“Well, then you do believe I can be trusted,
after all. Why didn’t you before?”
“Who doubted? Not I, indeed; and not she.”
“Well, why wouldn’t you tell me your story,
then?”
“Ye had made no promise; else had it been otherwise.”
“I see, I see.... And yet I believe I
don’t quite see, after all. You stood the
torture and refused to confess; which shows plain
enough to even the dullest understanding that you had
nothing to confess—”
“I, my lord? How so? It was I that
killed the deer!”
“You did? Oh, dear, this is the
most mixed-up business that ever—”
“Dear lord, I begged him on my knees to confess,
but—”
“You did! It gets thicker and thicker.
What did you want him to do that for?”
“Sith it would bring him a quick death and save
him all this cruel pain.”
“Well—yes, there is reason in that.
But he didn’t want the quick death.”
“He? Why, of a surety he did.”
“Well, then, why in the world didn’t
he confess?”
“Ah, sweet sir, and leave my wife and chick
without bread and shelter?”
“Oh, heart of gold, now I see it! The
bitter law takes the convicted man’s estate
and beggars his widow and his orphans. They could
torture you to death, but without conviction or confession
they could not rob your wife and baby. You stood
by them like a man; and you—true
wife and the woman that you are—you would
have bought him release from torture at cost to yourself
of slow starvation and death—well, it humbles
a body to think what your sex can do when it comes
to self-sacrifice. I’ll book you both
for my colony; you’ll like it there; it’s
a Factory where I’m going to turn groping and
grubbing automata into men.”
IN THE QUEEN’S DUNGEONS
Well, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent
to his home. I had a great desire to rack the
executioner; not because he was a good, painstaking
and paingiving official,—for surely it was
not to his discredit that he performed his functions
well—but to pay him back for wantonly cuffing
and otherwise distressing that young woman.
The priests told me about this, and were generously
hot to have him punished. Something of this disagreeable
sort was turning up every now and then. I mean,
episodes that showed that not all priests were frauds
and self-seekers, but that many, even the great majority,
of these that were down on the ground among the common
people, were sincere and right-hearted, and devoted
to the alleviation of human troubles and sufferings.
Well, it was a thing which could not be helped, so
I seldom fretted about it, and never many minutes
at a time; it has never been my way to bother much
about things which you can’t cure. But
I did not like it, for it was just the sort of thing
