said the officer.
"Take me away, take me away!" cried the prisoner in a tense voice. "Paul, Paul, my own little Paul!" The woman's breath came and went in gusts, and her child cried from the convulsive pressure to her breast.
"Remove them," said the bench.
There was a faint commotion. Among the people in the court, huddled like sheep, there was a harsh scraping of feet, and some suppressed whispering. The stolid faces on the bench turned and smiled slightly in the yellow gleam of the gas that burned in front of them. Then the momentary bustle ended, the woman and child were gone, and the calm monotony of the court was resumed.
Six months later a handsome woman, still little more than a girl, yet with eyes of suffering, stepped up to the door of a house in Pimlico and knocked timidly.
"I wish to see Mrs. Drayton," she said, when the door was opened by an elderly person.
"Bless you, they're gone, Mrs. Drayton and her Husband."
"Gone!" said the young woman, "gone! What do you mean?"
"Why, gone – removed – shifted."
"Removed – shifted?" The idea seemed to struggle its slow way into her brain.
"In course – what else, when the big hotel fails and he loses his job? Rents can't be paid on nothing a week, and something to put in the mouth besides."
"Gone? Are you mad? Woman, think what you're saying. Gone where?"
"How do I know where? Mad, indeed! I'll not say but other folk look a mort madder nor ever I looked."
The young woman took her by the shoulder.
"Don't say that – don't say you don't know where they're gone. They've got my child, I tell you; my poor little Paul.
"Oh, so you're the young party as drowned herself, are you? Well, they're gone anyways, and the little chit with them, and there's no saying where. You may believe me. Ask the neighbors else."
The young woman leaned against the door-jamb with a white face and great eyes.
"Well, well, how hard she takes it. Deary me, deary me, she's not a bad sort, after all. Well, well, who'd ha' thought it! There, there, come in and sit awhile. It is cruel to lose one's babby – and me to tell her, too. Misbegotten or not, it's one's own flesh and blood, and that's what I always says."
The young woman had been drawn into the house and seated on a chair. She got up again with the face of an old woman.
"Oh, I'm choking!" she said.
"Rest awhile, do now, my dear – there – there."
"No, no, my good woman, let me go."
"Heaven help you, child; how you look!"
"Heaven has never helped me," said the young woman. "I was a Sister of Charity only two years ago. A man found me and wooed me; married me and abandoned me; I tried to die and they rescued me; they separated me from my child and put me in an asylum; I escaped, and have now come for my darling, and he is gone."
"Deary me, deary me!" and the old woman stroked her consolingly.
"Let me go," she cried, starting up afresh. "If Heaven has done nothing for me, perhaps the world itself will have mercy."
The ghastly face answered ill to the grating laugh that followed as she jerked her head aside and hurried away.
CHAPTER I
It was Young Folks' Day in the Vale of Newlands. The summer was at its height; the sun shone brightly; the lake to the north lay flat as a floor of glass, and reflected a continent of blue cloud; the fells were clear to their summits, and purple with waves of heather. It was noontide, and the shadows were short. In the slumberous atmosphere the bees droned, and the hot air quivered some feet above the long, lush grass. The fragrance of new-mown hay floated languidly through a sub-current of wild rose and honeysuckle. In a meadow at the foot of the Causey Pike tents were pitched, flags were flying, and crowds of men, women, and children watched the mountain sports.
In the center of a group of spectators two men, stripped to the waist, were wrestling. They were huge fellows, with muscles that stood out on their arms like giant bulbs, and feet that held the ground like the hoofs of oxen. The wrestlers were calm to all outward appearance, and embraced each other with the quiet fondling of lambs and the sinuous power of less affectionate creatures. But the people about them were wildly excited. They stopped to watch every wary movement of the foot, and craned their necks to catch the subtlest twist of the wrist.
"Sista, Reuben, sista! He'll have enough to do to tummel John Proudfoot. John's up to the scat to-day, anyways."
"Look tha! John's on for giving him the cross-buttock."
John was the blacksmith, a big buirdly fellow with a larger blunt head.
"And he has given it too, has John."
"Nay, nay, John's doon – ey, ey, he's doon, is John."
One of the wrestlers had thrown the other, and was standing quietly over him. He was a stalwart young man of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired, clear-eyed, of a ruddy complexion, with a short, thick, curly beard, and the grace and bearing that comes of health and strength and a complete absence of self-consciousness. He smiled cheerfully, and nodded his head in response to loud shouts of applause. "Weel done! Verra weel done! That's the way to ding 'em ower! What sayst tha, Reuben?"
"What a bash it was, to be sure!"
"What dusta think you of yon wrestling, ey, man?"
"Nay, nay, it's verra middling."
"Ever seen owt like it since the good auld days you crack on sa often, auld man?"
"Nay, he doont him verra neat, did Paul – I will allow it."
"There's never a man in Cumberland need take a hand with young Paul Ritson after this."
"Ey, ey; he's his father's son."
The wrestler, surrounded by a little multitude of boys, who clung to his sparse garments on every side, made his way to a tent.
At the same moment a ludicrous figure forced a passage through the crowd, and came to a stand in the middle of the green. It was a diminutive creature, mounted on a pony that carried its owner on a saddle immediately below its neck, and a pair of paniers just above its tail. The rider was an elderly man with shaggy eyebrows and beard of mingled black and gray. His swarthy, keen wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines beneath a pair of little blinking eyes, which seemed to say that anybody who refused to see that they belonged to a perfectly, wideawake son of old Adam made a portentous mistake. He was the mountain peddler, and to-day, at least, his visit was opportune.
"Lasses, here's for you! Look you, here's Gubblum Oglethorpe, pony and all."
"Why, didsta ever see the like – Gubblum's getten hissel into a saddle!"
Gubblum, from his seat on the pony, twisted one half of his wrinkled face awry, and said:
"In course I have! But it's a vast easier getting into this saddle nor getting out of it, I can tell you!"
"Why,
