The physician, long since dead, and an old man at that date, was exceeding silent, eyeing everybody with an anxious corrugation of brows over sharp eyes, and he had always a nervous clutch of his hands to accompany the glance, as if for lancets or the necks of medicine-flasks, never leaving a patient, unless he had killed or cured.  He had visited me with as much faithfulness as if I had been the governor, and yet with no kindness, and I know not to this day, whether he was for or against the King, or bled both sides impartially.  He looked at me with no compassion, and I might, from his manner, as well have been going to be set on a throne as in the stocks, but he counted my pulse-beats, and then bled me.

My brother John’s man, however, whom he had brought from England, and whom I had known as a boy, and sometimes stolen away to hunt with, he being one of the village-lads, shaved me as if it had been for my execution, and often I, somewhat dazed by the loss of blood, looking at him, saw the great tears trickling down his cheeks.  A soft-hearted man he was, who had met with sore troubles, having lost his family, a wife and three little ones, after which he returned to England and entered my brother’s service, though he had been brought up independently, being the son of an inn-keeper.

Something there was about this gentle, downcast man, adding the weight of my sorrow to his own, which would have aroused me to courage, if, as I said before, I had not been in such a state of body, that for the time my consciousness of what was to come was clouded.

There I sat on my bench, leaning stiffly back against the prison wall, a strange buzzing in my ears, and I scarcely knew nor sensed it when Parson Downs entered hurriedly, and leant over me, whispering that if I would, and could, my chance to escape was outside.

“The fleetest horse in the Colony,” said he, “and, Harry, I have seen Dick Barry, and if thou canst but ride to the turn of the road, thou wilt be met by Black Betty and guided to a safe place; and the jailer hath drank over much Burgundy to which I treated him, and—­and if thou canst, Harry—­”

Then he stopped and looked at me and turned angrily to the physician who was packing up his lancets and vials to depart.  “My God, sir,” he cried, “do you kill or cure?  You have not bled him again?  Lord, Lord, had I but a lancet and a purge for the spirit as you for the flesh, there would be not only no sin but no souls left in the Colony!  You have not bled him again, sir?”

But Martyn Jennings paid no more heed to him than if he had been a part of the prison wall, and, indeed, I doubt if he ever heeded any one who had not need of either his nostrums or his lancet, and after a last look at my bandages he went away.

Then Parson Downs and my brother’s man looked at each other.

“It is of no use, sir,” said the man, whose name was Will Wickett.  “Poor Master Wingfield cannot ride a horse; he is far too weak.”  And with that verily the tears rolled down his cheeks, so womanish had he grown by reason of the sore trials to which he had been put.