CHAPTER XIX

  “In breathless quiet, after all their ills.”

  ARNOLD

A body of these wretches, fresh from some act of rapine and pillage, had seen Mrs. Franklin, hastening home, and, opening the hue and cry, had started in full chase after her.  Struck by sticks and stones that darkened the air, twice down, fleeing as those only do who flee for life, she gained her own house, thinking there to find security.  Vain hope! the door was battered in, the windows demolished, the puny barriers between the room in which they were gathered and the creatures in pursuit, speedily destroyed,—­and these three turned to face death.

By chance, Surrey had his sword at his side, and, tearing this from its scabbard, sprang to the defence,—­a gallant intent, but what could one weapon and one arm do against such odds as these?  He was speedily beaten down and flung aside by the miscreants who swarmed into the room.  It was marvellous they did not kill him outright.  Doubtless they would have done so but for the face propped against the pillows, which caught their hungry eyes.  Soldier and woman were alike forgotten at sight of this dying boy.  Here was a foeman worthy their steel.  They gathered about him, and with savage hands struck at him and the bed upon which he lay.

A pause for a moment to hold consultation, crowded with oaths and jeers and curses; obscenity and blasphemy too hideous to read or record,—­then the cruel hands tore him from his bed, dragged him over the prostrate body of his mother, past the senseless form of his brave young defender, out to the street.  Here they propped him against a tree, to mock and torment him; to prick him, wound him, torture him; to task endurance to its utmost limit, but not to extinguish life.  These savages had no such mercy as this in their souls; and when, once or twice he fell away into insensibility, a cut or blow administered with devilish skill or strength, restored him to anguish and to life.

Surrey, bewildered and dizzy, had recovered consciousness, and sat gazing vacantly around him, till the cries and yells without, the agonized face within, thrilled every nerve into feeling.  Starting up, he rushed to the window, but recoiled at the awful sight.  Here, he saw, there was no human power within reach or call that could interfere.  The whole block, from street to street, was crowded with men and boys, armed with the armory of the street, and rejoicing like veritable fiends of hell over the pangs of their victim.

Even in the moment he stood there he beheld that which would haunt his memory, did it endure for a century.  At last, tired of their sport, some of those who were just about Abram had tied a rope about his body, and raised him to the nearest branch of an overhanging tree; then, heaping under him the sticks and clubs which were flung them from all sides, set fire to the dry, inflammable pile, and watched, for the moment silent, to see it burn.