h the
door.

CHAPTER XI

THE GARDEN-HOUSE

During that long afternoon the master of the house had sat in his own
room, before his table, hearing the ceaseless footsteps and the voices
overhead, and the ring of feet on the tiles outside his window, knowing
that his friend and priest was somewhere in the house, crouching in some
dark little space, listening to the same footsteps and voices as they
came and went by his hiding-place, and that he himself was absolutely
powerless to help.

He had been overpowered in the first rush as he pealed on the alarm-bell,
to which he had rushed when the groom burst in from the stable-yard
crying that the outer court was full of men. Lackington had then sent him
under guard to his own room, where he had been locked in with an armed
constable to prevent any possibility of escape. In the struggle he had
received a blow on the head which had completely dazed him; all his
resource left him; and he had no desire even to move from his chair.

Now he sat, with his head on his breast, and his mind going the ceaseless
round of all the possible places where Anthony might be. Little scenes,
too, of startling vividness moved before him, as he sat there with
half-closed eyes--scenes of the imagined arrest--the scuffle as the
portrait was torn away and Anthony burst out in one last desperate
attempt to escape. He saw him under every kind of circumstance--dashing
up stairs and being met at the top by a man with a pike--running and
crouching through the withdrawing-room itself next door--gliding with
burning eyes past the yew-hedges in a rush for the iron gates, only to
find them barred--on horseback with his hands bound and a despairing
uplifted face with pike-heads about him.--So his friend dreamed miserably
on, open-eyed, but between waking and the sleep of exhaustion, until the
crowning vision flashed momentarily before his eyes of the scaffold and
the cauldron with the fire burning and the low gallows over the heads of
the crowd, and the butcher's block and knife; and then he moaned and sat
up and stared about him, and the young pursuivant looked at him
half-apprehensively.

Towards evening the house grew quieter; once, about six o'clock, there
were voices outside, the door from the hall was unlocked, and a
heavily-built, ruddy man came in with two pikemen, locking the door
behind him. They paid no attention to the prisoner, an