"I'm a hundred and twenty-two next Tuesday week."
Bertie stared, holding a mouthful of steak suspended on his fork in the air. A hundred and twenty-two! What was his tale of years compared to that? Freddy winked at him.
"Yes, I daresay. You were a hundred and ninety-five yesterday, and sixty-two this morning. It's my belief you're about five and twenty."
"Five and twenty! I daresay I look it, but I ain't. I'm more than that. I always did look a wild young thing."
Freddy roared; anything looking less like five and twenty, or a "wild young thing," could scarcely be conceived. The old woman went placidly on.
"I remember Jacky Sheppard, and Dicky Turpin, and Tommy King; they were all highwaymen in my young days."
"I suppose you were a highwayman's wife?"
"So I was; and they hung him the week after we were married. I went and saw him hung, and I've never seen a better hanging since. No, that I haven't. Times is changed since then."
"But you ain't changed. I wonder you don't marry again, a wild young thing like you."
"I ain't a marrying sort--not now I ain't. I've had ten of them, and that's quite enough for me."
"Ten's quite enough for one young woman, and when you've been two hundred and ninety times in prison a woman don't feel much like marrying again. It takes it out of her, it do."
Bertie had ended his meal. The warmth and the food had given the finishing touch to his previous fatigue; his head was already nodding on his breast. He heard the old woman talking as in a dream. Ten husbands! two hundred and ninety times in jail! Were they part of his nightmare, the things which he heard her say?
"Hollo, Ikey, you're blinking! Now then, mother, where are you going to put my pal? Can't you find a place where he can be alone?"
Had Bertie been sufficiently wide awake he would have seen the speaker wink at the old woman.
The woman's suggestion seemed to startle Freddy, and to set him thinking.
"The captain's room? Where is the captain?"
"How am I to know where he is or where he ain't? He don't tell me none of his goings on, none of you don't. He says to me he'd be four or five days away. That's all I know about it. Times is changed!"
The old woman produced a key from a voluminous pocket in her dress.
