“There is more yet,” he said.

Mr. Simpson, with a hand that still shook so violently that he could hardly hold his glass, lifted and drank off a cup of muscadel.  Then he cleared his throat, sat up a little in his chair, and resumed: 

“’Next I went to see Mr. Sherwood, to talk to him in prison and to encourage him by telling him of the passion of the other and how bravely he bore it.  Mr. Sherwood took it very well, and said that he was afraid of nothing, that he had reconciled his mind to it long ago, and had rehearsed it all two or three times, so that he would know what to say and how to bear himself.’”

Mr. FitzHerbert leaned over again to the priest at this point and whispered something.  Mr. Simpson nodded, and raised his eyes.

“Mr. Sherwood,” he said, “was a scholar from Douay, but not a priest.  He was lodging in the house of a Catholic lady, and had procured mass to be said there, and it was through her son that he was taken and charged with recusancy.”

Again ran a rustle through the benches.  This executing of the laity for religion was a new thing in their experience.  The priest lifted the paper again.

“’I found that Mr. Sherwood had been racked many times in the Tower, during the six months he was in prison, to force him to tell, if they could, where he had heard mass and who had said it.  But they could prevail nothing.  Further, no visitor was admitted to him all this time, and I was the first and the last that he had; and that though Mr. Roper himself had tried to get at him for his relief; for he was confined underground and lay in chains and filth not to be described.  I said what I could to him, but he said he needed nothing and was content, though his pain must have been very great all this while, what with the racking repeated over and over again and the place he lay in.

“’I was present again when he suffered at Tyburn, but was too far away to hear anything that he said, and scarcely, indeed, could see him; but I learned afterwards that he died well and courageously, as a Catholic should, and made no outcry or complaint when the butchery was done on him.

“’This, then, is the news I have to send you—­sorrowful, indeed, yet joyful, too; for surely we may think that they who bore such pains for Christ’s sake with such constancy will intercede for us whom they leave behind.  I am hoping myself to come North again before I go to Douay next year, and will see you then and tell you more.’”

The priest laid down the paper, trembling.

Mr. FitzHerbert looked up.

“It will give pleasure to the company,” he said, “to know that the writer of the letter is Mr. Ludlam, from Radbourne, in this county.  As you have heard, he, too, hopes by God’s mercy to be made priest and to come back to England.”

CHAPTER VIII

I