“Do you laugh, sirrah, with the rope about your
neck, upon the very threshold of that eternity you
are so suddenly to enter into?”
And then Blood took his revenge.
“Faith, it’s in better case I am for mirth
than your lordship. For I have this to say before
you deliver judgment. Your lordship sees me
— an innocent man whose only offence is that
I practised charity — with a halter round my
neck. Your lordship, being the justiciar, speaks
with knowledge of what is to come to me. I, being
a physician, may speak with knowledge of what is to
come to your lordship. And I tell you that I
would not now change places with you — that I
would not exchange this halter that you fling about
my neck for the stone that you carry in your body.
The death to which you may doom me is a light pleasantry
by contrast with the death to which your lordship
has been doomed by that Great Judge with whose name
your lordship makes so free.”
The Lord Chief Justice sat stiffly upright, his face
ashen, his lips twitching, and whilst you might have
counted ten there was no sound in that paralyzed court
after Peter Blood had finished speaking. All
those who knew Lord Jeffreys regarded this as the lull
before the storm, and braced themselves for the explosion.
But none came.
Slowly, faintly, the colour crept back into that ashen
face. The scarlet figure lost its rigidity,
and bent forward. His lordship began to speak.
In a muted voice and briefly — much more briefly
than his wont on such occasions and in a manner entirely
mechanical, the manner of a man whose thoughts are
elsewhere while his lips are speaking — he delivered
sentence of death in the prescribed form, and without
the least allusion to what Peter Blood had said.
Having delivered it, he sank back exhausted, his
eyes half-closed, his brow agleam with sweat.
The prisoners filed out.
Mr. Pollexfen — a Whig at heart despite the
position of Judge-Advocate which he occupied —
was overheard by one of the jurors to mutter in the
ear of a brother counsel:
“On my soul, that swarthy rascal has given his
lordship a scare. It’s a pity he must hang.
For a man who can frighten Jeffreys should go far.”
HUMAN MERCHANDISE
Mr. Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and
wrong — a condition much more common than is
generally supposed.
He was right in his indifferently expressed thought
that a man whose mien and words could daunt such a
lord of terror as Jeffreys, should by the dominance
of his nature be able to fashion himself a considerable
destiny. He was wrong — though justifiably
so — in his assumption that Peter Blood must
hang.
