Though this was presently brought vividly before me, and of all persons by Mrs. Harris. Mrs. D---- of herself would have given me neither bit nor sup in the house; but the constable insisting that the King's prisoner must be fed, Mrs. Harris, tearful and shaking, was allowed to bring me some broken victuals. These set before me, the good soul, instead of retiring, pottered aimlessly about the room; and by and by got behind me; on which, or rather a moment later, I felt something cold and sharp at the nape of my neck and started up. Bursting into a flood of tears she plumped down on a seat, and I saw that she had a pair of scissors and a scrap of my hair in her hand.
Doubtless the tone in which I spoke betrayed me, for the constable's man who was in charge of me laughed brutally. "Gad, if he does not think she did it out of love!" he cried, speaking to a friend who was sitting with him. "When all the old dame wants is a charm for the rheumatics; and she thinks the chance too good to be lost."
Then I remembered that the hair of a hanged man is in that part held to be sovereign for the rheumatics; and I sat down feeling cold and faint.
That saying, though a small thing, and a foolish one, brought my state home to me; and, moreover, filled me with so grisly a foreboding of the gibbet, that henceforth I gave my treacherous mistress no more thought than she deserved--which was little; but I became wholly taken up with my own fate, and especially with the recollection of a man, whom I had once seen, pitched and hanging in chains, at Much Hadham Crossroads. The horrible spectacle he had become, ten days dead, grew on my mind, until I grovelled and sweated in a green terror, and that not so much at the prospect of death--though this sent me hot and cold in the same instant--as of the harsh rope about my neck, and the sacking bands, and the dreadful apparatus, and the grinning loathsome thing I must become.
Near swooning at these thoughts, I sank huddled into the chair; and was presently plucked up by the constable's assistant, who, seeing my state, came forward, and though he was naturally a coarse fellow, strove to hearten me, saying that there was always hope until the cart moved, and that many a man cast for death was drinking the King's health in the Plantations. With an oath or two and in a loud voice.