"You will see, sir," she concluded, "that you cannot bide here. So long as I thought it was on the score of Nonconformity alone that you were suffering persecution, I was willing to take some risk in hiding you. But since your friend is what he is, the risk is greater than I should be asked to face, for my own sake and for that of my daughters. Nor can I say that I have ever held plottings and civil war in anything but abhorrence—as much in the old days as now. I am a loyal woman, and as a loyal woman I must bid you take your friend hence as soon as your fast is broken."
The corpulent and swarthy Hicks stood dejectedly before her. He might have pleaded, but at that moment there came a loud knocking at the gates below, and instantly Carpenter flung into the room with a white, scared face and whirling gestures.
"Soldiers, my lady!" he panted in affright. "We have been betrayed. The presence of Mr. Hicks here is known. What shall we do? What shall we do?"
She stood quite still, her countenance entirely unchanged, unless it were to smile a little upon Carpenter's terror. The mercy of her nature rose dominant now.
"Why, we must hide these poor fellows as best we can," said she; and Hicks flung down upon one knee to kiss her hand with protestations that he would sooner be hanged than bring trouble upon her house.
But she insisted, calm and self-contained; and Carpenter carried Hicks away to bestow him, together with Dunne, in a hole in the malt-house under a heap of sacking. Nelthorp had already vanished completely on his own initiative.
Meanwhile, the insistent knocking at the gate continued. Came shouted demands to open in the name of the King, until from a window my lady's daughters looked out to challenge those who knocked.
Colonel Penruddock, who had come in person with the soldiers to raid the house of his hereditary foe, stood forth to answer, very stiff and brave in his scarlet coat and black plumed hat.
"You have rebels in the house," he announced, "and I require you in the King's name to deliver them up to me."
And then, before they could answer him, came Carpenter to, unbar the door, and admit them to the court. Penruddock, standing squarely before the steward, admonished him very sternly.
"Friend," said he, "you had best be ingenuous with me and discover who are in your lady's house, for it is within my knowledge that some strangers came hither last night."
The stricken Carpenter stood white-faced and trembling.
"Sir—sir—" he faltered.
But the colonel was impatient.
"Come, come, my friend. Since I know they are here, there's an end on't. Show me where they are hid if you would save your own neck from the halter."
It was enough for Carpenter. The pair in the malthouse might have eluded all search but for the steward's pusillanimity. Incontinently, he betrayed the hiding-place.
"But, sir, of your charity do not tell my mistress that I have told you. Pray, sir—"
Penruddock brushed him aside as if he had been a pestering fly, and with his men went in, and straight to the spot where Hicks and Dunne were lurking. When he had taken them, he swung round on Carpenter, who had followed.
"These be but two," he said, "and to my knowledge three rogues came hither last night. No shufling with me, rascal. Where have you bestowed the other?"
"I swear, as Heaven's my witness, I do not know where he is," protested the afflicted steward, truly enough.
Penruddock turned to his men.
"Make search," he bade them; and search was made in the ruthless manner of such searches.
The brutal soldiers passed from room to room beating the wainscoting with pike and musket-butts, splintering and smashing heedlessly. Presses were burst open and their contents scattered; chests were broken into and emptied, the searchers appropriating such objects as took their fancy, with true military cynicism. A mirror was shattered, and some boards of the floor were torn up because a sergeant conceived that the blows of his halbert rang hollow.
When the tumult was at its height, came her ladyship at last into the room, where Colonel Penruddock stood watching the operations of his men. She stood in the doorway leaning upon her ebony cane, her faded eyes considering the gaunt soldier with reproachful question.
"Sir," she asked him with gentle irony, masking her agitation, "has my house been given over to pillage?"
He bowed, doffing his plumed hat with an almost excessive courtesy.
"To search, madame," he corrected her. And added: "In the King's name."
"The King," she answered, "may give you authority to search my house, but not to plunder it. Your men are robbing and destroying."
He shrugged. It was the way of soldiers. Fine manners, he suggested, were not to be expected of their kind. And he harangued her upon the wrong she had done in harbouring rebels and giving entertainment to the King's enemies.
"That is not true," said she. "I know of no King's enemies."
He smiled darkly upon her from his great height. She was so frail a body and so old that surely it was not worth a man's while to sacrifice her on the altar of revenge. But not so thought Colonel Penruddock. Therefore he smiled.
"Two of them, a snivelling Jack Presbyter named Hicks and a rascal named Dunne, are taken already. Pray, madame, be so free and ingenuous with me aye, and so kind to yourself—as if there be any other person concealed in your house—and I am sure there is somebody else—to deliver him up, and you shall come to no further trouble."
She looked up at him, and returned him smile for smile.
"I know nothing," she said, "of what you tell me, or of what you ask."
His countenance hardened.
"Then, mistress, the search must go on."
But a shout from the adjoining room announced that it was at an end. Nelthorp had been discovered and dragged from the chimney into which he had crept.
Almost exactly a month later—on August 27th the Lady Alice Lisle was brought to the bar of the court-house at Winchester upon a charge of high treason.
The indictment ran that secretly, wickedly, and traitorously she did entertain, conceal, comfort, uphold, and maintain John Hicks, knowing him to be a false traitor, against the duty of her allegiance and against the peace of "our sovereign lord the King that now is."
Demurely dressed in grey, the little white-haired lady calmly faced the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and the four judges of oyer and terminer who sat with him, and confidently made her plea of "Not Guilty."
It was inconceivable that Christian men should deal harshly with her for a technical offence amounting to an act of Christian charity. And the judge, sitting there in his robe of scarlet reversed with ermine, looked a gentle, kindly man; his handsome, oval, youthful face—Jeffreys was in his thirty-sixth year—set in the heavy black periwig, was so pale that the mouth made a vivid line of scarlet; and the eyes that now surveyed her were large and liquid and compassionate, as it seemed to her.
She was not to know that the pallor which gave him so interesting an air, and the dark stains which lent his eyes that gentle wistfulness, were the advertisements at once of the debauch that had kept him from his bed until after two o'clock that morning and of the inexorable disease that slowly gnawed away his life and enraged him out of all humanity.
And the confidence his gentle countenance inspired was confirmed by the first words he had occasion to address to her. She had interrupted counsel to the Crown when, in his opening address to the jury—composed of some of the most considerable gentlemen of Hampshire—he seemed to imply that she had been in sympathy with Monmouth's cause. She was, of course, without counsel, and must look herself to her defence.