turned to us.
"I will bleed him," he said. "For what saith the learned Hippocrates?" Whereupon he mouthed out a rigmarole of Latin phrases, wherein I could detect neither cohesion nor significance.
"Leave him to me, gentlemen!" he continued with a third flourish of his wrist. "Leave him to me and Hippocrates!"
"Which we do," I replied, "with the more confidence in that Hippocrates had so much foreknowledge of the Latin tongue."
And so we got us back to the parlour. How the minutes dragged! Through the door I could still hear the noise of the man's breathing; and now and again the light clink of instruments and a trickling sound as of blood dripping into a bason. I paced impatiently about the room, while Jack sat him down at the table and began loading his pistols.
"The twenty-first!" I exclaimed, "and this day is the fourteenth. Seven days, Jack! I have but seven days to win from here to Bristol."
I went to the window and leaned out. Swasfield's horse was standing quietly in the road, tethered by the bridle to a tree.
"'Canst do it, Morrice, if the wind holds fair," replied Jack. "Heaven send a wind!" and he rose from the table and joined me. Together we stretched out to catch the least hint of a breeze. But not a breath came to us; not a tree shimmered, not a shadow stirred. The world slumbered in a hot stupor. It seemed you might have felt the air vibrate with the passage of a single bird.
Of a sudden Larke cried out:
"Art sure 'tis the fourteenth to-day?"
With that we scrambled back into the room and searched for a calendar.
"Ay, lad!" he said ruefully as he discovered it; "'tis the fourteenth, not a doubt of it."
I flung myself dejectedly on the couch. The volume of Horace lay open by my hand, and I took it up, and quite idly, with no thought of what I was doing, I wrote this date and the name of the month and the date of the year on the margin of the page.
"Lord!" exclaimed Jack, flinging up his hands. "At the books again? Hast no boots and spurs?"
I slipped the book into my pocket, and sprang to my feet. In the heat of my anxiety I had forgotten everything but this half-spoken message. But, or ever I could make a step, the door of the bedroom opened and the surgeon stepped into the room.
"Can he speak now?" I asked.
"The fit has not passed," says he.
"Then in God's name, what ails the man?" cries Larke.
"It is a visitation," says the doctor, with an upward cast of his eyes.
"It is a canting ass of a doctor," I yelled in a fury, and I clapped my hat on my head.
"Your boots?" cried Larke.
"I'll e'en go in my shoes," I shouted back.
I snatched up one of Jack's pistols, rammed it into my pocket, and so clattered downstairs and into the street. I untied Swasfield's horse and sprang on to its back.
"Morrice!"
I looked up. Jack was leaning out from the window.
"Morrice," he said whimsically, and with a very winning smile, "'art not so much of a woman after all."
I dug my heels into the horse's flanks and so rode out at a gallop beneath the lime-trees to Rotterdam.
CHAPTER II.
I REACH LONDON, AND THERE MAKE AN ACQUAINTANCE.
At Rotterdam I was fortunate enough to light upon a Dutch skipper whose ship was anchored in the Texel,